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Sunday, May 08, 2011
 
New blog
This blog is moving to blog.darkbuzz.com.

This blog has been powered by software that I wrote myself. It has served well, but it does not allow comments, and I want to allow more reader feedback on my postings and my new book. Please update your bookmarks and blog readers.


Saturday, May 07, 2011
 
Trust in science
Virginia psychology professor Daniel T. Willingham writes in SciAm:
A friend of mine has long held that a vaccination his son received as an infant triggered his child’s autism. He clings to this belief despite a string of scientific studies that show no link between autism and vaccines. When the original paper on such a link was recently discredited as a fraud, my friend’s reaction was that it will now be more difficult to persuade people of the dangers of vaccination. He is not alone: nearly half of all Americans believe in the vaccine-autism link or are unsure about it.
His friend's reaction is not so bad. After all, discrediting a 15-year-old paper says nothing about whether there is a link between autism and vaccines. That paper was just a provisional report on about a dozen cases. Scientific knowledge comes from positive studies, not by exposing bogus papers.

It will be more difficult to get physicians to report vaccine concerns, because those who do are subject to getting pilloried.

Asking science teachers to impart enough content to understand all the issues may be unrealistic, but they might be able to improve people’s appreciation for the accuracy of scientific knowledge. Through the study of the history of science, students might gain an understanding both of their own motivations for belief and of science as a method of knowing. If a student understands how a medieval worldview could have made a geocentric theory of the solar system seem correct, it is a short step to seeing similar influences in oneself.
I get the impression that he thinks that medieval geocentrists were irrational and narrow-minded, and that one can become more enlightened about science by repudiating Christianity.

The point of the article is to teach kids to trust scientists more. This guy is on the wrong track.

Another SciAm essay says:

Now the U.K. government, represented by the Government Office for Science, has produced its own response. In a May 5 memo to Parliament, the government wrote: "After two independent reviews, and two reviews by the Science and Technology Committee, we find no evidence to question the scientific basis of human influence on the climate." ...

Ultimately, it is doubtful that the governmental proclamation will have any significant influence on the debate. Those who believe the planet is warming are already supported by scientific consensus and by a wealth of climate data, and those who believe a conspiracy is afoot to suppress conflicting data will hardly be swayed by a formal statement to the contrary from a government body.

This silly proclamation should not have any significant influence. I am convinced that human-generated CO2 has caused some warming, but it is ridiculous to say "no evidence to question". There is certainly evidence to question the consensus. The consensus may be correct, but having an official govt body say that there is "no evidence to question" is not something that should persuade anyone of anything, except that there is a political push to suppress criticism of certain ideas.

Friday, May 06, 2011
 
Lousy selection arguments
I have commented before on the group/kin selection dispute among evolutionists. A psychiatrist writes:
2. The rebuttals to Nowak and Wilson are almost all of the form, “you’ve misunderstood kin selection theory,” or, said generally, “that’s not what we meant!” They resort to ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority (“evolutionary biologists know…”) These are typically the defenses of a paradigm unable to critique itself from the outside. The result in these cases (when/if they happen) is not the gradual modification of theory (e.g. scientific method) but a full fledged Kuhnian shift. ...

Nowak and Wilson seem to be writing a paper about bugs, they are, in fact, not writing a paper about bugs:

We have not addressed the evolution of human social behaviour here, but parallels with the scenarios of animal eusocial evolution exist, and they are, we believe, well worth examining.
That’s the game. Wilson is talking about humans. Is human altruism and cooperation understandable and predictable as a function of genetic relatedness, or is relatedness the result of group dynamics, of competition between groups?
I am going to track this. My gut feeling is that Nowak and Wilson are right, and that Dawkins and the other mainstream evolutionists have been getting the subject wrong for decades.

NewScientist mag announces a computer simulation that takes the side of Dawkins:

Virtual robots have "evolved" to cooperate – but only with close relatives. The finding bolsters a long-standing "rule of thumb" about how cooperation has evolved, and could help resolve a bitter row among biologists. ...

Nowak's criticism has now been answered, argues Keller. "We show that the rule works very well," he says. "But I'm sure some people won't change their minds."

Indeed, Nowak remains unconvinced, saying that the simulation's design forces it to obey Hamilton's rule. "It is no surprise that Hamilton's rule holds in a system that is designed to validate it," he says. "It tells us nothing about whether Hamilton's rule makes a correct prediction for actual biological systems."

A computer simulation of robots eating virtual food is not going to resolve this. Either type of selection could be simulated on a computer. The question is what happens in nature. This should be easily settled for ants and bees. It could get a lot uglier when then get to human beings, as a lot of prominent evolutionists get queasy whenever anyone talks about apply evolution to people.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011
 
Natural selection was never a hypothesis
The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne is upset today about a newspaper article:
Tam Hunt, ... His particular beef was natural selection, which he sees as “little more than an assumption that evolution has resulted from natural causes rather than supernatural causes. As such, the theory of natural selections explains nothing in itself – it is a very loose framework that needs filling in rather substantially.” ...

He then characterizes natural selection as tautological, because it’s “survival of the fittest,” and the fittest are defined as “those who survive. This, of course, is an old creationist canard, which completely ignores the fact that hundreds of biologists are trying to understand those particular traits that promote survival and reproduction.

Yes, I agree that hundreds of biologists are trying to understand those traits. I sometimes post links to stories about progress that they are making. But I also agree with Hunt that natural selection is just a trivial and tautological assumption that explains nothing.

Coyne goes on to cite this Gould essay for explaining the point:

I am a strong advocate of the general argument that "truth" as preached by scientists often turns out to be no more than prejudice inspired by prevailing social and political beliefs.
Gould goes on to say that Darwin got natural selection wrong because Darwin's concept included progress and "improved design".

Only one of these die-hard evolutionist ideologues like Gould and Coyne could deny that evolution has brought progess.

A hypothesis is defined by M-W.com:

2: a tentative assumption made in order to draw out and test its logical or empirical consequences
This M-W dictionary defines empirical as "3: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment". These are reasonable definitions, altho I also like this: hypothesis - A guess made by someone with a PhD.

Wikipedia explains:

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ... For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous observations that cannot satisfactorily be explained with the available scientific theories.
M-W.com also defines Darwin's natural selection as:
a natural process that results in the survival and reproductive success of individuals or groups best adjusted to their environment and that leads to the perpetuation of genetic qualities best suited to that particular environment
I ask whether this should be called a hypothesis. It was a tentative assumption, but to be a scientific hypothesis, it should also have some testable consequences.

This essay tries to explain Darwin's theory:

Charles Darwin was missing a mechanism for the inheritance of beneficial traits when he published the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin had amassed a huge amount of evidence that supported some type of adaptive process that contributed to the evolution of new species, much like Wegener had for Continental Drift. He argued that with the natural variations that occur in populations, any trait that is beneficial would make that individual more likely to survive and pass on the trait to the next generation. If enough of these selections occured on different beneficial traits you could end up with completely new species. One major flaw in Darwin's theory was that he did not have a mechanism for how the traits could be preserved over the succeeding generations. At the time, the prevailing theory of inheritance was that the traits of the parents were blended in the offspring. But this would mean that any beneficial trait would be diluted out of the population within a few generations. This is because most of the blending over the next generations would be with individuals that did not have the trait.

In spite of the lack of a mechanism for the preservation of traits, Darwin's theory quickly came to dominate. Within 5 years, Oxford University was using a biology textbook that discussed biology in the context of evolution by natural selection. The textbook stated,

"Though evidence might be required to show that natural selection accounts for everything ascribed to it, yet no evidence is required to show that natural selection has always been going on, is going on now, and must ever continue to go on. Recognizing this is an a priori certainty, let us contemplate it under its two distinct aspects."
At Oxford, evolution by natural selection had gone from hypothesis to a priori certainty in the space of 5 years.
This shows that natural selection was never a scientific hypothesis; it was just a new term for a commonly understood truth. It had been published before Darwin, and before Wallace's letters to Darwin. Darwin was the third to give a written explanation of natural selection, at best.

Darwin's assumption was that evolution by natural selection could explain biological features such as the long necks of giraffes. Testing this (for giraffes) does not mean verifying that evolution has occurred or that natural selection has applied. As the textbook said, those are obvious truths.

Explaining the giraffe necks would mean to give some hypothesis about why giraffe ancestors split into short-necked and long-necked species, and then to show how that same hypothesis predicts splits in other species. Those predictions could be tested by examining the fossil record, along with other evidence of the ancient environment. Natural selection does not do that at all, and apparently that was well-understood in Darwin's day.

Wikipedia tries to explain the giraffe's neck:

For example, an incorrect way to describe giraffe evolution is to say that giraffe necks grew longer over time because they needed to reach tall trees. ... Tall trees could not cause the mutation nor would they cause a higher percentage of animals to be born with longer necks.
This is a bad example. It is not known that the evolution of giraffe necks has anything to do with tall trees, and there are experts with different opinions on the subject. But if it were shown that giraffes survived because they could reach tall trees, then it seems reasonable to me to say that the tall trees caused the predominance of long necks.

This is another example of how our leading evolutionists get hopelessly hung up on some ideological argument about some basic scientific point, and be confusing and misleading.


Tuesday, May 03, 2011
 
Detecting quantum entanglement
Anil Ananthaswamy reports in the 03 May 2011 NewScientist magazine:
"They are different sides of the same coin," says Busch. Where two particles are perfectly entangled, spooky action at a distance calls the shots, and uncertainty is a less stringent principle than had been assumed. But where there is no entanglement, uncertainty reverts to the Maassen-Uffink relation. The strength of the Berta interpretation is that it allows us to say how much we can know for a sliding scale of situations in between, where entanglement is present but less than perfect. That is highly relevant for quantum cryptography, the quantum technology closest to real-world application, which relies on the sharing of perfectly entangled particles. The relation means there is an easier way to test when that entanglement has been disturbed, for example, by unwanted eavesdroppers, simply by monitoring measurement uncertainty.
I don't know how any modern writer could say that quantum cryptography is "the quantum technology closest to real-world application". Quantum mechanics was invented in the 1920s, and is essential to all 20th century physics and chemistry. Your cell phone uses the theory in dozens of different ways.

Quantum cryptography is a speculative technology that has never been shown to work, and would not have any real-world usefulness even if it did.


Monday, May 02, 2011
 
Leftist attack on science and positivism
The Nation, a leftist magazine, writes a long attack on Sam Harris, new/gnu atheists, and positivism:
More a habit of mind than a rigorous philosophy, positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. (This strain of positivism is not to be confused with that of the French sociologist Auguste Comte.) The decades between the Civil War and World War I were positivism’s golden age. Positivists boasted that science was on the brink of producing a total explanation of the nature of things, which would consign all other explanations to the dustbin of mythology. Scientific research was like an Easter egg hunt: once the eggs were gathered the game would be over, the complexities of the cosmos reduced to natural law. Science was the only repository of truth, a sovereign entity floating above the vicissitudes of history and power. Science was science.
No, this is an inaccurate definition of Positivism. Positivism is a philosophy that believes in what can be positively demonstrated with empirical science. Logical positivism adds what can also be proved with reason and logic. But it does not assume that everything is precisely measurable, or deterministic, or reductionist. It would be contrary to postivitism to assume those things, unless they could be positively demonstrated.

Positivism is out of favor among philosophers. It died about 50 years ago, they say. I think that philosophy died about then. Positivism is much better than its replacements.

Though they often softened their claims with Christian rhetoric, positivists assumed that science was also the only sure guide to morality, and the only firm basis for civilization. ...

Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire —- all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research to advanced technology.

Wow, this is wacky. Christian rhetoric about morality is not positivist. Christians believe in a morality based on the Gospels, faith, tradition, and church teachings. They are informed by empirical science, but do not rely on it.

The view of the 20C is even more bizarre. Yes, the 20C advanced science and technology, but that made the world a much better place. You would have a hard time finding anyone who wants to live under 19C conditions.

I am not defending Harris here. He is neither a positivist or a Christian. His morality does not make much sense to me. The Nation does point out some of his screwy opinions, while giving its own screwy opinions. I am defending logical positivism. It is a perfectly legitimate view of scientific knowledge. It says nothing about morality.


Sunday, May 01, 2011
 
The latest evolutionist boycott
Here is the latest evolutionist dispute with alleged creationists:
It's more than a bit depressing to report that Synthese, a journal that has published classic papers by Carnap and Quine, among many others, and has been a major scholarly forum for philosophy informed by the sciences, should now have caved in to the major enemies of science education in the United States, the Creationist/Intelligent Design lobby.
It published a rant by Barbara Forrest against Francis Beckwith for supposedly supporting ID while having some religious motivations, and the editors attached a disclaimer about "the usual academic standards of politeness". Now the evolutionists want to boycott the journal for publishing the disclaimer.

I think that a philosophy journal ought to be apologetic about publishing ad hominem attacks on the religious motivations of others. Would they publish a paper attacking relativity based on Einstein's Jewish motivations?

There is no "Creationist/Intelligent Design lobby", as far as I know. The creationists say that the Earth is less that 10k years old, and the ID proponents say that it is billions of years old.

Beckwith says that he made a legal argument:

I argue that it is constitutionally permissible to teach intelligent design in public schools, ... I'm not an intelligent design advocate, and I don't think it should be required in public schools.
He also says:
I am not, and have never been, a proponent of ID. My reasons have to do with my philosophical opposition to the ID movement ...
Forrest and her evolutionist supporters are what Dilbert would call smooshers. They have a lot of difficulty compartmentilizing information, and they confuse legal, philosophical, and scientific arguments.

Saturday, Apr 30, 2011
 
Killing the king
Here is a story from Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960):
On Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 59.

Emerson said to him, "Young man, have you read Plato?" Holmes said he hadn't. "You must. You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'" Holmes said, "That's the lesson of independence." So off he went and read Plato for a few months or a year, and then wrote a piece doing in Mr. Plato in one of those ephemeral literary things at Harvard. He laid this, as it were, at the feet of Mr. Emerson and awaited the next morning's mail, hoping to get a warm appreciation from Emerson. And the next day and the next and the next — no sign of life. No acknowledgment from Mr. Emerson. Holmes didn't see him again for about a year. When he saw him, this, that, and the other thing was again talked about. Emerson said, "Oh, by the way, I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him." Holmes said, "That was the second great lesson — humility."

Likewise, critcisms of Pres. Barack Obama have to show that he is unfit for the office, or they do no real damage. The birth certificate had to show that he was not an American, or else it is insignificant.

Info about Obama's past does tell us more about who he is. His decisions as President continue to baffle those on the right and the left. We know less about him than we do about any American president in decades. His parents are dead. He has little contact with family and friends. We knew Bush, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dole, etc. much better.


Friday, Apr 29, 2011
 
Max Born on Einstein
It is easy to find glowing praise for Einstein's famous 1905 paper. Max Born wrote:
A long time before I read Einstein’s famous 1905 paper, I knew the formal mathematical side of the special theory of relativity through my teacher Hermann Minkowski. Even so, Einstein’s paper was a revelation to me which had a stronger influence on my thinking than any other scientific experience… Einstein’s simple consideration, by which he disclosed the epistemological root of the problem… made an enormous impression, and I think it right that the principle of relativity is connected with his name, though Lorentz and Poincare should not be forgotten.
But no one said anything so ridiculous (publicly) during 1905-1908. The most credit Einstein ever got was to have relativity called the "Lorentz-Einstein" theory.

The Born story is told a little differently in Einstein: the life and times By Ronald W. Clark. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the stories Born told about learning relativity.

Born's 1921 book on "Einstein's Theory of Relativity" said:

Only the reader who has made this view really his own will be able to folow the later development of the doctrine of space and time. Different people find progressive abstraction, objectivation, and relativization easy or difficult, as the case may be. The older peoples of the Continent, Dutch, French, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, are most susceptible to these ideas, are the most deeply engaged in elaborating this system. Englishmen, who incline to concrete ideas, are less readily accessible. Americans are fond of attaching themselves to pictures and models. [p.190-191]
He later wrote to Einstein:
It is my belief that when average people try to get hold of the laws of nature by thinking alone, the result is pure rubbish.
Born, who was considered Jewish by Nazi Germany because of his ancestry, also wrote privately about Jewish physics:
Ohanian (who may be Jewish himself) gives the background to this phrase ("Einstein's Mistakes" p. 97). He first attributes it to Sommerfeld (an admirer of Einstein), who wrote (approvingly) of "the conceptually abstract nature of the Semite". Ohanian goes on to interpret this remark repeating the wide-spread view (at that time) that "Jews are intellectually inventive & inclined to abstruse, convoluted arguments". Max Born (another Jewish physicist & very good friend of Einstein) described Jewish physics as "an attempt to find the laws of nature just by thinking". Einstein agreed with him when he wrote to Born "I am confident that 'Jewish physics' is not to be killed." To which, Born replied "I have always appreciated your good Jewish physics". All of these quotes are referenced in the text.
The book also says that Sommerfeld complained about Einstein's "nonconstructive and nonvisualizable dogmatics", and it says that the comments were "on target".

My problem with this is that Born's 1921 book shows only a limited understanding of relativity. He says very little about electromagnetism or gravity. He does not mention covariance or recognize the concept. It is central to both special and general relativity. I realize that he got a Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics, but I am unimpressed with his relativity.

It is wrong to say that Einstein "disclosed the epistemological root of the problem". You cannot get to the root of the problem without covariance. Covariance is what makes electromagnetism a spacetime theory. Einstein did not have a spacetime theory. Born credits Minkowski for making it a spacetime theory, and describes the spacetime metric, but does not explain that physical quantities are transformed by purely geometric considerations.

My other problem with Born is that he is emphatic about crediting his friend Einstein for relativity, but he admits that it is possible that Poincare had it all first, in a 1969 essay in the book Physics in my Generation:

The reasoning used by Poincaré was just the same as that which Einstein introduced in his paper of 1905 … Does this mean that Poincaré knew all this before Einstein? It is possible … [Einstein's paper] gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true.
I don't know what to make of this Jewish physics stuff. The term seems to be mostly used in connection with German physics, and various Nazi controversies in the 1930s. Germany dominated physics at the time, and according to Wikipedia, the Jewish physics presented an excuse to resist an ideologically unwelcome scientific "paradigm shift". Some of this was aimed at relativity, as you can read in Criticism of relativity theory.

Jewish physics also relates to various ethnic stereotypes. The Half Sigma blog writes:

Both Jains and Jews are tiny minority religion with onerous dietary rules and other restrictions on the enjoyment of life, and both have disproportionate economic success. This leads me to a new theory of why Jews evolved to be smarter than gentile whites. It has to do with the religion sucking really bad. You would think that this would work in the opposite manner. A really smart Jew or Jain would realize how dumb it is that they can’t eat any good foods, and they would be the most likely to jump ship. But such thinking would be based on a misunderstanding of the psychology of high-IQ people. The higher a person’s IQ, the more they follow the rules they are taught. Within the orthodox Jewish or Jain subcultures, the moral thing to do is obey the rules of the religion. It’s the least intelligent Jews or Jains who are most likely to be tempted by the forbidden joys of tasty food and stray from the religion. In this manner, over the centuries, the least intelligent Jews and Jains are most likely to have been culled from the religions’ gene pools.
I guess the idea is that Jewish rabbis are fond of arcane, tricky reasoning about artificially imposed rules that have no obvious relevance to real-world purposes, and that Jews are accustomed to admiring that. The religious Jews stick to the Talmud and religious reasoning, but the non-religious Jews try to apply the reasoning elsewhere.

The Paradigm shift was popularized by a man named Kuhn. That is often a Jewish name, and often not. I don't know whether he was Jewish or not. There are lots of Jews and non-Jews on different sides of the issues.


Thursday, Apr 28, 2011
 
Why science is the source of all progress
David Deutsch David Deutsch is plugging a new book with this:
What is the secret of science's success in understanding our world? It's to do with the quality of its explanations – though there is a twist in the tale

Evidently we do know: look at the remarkable changes to our society that have come from science. Progress rapid enough to be noticed, and that has continued over many generations, has been achieved only once in the history of our species. It began at roughly the time of the scientific revolution, a period that included improvements in technology, political institutions, moral values, art and every aspect of human welfare.

We call this the Enlightenment, a term that historians use to denote a variety of trends, some of them violently conflicting, but all of them rebellions against authority. But mere rebellion- a common event in history- cannot explain how science provided a stream of ever truer explanations. In my new book, The Beginning of Infinity, I offer a new answer to this question.

For thousands of generations, we were in the dark. Our ancestors gazed at the night sky wondering what stars are- which was exactly the right thing to wonder about- using eyes and brains anatomically indistinguishable from ours. In every other field too, they tried to observe the world and to understand it. Occasionally they recognised simple patterns in nature, but when they tried to discover the underlying features of reality they failed almost completely. At the time of the Enlightenment they mistakenly believed that we "derive" knowledge of these features from the "evidence of our senses", or "read" it from the "Book of Nature" by making observations, the doctrine called empiricism.

But science needs more than empiricism. ...

Sustained progress through alternating guesswork and criticism requires a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition. Usually, the whole point of traditions was to maintain the status quo and to defer to authority.

His previous book was filled with speculative opinions about how the universe. This one seems to be a continuation.

I am skeptical about the importance of "rebellions against authority" to the history of science. Most of the great advances of science had the explicity approval of the authorities, as far as I know. I guess I will have to read the book to find out.

The New Yorker also has an article about Deutsch.

David Deutsch, who believes in multiple universes and has conceived of an as yet unbuildable computer to test their existence. ...

With one millionth of the hardware of an ordinary laptop, a quantum computer could store as many bits of information as there are particles in the universe. It could break previously unbreakable codes. It could answer questions about quantum mechanics that are currently far too complicated for a regular computer to field.

I bet that none of this ever happens. He has a wrong idea of quantum mechanics.

Wednesday, Apr 27, 2011
 
The evolutionist split on religion
The leftist-atheist-evolutionists have split into two factions. There are the new/gnu atheists (like Dawkins, Coyne, Myers, Hitchens) who hate all religion and view the Darwinist cause as inseparable from the effort to stamp out religion. And there are the accommodationists (like Scott, NCSE, BCSE, Mooney) who insist on saying that some religions are better than others, and who try to make allies with the ones who accept evolutionism.

Eg, Myers and Coyne rant here.

It seems to me that all of the prominent evolutionists have some sort of disease where they cannot stop picking fights over religion. I think that it ought to be possible to teach evolution in school without picking fights with Christianity, but the evolutionists cannot be trusted to do it. They insist on attacking the fundamentalists, and then arguing about whether all Christians must be attacked.

I could understand if the evolutionists wanted to speak out against Islam. Prominent Moslems receive death threats if they support evolution. But fundamentalist Christians do not go around killing people for their beliefs.


Tuesday, Apr 26, 2011
 
Einstein on the aether
Here is how Einstein described Lorentz's belief in the aether:
In view of his unqualified adherence to the atomic theory of matter, Lorentz felt unable to regard the latter as the seat of continuous electromagnetic fields. He thus conceived of these fields as being conditions of the aether, which was regarded as continuous. Lorentz considered the aether to be intrinsically independent of matter, both from a mechanical and a physical point of view. The aether did not take part in the motions of matter, and a reciprocity between aether and matter could be assumed only in so far as the latter was considered to be the carrier of attached electrical charges.
This is from A Brief Outline of the Development of the Theory of Relativity (1921), by Albert Einstein, translated by Robert William Lawson, Nature, 106 (No. 2677); February 17, 1921; pp. 782-784.

All of this seems correct to me. It is widely believed that Einstein invented relativity by abolishing the aether that Lorentz foolishly believed in. But in fact Lorentz's beliefs were completely reasonable, and Einstein never disputed them.


Monday, Apr 25, 2011
 
Oppenheimer was crazy
A Wikipedia article about J. Robert Oppenheimer drew this comment:
''In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer poisoned an apple with chemicals from the laboratory and put it on Blackett's desk ... As Robert's parents were still visiting Cambridge, the university authorities immediately informed them of what had happened. Julius Oppenheimer frantically - and successfully - lobbied the university not to press criminal charges. After protracted negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London. This Freudian analyst diagnosed dementia praecox, a now archaic label for symptoms associated with schizophrenia. He concluded that Oppenheimer was a hopeless case and that "further analysis would do more harm than good".''

The story about the apple needlessly besmirches JRO's reputation. It should be removed. The London psychiatric analysis possibly revealed that he merely suffered from an eating disorder and was known to leave uneaten apples behind him when he left a room.

Needlessly besmirches JRO's reputation? Read the rest of the article. He was a no-good commie with an assortment of character defects. His reputation is only propped up thru the work of commie sympathizers.

Sunday, Apr 24, 2011
 
42 Nobelists oppose teaching critical thinking skills
The Wash. Post reports:
A 17-year-old Baton Rouge high school senior is leading the fight to repeal a Lousiana law that gives teachers license to equate creationism with evolution -- and now he is doing it with the support of more than 40 Nobel laureates.
Zack Kopplin's letter and 42 Nobel prizewinners are here. Only 8 of them got prizes in physiology or medicine, and only about half of them are American. The letter says:
As Nobel Laureates in various scientific fields, we urge you to repeal the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) of 2008. This law creates a pathway for creationism and other forms of non-scientific instruction to be taught in public school science classrooms. ...

Louisiana’s students deserve to be taught proper science rather than religion presented as science. Science offers testable, and therefore falsifiable, explanations for natural phenomena. ...

Scientific knowledge is crucial to twenty-first-century life. Biological evolution is foundational in many fields, including biomedical research and agriculture. It aids us in understanding, for example, how to fight diseases like HIV and how to grow plants that will survive in different environments.

So why are physicists, chemists, and foreigners expressing an opinion about fighting HIV and growing plants? This is way out of their expertise. You must be thinking that the La. law is really terrible.

Here is the official description of the bill to repeal the LSEA:

Present law, the "Louisiana Science Education Act," requires BESE, upon request of a local school board, to allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

Requires that assistance include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review such scientific theories being studied.

Requires that a teacher teach material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the local school board unless otherwise prohibited by BESE.

Present law specifies that the Louisiana Science Education Act shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

Proposed law repeals these provisions.

I do not see the problem with the LSEA. It does not promote creationism, religion, or supernatural beliefs. It only supports the "open and objective discussion of scientific theories". No real scientist should be afraid of that. So why are so many agitated about this harmless law, if no religion is involved?

It appears that the evolutionists want to force the schools to teach that evolution explains all life on Earth, and to prevent them from teaching that there is very little scientific knowledge about the origin of life.

This is crazy. Science classes should teach the limits of scientific knowledge. The Noble prizewinners have taken a very anti-science position.

Tennessee is considering a similar law to the LSEA.


Saturday, Apr 23, 2011
 
MacDonald on Einstein
A recent Christian blog post has been criticized for being anti-Jewish for comments like this:
Further reading of MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique extensively documents the academic fraud of Freud, Boas and the Frankfurt School (especially the “authoritarian personality” studies). All of these movements were led by Jews who expressly saw their work as an attack on the West, particularly Christianity, on behalf of Jews. MacDonald goes through pains to document this with their own words, that they were not Leftists who “happen to be” Jews, but rather Leftists who saw their Jewish identity as an integral motivation and justification for their work.
This refers to Kevin B. MacDonald, a California professor who wrote some controversial books Jews and group strategies.

I am skeptical about evolutionary psychology, so I would not take this too seriously. MacDonald seems to carefully document everything he says, but that does not mean that he is necessarily right. He has been widely criticized for discussing a taboo subject, as explained at the above links. Some of his more outrageous claims are listed here, such as:

(7) who suggests that European-Jewish intellectual prominence is genetically based and the result of eugenic processes within traditional Jewish communities; (8) who argues that Jewish intellectuals such as Franz Boas, Felix Frankfurter, Harold Laski, Max Lerner, Morris Cohen, and Robert Merton, accelerated the 'deChristianization' of America's public life by selectively promoting as cultural heroes Gentiles who advanced their goals, such as Margaret Mead, John Dewey, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; (9) who agrees with T. S. Eliot's most famous anti-Semitic statement, that any large number of free-thinking Jews is undesirable if one wants to maintain or develop a society in which a Christian, ethnically homogeneous tradition can flourish.
MacDonald has a theory about 20th century Jewish intellectuals, but he says that Einstein does not fit in:
Similarly, 20th-century theoretical physics does not qualify as a Jewish intellectual movement precisely because it was good science and there are no signs of ethnic involvement in its creation: Jewish identification and pursuit of Jewish interests were not important to the content of the theories or to the conduct of the intellectual movement. Yet Jews have been heavily overrepresented among the ranks of theoretical physicists.

This conclusion remains true even though Einstein, the leading figure among Jewish physicists, was a strongly motivated Zionist (Fölsing 1997, 494-505), opposed assimilation as a contemptible form of 'mimicry' (p. 490), preferred to mix with other Jews whom he referred to as his 'tribal companions' (p. 489), embraced the uncritical support for the Bolshevik regime in Russia typical of so many Jews during the 1920s and 1930s, including persistent apology for the Moscow show trials in the 1930s (pp. 644-5), and switched from a high-minded pacifism during World War I, when Jewish interests were not at stake, to advocating the building of atomic bombs to defeat Hitler. From his teenage years he disliked the Germans and in later life criticized Jewish colleagues for converting to Christianity and acting like Prussians. He especially disliked Prussians, who were the elite ethnic group in Germany. Reviewing his life at age 73, Einstein declared his ethnic affiliation in no uncertain terms: 'My relationship with Jewry had become my strongest human tie once I achieved complete clarity about our precarious position among the nations' (in Fölsing 1997, 488). According to Fölsing, Einstein had begun developing this clarity from an early age, but did not acknowledge it until much later, a form of self-deception: 'As a young man with bourgeois-liberal views and a belief in enlightenment, he had refused to acknowledge [his Jewish identity]' (in Fölsing 1997, 488).

In other words, the issues of the ethnic identification and even ethnic activism on the part of people like Einstein are entirely separate from the issue of whether such people viewed the content of the theories themselves as furthering ethnic interests, and, in the case of Einstein, there is no evidence that he did so. The same cannot be said for Freud, the New York Intellectuals, the Boasians, and the Frankfurt School, in which 'scientific' theories were fashioned and deployed to advance ethnic group interests. This ideological purpose becomes clear when the unscientific nature of these movements is understood. Much of the discussion in CofC documented the intellectual dishonesty, the lack of empirical rigor, the obvious political and ethnic motivation, the expulsion of dissenters, the collusion among co-ethnics to dominate intellectual discourse, and the general lack of scientific spirit that pervaded them. In my view, the scientific weakness of these movements is evidence of their group-strategic function.

The references are to Albert Einstein: A Biography, by the German physics journalist Albrecht Fölsing, an Einstein idolizer.

That is, the theory of relativity is not a theory designed to promote Jewish interests. I assume that MacDonald knows about the criticism of relativity theory, where some people tried to relate relativity to Jews, particularly during the Nazi era. Apparently some were proponents of the so called German Physics, which only accepted scientific knowledge based on experiments, and which is accessible to the senses. They preferred this to the alleged formal-dogmatic "Jewish physics", such as relativity.

According to Wikipedia, the 1931 German book, Hundred authors against Einstein, was not anti-Semitic. Opposition to relativity had very little to do with Einstein being Jewish.

MacDonald lists differences between Albert Einstein and other scholars who led unscientific movements. These differences are not so great. Relativity was scientific, but most of Einstein's later work on unified field theories was not. Einstein certainly lacked intellectual honesty and empirical rigor, as I explain in other posts. MacDonald seems to be overly impressed with the Einstein myth.

Scientific weakness is critical to MacDonald's theory, and no accuses Einstein of scientific weakness. Einstein is supposed to be the world's greatest scientist. But Einstein's scientific reputation is primarily based on his relativity work from 1905-1915. His later work on quantum mechanics, cosmology, and unified field theory was almost entirely worthless. And his relativity work is vastly overrated.

I don't know what the "obvious political and ethnic motivation" would be for either relativity or Einstein's theories. Einstein was involved in some academic battles, but I am not sure that he was always allied with Jews, and his enemies allied with non-Jews. So I am assuming that Einstein does not fit into MacDonald's theory, but I do not know enough about the subject. Someone should do a scholarly examination of this issue.


Thursday, Apr 21, 2011
 
Restoring humanity's rightful place in the universe
A physicist and philosopher (husband and wife) say:
That's the picture that Santa Cruz's Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack are drawing in their new book "The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World." While the rest of us are paying attention to the iPad, "American Idol" and Donald Trump, Abrams and Primack are making a spectacular claim -- that the most significant moment in human history may be ... right now. ...

"There have been only two changes in cosmology until today," said Abrams. "The first one was when the Greeks realized that the Earth is not flat. It's round and things go around it. And the second one was the Copernican Revolution, when Copernicus said that the Earth may not be the center of the universe. This today is the equivalent of the Copernican Revolution. It's that big. It's a picture that's stunning and hardly anyone knows it."

The picture has to do with the nature of the universe. The prevailing "double-dark theory" asserts that the visible universe is about one half of one percent of the whole universe, which consists largely of two mysterious forces known as "dark matter" and "dark energy." What's more, said Abrams and Primack, is that the double-dark theory restores the human as the central player in the universe. What's needed now is a new origin story that will reflect the new science and provide a way out of the cultural impasse between science and religion.

"What we're trying to do is to present a coherent picture of reality that is not just intellectually convincing, but feels good to be part of," said Abrams. "If we start thinking of ourselves as beings with a cosmic role -- which we actually are, if we understand what the cosmos is -- then it's a kind of spiritual awakening, too."

According to them, we earthlings really are at the center of the universe.

Wednesday, Apr 20, 2011
 
Mooney argues that Republicans are stupid
Chris Mooney writes in a Mother Jones article:
"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger (PDF), in a passage that might have been referring to climate change denial—the persistent rejection, on the part of so many Americans today, of what we know about global warming and its human causes. ...

And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts. ...

Republicans who think they understand the global warming issue best are least concerned about it; and among Republicans and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the issue doesn't increase one's concern about it. What's going on here? ...

Science denial today is considerably more prominent on the political right ...

Mooney's examples are not very convincing. It just seems like elaborate name-calling for people with a political disagreement.

For example, he starts off citing a study about people not accepting arguments about whether Pres. Obama is a Moslem.

It seems rational to me for someone to say that Obama is a Moslem, even after been told some (fictitious) quote of him denying it.

People usually attribute religion based on religion of the parents, unless there is an overt conversion or repudiation. In Obama's case, he has a Moslem name, his father and step-father were Moslems, he lived as a kid in Moslem country, he claims that he belonged to a Christian church in Chicago but seemed to have very little knowledge of what went on there, he goes out of his way to praise Islam, such as saying that the Koran is a holy book, his profession of Christianity is particularly unconvincing compared to other presidents, and we normally discount self-serving claims from politicians.

So I don't think that the Obama study really shows that people refuse to accept facts. It assumes that we are supposed to accept some politician's description of his own beliefs. Some people do and some don't. If a Jewish politician suddenly announced that he was not a Jew, some people would still call him a Jew. They are not stupid; they just define Jew differently.


Monday, Apr 18, 2011
 
Free Lorentz essay on Kindle
An Amazon review of Lorentz's 1920 relativity book begins:
Albert Einstein is rightly considered one of the greatest scientists of all time, and his two theories of relativity - special and general - are the crowning glory of his scientific oeuvre. They have fundamentally reshaped our thinking of the most fundamental concepts - space, time and matter. These two theories have also withstood the test of time, and a century after they had been formulated they are still almost entirely used in their original formulations.

H. A. Lorentz was a distinguished physicist in his own right, and one of Einstein's closest scientific and personal friends. ...

The review drew this reply:
Chauncey Zalkin writes: one of the? i'm asking without sarcasm here because this is not my field but wasn't he the greatest scientist of all time?
Apparently people are so accustomed to over-the-top praise for Einstein that anything less is considered an insult.

Only the free Kindle edition of this book gets gushing reviews, while the $4 paperback it is really just a poor reproduction of a short essay in the public domain. It is easily found online as The Einstein Theory of Relativity by Hendrik Lorentz.

The forward recites the myth of the 12 men:

WHETHER it is true or not that not more than twelve persons in all the world are able to understand Einstein's Theory, it is nevertheless a fact that there is a constant demand for information about this much-debated topic of relativity.
Lorentz says that the difficulty is exaggerated:
I cannot refrain, while I am mentioning it, from expressing my surprise that, according to the report in The Times, there should be so much complaint about the difficulty of understanding the new theory. It is evident that Einstein's little book "About the Special and the General Theory of Relativity in Plain Terms," did not find its way into England during wartime. Any one reading it will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; ...
That's right. The theory of quantum mechanics turned out to be much more difficult to understand.
 
Leakey on human evolution
Famed African paleontologist Richard Leakey was just interviewed on NPR Science Friday. Leakey says that man is an ape, and:
People didn't like the idea that the world was not at the center of the universe. People didn't like the idea that the world wasn't flat. Given time and evidence, people have learned to accept these things if they are true, and I think that there is no question about the truth of human evolution, none at all. [at 26:25]
Leakey also said that he has doubted that Lucy was a human ancestor, even tho that is claimed by other big-shots.

It is amusing that whenever a scientist wants you to believe something just because others scientists say so, he frequents makes some silly comparison to the Myth of the Flat Earth or Geocentrism. Both, in this case.

It is a big myth that people didn't like those ideas. Scientists discredit themselves when they give such phony arguments, and act as if they are common knowledge.

In Leakey's case, someone could argue that Leakey himself just didn't like the idea of being a descent of a small-brain ape like Lucy.


Saturday, Apr 16, 2011
 
Galison on Einstein thinking pure thoughts
Harvard historian Peter Galison writes in 2003:
The Einstein we know today is mostly based on Einstein’s later years, when he prided himself on his alienation from practically everything sociable and human, projecting an image of himself as a distracted, other-worldly character. We remember that Einstein who said that the best thing for a theoretical physicist would be to tend a lighthouse in quiet isolation from the world in order to be able to think pure thoughts. We have this picture of the theoretical physicist, and project it backwards to Einstein’s miraculous year, 1905. It is easy enough to think of him as working a day job in a patent office merely to keep body and soul together, while in actuality his real work was purely cerebral.
Yes, Einstein projected that image, but no progress in physics was ever accomplished that way.

Galison goes on to say:

Poincaré and Einstein, who had two of the largest scientific correspondences of the 19th and 20th centuries, including thousands of letters to and from other people, never exchanged a single postcard over the entirety of their overlapping lives. They met once, towards the end of Poincaré’s life, when Poincaré presided over a session at a vitally important physics conference where Einstein was talking about his new ideas about the quantum of light. At the end of this session, Poincaré said that Einstein’s presentation was so different from what physics should be — namely that it could be represented with causal interactions, with good differential equations, with clear presentations of principles and consequences — that he simply found it unbearable, and ended by making it clear that what Einstein was saying was so contradictory that anything could follow from it. It was a disaster for science, he thought. Einstein for his part went home and scribbled a note to a friend in which he recounted the wonderful work that had been done by various colleagues, how much he admired, even loved, the physicist Hendrik Lorentz, but disparaged Poincaré who simply seemed to understand nothing. The passed like ships in the night, each, on relativity, unable to acknowledge the other’s existence.
Causality was a major factor in Poincare formulating his theory of relativity, and I am not sure that Einstein ever understood it. I would not be surprised if Poincare had a low opinion of Einstein.

Friday, Apr 15, 2011
 
Bohr compares himself to Bruno
From a Niels Bohr interview in 1962:
So, therefore, the relationship between scientists and, philosophers was of a very curious kind. First of all I would say — and that is the difficulty — that it is hopeless to have any kind of understanding between scientists and philosophers directly. It has to go over the school. I don't know exactly how it is, but let us say, if you go back to ... the Copernican system, then some scientists they thought that it also was beautiful. But they were killed. Bruno was absolutely killed, and Galilei was forced to recant. But in the next generation, the school-children did not think it was so bad, and thereby a situation was created where it belonged to common knowledge or common preparation that one had to take that into account. I think it will be exactly the same with the complementary description.
Exactly the same? Who was killed over Complementarity?

It is true that physicists have debated Wave–particle duality for centuries, and many, such as Einstein, did not accept it. Some still don't.

Giordano Bruno was a Catholic monk who was burned at the stake for stubbornly denying the divinity of Jesus Christ. The closest he got to science was to speculate that there could be crucifixions on other worlds.

Bohr was brilliant, but he could be incoherent at times.


Thursday, Apr 14, 2011
 
Tegmark on teleportation
In the podcast for this 2008 NY Times article about teleportation in the movies, MIT physicist Max Tegmark says:
It is very important to realize that even tho it might sound totally useless to think about fundamental physics questions like how space and time work. It was precisely because Einstein was thinking about the nature of time that he figured out that mass equals energy times the speed of light squared, and this gave us nuclear power. [at 5:10]
No, that is all wrong. Even the formula is wrong.

What he says about quantum teleportation is even worse. He praises Quantum cryptography and Quantum computation as if these had proven validity. They do not, as noted below.


Tuesday, Apr 12, 2011
 
Stories about Professor Paradigm
This guy:
Errol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004
tells this story about famous Princeton philosopher Thomas Kuhn:
It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head. ...

“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. ...

Kuhn in those days was an incredible chain-smoker. First Pall Malls and then True Blues (a low tar and low nicotine alternative). Alternating. One cigarette lighting another. Matches were irrelevant. Maybe six, maybe seven packs of cigarettes a day. All that was essential was burning and smoke. And a massive cut-glass ashtray filled with the debris of an endless series of burnt-out butts. ...

I had written a paper on James Clerk Maxwell’s displacement current for Kuhn’s seminar on 19th century electricity and magnetism. The paper might have been 30 or so double-spaced pages. Kuhn’s reply, typed on unlined yellow paper, was 30 pages, single-spaced, with Courier marching all the way from the left to the right side of the paper. No margins. He was angry, really angry.

He had written at the very end of his comments, “You have long since passed the end of the road on which you began.” I asked, “What is that supposed to mean? I’m 24 years old.” He said that I was a “good” first-year graduate student but would become “less good” in subsequent years. ...

The conversation took a turn for the ugly. Were my problems with him, or were they with his philosophy?

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ” [8]

He started moaning. He put his head in his hands and was muttering, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.”

And then I added, “…except for someone who imagines himself to be God.”

It was at this point that Kuhn threw the ashtray at me.

For that he got kicked out of Princeton philosophy grad school. (In fairness, Kuhn's daughter denies the ashtray story in a comment. Maybe Kuhn wasn't trying to hit Morris, but Morris says that it was thrown at his head.)

Statistics professor A. Gelman tells this:

I was looking through the course catalog one day and saw that Thomas Kuhn was teaching a class in the philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn -- wow! So I enrolled in the class. I only sat through one session before dropping it, though. Kuhn just stood up there and mumbled.
Morris continues to rip Kuhn:
As John Burgess, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, told me in an interview: “Kuhn speaks one way when speaking to historians, and another way when speaking to philosophers. The trouble begins when he starts talking about things being socially constructed. ..."
The trouble begins when anyone starts talking about things being socially constructed. It is the first sign of a reality-denier.
Steven Weinberg has written eloquently in The New York Review of Books about Kuhn and paradigm shifts. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist was outlining the difference between “Kuhnian science” (that is, science as Kuhn imagined it) and actual science. And argued that Kuhn’s theories did not characterize science as Weinberg knew it. Weinberg wrote, “What does bother me on rereading Structure and some of Kuhn’s later writings is his radically skeptical conclusions about what is accomplished in the work of science…conclusions that have made Kuhn a hero to the philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cultural critics who question the objective character of scientific knowledge, and who prefer to describe scientific theories as social constructions, not so different from democracy or baseball.”

Or not so different from parapsychology, astrology or witchcraft.

He was also bothered by Kuhn’s arguments against progress. “[Kuhn] went on to reason that… there can be no sense in which theories developed after a scientific revolution can be said to add cumulatively to what was known before the revolution… More recently, in his Rothschild Lecture at Harvard in 1992, Kuhn remarked that it is hard to imagine what can be meant by the phrase that a scientific theory takes us ‘close to the truth.’”

And yet, Weinberg fails to drive the stake through the heart of the vampire. If paradigms are incommensurable how can we talk about their incommensurability? ... The devaluation of scientific truth cannot be laid on Kuhn’s doorstep, but he shares some responsibility for it.

Yes, that is right. Weinberg's article is here, with excerpts here. Somebody does need to drive that stake through the heart of the vampire. Kuhn is dead, but his followers dominate academic philosophy and their views are even more ridiculous. The vampire is the academic anti-science view of science.

Monday, Apr 11, 2011
 
Tennessee favors science
The Bad Astronomer says:
A bill clearly intended to promote and protect antiscience passed in the Tennessee State House yesterday, by a vote of 70 – 23.
The bill says:
Toward this end, teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught. ...

(e) This section only protects the teaching of scientific information, and shall not be construed to promote any religious or non-religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or non-beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.

This bill is pro-science, not anti-science. Learning science always means learning the strengths and weaknesses of the theories. It ought to, anyway.

I have become convinced that the real anti-science folks in our society are scientists like the Bad Astronomer who try to force their bad science on the rest of us.


Sunday, Apr 10, 2011
 
Hamming on mathematical physics
James Gleick has a new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. One of the famous information theorists is R. W. Hamming . He wrote in 1980:
The fundamental role of invariance is stressed by Wigner. It is basic to much of mathematics as well as to science. It was the lack of invariance of Newton's equations (the need for an absolute frame of reference for velocities) that drove Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Poincare, and Einstein to the special theory of relativity. ...

In recent years it was Einstein who most loudly proclaimed the simplicity of the laws of physics, who used mathematics so exclusively as to be popularly known as a mathematician. When examining his special theory of relativity paper [9. G. Holton Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, Kepler to Einstein, Harvard University Press, 1973.] one has the feeling that one is dealing with a scholastic philosopher's approach. He knew in advance what the theory should look like, and he explored the theories with mathematical tools, not actual experiments. He was so confident of the rightness of the relativity theories that, when experiments were done to check them, he was not much interested in the outcomes, saying that they had to come out that way or else the experiments were wrong. And many people believe that the two relativity theories rest more on philosophical grounds than on actual experiments.

Of course Einstein knew in advance what the theory looks like. It had been published by Lorentz and Poincare! It already had been experimentally confirmed, and Lorentz received the Nobel Prize. Einstein did not even need to learn about the details of the experiments; he just had to write up the Lorentz-Poincare theory.

There is more discussion of the applicability of mathematics on the article on Wigner's Puzzle.


Friday, Apr 08, 2011
 
More on Darwinian epicycles
I mentioned the group/kin selection controversy in evolutionism last year and last month

Wired reports:

In the Aug. 26 Nature, Wilson and two Harvard colleagues argue that the concept of kin selection is “limited” and “unnecessary.” And they propose steps for the evolution of ants, honeybees and other highly social species with such altruistic behaviors by just the broad “survival of the fittest” forces of natural selection without specifically invoking the power of kinship.

In recent years, Wilson has argued that the close family ties in ant colonies and other highly social groups may be consequences, rather than causes, of the evolution of such extreme social forms. In the new paper he combines his perspective with two co-authors’ mathematical critique of the methods used to calculate kinship effects, arguing that the techniques are as unnecessarily complicated as Ptolemaic astronomy.

“Babylonian astronomers look up in the heavens, and they see the planets moving in ‘epicycles,’” says paper co-author and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. “But if you put the sun in the center, there are no epicycles.”

Ptolemy lived in Egypt, in around AD 0150. He was not a Babylonian. The Babylonians did not have the invention of geometry, and are not known to have used epicycles. Putting the Sun in the center does not eliminate the need for epicycles.

Saying that the world is simpler without epicycles is like saying that the atmosphere is simpler without clouds.

The Rousset and Leon rebuttal says:

When they ask falsely evident rhetorical questions,1 liken inclusive fitness theory to geocentrism, or claim without justification that their approach is ‘common sense’ (their Appendix, p. 20), NTW are a long way away from what is generally expected of scientific discourse. In particular, it is troubling to see the authors turn to the argument of geocentrism and its unfalsifiable epicycles to discredit inclusive fitness (their Appendix).

The allusion to ‘Darwinian epicycles’ is indeed a typical rhetorical trick used to attack evolutionary biology.

Both sides of this debate are scientifically illiterate. There is nothing wrong with using a common sense argument that unfalsifiable features are an unnecessary complication. Except that is not really what epicycles were.

Apparently the phrase ‘Darwinian epicycles’ hit a nerve. The kin selection advocates do not think that such dispectful language should have been allowed into a journal like Nature.

Here is what Nowak el al say in their Nature supplement:

Inclusive fitness is just another method of accounting. The fact that an inclusive fitness calculation works for a particular model does not necessarily imply that ‘kin selection is at work’. ...

Of course, theoreticians are free to use any method of calculation as long as they employ it correctly and do not make unjustified statements claiming a ‘general principle’ for the evolution of cooperation (Lehman et al 2007a,b, Wild et al 2009, West et al 2008, Gardner 2009, West and Gardner 2010). A method of calculation which is arguably more cumbersome and confusing is not a general principle, much like the ptolemaic epicycles in the solar system were not a general principle either and became superfluous under Newtonian mechanics.

We have a similar situation in this debate. The epicycles of inclusive fitness calculations are not needed, given that we can formulate precise descriptions of how natural selection acts in structured populations.

No, the ptolemaic epicycles did not become superfluous under Newtonian mechanics. They got identified with the Earth's orbit, in the cases of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. For Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, they are used for the orbits of those bodies.

Here is more complete quote from the kin selection folks. It is unusually nasty. I cannot explain why people hate E. O. Wilson so much. Once someone dumped a pitcher of water on him at conference.

Nowak, M.A. et al. (2010) The evolution of eusociality. Nature, 466, 1057-1062.

Eusociality, in which some individuals reduce their own lifetime reproductive potential to raise the offspring of others, underlies the most advanced forms of social organization and the ecologically dominant role of social insects and humans. For the past four decades kin selection theory, based on the concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of eusociality. Here we show the limitations of this approach. We argue that standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach, allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations. ...

The rhetoric of social evolution

We think the publication of this article in a high-profile journal, along with the large media coverage it received, is an illustration of some serious shortcomings in current scientific practice. Arguably, the impact of NTW's paper reflects to a large extent the rhetorical ability of the authors, rather than the scientific value and novelty of the paper.

The format of the paper itself is an obstacle to scientific communication. The article has two parts: a short illustrated essay for the general reader and a 43-page online mathematical Appendix. Readers who are not mathematically inclined or simply short on time may be tempted to simply trust the authors and gauge the scientific value of the paper based on the ‘weight’ of the supplementary material or on the prestige of the authors. But as we have just shown, there is no significant mathematical novelty in this work. This latter point is best illustrated by the fact that their asserted main result is only the starting point of a recent paper by Taylor et al. (2007), although NTW do not cite this paper in regard to it.

Stylistically, the paper often departs from the neutrality of scientific prose, using a variety of rhetorical tricks typically found in the discourses of politicians or the writings of polemists, rather than in academic articles. When they ask falsely evident rhetorical questions,1 liken inclusive fitness theory to geocentrism, or claim without justification that their approach is ‘common sense’ (their Appendix, p. 20), NTW are a long way away from what is generally expected of scientific discourse.

In particular, it is troubling to see the authors turn to the argument of geocentrism and its unfalsifiable epicycles to discredit inclusive fitness (their Appendix). The allusion to ‘Darwinian epicycles’ is indeed a typical rhetorical trick used to attack evolutionary biology.2 Rhetoric aside, NTW are confused about epicycles in a way that is revealing about the utility of inclusive fitness theory. Epicycles are not specific to geocentrism: they were needed in Copernicus’ heliocentric theory as well, because it still rested on circular orbits, and it was not until Kepler's theory of elliptic orbits that epicycles were laid to rest. As Poincaré (1905) emphasized, geocentrism and heliocentrism are logically equivalent ways of accounting for celestial motion. The value of heliocentrism is that it makes sense through one factor (Earth's rotation) of phenomena that appear as coincidences in the geocentric perspective. Hamilton's rule (whether in the inclusive or neighbour-modulated perspectives) has the same value, in revealing common features of individual fitness across a range of biological scenarios.

The fragility of scientific publishing

We think the wide impact of an article that rests on such fragile foundations calls into question the efficiency of the editorial process in the most famous scientific journals. Nature's extravagant editorial characterization of the paper as ‘the first mathematical analysis of inclusive fitness theory’ recklessly tramples on nearly 50 years of accumulated knowledge. It is often said that science is self-correcting, but this can be so only if authors are engaged by the validity of what they are writing, if reviewers are engaged in the same way, and if science, rather than only media buzz, impact, and citations, matters to editors. These conditions are not necessarily fulfilled. Part of the problem lies in the increasingly specialized nature of science, and the increasing number of techniques that scientists have to handle. Students of ant societies, for example, may have to spend substantial effort in the field, yet they also have to care about possible artefacts of molecular markers, to understand the limits of various statistical methods, to understand some of the mathematical theory of evolution and to navigate through an increasingly large literature. Faced with such burden, both readers and journal editors have growing incentives to abandon critical thinking for more social considerations such as the prestige of the authors. Sometimes, the prospect of a ‘hot’ controversy seems to be enough to lure the editorial board into accepting a manuscript. Despite their claims of novelty and the media frenzy, NTW's article is actually a collection of worn-out arguments and thus represents a conceptual and technical step backward. Importantly, it does not provide any new theoretical tools or concepts to address the many exciting biological questions for future research on social evolution and structured populations.

No, the Earth's rotation has nothing to do with the coincidences; it is the Earth's revolution about the Sun that gives the coincidence between the Mars and Jupiter epicycles. Kepler did not lay the epicycles to rest, as they are logical equivalencies in heliocentrism (as Poincare emphasized). What Kepler did do was to show that the Mars and Jupiter epicycles were really the same and not a coincidence. The epicycles have nothing to do with elliptical orbits. It appears that these authors are agreeing that Hamilton's Rule is like the geocentric epicycles, but they are all hopelessly confused about what that means.

Thursday, Apr 07, 2011
 
Gould defines a fact
In connection with the Kansas evolution controversy, I ran across this 1999 Stephen Jay Gould op-ed in Time magazine:
Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth's revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a "fact." (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)
I really disagree with this. First, evolution is a theory that includes some facts, such as gene frequencies varying from one generation to the next, and hypotheses, such as a universal common ancestor. The theory is certainly not a fact.

Second, the Earth's motion depends on the frame of reference, and is not a fact according to relativity theory.

Third, by comparing evolution to something that is demonstrably a subjective opinion, he undermine his whole argument for teaching standards that forbid an alternative view to evolution. He effectively concedes that science depends on your point of view.

Fourth, science does deal in certainty. His definition of a "fact" is bizarre.

Gould died in 2002, but in 2000 he was elected president of the AAAS and leading the charge to tell Kansas how evolution should be taught.

Gould also argues:

Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar's life.
That is true, but irrelevant. Nobody cares about Caesar. If it turned out that Caesar did not exist, and maybe the historical accounts of him were really a composite of two other men, it would not affect our knowledge or worldview in any significant way.

OTOH, some people believe that evolution contradicts religion, and that would affect a lot of people, if accepted.

Gould goes on:

Third, no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature "is") can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we "ought" to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the "purpose" of our lives).
I doubt that very many people believe this, on either side of the evolution debate.

Wednesday, Apr 06, 2011
 
Religion prize goes to atheist multiverse believer
Templeton announces
LONDON, APRIL 6 – Martin J. Rees, a theoretical astrophysicist whose profound insights on the cosmos have provoked vital questions that speak to humanity’s highest hopes and worst fears, has won the 2011 Templeton Prize.
Woit says:
Rees does seem to believe in something that the Templeton people are willing to take as a replacement for belief in God: belief in the Multiverse. He has been one of the leading figures promoting the Multiverse and anthropic explanations, even before the recent string theory landscape pseudo-science made this so popular.
He is also a global warming alarmist.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coynes calls the prize a travesty because "Templeton's mission is a serious corruption of science." and because it promotes a dialogue between science and faith. Rees says that he is not religious, but I guess that he is not atheist enough for Coyne.


Tuesday, Apr 05, 2011
 
New attempts to verify quantum mechanics
AAAS Science magazine (Science 18 March 2011) has an article on Quantum Mechanics Braces for the Ultimate Test. It tries to justify Quantum cryptography by doing experiments to close Loopholes in Bell test experiments. Previous experiments have fallen short, as explained in the 2004 paper, Bell's theorem and the experiments: Increasing empirical support to local realism.

I think that this research is based on a profound misunderstanding of both quantum mechanics and cryptography. No useful results will come of it.

Abner Shimony gives a conventional explanation of Bell's Theorem.

Discussion of whether the Principle of locality (or Non-locality) can be consistent with the Interpretation of quantum mechanics is discussed in these recent papers: The EPR paradox, Bell's inequality, and the question of locality by Guy Blaylock, and EPR, Bell, and Quantum Locality by Robert B. Griffiths. If these papers are correct, then a lot of popular explanations of quantum mechanics are wrong. Some of these points are also explained by Lubos Motl's Delayed choice quantum eraser.

The problem with quantum cryptography is that it claims to use proven physics to solve a cryptographic problem. However, it does not do anything cryptographical useful because it cannot use a convention communication channel like the internet, and it cannot authenticate messages.

It also does not use proven physics. Many aspects of quantum mechanics have been proven by very convincing experiments, but not the features that are needed for quantum cryptography. As the above article explains, all those necessary arguments have loopholes, and no one has been able to close the loopholes. The article quotes researchers claiming that the loopholes will be closed any day, but they have been claiming that for 40 years. There are laws of physics that suggest that those laws will never be closed.

The AAAS Science does not explain these controversies, or why there are good reasons to believe that the quoted researchers are pursuing a dead end. Popular explanations of these subjects almost never get it right.


Monday, Apr 04, 2011
 
Boy smarter than Einstein
The UK Daily Mail says: Autistic boy,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity, and Time magazine says: 12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong.
A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics.

Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 - higher than Albert Einstein - and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role.

The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours.

Gifted: Jacob Barnett is so far ahead of his age group he is now leaving university he is developing his own theory on how the universe came into being

And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet - his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'.

The video is gibberish, of course. It looks as tho he is playing a joke on naive reporters.

Saturday, Apr 02, 2011
 
Fictional plot to kill Copernicus
I just saw Lawrence Goldstone on C-SPAN2 Book-TV promoting his 2010 book, The Astronomer: A Novel of Suspense. It is about a fictional 1534 Christian plot to kill Copernicus before he can publish his ideas about the Earth's motion.

One reviewer says that he got suspicious of the factual background when the characters ate potatoes! Potatoes were a New World food that had not yet spread to Europe. Another says that he teaches the Scientific Revolution, and was excited by the realism.

No, the book is not realistic. The Catholic Church had no quarrel with Copernicus when he published his 1534 book, and has never opposed the publication of scientific ideas. It certainly did not hire killers to murder scientists.

Goldstone is a Jewish name, and this is a bigoted anti-Christian book. I wonder how people would react if someone with a Christian name wrote a book claiming to be a historical novel about how Jews drank the blood of Christian babies, or some such nonsense.


Friday, Apr 01, 2011
 
Turtles all the way down
A variant of the Myth of the Flat Earth is the myth that the Earth is held up by turtles. The Evolving Thoughts blog tells this old story:
One day when the philosopher William James, who had a liking for scientific popularization, had just finished explaining in a small American town how the earth revolved around the sun, he saw, according to the anecdote, an elderly lady approaching with a determined look. Apparently, she strongly disagreed, expressing herself in the following terms: no, the earth does not move, because, as is well known, it sits on the back of a turtle. James decided to be polite and asked what, according to the hypothesis, the turtle rested on. The old lady replied without hesitating” But on another turtle, of course.” And James persisted: “But what does the second turtle rest on?” Then, so the story goes, the old lady triumphantly exclaimed: “It’s no use, Mr James, it’s turtles all the way down.” [From Isabelle Stenger's book, Power and Invention. However, in similar form, the story is widely found ascribed to James.]
While this story is commonly used by atheists to make fun of religious believers, the original usage appears to be from an 1854 debate in which a Christian was making fun of an atheist. A comment cites this:
[at the end of night #2 of a public debate between a Christian and a skeptic of some sort in 1854]

It is singular, that what I said about the ever-present agency of Providence in the affairs of this world, should have driven my opponent into the dreary regions of atheism. He discards a particular superintending Providence, and represents this world as governed by laws that change not. But did these laws make themselves? Did they make the world? Are they entirely independent of God? Do they need no one to superintend their operations? Will he pretend that God lives insulated from the creatures of this hands, from the world he made? What abominable folly of atheism. (General applause.) In what he said of plagues, did he not avow his unblushing atheism? (Enthusiatic applause.) And the marshes? (Renewed applause.) Agues come from marches, do they? But who fixed the law which makes auges come from marshes? (Applause.) My opponent’s reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, “On a tortoise.” But on what does the tortoise stand? “On another tortoise.” With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down. (Vehement and vociferous applause.)

p. 48, Great Discussion on the Origin, Authority, and Tendency of the Bible, between Rev. J. F. Berg, D.D., of Philadelphia, and Joseph Barker, of Ohio. Boston, J.B. Yerrington & Son, printers, 1854.

Barker & Berg discussion & Four sermons by T. Parker: A collection of 12 pieces By Joseph Barker, Joseph Frederick Berg, Theodore Parker

Bertrand Russell wrote, in Why I Am Not a Christian:
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.” [p.7]
Wow, I wonder if anyone really believed these elephant and turtle myths. My guess is that it is like the flat earth and stationary earth myths, and mainly used to make fun of scientific ignorance.

A related myth is that the Earth rests on an elephant. Both seem to have occurred in various cultures. The earliest reference seems to be 1690, according to this Hindu world tortoise article:

The combination of tortoise and elephant is present in John Locke's 1690 tract An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which references an "Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise".
What I don't see is where any Hindus or anyone took these myths seriously. The myths seem to be repeated primarily to make fun of people. That is what Hawking does, at the beginning of his famous 1988 book, A Brief History of Time.

Thursday, Mar 31, 2011
 
Smolin defines science
In the recent string theory debate mentioned below, Lee Smolin defines science this way:
Science is not about what's true, or what might be true. Science is about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by the weight of public evidence. [at 01:19:30]
The definition of science can be controversial, as noted below and here. I wonder how many people would go along with this one.

Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics, has a chapter on the question of defining science. He gives some other definitions, including this, attributed to Feynman:

Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.
Smolin's book supports the view of philosopher Paul Feyerabend, and says that there is no such thing as science, except as the opinions of the community of scientists.

Physicist Lawrence M. Krauss has a new book, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (Great Discoveries). But you have to wait until Feb. 2012 to his next book, on the subject of his video, A Universe from Nothing.


Tuesday, Mar 29, 2011
 
137 authors against an evolution opinion
Greg Mayer re-posts these comments:
The list of authors and their institutions, which occupies two pages of the three-page letter, reads like a Who’s Who of social evolution.  It’s telling that nearly every major figure in the field lined up against Nowak et al.

I’m confident that you’re on the right side of this dispute, but still, that argument is uncomfortably reminiscent of an infamous book titled “Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein” (Hundred authors against Einstein) [1931.]

Supposedly Einstein retorted, "If I were wrong, one would be enough."

I had thought that the 1931 German anti-Einstein book was some sort of Nazi or anti-Jewish propaganda, but according to Wikipedia, that is not true. It says that "no antisemitic expression can be found in the book", and portrays the authors as being older scholars who either misunderstood relativity or had some philosophical objections to it.

The issue in the new evolution article is whether kin selection is better explained by gene selection or group selection. Richard Dawkins and many others have staked their reputations on there being no such thing as group selection. I think that they are probably wrong, and are desperately trying to silence an alternate view.


Monday, Mar 28, 2011
 
Discover on Einstein
Discover magazine has a special issue on 47 great minds of science. Einstein is on the cover, and dominates about half the pages. Many great scientists are just there for what they have to say about Einstein.

Darwin is the "genius of the 19th century". Rachel Carson is the "crusader". Tesla is the "mad scientist".


Sunday, Mar 27, 2011
 
Greene on Einstein
Brian Greene's new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, says:
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once wrote, "Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. ..." ...

Although the details are of historical interest, I'm describing this episode for the larger point: everyone had access to Maxwell's mathematics, but it took the genius of Einstein to embrace the mathematics fully. And with that move, Einstein broke through to the special theory of relativity, overturning centuries of thought regarding space, time, matter, and energy. [p.319,320]

He uses this false account of Einstein as one of his main arguments for the multiverse.

Einstein did not embrace Maxwell's mathematics any more fully than Lorentz and Poincare had years earlier. Not in any sense. Greene's story is bogus, as is his whole argument for the multiverse.

Greene was on C-SPAN2 Book-TV today pushing his book and the idea that following the mathematical pattern of Copernicus can lead us to the multiverse without bothering with observational evidence.


Saturday, Mar 26, 2011
 
Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?
The current SciAm cover story is about cosmic inflation:
Thirty years ago Alan H. Guth, then a struggling physics postdoc at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, gave a series of seminars in which he introduced “inflation” into the lexicon of cosmology. The term refers to a brief burst of hyperaccelerated expansion that, he argued, may have occurred during the first instants after the big bang. ... To this day the development and testing of the inflationary theory of the universe is one of the most active and successful areas of scientific investigation.

Its raison d’être is to fill a gap in the original big bang theory. The basic idea of the big bang is that the universe has been slowly expanding and cooling ever since it began some 13.7 billion years ago.

The article says that inflation theory is being taught as fact, but there is really no empirical evidence that it is any better than the alternatives, and there may never be.

Every year Guth is talked about as a possible Nobel physics prize candidate. I don't see how they can give him a prize unless there is some demonstrable merit to his inflation theory, and there appear to be none. It is an intriguing idea, but that's all.

Meanwhile, a NY Times article on Clovis people ends with:

“The last spear carriers will die without changing their minds,” Dr. Adovasio said.
This seems to be based on the philosophy that the theory of pre-Clovis American people should be accepted because the opponents are dying off. Kuhnian science philosophy describes new ideas being accepted like fads, and not by rational argument.

In the string theory debate, mentioned below, the anti-string-theory position was represented by Lee Smolin. But he is a Kuhnian who believes that string theory should be accepted as true if merely the physics establishment accepts it, and does not believe that there is really any objective truth in the matter. So he only gave minor criticisms of string theory.

Inflation theory seems to be an example of a physics theory that has become accepted without any good evidence. Nobody can when the inflation started, when it ended or even whether it ended, what caused it, or anything like that. It is just an unsupported idea that happens to be popular.


Friday, Mar 25, 2011
 
Math society credits Einstein for new mechanics
A math society reprinted some old math articles in 2000, with these Introductory comments:
Poincaré's 1904 appraisal of the challenges faced by twentieth-century mathematical physics describes, in part, the then hot topic of relativity, ending with the challenge that perhaps we shall have to construct an entirely new mechanics," a challenge met the following year by A. Einstein. Indeed, the fourth article is Einstein's 1934 Gibbs Lecture about the equivalence of mass and energy.
If he had just finished the sentence in the quote, he would see that Poincare had already related mass to energy in 1904. Here is Poincare's essay from that St. Louis lecture:
The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a stationary observer as for one carried along in a uniform motion of translation, so that we have no means, and can have none, of determining whether or not we are being carried along in such a motion. ...

And then experiment, too, has taken upon itself to refute this interpretation of the principle of relativity; all the attempts to measure the velocity of the earth relative to the ether have led to negative results. ...

Their task was not easy, and if Lorentz has succeeded, it is only by an accumu- lation of hypotheses. The most ingenious idea is that of local time. ...

Perhaps too we shall have to construct an entirely new mechanics, which we can only just get a glimpse of, where, the inertia increasing with the velocity, the velocity of light would be a limit beyond which it would be impossible to go. The ordinary, simpler mechanics would remain a first approximation since it would be valid for velocities that are not too great, so that the old dynamics would be found in the new.

I don't see how this math society could fail to know that Poincare published that new mechanics himself the next year in 1905. He already had the relativity principle and the idea of local time in this essay, and those are the main ideas in Einstein's 1905 paper. Einstein just had part of the new kinematics, not the new mechanics.

Tuesday, Mar 22, 2011
 
New string theory debate
MSNBC reports on a recent string theory debate:
NEW YORK — Einstein died before completing his dream of creating a unified theory of everything. Since then, physicists have carried on his torch, continuing the quest for one theory to rule them all.

But will they ever get there? That was the topic of debate when seven leading physicists gathered here at the American Museum of Natural History for the 11th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate.

Mutually exclusive theories

Two of the most celebrated, successful theories in physics are contradictory.

The theory that describes very big things – general relativity – and the theory that describes very small things – quantum mechanics – each work amazingly well in their own realms, but when combined, break down. They can't both be right. And we can't just sweep that fact under the rug and continue to use them each as they are, because there are some cases in which both theories apply – such as a black hole.

"Its size is small in terms of length; its size is large in terms of mass. So you need both," explained Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University.

There is no such conflict, because the inside of a black hole is unobservable.

Greene prefers to say that he has "confidence" instead of "belief" (at 20:30), because belief is a murky word:

"There's been an enormous amount of progress in string theory," said Greene, a proponent of string theory whose 2000 book "The Elegant Universe" described the theory in layman's terms. "There have been issues developed and resolved that I never thought, frankly, we would be able to resolve. The progress over the last 10 years has only solidified my confidence that this is a worthwhile direction to pursue." ...

Greene admitted that string theorists have not produced testable predictions that experiments can confirm, but said it wasn't time to give up.

"As long as progress is carrying forward, you keep going," he said. "To say there's no progress, come on man, that's just not right!"

The theory is so complex, he charged, and deals with such fantastically small scales that are inaccessible to experimental data, that no wonder it's taking a while to crack.

This wasn't much of a debate, or someone would have challenged Greene on his claims of progress. Tyson asks him about it at 1:10:20, and his first response is that string theory should only be judged by string theorists, not others. Why Tyson persists, he makes (at 1:11:25) an assortment of grand claims, such as unifying all the 4 forces and solving quantum gravity. None of that is true.

The audio is here.

Here is another new Greene interview where he says similar things and plugs his new book on multiple universes. This time he says that string theory has made progress in doing computations, because ten years ago they had to use approximations. But he admits that there has been no progress relating the theory to experiment.

Update: There is also a SciAm article.


Saturday, Mar 19, 2011
 
Of course Einstein did not understand relativistic measurement
Those who credit Einstein are emphatic that his famous 1905 relativity paper was a work of great genius, but there explanations are confusing and unintelligible. NY Times science editor Dennis Overbye is an Einstein idolizer, and his explanation follows this pattern.

I posted below about Overbye's Einstein book, but I include here a more complete quote to show that I am quoting him fairly:

In Albert's hands, however, the meaning of these equations had changed completely. Lorentz believed the transformations were real electrodynamic effects, caused by forces created by the passage of objects through the aether. In the new relativity theory, however, they were purely intrinsic to the nature of motion, a consequence of nature's presumed desire to keep the speed of light constant. In this new universe, exceeding the speed of light was not so much impossible as meaningless. If we could exceed the speed of light, Albert later remarked, we could send telegrams to the past. Moreover, since there was no aether, there was no absolute rest frame, just as there was no real time. Any observer could view himself as being at rest and everybody else moving. Two physicists sailing past each other could look out and each see the other as shortened and moving in slow motion, and they would both be right.

But in Einstein's formulation did objects actually shrink? In a way the message of relativity theory was that physics was not about real objects; rather, it concerned the measurements of real objects. And each of those measurements included time as well as space. Relativity was not an expla-nation of nature at all, but of how we know about nature. In that sense it has sometimes been claimed that relativity is not a theory at all, but a lan-guage or a convention, a set of rules for how to talk about the universe. Af-ter relativity, no law could claim to be a law of nature that did not speak its language, that could not be expressed in a form that was true for observers moving at any constant speed -- so-called inertial observers. Although Al-bert spent the last half of his paper solving problems in optics and electro-magnetism, he knew that the relativity principle, as he called it, transcended any particular problem.

No such declarations of grandeur, of course, intruded on the flat and somewhat brisk tone of the paper. Albert simply presented his argument and in many cases left it to the reader to fill in the gaps and to realize the implications. Unlike most scientific papers, it did not specifically refer to any other scientist or body of experimental data and contained no foot-notes. This, remarks Galison, may be a reflection of Einstein's experience in the patent office, since footnotes, suggesting that somebody else has been there first, are anathema in a patent application. At its end Einstein listed no references, but only a brief acknowledgment. "In conclusion," he wrote, "let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work on the problem here discussed, and that I am indebted to him for many a valuable suggestion." [p.138-139]

What he is saying here is that there are two interpretations of special relativity, Lorentz's electrodynamic interpretation and a measurement-theory interpretation. Einstein did not cite Lorentz, so he could have disagreed with Lorentz. Maybe he did not cite Lorentz because he was mimicking a fraudulent patent application, where an applicant tries to claim credit for something that someone else invented. But Einstein did not claim to have any interpretation different from Lorentz.

Einstein's paper did have declarations of grandeur. Just read the first three paragraphs. He just didn't have any of the sort that would define a new interpretation to Lorentz's relativity.

The striking phrase here is "of course". Overbye implies that it is obvious that Einstein was not smart enough to give the measurement-theory interpretation. And if he was unable to give it, then he certainly did not understand it either, as everyone agrees that the paper was his entire understanding of special relativity. Even when Einstein wrote expository articles about special relativity years later, he stuck to what he wrote in 1905.

So what exactly was Einstein's innovation? By Overbye's account, it was not the mathematical formulas, as Lorentz had them all before. It was not a new interpretation of those formulas either, as Einstein did not state or understand any such interpretation. At best, by this account, his paper had gaps that allowed others to realize the implications of Lorentz's theory. And "of course", Einstein was unable to realize those implications himself.

This is one of many descriptions of the origin of special relativity that make Einstein sound like a great genius, but if you read it carefully, there is no clear statement of Einstein having done anything original. All of those great ideas were from others, not Einstein.


Thursday, Mar 17, 2011
 
Most important equations in physics
Nature magazine tells us that this month is the 150th anniversary of Maxwell's equations:
Exactly 150 years ago, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that three apparently separate phenomena — electricity, magnetism and light — are different aspects of one phenomenon, today known as electromagnetism.
Maxwell was just trying to explain experiments, and not unify anything. Today it is the reverse:
But even if the Higgs boson is discovered as predicted, physicists will not be satisfied. The ultimate goal is a unification theory that would reveal how all observed particles and forces are just different manifestations of a single underlying system, which can be expressed within a common mathematical framework. ... Although physicists agree that some kind of larger unification is needed, they don't know what form that should take.
The editorial continues to celebrate Maxwell. It credits him with the aether, without mentioning the word:
It is not only in materials that these equations can be applied. Empty space was also illuminated by Maxwell.
Maxwell's theory was the first fully relativistic theory. He did more to create relativity theory than Einstein.

Wednesday, Mar 16, 2011
 
Early attacks on relativity
NewScientist has a Nov 2010 article about early attacks on relativity:
These objections were first raised in scholarly journals, with discussion restricted to academia. But after a key prediction of general relativity was confirmed during an eclipse in 1919, Einstein was transformed into a media star and the debate acquired a much broader public impact. In 1919, The New York Times published an article headlined "Lights all askew in the heavens. Men of science more or less agog over results of eclipse observations", while a German magazine celebrated Einstein as "A new giant of world history". In the years that followed, the newspapers reported on everything from his clothing and Jewish background to his affection for music. ...

Another motivation was more noble. Einstein's opponents were seriously concerned about the future of science. They did not simply disagree with the theory of general relativity; they opposed the new foundations of physics altogether. The increasingly mathematical approach of theoretical physics collided with the then widely held view that science is essentially simple mechanics, comprehensible to every educated layperson.

This way of thinking can be traced back to the 19th-century heyday of popular science, when many citizens devoted their leisure to the pursuit of scientific understanding, and simple theories of gravity or electricity were widely discussed in scientific magazines. Relativity represented a quite different way of understanding the world. It was a theory that "only 12 wise men" could comprehend, The New York Times declared in 1919. ...

Aware of their marginalised position, many of Einstein's opponents turned to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. "Our trouble in America is that all scientific journals are closed to the anti-relativists through Jewish influence. The daily press is almost entirely under the control of the Jews," Reuterdahl wrote in 1923. From this position, it was easy for Einstein's opponents to see themselves as victims rather than aggressors. In their interpretation of reality, the mere existence of relativity theory and the non-acceptance of arguments against it qualified as an attack on them.

The article is mirrored here, and behind a paywall here. There is also info in Criticism of relativity theory on Wikipedia.

This portrays the opposition to relativity as being mainly academic, and not based on Jewish or other issues.

The NY Times was idolizing Einstein with absurd statements, such as the one about "only 12 wise men". The article does not say whether Reuterdahl was correct about Jewish motivations at the NY Times. The newspaper was owned and edited largely by Jews, and I have never heard of the paper giving so much over-the-top favorable publicity to a non-Jew.

I think that the article is correct that the main issues with Einstein had nothing to do with with Jewishness. There were many reasons to dislike Einstein, and to be skeptical about what he did.

But Einstein himself had another view. According to this April 3, 1921 NY Times article, Einstein said that opposition to his relativity theory was "entirely anti-Semitic":

No man of culture or knowledge has any animosity toward my theories. Even the physicists opposed to the theory are animated by political motives.
A 1923 NY Times article had the headlines, "Einstein Describes His Newest Theory -- Unintelligle to Laymen". [as quoted in Isaacson, 2007, p.339] The news story was largely about his support of Zionism.

Other news stories mentioned Einstein's Jewishness. A 1929 Time magazine cover story said that he was sickly and noted "Dr. Einstein, like so many other Jews and scholars, takes no physical exercise at all." [quoted in Isaacson, p.342]

Physics is still divided between those who are trying to explain the natural world, and those who propose abstract and untestable ideas. There are plenty of Jews and non-Jews on both sides of the divide, as far as I know. The Jewish issue is a distraction from the science.


Monday, Mar 14, 2011
 
Pursuit of New Physics
The Toronto Sun (from Reuters) reports:
New Physics, the motto of the LHC, refers to knowledge that will take research beyond the “Standard Model” of how the universe works that emerged from the work of Albert Einstein and his 1905 Theory of Special Relativity.

“We will be focusing this year on super-symmetry, extra dimensions, how black holes are produced, and the Higgs boson. We expect some first results by the summer,” said Buchmueller.

The Standard Model has nothing to do with Einstein's 1905 work. The LHC is not going to get any of those results, except maybe the Higgs.

The Michelson–Morley experiment is the world's most famous failed experiment. The LHC will be the second most famous failed experiment.

The current Wikipedia article on Albert Einstein starts:

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who discovered the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".
This suggests that general relativity was his greatest accomplishment. That may be correct, but I don't think that is why he is "often regarded as the father of modern physics." He is primarily idolized among physicists for his 1905 special relativity paper. That is what is said to have revolutionized physics. A century later, physicists still can't stop talking about it when asked about how the LHC is going to find new physics. The above quote is an example, as it suggests that our understanding of the universe emerged from that paper.

Wikipedia also recommends pronouncing the name in German as OL-bairt INE-shtine. Americans pronounce it Al-bert INE-stine.

Today is Pi day, because it can be written 3.14. It is also Einstein's birthday.


Saturday, Mar 12, 2011
 
A Universe from Nothing
Here is a video A Universe from Nothing - Talk by Lawrence Krauss, from last year. Krauss is introduced by R. Dawkins. Krauss argues that the net energy of the universe is zero, so it should not be surprising that it could be created out of nothing in the big bang. In answer to a question, Krauss says:
What is true, and is interesting, ... is that general relativity unfortunately gives people the wrong picture about science. I get a lot of letters from crackpots because of it. Everyone imagines that Einstein sat in a room, closed doors, and thought of this picture, and came up with this beautiful theory, independent of reality (like string theorists). That is not true at all. Einstein was guided by experiment, was guided deeply by experiment. And not just thought experiments. [at 56:10]
That is correct. The wrong picture was promoted by Einstein himself, historians, biographers, philosophers, and string theorists. And yes, this wrong picture promotes bad physics.

Einstein wrote in 1938:

The deviation of the motion of the planet Mercury from the ellipse was known before the general relativity theory was formulated, and no explanation could be found. On the other hand, general relativity developed without any attention to this special problem. Only later was the conclusion about the rotation of the ellipse in the motion of a planet around the sun drawn from the new gravitational equations. [p.254
Einstein's work on general relativity was a collaboration with many others, with most of the original and difficult ideas coming from others. A goal all along was to improve the relativistic explanations of the Mercury orbit anomaly. There were partial relativistic explanations from Poincare and DeSitter before Einstein.

Thursday, Mar 10, 2011
 
Does nature play dice?
The 2005 Einstein Symposium has this homepage:
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have had to postpone the "Einstein II" conference entitled "Does nature play dice?" until further notice.
Funny. Einstein was a determinist who did not believe that there were any random circumstances beyond our control. It sounds like the cancelation was caused by nature rolling the dice.

This sounds like a joke. Or like last month's story, Psychic Joe Power's Performance Canceled Due To Irony. There were unforeseen circumstances.

Meanwhile, the current no. 1 bestseller on Amazon is Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. It is about memory competitions, and not Michael Jackson or Albert Einstein.


Wednesday, Mar 09, 2011
 
Film on Kansas evolution hearings
An 82 minute film on the Kansas evolution hearings is available (for streaming) free until March 14. Here is how the film was promoted:
Even before they took place, the 2005 Kansas school board hearings on evolution were recognized as a pivotal battle in America's ongoing war over teaching evolution in the public schools. Organized by believers in Intelligent Design and convened by creationists, the hearings provided a testing ground for the successful legal and political tactics that drive today's ongoing actions by anti-evolution organizations in the US and around the world. On the pro-evolution side, they inspired a worldwide boycott of the event by mainstream science.
It starts with this made-up quote:
"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who crave certainty, and those who seek understanding." -unknown
That quote is supposed to represent the Religion v. Science dichotomy, with scientists being the ones seeking understanding. But the evolutionists who boycotted the hearings seemed like the ones who crave certainty to me.

Whenever the NY Times has article on evolution, it nearly always makes a point of saying that we are certain that evolution is correct. I pointed this out yesterday and previously.

At 21:40, the film makes fun of the Kansas education leaders for not being likely to understand string theory! Nobody understands string theory, or can explain what it has to do with the real world. And yet our leading physicists have a dogmatic certainty that it is correct.

The string theorists all emulate Einstein, and he was famous for craving certainty. He hated quantum uncertainty, as shown in the Bohr–Einstein debates. He is also widely praised for ignoring experiment, such as here and here.

The Kansas hearings were about changing the definition of science. I think that the evolutionists were embarrassments to science.

The film has no scientific content. It tries to ridicule some religious folks for not being very knowledgeable about evolution. One witness was berated for only reading the documents related to his intended testimony. Others gave conflicting answers for the age of the Earth, with some saying 10K years and some 4.5B years. The purpose of this question was explained as driving a wedge between evolution skeptics. The question reveals something about where the witnesses were getting their info, but none of them gave any reasoning anyway. So it did not distinguish between those who crave certainty, and those who seek understanding.


Tuesday, Mar 08, 2011
 
Darwin wrong about invasive species
The NY Times reports that Darwin was wrong:
He may, however, have been wrong about invasive species, at least where amphibians are concerned. Darwin believed that when an invasive species entered a region where a closely related species already existed, it would most likely be unsuccessful because of a competition for resources.

“Instead, we found the opposite pattern with amphibians,” said Reid Tingley, a biologist at the University of Sydney. “When frogs and toads and salamanders invade an area where a similar species exists, they are more, not less, likely to establish themselves.” ...

This is the first study that contradicts Darwin’s invasive species hypothesis using animals.

The article does not explain the error in Darwin's reasoning. He presumably said that animals thrive and succeed by adapting to their environment, and a native species would be better adapted than an invasive species.

So where is the error? Can an animal gain an advantage by adapting to harsher conditions? That would go against a lot of Darwinian thinking. The researchers only say that the aliens may be preadapted, but that does not explain anything.

The article is careful not to give encouragement to Darwin skeptics:

Charles Darwin has had a remarkable record over the past century, not only in the affirmation of evolution by natural selection, but in the number of his more specific ideas that have been proved correct.
I think that Darwin would have said that his naturalization hypothesis was a consequence of evolution by natural selection. So it does not make much sense to say that it was affirmed and disproved at the same time.

Friday, Mar 04, 2011
 
Overbye on Einstein
NY Times science editor Dennis Overbye wrote the 2000 biography, Einstein in Love: (A Scientific Romance). In the epilogue, Overbye writes:
HENDRIK LORENTZ continued to cling to his beloved aether after the advent of general relativity, and Albert humored him to the extent of titling a talk he gave in Leiden in 1920 "Aether and Relativity Theory.” The postwar years Lorentz campaigned to get German scientists readmitted to international scientific organizations. When he died, in 1928, the Dutch telegraph and telephone services were suspended for three minutes in his honor. His funeral was attended by government and scientific dignitaries from around the world, including Einstein, who called Lorentz "the greatest and noblest man of our times." [p.379]
Einstein did not just favor the aether in that 1920 title; after the advent of general relativity in 1916, all of his comments favored the aether. Lorentz and Einstein were in complete agreement on this point after 1916.
HENRI POINCARE' died unexpectedly in 1912, after a supposedly successful operation, never having accepted Einstein's version of relativity. "What shall be our position in view of these new conceptions? Shall we be obliged to modify our conclusions?" he asked rhetorically in a lecture the end of his life. "Certainly not ...," he concluded. "Today some physicists want to adopt a new convention. It is not that they are constrained to do so; they consider this new convention more convenient; that is all. And those who are not of this opinion can legitimately retain the old one in order not to disturb their old habits. I believe, just between us, that that is what they shall do for a long time to come." [p.380]
What the book omits is that those 1912 remarks about "new conceptions" were not about Einstein's version of relativity. It was about Minkowski's version. And Poincare was not saying whether or not he accepts it; he was only predicting that some physicists will prefer other interpretations.

As Overbye explains on p.103, Poincare had a conventionalist philosophy that recognized the possibility of differing mathematical structures being consistent with experiment. Choosing one is a matter of convenience. Poincare was demonstrating the point again in 1912.

These biographical snippets are obviously chosen to show the superiority of Einstein's relativity over Lorentz and Poincare. However, they do not show that at all.

In the prologue, Overbye calls Einstein "the cosmic saint, whose only peer is God." [p.xi] Here is how special relativity is credited in the book:

Lorentz's theory worked, but in its final form it embodied eleven different fundamental assumptions. [p.128]

Poincaré ... regarded these inverse transformations as mere mathematical artifacts with no physical significance. [p.129]

Albert's results were identical to those of Lorentz and Poincaré. ...

In Albert's hands, however, the meaning of these equations had changed completely. Lorentz believed that the transformations were real electrodynamic effects, ...

But in Einstein's formulation did objects actually shrink? In a way, the message of relativity theory was that physics was not about real objects, rather, it concerned the measurement of real objects. ... Although Albert spent the last half of his paper solving problems in optics and electromagnetism, he knew that the relativity principle, as he called it, transcended any particular problem.

No such declaration of grandeur, of course, intruded on the flat and somewhat brisk tone of the paper. Albert simply presented his argument and in many cases left it to the reader to fill in the gaps and to realize the implications. [p.138-139]

This is crazy. The book credits Lorentz for saying that the transformations were real, and it describes another interpretation, but it says that Einstein did not gave the other interpretation. So what's the difference?

The part about Poincare is hopelessly confused. I guess the book is trying to say that Poincare thought that the transformations were real, but the inverse transformations were not. But that does not make any sense, as Poincare proved that the transformations form a group, and there can be no distinction between the transformations and the inverses.

While Einstein did not make that declaration of grandeur, Poincare did in 1905:

This state of affairs may be explained in one of two ways: either everything in the universe would be of electromagnetic origin, or this aspect — shared, as it were, by all physical phenomena — would be a mere epiphenomenon, something due to our methods of measurement.
Or in another translation:
Either there would be nothing in the world which is not of electromagnetic origin. Or this part which would be, so to speak, common to all the physical phenomena, would be only apparent, something which would be due to our methods of measurement.
If this is really the crucial "message of relativity theory", then it is unmistakable that Poincare said it in 1905, and Einstein did not.

The comment about Lorentz's 11 assumptions is one of the few things not footnoted, but I happen to know that it comes from Holton. I have mentioned him before here and here. The count is unfair. Most of the assumptions are used to prove what Einstein just postulated, and so they are not really comparable to Einstein's assumptions.


Wednesday, Mar 02, 2011
 
More supersymmetry bad news
Nature magazine reports:
"Wonderful, beautiful and unique" is how Gordon Kane describes supersymmetry theory. Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has spent about 30 years working on supersymmetry, a theory that he and many others believe solves a host of problems with our understanding of the subatomic world.

Yet there is growing anxiety that the theory, however elegant it might be, is wrong. Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometer proton smasher that straddles the French-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, have shown no sign of the "super particles" that the theory predicts.

It is not so wonderful or unique either. Supersymmetry (SUSY) would introduce about 100 new unknown parameters, and we would not have much hope of determining them. The arguments for SUSY seem bogus to me, and I bet that it is not found. Kane is also a string theory promoter, who claims that it is testable, but believes in it regardless.

Here is an explanation of why the string theorists believe in SUSY, regardless of the facts.


Tuesday, Mar 01, 2011
 
Famous in 10 kiloyears
Marginal Revolution blog writes:
Who do you think will still be famous in 10,000 years? ... I'll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong. (Addendum: Oops! I forgot Darwin and Euclid.)
These choices seem to be based on their symbolic value, rather than actual accomplishments. Einstein symbolizes relativity and other physics, Turing symbolizes computability, Watson and Crick symbolize advances in biochemistry, and Armstrong symbolizes space exploration.

Surely Kurt Goedel was more important than Turing, and Linus Pauling was more important than Watson and Crick. And Maxwell, Lorentz, Poincare, Minkowski, Bohr, Hilbert, and Weyl were more important than Einstein.

Einstein's fame seems safe for a few decades. But someday, his fans will die out, and people will have to look up what he actually did. And then they will find that his accomplishments were minor.


Monday, Feb 28, 2011
 
Bethell on Einstein's relativity
The net is fully of Einstein idolizers, and a few skeptics. One of the more prominent skeptics has written a book, and now a new article. Tom Bethell writes:
A major turning point in the public’s understanding of science came about a century ago, with the introduction of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Before then, educated laymen were expected to and usually could understand new developments in science, at least in outline. After Einstein this changed. Science moved beyond the ken of educated laymen. ...

Special relativity theory (1905) has a special difficulty. It baffles almost everyone, yet nothing more than high school algebra is involved. So it’s not the math. It’s that we must accept something that is impossible to believe – except on Einstein’s authority. If Petr Beckmann is right, we should reject that authority, as indeed we should reject authority in all fields of science. ...

It was the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 that launched special relativity. It involves only unaccelerated, linear motion. If curved motion, acceleration, or gravity, are involved, then we must turn to general relativity (1916), where the math gets much more difficult. ...

Einstein postulated – assumed – that the speed of light is a constant irrespective of the motion, ...

Petr Beckman made a different claim. He argued that the ether is equivalent to the gravitational field, which of course is non-uniform. It is denser at the earth’s surface than it is near the moon, for example. The Sun’s gravitational field is much denser near the Sun than it is in outer space (where it is still not zero). The light medium, then, is non-uniform. ...

Beckmann’s theory gives the same results as Einstein’s general relativity, but by a far simpler method. For various reasons, Einstein’s special relativity should be discarded. ...

At present, the world of orthodox physics is unwilling to reexamine Einstein’s relativity, whether special or general. It would fall apart if subjected to real scrutiny, I believe. But in science (and perhaps everything else) the simple should always be preferred to the complex – all else being equal. Such a revision, if it ever came to pass, would also constitute a serious challenge to the priesthood of science. Perhaps that’s why the relativists are hanging tough.

Bethell is not a scientist, and he relies mainly on Beckmann, who is now dead. You don't need to know any physics to understand how unlikely his story is.

First, special relativity is a special case of general relativity. Special relativity is much more widely accepted and confirmed than the general theory. But Bethell claims that the general theory is true, but he special theory is false. How is that even possible?

Second, Beckmann published many things, but never his theory that is supposedly somehow better than Einstein's. Why not?

Third, he complains that we accept the constancy of the speed of light because of Einstein's authority, but he also admits that the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 already found that, before Einstein. Which is it?

I am all for simplicity, but how is Beckmann's non-uniform gravitational aether simpler than a uniform aether?

Some of this is the fault of the popular relativity books. Einstein denied that he used the experimental evidence, and claimed that he just applied pure thought. So in the process of fully crediting Einstein, the experimental evidence for special relativity is downplayed. Instead of saying that we know the speed of light is constant because of experiments like Michelson-Morley, the books say that Einstein postulated.

In fact, the Einstein postulates were ideas that were previously proved by theory and experiment. Acceptance of relativity had very little to do with Einstein's paper.

Update: I learned that Wikipedia has a page on this stuff, called Criticism of relativity theory.


Sunday, Feb 27, 2011
 
4 reasons to hate string theory
Phil Gibbs gives Four reasons why he likes string theory. They are:
(1) the inclusion of gravitons
(2) supersymmetry is a natural byproduct of string theory and if it does exist in nature at scales currently being probed by the LHC then it can explain several mysteries
(3) a holographic principle to avoid the paradox of thermodynamic information being lost inside a black hole
(4) I am comfortable with the platonic view that all mathematically consistent universes exist and we just inhabit some part of that realm ... the laws of physics are somehow selected to promote intelligent life ... string theory ... can be realized in many forms in lower dimensions ..., plenty enough to account for anthropic reasoning. In my view it is the perfect outcome.
Only reason (2) has any relation to experiment. However the latest evidence is against it:
The first results on supersymmetry from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been analysed by physicists and some are suggesting that the theory may be in trouble. Data from proton collisions in both the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and ATLAS experiments have shown no evidence for supersymmetric particles – or sparticles – that are predicted by this extension to the Standard Model of particle physics.
See also Woit's comments. Supersymmetry was invented before string theory, and most of the reasons for and against it have nothing to do with string theory.

Reason (1) is based on the conjecture that gravity is transmitted by spin-2 bosons. Gravitons, if they exist, would be trillions of times harder to detect than gravity waves, and all attempts to detect gravity waves have failed. It is not even certain that they would have spin 2. (I think Pauli said that they would have spin 2, based on the field equations using rank 2 tensors, and gravity waves having 2 helicity states.) Reasons (3) and (4) are unobservable by definition.

Conspicuously absent in the reasons for liking string theory is any agreement with experiment. The guy doesn't seem to even have any interest in the physical world, or in experimental science. His view is that it is a "perfect outcome" to have a theory that says that anything is possible and predicts nothing except to say that we are here to observe whatever happened.


Friday, Feb 25, 2011
 
Most moral acts of that time
Harvard professor Gerald Holton is an Einstein idolizer. Besides being a physicist and an Einstein biographer, he is on the List of American philosophers. He got a prize named for a fellow Einstein worshipper. He said:
“During that war when much of humanity devoted itself to senseless destruction,” Holton has said, Einstein “revealed the outlines of the grand construction of the universe. That must count as one of the most moral acts of that time.”
Wow. Einstein wrote a 1916 paper on general relativity that was about 90% a recapitulation of the work of others, but did not reference a single paper. I guess that is supposed to make him more moral than those who were fighting World War I, but "most moral"?

This is absurd. The Einstein biographies are written by people like Holton. They are all unreliable idolizers.


Wednesday, Feb 23, 2011
 
How Einstein got famous
I posted below about Einstein and the twelve men. The newspaper hype about that had a lot to do with Einstein's fame.

Michael Madow writes on publicity law, and explains how Einstein got famous, including the 12 men story:

Consider, for starters, the case of Einstein. Why did he, alone among theoretical physicists in this century, achieve worldwide recognition and commercially marketable fame? Why has his name, rather than Bohr's or Schrodinger's, become virtually synonymous in our vernacular with "genius"? Why is it his face, rather than Heisenberg's or Pauli's, that today stares out at us from advertisements, T-shirts, posters, greeting cards, and even party favors? n283 Why, in short, is his face a "sign," while theirs are not? Our first instinct may be to reject these questions as [*186] somewhat foolish. Einstein, we may think, was a great scientist, probably the greatest scientist of the century, and a "great soul" to boot. Surely, neither his renown nor his cultural significance needs explanation: things could not have turned out otherwise.

Yet a recent article by the historian Marshall Missner casts doubt on this easy answer. Missner has marshalled impressive evidence that Einstein's fame, in America at least, was "by no means inevitable." n284 The process by which Einstein became a celebrity in America in the years immediately after World War I was instead "a tale of serendipity -- a publicity campaign run by an invisible hand." n285 Although it is a long way from Einstein to Madonna and Vanilla Ice, and from the 1920s to the 1990s, Missner's study can teach us something about the mechanisms of renown and popular meaning-making in our society -- about the ways in which fame is generated and specific public images are formed in an era of mass communications. For that reason, I will set out a brief summary of his findings.

Missner suggests that the first puzzle to be explained is why the theory of relativity itself attracted so much public attention. The theory, put forward by Einstein in 1905, "did not have any obvious technological consequences at the time." n286 Nor did it conflict, in any obvious way at least, with religious dogma. True, it was a great theoretical achievement, but the achievements of Bohr and Heisenberg "were of at least similar magnitude" and yet "did not gain any public recognition at all." n287 Why, then, did Einstein's theory cause a public sensation, both in Europe and America, while their work did not? The initial factor, Missner claims, was the dramatic way in which the theory was confirmed: by observation of the deflection of light during the solar eclipse of May 1919. n288 This confirmation was announced, with great fanfare, at a scientific conference held in London in November of the same year. n289 Subsequent newspaper and magazine accounts did much to fuel public interest in the theory, trumpeting it as a "revolutionary" discovery that upset common sense assumptions about time and space. n290

[*187] According to Missner, however, the primary reason the theory aroused intense interest in the United States was its political and ideological resonance. n291 The period immediately after World War I was a time of intense xenophobia; there was widespread fear of social revolution and alien, antidemocratic conspiracies. The theory of relativity, at least as presented by the popular press, struck many Americans as elitist, sinister, and subversive. n292 Revealingly, a story somehow took hold after 1919 that only "twelve men" in the entire world (all foreigners, presumably) really understood Einstein's theory. n293 Editorialists voiced concern that this elite might ultimately use their knowledge of the theory to alter basic aspects of reality -- to "bend" space and time, to enter a "fourth dimension," and so on -- and thereby achieve world dominion. n294 Even the sober editors of The New York Times railed against the theory's antidemocratic implications. n295

In April 1921, Einstein himself paid his first visit to this country as part of a Zionist delegation led by Chaim Weizmann. The American mainstream press misinterpreted the tumultuous welcome that New York City's Jews gave to the delegation, and to Weizmann in particular, as a "hero's welcome" for Einstein. The Washington Post, for example, headlined its account of the arrival: "Thousands at Pier to Greet Einstein." n296 The New York Times misreported the event in similar fashion. n297 These erroneous reports helped to generate keen curiosity about Einstein as a person. Reporters who sought him out for interviews were relieved to find that he was not a "haughty, aloof European looking down on boorish Americans," n298 but a modest, humorous, and informal man, who "smiled when his picture was taken, and produced amusing and quotable answers to their inane questions." n299 The fact that Einstein wore rumpled, ill-fitting clothing, played the violin, and smoked a pipe seemed particularly reassuring. He simply did not look like "the 'frightening Dr[.] Einstein,'" the "destroyer of space and time." n300

Before very long, the press coverage turned sharply in Einstein's favor, and less was heard about his theory's sinister implications. Einstein had come to America in April 1921, as the somewhat obscure originator of a frightening and "un-American" theory. He left, two months later, a person revered in the American Jewish community and [*188] widely admired in the general populace, well on his way to secular sainthood and cultural iconization. n301

Yes, Einstein was lucky, the eclipse was dramatic, the press exaggerated the profundity of his ideas, and the Zionists made a hero out of him. But there is much more to the story.

Einstein was an egotistical publicity seeker. His 1905 relativity theory did not just fail to have any obvious technological applications at the time, it did not have any substantial original content at all. A lot of people cooperated to portray him as something that he was not.

I don't know why someone would say that Einstein was not a "haughty, aloof European looking down on boorish Americans". On that trip he said that American men are toy dogs for women.

Einstein certainly got a lot of lucky breaks.

I do wonder whether anyone told the newspapers that there were other physicists who were more important than Einstein. Since Einstein had enemies, it seems likely that they did. But didn't anyone explain it in detail? Surely a lot of people knew the truth about Einstein and kept quiet.

At any rate, a lot of people are lying about Einstein today. The truth is readily available.


Monday, Feb 21, 2011
 
The essence of atheistic evolution is that it is unsupervised
The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Cosmic Variance blog complains about compromising with theologians on the definition of evolution:
Apparently the National Association of Biology Teachers used to characterize the theory of evolution in the following way:
The diversity of life on earth is the result of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.
That’s a good description, because it’s true. But some religious thinkers, along with their enablers within the scientific establishment, objected to the parts about “unsupervised” and “impersonal,” because they seemed to exclude the possibility that the process was designed or guided by God.
The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne agrees, and adds:
And, indeed, this is what I teach—that natural selection, and evolution in general, are material processes, blind, mindless, and purposeless. ...

As one Christian said to me, defining evolution as “unsupervised” and “impersonal” implied to many Americans that “God had nothing to do with it and life has no meaning.” ...

After all, Darwin’s greatest achievement was the explanation of organismal “design” by a completely naturalistic process, replacing the mindful, purposeful, and god-directed theory that preceded it.  That was a revolution in human thought, and students should know about it.  (This achievement is also why Dawkins claimed, in The Blind Watchmaker, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”  Perhaps Darwin did not mandate that evolution ineluctably proves the absence of God, but he kicked out the last prop supporting the action of a deity in nature.)

Evolution and selection lack any sign of divine guidance.  ...

Actually -— and I thought this was implicit in my piece -— I don’t think it’s a good tactical move, for to strip those words from the characterization of selection is to rob it of its essence and intellectual (and biological) importance.

One comment asks:
Gravity, the electroweak force, the strong force, the Standard Model, both theories of relativity, among countless others are all considered “unsupervised” and “impersonal”. Nobody wrote letters about their characterizations as “unsupervised” and “impersonal”, and nobody has bothered with surveys, focus groups, etc to determine what “sells best” to the public. Why should the theory of evolution be any different?
No, the physics textbooks do not explicitly say that gravity is unsupervised. The physicists are not always trying to impose their atheism on their students. Saying that it is unsupervised, impersonal, and natural is just a gratuitous attack on religion.

I do not see any purpose to calling evolution "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process", except to attack religion. Saying that evolution is "unpredictable" is what robs it of its scientific importance. If it is unpredictable, then it is unscientific. Science is all about making hypotheses, predicting the outcome of experiments, and observing those outcomes.

Carroll and Coyne are happy to disclaim any scientific content to the theory of evolution as long as it is declares that God had no part in life on Earth.

Yes, chance has a role in the theory of evolution, but the same is true about quantum mechanics. But no physics book would characterize quantum mechanics as "an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process". It is predictable, and there is scientific merit to considering it a personal and unnatural process. See the Copenhagen interpretation for details.

Another comment adds:

But Dr. Scott is not really interested in speaking for “S”cience: “Nobody speaks for capital ‘S’ science, neither people of faith nor atheists,” she said. “Science is religiously neutral. Whether you’re religious or not, you use the same method and rationale in the way you do science, and if you don’t, then you’re stepping outside of science.”
Coyne tries to speak for Science, and he mainly attacks religion when he does.

Notes: The history of the NABT is that it adopted the original statement in 1995, and was eventually persuaded to remove "unsupervised, impersonal" in 1998. The revision is here and here. The current abbreviated NABT statement drops the whole sentence. NABT Statement on Evolution Evolves by Eugenie C. Scott says that "The strong position of evolution in biology and other sciences was not compromised by removing two adjectives that miscommunicated NABT's meaning.", but has removed her statement from her own web site. One of Coyne's critics says:

You guys are sneaking metaphysics into science class. The logical support that biology lends to atheism is no stronger than that between, say, meteorology and atheism, yet for basically historical reasons we have some evolutionary biologists who consider it part of their job to issue rulings on imponderable cosmic matters, whereas such things are very rare elsewhere in science (excepting perhaps cosmology itself).
I agree with that. These evolutionists are constantly picking unnecessary fights with religion. It would not be so bad if they were at least defending science in the process. But they push a horrible idea of what science is all about.

Sunday, Feb 20, 2011
 
Ardi and Africa theories doubted
From yesterday's Razib Khan and Milford Wolpoff video podcast, I learned that the multiregional human evolution theory is in sharp contrast to the Out of Africa theory, that both theories cannot be true, that the Out of Africa theory dominated public opinion because of the prominence of fossil finders but profession opinion has been split, that many experts do not believe that Ardi was a hominid (ie, in the human line from the human-chimp split), and that the professors promoting the idea that Ardi was a hominid are sufficiently powerful that a young scholar would be foolish to question it.

I have expressed doubts about the out-of-africa and Ardi-hominid theories on this blog. I was suspicious because the announcements were so conveniently aligned with the career goals of those making the claims, because the press had so uncritically accepted the claims, and because of the lack of hard evidence supporting those claims.


Friday, Feb 18, 2011
 
Einstein's wandering mind
SciAm has a new slideshow on great breakthrus, and Einstein leads the show:
Delivered in a Daydream: 7 Great Achievements That Arose from a Wandering Mind [Slide Show]

Daydreaming and downtime can lead to solutions for difficult scientific problems and provide inspiration for creative works. Some of history's best-known scientific and literary achievements grew out of such mental meandering

Relativity Revelation

Albert Einstein's unleashed imagination was an important ingredient to his success. After months of intense mathematical exercises he homed in on the gist of his special theory of relativity while taking a break from his work "and let his imagination wander about the concepts of space and time," wrote Guenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger in the October 2006 Scientific American MIND. In his mental meanderings Einstein imagined two bolts of lightning striking the front and back of a moving train at the same instant. He realized that those strikes would not seem simultaneous to a person standing next to the track even if they did seem so to an individual on the moving train. Einstein described his moment of insight in 1924: "After seven years of reflection in vain [1898 to 1905] the solution came to me suddenly with the thought that our concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity insofar as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences; and that experience could very well lead to the alteration of these concepts and laws."

Einstein gave interviews all his life, and always told a story about how he invented special relativity all by himself in a flash of brilliance. But FitzGerald proposed altering our concept of space in 1889, and Lorentz proposed altering time in 1892. It was old news by 1898. Even Einstein's biograhers and defenders admit that he read Lorentz's 1895 paper and Poincare's 1902 book. Lorentz got his Nobel Prize for his electrodynamics in 1902. Einstein spent his whole life pretending that he did relativity on his own.

It is often remarked that Einstein's 1905 relativity paper did not cite any previous work. That was irresponsible enough, but it could have just been laziness, and not dishonesty. But nobody has ever been able to give an explanation to justify all these phony stories that Einstein gave in his later life.

This false Einstein story is used today to justify elite physicists daydreaming about new theories that have no scientific merit. They argue that they are just following Einstein's example.


Thursday, Feb 17, 2011
 
Claiming that gross evolution that has stopped
Dr. Neandertal complains about physicist Michio Kaku saying that human evolution has stopped.

Kaku is just reciting what the evolutionists said themselves, just a few years ago. The NY Times reported in 2005:

It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago.
This was proved wrong in 2007.

My guess is that many of the leftist-atheist-evolutionists are still saying that human are not evolving, but the subject of human diversity is unpleasant for them. They have hated the subject ever since Darwin described the widening gap between humans and apes.

I have criticized Kaku for saying kooky things about physics many times, such as here:

Einstein said that the harmony he sees could not have been an accident. ... I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. ... We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word “God” and not blush.
and here:
Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time. By Michio Kaku. ... As Kaku writes, “crumbs that have tumbled off Einstein’s plate are now winning Nobel Prizes for other scientists.”
No, no Nobel Prize has ever come out of Einstein's crumbs. Some have been given for relativity-derived work, but not based on Einstein's contributions. None will ever be given for string theory.

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011
 
Relativity is easy
The Cosmic Variance blog today agrees with DeLong:
My point is that Relativity is easy, intuitive, and consonant with every day human experience when compared to Quantum Mechanics, which is the other branch of twentieth-century physics. Quantum Mechanics is genuinely mind-bending, is genuinely incomprehensible in a way that Relativity is not. It is so incomprehensinblr that physicists' standard advice to their students when they try to make sense of Quantum Mechanics is that they should stop: instead they should just "shut up and calculate."
and Carroll agrees with Feynman who said:
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Those newspapers were in New York and London. The 1955 NY Times obituary said:
The scientific fraternity in the world of physics, particularly the leaders of the group, recognized from the beginning that a new star of the first magnitude had appeared on their firmament. But with the passing of time his fame spread to other circles, and by 1920 the name of Einstein had become synonymous with relativity, a theory universally regarded as so profound that only twelve men in the entire world were believed able to fathom its depths.
(It was tricky to find the above text. The NY Times Einstein page only has a link to a scanned newspaper image.)

Why 12 men? Relativity was surely more widely understood than quantum mechanics. It appears that the NY Times wanted to portray him as the new Messiah, with 12 enlightened followers just as Jesus had 12 disciples.

Next, I will explain about how the "12 men" story goes back to 1919, when Einstein became a world-wide celebrity. And it continued for decades, even while quantum mechanics was being developed in the 1920s, and never got these stories. The newspapers should have been able to ask any physicist and learn that quantum mechanics was where the action is. Yet they continued with these crazy stories about Einstein and the 12 men.

This sounds like a Jewish story, because Albert Einstein was Jewish, because of the religious overtones of the "12 men" story, and because the NY Times was a Jewish newspaper. But many of the pioneers of quantum mechanics were also Jewish (or of Jewish descent), including Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Richard Feynman. Hermann Weyl had a Jewish wife. Their work was more important than Einstein's, but they never got he royal treatment that he got.

Update: A physicist writes:

Relativity is “hard” because there’s like one million books full of confusing stories about spaceships and lasers and somebody observing somebody’s something, which is all completely irrelevant decoration. As a teenager I read a whole stack of these books and failed to make much sense out of them because one starts asking all sorts of questions about the construction of clocks and what it means to actually ‘see’ something etc. Then, hallelujah, somebody handed me a book in which it said the Poincaré-group is the symmetry group of Minkowski-space.
That understanding of relativity in terms of the symmetry group is due to Poincare and Minkowski, not Einstein. Einstein's view of symmetry was slightly improved over Lorentz, in that he seemed to have understood that if there are two moving frames A and B, then transforming from A to B has to be to inverse of transforming from B to A. But he did not have the concept of a group, or have a formulation in terms of the symmetries of spacetime. He really did not have what has been considered the core of relativity since 1910.

Monday, Feb 14, 2011
 
When do anomalies begin?
Alan Lightman and Owen Gingerich wrote in 1992 (behind AAAS Science paywall here, and summarized here):
As our final example, we consider the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. The first mass resists a body's change in motion whereas the second determines its gravitational force. It is the equality of these two masses that causes bodies of different masses or different materials to fall with the same acceleration in a gravitational field, a long-observed fact. Indeed, in 1592 Galileo wrote in his De Motu (12, p. 48): ...

In Newtonian physics, the inertial mass and gravitational mass are regularly canceled against each other. Newton himself was perplexed by this extraordinary equality between quantities that seemed conceptually very different, and he went to considerable lengths to establish their experimental equivalence. ...

It was not until Albert Einstein's new theory of gravity, general relativity, that a fundamental explanation was given for the equality of inertial and gravitational mass. Indeed, Einstein saw this equality, which was a part of his "equivalence principle," as a profound statement about the nature of gravity, and he constructed his entire theory around it. In the resulting theory, gravity is understood as a geometrical phenomenon, with the equality of the two masses a fundamental and necessary part of that picture.

It seems a little strange to say that Einstein discovered an anomaly, when he just said the same thing that everyone else said for 300 years. The Equivalence principle is no big deal, and general relativity is no more founded on it than Newtonian celestial mechanics was.

A better example is the finite propagation speed of gravity. Newton had identificd the apparent action-as-a-distance as an anomaly. The speed was not identified until the discovery of relativity in 1905. No, Einstein had nothing to do with it.

Apparently the article examples were chosen to support Kuhnian Paradigm shift theory, where the emphasis is on anomalies that are not really anomalies. I don't see much merit to this. Just about anything could be called an anomaly, if the method of the article is applied.


Saturday, Feb 12, 2011
 
Evidence that Lucy walked upright
I have been skeptical about the 3 million year old missing link Lucy here, here, and here. The NY Times reports some evidence that I could be wrong:
Lucy may well be the world’s most famous fossil hominid. She is the best-known specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis, and her partial skeleton, found in 1974, revealed that she and her kin could walk upright.

But because of a lack of foot bone specimens, scientists have long debated how well she walked — that is, whether A. afarensis also used a grasping movement with the feet, as apes do when they grab tree branches.

Now, a fossilized foot bone from Hadar, Ethiopia, reveals that A. afarensis had arched feet, as do modern humans, and was fully committed to walking upright. The species lived between 3.7 million and 2.9 million years ago.

This is still just one lousy footbone. It is the long bone leading to the fourth toe. I am still not convinced that this is so significant. Supposedly this proves that walking upright is the essence of being human.

The new bone suggests that Lucy's foot was slightly arched. But many modern humans have flat feet with no ill effects, so I am not so sure why an arch is so important.

There are apes today who walk upright:

Orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees do it. Bonobos seem to love doing it. Apparently gibbons do it really well. Indeed, bipedalism is not unique to humans and is quite common among apes. Apes are known to walk upright once in awhile, although bonobos seem to do it more frequently than other apes. Bipedalism is just one of the natural repertoire of ape locomotion.
There are videos to prove it. So maybe Lucy was just an ape that could walk upright as well as the gorilla in the video. If so, then it is no big deal. If not, then some scientific paper ought to say so.

Friday, Feb 11, 2011
 
Climate change not causing extreme weather
A WSJ op-ed reports:
As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.

We do know that carbon dioxide and other gases trap and re-radiate heat. We also know that humans have emitted ever-more of these gases since the Industrial Revolution. What we don't know is exactly how sensitive the climate is to increases in these gases versus other possible factors -— solar variability, oceanic currents, Pacific heating and cooling cycles, planets' gravitational and magnetic oscillations, and so on.

This seems correct. There is some reason to believe that most of the warming in recent decades is attributable to gas emissions of man-made processes. But there is no reason to believe that weather variability is increasing.

Thursday, Feb 10, 2011
 
Evidence from climate science
Here is a new open letter from climate skeptics to Congress:
Do the 678 scientific studies referenced in the CO2 Science document, or the thousands of studies cited in the NIPCC report, provide real-world evidence (as opposed to theoretical climate model predictions) for global warming-induced increases in the worldwide number and severity of floods? No. In the global number and severity of droughts? No. In the number and severity of hurricanes and other storms? No.

Do they provide any real-world evidence of Earth's seas inundating coastal lowlands around the globe? No. Increased human mortality? No. Plant and animal extinctions? No. Declining vegetative productivity? No. More frequent and deadly coral bleaching? No. Marine life dissolving away in acidified oceans? No.

Quite to the contrary, in fact, these reports provide extensive empirical evidence that these things are not happening. And in many of these areas, the referenced papers report finding just the opposite response to global warming, i.e., biosphere-friendly effects of rising temperatures and rising CO2 levels.

The letter makes some good points, and responds to this letter:
We want to assure you that the science is strong and that there is nothing abstract about the risks facing our Nation. ... increasingly vulnerable to drought ... massive flooding ... extreme storms ... increasing frequency ... direct security implications for the country ... Climate change poses unique challenges to human health. ...

He testified that the scientific process “is inherently adversarial – scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That’s what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. ...”

Sounds like a recitation of absract risks to me, with no solid evidence to back them up.

When did Einstein ever demonstrate that the scientific consensus was wrong? Certainly not with relativity, as his papers were squarely in support of the most respected theories at the time. His special relativity papers never said that the earlier Lorentz theory was wrong, and only had favorable comments about it. His theory was contrary to the aether drift theory and Max Abraham's 1902 theory, but neither was a scientific consensus, and Einstein made no direct attempt to demonstrate that they were wrong.

Einstein did say that Planck's particle model of light was a useful heuristic, and that could be seen as contrary to the Maxwell wave theory. But he never said that the Maxwell theory was wrong, and he continued to write papers about the Maxwell theory as if it were correct.

Einstein did attempt to prove quantum mechanics wrong. But he was the one who was proved wrong. He was wrong about a lot of other things also.

There are better examples of demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong. One is Alfred Wegener. In relativity, George FitzGerald went against the consensus by proposing the length contraction. He said that everyone laughed at him for years. Hendrik Lorentz proposed that motion could alter time. Henri Poincaré advocated the relativity principle when no one else believed in it. They all openly criticized other physicists, such as those supporting aether drift theories. Einstein never did anything so original and correct and contrary to consensus.


Tuesday, Feb 08, 2011
 
Evolutionist intolerance
Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
While the Catholic church officially accepts evolution, it accepts theistic evolution, in which God guided the process and casually slipped an immortal soul into the hominin lineage.  And theistic evolution, in which God has a role in the process, is not acceptance of evolution as we biologists understand it.  So yes, the true biological view of evolution as a materialistic, unguided process is indeed at odds with most religions.  Organizations that promote evolution, such as the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), prefer to avoid this critical point: all they care about is that evolution get taught in the schools, not whether believers wind up accepting the concept of evolution as it’s understood by scientists.
Whether "God guided the process" is not a scientific hypothesis, as far as I know. That is, there is no scientific evidence for or against it, and no known way to collect such evidence.

Coyne's point is that the schools should teach kids atheistic evolution, as long as the elite scientists understand evolution as atheistic. He hates all religion.

Many Christians have complained for years that they are happy with the science of evolution being taught, but they object to atheism being taught along with it in science classes. Coyne makes it clear that his real objective is to promote the atheism.

The NY Times reports:

Einstein is a household name today. But at the end of the 19th century, it was Poincaré, a mathematician, physicist, philosopher and member of national academies, who was the famous one …

Among his noteworthy feats now is what he did not do: he did not invent relativity, even though he had some of the same ideas as Einstein, often in advance, and arrived, with the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz at a theory that was mathematically identical.

The difference was that Poincaré refused to abandon the idea of the ether, the substance in which light waves supposedly vibrated and which presumably filled all space.

This is false. Poincare denied the aether more forcefully than Einstein. But even if it were true, why would anyone care so much about the aether if it were invisible and undetectable?

My objection here is to scientists claiming that there is some scientifically correct position on some issue, when there is no actual scientific evidence. At least the Catholic church does not claim that its theological beliefs are scientific, and does not insist that they be taught in public schools.

Coyne and the Einstein fans are not being scientific when they make these arguments. They are just pushing their pseudo-religious beliefs in the non-existence of God and the aether.


Saturday, Feb 05, 2011
 
Lorentz invented relativistic mass
Lorentz invented relativistic mass in this 1899 paper:
Since k is different from unity, these values cannot both be 1; consequently, states of motion, related to each other in the way we have indicated, will only be possible, if in the transformation of S0 into S the masses of the ions change; even, this must take place in such a way that the same ion will have different masses for vibrations parallel and perpendicular to the velocity of translation.

Such a hypothesis seems very startling at first sight. Nevertheless we need not wholly reject it. Indeed, as is well known, the effective mass of an ion depends on what goes on in the aether; it may therefore very well be altered by a translation and even to different degrees for vibrations of different directions.

He introduced new terminology for it in this 1904 paper:
Hence, in phenomena in which there is an acceleration in the direction of motion, the electron behaves as if it had a mass m1, those in which the acceleration is normal to the path, as if the mass were m2. These quantities m1 and m2 may therefore properly be called the "longitudinal" and "transverse" electromagnetic masses of the electron. I shall suppose that there is no other, no "true" or "material" mass.
Einstein addresses the subject in the final section of his famous 1905 paper:
Taking the ordinary point of view we now inquire as to the ``longitudinal'' and the ``transverse'' mass of the moving electron.
Einstein has no references, but he appears to be referring to Lorentz's work. The wording is strikingly similar. Lorentz is using quote marks because he is explicitly defining new terms, but why is Einstein using quote marks if not to quote Lorentz?

The trouble is that Einstein claimed all of his life that he had seen Lorentz's 1895 paper, but not the 1899 and 1904 papers. When Einstein's 1905 paper was reprinted in 1923, Sommerfield inserted a footnote explaining Einstein's story that "The preceding memoir by Lorentz was not at this time known to the author."

Einstein's claim is farfetched. The main purpose of his 1905 paper was to improve Lorentz's 1895 paper, and Lorentz was one of the most famous physicists in Europe. Lorentz had received a Nobel prize in 1902 for his electrodynamics work. Einstein had access to the later papers, and he would surely have checked before trying to publish an update on a 10-year-old paper. Einstein even wrote reviews for a journal that published a review of Lorentz's 1904 paper.

The only reason for believing Einstein is that Lorentz got the mass formulas correct, and Einstein did not. If Einstein were just plagiarizing Lorentz, then he should have gotten the formulas correct.

My guess is that Einstein had trouble understanding Lorentz's papers because they were in English and his English was poor. But he certainly got the main ideas, and may have thought that Lorentz's mass formulas were wrong but did not have the guts to say so. When it turned out that Einstein published incorrect formulas for something that Lorentz had already published correctly, he was too embarrassed to even admit that he read Lorentz's paper. Einstein also had a hard time explaining what was original about his 1905 paper. So he lied about it all of his life.

If you don't think that Einstein could keep a secret like that, then read about Lieserl Einstein. Einstein spent his entire life denying the existence of his illegitimate daughter.

Lorentz's prediction of relativistic mass was observed in 1901, and Lorentz got a Nobel Prize in 1902. This is the origin of the famous mass-energy equivalence of relativity, as energy used to accelerate an electron gets turned into mass.


Wednesday, Feb 02, 2011
 
Gravity is no incompatibility
The current Scientific American Magazine (February 2011) reports:
A magazine news story on the unification of physics usually begins by saying that Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory are irreconcilable. The one handles the force of gravity, the other takes care of electromagnetic and nuclear forces, but neither covers all, so physicists are left with a big jagged crack running down the middle of their theoretical world. It’s a nice story line, except it’s not true. “Everyone says quantum mechanics and gravity don’t get along -— they’re incompatible,” says John F. Donoghue of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “And you still hear that, but it’s wrong.”
That's right, there is no known incompatibility at any observable scale. For details, see Effective field theory or Donoghue's paper.

This alleged incompatibility is the justification for String theory. Here is a recent Brian Greene interview on NPR:

GROSS: Okay. Let's backtrack just a little bit. So the unified theory that Einstein sought and never found, that's a theory that would explain both subatomic particles but also explain, like, the laws of gravity and speed and light and the cosmos and make the large coincide with the small.

Prof. GREENE: That's exactly right. What we have found is that in the 20th century there are two major developments in physics. One as you mentioned, general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. It does a fantastic job for big things, stars and galaxies and so forth. The other development we were talking about, quantum mechanics, and it does a fantastic job at the other end of the spectrum for small things -- molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. The big problem for 70 years is that each of these theories does fantastically well in its own realm, but whenever these theories confront one another, they are ferocious antagonists. The math completely falls apart.

Now you might say when would they ever confront each other, one's for the big, the other is for the small? But there are realms in the cosmos, such as at the center of a black hole, where an entire star is being crushed to a very small size. A star is big and heavy. You need the theory of gravity. It's being crushed to a fantastically small size. You need quantum mechanics. In that domain you need both of these theories and when you bring them both to bear, everything falls apart.

GROSS: So - yeah.

Prof. GREENE: String theory is an attempt to fix that.

So if a star collapses down to the size of an atom, then all of the known laws of physics break down. That is true, but we could never observe any such thing anyway. The Schwarzschild radius for any star large enough to collapse is at least five miles. That means that any star that small will be a black hole, and no light or other information can escape. (This is due largely to work of Chandrasekhar in 1931, and Lemaître in 1933. I knew that Lemaître discovered the big bang, but I didn't know that he had a role in black holes also. Einstein did not believe in black holes at this time.)

Quantum mechanics is a theory about observables. It does not, and cannot, have anything to say about the interior of a black hole. The whole subject of quantum gravity is bogus, as it aims to solve a problem that has already be solved to the extent that it is solvable.


Saturday, Jan 29, 2011
 
Hindering scientific literacy
Here is evolution teaching news:
High school biology teachers refuse to teach evolution

That's the conclusion of Penn State scientists, who discovered that most are reluctant to teach evolutionary theory in class. ...

Indeed, 13 percent of biology teachers 'explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light', they say. ...

Others undermine the whole curriculum and "tell students it does not matter if they really 'believe' in evolution, so long as they know it for the test," the researchers say.

Finally, many teachers expose their students to all positions, scientific and otherwise, and let them make up their own minds. But while this approach might at first seem reasonable, say the team, "this approach tells students that well established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions."

In other words, we don't encourage children to make up their own minds about whether the world orbits the sun or vice versa.

And it's these 60 percent that most worry the scientists: "They may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists," they say.

So the Penn State scientists are most worried about the teachers to tell kids to make up their own minds, because that hinders scientific literacy. Or so they say.

According to General relativity, it is completely legitimate to to make up your own mind about whether the Earth orbits the Sun or vice versa. These Penn State scientists say that they are promoting scientific literacy, but their science is a century out of date.

It is also revealing that the Penn State scientists are upset that students can pass the tests without believing in evolution. That tells me that the purpose is more indoctrination than learning knowledge. In most subjects, the teachers are happy to have the students learn and understand the subject matter, and do not insist on uniformity of ideological beliefs.

For example, a student should be able to take a class in the American Civil War, without necessarily agreeing with the teacher about whether the Southern (Confederate) states should have seceded. He should be able to take a class in black holes without necessarily believing in singularities.

The survey was actually in 2007.

AAAS Science magazine adds:

Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom

Just over 5 years ago, the scientific community turned its attention to a courtroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eleven parents sued their Dover, Pennsylvania, school board to overturn a policy explicitly legitimizing intelligent design creationism. The case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, ... Many scientists cheered the decision, agreeing with the court that the school board displayed “breathtaking inanity” [p. 765 (1)]. We suggest that the cheering was premature and the victory incomplete.

The article argues for educating the public on this issue, but it is behind a paywall so I cannot read it. I am always amused when someone makes a big self-righteous stand about education, and then blocks its own article.

It is worse for scientists to complain that legal actions in court have not successfully censored a contrary view.

Nature magazine writes:

These “cautious 60 percent” generally teach a watered down version of evolution ...

Some of these teachers avoided teaching the more controversial macroevolution, which describes new species arising from old ones, while still describing microevolution, which can explain how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance. Others taught evolution in order that their students could pass standardized tests, though they did not believe in it unequivocally. Finally, a large number of this group exposed students to all positions in the hopes that they could make up their own minds.

Actually, I am surprised to see Nature say this, as many evolutionists deny that there is any difference between macroevolution and microevolution.

The main point of this study is to say that the biggest threat to teaching evolution is the high schools is not the creationists, but the teachers who allow students to make up their own minds, and who do not insist that the students believe in it unequivocably. In other words, the teachers are not the sort of true believers who will brainwash a new generation of true believers in evolution.

As the Penn State press release says:

Berkman and Plutzer dubbed the remaining teachers the "cautious 60 percent," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives. ...

Finally, many teachers expose their students to all positions, scientific and otherwise, and let them make up their own minds. ...

As a result, "they may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists."

I do not think that it hinders scientific literacy to let students make up their own minds. Science is all about making deductions from evidence, not rote memorization of facts and blind acceptance of authority.

Friday, Jan 28, 2011
 
Einstein hated the Germans
Time magazine reports:
In 1939, when Einstein's fellow refugees Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner learned that German scientists had managed to split the atom, they sought Einstein's help. Einstein himself may have had only the faintest idea of the recent progress in nuclear physics, but after a briefing by Szilard and Wigner he agreed to write a letter to President Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility that the Nazis might try to make an atomic bomb. That letter is popularly credited (though its precise effect is unclear) with helping to persuade Roosevelt to order up the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic weapons.

Later, when A-bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein expressed deep regret. After the war, he apologized personally -— and in tears -— to visiting Japanese Physicist Hideki Yukawa. On another occasion, he said, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb."

In his final years Einstein was an outspoken foe of McCarthyism, which he felt was an echo of the turbulent events that had preceded the downfall of Germany's Weimar Republic. He urged intellectuals to defy what he considered congressional inquisitions, even at the risk of "jail and economic ruin." He was widely denounced, and Senator Joseph McCarthy called him "an enemy of America." In his last public act, Einstein joined Bertrand Russell and other scholars in a desperate plea for a ban on all warfare. [Time mag, Monday, Feb. 19, 1979, cover story]

Einstein hated the Germans. He renounced his German citizenship twice, once to avoid the military draft and once to avoid the Nazis, and according to this Einstein-hater, he said the following about Germany after World War II:
The nation has been on the decline mentally and morally since 1870. Behind the Nazi party stands the German people, who elected Hitler after he had in his book and in his speeches made his shameful intentions clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding. The Germans can be killed or constrained after the war, but they cannot be re-educated to a democratic way of thinking and acting.
I cannot confirm this, but he did advocate building atomic bombs only for bombing Germans, and not commies and other enemies.

Thursday, Jan 27, 2011
 
Why philosophy is dead
Philosopher Chris Ormell argues against reliance on math:
take physicist Stephen Hawking's claim that philosophy is dead. The reason he gave was that philosophers have stopped bothering trying to understand modern mathematical cosmology. This cosmology is based on current mathematical physics, most of which has been in place for less than 100 years.
He is living proof, because he does not understand cosmology:
Instead it was discovered that light does not travel in absolutely straight lines, but bends slightly due to the Earth's gravitation. It is a minute effect and detectable only with great difficulty, but its consequences are deadly. If this degree of bending occurred in outer space, the light from the nearest star would have completed a circular trajectory on its way from its source to our telescopes. Nothing in the Universe would be where it appears to be.
No, that is completely wrong. Light travels in straight lines in all of the theories, including general relativity. He seems to be referring to an effect of the Sun's gravity, not Earth's. There is no circular trajectory, except maybe near a black hole.

He goes on to attack math:

So how has it happened that for a hundred years, the mathematical establishment has swallowed the idea of transfinite sets? Georg Cantor produced an argument that seemed to point to transfinite immensities, but that was before we realised that mathematics was incompletable. In effect Cantor's argument showed that the set of real numbers was incompletable. It did not (could not) show that there were more mathematical objects than an ordinary infinity.
This is just gibberish. Of course the real numbers are complete. He is innumerate.

Wednesday, Jan 26, 2011
 
String theory and the real world
Lubos Motl has the link for Gordon Kane's nice November 2010 article in Physics Today. It promotes String theory and says:
Some books and popular articles have claimed that be- cause string theories are naturally formulated at such high energies or small distances, they cannot be tested. ...

Of course, a theory needs only to be falsifiable in one way to be testable. Some compactifications have generated wrong predictions. In those cases, we have successfully im- plemented a test, but the theory failed. I give specific exam- ples of tests below; ...

I realized that a particular compactified string theory had been studied so well ... that we could identify all the particles that could be neutrinos. We showed that in no case could the theory generate light but not massless neutrinos. That work represents a clear example of a test of string theory. Although the particular compactifi- cation we studied did not yield the desired neutrino masses, different compactifications may allow for neutrino masses consistent with experiment and offer explanations of ob- served neutrino properties.

Just to be clear, there are no massless neutrinos in the real world. Kane's idea of a test of string theory is to give argument for nonexistent particles!

At the end, Kane has references to his own articles, but not to the "books and popular articles" that he criticizes.

Kane concludes:

Some of those who talk about testing string theory, and most critics of theory, are assuming the 10D or 11D approach and want somehow to test the theory without applying it to a world where tests exist. That is analogous to asking a La- grangian to be falsifiable without applying it to any physical system. Is 10D string theory falsifiable? That is not the rele- vant question. What matters is that the predictions of the 10D theory for the 4D world are demonstrably testable and falsi- fiable. If no compactified string theory emerges that describes the real world, physicists will lose interest in string theory. But perhaps one or more will describe and explain what is observed and relate various phenomena that previously seemed independent. Such a powerful success of science would bring us close to an ultimate theory.
Again, he is attacking an anonymous straw man that probably does not exist. He seems to concede that no testable string theory has emerged yet. That is what the critics are really saying -- that no testable theory has emerged.

Note that his goals do not include discovering or explaining new phenomena, as is the traditional purpose of physics. He wants to get closer to an "ultimate theory", whatever that is, and hopes that physicists will not lose interest in the meantime. I think that the real physicists have already lost interest.

Motl tries to answer What experiment would disprove string theory? His examples are things like proving that 2+2=5, or proving that the information is lost in the black holes. These are not even testable hypotheses.

His main argument is philosophical:

In science, one can only exclude a theory that contradicts the observations.
There has never been one observation that has been shown to be consistent with string theory. Not one. Motl would say gravity, and argues that string theory could be disproved "By experimentally proving that the world doesn't contain gravity". But it is not even known that string theory can accommodate gravity. String theorists just assume a gravitationally empty space, and gravity plays no role. See string theory background dependence for details.

He concludes:

But even if such a new surprising observation were made, a significant fraction of the theorists would obviously try to find an explanation within the framework of string theory, and that's obviously the right strategy. Others could try to find an explanation elsewhere. But neverending attempts to "get rid of string theory" are almost as unreasonable as attempts to "get rid of relativity" or "get rid of quantum mechanics" or "get rid of mathematics" within physics. You simply can't do it because those things have already been showed to work at some level.
In other words, he will continue to believe in string theory regardless of the facts.

Monday, Jan 24, 2011
 
Ethnocentric Jew claims Jews invented modernity
Jeffrey Goldberg writes for The Atlantic:
It's become clear to me that the Fox commentator Glenn Beck has something of a Jewish problem. Actually, he has something of a modernity problem, and people with modernity problems tend to have problems with Jews, who more or less invented modernity (Einstein, Marx, Freud, Franz Boas, etc.) ...

This is a post about Beck's recent naming of nine people -- eight of them Jews -- as enemies of America and humanity. He calls these people prime contributors to the -- wait for it -- "era of the big lie." The eight Jews are Sigmund Freud; Edward Bernays, the founder of public relations, and a nephew of Freud's (which Beck discloses as if this had previously been a secret); [George] Soros, of course; Cass Sunstein, now of the White House; the former labor leader Andy Stern; Walter Lippman, who is no longer here to defend himself; Frances Fox Piven, who Beck believes is "sowing the seeds" of revolution; and, of all people, Edward Rendell. ...

My modest suggestion to those Jews who fear the building of mosques in American cities is that they look elsewhere for threats that seem to be gathering against them.

Steve Sailer doubts whether those 8 are really Jewish, (see also this), and writes:
Extremely ethnocentric Jews like Jeffrey Goldberg (born in Brooklyn, he joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduating from the Ivy League) vastly overestimate how much gentiles pay attention to the Is-he-a-Jew? questions that obsess them. Further, the media has done a really good job of persuading the average American that even noticing the ethnic patterns that personally preoccupy leading members of the media like Goldberg is a mark of lack of gentility, so most of them don't.
I have no idea about Fox Piven and most of the others. Beck seems to attack Woodrow Wilson more than anyone, and he was certainly not Jewish.

I agree with Sailor. Some of those Jews are really atheists who never practiced any of the Jewish religion, and non-Jews do not care whether they had some Jewish ancestry or not.

It is really nutty to claim that Jews invented modernity, and to point to Einstein, Marx, and Freud. Marx's influence was almost entirely destructive. There was no scientific merit to anything Freud said, as far as I know, and he even faked much of his work. Einstein's work and influence has been greatly exaggerated, as I have documented on this blog.

I don't know much about Frank Boas, but he has also been called a liberal icon and scientific fraud. His student Margarent Mead was a similar fraud, altho not everyone agrees.

I do wonder how much the reputations of these folks are propped up by Jews like Goldberg who make wildly exaggerated claims about how great they were, and then accuse critics of being anti-semitic. I have seen a lot of articles claiming that Nazis and others attacked Einstein because he was Jewish, but not on how he has been promoted by Jews. He has surely been unfairly promoted far more than he has been unfairly attacked.

Goldberg would probably just call me anti-semitic, and not address anything that I have to say.


Friday, Jan 21, 2011
 
Why Einstein lied about Michelson-Morley
The textbooks say that the crucial experiment for special relativity was the Michelson–Morley experiment, but there is some question about whether Einstein even knew about it when he wrote his famous 1905 paper.

Kevin Brown writes in his book:

Einstein’s own recollections on this point were not entirely consistent. He sometimes said he couldn’t remember if he had been aware in 1905 of Michelson's experiments, but at other times he acknowledged that he had known of it from having read the works of Lorentz. ...

One possible explanation for Einstein’s reluctance to cite Michelson, both in 1905 and subsequently, is that he was sophisticated enough to know that his “theory” was technically just a re-interpretation of Lorentz’s theory - making identical predictions - so it could not be preferred on the basis of agreement with experiment. ...

This is not to suggest that Einstein was being disingenuous, because it’s clear that the principles of special relativity actually do emerge very naturally from just the first-order effects ... It seems clear that Einstein’s explanations for how he arrived at special relativity were sincere expressions of his beliefs about the origins of special relativity in his own mind.

No, this cannot be a correct explanation. Here is what Einstein said about M-M in his 1909 paper:
This contradiction was chiefly eliminated by the pioneering work of H. A. Lorentz in 1895. Lorentz showed that if the ether were taken to be at rest and did not participate at all in the motions of matter, no other hypotheses were necessary to arrive at a theory that did justice to almost all of the phenomena. In particular, Fizeau's experiments were explained, as well as the negative results of the above-mentioned attempts to detect the Earth's motion relative to the ether. Only one experiment seemed incompatible with Lorentz's theory, namely, the interference experiment of Michelson and Morley.

According to Lorentz's theory, a uniform translational motion of the apparatus of optical experiments does not affect light's progress, if we ignore second- and higher-order terms of the quotient (speed of apparatus)/(speed of light). The Michelson and Morley interference experiment showed that, in a special case, second-order terms also cannot be detected, although they were expected from the standpoint of the ether-at-rest theory. To include this experiment in the theory, Lorentz and FitzGerald introduced the postulate that all objects, including the parts of Michelson and Morley's experimental set-up, changed their form in a certain way, if they moved relative to the ether.

So by 1909, Einstein understood the importance of M-M to relativity. Lorentz's 1895 theory explained all the first order experiments, but not M-M. That is why Poincare criticized Lorentz, and why Lorentz and Poincare produced theory for all orders in 1904.

Later, Einstein denied being influenced by M-M, or that M-M had any role in the foundation of special relativity, as documented here and here. How could he deny what he said in 1909? No, he did not forget. He was just leaving out the part where he himself had no role in the foundation of special relativity.

In 1905, Einstein reproduced the Lorentz-Poincare theory to all orders, but only mentioned the first-order experiments. This simple fact has puzzled scholars for a century. Why didn't Einstein mention M-M in 1905? How is it that he could write a paper that solves a problem created by M-M, and not even seem to know about M-M? And why did he tell so many inconsistent stories about M-M? Doesn't he know how he came to write his greatest paper?

Philosophers and historians have given various explanations, but I think that it is very simple. Einstein only partially understood the Lorentz-Poincare papers, and did not understand why M-M was so important until sometime between 1907 and 1909. When asked about M-M, he just egotistically said whatever would enhance his reputation the most. After he learned about M-M and while Lorentz and Poincare were alive, that meant admitting that M-M was the crucial experiment. Later, when he could get away with claiming to have invented relativity out of pure thought, he downplayed the role of any experiment.

Einstein did not invent relativity, he got it from Lorentz and Poincare, and he did not understand some aspects of it when he wrote that 1905 paper.


Thursday, Jan 20, 2011
 
Christian astronomer wins settlement
I mentioned before that an astronomer blackballed for Biblical beliefs. The university has now paid:
The University of Kentucky has settled a religious discrimination lawsuit with C. Martin Gaskell, a former University of Nebraska astronomer whom Kentucky declined to hire as director of its Lexington-based observatory.

After being snubbed for the directorship in 2007, Gaskell alleged that Kentucky officials had passed on him because of his Christian views -- a claim his lawyers say is supported by e-mails sent by members of the search committee, as well as sworn testimony given by the panel's members and other Kentucky faculty. The university will pay the spurned astronomer $125,000 -- roughly the equivalent of the extra money Gaskell would have made if he had held the directorship for two years, according to Francis Marion, a senior trial lawyer for the National Center for Law & Justice, which worked the astronomer's case pro bono. A district court judge had denied motions for summary judgment from both parties. ...

But Paul Z. Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota at Morris (and keeper of the popular blog Pharyngula), said the Kentucky search committee was within its rights to consider how members of the biology faculty would feel about the university hiring to a high-profile position an astronomer whom they considered hostile to their views and methods. “I wouldn’t want to hire a biologist that’s going around on the side saying that the world is flat,” Myers said. “...Collegiality is a significant factor in employment decisions here.”

Myers is a good example of the intolerant narrow-mindedness of the leftst-atheist-evolutionists. They are the only ones who talk about a flat earth, and the only ones who want to censor the views of others at universities.

As pointed out below, many modern physicists devote a lot of energy theorizing about unobservable phenomena. It should not be any more objectionable for Gaskell to theorize about the Bible. The lawsuit turned up this university document:

“It has become clear to me that there is virtually no way Gaskell will be offered the job despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant,” Troland wrote. “…[T]he real reason we will not offer him this job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the duties that are specified to this position.”
Much goofier and unscientific beliefs are very common, even in astronomy departments.

Wednesday, Jan 19, 2011
 
Slandering Neanderthals
I like the John Hawks blog because he is one of those academic anthropologists who tries to be scientific. He quotes:
The early theories of human evolution are really very odd, if one stops to look at them. ... here were theories about human evolution that one would think would require some fossil evidence, but in fact there were either so few fossils that they exerted no influence on the theory, or there were no fossils at all. ... Even so, the Neanderthals were described as "uncouth, repellent, unattractive, incapable of fine coordination of the fingers, and certainly belonging to a different species." This is science derived directly from bones -- "uncouth, repellent, and unattractive"? Who felt this way about the skeletons?
Hawks also posts this:
A new paper in PNAS by Erik Trinkaus covers the mortality patterns of old versus young adults in Neandertals, early modern humans in the Levant and early Upper Paleolithic people of Europe [1]. The paper has gotten a lot of attention from the press, including the NY Times: "Life Span of Early Man Same as Neanderthals’". Reporters worldwide (so far, 30 articles in Google News) were relying on a press release issued from Trinkaus' university. ...

NAS members can submit papers to PNAS directly, relying on reviews from peers that they select themselves. The editorial policy of the journal makes it very difficult to reply to these papers, and certainly no reply could gain the attention that this paper has already received.

Lucky for me, I just happen to have a blog for such occasions.

He goes on to demonstrate that Trinkaus deliberately ignored that the same work had been already done five years earlier, with the only excuse being that PNAS had allowed the citation to be omitted.

Wow. I used to think that it was a good think that we had a nationally-sponsored prestigious journal that permitted big-shots to publish with only minimal peer review. NAS members have already proven themselves worthy.

Now I see this. Erik Trinkaus denies that he even has any responsibility to cite the previous (and nearly identical) work. This guy is supposed to be one of our leading experts in missing link human evolution, and he appears to be a plagiarist. That is, he published ideas about Neanderthals that had been previously published by others, he knew that they had been previously published, and he deliberately avoid citing the earlier work.


Tuesday, Jan 18, 2011
 
Age of Aquarius
Astrologers are upset:
A spokeswoman for the American Federation of Astrologers, Shelley Ackerman, said she'd been swamped with e-mails from worried clients. She advises them not to overreact.

"This doesn't change your chart at all. I'm not about to use it," she said. "Every few years a story like this comes out and scares the living daylights out of everyone, but it'll go away as quickly as it came."

That should make one demographic pretty happy—people who have zodiac tattoos.

Sam Bielinski, who owns Atomic Tattoos in Milwaukee, estimated that one in five customers asks for a zodiac tattoo, making the art among the most popular requests.

The news is that the signs of the Zodiac are changing. You can find your true sign there.

The precession of the equinoxes was discovered by by the Greek Hipparchus in 130 BC. Our view of the stars is changing on a 26,000 year cycle. We are now entering the Age of Aquarius, as was popularized by the New Agers in the 1960s.

I am not sure who is worse, the astrologers who are not even following the correct stars, or the "majority of scholars" who say that science was invented in the Scientific revolution of 1543. How do they think that the ancient Greeks figured out a 26K-year star cycle before science had been invented? The ancient astronomers understood science better than the modern philosophers.

Update: I watch Comedy Channel's Jon Stewart cover this issue, and he was making fun of other programs for playing the song, "Age of Aquarius". He obviously did not understand the point of the story at all, because he did not see how the song related. He said that they should have been able to think of other songs to play. However, it is the only song about the precession of the equinoxes, as far as I know.


Monday, Jan 17, 2011
 
Darkness on the Edge of the Universe
I previously criticized a NY Times op-ed by physicist Brian Greene about string theory. He mentioned Einstein 11 times.

Greene now has another NY Times op-ed, and he again mentions Einstein 11 times. The points to these articles don't really have much to do with Einstein, except that any wacky idea has to be rationalized as being something that Einstein would have wanted somehow. Greene says:

Were Einstein still with us, his discovery that repulsive gravity lies within nature’s repertoire would have likely garnered him another Nobel prize.
No, Einstein did not even get a Nobel prize for relativity, and he did not even believe in the expansion of the universe, so he would surely not get one for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

It is not really correct to credit Hubble for the expansion of the universe, as I have noted here and here.

Greene's main point seems to be to plug his new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, and argue for the study of unobservable physics. A review says:

The book devotes considerable time to the critical question of whether the universe is finite or infinite in size, something which has profound scientific and philosophical implications. ...

Greene discusses all of the current hot topics in cosmology: brane-worlds, the multiverse, the holographic universe, unseen parallel worlds in dimensions separated by millimeters, our universe as a super-advanced computer program, the essentially hidden nature of reality.

No, I do not believe that unobservable phenomena have any profound scientific or philosophical implications. I guess that makes me a positivist.

Greene's stuff just seems like a religion to me. He has his idol worship of Einstein, his belief system about how the universe ought to be, his grand declarations about unobservables that have to be taken on faith, and some occasion facts thrown in to make himself sound scientific.

A 2008 NY Times article on this subject of dark energy mentions Einstein 14 times.

Greene's attitude is exactly what is wrong with physics. It is scientific to observe the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. But he leave science when he starts talking about things that can never be observed or tested.

Lubos Motl already has an opinion about Greene's new book:

The third book will be dedicated to cosmology - especially to the multiverse and eternal inflation. While many ideas attached to this topic are demonstrably wrong while others are arbitrary i.e. probably wrong and the anthropic people are spreading lots of defeatist emotions, I am confident that the new book will be very good and will present a convincing picture. ...

After all, the main "critic" who is the informal king of this whole aggressive crackpot movement is employed as a useless shameless parasite ...

In other words, the book is wrong but he will launch an ad hominem attack against anyone who says so. Woit responds here.

Update: Here is an NPR interview.


Sunday, Jan 16, 2011
 
Coriolis effect found 184 years before Coriolis
New Scientist magazine reports:
While trying to prove that the Earth is fixed in space, an Italian priest described something similar to the Coriolis effect – the slight deflection experienced by objects moving in a rotating frame of reference – nearly 200 years before mathematician Gustave Coriolis worked it out in 1835.

In 1651, Giovanni Riccioli published 77 arguments against the idea that the apparent motions of the heavens were due to the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun. These included claims that Hell would be in the wrong place, aesthetic concerns over proportion and harmony, and more scientific approaches. ...

Riccioli argued that if the Earth were rotating, the speed of the ground at different latitudes would be different, so cannon shots fired due north or south from near the equator would show a slight deflection east or west as the ground moved beneath them during flight. No such effect was known at the time, so he wrongly concluded that the Earth must be stationary.

The paper is The Coriolis Effect Apparently Described.

This was indeed a legitimate reason for doubting the motion of the Earth. Even in World War I, British artillery gunmen missed targets because they failed to compensate for the Earth's motion and the Coriolis effect.

The best scientists are not the ones whose hunches turn out to be correct. They are the ones who properly analyze the available data, and formulate reasonable hypotheses. Riccioli should be credited for figuring out a way to test for the motion of the Earth. My guess is that no one will want to credit him because he was on the wrong side of the Galileo debate.


Saturday, Jan 15, 2011
 
Getting energy from relativity
The Economist magazine credits Einstein for ordinary lead-acid car batteries:
Without the magic of relativity, a car’s starter motor would not turn

ALBERT EINSTEIN never learned to drive. He thought it too complicated and in any case he preferred walking. What he did not know -— indeed, what no one knew until now -— is that most cars would not work without the intervention of one of his most famous discoveries, the special theory of relativity.

Special relativity deals with physical extremes. It governs the behaviour of subatomic particles zipping around powerful accelerators at close to the speed of light and its equations foresaw the conversion of mass into energy in nuclear bombs. A paper in Physical Review Letters, however, reports a more prosaic application. According to the calculations of Pekka Pyykko of the University of Helsinki and his colleagues, the familiar lead-acid battery that sits under a car’s bonnet and provides the oomph to get the engine turning owes its ability to do so to special relativity. ...

As the one Einsteinian equation everybody can quote, E=mc2, predicts, the kinetic energy of this extra velocity (ie, a higher E) makes lead’s electrons more massive than tin’s (increasing m) -— and heavy electrons tend to fall in and circle the nucleus in more tightly bound orbitals. ...

And so it turned out. Dr Pyykko and his colleagues made two versions of a computer model of how lead-acid batteries work. One incorporated their newly hypothesised relativistic effects while the other did not. The relativistic simulations predicted the voltages measured in real lead-acid batteries with great precision. When relativity was excluded, roughly 80% of that voltage disappeared.

So E = mc2 explains atomic bombs and car batteries? A down-to-earth application of relativity has finally been found?

Actually, I think that it is pretty crazy to suggest that there is any such thing as a non-relativistic electron theory. At one time, the term "electron theory" was pretty much synonymous with "relativity theory". Without the magic of relativity, no electrical device of any kind would function.

The electron had been conjectured for a long time, but the first really good evidence for it was discovered in 1896. At that time, the dominant theories for it were Maxwell's equations and Lorentz's electron theory, and they were fully relativitistic. A non-relativistic quantum theory for it was developed in 1926, but it was made relativistic in 1928 with the Dirac equation. This new research is based on that equation, and the chemistry derived from it.

The paper is Relativity and the lead-acid battery. I guess that they have an argument that a particular non-relativistic approximation does not work when showing that lead works better than tin in batteries. It says that the 1928 theory gives a good explanation, and the 1926 theory does not. Einstein had nothing to do with any of this, as far as I can see. He lived until 1955 and wrote many papers on the subject all his life, but as far as I can tell, he never showed any understanding of that 1928 theory. He repeatedly proposed alternatives that did not work and did not solve the problems that were already solved in 1928.


Friday, Jan 14, 2011
 
How Lorentz credited Einstein
Some people say that Lorentz deserves no credit for special relativity because he credited Einstein.

Lorentz's 1904 paper was published in English, and a German translation was published in 1913. Lorentz added a footnote 11 to the translation crediting Einstein for (1) correcting the transformation of charge density, and (2) expressing the relativity principle as a general strict and exactly valid law. This is used to argue that Einstein is the true discoverer of special relativity.

Poincare had just died in 1912, but it is strange that Lorentz did not credit him on both of these points. Lorentz wrote that 1904 paper partially in response to Poincare expressing that principle. Lorentz says so in the paper. And soon after that paper appeared, Poincare wrote to Lorentz praising the paper, but telling him that the transformation formula for charge density was incorrect.

It is to Einstein's credit that he got the charge density transformation correct in 1905, but he also got the mass transformation wrong, and Lorentz had published the correct formula in 1904. On balance, Einstein was no better, and he was a year later.

Poincare got all of the formulas correct, and did them before Einstein.

Lorentz's 1913 footnote is inadequate, but the next year he published a paper crediting Poincare over Einstein, as explained here.

Lorentz was a generous and honorable man. No one ever said a bad thing about him personally. He could have demanded credit for special relativity, but he did not. He credited FitzGerald for the contraction, even tho a letter from FitzGerald said that no credit was necessary. He credited Einstein for the charge density transformation, even tho he certainly could have used the opportunity to gloat that Einstein got the mass formula wrong. Einstein was never so generous with the credit.

The right way to judge the scientific contributions of Lorentz and Einstein is by the content of their physics papers, not what they said about each other. Only one of them was honest.


Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011
 
Failing to resolve a dispute
I mentioned that math is unique because it resolves all of its disputes, and that anthropologists are not sure that they even want to be considered scientists. Here is an example of a failure to resolve a dispute:
So which is it? The Mead vs. Freeman controversy doesn’t look like it has much room for an in-between answer. Either Samoan teenagers of that time were free and easy with their sexuality or they were hemmed in by a social system that strongly repressed pre-marital sexual activity.

Anthropology as a science ought to be able to answer such a straightforward question. It says something about anthropology that the issue is still controversial 27 years after Freeman declared that Mead was provably wrong.

Maybe fields like anthropology should split into those who are scientific, and those who don't even want to be.

Monday, Jan 10, 2011
 
How Einstein makes $20M per year
The CBS TV 60 Minutes news show reports:
No other agent in the world represents more famous people than Mark Roesler: stroll down Hollywood Boulevard with him and he'll point out 62 of his clients who are immortalized with their own stars on the "Walk of Fame," stars such as Errol Flynn, Gloria Swanson, and Marilyn Monroe.

His client list includes some of the biggest names of the 20th century: actresses like Ingrid Bergman and Bette Davis, baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and singer Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. ...

The photo archive Corbis, owned by Bill Gates, has branched out from photo and film rights to representing the deceased people who appear in them.

The agency, called "Greenlight," was run until recently by Martin Cribbs. ...

And Cribbs has a name for his deceased clients: "delebs," as in dead celebrities.

He said their biggest "deleb" is Albert Einstein. "He's our number one man."

"Bigger than Marilyn Monroe and James Dean?" Kroft asked.

"Huge, huge, the biggest in the world. Albert Einstein was Time Magazine's person of the century," Cribbs said.

Every 12-year-old in the world recognizes Einstein's picture and instantly equates it with genius. Einstein's beneficiary, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has earned millions and millions of dollars from Baby Einstein videos and Nike commercials featuring Kobe Bryant, executing a genius move as the late Princeton professor.

I don't know why this same info is on a Sept. 2009 page. Maybe last night's show was a rerun.

Info on Cribbs is here. The UK Guardian says Einstein makes $20M per year.

This story says:

Polsky Films has licensed film rights to the life story of Albert Einstein and signed biographer Walter Isaacson ("Einstein: His Life and the Universe") as a consultant.

Banner announced the deal Monday with Corbis, which reps the Hebrew U. of Jerusalem, the beneficiary of Einstein's intellectual estate and owner of Einstein's rights. Pact provides for consultation with experts from the Albert Einstein Archives of the Hebrew U., which holds the late scientist's personal and professional papers.

Polsky Films, headed by Alan and Gabe Polsky, plan to focus on Einstein's personal triumphs in understanding space and time along with his struggles, such as being forced to flee Nazi Germany. Although Einstein became a global icon and was recognized as Time's "Person of the Century" in 2000, he was reluctant to acknowledge his own legend and once quipped, "I am no Einstein."

It does not mention that Isaacson was the Time editor chiefly responsible for Einstein being named "Person of the Century". And now Isaacson and the owners of Einstein's name are making a lot of money off of it.

Promoting Einstein is big business. The next time you hear someone say how great Einstein was, remember that he might be brainwashed by profiteers.


Sunday, Jan 09, 2011
 
The Scholar and the Caliph
Physics World has just published this:
In 11th-century Egypt a man named Ibn al-Haytham became the stuff of science legend. Jennifer Ouellette tells his story

N.B. This is a fictionalized account – see author's note below ...

Never again will the Scholar blindly accept assertions made by the Ancients, however revered; he vows to test and question everything. ... He tilts his head back, raises his palms, and embraces the light.

Weird. I guess that she is trying to portray him as some sort of Moslem Galileo. Unusual for a physics journal to publish a fictionalized story.

Saturday, Jan 08, 2011
 
Lorentz accepted relativity
Kevin Brown writes:
Still, it's clear that neither Lorentz nor Poincare ever whole-heartedly embraced special relativity, for reasons that may best be summed up by Lorentz when he wrote
Yet, I think, something may also be claimed in favor of the form in which I have presented the theory. I cannot but regard the aether, which can be the seat of an electromagnetic field with its energy and its vibrations, as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary matter. In this line of thought it seems natural not to assume at starting that it can never make any difference whether a body moves through the aether or not, and to measure distances and lengths of time by means of rods and clocks having a fixed position relatively to the aether.
This passage implies that Lorentz's rationale for retaining a substantial aether and attempting to refer all measurements to the rest frame of this aether (without, of course, specifying how that is to be done) was the belief that it might, after all, make some difference whether a body moves through the aether or not. In other words, we should continue to look for physical effects that violate Lorentz invariance (by which we now mean local Lorentz invariance), both in new physical forces and at higher orders of v/c for the known forces.
I do not agree that this quote implies that Lorentz did not accept special relativity.

A famous physicist, J.S. Bell, wrote a 1976 article saying that Lorentz's approach is a better way to teach relativity. He was not refusing to accept relativity.

(Well, actually I do think that Bell was not fully accepting relativity. But my reasons have nothing to do with the aether or the above criticism of Lorentz. They have to do with quantum field theory and nonlocality, where Bell had some funny ideas.)

Likewise, Lorentz is only describing how he "presented the theory". He is not saying that he presented a different theory, or that he did not believe in the theory. His simply presented the ideas in a different order. The above quote is from 1906 lectures at Columbia University that were later published. The context is instructive. In the previous paragraph, he says, "the chief difference being that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced". See Lorentz's The Theory of Electrons (1916) or my earlier quote. [p.230, sec.194] Those are not the words of someone who is rejecting Einstein's theory. Lorentz is clearly agreeing with what Einstein postulated, and only saying that another presentation also has merit.

In spite of Bell's opinion, Einstein is widely credited with presenting relativity more clearly and simply than Lorentz. Many eminent physicists have said so. But the argument is meaningless unless you recognize the fact that Einstein simply postulated what Lorentz and Poincare had deduced from more elementary premises several years earlier. I show below where Einstein assumed that postulate.

Any comparison of electromagnetic relativity should recognize the fact that Lorentz proved his theorem of the corresponding states, Poincare proved covariance of Maxwell's equations (a stronger statement), and Einstein merely assumed Lorentz's theorem as a postulate, and did not prove covariance. Once you grasp these essential points, it is difficult to see how Einstein could have said anything conceptually superior to Lorentz or Poincare. Einstein did not reject any part of what Lorentz said when assuming his theorem as a postulate.

I have read many books and articles on the history of relativity, but I have yet to see anyone address this essential difference between the works of Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein. The above Lorentz quote alludes to this difference. If you look at what they said about each other, you have to find that quote. It only has one meaning, and it is at the heart of what special relativity means. Any book that ignores it is ignoring the essential facts.

Gerald James Holton (a big Einstein fan) wrote a book on Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein, and complains of two mistakes in Lorentz's 1904 paper. The first involved the transformation of charge density, as found by Poincare.

The recognition of a second flaw in Lorentz's work, one that now strikes us as even more serious than the first, is implied in another typically generous comment by Lorentz in 1909 in The Theory of Electrons.
The comment is the one about how "Einstein simply postulates". It is not Lorentz's flaw, it is Einstein's!

Thursday, Jan 06, 2011
 
Common misconceptions exposed
The current xkcd comic recommends this list of common misconceptions. Most of these are good examples, such as the Myth of the Flat Earth, which is mentioned 3 times. I have heard people argue for many of these demonstrably false beliefs. Most of the items are informative, and some of them are silly.

The items on evolution are a little strange:

The word theory in the theory of evolution does not imply doubt from mainstream science regarding its validity; ... Evolution is a theory in the same sense as germ theory, gravitation, or plate tectonics.

Evolution does not claim humans evolved from monkeys

Evolution is not a progression from inferior to superior organisms

The rigid hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion model of science is ... not the only way to perform genuine science.

Maybe these are simplifications, but they are not wrong.

Nobody says that the word theory implies doubt. What they say is that a scientific theory is subject to testing and verification, and they would say the same about germ theory or gravitation.

Evolution does teach that human evolved from animals that looked like monkeys. And some of us do believe that it was progress to something superior.

The model of the scientific method is very useful and essentially correct. The main dissent comes from those who promote ideas that are not testable. There are philosophers who deny objective reality, and argue that science changes by irrational Kuhnian paradigm shifts. They like to deny the scientific method, but it is still a useful description of what real scientists do. Some of those philosophers cite Einstein, and that is one reason I blog about what Einstein really did. For example, Wikipedia explains:

Critics of Popper, chiefly Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, rejected the idea that there exists a single method that applies to all science and could account for its progress. ... As Kuhn put it, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Kuhn thought that we believe Einstein's relativity because the opponents died. His argument is absurd, as I show on this blog. He also used an evolution analogy to argue that science does not make progress. He has made a monkey out of all of us!

Update: The attention from the comic caused this section to be deleted:

Science and religion

* No scientist ever lost his life because of his scientific views, at least to the knowledge of historians of science.[citation needed] It is true that the Italian Inquisition incinerated the sixteenth century Copernican Giordano Bruno, but it happened also for his heretical theological notions,[178][179] such as his denial of the divinity of Christ.[180]

* Claims that "the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of science"[citation needed], or that "the rise of Christianity was responsible for the demise of ancient science"[citation needed] are widely popular[citation needed] myths[citation needed] that still pass as historical truth[citation needed], although they are not supported by historical research[citation needed]. Assertions that "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections", and that "the medieval Christians thought that the world was flat" are also common errors.[178][181]

* The popular notion[citation needed] that science and religion "had been in a state of constant conflict" was spread in the 19th century, but is rejected by current scholarship on the history of science.[182] For instance, studies have shown that Christianity has often nurtured and encouraged scientific endeavor, while at other times it coexists with new scientific views without either tension or attempts at harmonization. Instances of conflict are actually the exception, not the rule.[183]

These are indeed common misconceptions.

Update: (Feb. 9) The evolution section has gotten worse, and has drawn this comment:

I contest almost everything what is described as "common misconceptions" in evolution. Most of these are definitely not common misconceptions but rather religious-like beliefs by certain groups in the U.S. only.

Tuesday, Jan 04, 2011
 
Zahar on Einstein
Philosopher Élie Zahar wrote Why did Einstein's Programme supersede Lorentz's? (II), saying: (pdf)
Einstein asserted that all physical laws are Lorentz-covariant whereas Lorentz restricted his attention largely to electrodynamics (and did not fully establish the covariance of Maxwell's equations). [p.237,fn.5]

Einstein based his heuristic on the requirement that all physical laws should be Lorentz-covariant; i.e. all theories should assume the same form, whether they are expressed in terms of x, y, z, t or in terms of x', y', z', t'. [p.243]

No, this is not correct. Lorentz covariance is not just the idea the equations have the same form. The equations have to be the same as a consequence of applying the Lorentz transformations to the spacetime variables.

This concept was invented by Henri Poincaré in 1905, popularly explained by Hermann Minkowski in 1908, and has been in all the better relativity textbooks ever since. It was not known to either Hendrik Lorentz or Albert Einstein in 1905, and they showed no sign of understanding it until many years afterwards. They just had the simpler notion of the theories having equations of the same form. Lorentz proved that Maxwell's equations had the same in 1895 (to first order) and 1904 (to all orders). Einstein just assumed this in 1905, without crediting Lorentz, and did not even claim anything stronger.

It is also not true that Lorentz restricts his theory to electromagnetism. In sec. 91 of his 1895 Versuch paper, he applies his transformations to molecular forces even if they are not electromagnetic. In Considerations on Gravitation (1900), he tries to apply them to gravity.

Meanwhile, Einstein's famous 1905 paper only considers electromagnetism, and not gravity or any other forces. Here is how he states his assumption of Lorentz's theorem:

They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate, ...
Zahar goes on with a lot of nonsense about relativity that is too silly to refute. But the following is revealing because he actually quotes what Lorentz said about the aether in 1895:
Hence, if he was to assume that the ether was anything like an ordinary substance, he would have also to suppose that it was in constant motion. But this contradicted his original assumption of an ether at rest. He concluded 'that the ether is undoubtedly widely different from all ordinary matter' and that 'we may make the assumption that this medium, which is the receptacle of electromagnetic energy and the vehicle for many and perhaps for all the forces acting on ponderable matter, is, by its very nature, never put in motion, that it has neither velocity nor acceleration, so that we have no reason to speak of its mass or of forces that are applied to it'. In other words Lorentz had reached a point where the behaviour of the electromagnetic field dictated what properties the ether ought to have, no matter how implausible these properties might be: for example the ether was to be both motionless and acted upon by non-zero net forces. The ether was nothing but the carrier of the field. This involved a reversal of the heuristic of Lorentz's programme instead of learning something about the field from a general theory of the ether he could only get at the ether post hoc by way of the field. [p.242-243]
It is often said that Lorentz assumed that the aether was at rest. But what Lorentz really meant was that (1) the term aether is a way of expressing the concept that space is a receptacle for electromagnetic fields, and (2) there is no aether velocity.

About 30 years later, Einstein adopted a view of the aether that was nearly identical to Lorentz's. See Einstein's views on the aether.

Zahar later wrote Poincaré's Philosophy. From Conventionalism to Phenomenology (2001), where he says that Poincare discovered relativity independently from Einstein. Perhaps he did not know about Poincare when he wrote the above article on Lorentz and Einstein.

Needless to say, Zahar's question is bogus. Einstein's special relativity programme never did supersede Lorentz's. As Zahar admits, they were functionally equivalent, and his alleged differences are mostly from his misunderstandings about covariance.

Part I of Zahar's paper (pdf) concludes:

What I have established so far is that one cannot explain the success of Einstein's Special Relativity Theory in terms of the demerits of Lorentz's rival theory. Lorentz's programme was non ad hoc in all senses of the term. The adjustments to the theory in the 1890's were not made in the light of Michelson's result and thus were not ad hoc relative to it. The adjustments were both theoretically and empirically progressive and they were made in conformity to the heuristic of the classical programme. Thus if the eventual acceptance by the scientific community of Einstein's theory in preference to Lorentz's was rational (i.e. if there are acceptable general criteria according to which Einstein's theory was objectively better than Lorentz's), that rationality must lie in the extra merits of Einstein's theory. I now turn to the Einsteinian programme and a consideration of its merits. Let me say that I shall argue that the acceptance of Einstein's programme was rational, although, given that Lorentz's and Einstein's theories were anno 1905 'observationally equivalent', my claim may well appear doubtful at this stage.
Much of the paper is concerned with the logical relation between the Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction and the Molecular Forces Hypothesis "which can be loosely formulated as follows: 'Molecular forces behave and transform like electromagnetic forces.'" Zahar's main concern seems to be that an idea is not really scientific if it is ad hoc.

I think that it is a little bizarre for philosophers to analyze a great scientific discovery, and claim that it is not scientific for some obscure philosophical argument about whether it was properly inductivist. If it was not, then they should revise their philosophical definitions.


Monday, Jan 03, 2011
 
Third elephant species named
Evolutionist Jerry Coyne says that a new species of elephant was named for political reasons, not scientific reasons:
But biologists often have to hide this motivation: we must pretend that we’re saving populations because we need to retain genetic diversity, or prevent inbreeding, or save rare alleles that could bring back a larger species.  We can never divulge the real reason why many of us want to save things like the elephants—because they have inherent value as organisms, and because they’re fascinating. That’s why many conservation biologists are busy worrying about the species and subspecies status of plants and animals: they secretly treasure them for their own qualities, but have to make a different case to the government and public about why they need to be saved.

This isn’t just a theory of mine: I’ve talked to many conservation biologists who admit that the real reason they want to save species differs from the rationale they must offer the public and the government. ...

What a shame, though, that we have to manipulate biological nomenclature, and dissimulate about our motivations, to keep other species alive! Shouldn’t we name species based on biology rather than politics?

Unfortunately, this is a problem with a lot of scientists. They will support the global warming alarmists because they think it will force energy resource conservation. They will promote evolution because they think it will undermine religion. They will support embryonic stem cell research because they opposed Bush policies. They will support all sorts of other causes that are perceived to be in alignment with environmentalism. I would prefer if they separated their science from their politics.

Thursday, Dec 30, 2010
 
Weyl invented gauge theory
Physics World, September 2007, published this start to an article by a couple of philosophers of science:
String theory under scrutiny

One of the main charges against string theory is that it cannot make specific predictions that may be checked against an experiment. But as Nancy Cartwright and Roman Frigg explain, other criteria should be taken into account too when evaluating scientific research

Ever since antiquity, attempts have been made to reduce an apparently complex re- ality to a few elementary building blocks from which everything else is constructed. This project – now called reductionism – has a long history of failures. One example is the 200-year-long attempt to describe all phys- ical processes in terms of mechanics, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s mechanical mod- els of the electromagnetic field. Another is Hermann Weyl’s failed attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravity in a single theory shortly after Einstein had introduced special relativity.

I think it meant to say, "after Einstein had introduced general relativity."

No, the Maxwell and Weyl theories were not failures. A physics journal should be embarrassed about this.

Hermann Weyl's 1918 paper invented gauge theory as a way of combining electromagnetism with general relativity. He successfully combined it with quantum mechanics in 1929. You can read the details here (with a copy also here), and many other places.

The 1918 paper is famous among physicists because it was published with an appendix written by Einstein arguing that the theory was wrong. Pauli also attacked the 1929 paper, and told Weyl to stick to math.

And yet these two papers were two of the most important papers in 20th century theoretical physics. The ideas in them have become essential to all high-energy physics. They were more important than any papers that Einstein ever wrote. Today's textbooks explain nuclear and electromagnetic interactions in terms of gauge theories.

So how is it that a major physics journal could badmouth a major physics breakthru as a failure? How could they not know that about ten Nobel prizes were given for work in gauge theory, and that Weyl invented gauge theory with these papers?

My explanation is that it is part of the evil of Einstein's influence. Einstein attacked the paper, and everyone assumes that Einstein knows everything. But Einstein was the failure on this subject. He spent the next 35 years of his life trying to do what Weyl did in that 1918 paper, and he never wrote another paper that was even 1% as good as that Weyl paper.


Monday, Dec 27, 2010
 
Evolving idiocracy
Razib Khan cites evidence that we are slouching toward idiocracy by evolving smaller brains. He also says that some subpopulations are evolving taller, and others shorter.

The North Magnetic Pole is moving from Canada to Siberia.

The 2006 movie was a comedy about how humans are evolving towards stupidity.

Funny how the global warming alarmists are not eager to stop any of these changes.

Update: Brain size is not just correlated with IQ, but with other mental traits as well:

Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.

Sunday, Dec 26, 2010
 
The Danger of Cosmic Genius
An environmentalist site says:
An article entitled “The Danger of Cosmic Genius” appearing in the December 2010 edition of The Atlantic, authored by Kenneth Brower, refers to the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson, and his “dangerous” skepticism regarding climate change. As Brower puts it, “Among intelligent nonexperts who have weighed in on climate change, Freeman Dyson has become, now that Michael Crichton is dead, perhaps our most prominent global-warming skeptic.”
I previously commented on Dyson's climate views, and pointed out his Kuhnian views on Einstein. He has some other unusual views also, such as on ESP.

Brower says:

For whatever reason, he is emotionally incapable of seeing the true colors of the rampant ingenuity of our species and calculating where our cleverness, as opposed to our wisdom, is taking us.
This sort of mindreading is useless. If Dyson is wrong, then just show how he is wrong.

If you have a Kuhnian view of science, then scientific knowledge is defined by the dominant paradigm, and not by objective reality. That is the problem with both Brower and Dyson.


Saturday, Dec 25, 2010
 
Obama fails to change science policy
After two years of study, the White House science advisor has announced in 4-page letter that he favors shielding scientists from "inappropriate political influence". Yawn.

In other words, the Obama policy is the same as the Bush policy.

I would have liked to see some more scientific procedures for the scientific advisory panels. The vaccine panels do not have open meetings, do not have clear objectives, do not avoid conflicts of interest, and do not have a diversity of members.


Friday, Dec 24, 2010
 
Lorentz's assumptions
There is now a complete English translation of Lorentz's 1895 electromagnetism and relativity book. It is modestly titled, "Attempt of a Theory of Electrical and Optical Phenomena in Moving Bodies", but it was good enough to win him the 1902 Nobel Prize in physics.

I previously discussed how this paper is the basis of the Lorentz aether theory, but it really has almost nothing to do with the aether. Wikipedia says:

Einstein identified two fundamental principles, each founded on experience, from which all of Lorentz's electrodynamics follows:

1. that the laws by which physical processes occur are the same with respect to any system of inertial coordinates (the principle of relativity), and
2. that light propagates at an absolute speed of c in terms of any system of inertial coordinates ("principle of the constancy of light“)

Taken together (along with a few other tacit assumptions such as isotropy and homogeneity of space), these two postulates lead uniquely to the mathematics of special relativity. Lorentz and Poincaré had also adopted these same principles, as necessary to achieve their final results, but didn't recognize that they were also sufficient, and hence that they obviated all the other assumptions underlying Lorentz's initial derivations (many of which later turned out to be incorrect [C 4]).

[footnote C4] The three best known examples are (1) the assumption of Maxwell's equations, and (2) the assumptions about finite structure of the electron, and (3) the assumption that all mass was of electromagnetic origin. Maxwell's equations were subsequently found to be invalid and were replaced with quantum electrodynamics, although one particular feature of Maxwell's equations, the invariance of a characteristic speed, has remained. The electron's mass is now regarded as a pointlike particle, and Poincaré already showed in 1905 that it is not possible for all the mass of the electron to be electromagnetic in origin. This is how relativity invalidated the 19th century hopes for basing all of physics on electromagnetism.

It is false to say that Einstein did not need to assume Maxwell's equations, or that Einstein had any better understanding about the sufficiency of assumptions. Einstein explicitly said in 1905 that he was relying on Maxwell's equations for his derivations.

Einstein also assumed that Maxwell's equations hold in both the stationary and moving systems, and in the same form. Lorentz and Poincare did not assume this -- they proved it, based on other assumptions. Einstein's assumptions are much more complex than Lorentz's and Poincare's. Modern textbooks follow Poincare, not Lorentz or Einstein. And those two fundamental principles were not "founded on experience", either. They were based on Lorentz's interpretation of the Michelson–Morley experiment and other experiments.


Thursday, Dec 23, 2010
 
Out-of-Africa debunked
For 25 years, the evolutionist consensus has been the Out of Africa theory, that we are all descended from a small group of Africans, including the "Mitochondrial Eve", 200K years ago. This was predicted by Darwin and confirmed by DNA, we were told.

Now we learn:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.
Separate DNA research has shown that we have Neanderthal genes as well. Razib Khan has much more info, and John Hawks has a Denisova genome FAQ.

I am not sure what to make of this, but it seems to be the biggest anthropological discovery in decades. First, I'd like to find out how the evolutionists could have been so wrong.


Wednesday, Dec 22, 2010
 
Name-calling by string theorist
A prominent string theorist complains about skeptics:
Science sceptics
08 December 2010
From Michael Duff, Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics, Imperial College London

I enjoyed Milena Wazeck's analysis of the thought processes of those who denied Einstein's relativity (13 November, p 48). Yet it all sounded eerily familiar.

Phrases such as "when people don't like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience" and "the increasingly mathematical approach of theoretical physics collided with the then widely held view that science is essentially simple mechanics, comprehensible to every educated layperson" call to mind the modern-day ramshackle alliance between unqualified scientists, the blogosphere and many science journalists when confronted with the academic consensus of superstrings and M-theory as the most promising candidates for unifying gravity with the other forces of nature. These people are quick to cry "this is not science", while themselves resorting to pseudoscientific alternatives.

The letter responds to this:
I discovered (http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/DEPT1_Wazeck-GehrckeCollection) that the group opposing relativity was much broader than many historians believed till now, and that their tactics had much in common with those used by creationists and climate-change deniers today. Their reasons for countering relativity were also more complex and varied than is usually thought. Even Einstein misjudged the motivations of many of his opponents.
In this interview, Duff says that M-theory just has two problems, finding a theory and finding an experiment:
What is the greatest challenge at the moment?

I think there are two. One on the theoretical side, and one more on the reality side. The theoretical one is to pin down exactly what M theory is. ... That’s the theoretical challenge: to rigorously pin down what this all-embracing theory really is.

The other challenge is to make contact with experiment.

Any allegedly scientific theory with those two defects is pseudoscience.

Duff likes to align himself with Einstein, and badmouth any skeptic as being a pseudoscientist or like those who refused to accept Einstein's theories. The analogy to relativity is bad. Relativity never had those two challenges, and always had experimental evidence.

Duff once debated string theory, and spent a lot of it attacking his opponent for quotes from a pre-publication draft, even tho the quotes had been changed for publication in the book.

Duff shows how low the theoretical physicists have gotten. He is a big-shot with a high-status job. And yet he is very insecure about the pseudoscientific nature of his own research that he launches into these vague and unsubstantiated attacks on others.


Tuesday, Dec 21, 2010
 
Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism
A new Gallup Poll gave these choices:
Which of the Following Statements Comes Closest to Your Views on the Origin and Development of Human Beings?

1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

A small minority of Americans hold the "secular evolution" view that humans evolved with no influence from God -- but the number has risen from 9% in 1982 to 16% today. At the same time, the 40% of Americans who hold the "creationist" view that God created humans as is 10,000 years ago is the lowest in Gallup's history of asking this question, and down from a high point of 47% in 1993 and 1999. There has been little change over the years in the percentage holding the "theistic evolution" view that humans evolved under God's guidance.

My problem with this is that the standard evolutionist view is that human beings developed only 50k years ago, not millions of years ago. We split from the Neanderthals in the last 600K years or so, but they are not considered human.

Furthermore, the standard evolutionist dogma is that apes are no less advanced than humans, and that humans did not evolve from from less advanced forms of life. All life forms are equally advanced in that they are adapted to their environments. That is what they say, anyway. In particular, they say that there is no such thing as devolution.

So while answer (2) is supposed to be the scientific answer, it is not really what the leading evolutionary scientists say. If the experts do not agree on these statements, then how can we expect the general public to answer correctly?


Monday, Dec 20, 2010
 
New value for fine structure constant
The latest value of the fine structure constant has been found in France to be about 1/alpha = 137.035999, with theoretical and experimental errors of about 1e-7. Thus there is eight-digit agreement between theory and experiment.

Some famous physicists have looked for numerological significance of this number, especially when it was thought possible that it was exactly 137.

The fine structure constant is the most fundamental of all the coupling constants. It defines the coupling between electrons and photons. In other words, it defines the interaction between electric charge and the luminiferous aether.

The calculations involve assuming that empty space is not really empty, and that electron-positron pairs are being spontaneously created and annihilated throughout the universe. Even some exotic particles such as muons have such a fleeting existence. Such is the nature of the modern aether. We have no other way to understand electricity to such high precision.

A 2005 SciAm article starts by saying:

When Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, he rejected the 19th-century idea that light arises from vibrations of a hypothetical medium, the "ether." Instead, he argued, light waves can travel in vacuo without being supported by any material--;unlike sound waves, which are vibrations of the medium in which they propagate. This feature of special relativity is untouched in the two other pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Right up to the present day, all experimental data, on scales ranging from subnuclear to galactic, are successfully explained by these three theories.
This is a very odd description of modern physics. Einstein denied in 1920 that he rejected the aether. Special relativity is a special case of general relativity, and they cannot be seen as two separate theories. Quantum mechanics is not really separate either, as special relativity has been fully incorporated in it to turn it into quantum field theory, as of about 1930. Modern physics says that light cannot travel in a vacuum unless it is supported by a pervasive structure of virtual electrons, muons, and other particles. That is what you get when you combine relativity and quantum mechanics, and there has been no other high-precision understanding of light since about 1950.

The above 8-digit agreement, and similar confirmations of quantum electrodynamics, are among the greatest achievements of modern science. It is simply not possible to get such agreement between theory and experiment if you assume that "light waves can travel in vacuo without being supported by any material". SciAm is decades out of date when it says that.


Sunday, Dec 19, 2010
 
Astronomer blackballed for Biblical beliefs
The NY Times reports:
In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. ... Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky.

With his faith, Dr. Gaskell, who now works at the University of Texas but has accepted a job in Chile, does embrace views that most of his peers find indefensible. In a 1998 survey, 7.5 percent of physicists and astronomers in the National Academy of Sciences said they believed in God — and many of the believers would still concede that science explains the universe better than a reading of Genesis.

It appears to me that Gaskell also believes that science explains the universe better than Genesis. Here is what he says:
I list, and briefly discuss, some of the main theological interpretational viewpoints of the creation stories in Genesis. It is explained that there are more than just two extreme views on the origin of the universe and that the majority of scientists who are Christians adhere neither to the view that the Bible is irrelevant to the earth's origin (which exponents of atheistic evolution claim) nor the view that God made the earth essentially as it now is in six 24-hour periods about 6000 years ago (the “young earth creationist” position.) ...

What I've sketched above is just a series of possible interpretations of Genesis 1 & 2. The main point that I'd like to get across from doing this is that given that there is a possible scientific explanation of most things, one cannot say “science disproves Genesis”. Another point is that we do not have to take Genesis as something “just theological”. It is quite likely that Genesis is describing physical things that happened in space and time in the history of our universe. ... I personally am not going to be the least bit surprised if someone proves that the age of the universe is outside that “± 0.01” billion year range (for example, if it is only 13 billion years or more than 14 billion years).

My views are more like what Gaskell calls the extreme views of the atheistic evolutionists, but his views are not demonstrably wrong. They are no more wrong than those who believe in extraterrestial life, evaporating black holes, or extra dimensions or universes. He accepts that science determines the age of the universe, not Genesis.

Here is the latest evidence on some of those goofy theories:

The Large Hadron Collider has not yet seen any of the microscopic black holes that inspired numerous scare stories in recent years.

Many theorists actually hope the collider, based near Geneva, Switzerland, will create short-lived, miniature black holes. These would not pose a threat to Earth, but they would provide evidence for hypothetical extra dimensions that might lie beyond the 3D world we normally experience.

Not just scaremongers. The string theorists were predicting mini black holes. I don't see where any of them are being blackballed for being proven wrong.

The University of Kentucky should be embarrassed for this. Not just for practicing religious discrimination, but for making an unscientific rejection of an astronomer's speculations. If Gaskell said something that is demostrably wrong, then his critics should prove it, instead of censoring him. The anti-Genesis astronomers already have 99% of their colleagues on their side, and they should not be threatened by Gaskell.

The godless liberal PZ Myers complains that "Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn't going to confine himself to talking only about his field". Fellow religion-hater Jerry Coyne complains that mainstream Christians are just as bad as Gaskell.


Saturday, Dec 18, 2010
 
Climate science regresses
The current AAAS Science magazine has a special on the Insights of the Decade. The accompanying podcast says:
Host – Sophia Cai
So what does the coming decade look like for climate science research, Dick?

News Writer – Richard Kerr
Well, there's going to be another report assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They last came out with an assessment in 2007, made a very big splash. The next one, due I think 2013, could be a difficult report to present to the public; there's a real possibility that as climate scientists get more deeply into the climate system, they get more realistic models, that things are going to get more complicated, and therefore less certain. And so they may be having to present results with more uncertainty that they'd been talking about before, so that should be a challenge. And their last remaining question – just how bad could the warming get? – looks like a very tough nut to crack, and there may be very limited progress on that front.

This is an amazing admission from a leftist journal. Climate science must be the only science that advances by more realistic models and more uncertain results. In every other science, more realistic models reduce the uncertainty in the predictions.

Kerr is saying that new research is going to show that the global warming scare stories are unlikely, and that we are not able to make long term climate predictions nearly as well as our leaders have pretended. Selling the public on the scare stories is going to become more challenging, as the research proves the alarmists wrong.

As noted below, AAAS is a leftist organization. If it were objectively seeking the truth, wherever it might lead, then it would not be complaining that more realistic climate models would soon be available to the public.


Friday, Dec 17, 2010
 
Conflict between science and religion
Jason Rosenhouse responds to this book on science and religion:
Historians have shown that the Galileo affair, remembered by some as a clash between science and religion, was primarily about the enduring political question of who was authorized to produce and disseminate knowledge. [Thomas Dixon's book]
by saying:
Why was Pope Urban VIII so threatened by Galileo's ideas? Why didn't the church simply laugh at Galileo, and tell him condescendingly to go keep playing with his telescope while the grown-ups talked about more serious things? The reason was that the Pope's authority was based entirely on the idea that he stood in a privileged relation to God, uniquely able to interpret scripture. If someone like Galileo could use science to challenge his claims, then the entire basis for the church's power would be seriously weakened. ...

Young-Earth creationists believe the Bible constitutes a source of evidence that trumps anything a scientist might discover. Furthermore, failure to recognize that fact places your eternal soul in danger.

No, he is completely wrong. Mainstream Christian denominations do not even believe in Young-Earth Creationism (YEC). The minority that do believe in YEC all say that your eternal soul is saved by belief in Jesus, not YEC, as under John 3:16.

At the time of Galileo, the Pope was fighting against the Protestant Reformation, where Martin Luther and others were arguing for more literal interpretations of the Bible. Luther objected to Church theology that was influenced by Aristotelian reason. As a comment says:

To say “The Galileo affair was primarily about religion vs. science” misses that Galileo was as deeply religious as his opponents, that his opponents were motivated by Aristotle's philosophy rather than Biblical literalism, and that the evidence that would eventually show Galileo's heliocentrism to be far superior was not yet available, and some of Galileo's “best arguments” (e.g. from the tides) were wrong, and visibly so, as his opponents noted.
This is correct. Galileo only got into trouble when he started giving theological arguments for heliocentrism that contradicted official Church position. The Church was trying to maintain its authority over theological teachings.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne cites this false Rittenhouse argument to prove that there can be no accommodation between science and religion. But the Galileo trial proves no such thing.

Coyne spends most of his energy promoting his idea of science, and how it disproves religion and it is based on false premises.

I am not arguing that there is no conflict between science and religion. There is. A famous and influential 11th century Islamic theology book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, said:

our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively ... This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God ... Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.
This is the sort of thinking that made Islam hostile to science. The Islamic world did some great science until these anti-science attitudes took over.
 
Biology journal invites evolution controversy
Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne praises Behe’s new paper on the observation of evolutionary mutations. But he is unhappy about the inferences that others have drawn, and blames Behe's motivations:
This distortion is hardly news, of course -— I’m completely confident that Behe not only expected it, but approves of it -— but I feel compelled to highlight it once again. ... So typical of these clowns to ignore the insuperable problems with extending Behe’s limited conclusions to evolution as a whole.  But I’m absolutely sure that Behe intended his paper to be distorted in this way.
The same journal with Behe's paper also has a paper attacking his earlier work as pseudoscience. The paper complains about the motives of the advocates of the Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), and says that they keep "moving the goalposts". Eg, it says:
As was apparent from its conception, the rapid success of the IDC movement was never driven by its arguments but by its religious ideology, which was epitomized in the so-called Wedge document of IDC’s home base, the Discovery Institute (Forrest and Gross, 2007b).
I think that it is funny how these evolutionists devote so much energy in mindreading Behe and others, and in using name-calling attacks. Behe says that he is not a creationist, and that he believes that we descended from apes. I see no reason to doubt Behe's sincerity. Even if he does have some religious motivations, a real scientist would address what he actually says, and not the religion of someone quoting him.

It is strange for a biology journal to publish one scientific article by Behe, and then in the same issue accuse him of pseudoscience because he was moving the goalposts by making slight changes to a technical definition.

Update: Behe replies to Coyne. Behe responds to the substantive comments, and ignores the ad hominem attacks. I don't know who is right, but Behe is certainly more rational and professional than Coyne.


Wednesday, Dec 15, 2010
 
Fake scientist joins geology board
War On Science activist Chris Mooney was appointed to a geology board. Since he is a non-scientist known mainly for leftist partisan political opinions about science-related issues, he is criticized in the comments above, and here.

I have previously criticized the Mooney war on Science here and here. He is an atheist, but he is a proponent of using Christians to support his leftist-evolutionist causes.

This is another example of a previouly-scientific organization putting politics ahead of science. The next time it puts out a statement on global warming or some such issue, I will have to assume that it is driven by politics, not science.


Monday, Dec 13, 2010
 
Einstein and GPS
Physics professor (of relativity) Clifford M. Will explains the need for relativity in GPS:
But in a relativistic world, things are not simple. The satellite clocks are moving at 14,000 km/hr in orbits that circle the Earth twice per day, much faster than clocks on the surface of the Earth, and Einstein's theory of special relativity says that rapidly moving clocks tick more slowly, by about seven microseconds (millionths of a second) per day.

Also, the orbiting clocks are 20,000 km above the Earth, and experience gravity that is four times weaker than that on the ground. Einstein's general relativity theory says that gravity curves space and time, resulting in a tendency for the orbiting clocks to tick slightly faster, by about 45 microseconds per day. The net result is that time on a GPS satellite clock advances faster than a clock on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day.

To determine its location, the GPS receiver uses the time at which each signal from a satellite was emitted, as determined by the on-board atomic clock and encoded into the signal, together the with speed of light, to calculate the distance between itself and the satellites it communicated with. The orbit of each satellite is known accurately. Given enough satellites, it is a simple problem in Euclidean geometry to compute the receiver's precise location, both in space and time. To achieve a navigation accuracy of 15 meters, time throughout the GPS system must be known to an accuracy of 50 nanoseconds, which simply corresponds to the time required for light to travel 15 meters.

But at 38 microseconds per day, the relativistic offset in the rates of the satellite clocks is so large that, if left uncompensated, it would cause navigational errors that accumulate faster than 10 km per day! GPS accounts for relativity by electronically adjusting the rates of the satellite clocks, and by building mathematical corrections into the computer chips which solve for the user's location. Without the proper application of relativity, GPS would fail in its navigational functions within about 2 minutes.

This is correct. Light travels at a speed a one foot per nanosecond. So the clocks on the space satellites must be accurate to one nanosecond in order to get one foot accuracy on the ground. They are accurate to about 40 nanoseconds, so we get about 40-foot accuracy on the ground.

But the space clocks run faster than Earth clocks, accumulating what would be errors of about 40 microseconds per day, ie, 40,000 nanoseconds per day. That would give an error of about 40,000 feet (ie, several miles) after one day of space clocks getting de-synchronized.

Everyone who tells this story gives the impression that we could never have had GPS without Einstein. But the story does not show that at all. If we knew nothing about relativity, the GPS engineers still would have recalibrated the clocks after launching them into space. They would have been mystified as to why the space clocks needed a 38 millisecond per day adjustment, but they would have done it anyway. No one would have seen the several mile long errors that Will describes. There would be a bunch of silly papers about how maybe cosmic rays were slowing down atomic clocks, but we would still have a GPS system.

Einstein said in 1905 that moving clocks slow down, but that was not new. It had already been part of Lorentz's theory years earlier. He may have been the first to say that gravity slows down clocks in his 1908 paper. His argument was that gravitational acceleration is just like other forms of acceleration, so gravity will affect clocks just like accelerated motion.

The Newtonian mechanics had already said that such accelerations were the same, and the Hungarian physicist Loránd Eötvös published a pretty good experimental confirmation in 1908. Nevertheless, Einstein is credited with being the first to apply this idea to the slowing of clocks. The effect was not observable until the invention of electronic clocks and artificial satellites, about 50 years later.

I previously mentioned Will here and here. Will has a lecture on Einstein here.

Will is a big Einstein idolizer, and wrote this in 2005:

A hundred years ago, Einstein laid the foundation for a revolution in our conception of time and space, matter and energy. In his remarkable 1905 paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” [1], and the follow-up note “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?” [2], he established what we now call special relativity as one of the two pillars on which virtually all of physics of the 20th century would be built (the other pillar being quantum mechanics). ...

Strangely, although general relativity had its crucial successes, such as the bending of starlight and the explanation of the advance of Mercury’s perihelion, special relativity was not so fortunate. Indeed, many scholars believe that a lack of direct experimental support for special relativity in the years immediately following 1905 played a role in the decision to award Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize, not for relativity, but for one of his other 1905 “miracle” papers, the photoelectric effect, which did have direct confirmation in the laboratory.

No, that is not the correct explanation for Einstein not getting a relativity prize. There was a lot more experimental support for special relativity than general relativity. The mass increase with velocity was predicted in 1899 by Lorentz, and observed in 1901. But Einstein could not be credited with this, because he did not write anything on the subject until 1905.

Will is using some tricky language when he says, "lack of direct experimental support for special relativity in the years immediately following 1905". The most dramatic experimental confirmations of special relativity were the Michelson-Morley and relativistic mass experiments, and those were before 1905 and before Einstein. They confirmed special relativity as much as the 1919 eclipse confirmed general relativity. Einstein did not get the Nobel prize for relativity because the consensus was that he did not invent relativity.

Sometimes people say that general relativity was tested, and not special relativity. Tom Bethell argues:

Most people know little about relativity theory, but we recognize that it was highly influential and that Einstein's theory somehow rewrote the laws of physics. It is divided into two parts, the special theory (1905) and the more difficult general theory (1916). The generally accepted view is that the special theory has been proven over and over again, while the general theory perhaps can be questioned and retested. In Beckmann's theory, this is more or less reversed. The general theory gives the right answers but by a complicated and roundabout route. Meanwhile a simpler path lay at hand. But the special theory may have to be discarded because the logical consequences of its postulates do not correspond to experimental results.
This is nonsense, of course. Special relativity is the infinitesimal version of general relativity. There is much more evidence for the special theory.

There is also a myth that Einstein discovered relativity with pure thought, and without paying any attention to experiment. He himself promoted this myth in his later life, and others cite this argument in order to undermine the scientific method. In fact, the discovery of relativity was directly designed to explain experiments.


Sunday, Dec 12, 2010
 
Faulty Nobel physics prize
I previously commented that last year's Nobel physics prize went to wrong guys. See also Controversy raised about 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Now there is a similar problem with this year's prize. Nature magazine reports:

A high-profile graphene researcher has written to the Nobel prize committee for physics, objecting to errors in its explanation of this year's prize. The award was given to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of Manchester University, UK, for their work on graphene, a two-dimensional carbon structure that has huge potential in the field of electronics.
There are, of course, many other Nobel Prize controversies.

Saturday, Dec 11, 2010
 
Leftists took over scholarly organizations
Daniel Sarewitz writes in Slate:
A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.

This immense imbalance has political consequences. When President Obama appears Wednesday on Discovery Channel's Mythbusters (9 p.m. ET), he will be there not just to encourage youngsters to do their science homework but also to reinforce the idea that Democrats are the party of science and rationality.

Not exactly. The poll was not of scientists but of members of the left-wing organziation American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They are the ones who just pubished the bogus claims about arsenic-based extraterrestrial life, and their editorial opinions are always left-wing. Leftists are also the ones who have just taken over the major American anthropology organization in order to drive out the scientists.

Pres. Obama's appearance on Mythbusters was remarkably silly. He just asked them to redo a previous experiment on whether Sun-reflecting mirrors could be used as a defensive military weapon. He added no new ideas, and they just did the same experiment and got the same results. What was the point? I really doubt that it convinced anyone that Democrats were scientific and rational.

My guess is that Obama's choice of topic was intended as propaganda that the Strategic Defense Initiative would not work.

Support for Einstein is largely driven by leftist politics. He was an avowed socialist, Communist fellow-traveler, and Stalinist apologist.

Ideally, the politics of a scientist should be irrelevant. They should be seekers of truth, wherever that leads. But you do not see that among the leading leftist advocates of evolution, global warming, stem cells, conservation, etc.


Friday, Dec 10, 2010
 
Anthropology abandons science
The NY Times reports:
Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan. ...

He [Peter Peregrine] attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.

Here is the old statement, supporting the advance of science. On anthropologist says:
They are happy not to be held to a high standard of rigor in their research and writing and pleased to be judged by the more open-ended and subjective standards of humanistic research.
Many academic soft science departments suffer from this split between the scientific and the anti-science. The unscientific ones just hate it when they get proved wrong, over and over. The problem is especially bad in anthropology because it studies people. Politically correct academics tend to get excited when you talk about human biodiversity, and give scientific data to back up observed differences.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne responds to The Truth Wears Off, where Jonah Lehrer explains The Mysterious Decline Effect:

I tend to agree with Lehrer about studies in my own field of evolutionary biology. Almost no findings are replicated, there’s a premium on publishing positive results, and, unlike some other areas, findings in evolutionary biology don’t necessarily build on each other: workers usually don’t have to repeat other people’s work as a basis for their own. ...

In many fields, especially physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, workers regularly repeat the results of others, since progress in their own work demands it. ...

Lehrer, like Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man, has done a service by pointing out that scientists are humans after all, and that their drive for reputation -— and other nonscientific issues -— can affect what they produce or perceive as “truth.” But it’s a mistake to imply that all scientific truth is simply a choice among explanations that aren’t very well supported.  We must remember that scientific “truth” means “the best provisional explanation, but one so compelling that you’d have to be a fool not to accept it.”  Truth, then, while always provisional, is not necessarily evanescent.  To the degree that Lehrer implies otherwise, his article is deeply damaging to science.

Coyne is actually one of the more scientific evolutionists. He is willing to criticize the work of others when he thinks that it is correct, and he tries to limit his arguments to what the data actually prove. But he also show how evolutionists devalue science as anthropologists do. To them, Truth is just what they and their elite buddies say is the truth. To that end, they have to carry on a campaign of ridicule in order to convince the public that other views are foolish. That is why you see arguments for mainstream anthropology, evolution, global warming, etc. that are not based on any hard science, but rather ad hominem attacks on those not conforming to the supposed consensus of the elites.

Real scientists use data and logic to back up their arguments.

It is telling that Coyne relies on The Mismeasure of Man for his view of science. That book has been discredited. It promotes entirely false ideas based on ad hominem attacks on the supposedly sloppy work of scientists a century ago, while ignoring recent experiments that replicated the older work. The book was extremely popular among leftist academics for political reasons, not scientific reasons. The book was an inspiration to those anthropologists who want to disassociate themselves from science.

Gould was the world's most famous evolutionist. The scathing criticisms of his book were published in peer reviewed scientific journals, and he never attempted to rebut them. He was an embarrassment to science. His followers are the one who are deeply damaging to science.


Thursday, Dec 09, 2010
 
The Truth Wears Off
Jonah Lehrer writes (copy here) in the New Yorker:
THE TRUTH WEARS OFF
Is there something wrong with the scientific method?

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts are losing their truth. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. ...

Mentions John Ioannidis. In the late nineteen-nineties, neuroscientist John Crabbe investigated the impact of unknown chance events on the test of replicability. The disturbing implication of his study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data is nothing but noise. This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything.

He acts as if the truth-wears-off effect is analogous to the placebo effect, where sugar pills appear to improve medical conditions. The truth-wears-off effect keeps good science papers from being replicated.

No, there is nothing wrong with the scientific method. There is something wrong with the way the soft sciences are preoccupied with p-values as being the main criterion for publication.


Wednesday, Dec 08, 2010
 
More on bogus alien life claims
I criticized the recent NASA claims for the possibility of extraterrestial arsenic-based life. It was one of the most heavily hyped scientific papers promoting space alien life in years. Carl Zimmer writes in Slate that others have now made sharper criticisms, and the authors are refusing to respond:
As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me. ...

That was about as positive as the critics could get. "This paper should not have been published," said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado. ...

I asked two of the authors of the study if they wanted to respond to the criticism of their paper. Both politely declined by email.

"We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time," declared senior author Ronald Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey. "If we are wrong, then other scientists should be motivated to reproduce our findings. If we are right (and I am strongly convinced that we are) our competitors will agree and help to advance our understanding of this phenomenon. I am eager for them to do so."

"Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated," wrote Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. "The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner."

The proper way to engage in a scientific discourse? What she did do was to issue exaggerated and misleading press releases, and to give friendly press interviews such this NRP Science Friday interview where her claims went unchallenged.

I have no respect for scientists who refuse to respond to public criticisms. Any real scientist would either defend a published paper, or withdraw it. Instead these authors are hiding behind nameless faceless editors.

NASA and the leftist-atheist-evolutionists would very much like to demonstrate the possibility of life in outer space. NASA would get more funding, and the others consider any such evidence as an endorsement of their worldview. As a result, a lot of bogus arguments are used.

Update: Zimmer has posted responses. Some are scathing. And even if the microbes are really using arsenic, there are very good reasons for believing that other planets will have a lot more phosphorus than arsenic, so the experiment has nothing to do with extraterrestrial life. See also Scientists poke holes in NASA’s arsenic-eating microbe discovery.


Tuesday, Dec 07, 2010
 
Wrong scientific beliefs
The Edge asks this question of various experts:
The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?
Other answers are here and here.

The answers are disappointing. Some people seem to have funny ideas about what it means for a scientific idea to be proved wrong. Here is a bad answer:

Caloric, phlogiston, and ether immediately come to mind, but I'm particularly fond one consequence of Aristotelian mechanics: the assertion that there is no such thing as a vacuum.
These theories were improved, but they are not really wrong. A lot of useful scientific work came out of those theories. All theories get improved. The question calls for examples of theories which are dead wrong.

Actually, the question is confused, because the flat earth and geocentric world are not good examples of wrong scientific beliefs.

Here is a much better answer:

1. Stress theory of ulcers — it turns out they are due to infection with Heliobacter pylori. Barry Marshall won Nobel Prize for that.

2. Continental drift was proposed in the 1920-30s by Alfred Wegner, but was totally dismissed until the 1960s when it ushered in plate tectonics.

3. Conventional belief was the eye evolved many, many times. Then they discovered the PAX genes that regulate eyes and are found throughout the animal kingdom — eyes evolved ONCE.

4. Geoffrey St. Hillare was a French scientist who had a theory that invertebrates and vertebrates shared a common body plan. He was widely dismissed until the HOX genes were discovered.

Nothing good ever came out of that stress theory of ulcers. People suffered useless psychobabble when they could have been cured with antibiotics. Likewise, Wegener was right about continental drift, and nearly everyone else was wrong.

The final answer is from someone who was brainwashed with anti-science in grad school:

My favorite example is about science itself. For the longest time scientists didn't believe that their own discipline followed rules, per se, but then Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and, my favorite, Paul Feyerabend showed how science was sociology, was prone to enthusiasms, fashions, and dogma, and so on. It was one of the most important realizations of my doctoral program.
He got that Ph.D. in the economics of technology, whatever that is.

I wonder how so many people can fail to grasp the simple point that science is all about proving hypotheses true or false. It is not just sociology and fashion. Even grade school kids learn about the scientific method.

Kuhn and Popper based some of their (different) philosophies on faulty accounts of the history of relativity. I post here about relativity to correct some of those errors.

Physicist Lee Smolin wrote:

Perhaps the most embarrassing example from 20th Century physics of a false but widely held belief was the claim that von Neumann had proved in his 1930 text book on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics that hidden variables theories are impossible. These would be theories that give a complete description of individual systems rather than the statistical view of ensembles described by quantum mechanics. In fact de Broglie had written down a hidden variables theory in 1926 but abandoned work on it because of von Neumann's theorem. For the next two decades no one worked on hidden variables theories.

In the early 1950's David Bohm reinvented de Broglie's theory. When his paper was rejected because von Neumann proved what he claimed impossible, he read and easily found a fallacy in the von Neumann's reasoning. Indeed, there had been at least one paper pointing out the fallacy in the 1930s that was ignored. The result was that progress on hidden variables theories in general, and de Broglie and Bohm's theory in particular, was delayed by several decades.

Whether or not von Neumann's reasoning is convincing, the impossibility of a sensible hidden variable theory was proved by Bell's theorem and subsequent experiments validating quantum mechanics.

Physicist David Deutsch writes:

Surely the most extreme example is the existence of a force of gravity. ... Since 1915 we have known the true explanation, namely that when you hold your arm out horizontally, and think you are feeling it being pulled downwards by a force of gravity, the only force you are actually feeling is the upward force exerted by your own muscles in order to keep your arm accelerating continuously away from a straight path in spacetime.
You might think that Deutsch is making a joke, but he wrote a whole book, The Fabric of Reality, where he explains more fantastic ideas from physics.

From a psychologist:

The psychologist Tania Lombrozo has shown that even Harvard undergraduates who endorse evolution consistently interpret evolutionary claims in a teleological rather than mechanistic way (eg giraffes try to reach the high leaves and so develop longer necks). And we have shown that six year olds develop a notion of fully autonomous "free will" that is notoriously difficult to overturn.
Wow. There are fully grown intelligent adults who also believe in free will.
In the 17th century, that led skeptics to scoff at Newton's theory of gravity. Proper science was supposed to map how matter pushes against matter to cause various effects. Yet in this theory there was no physical contact, just spooky action at a distance. Almost a century after Newton, rival theories of gravity were still being proposed to remedy this defect.

Similarly, many scientists (including Newton) long theorized about aether, the substance that carries light, in part because, well, if light arrives, it must be borne by something.

Similarly? Those views, action-at-a-distance and aether theory, were opposite alternatives. Those who believed in the aether theory justified it by arguments against action-at-a-distance, and those who believed in the action-at-a-distance theory justified it by arguments against the aether.

It is also odd to say that rivals were still trying to correct Newton a century later. As Deutsch explains above, they corrected him 250 years later with general relativity.

Some of the more commonly heard false theories are the extreme views of the nature versus nurture debate. In psychology, it is nativism v tabula rasa (blank slate).

For decades, theoretical physicists have promoted various unified field theories which were disproved by the failure to find proton decay.

Physics textbooks in my lifetime were also proved wrong by the discovery of neutrino mass.

Someone found a cure for phantom limb pain 15 years ago, but apparently physicians have trouble accepting it, and continue to prescribe useless painkillers instead.

I guess scientists have a long way to go when it comes to convincing people that hypotheses are right or wrong.


Monday, Dec 06, 2010
 
New Bush-hater movie
There is a new movie, Fair Game, about Valerie Plame, and a Wash. Post editorial attacks it:
The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson's reporting did not affect the intelligence community's view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush's statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

"Fair Game" also resells the couple's story that Ms. Plame's exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy - but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

Funny how the editorial just refers to itself as "a newspaper". The newspaper is most famous for relying on leaks from unnamed govt officials, so I guess that it is sensitive to the accusation that it is being manipulated for political purposes.

The Plame story was never the scandal that it was supposed to be. Scooter Libby was convicted of lying to the feds by claiming to have lied to Tim Russert about what he knew about Plame. Libby said that he denied knowing about Plame and the CIA to Russert, and Russert testified that Plame was not discussed. I don't know why anyone would care about that, as it did not result in any classified info being leaked or any stories being printed. I have discussed the Libby case before, such as here and here.


Sunday, Dec 05, 2010
 
Atheist bus signs
The Vancouver Canada Sun reports (also here):
The atheist group behind last year's controversial bus ads suggesting "there's probably no God" is rolling out a provocative new set of posters on buses across the country that places Allah beside Bigfoot and Christ beside psychics.

The new posters bear the slogan: "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" with "Allah, Bigfoot, UFOs, Homeopathy, Zeus, Psychics, Christ" listed below.

They will hit Toronto streetcars in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission, said Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry, an atheist organization.

These atheist groups seem to like bus signs. Their web site, www.extraordinary-claims.com, attacks various pseudo-scientific beliefs, and includes this attack on geocentrism:
Modern Geocentrism is a belief mostly held by religious groups adhering to the Abrahamic tradition (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) that Earth is the center of the universe while the Sun and the rest of the solar-system fully revolve (as a static assembly) around it in one day. Geocentrics believe the stars are closer to us than current measurements indicate and that they are embedded in a rigid substrate called the aether. The aether with the stars is supposedly also rotating around the earth in a sidereal day. ...

Much of physics, such as the theory of general relativity, would have to be discarded if we were to apply the geocentric model to the universe.

No, geocentric models do not contradict relativity. In fact the site links to the Bad Astronomer, who explains that there is no such contradiction:
I have two things to say that might surprise you: first, geocentrism is a valid frame of reference, and second, heliocentrism is not any more or less correct.

Surprise! Of course, the details are important.

Look, I’m human: I say "The Sun rose in the east today", and not "the rotation of the Earth relative to the rest of the Universe carried me around to a geometric vantage point where the horizon as seen from my location dropped below the Sun’s apparent position in space." To us, sitting here on the surface of a planet, geocentrism is a perfectly valid frame of reference. Heck, astronomers use it all the time to point our telescopes. We map the sky using a projected latitude and longitude, and we talk about things rising and setting. That’s not only natural, but a very easy way to do those sorts of things. In that case, thinking geocentrically makes sense.

However, as soon as you want to send a space probe to another planet, geocentrism becomes cumbersome. In that case, it’s far easier to use the Sun as the center of the Universe and measure the rotating and revolving Earth as just another planet. The math works out better, and in fact it makes more common sense. ...

So geocentrism is valid, but so is every other frame. This is the very basis of relativity! One of the guiding principles used by Einstein in formulating it is that there is no One True Frame. If there were, the Universe would behave very, very differently.

In other words, geocentrism is not wrong; it is just sometimes inconvenient.

I am all in favor of scientific skepticism, but I don't see these bus signs convincing any Christians because (1) they believe that the message of the Gospels is extraordinary, (2) they want skepticism about alternative mystical ideas that undermine Christianity, and (3) they do not reject their core beliefs because they are inconvenient.

Christianity tolerates dissenting views. You will not see these bus signs in a Mohammedan country.


Saturday, Dec 04, 2010
 
The sorry state of psychology science
There is a split among psychologists between those who try to be scientific, and those who don't. The split is particularly apparent in court testimony.

Psychologist Bram Fridhandler defends the use of unscientific court testimony in this paper:

ABSTRACT. In response to statements that child custody evalua- tions violate the accepted definition of science in psychology and are therefore unethical in their current form, the evolving definition of science in psychology and the position of the American Psychological Association on evidence-based practice are reviewed. ...

Thomas Kuhn’s influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), fundamentally critiquing the positivist model of scien- tific activity, became influential in psychology, giving voice to the growing uncertainty about the adequacy of the positivist model. Building on Kuhn’s analysis, psychologists discerned the operation of sociological processes of power and influence within their field, a fundamental violation of the positivist assumption of an objective, ‘‘data-driven’’ process. Gergen’s (1973) critical argument questioning social psychology’s claim to scientific status in view of the historically shifting, culturally contingent nature of its subject matter galvanized these doubts and hastened the dissolution of the previous consensus. Sigmund Koch, who chronicled the history of psychology in a monu- mental study, became increasingly dismayed by its overemphasis of positivism, ultimately driving him to the conclusion that ‘‘much of psychological history can be seen as a form of scientistic role- playing’’ with far too little genuine knowledge to show for many years of research (Koch, 1981, p. 257). Prominent observers called on psychology to recognize that ‘‘in recent decades, a virtual Copernican Revolution has taken place in the philosophy of science, a radical change that has profound implications for the human sciences’’ (Manicas & Secord, 1983, p. 399).

Currently, the definition of science in academic psychology can best be described as pluralistic. Empirical evidence remains central to the endeavor, and data-gathering and analytic strategies have, if anything, become more elaborate in recent decades. However, the range of acceptable research designs has broadened considerably. Controlled experiments no longer hold pride of place and, corre- spondingly, methods such as correlational techniques, naturalistic studies, and systematic qualitative observation are in wide use. For example, a perusal of recent articles in the Annual Review of Psychology (e.g., Tyler, 2006) reveals wide methodological variety. The relationship between theory and research is also more fluid than it was in the early period of the field.

Kuhn's book was actually only about the hard sciences like physics, and not the soft sciences like psychology. When confronted with silly arguments like the above, he would deny that he is a Kuhnian.

Fridhandler is correct that Kuhn's book did influence a lot of academic philosophers and others that science was not really scientific. This trend allowed other sloppy pseudo-scientists to pretend that there is no meaningful definition of science, that flawed methodologies are acceptable if practiced by others, and that the theory is too fluid to actually say that anyone's work is wrong. Anyone who does not agree can just be ridiculed as someone not accepting the Copernican Revolution.

I have posted dozens of messages on this blog explaining what is wrong with this Kuhnian thinking. No good has ever come from it. Kuhn denies that science has progressively found better and better explanations of an objective reality, and portrays the history of science as a bunch of paradigm shifts in which scientists jump from one theory to another as if they were clothing fashions.

Those who credit Einstein for relativity nearly always rely on Kuhnian arguments, as in this Dyson example.

People like Fridhandler are doing real harm to real people with this bogus analysis. I plan to detail some of that damage later.


Friday, Dec 03, 2010
 
Finding a microbe that uses arsenic
This NASA announcement got a lot of press:
Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about. ...

Phosphorus is one of six chemical elements that have long been thought to be essential for all Life As We Know It. The others are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur. ...

By labeling the arsenic with radioactivity, the researchers were able to conclude that arsenic atoms had taken up position in the microbe’s DNA as well as in other molecules within it. Dr. Joyce, however, said that the experimenters had yet to provide a “smoking gun” that there was arsenic in the backbone of working DNA.

So how does this relate to extraterrestial life? Are there planets with a lot of arsenic and no phosphorus? No, there are not. The abundances of these elements are determined by the nuclear physics of supernova explosions. Those six chemical elements are on every rocky planet, as they formed from the debris of such explosions. There is no planet with arsenic but not phosphorus. The paper does not show that phosphorus is unneeded anyway. Nothing here makes E.T. life more likely.

Others are also skeptical. The paper itself ends with:

We report the discovery of an unusual microbe, strain GFAJ-1, that exceptionally can vary the elemental composition of its basic biomolecules by substituting As for P. How arsenic insinuates itself into the structure of biomolecules is unclear, and the mechanisms by which such molecules operate are unknown.
So some microbes were poisoned with arsenic, and the surprise is that they did not die as rapidly as other microbes poisoned with arsenic. That's all.

Here is some WSJ hype:

"This will fundamentally change our definition of life and how we look for it," said astrobiologist Pamela Conrad at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This is a huge deal."

Their finding comes as the hunt for Earth-like planets accelerates. With 22 space-based observatories and 100 ground telescopes, researchers are scanning tens of thousands of stars for evidence of a planet that could support life like that on Earth.

But it also admits:
The researchers weren't able to entirely eliminate all traces of phosphorus, leaving open the possibility that these bacteria were still eking out their existence in a normal way, the researchers said. "There does seem to be a low level of impurity," Dr. Wolfe-Simon said.
It was known that arsenic could substitute for phosphorus. That is why arsenic is poisonous. They have not proved much.

Update: There is more scathing criticism here:

And the paper simply does not include the controls to show that arsenate has been taken up as part of the DNA. All the other claims in the press accounts of the discovery -- for example, the idea that the organisms could substitute arsenate for phosphate in ATP -- were complete fiction.

Wednesday, Dec 01, 2010
 
Claiming that Kepler killed Tycho
John Tierney writes on the effort to find how Tycho died:
What killed him? At the time of Tycho’s death, in 1601, the blame fell on his failure to relieve himself while drinking profusely at the banquet, supposedly injuring his bladder and making him unable to urinate. (Danes still sometimes invoke Tycho when they explain their need to excuse themselves during a meal.) Later medical experts discounted that and said some kind of kidney problem was more likely. ...

As an assistant living at Tycho’s home, Kepler had access to toxic mercury compounds in Tycho’s alchemical lab and could have poisoned him at the time of the banquet, the Gilders write. When Tycho began to recover 10 days later, they reason, Kepler could have administered a second dose because he was one of the few people at the home who saw Tycho the evening before his death.

A devoutly religious scholar may not sound like a good candidate for murderer, but the Gilders argue that Kepler was an unhappy, temperamental zealot. In an astrological self-analysis, he described his “eagerness for trickery” and his plots against his “enemies,” and said he was under the influence of Mars’s “rage-provoking force.” In his furious arguments with Tycho, he called himself an “uncontrollable spirit” and once told a friend that he felt like attacking Tycho with a sword.

Kepler resented Tycho’s higher status and, above all, his refusal to allow access to the full log of observations, including the records of Mars’s movements that Kepler considered essential to demonstrate the validity of his own model of the universe. Kepler tried several schemes to see Tycho’s data — to sneakily “wrest his riches away,” as Kepler put it — but Tycho resisted and forced Kepler to keep working on calculations aimed at supporting the Tychonic cosmology.

“Kepler’s ambition was to prove his vision of the divine architecture of God’s universe,” Mr. Gilder says in an interview. “Every time he feels Tycho is getting in the way, he blows up at him. Is it plausible that Kepler would kill for a vision? I look around the world and see it happening all the time. Kepler had felt himself despised and outcast his whole life. This would make him famous.”

This seems very unlikely to me. Tycho had a gold nose from losing his real nose in a duel. Maybe he got mercury poisoning from his nose.

The Tycho-Kepler collaboration was surely the greatest collaboration in the history of astronomy, if not all of science. Their contributions to astronomy were vastly greater than those of others of that era, including Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.


Sunday, Nov 28, 2010
 
Most accepted theories
I am wonder what is the most accepted theory today.

It would not be Evolution or the Big Bang, in spite of overwhelming evidence, because of widespread skepticism that goes to the root of what these theories mean. It also would not be gravitation, even tho we have a very good theory and universal agreement about the basics, because it has an assortment of anomalies such as dark energy that are not understood and have competing explanations. And heliocentrism is not even considered correct according to modern thinking. Quantum mechanics ought to be on the list, but confusion about the interpretations of quantum mechanics causes many doubters.

In ordinary conversation, people often ridicule others for believing in some outmoded theory, or failing to believe in some universally accepted theory. Eg, people get made fun of for believing in the Flat Earth, or in geoocentrism, or not accepting the Germ theory of disease. These are bad metaphors for various reasons.

I want theories of hard science (or hard math) where one anomaly would be deadly.

Here is my list of the top contenders for the most accepted theory.

These theories are vitally important for the progress of science, I don't think that they have any anomalies or substantive objections.

Aether theory is sometimes considered a superseded scientific theory because Michelson-Morley experiment. failed to detect any aether velocity. But everyone agrees that it is pervasive, uniform, measurable, and essential to our understanding of the propagation of light and electricity. Calling it obsolete is about like calling the proton obsolete. It has a structure that is different from what was expected a century ago, but the same basic concept remains.

Causation is sometimes said to be violated by quantum nonlocality, which some people believe in, but it does not because correlation does not imply causation. I don't think that anyone claims that quantum nonlocality is observable, if there is even any such thing. So I include aether theory and causality theory because no one is really objecting to the underlying theory.


Thursday, Nov 25, 2010
 
When Man Invented Science
The leading view of the history of science is that science was invented in 1543. Scott Locklin writes that it was 300 years earlier:
What we refer to today as “science” is something which was invented by humans, rather than springing forth from Jove’s forehead in some ancient time before time. There is a definite date before which there was no science and a date after which there was science. This isn’t controversial or mysterious: We know exactly when it happened, and some of the original manuscripts which invented science and modern thought still exist.

Science was invented in the “High Middle Ages.” This was an era of great prosperity in Europe (and everywhere else, really). It was warmer than it is now: Grapes grew in Northern England. Since Europe was an agricultural economy, this meant much more prosperity than in years previous. During this era, Europe was wealthy enough to fund the Crusades, something we arguably can’t afford today.

The Black Death ended this era. Had this disease not spread to Europe in the 1340s, we might have had a different world. ...

History’s first scientist was Robert Grosseteste, although his work is little known in popular education today. He was born in 1170 or so to a humble Suffolk family. He found his calling in the Catholic Church, as important a source of social mobility then as the university system is now. It was Grosseteste who formulated the first description of the scientific process. He was the first European in centuries to study Aristotle’s works and the first to study Arab natural philosopher Abu Ibn al-Haytham’s writings. From these thinkers he developed the idea of “composition and resolution,” which is the scientific method in itself. He advocated using mathematics to learn about reality. He also developed the idea of peer review. He built upon the notion that one could learn natural law’s general principles by studying specific examples. He developed the all-important idea of falsification, to separate true from false ideas. ...

Roger Bacon could probably be considered the great systematizer of Grosseteste’s work. He put science in the form and words we know now. He used the terms we know today: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and independent verification.

This proves that science was invented centuries before Nicolaus Copernicus and the Age of Enlightenment, and that science was active during the Middle Ages. But I also think that it is pretty silly to say that science was invented in 1200.

The first Egyptian pyramids were built in around 2600 BC. We are still not sure how, but we can be sure that the builders had processes to separate true from false ideas. They had scientific methods. They had to. The Greek Thales predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC. Eratosthenes uses shadows to determined the diameter of the Earth in 200 BC. Hipparchus is credited with discovering precession of the equinoxes in about 130 BC. The suggestion that any of these folks lacked science is just chronological snobbery.

Nature magazine has a new article about the Antikythera mechanism. It is an ancient Greek astronomical calculator from over two millennia ago. It used about 30 gears and was more sophisticated than any mechanical device made in the following millennium, and there is a debate over whether it was based on Babylonian or Greek astronomy. The story claims that maybe it explains the invention of epicycles:

"Perhaps a mechanic tried to represent the variations in the Moon's speed according to the Babylonian theory using gears," he says — and hit upon an epicyclic arrangement.

In other words, epicycles were not a philosophical innovation but a mechanical one. Once Greek astronomers realized how well epicyclic gearing in devices such as the Antikythera mechanism replicated the cyclic variations of celestial bodies, they could have incorporated the concept into their own geometrical models of the cosmos.

"It is a new possibility," says Jones. "I am quite attracted to it." There is little evidence for who came up with the idea of epicycles, although it is often ascribed to third-century-BC Greek geometer Apollonius of Perga. Intriguingly, gears and epicycles seem to have arisen at about the same time, with gears perhaps a little earlier.

The claim seems unlikely to me, but an intriguing possibility. Regardless, this device was made by men who knew about the invention of science, and a lot more.

The Armarium Magnum blog explains:

As mentioned above, no manifestation of "the Myth" is complete without the Galileo Affair being raised. The proponents of the idea that the Church stifled science and reason in the Middle Ages have to wheel him out, because without him they actually have absolutely zero examples of the Church persecuting anyone for anything to do with inquiries into the natural world. The common conception that Galileo was persecuted for being right about heliocentrism is a total oversimplification of a complex business, and one that ignores the fact that Galileo's main problem was not simply that his ideas disagreed with scriptural interpretation but also with the science of the time. Contrary to the way the affair is usually depicted, the real sticking point was the fact that the scientific objections to heliocentrism at the time were still powerful enough to prevent its acceptance. ...

I love to totally stump them by asking them to present me with the name of one - just one - scientist burned, persecuted or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any.

I previously cited this blog for its excellent review of the movie Hypatia.

Tuesday, Nov 23, 2010
 
Debating atheism
Christopher Hitchens debates William A. Dembski on Does a Good God Exist? They seem to be similarly controversial characters for various reasons. In Part 2 at 3:00 he says:
As you know, the Church did not want Galileo to look thru a tube and make the disconcerting discovery that the Sun does not go around us, we go around the Sun. I presume now that no one is going to give me an argument about that.
I would have argued about that. The statement is completely false. The Church never discouraged Galileo from looking thru a telescope, and Galileo never had any telescopic evidence that we go around the Sun.

This is important to his atheism argument because it (supposedly) shows that the Catholic Church was anti-science, and that we are not at the center of the universe.

Hitchens is a typical leftist-atheist-evolutionist. Those folks have leftist politics, and support causes like socialized medicine. They support atheism as not just a denial of God, but a belief that all of organized religion is backwards and harmful. And they are evolutionist in that they actively promoting beliefs in evolution. And not just the science, but an evolutionist worldview that goes far beyond what any science has demonstrated.

My main complaint with these folks is how they mix these views. They will take some completely bogus science argument, and use it to support some bogus political or religious argument. Galileo is just one example. Most of Hitchin's bogus science arguments have to do with evolution.

MIT physicist Max Tegmark doesn't mind saying that we are at the center of the universe:

Our entire observable universe is inside this sphere of radius 13.3 billion light-years, with us at the center.
Of course he is a big proponent of multiple parallel universes, so don't get too excited. He also says that all mathematically structures must exist physically, as some sort of alternate universes. We are allowed to think that we are the center of ours because of the anthropic principle.

Monday, Nov 22, 2010
 
Father of modern physics
Biographer Dava Sobel writes:
Posterity agrees that Galileo's great genius lay in his ability to observe the world at hand, to understand the behavior of its parts, and to describe these in terms of mathematical proportions. For these achievements, Albert Einstein dubbed Galileo "the father of modern physics -— indeed of modern science altogether."
Galileo is most famous for his astronomy, but that work was not very mathematical at all. It was his contemporary, Kepler, who solved the big mathematical astronomy problems of the day. Galileo was not even a player.

The Wikipedia article on Einstein says:

A German-Swiss Nobel laureate, he is often regarded as the father of modern physics.
It is very misleading to call Einstein "German-Swiss" in the opening paragraph. Einstein was more American than Swiss. Einstein was born in Germany, spoke German, and got famous as a German professor. He also renounced his German citizenship twice, once to evade military service and once to escape the Nazis. His primary ethnic identification was that of a German Jew.

Here is the source:

The source cited by this wikipedia article is an article on Poincare, not Einstein, and actually says "together with Einstein, Poincare can therefore be regarded as the founding father of Modern physics".
I don't know how Einstein could be the father of modern physics when he did not even believe in quantum mechanics. And I don't know how he can be lumped in with Poincare, as Poincare's relativity papers were vastly superior to Einstein's.

The parallels are curious. Kepler was the genius who was way ahead of Galileo on modeling the solar system, and it is doubtful that Galileo even understood his mathematics. Likewise, Poincare was the genius who was way ahead of Einstein on creating relativity, and it is doubtful that Einstein even understood his mathematics. It is not that Kepler and Poincare were obscure, or failed to publish their ideas, or were poor at explaining to the general public. Their works were brilliant masterpieces, and they were appreciated at the time.

So why are Galileo and Einstein idolized so much? I think that the reasons are primarily ideological. They are both leftist icons, and symbols of anti-Christian beliefs.


Saturday, Nov 20, 2010
 
The latest unification theory
SciAm magazine has a new article on A Geometric Theory of Everything. It says:
Modern physics began with a sweeping unification: in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that the existing jumble of disparate theories describing everything from planetary motion to tides to pendulums were all aspects of a universal law of gravitation. Unification has played a central role in physics ever since. In the middle of the 19th century James Clerk Maxwell found that electricity and magnetism were two facets of electromagnetism. One hundred years later electromagnetism was unified with the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity, in what physicists call the electroweak theory.

This quest for unification is driven by practical, philosophical and aesthetic considerations. When successful, merging theories clarifies our understanding of the universe and leads us to discover things we might otherwise never have suspected.

The proposed unification is nothing like those previous ones. This one is a vastly more complex theory with dozens of new particles and forces that no one has ever seen. The previous unifications were simplifications. I think that it is very strange that so many physicists find such a unified theory philosophically desirable.

This theory appears to be contrary to known physics, and does not have much of a following. But belief in this sort of a unification is much of what drives string theory and related theories.


Thursday, Nov 18, 2010
 
Higgs alternative looks like epicycles
Physicist Steven Weinberg says in this NASW2009 lecture and in this SciAm podcast, about the possibility that the European CERN LHC will discover the Higgs particle:
In that picture, there really isn't a Higgs. ... That's a possibility ... first suggested by Leonard Susskind and myself, independently. I don't think it's likely that that's what's going to be found because it leads to problems. There are observations that you could only understand by tinkering carefully with the theory so that it begins to look like Ptolemaic epicycles, and I don't find it as attractive as the original simple picture. But it's a possibility. ... That's why it is not sure thing that the Higgs will be found, but it is highly likely.
So one of the world's most famous physicists rejects a theory because it looks like Ptolemaic epicycles. It would make more sense to reject a theory because of Copernican epicycles.

The history of science should be a simple an uncontroversial subject, but educated people continually draw incorrect lessons from the great events in science history. Ptolemaic epicycles were not wrong, and mathematically equivalent formulations continue to be used today when one circular orbit is observed relative to another circular orbit. An epicycle is nearly always used to describe the Moon's orbit, for example.

If the Higgs boson is found, there will be a fight for the Nobel prize. Peter Woit writes:

What Philip Anderson realized and worked out in the summer of 1962 was that, when you have both gauge symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking, the Nambu-Goldstone massless mode can combine with the massless gauge field modes to produce a physical massive vector field. This is what happens in superconductivity, a subject about which Anderson was (and is) one of the leading experts. His paper on the subject was submitted to Physical Review that November, and appeared in the April 1963 issue of the journal, in the particle physics section. It explains what is commonly called the “Higgs mechanism” in very much the same terms that the subject appears in modern particle physics textbooks ...
There is also a genius named Ernst Stueckelberg who published a similar idea many years earlier. He apparently has a priority claim on several other Nobel-prize-winning discoveries.

Wednesday, Nov 17, 2010
 
Lucy did not use tools after all
I was skeptical before about a highly publicized claim that human ancestors used tools 3.4M years ago. Now some experts are skeptical as well:
Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, writing with my University of Wisconsin colleagues Travis Pickering and Henry Bunn, has challenged the interpretation that two bovid bones from Dikika bear cutmarks made by hominins [1].
The news media is always making exaggerated claims about apes and alleged missing links showing human behavior. It is all part of a leftist-atheist-evolutionist plot to dehumanize people. Lucy was just an ape.

Meanwhile, even Louisiana endorses the teaching of evolution:

A state advisory panel Friday voted 8-4 to endorse a variety of high school science textbooks that have come under fire for how they describe evolution.
Evolution is taught as the only scientific theory of life on Earth in all 50 states.

Tuesday, Nov 16, 2010
 
Testing whether Tycho was murdered
The BBC News reports on one of the greatest astronomers of all time.
The body of a 16th Century Danish astronomer is being exhumed in Prague to confirm the cause of his death.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who served as royal mathematician to the Bohemian Emperor Rudolf II.

He was thought to have died of a bladder infection, but a previous exhumation found traces of mercury in his hair.

A team of Danish and Czech scientists hope to solve the mystery by analysing bone, hair and clothing samples. ...

He lost the bridge of his nose in a duel, while at the University of Rostock in 1566, and wore a metal prosthetic for the rest of his life.

Another story widely told about Brahe was that his bladder exploded at a royal banquet.

When Galileo had his famous dispute with the Catholic Church, some Church scholars supported the Tychonic system that Tycho developed many years years. It was better than what Galileo supported, by any objective measure.

Kepler worked for Tycho. The Tycho-Kepler work was not just an astronomical breakthru, it was one of the great scientific achievements in human history.

George writes:

You write "Tycho-Kepler" as if it were joint work. In fact they were completely opposed. Tycho advocated a stationary Earth, while Kepler advocated the Copernican system. Besides, Kepler may have murdered Tycho.
It was joint work. Tycho collected the data, and figured out that the orbit of Mars was not spherical. Astronomers had been watching Mars for millennia, and no one else figured it out. He sold Kepler on the idea, and Kepler modeled it with an ellipse. Kepler completed Tycho's work on the Rudolphine Tables. The idea that Kepler murdered Tycho is ridiculous.

The motion of the Earth was just one detail in the Tycho and Kepler models. Those same tables could be used for either. The essential science of the work of Tycho and Kepler were consistent.


Monday, Nov 15, 2010
 
NPR blames Church for genocide
NPR radio Science Friday refused to apologize (listen at 11:00) for anti-Catholic comments the previous week (listen to Sam Harris at 15:40). Harris accused the Catholic Church of favoring genocide and of being against "human flourishing" in other ways. The other panelists did not disagree. NPR read a letter objecting to Harris's remarks, but refused to read any of the letters that explained why Harris was wrong.

Harris says that scientists can come to moral conclusions better than theologians. But he is on thin ice talking about genocide. The great genocides of the 20th century were done by leftist-atheists like himself, and opposed by the Catholic Church.

This is the same NPR that fired Juan Williams for saying on another network that he gets nervous on airplanes when he sees those who "identify themselves first and foremost as Muslims."

Apparently NPR supports the most bigoted and false comments about Catholics, but cannot tolerate any criticism of Muslims.

Here is a list of aircraft hijackings. Check it out yourself. The hijackers are not Catholics. Sam Harris and NPR are the bigots, not Juan Williams. It is a sad day when govt radio has to criticize Catholics as a proxy for others who might kill us.


Sunday, Nov 14, 2010
 
Pres. Wilson preferred Darwin over Newton
Glenn Beck says that Woodrow Wilson was one of our worst American presidents. A recent NPR interview interview accused Beck of being an "extremist" for having this opinion, and here was the historian-guest's best example of Beck being wrong about something:
Particularly troublesome, Wilentz says, are the gross historical inaccuracies Beck makes on his Fox show, which now reaches more than 2 million people each day.

"On one of his shows, for example, he pulled out a 'Mercury' dime. On the back of [the dime] is the fasces, which is the symbol of fascism," Wilentz says. "So [Beck] says, 'Aha! Who brought the dime in? It was Woodrow Wilson. We've been on the road to fascism for a long time.' [But he's] neglecting the fact that fasces didn't become a fascist symbol until well after that dime was made and designed — and the man who designed it [knew that] fasces was a design of war and balanced it off with an olive branch. Those are the facts. It has nothing to do with the coming of American fascism under Woodrow Wilson."

Huhh? That's it? Beck is on the air for an hour a day, so you would think that the NPR leftists could find a better example than that. Supposedly Beck is wrong because Wilson put the symbol on the dime in 1916, and the Italian fascists did not adopt it until 1919. I thought that Beck was making a joke, but if the Wilson and the fascists adopted the symbol only three years apart, then a relationship seems possible.

If you want to know why Beck hates Wilson, just tune into his show on FoxNews, or check thingsglennbeckhasblamedwoodrowwilsonfor.com. Wilson was a progressive, a racist, and a warmonger. He left us with the income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, and something similar to the United Nations. These things helped cause the Great Depression, World War II, and many other evils.

I think that the root of Wilson's evil is his philosophy of science. You have to read it here, because Beck won't talk about it. Wilson was a leftist-evolutionist who cited Darwin to justify undermining the US Constitution.

Wilson in The New Freedom, 1913, wrote:

For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development and accommodation to environment.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of the The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system, -— how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton’s description of the mechanism of the heavens.

The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way -— the best way of their age -— those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of Nature" -— and then by way of afterthought -— "and of Nature’s God." And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery [planetarium] -— to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of "checks and balances."

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive coordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission -— in an era when "development" "evolution," is the scientific word -— to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

This is from 1912 campaign speeches that were published in a 1913 book.

Physicist Frank J. Tipler says this is nonsense, (also here), and says:

This conflict is a reflection of a battle between the two greatest scientists of the past two centuries, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Einstein famously claimed that “God does not play dice with the universe,” whereas Darwin claimed that God does, indeed, play dice with the universe. Codevilla pointed out the self-image of the ruling class rests on its belief that humans are the unforeseen outcome of chance mutations acted upon by natural selection. Not so. God decreed the evolution of humans before time began. The ruling class stands with Darwin. We stand with Einstein.
Wilson's essay is an example of a goofy use of science to support leftist ideas. A later version of such ideas is Prof. Tribe's Curvature of Constitutional Space, written with the assistance of Pres. Barack Obama. The point of these essays is that the US Constitution has no objective meaning that we have to respect.

Academic philosophers go further, and and say that science has no objective meaning. They say that theories get replaced because of fads among scientists. I call them the paradigm shifters, and criticize their Marxist view of history.

There are historians who rank Wilson as one of the best 20th century American presidents. The Beck fans think that Wilson is one of the worst. I am going with Beck. Wilson's statement is anti-American and anti-science. His presidency was a disaster, and this is why.


Saturday, Nov 13, 2010
 
Climate propagandists say all science was heresy
NPR radio just had a Science Friday program interviewing a panel of experts on how to best promote leftist climate policies:
Scientists and Advocacy?

A group of climate researchers has banded together to speak out on climate change, providing a unified voice against climate policy skeptics. But should that be the role for scientists? Do scientists have a responsibility to speak out on policy issues?

The host did say that he asked a couple of Republican congressmen to appear, but he did not ask any climate skeptics with expertise comparable to the leftists on the program. The Republicans probably figured (correctly) that they were being ambushed.

At 13:30 a caller Ryan from Nashville asked:

I just want to encourage these scientific folks there to really in these peoples' faces. You have to find a cross between Carl Sagan and Karl Rove and get him out there. Because what -- for 5 to 7 hundred years of our history, all science was heresy -- and imagine where we'd be if that hadn't taken place.
No one on the panel disagreed.

This is leftist-atheist propaganda. No science was ever heresy in the West. The only specific example that anyone ever alleges is the Galileo affair of 1633:

Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of heresy," namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture.
I argue that no actual science was suppressed, or declared heretical, as explained here. Galileo was commissioned to write a scientific book, but he wrote an unscientific book making fun of the Pope instead.

Even if you disagree with me about Galileo, that was just one decision applied to one person. Every civilization has punished innocent people. How do you get to 500 years? Are there 500 other such decisions?

Nobody even argues that astronomy research was slowed down one year as a result of the Galileo trial. Galileo was already decades behind the research frontier. Even Galileo continue to publish his work.

People wonder why I write about some issue that died centuries ago. The answer is that false myths about the history of science are being used to today to trick you into accepting dubious climate policies. The proof is on yesterday's NPR science broadcast.


Thursday, Nov 11, 2010
 
How Lorentz credited Poincare
Many of those who credit Einstein for relativity draw great attention to the fact that Lorentz credited Einstein, and paid little recognition to Poincare. Lorentz appears to not have understood Poincare's papers.

However, Lorentz later in 1914 wrote a paper crediting Poincare with priority over Einstein. He wrote Two Papers of Henri Poincaré on Mathematical Physics (1921), recently translated from French to English:

The following pages cannot at all give a complete idea of what theoretical physics owes to Poincaré. ...

To fully appreciate the first of this works, I will have to enter in some details on the ideas whose development led to the principle of relativity. Thus let us speak a little about the part that I contributed to this development, I must say first that I have found a valuable encouragement in the benevolent interest that Poincaré constantly took with my studies. Moreover, we will see soon by which degree he surpassed me. ...

These were the considerations published by me in 1904 which gave place to Poincaré to write his paper on the dynamics of the electron, in which he attached my name to the transformation to which I will come to speak. I must notice on this subject that the same transformation was already present in an article of Mr. Voigt published in 1887, and that I did not draw from this artifice all the possible parts. Indeed, for some of the physical quantities which enter the formulas, I did not indicate the transformation which suits best. That was done by Poincaré and then by Mr. Einstein and Minkowski. ...

This time it was indeed an effect of the second order and it was easy to see that the hypothesis of the stationary aether alone is not sufficient for the explanation of the negative result. I was obliged to make a new assumption which consists in admitting, that the translation of a body through the aether produces a slight contraction of the body in the direction of motion. This assumption was indeed the only possibility; it had also been imagined by Fitzgerald and it found the approval of Poincaré, who however did not conceal the lack of satisfaction that the theories gave him in which one multiplies special assumptions invented for particular phenomena. This criticism was for me an additional reason to seek a general theory, in which the same principles would lead to the explanation of the experiment of Mr. Michelson and all those that were undertaken after him to discover effects of the second order. In the theory that I proposed, the absence of phenomena due to the collective motion of a system should be demonstrated for any value of speed less than light. ...

Later, I could see in the paper of Poincaré that when proceeding more systematically I could have reached an even greater [252] simplification. Not having noticed it, I did not succeed in obtaining the exact invariance of the equations; my formulas remained encumbered with certain terms which should have disappeared. These terms were too small to have an appreciable effect on the phenomena and I could thus explain the independence of the earth's motion that was revealed by observations, but I did not establish the principle of relativity as rigorously and universally true.

Poincaré, on the contrary, obtained a perfect invariance of the equations of electrodynamics, and he formulated the "postulate of relativity", terms which he was the first to employ. Indeed, stating from the point of view that I had missed, he found the formulas (4) and (7). Let us add that by correcting the imperfections of my work he never reproached me for them.

I can not explain here all the beautiful results obtained by Poincaré. Let us insist however on some points. ...

Let us pass now to the paper on the quantum theory. Towards the end of 1911 Poincaré had attended the meeting of the Council of Physique convened in Brussels by Mr. Solvay, in which we had especially dealt with the phenomena of the calorific radiation and the hypothesis of the elements or quanta of energy imagined by Mr. Planck to explain them. In the discussions, Poincaré had shown all promptness and the penetration of its spirit and we had admired the facility with which he could enter the most difficult questions of Physics, even in those which were new for him. At the return to Paris, he did not cease dealing with the problem of which he felt the high importance. If the hypothesis of Mr. Planck were true, "the physical phenomena would cease obeying laws expressed by differential equations, and it would be, undoubtedly, the greatest and most profound revolution that natural philosophy suffered since Newton". ...

That is the reasoning by which Poincaré established the necessity of the quantum hypothesis.

Einstein got his 1921 Nobel prize for a 1905 paper supporting Planck's 1900 quantum hypothesis. Here, Lorentz praises Poincare for showing the necessity of that hypothesis, without even mentioning Einstein.

Lorentz generously credits others in this paper. He refers to the "group of relativity", when Poincare called it the "Lorentz group". He admits to defects in his own work when he could be pointing out the similar defects in the work of others. But he only credits Einstein and Minkowski with doing what Poincare had already done.

Some people say that it is wrong to credit Lorentz and Poincare over Einstein, because Lorentz never claimed such credit in his lifetime. But he does here. He pretty clearly explains how he and Poincare had all of special relativity, with an acknowledgement only to Voigt and FitzGerald for priority. He only mentions Einstein and Minkowski to say that they redid what Poincare had already done. This seems to me to be about as direct a repudiation of Einstein's and Minkowski's priority as I could expect from a gentleman like Lorentz.

Lorentz is right. Everything he says here is verifiable by reading the original papers.

Lorentz's paper is in French. His other relativity papers were in Dutch (1892), German (1895), and English (1899, 1904). I guess scientists had to be multilingual back then. Einstein wrote in German, and in English after moving to the USA. He was also fluent in French and maybe Italian, as he attended college at a French-speaking University, and his family lived in Italy for a while.


Wednesday, Nov 10, 2010
 
Coyne hates science magazine
Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne complains that NewScientist publishes articles casting doubt on the standard evolutionist dogma, and got this response:
Perhaps some of your ire should be turned on your scientific colleagues - if Bennett is so hopelessly wrong, why was he ever invited to give that keynote (alongside Niles Eldredge)? Why did the symposium even take place? Bennett wasn't the only one to question the primacy of natural selection in macroevolution. Why does the Royal Society support his work? Similarly, if the tree of life concept is unimpeachable, why is there such a large literature questioning its validity and a major project on it at a leading UK biology department?

As a weekly science magazine (not journal) we can only report what we see and hear going on around us. And we're always going to look for new, potentially game-changing ideas (it's the news, stupid).

I was at Bennett's talk; the room was full of learned and eminent people. He took a few questions but there were no howls of protest like yours. What am I to make of this? I'm genuinely baffled. ...

Also, please consider my invitation to write something to be an open one.

Coyne refuses by saying:
What I won’t do is help New Scientist sell magazines by fanning the flames of controversy. I wash my hands of this rag, and I’d advise readers to do likewise until it cleans up its act.
It is not that baffling. People like Coyne just hate it when anyone deviates from the party line.

Yes, the magazine overhypes new ideas. All the science reporters do. But this is not about the religion and creationism that Coyne really hates. He is complaining about ideas that have been proposed thru accepted scientific channels.


Tuesday, Nov 09, 2010
 
The embrionic stem cell fraud
Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times:
This is why it was such a risk for California to earmark $3 billion specifically for stem cell research over the next 10 years. Stem cells are just one of many promising fields of biomedical research. They could yield great advances, or become an exercise in sustained failure, as gene therapy has so far been. By allocating so much money to a single field, California is placing an enormous bet on a single horse, and the chances are substantial that its taxpayers will lose their collective shirt.

Stem cell researchers have created an illusion of progress by claiming regular advances in the 12 years since human embryonic stem cells were first developed. But a notable fraction of these claims have turned out to be wrong or fraudulent, and many others have amounted to yet another new way of getting to square one by finding better methods of deriving human embryonic stem cells.

The major advances in stem cell biology have come from molecular biologists who study transcription factors, the master control switches that govern the cell’s operations.

The California fund was passed with heavy lobbying from scientists who stood to profit from it, and from pro-abortion groups who were making an anti-Bush political statement. Nothing good has come out of the fund and the money would have been much better spent elsewhere.

Monday, Nov 08, 2010
 
Lorentz aether theory
Lorentz's relativity is now called the Lorentz aether theory, in order to emphasize the aether and its obsolescence. But no one called it that at the time.

Lorentz is said to have believed in an immobile aether at absolute rest, and therefore an absolute frame of reference for space and time from which absolute velocities can be deduced. Eg, Einstein's 1909 paper said that Lorentz's theory "depended on a completely immobile aether." I am looking for where Lorentz actually said this.

This is from the introduction to Lorentz's 1895 paper, after reciting a couple of other competing aether theories:

Es liegt nicht in meiner Absicht, auf derartige Speculationen näher einzugehen oder Vermuthungen über die Natur des Aethers auszusprechen. Ich wünsche nur, mich von vorgefassten Meinungen über diesen Stoff möglichst frei zu halten und demselben z. B. keine von den Eigenschaften der gewöhnlichen Flüssigkeiten und Gase zuzuschreiben. Sollte es sich ergeben, dass eine Darstellung der Erscheinungen am besten unter der Voraussetzung absoluter Durchdringlichkeit gelänge, dann müsste man sich zu einer solchen Annahme einstweilen schon verstehen und es der weiteren Forschung überlassen, uns, womöglich, ein tieferes Verständniss zu erschliessen.

[4]Dass von absoluter Ruhe des Aethers nicht die Rede sein kann, versteht sich wohl von selbst; der Ausdruck würde sogar nicht einmal Sinn haben. Wenn ich der Kürze wegen sage, der Aether ruhe, so ist damit nur gemeint, dass sich der eine Theil dieses Mediums nicht gegen den anderen verschiebe und dass alle wahrnehmbaren Bewegungen der Himmelskörper relative Bewegungen in Bezug auf den Aether seien.

The book is apparently still in print, altho a modern reader would have a tough time with the terminology and notation. Here is a machine translation:
It is not my intention to enter into such speculations closer or expressing suspicions about the nature of the aether. I only wish to keep me from preconceived opinions about the substance and the same as free as possible, for example, none of the properties of ordinary liquids and gases due. If it appeared that a representation of the phenomena succeed best under the condition of absolute penetrability, then one would have to be such an assumption for the time being already understand and leave it to the further research, us, maybe open up a deeper understanding.

[4] That of absolute Rest of the aether can not be said, of course most of themselves and the term would not even make sense. When I say sake of brevity, the ether rest, so that only meant that one part of this medium does not move against the other and that all perceptible movements are relative movements of the heavenly bodies in relation to the ether.

I read this as saying that he is pointedly disavowing any aether theory. He is saying that this theory is independent of how the aether really works, and that he is denying that the aether is of absolute rest. He is mainly rejecting Fresnel's theory that parts of the aether can have velocity relative to other parts of the aether. Fresnel's believed that solid bodies like the Earth drag the aether along with it, somewhat like the way the Earth drags the atmosphere with it. He is not saying much to endorse or deny the aether, and leaves it to further research to understand its properties.

I do not agree that Lorentz's theory depends on an immobile aether. It does not depend on any properties of the aether except for Maxwell's equations.

Section 1 starts:

The equations for the aether.

§ 5 When setting up the equations of motion, we will express all quantities in electromagnetischem Maass and temporarily insert a basis of co-ordinates, the rest in the aether.

So he talks about the aether being at rest, but it is just a figure of speech, as he explains above.

Lorentz's 1904 paper first mention of the aether is:

The first example of this kind is Michelson's well known interference-experiment, the negative result of which has led FitzGerald and myself to the conclusion that the dimensions of solid bodies are slightly altered by their motion through the aether.
He mentions the aether five more times, and in each case it is just a way of talking about electromagnetic fields in empty space. When he introduces Maxwell's equations, he says, "if we use a fixed system of coordinates". He does not say "in the absolute coordinates of the aether" or anything like that.

Lorentz was not convinced by arguments that the aether should be undetectable. Long after relativity theory was accepted, he argued that the theory was the same whether the aether was detectable or not, so it was unnecessary to assume that it was not. The story is explained in Faraday to Einstein: constructing meaning in scientific theories By Nancy J. Nersessian.

A reader adds:

Roger: My German is shaky but I agree with your analysis of those German passages. Lorentz is very clearly disclaiming any broad theory of, or speculations about, aether. He declines to attribute any properties of liquids or gas to the aether. He suggests the need for more research. He denies any belief in the absolute rest or immobility of the aether. He uses the phrase "the aether at rest" only to mean that different parts of the aether don't move relative to each other; perceptible movements of heavenly bodies are movements [by those bodies] relative to the aether.

Based on those passages, Lorentz seems to assume the existence of the aether, but doesn't feel there is evidence to say much about it beyond his belief that the aether doesn't have moving parts. He thinks heavenly bodies are moving within the aether, rather than parts of the aether moving in relation to each other.


Sunday, Nov 07, 2010
 
Denouncing the progress of evolution and technology
Leading leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
Up at the Sunday New York Times Book Review — it appears online a day early — is “Better all the time“, my review of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants.

It’s not a bad book.  In fact, parts of it are really interesting: the stuff on the history of technology, for instance, including Kelly’s stint with the technology-dubious Amish. But for me What Technology Wants was seriously marred by Kelly’s relentless progressivism, including his idea that evolution “strives” for certain outcomes (complexity, beauty, specialization, ubiquity, etc.), and that technology strives for exactly the same outcomes.  His view of evolution is unidirectional and teleological, and if that’s not the case, which it isn’t, then his idea that technology and evolution both follow universal “laws” (I think Kelly, a devout Christian, sees these laws as God given) breaks down.

Coyne is hung up on Stephen Jay Gould's view that evolution does not increase complexity:
Gould [1989] felt so strongly about it he was moved to deny that, at least since the Cambrian explosion, there has been any progress at all.
The Cambrian explosion was 530 million years ago. Here is a more reasonable view of progress and direction in evolution.

Yes, of course there is direction in evolution. There is direction for some of the same reasons that there is a time direction in physics, and there is a Second law of thermodynamics. You can read about it in Entropy (arrow of time). Only a leftist-atheist-evolutionist kook like Gould would deny that there has been any progress in 500M years.

Coyne is strangely silent on the book's argument that The Unabomber Was Right:

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.
I guess Coyne was more interested in making some dubious ideological point about evolution than to address the main points of the book. The Unabomber manifesto was considered the rant of a madman, but it actually had a lot of strong arguments in it.

Friday, Nov 05, 2010
 
More Neanderthal than chimp
Amazon has a book titled, What it Means to be 95% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes, but the cover clearly says "98% chimpanzee". Which is it?

Estimates of how much of our genome is shared with chimps varies from 94% to 98.8%, as noted here and here. Here is an example of the confusion in an Amazon review:

Years ago a colleague who knew how fond I was of explaining our primate origins to students asked me, "Did you know we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees"? "I'm comfortable with that", I replied, "as long as I still only share 50% with my brother", introducing a conundrum for many students that few professors can adequately resolve.
Instead of explaining these percentages, the book seems to be mostly an argument that and such data is meaning. He rejects any scientific argument that humans are similar to animals, or that human are dissimilar to other humans, based on genes. He says:
Humans are marked by a large number of physical, ecological, mental, and social distinctions from other life...what does genetics have to say about all this? Nothing. Sameness/otherness is a philosophical paradox that is resolved by argument, not by data. (p.22)
The book is attacked here for trying to deny that human racial differences exist.

I would expect this book to be praised by PC journalists for its left-wing view of science, but one of the Amazon reviews attacks it for not being suffiently critical of creationists!

Meanwhile, we are supposed to have Neanderthal genes:

The study shows that Neanderthals are not as extinct as everyone thought. Somewhere between one and four percent of the DNA in people who are ethnically non-African comes from Neanderthals. In other words, they live on in some of us.
A UK newspaper reports on the latest dubious Neanderthal research:
Neanderthals really were sex-obsessed thugs

Neanderthals really did act like Neanderthals, new research suggests, as our early relatives were found to be more aggressive, competitive and promiscuous than modern man.

Scientists examining fossils have discovered that Neanderthals were exposed to more testosterone during development which is likely to make them more unreconstructed in their behaviour.

That means they were more likely to start fights over mates and hierarchy in the group and more likely top have multiple partners.

I have omitted the evidence because the article gets it backwards.
Your article has a mistake in it.

You say, "High levels of the hormones [testosterone] increase the length of the fourth finger in comparison to the second finger".

Then you say, "The team found that the fossil INDEX fingers of Neanderthals were LONGER compared with the ring finger than most living humans, which suggests that they had been exposed to higher levels of testosterone."

Your article has a basic mistake in it which should have been spotted before you posted it for the world to see. Sloppy.

The article is anti-male propaganda. Anti-Neanderthal, also. Maybe modern men are wimps.

Thursday, Nov 04, 2010
 
Reignier on Poincare
J. Reignier writes on The birth of special relativity:
"What would have happened if Poincaré's papers of 1905 did not exist"? The answer is immediate since these papers were nearly forgotten 41 and didn't really influence the later development of physics!

[footnote] 41 Except for details like Poincaré's pressure.

"What would have happened if Einstein's original paper "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" of 1905 did not exist"? This time, the answer is not so easy to give. On the one hand, all important formulae existed already or would have appeared at the same time in Poincaré's papers (even if some of them are there derived in a different way; see f.i. the formulae of the new dynamics).

No, this is backwards. Einstein's 1905 paper was of no long term consequence. His approach is sometimes mentioned in special relativity textbooks, but it was obsolete by 1908. By 1909, most of the relativity papers were not using his approach, and the general relativity books do not even mention it.

Maybe Poincare's papers were forgotten, but not his ideas. Those 1905 papers had several crucial ideas that were never independently discovered by Einstein or anyone else. Most of them are listed here (except that the first four were before 1905).

Presumably Poincare's ideas would have eventually been independently rediscovered, but it is not known that any of them ever were.

You can find Poincare's papers in French on Wikisource, or translated to English, and I have some previously-posted links here. Other relativity papers are on Wikisource:Relativity, including Einstein's famous 1905 paper. Einstein's most famous papers are also here.

There are some Frenchmen who credit Poincare. Eg, there is the recent book by Jules Leveugle, outlined here, and translated here. Leveugle proposes some conspiracy theories, which have been attacked elsewhere, such as by Gingras.

Other good sources include the Wikipedia article on the Relativity priority dispute and Einstein's 1905 paper (also here). Here are translations of Poincare's 1905 short and long papers.


Wednesday, Nov 03, 2010
 
Not voting for Einstein
I just voted in California, and the sample write-in was Albert Einstein! You would think that they could at least choose an American.

Einstein eventually became a naturalized USA citizen, but he was Communist fellow traveler and Stalin apologist.


Monday, Nov 01, 2010
 
Pay for your dark science
A SciAm cover story has the latest theories about dark energy and dark matter, but a reader doesn't like the paywall:
“Just like the newsstand version, the online version of the article costs money of course. But if you do read it, I hope you enjoy it.”

I will not. Paying money for knowledge is just plain idiotic. So people with money can’t have the knowledge? Are you saying that the knowledge should stay with the elite that control our world? Sorry but paying for information and knowledge is a huge peeve of mine especially this day and age.

Funny. Secret knowledge about dark matter will not let the elites control us. Nobody was even figured out how to detect the stuff! He could read the magazine in the library, if he really wants.

SciAm is a commercial magazine, owned by the British Nature magazine. It is much more annoying when academic research articles are not freely available online, even tho the researchers have that choice.

It is a nice article. Most of the articles on this subject refuse to speculate what the dark matter and dark energy really are. This article lays out the leading possibilities. The array of possibilities shows how little they know.

It is amazing how little string theory has to say about any of this. How can it be a theory of everything when it cannot even say anything about the nature of empty space?

The Dark Buzz is still free.


Sunday, Oct 31, 2010
 
Kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being
When people idolize Einstein, it reminds me of The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film):
Shaw is awarded the Medal of Honor for his supposed actions. In addition, when asked to describe him, Marco and the other soldiers automatically respond, "Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." Deep down, however, they know that Shaw is a cold, sad, unsociable loner. As Marco puts it: "It isn't as if Raymond is hard to like. He's impossible to like!"
Since Shaw does not match the description, you eventually figure out that his colleagues have been hypnotized to praise him that way. They were brainwashed by North Korean communists.

I have been reading some of the original papers on relativity, and I find that Einstein does not match his public image at all. Nearly everyone says glowingly positive things about him. After reading the papers, it is not just hard to see Einstein as a great genius, it is impossible. His papers are shallow and derivative.

Here are podcast lectures from a UC Berkeley course on the history of physics, and it is filled with Einstein flattery. Nobody who knows Einstein's contributions could actually believe such nonsense, unless brainwashed. Perhaps the professor has been hypnotized.


Friday, Oct 29, 2010
 
No Earth-like planets
The LA Times reports:
Many Earth-like planets orbit sun-like stars

At least one in every four stars like the sun has planets about the size of Earth circling in very close orbits, according to the first direct measurement of the incidence of such planets, researchers said Thursday.

That means that our galaxy alone, with its roughly 200 billion sun-like stars, has at least 46 billion Earth-size planets orbiting close to the stars, and perhaps billions more circling farther out in what scientists call the habitable zone ...

Of course, all these planets so close to their stars are exceedingly hot and are certainly not habitable.

You have to read to the last paragraph to learn that none of those other planets are really Earth-like.

Every news article on planet discoveries outside our solar system is written with the angle that experts are trying to convince us that the discoveries mean that there is more evidence of Earth-like planets, and life in outer space. In fact, there is less reason to believe in Earth-like planets today than there was 50 years ago.


Thursday, Oct 28, 2010
 
Motl claims that Lorentz was confused
I mentioned below that some books give explanation's of Lorentz's and Einstein's special relativity that are nearly identical. Then they say that Einstein was revolutionary, and thus a great hero.

Here is another version of Einstein's superiority over Lorentz, from today's Lubos Motl blog:

Fields "couldn't be" fundamental until 1905 when Albert Einstein, elaborating upon some confused and incomplete findings by Lorentz, realized that there was no aether. The electromagnetic field itself was fundamental. The vacuum was completely empty. It had to be empty of particles, otherwise the principle of relativity would have been violated.
At least here is something that makes some superficial sense. Lorentz believed in the aether and Einstein did not, so Einstein was different. Of course there was very little actual difference between what Lorentz and Einstein said about the aether, but Motl can pretend that there was a difference. Lorentz did not say that there were particles in the aether.

So why do relativity explanations usually include a put-down of Lorentz? Even if Einstein's theory was superior somehow, why wouldn't Lorentz simply be credited for getting the breakthru that led to the better theory? We do not see people saying:

Spacetime "couldn't be" fundamental until 1908 when Hermann Minkowski, elaborating upon some confused and incomplete findings by Einstein, realized that relativity was a consequence of 4D spacetime geometry.
or:
Wave functions "couldn't be" fundamental until 1926 when Max Born, elaborating upon some confused and incomplete findings by Heisenberg and Schroedinger, realized that wave functions predict probability densities.
I say that there is some insecurity in this Einstein worship. It is not enough to just say what he did. Everyone must inject some phony argument about Einstein's superiority to everyone else.

Wednesday, Oct 27, 2010
 
Finding reality in models
Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, has a good description of Poincare's conventionalism. It says:
When such a model is successful at explain- ing events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and con- cepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental el- ements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models ac- curately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient. [p.7]

So which is true, the Ptolemaic or Copernican system? Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true. [p.41]

That's right. The book is correct that people say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, but both models are about equally valid.

Compare this to the book's comments on special relativity below, as it says that Lorentz-FitzGerald (1889-1895) and Einstein (1905) predict the same events, so one cannot be more real than the other. At best, one is more convenient.

Einstein's version is not any more convenient. The book does not even argue that it is more convenient. The only advantage it gives to Einstein is that he avoids certain speculations about the rigidity of matter. That is not really an advantage, as those speculations by FitzGerald and Lorentz proved to be entirely correct after quantum field theory was discovered decades later.

I think that the biggest difference between Lorentz-1895 and Einstein-1905 is that the latter includes a discussion of the relativity of simultaneity, as invented by Poincare in 1900. That is what the papers by Lorentz, Einstein, and others said at the time, altho they did not mention Poincare. Nobody argued that Einstein was better because he omitted a physical explanation.

In the Wikipedia article on Length contraction, someone suggested adding a physical explanation, and got this reply:

Now, the overwhelming majority of secondary sources tell me that special relativity is a kinematic theory, and length contraction is therefore a consequence of the properties of relativistic space-time (electrodynamic explanations like those of Lorentz, Larmor and Poincaré can be found in the History section).
I agree that special relativity is most commonly understood as a kinematic theory, but I think that it is bizarre to forbid a completely legitimate physical explanation. I cannot think of any other area of science where such an explanation is forbidden. It seems to be just a way of honoring Einstein for failing to give an explanation. But Einstein himself was not opposed to giving a physical explanation, and never argued that the explanation was wrong or undesirable. He just did not give one because he could not figure out how to do it.

Where the Hawking book goes wrong is by assigning reality to M-theory and other untested theories, when those theories are not successful at explaining any events. I will post later on that.


Tuesday, Oct 26, 2010
 
Hawking explains Einstein's idea
Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, tells the story of special relativity on p.95-97:
Inspired by Maxwell's speculation, in 1887 Michelson and Edward Morley carried out a very sensitive experiment designed to measure the speed at which the earth travels through the ether. Their idea was to compare the speed of light in two different directions, at right angles. If the speed of light were a fixed number relative to the ether, the measurements should have revealed light speeds that differed depending on the direction of the beam. But Michelson and Morley observed no such difference.

The outcome of the Michelson and Morley experiment is clearly in conflict with the model of electromagnetic waves traveling through an ether, and should have caused the ether model to be abandoned. But Michelson's purpose had been to measure the speed of the earth relative to the ether, not to prove or disprove the ether hypothesis, and what he found did not lead him to conclude that the ether didn't exist. No one else drew that conclusion either. In fact, the famous physicist Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) said in 1884 that the ether was "the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether."

How can you believe in the ether despite the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment? As we've said often happens, people tried to save the model by contrived and ad hoc additions. Some postulated that the earth dragged the ether along with it, so we weren’t actually moving with respect to it. Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald suggested that in a frame that was moving with respect to the ether, probably due to some yet-unknown mechanical effect, clocks would slow down and distances would shrink, so one would still measure light to have the same speed. Such efforts to save the aether concept continued for nearly twenty years until a remarkable paper by a young and unknown clerk in the patent office in Berne, Albert Einstein.

Einstein was twenty-six in 1905 when he published his paper "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"). In it he made the simple assumption that the laws of physics and in particular the speed of light should appear to be the same to all uniformly moving observers. This idea, it turns out, demands a revolution in our concept of space and time. To see why, imagine two events that take place at the same spot but at different times, in a jet aircraft. To an observer on the jet there will be zero distance between those two events. But to a second observer on the ground the events will be separated by the distance the jet has traveled in the time between the events. This shows that two observers who are moving relative to each other will not agree on the distance between two events.

Now suppose the two observers observe a pulse of light traveling from the tall of the aircraft to its nose. Just as in the above example, they will not agree on the distance the light has traveled from its emission at the plane's tall to its reception at the nose. Since speed is distance traveled divided by the time taken, this means that if they agree on the speed at which the pulse travels the speed of light-they will not agree on the time interval between the emission and the reception.

What makes this strange is that, though the two observers measure different times, they are watching the same physical process. Einstein didn't attempt to construct an artificial explanation for this. He drew the logical, if startling, conclusion that the mea-surement of the time taken, like the measurement of the distance covered, depends on the observer doing the measuring. That ef-fect is one of the keys to the theory in Einstein's 1905 paper, which has come to be called special relativity.

Get that? Lorentz and FitzGerald said that the speed of light would be measured as the same in moving frames. Ten years later, Einstein published the idea that the speed of light would appear the same to moving observers. Lorentz said that clocks would slow down and distances would shrink. But it was Einstein's idea that demanded "a revolution in our concept of space and time", and he drew the startling conclusion that the measurement of distance and time depends on the moving observer.

This is a very polished and self-contained book for the general public. Can you read that and explain to me how Einstein's idea was any different from Lorentz's? The ideas are the same. They use the same words, have the same meaning, and imply the same physical consequences.

This explanation is not unusual, and is similar to that given in textbooks, such as here.

The only difference I get out of this is that maybe Lorentz had some speculation about the aether and about "some yet-unknown mechanical effect", and Einstein made no such attempt to construct an explanation. Einstein's restatement of Lorentz's idea is called a "revolution".

Based on this, I would say that Lorentz and FitzGerald discovered special relativity, and Einstein later published a partial explanation of the theory.


Sunday, Oct 24, 2010
 
Obama tries to quote Einstein
John Lott points out that Pres. Obama has misquoted Einstein:
For Democratic supporters from 2008 who are thinking about switching sides this election, Obama paraphrased Albert Einstein. “The true sign of madness is if you do the same thing over and over again and expect the same result,” he said during a rally at the University of Minnesota.

“All of you have to vote,” Obama told thousands of supporters. “There is not excuse.”

No, the quote is backwards and Einstein never said it anyway. Rita Mae Brown said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." Sane people (and scientists believing in causality) expect the same results from doing the same thing. Obama essentially said that all scientists are mad.

This saying is currently all over the California TV stations:

Democrat Jerry Brown is out with a new campaign ad ... features alternating clips of Whitman and Schwarzenegger communicating virtually the same lines. ...

"Meg Whitman said it herself, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results,'" said Steven Glazer, Campaign Manager for Brown.

At least Whitman and Schwarzenegger said it correctly. I guess the point of the ad is that if we elect Brown, then we can expect him to govern like a Democrat, and Whitman would govern like her Republican predecessor. Seems likely to me.

Update: The White House transcript has Obama saying slogan correctly. You can see the Obama video at 10:40. So his speech was reported incorrectly. USA Today got the quote right, but falsely attributed it to Einstein.


Saturday, Oct 23, 2010
 
Beck does not believe in evolution
A NY paper reports:
Glenn Beck thinks the theory of evolution is a bunch of monkey business.

The wildly popular Fox News host Wednesday called the idea that humans evolved from primates "ridiculous."

While the deeply religious Beck denouncing evolution isn't a shock, his defense was a head-scratcher: "I haven't seen a half-monkey, half-person yet. Did evolution just stop?"

Actually chimps are halfway between monkeys and humans, more or less.

Here is an explanation. See also, Why are there still monkeys? Other such questions are answered here.

I doubt that Beck would find these explanations very convincing. The problem is that no one knows how humans split from monkeys and so the explanations just cite some generalities about evolution without really answering the question.

I think that the evolutionists would be more persuasive that they have a theory with some scientific merit if they were willing to admit what they do not know. They cannot even explain why humans are not furry.


Thursday, Oct 21, 2010
 
Counterfactual
It is often said that quantum mechanics violates local causality, and hence also violates my motto above. The argument is based on Bell's theorem.

The equations for relativistic quantum mechanics respect local causality, so the paradox arises in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some interpetations are contrary to some notions of causality. But for the more well-accepted interpretations, the problem is with counterfactual definiteness, not local causality.

The paradoxical situations are rooted in some unrealistic assumptions, such as the electron being a particle. An electron acts like a particle, it is observed as a particle, and there is good theory for treating is as a particle. But it also has wave properties, and if you take the electron to literally be a particle, then you will get confusing situations. It is not a particle. It has particle and wave properties. You can treat it as a particle, but then you have to give up counterfactual definiteness, because as you examine possible scenarios for that electron, some of them must involve some wave-like properties that are contrary to your intuition about particles.

Consider the double-slit experiment, where a particle beam is directed at a pair of slits. They form a diffraction pattern on the screen on the other side, just as you might expect from waves. The confusion occurs when you start asking questions like, "what if a particle passes thru the first slit?". There is no definite answer. You can do a measurement and get an answer, but you can just answer hypothetical questions about definite values for particle observable unless you actually do the observation.

Yes, that is confusing. The confusion is why we have about a dozen interpretations. But it is certainly false to say that quantum mechanics violates local causality.

Meanwhile, mathematicians are fond of counterfactual thinking, as illustrated by Terry Tao in The “no self-defeating object” argument.

In case you are still wondering what "counterfactual" means, it is an adjective that means contrary to fact. When used as a noun, it is an abbreviation of "counterfactual conditional". But it does not just mean a false conditional, as false conditionals are meaningless. A philosophy site defines:

A conditional statement whose antecedent is known (or, at least, believed) to be contrary to fact. Thus, for example, "If George W. Bush had been born in Idaho, then he would never have become President." Unlike material implications, counterfactuals are not made true by the falsity of their antecedents. Although they are not truth-functional statements, counterfactuals may be significant for the analysis of scientific hypotheses.
It could also be called hypothetical reasoning.

Local causality is what makes the world amenable to analysis. It is a basic postulate, like conservation of energy. It will take some hard empirical proof before either of these is rejected. It is better to reject counterfactual definiteness, because that may be just a fault of our models, and not physical reality. So I accept counterfactual thinking, but not counterfactual definiteness in quantum mechanics.

Counterfactual definiteness also causes problems for Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theory, as noted here. You can ask people for preferences in gambling situations, but if you try to break down their choices into counterfactual scenarios, you get paradoxes that are contrary to expected utility theory. Economists argue that these paradoxes prove that people are irrational.

Counterfactual definiteness is also at the heart of an argument by philosopher Jerry A. Fodor in the essay Against Darwinism, and book What Darwin Got Wrong. I mentioned this previously here and here. He is a philosopher, so he is hoping his colleagues will say, At least he didn't confuse his epistemology with his metaphysics. Fodor is a metaphysical naturalist and atheist, but he says that natural selection is unscientific because it fails to make any counterfactual predictions. For example, evolution claims to explain why frogs snap at flies, but cannot say how frogs would evolve if there were no flies. Therefore it is more like history than science.

The Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a physical theory of counterfactuals. It postulates that each possible counterfactual scenario is a reality in an alternate universe.

A reader points out that my motto, Natura non facit saltus (Latin for "nature does not make jumps"), seems to be a grammar error, because saltus should be accusative. Darwin used saltum in his famous book, and so does Webster's dictionary. Usage on the web seems to be about evenly divided, with Mandelbrot having used it both ways. But the reader informs me that saltus is fourth declension, plural accusative, so it is correct.


Tuesday, Oct 19, 2010
 
Science of morality
There is increasing public visibility for scientists who try use science to establish Morals Without God. See also Peter Singer on morality, saying that "a new generation of scientists has emerged who seek to shed light on morality". The leader in this field got caught misinterpreting monkeys in his research, but that will not stop anyone. The new atheists are out to prove that religion is entirely useless, and that science can do anything better.

SciAm's John Horgan is skeptical about the movement. He is skeptical about everything, except maybe pacifism. About the leftist-atheist-evolutionist Sam Harris, he says:

Harris further shows his arrogance when he claims that neuroscience, his own field, is best positioned to help us achieve a universal morality. "The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values." Neuroscience can't even tell me how I can know the big, black, hairy thing on my couch is my dog Merlin. And we're going to trust neuroscience to tell us how we should resolve debates over the morality of abortion, euthanasia and armed intervention in other nations' affairs?
Just listen to Harris for a while, and you will be wanting to go back to religious morality.

The trouble with these scientific morality advocates is that they mainly just just promote secular law, with a dose of egalitarianism, depending on how leftist their politics are. They sound like law professors lecturing us on the enforcibility of contracts. Anything is moral as long as it is permitted by the fine print of some contract somewhere. The only exception is when it conflicts with some egalitarian ideal. This is just not what religious folks mean by morality, as Jonathan Haidt explains.


Monday, Oct 18, 2010
 
Mandelbrot dies
The NY Times reports:
Benoît B. Mandelbrot, a maverick mathematician who developed the field of fractal geometry and applied it to physics, biology, finance and many other fields, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. ...

In the 1950s, Dr. Mandelbrot proposed a simple but radical way to quantify the crookedness of such an object by assigning it a “fractal dimension,” an insight that has proved useful well beyond the field of cartography.

The fractal dimension was invented in 1918, long before Mandelbrot.
His influence has also been felt within the field of geometry, where he was one of the first to use computer graphics to study mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, which was named in his honor.
People assume that Mandelbrot invented the Mandelbrot set, but he was not, and he was not even the first to plot it with computer graphics. He just popularized the work of others. I do not think that he has had any influence on geometry.
Dr. Mandelbrot received more than 15 honorary doctorates and served on the board of many scientific journals, as well as the Mandelbrot Foundation for Fractals. Instead of rigorously proving his insights in each field, he said he preferred to “stimulate the field by making bold and crazy conjectures” — and then move on before his claims had been verified. This habit earned him some skepticism in mathematical circles.
There is some polite language for an obituary. This is a way of saying that he talked big and accomplished nothing (in mathematics, anyway). His influence was almost entirely in popularizing some applications of math to other fields, such as modeling nature and finance. He wrote a couple of books with pretty pictures of mathematical patterns. He won some prizes. He wrote a popular essay on the coastline paradox and showed how the length of Britain's coast depends on the resolution. Instead of calling himself a mathematician, he described himself with, "I'm a mathematical scientist". That is more accurate as his contributions were to science, not math.

John Horgan explains why interest in Mandelbrot's work peaked in the 1980s.


Sunday, Oct 17, 2010
 
Ouwehand on Einstein and Poincare
Martin Ouwehand writes:
Why isn't the mathematician Henri Poincaré acknowledged as the true discoverer of the special theory of relativity?

because he didn't discover the theory of relativity as we now understand it.

It is true that after all the failed attempts to show the movement of the earth with respect to the aether, he and Lorentz did realise that the principle of relativity must be true and that it is impossible to detect a translation movement with constant velocity.

But despite this, Poincaré still believed somehow in the aether ...

He certainly did not explain, as Einstein did, the changes to the concepts of space and time that follow from the theory of relativity. ...

Nowhere do Lorentz or Poincaré say that the Lorentz transformation connects space-time measurements in two inertial frames in relative motion.

He gives cites to Poincare's papers, but they are refuted here.

Ouwehand has it backwards. Poincare's theory requires changes to space and time. Einstein's 1905 paper describes changes to measuring rods, clocks, and electromagnetic observables. He does not say whether the changes are to space or to the rods. For that, Einstein's view is the same as what FitzGerald published in 1889. Einstein's theory did not require space and time changes any more than what FitzGerald and Lorentz published years earlier.

Ouwehand explains:

Mathematically, the transformation (x, t) -> (x'', t'') is what we call a Lorentz transformation, but it seems clear to me that for Lorentz the transformation of space-time measurement between the two frames is (x, t) -> (x', t'), not (x, t) -> (x'' ,t''). This is what I meant by the above comment "Nowhere do they..." Poincaré's 1906 paper is silent about the space-time content of the Lorentz transformation, but as it's a follow-up to Lorentz' I take it that he agrees with him on this point.
Lorentz and Poincare were emphatic that their theory explained the Michelson-Morley experiment. To do that, Lorentz transformation had to connect space-time measurements in two different frames.

There are only two known explanations for Michelson-Morley -- special relativity and the Earth being stationary (with respect to the aether). So if Lorentz and Poincare were claiming that their theory explained it, then either they were stupid, they were advocating a stationary Earth, or they discovered special relativity. The idea that their transformations were mathematical and not physical is just nonsense. They had to be physical to explain a physical experiment.

Essentially, Ouwehand is arguing that Lorentz and Poincare got the right answer but did not understand what they were doing. You do not have to understand relativity to see that his argument is nonsense. It is like saying that Mendeleev figured out the periodic table of the elements, but he should not be credited because he had some conceptual error about elements.


Saturday, Oct 16, 2010
 
Weinberg says to learn physics history
Physicist Steven Weinberg writes in a 2003 essay in Nature magazine:
At the beginning of the twentieth century, several leading physicists, including Lorentz and Abraham, were trying to work out a theory of the electron. This was partly in order to understand why all attempts to detect effects of Earth's motion through the ether had failed. We now know that they were working on the wrong problem. At that time, no one could have developed a successful theory of the electron, because quantum mechanics had not yet been discovered. It took the genius of Albert Einstein in 1905 to realize that the right problem on which to work was the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. This led him to the special theory of relativity. ...

Finally, learn something about the history of science, ... For instance, now and then scientists are hampered by believing one of the over-simplified models of science that have been proposed by philosophers from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The best antidote to the philosophy of science is a knowledge of the history of science.

Wow, Weinberg gives some bogus history of science, and in the next paragraph, he advises to learn it correctly and not as simplified by the famous philosophers.

Lorentz did not just work out a theory of the electron. He worked out the effect of motion on measurements of space and time, in an 1895 paper. He credited FitzGerald for earlier work. Those effects are now known as Lorentz transformations, and you can read the History of Lorentz transformations to see that a lot of excellent work was done before Einstein's 1905 paper.

Einstein wrote more or less the same thing about the effect of motion on measurements as Lorentz and Poincare had previously written. It is only those oversimplified philosophical models that have (falsely) convinced people that Einstein did something different. For proof, see Dyson on Poincare and Einstein.

I do agree with Weinberg that physicists ought to learn science history correctly, so that they are not duped by the philosophers and Einstein worshipers.

You can see for yourself that physicists before Einstein were explicitly working on the effect of motion on measurements of space and time. From Lorentz's 1892 paper, translated from Dutch:

It was noted by Maxwell, that if the aether remains at rest, then the motion of earth must have an influence on the time, that was required by light to travel forth and back between two points regarded as fixed to earth. ...

But Michelson together with Morley repeated the experiment on a larger scale. ... I have sought a long time to explain this experiment without success, and eventually I found only one way to reconcile the result with Fresnel's theory. It consists of the assumption, that the line joining two points of a solid body doesn't conserve its length, when it is once in motion parallel to the direction of motion of Earth, and afterwards it is brought normal to it. ... Such a change in length of the arms in Michelson's first experiment, and in the size of the stone plate in the second, is really not inconceivable as it seems to me.

Lorentz then goes on to give an electrodynamic explanation:
Indeed, what determines the size and shape of a solid body? Apparently the intensity of molecular forces; any cause that could modify it, could modify the shape and size as well. Now we can assume at present, that electric and magnetic forces act by intervention of the aether. It is not unnatural to assume the same for molecular forces, but then it can make make a difference, whether the connection line of two particles, which move together through the ether, are moving parallel to the direction of movement or perpendicular to it. ...

Since we know nothing about the nature of molecular forces, it is impossible to verify the hypothesis. ...

Anyway, it seems undeniable that changes of the molecular forces and consequently of the body's size of order 1-v2/2c2 are possible. ... We cannot speak about the observation of a change in length of two hundred millionth when comparing meter sticks, and even if an observation method would allow this, then this method would be the juxtaposition of two sticks, but we would never detect the discussed changes, when they occur in the same way for both of them. The only remedy is to compare the length of two sticks perpendicular to each other, and if we want to do this by the observation of an interference phenomenon (with a light ray that travels back and forth along the first and the other ray along the second arm), then we would come back to Michelson's experiment.

He turned out to be completely correct that electromagnetism is the molecular force that determines the size and shape of a solid body. He was also correct that electric and magnetic forces act by intervention of the aether, altho we would use more modern terminology and say that electromagnetic forces act by perturbing the quantum vacuum state. And of course he was completely correct that motion causes a length contraction in the direction of the motion. Einstein said the same thing 13 years later, without mentioning the molecular forces.

Friday, Oct 15, 2010
 
Sparse coverage of string theory
Here is a defensive explanation of Why has Physics Today's news coverage of string theory been so sparse?

No, the real reason is that string theory has not accomplished anything. But that does not stop new book from making big claims:

The reason strings are such a hot topic nowadays, Jones explains, is that the new theory not only helps to solve some long-standing problems in physics, but it also attempts to explain other, not-yet-observed phenomena such as time travel and the possible existence of extra dimensions.

One of the great virtues of string theory is that it tries to be a theory of everything. ...

In practice, contriving a theory of everything means reconciling the two great physics theories of the previous century: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Quantum science generally deals with matter at small scales (all those nested layers of particles), while general relativity generally deals with massive things like planets and galaxies. For the past century physicists have failed to bring these two mighty theories together.

String theory, at least on paper, seems to have succeeded.

No, it has not succeeded. If it did, then there would be some paper demonstrating it, and there would be a Physics Today story about it.

Thursday, Oct 14, 2010
 
Varying time was forced by a dramatic experiment
NPR radio recently had an explanation of a new relativity experiment. From the Fri, 24 Sep 2010 NPR broadcast, downloadable at npr_130109040.mp3:
Joe Palca, at 11:40: ... the nature of time. It is hard to think of time as something that varies.

Carroll: It is just so counter-intuitive to our everyday lives.

Palca: Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena.

Carroll: The miracle is that Einstein's way of thinking about it wasn't forced by some dramatic experiment that anyone did. It was really just pure thought.

Palca: But pure thought led Einstein to the conclusion that light, not time, was the constant.

No, this is a myth that has been propagated in the latter part of the 20th century to promote Kuhnian paradigm shift theory. The decisive experiment was the Michelson-Morley experiment.

If you do not believe me, read Einstein's 1907 review paper or Einstein's 1909 paper:

This experiment demonstrated that matter does not completely carry along its ether but, in general, the ether is moving relative to matter. ... The most diverse experiments were performed without detecting the expected dependence of phenomena on orientation.

This contradiction was chiefly eliminated by the pioneering work of H. A. Lorentz in 1895. Lorentz showed that if the ether were taken to be at rest and did not participate at all in the motions of matter, no other hypotheses were necessary to arrive at a theory that did justice to almost all of the phenomena. In particular, Fizeau's experiments were explained, as well as the negative results of the above-mentioned attempts to detect the Earth's motion relative to the ether. Only one experiment seemed incompatible with Lorentz's theory, namely, the interference experiment of Michelson and Morley.

By this time, two Nobel prizes had been given for this work showing that a dramatic experiment leads to the concept of varying time. One to Michelson in 1907 for doing the experiment, and another to Lorentz in 1902 for his 1895 theory, which included varying time. Lorentz cited Michelson-Morley in his 1895 paper, and he and Poincare continued to stress its importance in subsequent papers.

Today, Einstein biographies say that Michelson-Morley had nothing to do with the discovery of relativity, because he was reasoning with pure thought. This is just one aspect of a false Einstein myth that gets perpetuated.


Wednesday, Oct 13, 2010
 
French economist opposed Einstein and his relativity
The economist Maurice Allais just died. He won the 1998 Bank of Sweden Prize, sometimes also called the Nobel prize in economics. He is famous for showing that common preferences are contrary to economic utility models.

He wrote a 2005 book saying that Einstein plagiarized the theory of relativity, and that relativity was disproved by a 1926 Dayton Miller experiment. That experiment was an attempt to detect the aether drift, like the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that was the main experimental support for relativity.

It is a little goofy for him to rely so heavily on a 1926 paper when dozens of others have done similar experiments, and confirmed relativity. But Allais was correct about Poincare publishing the theory before Einstein, as you can read in this blog or in Relativity priority dispute.


Tuesday, Oct 12, 2010
 
Isaac Newton, alchemist
The NY Times reports:
How could the man who vies in surveys with Albert Einstein for the title of “greatest physicist ever,” the man whom James Gleick has aptly designated “chief architect of the modern world,” have been so swept up in what looks to modern eyes like a medieval delusion? How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold? Was Newton mad — perhaps made mad by exposure to mercury, as some have proposed? Was he greedy, or gullible, or stubbornly blind to the truth?

In Dr. Newman’s view, none of the above. Sir Isaac the Alchemist, he said, was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.

Newton was second to Einstein in this poll.

Einstein wasted 30 years of his life on a crackpot search for a unified field theory. Newton's alchemy had more scientific validity.


Monday, Oct 11, 2010
 
Hockey stick graph guy hates public scrutiny
Climate professor Michael E. Mann, famous mostly for the global warming hockey stick graph, writes:
My employer, Penn State University, exonerated me after a thorough investigation of my e-mails in the East Anglia archive. Five independent investigations in Britain and the United States, and a thorough recent review by the Environmental Protection Agency, also have cleared the scientists of accusations of impropriety. ...

We have lived through the pseudo-science that questioned the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, and the false claims questioning the science of acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. The same dynamics and many of the same players are still hard at work, questioning the reality of climate change. ...

Challenges to policy proposals for how to deal with this problem should be welcome -- indeed, a good-faith debate is essential for wise public policymaking.

But the attacks against the science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science.

How can I assure young researchers in climate science that if they make a breakthrough in our understanding about how human activity is altering our climate that they, too, will not be dragged through a show trial at a congressional hearing?

I would expect most scientists to be happy to explain their breakthroughs at a congressional hearing.

Mann being cleared of impriety by a university? That is no reason to accept Mann's analysis. We should be troubled by the fact that his university finds it acceptable for him to cover up his data and methods, as revealed in those emails.

Worse, Mann says that we can question the public policy, but not the science. He is the one who is anti-science for saying this.

Also getting a lot of news is this Hal Lewis complaint about this American Physical Society policy:

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.
Yes, you should be wary of any statements like this.

There is an APS reply.


Saturday, Oct 09, 2010
 
What is fate
I like this joke:
A priest asked the Master, "What is fate?"

The Master answered:

It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.

It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.

It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst, and Weariness.

"And that is fate?" said the priest.

"Fate... I thought you said Freight", responded the Master.

"That's all right" said the priest, "I wanted to know about Freight too."

I like this joke because "fate" seems like a suitably profound topic for a guru's wisdom, as opposed to "freight". But the Master's answer showed that freight can be just as profound.

The Danish physicist Niels Bohr said:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
This is also quoted to explain the half-truth. I cannot find the context for this, but he surely said something similar, because Bohr's son wrote:
One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
Supposedly, Heraclitus said something similar.

Many of the profound truths of 20th century physics are like that. You can say that there is no aether, that an electron is a particle, that the world is non-deterministic, that quantum entanglement requires spooky action at a distance, that gravity is quantized, that the fundamental forces are unified at the Planck scale, etc. Pick any popular explanation of quantum mechanics, and you will find that its profound truths are not really truths in the sense that the opposites are incorrect.

The next time you hear some wise guru tell you some profound truth, ask whether the opposite is incorrect.


Friday, Oct 08, 2010
 
Claiming Lorentz was opposed to relativity
Here is a typical explanation of the claim for Einstein's originality:
The mathematical work of H.A. Lorentz would prove invaluable to Albert Einstein as he attempted to work out his theory of Special Relativity.

The Dutch Physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was often given credit by Albert Einstein for inspiring the notions of Time and Space Dilation. Indeed, it is the mathematical work of Lorentz which Einstein uses as a guide in determining the exact formulations of these very things. However, this credit often seems somewhat misplaced, considering the fact that Lorentz’s actual intention in creating his mathematics was to explain something very much opposing the theory of relativity.

It all started, like so many things, with the fateful experiment of Michelson and Morley in 1887, which determined once and for all the non-existence of the substance known as “ether,” which according to physicists formed the makeup of the vacuum through which light traveled so quickly. In addition, it showed that the speed of light was a constant, independent of one’s motion. As a result of this experiment, some physicists, such as Einstein, searched for entirely new laws of physics, while others, such as Lorentz, searched for ways to reconcile these findings with the existing theories, mathematically.

In other words, Lorentz’s goal was to save the theory of luminiferous ether from annihilation. As a result, he came up with some very revolutionary and very useful mathematics.

So Lorentz cited the previous work, making him opposed to revolutionary thought. Einstein built on the work of Lorentz and Michelson-Morley without citing them, making him the great genius.

Einstein never described having any intentions different from Lorentz. Einstein's 1905 relativity theory was not opposed to Lorentz's theory in any way. Neither Einstein nor Lorentz nor anyone else at the time said that it was. Lorentz lectured on the theory in 1906, and described Einstein's work as an addition to his own. Einstein did not come up with any new math -- his formulas were essentially the same as what Lorentz had already published.

People recite these silly arguments as if they mean something. Somehow you are supposed to believe that Lorentz made all the correct deductions and formulas from Michelson-Morley, but it was somehow inferior to Einstein publishing the same thing ten years later.


Wednesday, Oct 06, 2010
 
Deepak’s God 2.0 and quantum flapdoodle
Michael Shermer attacks quantum theology:
This last spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different species—the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra -— whose arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically different tact. Filmed by ABC’s Nightline and viewed by millions, Deepak hammered out a series of scientistic-sounding arguments for the existence of a nonlocal spooky-action-at-a-distance quantum force. Call it Deepak’s God 2.0. ...

Deepak’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which is when you string together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and assume that explains something in the regular macro world in which we live. “The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom,” Chopra writes in his 2006 book Life After Death.

Okay, but I am not sure why this is any worse than what Hawking does.

Shermer debated Chopra in a March 2010 ABC TV Nightline Faceoff. I expected the level-headed Shermer to make mincemeat out of the kooky Chopra, but I think Shermer lost. When asked about the reality of the Moon, Chopra said:

In the absence of a conscious entity, the Moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.
Shermer just called this "woo-woo", and argued that quantum mechanics had no macroscopic significance.

Hawking co-author Leonard Mlodinow challenged Chopra to learn some quantum mechanics. But the Hawking-Mlodinow book has a chapter on the same non-locality that Chopra was talking about, and the book applies it to God just like Chopra. Here is what the book says about the Moon:

There might be one history in which the moon is made of Roquefort cheese. But we have observed that the moon is not made of cheese, which is bad news for mice. Hence histories in which the moon is made of cheese do not contribute to the pres- ent state of our universe, though they might contribute to others. That might sound like science fiction, but it isn't.
I get from this that they subscribe to different interpretations of quantum mechanics. But there is no proof that any one interpretation is any more correct than any other, and they are all leaping to unwarranted conclusions. It is science fiction. Hawking-Mlodinov have a much more sophisticated knowledge of math than Chopra, and are better at avoiding statements that are demonstrably false, but it is still just wild speculation. They are taking reasonable theories and extrapolating them far beyond where they have any experimental support. Apparently Hawking-Mlodinow think that it is okay to apply quantum non-locality to God's brain, but not to the human brain.

Tuesday, Oct 05, 2010
 
Graphene prize
Sweden just announced the Physics Nobel for graphene, a thin sheet of carbon. As usual, the predictions were for prizes in theoretical cosmology, inflation, dark matter, and string theory. All stuff that has never been substantiated. They primarily give the prizes for experimental work, not theoretical. And especially not theoretical work that has never been tested, like cosmic inflation and string theory.

The Nature magazine prediction was for a dark energy prize. I think that probably will get a physics prize in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the Vatican is complaining about yesterday's prize for test-tube babies:

Nearly four million babies have been born using IVF fertility treatment since 1978.

Monsignor Carrasco, the Vatican's spokesman on bio-ethics, said in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) had been "a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction".

But he said the Nobel prize committee's choice of Prof Edwards had been "completely out of order" as without his treatment, there would be no market for human eggs "and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world", he told Italy's Ansa news agency.

No estimate on the number of frozen or destroyed embryos.

Sunday, Oct 03, 2010
 
Truth of the Einsteinian or Minkowskian interpretations
A 2007 book, Einstein, relativity and absolute simultaneity By William Lane Craig, Quentin Smith, says about Special Relativity (SR):
It is an interesting historical fact that neither of the giants of late nineteenth century physics to whom Einstein looked for inspiration in his work on SR, H. A. Lorentz and Henri Poincare, was ever convinced, despite being fully apprised of the empirical facts, of the truth of the Einsteinian or Minkowskian interpretations of the Lorentz transformations.
The 1908 Minkowskian interpretation was that the Lorentz transformations are symmetries of spacetime, and that the relativity principle is a consequence of covariance under those symmetries. This is also the interpretation found in modern textbooks.

The 1905 Einsteinian interpretation of the Lorentz transformations is that they affect measuring rods and clocks, and that there is a way to extend them to electromagnetic variables so that Maxwell's equations take the same form in difference reference frames. Lorentz published the same interpretation in 1895, after FitzGerald conjectured a simplified version of it in 1889.

In around 1910, Einstein switched over to the Minkowski interpretation. Poincare had already made this switch in 1905. The book supplies quotes from Lorentz where he says (correctly) that both interpretations are consistent with the known experimental results.

Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, correctly says:

When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient. [p.7]
That is right. If Lorentz and Poincare understood that both interpretations predict the same events, then the choice is a matter of convenience. Poincare said similar things in his 1902 book, and he is famous for espousing this philosophy of conventionalism.

Sometimes Lorentz and Poincare are criticized for admitting that multiple interpretations are possible. They get blamed for not joining the paradigm shift. This criticism is wrongheaded. First, there are two major interpretations of special relativity. Lorentz created one, and Poincare created the other. So they were leaders in jumping to new ideas. Second, both interpretations are indeed possible.

Similar criticism has been mounted against those who have admitted the possibility of both the geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system. Eg, Galileo argued that only one model was possible while some of his contemporaries argued that both were. But Galileo was the one who was wrong on this point.


Friday, Oct 01, 2010
 
How philosophers credit Einstein
Philosopher Marc Lange explains the discovery of relativity on a philosopher site:
I once read that, in the case of most scientific discoveries, if they hadn't been made when they were, and by who they were, the same discovery would have been made by someone else. Is this true? I also read that Einstein's general and special theories of relativity were such an original contribution that if he hadn't come up with them we would still be waiting for them. Do you think that's the case? ...

I have heard this said as well. In the history of science, there are many examples in which several researchers independently came up with the same new idea. Schrodinger and Heisenberg independently came up with the same theory (quantum mechanics) and presented it in such different forms that someone else (Born) had to figure out that they were equivalent. Darwin and Wallace (both from reading Malthus!) independently came up with the theory of natural selection. Adams and LeVerrier independently predicted the existence of the planet Neptune. Lavoisier and Priestley independently discovered oxygen. The examples are legion. These cases of simultaneous discovery are good evidence that once a problem reaches a certain point, it is widely recognized as a problem and the same solution would soon have been found even if the actual discoverer had not found it.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity are sometimes cited as exceptions to this general rule. One reason for this view is that the "problem" as Einstein saw it was not widely recognized. Of course, many scientists knew of the Michelson-Morley experiment and realized that it was an anomaly that had to be dealt with somehow. But Einstein was motivated to develop relativity not primarily by experimental results that needed to be explained, but rather by an "asymmetry" in Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. (See the majestic opening paragraph of his 1905 relativity paper for the "asymmetry" argument.) This "asymmetry" was widely known, but very few besides Einstein regarded it as a problem of any kind.

Another reason for the view that relativity would not have been found without Einstein is that relativity was not a modest solution to a narrowly confined problem. Rather, relativity was a sharp break from all of the physics that had gone before. It dispensed with absolute time, space, and motion -- the conceptual framework of Newtonian physics as it was then understood. It is therefore more difficult to say in the case of relativity that it would still have been discovered at about the same time, had Einstein not been there to do it.

It is amazing that a university professor could say anything so silly and so wrong.

Einstein's work on relativity was not a break from previous physics. It did not reject Newtonian physics any more than papers written five and ten years before. Einstein was motivated to give an exposition of the Lorentz-Poincare theory, and that is all he did. Just look at Einstein's famous 1905 paper, and you can see that nowhere does he even claim to contradict the prevailing wisdom of the day. He only refers vaguely to previous work, and only implies an increment improvement. He says:

They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, ... Insufficient consideration of this circumstance lies at the root of the difficulties ...
So he is only claiming to present a more precise (higher order) version of what has already been shown, and giving more consideration to foundational issues in order to clear up some difficulties. Physicists at the time considered Einstein's paper a comparatively minor philosophical gloss on Lorentz's theory.

Einstein rushed his paper into print because it was being obsoleted by papers by Lorentz and Poincare. As noted below, Watson-Crick also rushed their paper into print because they suspected that a competitor was about to publish the same thing. These two papers are credited as two of the great papers in 20th century science, but in reality, history would not be much different if these papers did not exist.

Lange also says:

Did Einstein ever engage the "scientific method" ...?

Many of Einstein's most famous papers make shockingly few references to the details of previous empirical work by other scientists. To put the same point in another way, many of Einstein's most famous arguments arise largely from "philosophical" considerations.

No, the lack of references is explained by Einstein dishonestly seeking credit for the work of others.

The myth that relativity was the result of Einstein's philosophical thought experiments is widespread. It is used to undermine science, and promote unscientific ideas that have no empirical basis.

You can see the consequences of this my in this string theory report card:

If you care, string theory gets an:

A for not being ruled out,
F for unambiguous testable predictions,
D for an LHC signal,
B for solving black hole puzzles,
A for inspiration to maths,
B for inspiration to the rest of physics,
A for unification (surely "a" solution to a previous superhard problem),
D for uniqueness,
F for solutions to the cosmological constant problem,
D for understanding of the Big Bang or the birth of the Cosmos,
A for solving Pauli's renormalizability problem of GR.

I think Andy is right that people would agree with the grades; they would disagree with whether it is a passing or failing report card. However, as Strominger emphasizes, string theory is the only student in the class. ;-) If you flunk her, you have to shut the school down.

Woit also comments on this report card.

The only reason that it has not been ruled out is that it does not make any predictions! How can a theory achieve unification without being testable?

The only reason anyone can say such nonsense with a straight face is that there is a widespread myth that Einstein invented relativity and revolutionized physics by making philosophical considerations and ignoring experimental results.

Einstein wasted the last 30 years of his life publishing unified field theories. He made no testable predictions, and his theories were garbage. He was guided only by philosophical considerations.

String theorists are doing the same thing when they say that their theory is the only only that matches their philosophical expectations, and ignore experiment.

The "cosmological constant problem" is just to explain empty space. That's right, string theory fails to say anything correct about empty space. It is said that Newtonian gravity fails to solve the 3-body problem, general relativity fails on the 2-body problem, quantum mechanics fails on the 1-body problem, and now string theory fails on the 0-body problem. Some physicists say that this is progress!


Thursday, Sep 30, 2010
 
DNA letters released
Letters about the 1953 Watson-Crick work on DNA have been released. This discovery applied Linus Pauling's methods to Rosalind Franklin's data. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared a Nobel prize for it. They had surreptitiously taken Franklin's ideas and data without her consent, and the letters reveal:
Dr. Bragg learned that Pauling, his longtime rival, was also hot on the trail of the DNA structure. ...

An added complication was that Pauling was about to visit London and Crick feared that Dr. Franklin, who hoped to see him, might give him her experimental data on DNA, enabling him to guess and announce the structure before the articles then in press with Nature were published.

This is an example of a couple of scientists who got fame and glory for rushing a good idea into print, and capitalizing on the work of others. The hard leg work had been done by others, and the Watson-Crick model would have been found in a few months anyway, without Watson and Crick. Pauling even had to correct an error in their model.

Wednesday, Sep 29, 2010
 
Flores Man exposed
Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne complains that an open-access journal publishes too much science when it has this policy:
PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound.
But only in that journal will you learn that Post-Cranial Skeletons of Hypothyroid Cretins Show a Similar Anatomical Mosaic as Homo floresiensis.

Razib Khan writes:

I just went back and reread some of the press when the hobbit finds were revealed. New member of the human family tree! Evolution rewritten! And so forth. If H. floresiensis turns out to be pathological, I don’t know what to think about paleontology. More honestly, I might start slotting the discipline in with social psychology or macroeconomic modeling.
I think that Flores Man is the new Piltdown Man. The evolutionists made a very big deal out this as the latest missing link, based on some very flimsy evidence.

Sunday, Sep 26, 2010
 
Chopra reviews Hawking
New Age guru Deepak Chopra writes:
Stephen Hawking occupies a position in popular culture comparable only to Einstein's eminence sixty years ago: he is our last wise man speaking with the total authority of advanced science.
Chopra has his own cult following, with goofy pseudoscience:
The word “quantum” appears frequently in New Age and modern mystical literature. For example, physician Deepak Chopra (1989) has successfully promoted a notion he calls quantum healing, which suggests we can cure all our ills by the application of sufficient mental power.

According to Chopra, this profound conclusion can be drawn from quantum physics, which he says has demonstrated that “the physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world” (Chopra 1993, 5). Chopra also asserts that “beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell,” and “the world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learn to perceive it” (Chopra 1993, 6). Thus illness and aging are an illusion and we can achieve what Chopra calls “ageless body, timeless mind” by the sheer force of consciousness.

It is a sad day when our leading science authority and our goofiest New Age guru are babbling the same sort of nonsense.

Einstein set the example, I am afraid. He babbled a lot of nonsense, and a lot of intellectuals ate it up.

Update: Landsburg reviews Hawking, extends the argument into believing in every mathematical possibility:

Every modern physical theory, taken literally, predicts that our universe is a mathematical object. For example, the simplest version of special relativity posits that we live in a four-dimensional geometric object called “spacetime”. More sophisticated theories posit that spacetime is part of some larger geometric object whose properties we perceive as “forces” or “particles”. According to modern physics, everything is made of math. ...

Once you believe the universe is a mathematical object, its existence ceases to be a mystery—at least if you believe, along with most mathematicians, that mathematical objects can’t help but exist.

It sounds like he believes in Simulism or the Simulation hypothesis. Or maybe the Boltzmann brain. There is a long history of such beliefs, but I doubt that Hawking would endorse them.

The Simulation Argument is promoted by Professor Nick Bostrom, who "was listed as one of the world's 100 most influential intellectuals by FP Magazine in 2009."


Saturday, Sep 25, 2010
 
We already have a theory of everything
The Cosmic Variance blog writes:
The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood

Not sure why people don’t make a bigger deal out of this fact. Physicists (and scientists more generally) are infamous for making grandiose claims about how close we are to Figuring It All Out, only to be shocked by some sort of revolutionary discoveries soon thereafter. Personally I have no idea how close we are to a comprehensive theory of absolutely everything. But I do know how close we are to having a comprehensive theory of the basic laws underlying the phenomena we encounter in our everyday lives — without benefit of fancy telescopes or particle accelerators or what have you. Namely, we already have it! That seems to be worth celebrating, or at least remarking upon, but you don’t hear it mentioned very much.

The public has been fooled by Einstein and his worshipers that we need some sort of unified field theory. The belief seems to be based on some religious belief in Monism, not physics. They say that quantum mechanics is inconsistent with relativity, and that we need quantum gravity.

But there is no contradiction between quantum mechanics and relativity in any physically observable realm. There is no observation or experiment that awaits explanation by some new quantum gravity theory. We do have some unexplained anomalies, but none of them involve quantum gravity.

Supposedly the need for quantum gravity comes during the first 10-43 seconds of the big bang. But there is so much other misunderstood physics after that point, that such speculation is meaningless.

Update: Cosmic Variance responds to criticisms.


Tuesday, Sep 21, 2010
 
Kooky birth order theories
This is from the intro to a Skeptic magazine interview:
The publicity surrounding his new book — Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (Pantheon) — has been extensive to say the least. Even more striking than The New Yorker’s nine-page story about Sulloway and his theory was Newsweek’s six-page review, complete with Sulloway’s formula for calculating your own propensity to rebel. In the New York Review of Books Jared Diamond found no flaws whatsoever in the theory, calling it a “fascinating and convincing work.” PBS’s Charlie Rose and Patt Morrison each hosted Frank on their respective author talk shows. In addition he has been featured on numerous magazine television programs such as Dateline, was challenged by Bryant Gumble on The Today Show, and even appeared unopposed on Ted Koppel’s Nightline, almost unheard of for a program based on point-counterpoint confrontations. The author of the highly acclaimed and extremely controversial biography (within psychoanalytic circles), Freud, Biologist of the Mind (Basic Books, 1979), Sulloway is perhaps best known as the scholar who showed that Darwin did not convert to the theory of evolution during his five-year voyage around the world, but only after his return home to England.
I would expect Skeptic magazine to be more skeptical about Sulloway's ideas. His science is shoddy, and his work has not been replicated. He published his theory in a popular book, but it has not survived the scrutiny of peer-review journals, as far as I know.

I have criticized Jared Diamond for being unscientific before, in Dec. 2007, June 2005, June 2006, April 2009, and Dec. 2002. He has won a lot of awards, but I should would not accept his opinion on whether some research has some validity.


Monday, Sep 20, 2010
 
Early acceptance of special relativity
S. G. Brush supplies this comment on acceptance of Einstein's 1905 relativity paper in England:
derived from their adherence to the formal school of [Joseph] Larmor’s ETM [Electronic Theory of Matter]. They fully accepted the reality of the contraction of moving matter, and routinely applied the Lorentz transformations, in Lar- mor’s sense, when tackling problems in the electrodynamics of moving bodies. We should not, then, be surprised that they did not identify Einstein’s work as representing any kind of important break-through or advance in physics, but treated it rather as a comparatively minor philosophical gloss upon one of the important results of the ETM. [Stephen G. Brush, Why was Relativity Accepted?, Phys. perspect. 1 (1999) 184–214]
I think that was the view elsewhere as well. No one was so impressed with Einstein's 1905 paper until after other versions of special relativity were popularized.

Here he explains that Einstein's theory was supposed to be better because it was less ad hoc:

The preference for novel predictions is often associated or confused with the dislike of ad hoc hypotheses. For example, G. F. FitzGerald explained the nega- tive result of the Michelson-Morley experiment by postulating that ‘‘the length of material bodies changes, according as they are moving through the ether or across it,’’ by an amount just sufficient to cancel the expected differences in the times for the light beams to travel the paths along and perpendicular to the earth’s motion.7

A similar assumption was later made by H. A. Lorentz as part of his electron theory. The FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction (FLC) was considered ad hoc by physicists because it was not derived from a plausible theory. It is considered ad hoc by philosophers of science because it is not independently testable by any experiment other than the one it was invented to explain. Thus many physicists considered that Einstein’s theory was preferable to Lorentz’s because it explained the FLC by deriving it from general postulates.

No, this is incorrect. The contraction was considered ad hoc because, as of 1900, Lorentz and Larmor had only shown that it explains the first-order aether drift experiments, and not Michelson-Morley. Lorentz did not demonstrate the higher order invariance until 1904. Larmor is said to have discovered it also, but did not publish it. By 1905, it was not an issue, and Einstein's 1905 paper had no such advantage over the previous work.

Einstein once complained that Lorentz's theory was ad hoc, but Einstein was dishonestly ignoring the 1904 work.

Brush says that Einstein's theory was preferable to Lorentz's because of the use of postulates instead of an ad hoc Michelson-Morley. This idea is commonly stated by physicists and philosophers. And it is nonsense. No one ever said anything so ridiculous around 1905. This idea was only cooked up many years later in order try to find some explanation for Einstein having done something better than the previous work. But Einstein's theory was just as ad hoc as Lorentz's.

FitzGerald, Lorentz, and Einstein all deduced the length contraction in the same way -- as a logical consequence of the speed of light being constant for all observers. Einstein had no plausible theory other than what others had already published.

It is also incorrect to say that there was no independent test of Lorentz's theory. His prediction of electron mass increase with velocity was already being successfully tested in 1901, long before Einstein first said anything on the subject in 1905.

Brush goes on to kookier theories:

Why would a particular physicist tend to accept or reject an idea because it is revolutionary? We might find an answer to this question in Frank Sulloway’s study of openness to scientific innovation. Based on analysis of 308 scientists whose positions on relativity before 1930 are known, Sulloway concluded that age is a strong predictor of tendency to accept Einstein’s theories, while social attitudes and birth order are moderately good predictors: young, more liberal scientists who were the second or later child in their family were statistically more likely to support relativity. ...

Sulloway, in his analysis of the response of first-born and later-born scientists to radical innovations, found that the correlation between birth order and acceptance of relativity was much weaker after 1915 than it had been before the publication of the general theory. He suggests that ‘‘the eclipse results of 1919 caused empirical arguments to uncouple from ideological ones.’’

This article lists Poincare as someone who rejected relativity!

These folks completely misunderstand the innovation of relativity, its scientific merits, and who did what. They think that acceptance and rejection of relativity was entirely or mostly ideological. If they were deciding whether to accept or reject relativity based on ideology and birth order, then they sure were not very good scientists.

I guess the point is that science is just a big game, with scientists jumping on new ideas like fads in the world of clothing fashions. Their main example is always Einstein, because he did so little of substance. It does not matter to them what Einstein really did, because they see his role as leading an ideological shift. He is primarily credited for his ideology, not his science.

Brush also has this amazing story about letters between FitzGerald and Lorentz. FitzGerald published his famous contraction hypothesis in a leading American science journal in 1889, but it went unnoticed by relativity historians for decades. It did not even appear in a compilation of his complete works. Apparently FitzGerald's ideas spread by word of mouth in Europe in the early 1990s, and started to get cited in papers around 1992.


Saturday, Sep 18, 2010
 
Galileo was wrong
Andrew Sullivan is upset by an upcoming conference on Galileo was wrong, promoting geocentrim. The organizers have a book out on the subject, and it seems to be more theology than science.

A lot of nonsense gets said on the subject of geocentrism. It has been going on for centuries, so I doubt that it will end any time soon. Here is the scientific conventional wisdom.

The theory of relativity teaches that motion is relative, and we only know how to define motion relative to some frame of reference. Special relativity required inertial frames, but general relativity can handle any frame, including one that is rotating or revolving.

Thus you can write the laws of physics relative to the frame of the Earth, and the Earth will be stationary in that frame. That frames is as valid as any other. This view has been widely accepted for a century.

About 10 years ago, the velocity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation was measured. You can think of the CMB as being the center of mass of the big bang. The CMB is therefore a natural frame for anyone in the universe to use, and we can now give a velocity for the Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way, and other galaxies.

The Catholic Church's opinion in 1616 was that Galileo could teach geocentrism and heliocentrism, but it was incorrect to say that the immobility of the Sun had been proven. The Church was quite correct about that, as relativity shows that the immobility of the Sun cannot be proven.

Geocentric coordinates are still used today when convenient, just as they were two millennia ago. There is nothing wrong about them, either then or now.

The funny thing about this subject is how people are so eager to ridicule others as being stupid, and yet they do not acknowledge basic facts about the matter that have been known for centuries.

The Bad Astronomer makes some of these points, and says:

I have two things to say that might surprise you: first, geocentrism is a valid frame of reference, and second, heliocentrism is not any more or less correct. ...

However, as soon as you want to send a space probe to another planet, geocentrism becomes cumbersome. In that case, it’s far easier to use the Sun as the center of the Universe and measure the rotating and revolving Earth as just another planet. The math works out better, and in fact it makes more common sense.

However, this frame of reference, called heliocentrism, still is not the best frame for everything. ...

So geocentrism is valid, but so is every other frame. This is the very basis of relativity! ...

In the end, the actual evidence is totally against the Geocentrists. The only way — the only way — they can assert their idea being factual is to rely on the Bible itself, and ignore everything else.

His evidence consists of saying that geocentric calculations are more complicated for some purposes. The whol point of choosing a frame is that different frames are simpler and more convenient, depending on the purpose of the calculation.

The Bad Astronomer says that he had to consult a relativist to get this right. But really, this is has been a basic premise of relativity for a long time. Of course he attacks the Geocentrists for believing in the Bible, and for overstating their case if they say that there is physical proof of an immobile Earth.

Meanwhile, a senior Vatican astronomer says that "the idea that God could be discovered in the laws of space and time and the existence of human reason" is bad theology because "it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning." He is open to space aliens and whatever else science may discover.


Friday, Sep 17, 2010
 
Poincaré anticipated the so-called Minkowski space-time
Jean Mawhin writes, in a 2005 biography of Poincare:
Among other things, he carefully discussed Hertz’s experiments on the propagation of elec- tromagnetic waves and the beginnings of wireless telegraphy. His books on Maxwell theory contain the germs of special relativity and led him to analyze, correct, and name the Lorentz transformations. Poincaré published in 1905 a note (followed by an extended memoir) on the dynamics of the elec- tron, containing the whole mathematics of special relativity. Historians of science still passionately discuss the priority between Einstein and Poincaré, and if one follows some recent publications, one might conclude that Hercule Poireau might be the only one able to uncover the whole story. Curiously, the mathematician Poincaré reached relativistic kinematics via Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, while the physicist Einstein used an axiomatic method. But it is unquestionable that Poincaré an- ticipated the so-called Minkowski space-time.
This suggests that Einstein actually proved something in a mathematically rigorous way. He did not. Even tho many textbooks purport to reproduce Einstein's 1905 theory, with his postulates and deductions, none do it correctly. They rarely say that Einstein has hidden assumptions, such as spacetime being homogeneous and isotropic, and confusing reasoning. More importantly, no one correctly explains how Einstein's work is any better than Lorentz's 1895 theorem of the corresponding states. If Einstein really used an axiomatic method, then it would be clear what he had proved.

This also suggests that Poincare's assumptions were more electromagnetic than Einstein's. They were not. Einstein described his assumptions this way in 1905:

I based that investigation on the Maxwell-Hertz equations for empty space, together with the Maxwellian expression for the electromagnetic energy of space, and in addition the principle that:--

The laws by which the states of physical systems alter are independent of the alternative, to which of two systems of coordinates, in uniform motion of parallel translation relatively to each other, these alterations of state are referred (principle of relativity).

In effect, he assumed Maxwell's equations as well as the covariance of those equations.

By contrast, Poincare assumed a spacetime geometry, and proved the electromagnetic covariance.

I don't know how anyone could study this and say that there is any mystery about it. There are no significant facts in dispute. Just read the papers.


Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010
 
Einstein's philosophy of science
John D. Norton is a philosophy professor and Einstein expert, and says this:
What is less well recognized is how Einstein's work altered our understanding of the nature of science itself. ...

The most enduring change brought by Einstein's work was to shake our sense of certainty. When Einstein entered science at the start of the 20th century, there was a strong sense of its stability. ...

Later in life, Einstein came to a radical solution of the problem of responsibly practicing science while still believing that its core concepts are free inventions. Drawing on his discovery of general relativity, he concluded that the right concepts and theories could be found merely by seeking the mathematically simplest theories.

A philosophy site says:
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is well known as the most prominent physicist of the twentieth century. Less well known, though of comparable importance, are his contributions to twentieth-century philosophy of science.
No, Einstein had no coherent philosophy of science, and no lasting influence on philosophy.

He occasionally endorsed the philosophies of others, such as Mach's and Poincare's. But he had no consistent explanation of what he meant. He gave philosophical attacks on quantum mechanics and other physical theories, but he was nearly always wrong with those arguments, and had to retract most of them. He often said obvious truisms, such as simplicity being a good property of a theory, but that has been conventional wisdom for centuries. Today, there is no Einstein philosophy that anyone uses for anything. Just read the above page.

What is not so clear is whether he subscribed to scientific realism or anti-realism; whether his search for a Unified field theory was a byproduct of monism; and whether he followed conventionalism or positivism.


Tuesday, Sep 14, 2010
 
SciAm trashes Hawking book
John Horgan writes for SciAm:
Actually M-theory is just the latest iteration of string theory, with membranes (hence the M) substituted for strings. For more than two decades string theory has been the most popular candidate for the unified theory that Hawking envisioned 30 years ago. Yet this popularity stems not from the theory's actual merits but rather from the lack of decent alternatives and the stubborn refusal of enthusiasts to abandon their faith.

M-theory suffers from the same flaws that string theories did. First is the problem of empirical accessibility. Membranes, like strings, are supposedly very, very tiny -— as small compared with a proton as a proton is compared with the solar system. This is the so-called Planck scale, 10^–33 centimeters. Gaining the kind of experimental confirmation of membranes or strings that we have for, say, quarks would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around, scaling up from our current technology. Our entire solar system is only one light-day around, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful accelerator, is 27 kilometers in circumference.

Hawking recognized long ago that a final theory -— because it would probably involve particles at the Planck scale -— might never be experimentally confirmable. "It is not likely that we shall have accelerators powerful enough" to test a unified theory "within the foreseeable future—or indeed, ever," he said in his 1980 speech at Cambridge. He nonetheless hoped that in lieu of empirical evidence physicists would discover a theory so logically inevitable that it excluded all alternatives.

Quite the opposite has happened. M-theory, theorists now realize, comes in an almost infinite number of versions, which "predict" an almost infinite number of possible universes.

Horgan is right. He charitably suggests that Hawking is joking with the more foolish statements in his new book.

M-theory promoter Lubos Motl responds by launching an attack on Horgan's IQ. If M-theorists really had such an IQ, then you would think that they could defend theory from criticism. But all I ever see are ad hominem attacks.


Saturday, Sep 11, 2010
 
Epicycles and electrons are real
The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica defines:
EPICYCLE (Gr. Esri, upon, and icbsXos, circle), in ancient astronomy, a small circle the centre of which describes a larger one. It was especially used to represent geometrically the periodic apparent retrograde motion of the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which we now know to be due to the annual revolution of the earth around the sun, but which in the Ptolemaic astronomy were taken to be real.
This is fine right up to the last word, "real". What does it mean?

This is like defining an electron as a negatively-charged subatomic particle which we now know to be due to the quantization of electromagnetic fields, but which in the 1913 Bohr atomic model were taken to be real.

Or like defining an elliptical orbit as an elongated circle used to represent geometrically the periodic apparent motion of the planets, which we now know to be due to the curvature of spacetime, but which in the Keplerian and Newtonian astronomy were taken to be real.

Epicycles have gotten a reputation for bad science, as I have commented before, but they were actually great scientific breakthrus. Without them, civilization would have been set back centuries.

Ptolemy also used epicycles for the Moon, Mercury, and Venus. This use of epicycles is more obviously valid, so it is not criticized so much. Criticizing Ptolemaic astronnomers for thinking that Martian epicycles were "real" is bizarre. Mars really has a periodic apparent retrograde motion as viewed from Earth, and epicycles are as real as any other geometric construction.

Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, mentioned below, has a chapter on reality. It describes the conflict between the realists, who believe that science describes an objective reality, and the anti-realists, who say that the world may all be just a figment of our imaginations.

The book tries to convince you that epicycles and the aether were not real. It blames Ptolemy and Lorentz for thinking that they were real, and praises Copernicus and Einstein as great geniuses for proposing otherwise.

Meanwhile it presents quantum mechanical arguments that seem to contradict naive ideas about reality. While it seems that the book has descended into philosophical mumbo-jumbo, it starts by declaring that philosophy to be dead, and that physicists have taken over the subject from the philosophers.

The book is still topping the Amazon top seller list. I just don't see how the arguments in this book would convince anyone. I hope to quiz people who have actually read it.

The book does have critics, such as Marcelo Gleiser who writes:

The search for an all-embracing theory of nature inspired by beauty and perfection is misguided, rooted in the monotheistic culture that has for so long dominated Western thought.

Superstring theory, and the widespread belief that it represents the truth of all existence, is the scientific equivalent of a Jewish-Christian-Muslim God that designed the cosmos, a theory based on mathematical symmetry as an expression of nature’s perfection. Even if God is hidden from the equations (and He certainly is), the mythic equivalent of “all is one” persists.

Yes, the main idea behind this book is seriously misguided.

Thursday, Sep 09, 2010
 
Evolutionists take Bible too literally
Leftist-atheist-evolutionists frequently attack a literal interpretation of the Bible. Jason Rosenhouse writes:

For example, consider the book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally, by Marcus Borg, published in 2001. According to the back of the book, Borg is a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University.

... Here is Borg's summary of the modern consensus among Biblical scholars:

But contemporary biblical scholarship does not read these stories as historically factual accounts of the world's beginnings. Instead, it sees them as ancient Israel's stories of the world's beginnings and interprets them as profoundly true mythological stories. ...

Second, to call these early chapters of Genesis prehistory means that they are not to be read as historical accounts. Rather, as ancient Israel's stories about the remote beginnings before there was an Israel, they are to be read as a particular kind of metaphorical narrative -- namely as myths, about which I will soon say more. For now, I simply note that while myths are not literally true, they can nevertheless be profoundly true, rich in powerfully persuasive meanings.

Finally, what really strikes me is Borg's insistence that these stories are not intended as historical narratives. This, too, is ubiquitous in the writings of Biblical scholars, ...
Borg is correct. Mainstream Christian theology has never said that a literal reading of Genesis should outweigh scientific evidence. As a comment on an evolutionist blog explains:
So there is at least some truth to the idea that fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent development, although there were signs of it throughout the Middle Ages, often brutally suppressed. But the idea of completely literal interpretation is a fairly late development, the church reserving to itself the judgement as to which portions should be read literally, and which should be read allegorically and figuratively. ... But, of course, the whole Bible was held to be revelatory of God’s nature and purposes for mankind.
I don't mind the evolutionists attacking people for their religious beliefs. They can burn Bibles, for all I care. But they are making a silly straw man attack when they treat all Christians as believing in a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Wednesday, Sep 08, 2010
 
More reviews trash Hawking's new book
I commented before about Hawking's new book. It is getting a lot more attention. It is intended as a sequel to one of the best-selling science books of all time. The NY Times reviews it:
Many Kinds of Universes, and None Require God

Stephen Hawking, the most revered scientist since Einstein, is a formidable mathematician and a formidable salesman. ...

Mr. Hawking’s “Brief History of Time,” published in 1988, sold some nine million copies. (A typical science best seller will move a tiny fraction of that number.) It did so partly by leaning on his preoccupying personal story. ...

In “A Brief History of Time” Mr. Hawking also dabbled in what the science writer Timothy Ferris has called “Godmongering.” Mr. Hawking, a longtime professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, has hardly displayed a religious bent during his long career. (A memoir by his former wife outed him as an atheist.) But he ended “Brief History” by declaring that the discovery of a unified theory of physics could help us to “know the mind of God.” It was a line that — cynically, some thought — allowed glints of fuzzy sunshine to warm the cold blade of his thinking.

Mr. Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design,” published on Tuesday, has already made headlines and been a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to a different sort of Godmongering. This time Mr. Hawking has, we’re told, declared God pretty much dead. ...

At its core “The Grand Design” is an examination of a relatively new candidate for the “ultimate theory of everything,” something called M-theory, itself an extension of string theory, which tries to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. “M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense,” the authors write. “It is a whole family of different theories.” According to M-theory, “ours is not the only universe,” the authors say. “Instead M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.” The image that comes to mind here, others have written about M-theory, is of a God blowing soap bubbles.

But Mr. Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow assert that “their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.” Many of these universes would be quite different from ours, they add, and “quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life,” or at least any form of life remotely like ours.

M-theory, if it is confirmed, would be “the unifying theory Einstein was hoping to find,” the authors write. But it’s a somewhat disappointing theory, a patchwork quilt rather than a fine, seamless garment.

Peter Woit's review is much more critical:
One thing that is sure to generate sales for a book of this kind is to somehow drag in religion. The book’s rather conventional claim that “God is unnecessary” for explaining physics and early universe cosmology has provided a lot of publicity for the book. I’m in favor of naturalism and leaving God out of physics as much as the next person, but if you’re the sort who wants to go to battle in the science/religion wars, why you would choose to take up such a dubious weapon as M-theory mystifies me. A British journalist contacted me about this recently and we talked about M-theory and its problems. She wanted me to comment on whether physicists doing this sort of thing are relying upon “faith” in much the same way as religious believers. I stuck to my standard refusal to get into such discussions, but, thinking about it, have to admit that the kind of pseudo-science going on here and being promoted in this book isn’t obviously any better than the faith-based explanations of how the world works favored by conventional religions.
Roger Penrose concludes his review with:
unlike quantum mechanics, M-theory enjoys no observational support whatever.
This book has been the Amazon top seller for a week. It is as ridiculous as a college class on zombies:
Students taking English 333 will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics. As an alternative to a final research paper they may write scripts or draw storyboards for their ideal zombie flicks.
The leftist-atheist-evolutionists love to go around denouncing the evils of pseudoscience, and lecturing us on the merits of the scientific method. If they really believed that, then they could start by denouncing Hawking's crackpot book.

Update: Lawrence Krauss is promoting his own book, and adds:

Physicist Stephen Hawking has done it again. This time he's sent shock waves around the world by arguing that God didn't create the universe; it was created spontaneously. Shocking or not, he actually understated the case.

For over 2,000 years the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" has captured theologians and philosophers. While usually framed as a religious or philosophical question, it is equally a question about the natural world. So an appropriate place to try and resolve it is with science.

NewScientist says:
M-theory in either sense is far from complete. But that doesn't stop the authors from asserting that it explains the mysteries of existence: why there is something rather than nothing, why this set of laws and not another, and why we exist at all. According to Hawking, enough is known about M-theory to see that God is not needed to answer these questions. Instead, string theory points to the existence of a multiverse, and this multiverse coupled with anthropic reasoning will suffice. Personally, I am doubtful.
The Wash. Post reviews:
Deep stuff, indeed. In the first chapter, Hawking and Mlodinow launch into an accessible and elegant history of the progression of scientific knowledge from the Greeks to modern cosmology. As is customary in such treatments, the authors point out the significance of certain milestones. The first of these, the realization by the Ionian Greeks that nature could be explained by laws rather than by the whims of the gods, is really the start of modern science. The second, the discovery by Copernicus that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, opened the door for a realistic exploration of our solar system and, later, our galaxy and universe. ...

In other words, not only is the Earth just one of several planets in our solar system and the Milky Way one of billions of galaxies, but our known universe itself is just one among uncounted billions of universes. It's a startling replay of the Copernican Revolution.


Monday, Sep 06, 2010
 
Hoping for a final theory
The latest SciAm mag says:
Rummaging for a Final Theory: Can a 1960s Approach Unify Gravity with the Rest of Physics?

To unify the four forces of nature, physicists are turning to Lie groups, an approach famously resurrected in 2007 by a surfer-dude theorist

Turning the clock back by half a century could be the key to solving one of science’s biggest puzzles: how to bring together gravity and particle physics. At least that is the hope of researchers advocating a back-to-basics approach in the search for a unified theory of physics.

In July mathematicians and physicists met at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada, to discuss a return to the golden age of particle physics. They were harking back to the 1960s, when physicist Murray Gell-Mann realized that elementary particles could be grouped according to their masses, charges and other properties, falling into patterns that matched complex symmetrical mathematical structures known as Lie (“lee”) groups.

No, there is a big difference. Gell-Mann was trying to explain hadrons (protons, neutrons, and more exotic particles) that had actually been observed. His predictions were testable. He predicted a particle that was soon found.

The surfer-dude and the string theorists are not doing anything related to the real world. Gell-Mann was doing science, and these modern-day unified field theorists are not. That is the difference.


Saturday, Sep 04, 2010
 
Sponges have more genes than we do
An NPR radio blog comments:
Recently, geneticists obtained a remarkable result: sponges, the oldest form of multicellular life known, can harbor between 18,000 and 30,000 genes, a range comparable to that of humans, fruit flies, roundworms, and many other animals. Since the sponge was taken from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and I’m presently here in a conference, I felt compelled to reflect about this. Considering that sponges have been around for over 500 million years, possibly even a billion years, many scientists believe they form the base of the evolutionary branch in the tree of life that led to animals. In other words, don’t think of humans as coming from monkeys; we, and every other kind of critter out there, came from sponges, the cousins of the porous yellowy objects you use to scrub yourself in the shower.

It may be a bit strange to think of such simple beings as our ancestors. After all, sponges don’t have skin tissue or nerve cells.

We only have about 20k genes. Some plants have a lot more.
Creationists are going to love this.

“Ha!” they’ll say with glee, “how could something like this happen without the agency of purposeful engineering? Clearly, there was some serious tweaking with primitive life forms to get to this level of complexity.” I predict that the argument for the implausibility of the eye will be taken a notch further down the evolutionary ladder.

Biologists, and I hope my distinguished co-bloggers will come in to say hi and set me straight, should easily dismiss any of this nonsense. There is something fundamentally perverse in using scientific evidence at hand as proof of a final argument.

It is funny how evolutionists get upset when their ideological opponents use scientific evidence.

Assuming that life on Earth evolved gradually from non-living chemicals, then I figure that we had an ancestor with only 10k genes, and that had one with only 1k genes, and so on down to some primitive life form with only a few genes. We should be able to find ancient life forms with very low gene counts. Apparently not. These ancient sponges have a lot of genes.

It seems also possible that we are descended from beings that did not have genes as we know them today. I have no idea how that would work.

It would be nice if the evolutionists could admit that they have no idea what early life on Earth was like, and if they were not always worrying about encouraging creationists.


Friday, Sep 03, 2010
 
Objecting to the word theory
A Slashdot comment says:
Actually, it seems to me like we don't call those grand-unified things a proper scientific theory either. As long as there are no testable predictions, and it fails Occam's Razor, it's not a theory, plain and simple. It's a hypothesis.

Yes, there is a name for a theory which hasn't yet been tested: hypothesis.

And really, as someone who's gotten tired of hearing Young Earth Creationists go "well, evolution is just a theory" and having to explain to them "yeah, but theory in science doesn't mean what you think. It means it already made testable predictions and is the best we have"... it's getting annoying to see that a whole bunch of physicists are actually using it exactly as the YECs and conspiracy theorists think: as just an untested and untestable supposition, which may or may not actually hold any water at all.

Yes, I realize that calling it a "theory" is more science-y sounding and good for your funding. But it devalues the whole idea of science for everyone. If we accept that some untested and untestable calculation is just as worthy of being called a "theory" with a straight face as GR or electromagnetism just because it's the pet supposition of some physicist, then basically why wouldn't Behe's pencils-up-the-nose ID idiocies be a "theory" too? I mean Behe _is_ a professor of biochemistry.

Call it the String Hypothesis, and you'd see a lot less complaints, basically.

No, this is not correct. A hypothesis is a scientific statement, possibly generalized from observations, which is subject to verification or falsification by experiment. There is no String Hypothesis.

This comment is an attempt by leftist-atheist-evolutionists to re-define the word theory in order to score some debating points with creationists. The word has been in common use for centuries, and there is little chance that everyone is going to change in order to justify censoring the ideas of an obscure biochemist.

Use of the word theory in string theory is consistent with many other usages of the terms, as you can see from examples in the dictionary.


Thursday, Sep 02, 2010
 
Hawking and the Big Bang machine
Stephen Hawking is promoting his new book, and says:
In 1915, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity solved the conundrum: space and time were not fixed backgrounds to events, but dynamic entities. And, just as there is no point further south than the South Pole, time cannot exist outside the universe. But there was a problem: Einstein's idea, which describes the very large, does not fit with the other pillar of 20th century physics - quantum theory - which describes the very small.
No, Einstein thought in 1915 that the universe had no beginning or end. Theory and evidence for a finite age of the universe came about ten years later, and Einstein did not believe until after most other astrophysicists did.

Saying that "time cannot exist outside the universe" has nothing to do with relativity, or even with science at all. There is nothing that anyone can do to prove that statement true or false. You can believe it, or disbelieve it, regardless of whether you believe in relativity.

There is also no known conflict between "Einstein's idea" and quantum mechanics. In 1915, Einstein was trying to explain the planet Mercury's perihelion doing extra revolution once every million years.

Some have asked if turning on the LHC could produce some disastrous, unexpected result. Indeed, some theories of spacetime suggest the particle collisions might create mini black holes. If that happened, I have proposed that these black holes would radiate particles and disappear. If we saw this at the LHC, it would open up a new area of physics, and I might even win a Nobel prize. But I'm not holding my breath.
No, I am not holding my breath either. No one is ever going to create a black hole in a particle accelerator, and Hawking is never going to get a Nobel prize.

Hawking seems to have reversed himself about whether God created the universe. Now he says that cosmology supports atheism.

The new book is The Grand Design.


Wednesday, Sep 01, 2010
 
Quantum crypto broken again
Nature mag reports:
Quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.

Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have now cracked it. "Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system," he says.

You can get the details here. This sounds like a repeat from 2007, when I reported a previous break.

The claims that quantum crypto is provably secure are bogus, as I have argued here, here, here, and here. The whole field seems to suffer misunderstandings about what both quantum mechanics and cryptography are all about.

Bruce Schneier tries to explain this by saying:

Just because something is secure in theory doesn't mean it's secure in practice. Or, to put it more cleverly: in theory, theory and practice are the same; but in practice, they're very different.
No, that is the wrong lesson. There are plenty of good cryptographic methods that are secure in theory and secure in practice. Quantum cryptography only promises security in some idealized model that has no obvious applicability to the real world. Its proponents claim that it is more secure than anything else. But nobody should rely on this to protect any valuable data.

Tuesday, Aug 31, 2010
 
Renewed controversy over group selection
Evolutionists have never been able to agree on whether evolution works entirely on the gene level, as Richard Dawkins claims, or whether it also works on the group level. I've mentioned this issue before here and here.

Now the NY Times reports:

Why are worker ants sterile? Why do birds sometimes help their parents raise more chicks, instead of having chicks of their own? Why do bacteria explode with toxins to kill rival colonies? In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton published a landmark paper to answer these kinds of questions. Sometimes, he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own.

For the past 46 years, biologists have used Dr. Hamilton’s theory to make sense of how animal societies evolve. They’ve even applied it to the evolution of our own species. But in the latest issue of the journal Nature, a team of prominent evolutionary biologists at Harvard try to demolish the theory.

The scientists argue that studies on animals since Dr. Hamilton’s day have failed to support it. The scientists write that a close look at the underlying math reveals that Dr. Hamilton’s theory is superfluous. “It’s precisely like an ancient epicycle in the solar system,” said Martin Nowak, a co-author of the paper with Edward O. Wilson and Corina Tarnita. “The world is much simpler without it.”

No, the ancient epicycles were not superfluous, and the world is not simpler without them. The epicycles were invented to describe the apparent retrograde motion of Mars and other planets, The epicycle corresponds to the revolution of the Earth. There is no simpler system for describing that motion, than using an epicycle or something equivalent to represent the Earth's orbit.

Richard Dawkins sticks to his position:

Edward Wilson was misunderstanding kin selection as far back as Sociobiology, where he treated it as a subset of group selection (Misunderstanding Two of my 'Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection': Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 1979). Kin selection is not a subset of group selection, it is a logical consequence of gene selection. And gene selection is (everything that Nowak et al ought to mean by) 'standard natural selection' theory: has been ever since the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s.
It is funny to see Dawkins so ideologically committed to being against group selection. He hates the theory of ethnic nepotism, for political reasons.
Richard Dawkins’ tremendous career as a science journalist has been built on his talent at translating Hamilton’s formulas into engaging prose. But he has long denied the possibility of ethnic nepotism, even though Hamilton had published an elaborate model of it the year before Dawkins published The Selfish Gene.
E. O. Wilson renounced what he previously called a paradigm shift:
I gave up. I was a convert and put myself in Hamilton's hands. I had undergone what historians of science call a paradigm shift.
Be wary of any scientist claiming to follow a paradigm shift. That means that there is no empirical proof that the new theory is any better than the old one, but he is following it like a fad anyway. In this case, he later decided that the paradigm shift was contrary to the evidence.

Monday, Aug 30, 2010
 
String theory has petered out
Amanda Peet describes string theory in this video of a lecture to a Canadian atheist group.

Her claim that string theory is falsifiable (1:20) is refuted here. She also says that they are waiting on results from the LHC, but cannot say what. She also promotes string theory in a 2003 interview.

Don't miss her arrogant answers and non-answers to questions at the end. When asked for some empirical evidence (1:21), like the starlight deflection for general relativity, she said quantum gravity and black hole entropy. She keeps asking "what's the standard of proof", even tho the questioner clearly says that he is looking for a measurement like the starlight deflection. She also made the usual ad hominem attacks against those who disagree with her.

She makes a reference to the possibility that string theory might "peter out", but it is not clear whether anyone understood this as a pun on her name. My guess is that the audience of skeptics were not too impressed, if they were really skeptics.


Tuesday, Aug 24, 2010
 
Does the past exist yet?
Robert Lanza writes:
Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light

I think that these articles are nonsense. It says:
It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past.
We do not know that there is any such thing as a particle. We only know that there are mysterious fields that look like particles when we make observations. Some when someone makes a claim about what "the particle actually did", he is choosing some interpretation of quantum mechanics, and not necessarily talking about reality. We are never sure that the particle "actually did" anything.

12 interpretations of QM are listed here. To say that these are interpretations means that no known experiment can prove that any one of them is more correct than any other.

So when you read some article that claims that some new experiment has demonstrated some metaphysical consequence of QM, the first question is whether the experiment proved the impossibility of any of those 12 interpretations. If so, then give that guy a Nobel prize. If not, then he is just elaborating some interpretation that is contrary to interpretations promoted by others. If the article does not even mention which interpretation it is talking about, then it may not have even considered the possibility that another interpretation might have a radically different conclusion.

As for whether others would agree with my response, I guess I am subscribing to Poincare's conventionalism. Others might be more realist, and insist that physics tell us what is really going on. They would be more likely to adopt one of those QM interpretations, and insist that the others are wrong and need not be discussed.

Einstein is supposed to be a great philosopher of science, but his opinions on thie subject are incoherent. Sometimes he claimed to be a conventionalist, and sometimes not.

The Lorentz contraction of special relativity had two interpretations -- that changes in the electromagnetic fields cause the molecules of the measuring rod to move closer together, or that space itself is contracting. I say that both interpretations are valid, and it is meaningless to say that one is more correct than the other.

In reading Einstein-related works, I have found that hardly anyone recognizes the simple fact that both interpretations are valid. Everyone acts as if it is obvious that Einstein's big breakthru was to disover the 2nd interpretation, while Lorentz had the 1st. However I say that Einstein never said anything of the kind, until well after Minkowski gave that 2nd interpretation in 1908. Furthermore, no one before about 1910 ever credited Einstein with having an interpretation of the contraction that was different from Lorentz. Einstein's famous 1905 paper talks about measuring rods contracting, but conspicuously avoids saying anything about why they contract.

NewScientist mag says

Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world?

Our most successful theory of nature is bewilderingly remote from reality. But fixing that may require a weirder theory still

Lubos Motl responds:
How it can be "bewilderingly remote from reality" if it is our most successful theory of Nature? It just doesn't make sense. A theory's proximity to reality is defined by its ability to successfully and accurately reproduce and predict the information about the relevant class of phenomena and objects. So it is just a logical contradiction for a successful theory of Nature to be "remote from reality".

Moreover, as long as one is doing science, there is no justification for attempts to "fix" a theory that agrees with all the observations and works perfectly consistently at the mathematical level, too.

He has a followup here.

Yes, the complaints about quantum reality are complaints that the theory has multiple interpretations. This much of Motl's rant is correct, altho he has his own goofy ideas about fixing quantum mechanics with string theory.


Monday, Aug 23, 2010
 
First They Came For The Climate Scientists
Nobel Bank of Sweden prize-winner and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman writes:
Everyone knows that the American right has problems with science that yields conclusions it doesn’t like. Climate science — which says that we face a huge global externality that requires not just government intervention, but coordinated international action (black helicopters!) has been the target of a sustained, and unfortunately largely successful, attempt to damage its credibility.
No, this is quite wrong. There is no climate science that requires any government intervention or international action.

The IPCC report does predict that sea level will right about two feet in the next century, in addition to the foot it rose in the last century. I accept this as a valid scientific prediction that is likely to come true, but it says nothing about the necessity of the drastic actions that Krugman supports.

An externality is economics jargon for a side effect. It means that when we buy gasoline and other fossil fuels, the price does not include the possible adverse effects of the resulting carbon dioxide. The increased CO2 will surely make some people better off and some people worse off. The statement that we face an externality has no scientific content; it is just a statement about how gasoline is priced.

But it doesn’t stop there. We should not forget that much of the right is deeply hostile to the theory of evolution.

And now there’s a new one (to me, anyway; maybe it’s been out there all along): it turns out that, according to Conservapedia, the theory of relativity is a liberal plot.

You may think that Krugman's main problem is that he expresses opinions outside of his expertise, but he says silly things in his own field of economics, as Steve Landsburg frequently points out.

My guess is that the Conservapedia editors will see this Krugman column as just another example of dogmatic knee-jerk leftists rushing to the defense of evolution and relativity, without much apparent understanding of what either theory is about. Climate science is important to justify expanded government powers and coordinated international action. But why does he care about evolution and relativity? It does not seem to be the science, so what is it?

The title is a Nazi name-calling analogy from Krugman. It is an example of Godwin's law, which points out how online discussions degenerate into Nazi analogies. As a comment points out, Krugman paraphrases a famous quote that starts, "They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Another comment mentions this blog.


Saturday, Aug 21, 2010
 
Get the buzz
The word buzz is one of the hardest hangman words. Only jazz and maybe some obscure words are harder, depending on how many guesses are allowed.

You can also get the hot news from Yahoo buzz, or subscribe to my wisdom on Google Buzz. The origin of dark buzz is explained here.


Friday, Aug 20, 2010
 
No way it came from an ape
The NY Times ethicist is presented with this problem:
As I was wired up and moved to the treadmill, the technician said that she was fascinated with the heart, had studied it and knew that “there is no way it came from an ape.” Then she added, “Only divine creation could have created such an organ.”
His advice is that she has an ethical obligation to report the technician to her boss!

The comment does not make much sense, as apes have hearts also. But it is a little bizarre to advocate actively trying to punish folks who don't believe in evolution.

Maybe 30% of the population does not believe that we came from apes. Get over it.


Thursday, Aug 19, 2010
 
Replace liberals with Jews
A Jewish site argues (also here) this:
Now a new generation of Einstein deniers, including some Holocaust revisionists, are launching attacks, simultaneously rejecting Einstein’s science and accusing him of stealing his ideas from others.

They point to the published work of French physicist Jules Henri Poincare and Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, which preceded Einstein’s publication by several years. These men were superb physicists (Lorentz won a Nobel Prize) and they had thought about relativity, but neither made the huge leap in imagination Einstein did, although Poincare came close and probably did influence him.

Lorentz had these huge leaps: length contraction, local time, explaining Michelson-Morley with transformations of Maxwell's equations, extending that explanation to all velocities, relativistic mass.

Poincare had these huge leaps: relativity principle, relativistic clock synchronization, E = mc2, no aether, spacetime geometry, electromagnetic covariance, gravity waves.

Einstein had nothing comparable for special relativity, and just recapitulated what Lorentz and Poincare had published years earlier. I have detailed these points on this blog, such as here and here.

While there is no overt anti-Semitism in the Conservapedia entries on Einstein, the ones on relativity are redolent with the old arguments. For instance, Schlafly writes: “The theory ... is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.”

Greg Gbur, assistant professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, argued in his blog, Skulls in the Stars, that if you “replace ‘liberals’ with ‘Jews’ in [that] sentence,” the words might as well have been written by a Nazi circa 1930s-era Germany.

Here is an example of relativity being promoted by liberals. You can also find Einstein's works on Marxist sites.

It is remarkable how strongly everyone identifies Einstein with relativity. An attack on relativity is assumed to be an attack on Einstein, and vice-versa. In reality, Conservapedia is attacking relativity and not Einstein, while I am attacking Einstein and not relativity.

There is nothing wrong with promoting relativity. I do it myself, just as I promote evolution and many other scientific ideas. There is something wrong with using it to promote a misleading world view, and to justify Nazi name-calling.

It is also very strange to see Einstein so heavily promoted for things that he did not do. The promotion is not just from Jews and liberals, but it is certainly not rooted in pure science either.

Meanwhile, physicists are expressing mixed feelings about how to react. Several refused to comment for this story because they did not want to give Schlafly credibility. But Clifford Will, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, did weigh in.

“The Internet world is full of kooks and crackpots who put out all kinds of drivel. It is pointless to attempt to refute these people with evidence, because they don't believe in evidence,” Will wrote in an e-mail from Paris.

“…People may not like relativity,” he wrote, “but the experimental and observational evidence that supports it is so overwhelming that it is now a fact of the universe.”

I previously criticized Will on relativity. Will idolizes Einstein, regardless of the contrary evidence. He does not address the reasons for crediting Lorentz and Poincare, and neither do his colleagues.

The Conservapedia arguments do have some scientific weaknesses, but hardly anyone is addressing those. Mainly, liberals seem to be upset that it is challenging their cherished icon.

Another Conservapedia-hating site says this:

The page on Einstein himself also contains some amazing deprecation, mostly by Roger Schlafly, including the following astonishing paragraph:
Many ideas and quotes are falsely attributed to Einstein. He did not invent very much of we now call special relativity. The Principle of Relativity, that the law of physics should be the same in all inertial frames, had already been published before Einstein. He did not discover the Lorentz transformation, or the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. He was not the first to propose that the speed of light is constant for all observers, or that the aether is superfluous and not observable. He was not the first to recognize and explain how special relativity causes an ambiguity in defining simultaneity. He did not combine space and time into a four-dimensional spacetime in his special relativity papers until others had been doing it for a couple of years.

Einstein was not the first to observe the equation E=mc2 as a consequence of special relativity, or to foresee its application to nuclear binding energies or antimatter annihilation. He did not foresee a nuclear chain reaction and had to be persuaded about the possibility of an atomic bomb.

Einstein did not originate the idea of using metric tensors to reconcile gravity with special relativity. He did not discover the Lagrangian formulation of general relativity, and was not the first to publish the field equations. He did not foresee the expansion of the universe, the possibility of black holes, or dark energy.

(In fairness, the statements in that paragraph cite (and spin) "references", which we have not included here. Feel free to look at the actual CP article [4].)

Even if absolutely true, however, one is instructed to remember that breakthroughs in science, as often as not, are in tiny increments that sometimes shift the entire course of thought in a subject, and to also remember Isaac Newton's invocation of the old statement: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

I guess that he is not disputing what I say in that "astonishing paragraph". Of course it is absolutely true. If Einstein did contribute some tiny increment to special relativity, what was it? No one will say today, because his contribution was so negligible. You have to go back to the papers of 1906-09 to find physicists who tried to say accurately just what Einstein added to the theory.

Wednesday, Aug 18, 2010
 
Can quantum gravity be directly measured?
Lubos Motl says the answer is no:
Today, we still lack experimental tools to directly see some qualitative effects of quantum gravity. And chances are that we always will.
He is right. The supposed incompatibility between general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics is a big myth. You can say whatever you want about quantum gravity, and no experiment will test your ideas. You can test quantum mechanics, and you can test gravity. You can even test quantum effects in a weak gravity field, with effective field theory. But we cannot test the very high energy quantum gravity that the researchers are concerned with. The subject is not scientific.

Tuesday, Aug 17, 2010
 
Overselling the human genome
Here is a new interview with the man chiefly responsible for the human genome project:
In a SPIEGEL interview, genetic scientist Craig Venter discusses the 10 years he spent sequencing the human genome, why we have learned so little from it a decade on and the potential for mass production of artificial life forms that could be used to produce fuels and other resources. ...

SPIEGEL: The genome project has been called the Manhattan Project or Moon Landing of its era. It has also been said that knowledge of the genes will change the future of humanity and become a "main driver of the world economy."

Venter: Who said that? I didn't. That was the people at the consortium.

SPIEGEL: You're wrong. You made all those statements in an interview with DER SPIEGEL in 1998. ...

SPIEGEL: The decoding of your personal genome has so far revealed little more than the fact that your ear wax tends to be moist.

Venter: That's what you say. And what else have I learned from my genome? Very little. We couldn't even be certain from my genome what my eye color was. Isn't that sad? Everyone was looking for miracle 'yes/no' answers in the genome. "Yes, you'll have cancer." Or "No, you won't have cancer." But that's just not the way it is.

SPIEGEL: So the Human Genome Project has had very little medical benefits so far?

Venter: Close to zero to put it precisely. ...

We have learned a lot from the human genome, but not as much as people think.

There is still plenty of optimism:

Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

This will take about a millennium, at our present rate of progress. Kurweil famously believes in the Technological singularity, where unlimited progress could occur in a couple of decades.

Meanwhile, dog breeds are determined by just few genes:

These seven locations in the dog genome explain about 80 percent of the differences in height and weight among breeds, said Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors.

Monday, Aug 16, 2010
 
The cause of the pertussis epidemic
The NY Times reports:
Highly contagious, spread by coughs and sneezes, pertussis is now epidemic in California, with 2,774 confirmed cases in 2010 — a sevenfold increase from last year, putting the state on track for the worst outbreak in 50 years. Seven infants have died. ...

Another factor may be the declining use of antibiotics to treat simple coughs and colds. While doctors legitimately worry that indiscriminate use of antibiotics can lead to the development of drug-resistant bacteria, it may be that in the past the drugs inadvertently cured many cases of undiagnosed pertussis.

The rise in pertussis doesn’t seem to be related to parents’ refusing to have their children vaccinated for fear of potential side effects. In California, pertussis rates are about the same in counties with high childhood vaccination rates and low ones. And the C.D.C. reports that pertussis immunization rates have been stable or increasing since 1992.

The evolutionist and other science bloggers have been pushing pro-vaccination propaganda, and warning about the overuse of antibiotics. They even claim that people overuse antibiotics because they did not learn evolution is school. Eg, the bad astronomer says:
That’s right: an almost completely preventable disease is coming back with a roar in California.
What he does not say is that it is preventable by overusing antibiotics.

Saturday, Aug 14, 2010
 
Evidence for natural selection
Here is progress in the search for evidence of natural selection in humans:
One of the problems of these studies, as Gibbons notes, is that statistics is not sufficient to show selection: “Finally, few teams have been able to prove that a particular allele actually affects the function of a trait under selection.” I think it’s unwise to say that your case for selection is conclusive without showing that the genetic variants you’re studying make a physiological difference to their carriers. And, of course, the ultimate “proof” of selection is to connect those physiological differences to reproductive output: i.e., that there really was selection.

Gibbons talks a bit about physiological studies (there aren’t many of these), but showing that genetic variants really do affect reproductive fitness is even harder. For one thing, that selection might have occurred in our ancestors, and not be going on so much today. Or, the selection could be very weak, and, though sufficient to cause significant evolution over centuries, might be undetectable in just one or two generations of an experiment.

Note how difficult it is to prove that a specific natural selection mechanism actually happens. No one doubts that natural selection happens -- that was understood long before Darwin. The question is to determine what exactly it has to do with evolution. There is no consensus on how much evolution is caused by natural selection, and how much by genetic drift or something else.

Thursday, Aug 12, 2010
 
Conservapedia on relativity
The UK NewScientist magazine follows its previous article on relativity with this:
Despite the fact that it has passed test after test, you would be hard-pressed to find a single physicist who believes that general relativity is ultimately the correct theory of the universe. That's because it conflicts with quantum mechanics and is yet to be unified with the other three forces of nature. A theory of quantum gravity such as string theory will be needed to pick up where Einstein left off. General relativity is certainly not wrong – but it's not the whole story.
The article attacks the Conservapedia Counterexamples to Relativity:
In the end there is no liberal conspiracy at work. Unfortunately, humanities scholars often confuse the issue by misusing the term "relativity". The theory in no way encourages relativism, regardless of what Conservapedia may think. The theory of relativity is ultimately not so much about what it renders relative – three dimensional space and one-dimensional time – but about what it renders absolute: the speed of light and four-dimensional space-time. Einstein himself lamented the name "relativity", wishing instead to call his theory the theory of invariance. The name change might have avoided this whole mess.
Poincare popularized the term "relativity" before Einstein ever wrote anything on the subject. Einstein soon called it the "so-called theory of relativity" in 1909. Calling it the "theory of invariance" was not Einstein's idea either, as it was Poincare who emphasized basing the theory on the invariants of the Lorentz group, not Einstein. It was Felix Klein's suggestion in 1910. Klein was a pioneer in understanding geometry in terms of transformation groups. Poincare and Minkowski (but not Einstein) understood special relativity that way.

The name relativity is from motion being relative. A basic premise is that electromagnetic experiments were not able to detect the motion of the Earth, and that only relative motion is observable.

The theory does not encourage relativism, but non-physicists use relativity and Einstein to promote all sorts of wacky ideas, as the magazine explains:

Read further and you will find this astonishing piece of information, clearly the smoking gun of the Einsteinian liberal conspiracy: "Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of 'curvature of space' to promote a broad legal right to abortion".

Wait. What? The article in question is "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What lawyers can learn from modern physics" (pdf) by Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Published in 1989 in the Harvard Law Review, the paper includes a "thank you" to Barack Obama in the acknowledgments, an unsurprising fact given that Obama was the journal's editor at the time.

In the article, Tribe uses metaphors of space-time curvature in the context of constitutional law, including an analysis of Roe v. Wade. "I do not address the subject because I am determined to bring science or mathematics into law," he writes. "Rather, my conjecture is that the metaphors and intuitions that guide physicists can enrich our comprehension of social and legal issues."

General relativity proposes that space-time is not an inert stage upon which the world plays out but rather a dynamic medium that is warped and curved by the presence of matter and in turn affects matter's motion. Tribe argues that constitutional law is likewise not only the backdrop against which the nation's affairs play out but a dynamic force that shapes those very affairs. In summary, Tribe writes, "The question is whether the state's combination of acts and omissions, rules, funding decisions and the like, so shaped the legal landscape in which women decide matters bearing on their reproductive lives as to violate the constitution's postulates of liberty and equality."

Articles do not usually thank the editor. I think that Tribe employed Obama to do some research for the article. The Tribe-Obama analogy is crackpot stuff, as previous theories also had gravity as a dynamic force.

The magazine also has an interview that argues for the usefulness of some creation science techniques:

Creation scientists take data from nature and try to reconcile it with a literal interpretation of the Bible, such as the creation of the world in six days. ...

Like evolutionists, creationists assess relationships between animals by comparing their morphology [physical characteristics] and their molecules. They continue to doubt the geologic timescale and that all life shares a common origin, but most creation scientists accept other evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and beneficial mutations. ...

I used a statistical technique called classic multidimensional scaling, which creation scientists use to quantify morphological gaps between species.

I guess some of them do use some scientific methods, even if their conclusions are far-fetched.

Wednesday, Aug 11, 2010
 
Lucy’s Kin Carved Up a Meaty Meal, Scientists Say
The NY Times reports:
As early as 3.4 million years ago, some individuals with a taste for meat and marrow — presumably members of the species best known for the skeleton called Lucy — apparently butchered with sharp and heavy stones two large animals on the shore of a shallow lake in what is now Ethiopia.
Look at the picture and decide for yourself. They did not find any tools or any Lucy or hominid bones. No Lucy tools have ever been found. All they found were a couple of animal bones with some scratch marks. It looks dubious to me.

Here is another opinion

Could the “cuts,” for example, be toothmarks from animal preadators and not hominins? We don’t for sure, of course, but I know that evolutionary anthropologists have spent a lot of time, including replicating the actions of hominins with stone tools, trying to distinguish between animal carnivory, natural abrasions, and real tool use. I don’t know a lot about this, but clearly these speculations were not off the cuff. The cuts certainly look real (see photo from yesterday)! But of course there is some dissent: Tim White, who has worked at the site for 40 years, observes that his team has never found a stone tool and that that the authors’ “claims greatly outstrip the evidence.”

Monday, Aug 09, 2010
 
Albert Einstein's hot new idea
The UK NewScientist magazine reports:
IT WAS a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
No, Minkowski was not trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea. Here is all Minkowski says about Einstein in that 1908 paper:
Lorentz called the combination t' of (t and x) as the local time (Ortszeit) of the uniformly moving electron, and used a physical construction of this idea for a better comprehension of the contraction-hypothesis. But to perceive clearly that the time of an electron is as good as the time of any other electron, i.e. t, t' are to be regarded as equivalent, has been the service of A. Einstein [ Ann. d. Phys. 891, p. 1905, Jahrb. d. Radio... 4-4-11—1907 ] There the concept of time was shown to be completely and unambiguously established by natural phenomena. But the concept of space was not arrived at, either by Einstein or Lorentz, probably because in the case of the abovementioned spatial transformations, where the (x', y') plane coincides with the x-t plane, the significance is possible that the x-axis of space some-how remains conserved in its position. ...

The fact that the world-postulate holds without exception is, I believe, the true essence of an electromagnetic picture of the world; the idea first occurred to Lorentz, its essence was first picked out by Einstein, and is now gradually fully manifest. [Indian translation]

As you can see, the credit for Einstein is fairly narrow. It is only for writing about two ideas credited to Lorentz, local time and the relativity principle (that the laws of physics are the same in different frames). Lorentz got the 1902 Nobel prize for his electrodynamics, and in part for those ideas. They were old news when Einstein first wrote about them in 1905. Minkowski denies that Einstein had the idea of spacetime.

Minkowski does not mention Poincare in that paper. His previous 1907 paper starts with Poincare's approach to 4-dimensional spacetime, and uses it for all subsequent work. When Minkowski's 1908 paper was reprinted after his death, a credit to Poincare was inserted.

The NewScientist article is about research that has nothing to do with any of Einstein's ideas. It is a common example of how he is credited for work that he did not do.


Friday, Aug 06, 2010
 
Cunningham on relativity
The English mathematician Ebenezer Cunningham wrote this in a 1909 paper:
THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY IN ELECTRODYNAMICS AND AN EXTENSION THEREOF
By E. Cunningham.
[Received May 1st, 1909]
Introductory.
1. The absence, as far as experiment can detect, of any phenomenon arising from the Earth's motion relative to the electromagnetic aether has been fully accounted for by Lorentz and Einstein, provided the hypo- thesis of electromagnetism as the ultimate basis of matter he accepted, so that the only available means of estimating the distance between two points is the measuring of the time of propagation of effects between the bodies, such propagation taking place in accordance with the equations of the electron theory. It has been proved not only within the limits of experimental accuracy, but exactly, that any actual effect is completely obscured by the fact that the observer necessarily shares in the motion of the earth, and has therefore different measures of time and space from those which he would have if he did not do so. The foundation of this theory of relativity is the set of relations subsisting between the space and time measures of two observers having a uniform relative velocity. ... [p.77]

It has been pointed out by Minkowski that in a space of four dimensions in which the coordinates are (x,y,z,ct√-1), the geometrical transform- ation employed by Einstein, is simply a finite rotational displacement of the whole space about y=0, z=0. [p.79]

Poincare pointed that out earlier in 1905, before Einstein and Minkowski had ever published anything on the subject.

I am not sure how it is possible that a leading relativity researcher in 1909 could not be aware of the leading 1905 paper on the subject. Maybe his German fluency was better and his French. But Minkowski's 1907 paper cited Poincare, so Cunningham would not have to look very hard.

More importantly, why do textbooks still get this point wrong, a century later?

Note also that Cunningham credits "Lorentz and Einstein". By 1915, he was giving Einstein more of the credit.


Wednesday, Aug 04, 2010
 
Movie celebrates ancient female mathematician
A new movie Agora tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria. It is an anti-Christian polemic set in Alexandria, Egypt, AD 415. The Slate review says:
In the movie's most spectacular set piece, the legendary library of Alexandria is destroyed by marauding Christian hordes as the pagan scholars flee with whatever scrolls they can carry. ...

But like Spartacus, this movie is engaging because it's actually about something: the love of learning, the clash between science and religious faith, and the grim fact that political change often proceeds on the foundation of mob violence and genocide. Agora engages more effectively with this kind of big historical idea than it does with human drama. The movie's most emotionally powerful moment has nothing to do with any individual character. It's the looting of the library, the burning of all those irreplaceable documents from the early years of human history, that really makes you cry.

The movie portrays Apatia as an atheist scholar who was on the brink of discovering heliocentrism and the Earth's elliptical orbit, when the Christian authorities felt threatened by scientific knowledge, and had her murdered.

This is about 99% fiction, of course. There was a scholar named Apatia who was murdered by an angry mob, but it is not known that the reasons had anything to do with science or Christianity. Nor was the library destroyed by Christians. And Apatia had nothing to do with those astronomical ideas. Elliptical orbits were first discovered 1200 years later, without any Christian objection.

The errors in this movie are explained in May 2009 and May 2010 blog posts by someone who seems to know what he is talking about. He says:

The final major invention by Amenábar which also suits his agenda is the rather fanciful idea that Hypatia was on the brink of not only proving heliocentrism when she was murdered but at establishing Keplerian elliptical planetary orbits into the bargain. The film makes reference to the fact that Aristarchus of Samos had come up with a heliocentric hypothesis in the 300s BC, and mentions a couple of reasons it was regarded as making "no sense at all" (though doesn't mention the primary one - the stellar parallax problem). But it invents a series of scenes depicting Hypatia pressing on with this idea despite these (then) not inconsiderable objections. The whole purpose of these sequences is to make the murder of Hypatia seem like more of a loss to learning at the hands of ignorant fundamentalists. ...

One IMDB reviewer certainly got the message, writing a glowing review entitled "Atheists of the all the world unite!" Another notes " Amenábar made a statement before the screening that if the Alexandria library had not been destroyed, we might have landed on Mars already." A third declares "I hope the film is appreciated and understood, and that we learn a little bit from its depiction of history so that we can't allow the destruction of art, history, knowledge, and the respect that allows civilizations to flourish." And these comments are typical. These viewers accepted all the invented pseudo historical additions to the story without question and happily swallowed the sermon they rest on.

An atheist site says:
It has just opened in a limited number of cinemas in the US to great acclaim, but has been utterly condemned by the Catholic Church.

Just days before the release last year in Europe of Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s movie, religious organisations denounced the film for promoting hatred of Christians and reinforcing false clichés about the Catholic Church. ...

Amenabar insists that the film:

Is not against Christians but rather against those who set off bombs and kill in the name of God, that is, against religious fanatics.
Apparently Amenabar was inspired by some myths promoted by Carl Sagan in PBS TV Cosmos.

Christians do not set off bombs and kill in the name of God today, and they did not kill Apatia in the name of God. It is the Mohammedans who have a long history of doing that. If he really wanted to make a movie about religious terrorists, he picked the wrong target. This movie should be treated as fiction and propaganda.

George writes:

Why do you think that they call it the Dark Ages? It is because Christian superstition and intolerance suppressed Greek and Roman science and philosophy. If the Bible is the supreme authority, then there is no need to have any other book. It was not until Galileo and Copernicus stood up to the Church that Western Civilization started to recover.
No, that is not why they call it the Dark Ages. Wikipedia says this:
When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times. ...

The 2007 television show The Dark Ages from The History Channel called the Dark Ages "600 years of degenerate, godless, inhuman behavior".

The public idea of the Middle Ages as a supposed "Dark Age" is also reflected in misconceptions regarding the study of nature during this period. The contemporary historians of science David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers discuss the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages were a "time of ignorance and superstition", the blame for which is to be laid on the Christian Church for allegedly "placing the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity", and emphasize that this view is essentially a caricature.

For instance, a claim that was first propagated in the 19th century and is still very common in popular culture is the supposition that all people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. According to Lindberg and Numbers, this claim was mistaken: "There was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".

Ronald Numbers states that misconceptions such as "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science", and "the medieval Christian church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy" are examples of widely popular myths that still pass as historical truth, although they are not supported by current historical research.

The Catholic Church has a long history of supporting the study of Aristotle and other classical non-Christian scholars. It never burned libraries or anything like that. The Greeks and Romans were in decline before the Christians came along.

I see that Numbers edited a new book on Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. The book starts with the story of Hypatia, and how anti-Christian propagandists have been distorting it since 1720.


Tuesday, Aug 03, 2010
 
Galileo was not the first observer
The NY Times reports:
Galileo’s rolling of spheres down an inclined plane four centuries ago disproved Aristotle’s notion that falling (or rolling) objects move at a constant speed. That was one of the earliest examples of using experiments to devise and test hypotheses to explain observations.
No, Aristotle never said that falling objects move at a constant speed. And ancient people were testing hypotheses 1000s of years before Galileo.

I wonder how anyone could say anything so silly. Does the reporter really think that the ancient Egyptians built those pyramids without ever testing a hypothesis?

Apparently it is conventional wisdom that Galileo was the first real scientist, and Aristotle and all those others were just inventing bogus ideas that their followers blindly accepted. That conventional wisdom is wrong.


Saturday, Jul 31, 2010
 
The quantum leap is a Marxist plot
A new BMW ad campaign says:
A quantum leap is defined as a dramatically large advance, especially in knowledge or method. ... experience this quantum leap
Not only is this not the definition, but the phrase "dramatically large advance" is nowhere on the web.

The term quantum leap comes from physics, where it is not dramatically large, and is not an advance. The earliest usage was in 1956, even tho the physics concept dates back to the 1920s. Here is a more scientific definition:

Quantum Leap: The disappearance of a subatomic particle - e.g., an electron - at one location and its simultaneous reappearance at another. The counter-intuitive weirdness of the concept results in part from the limitations of the particle metaphor in describing a phenomenon that is also in many respects a wave.
So how did the definition get so distorted? My guess is leftist propaganda. See for example this Marxist essay:
The dialectical method seeks to explain natural phenomena as the transformation of quantity into quality: a long period of slow, gradual change is interrupted at a critical point by a sudden change of state, a quantum leap, a phase transition or, to use the language of dialectics, a qualitative leap. This method of analysis was first developed by Hegel two hundred years ago and then placed on a scientific basis by Marx and Engels. But it is only in recent years, thanks to the development of chaos theory and its derivatives that it has begun to be taken seriously by scientists.
The article goes on to challenge theories for the extinction of the dinosaurs, and to argue for a crisis in capitalism.

The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote about a qualitative leap in consciousness. in the early 1800s. The German phrase was "ein qualitativer Sprung". Marx and Engels adopted Hegel's terminology about dialectical materialism. They had a pseudoscientific theory about how historical events are the dramatic and inevitable consequences of dialectical law. They used this theory to justify revolutions.

Marxists are big fans of scientific terminology, so when quantum mechanics came along they adopted the "quantum leap" to make they "qualitative leap" sound more scientific. It is not. The scientific basis for the quantum mechanical quantum leap does not support the Marxist agenda.

Suppose a BMW ad said to "experience the Marxist dialectic materialist cultural revolution" as if that were a good thing in a car. You would wonder why a German car company would misuse a bunch of commie German buzzwords to sell cars. That is what I think of the BMW quantum leap.

I previously criticized misuse of quantum leap in Feb. 2010, and noted that it was one of the top misused science cliches in July 2009, according to Wired mag readers.

Here is the opposite concept:

Natura non facit saltus (Latin for "nature does not make jumps") has been a principle of natural philosophy since at least Aristotle's time. It appears as an axiom in the works of Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays, IV, 16) and Isaac Newton, the co-inventors of the infinitesimal calculus, and is also an essential element of Charles Darwin's treatment of natural selection in his Origin of Species. The phrase comes from Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica.

The principle expresses the idea that natural things and properties change gradually, rather than suddenly. In a mathematical context, this allows one to assume that the governing equations are continuous, and also differentiable to some degree.

It then notes that some Marxists see modern day quantum mechanics as violating the principle, with its idea of a quantum leap. But quantum mechanics is formulated in terms of differential equations, just like other forms of mechanics.

Here is what Heisenberg said in 1958, as posted on a Marxist site:

When old adage `Natura non facit saltus' is used as a basis of a criticism of quantum theory, we can reply that certainly our knowledge can change suddenly, and that this fact justifies the use of the term `quantum jump'.
Note that he is not saying that nature makes the jump, but rather that our knowledge of nature changes suddenly. We could open a box and suddenly discover that Schroedinger's cat is dead. It may be uncertain whether the cat was already dead. As Henry Stapp explains:
Let there be no doubt about this key point, namely that the mathematical theory was asserted to be directly about our knowledge itself, not about some imagined-to-exist world of particles and fields.
Ideas of sudden change in biology go under names like hopeful monster and punctuated equilibrium. Some of these were promoted by Marxist evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould.

I say that a lot of Marxist wishful thinking has tricked us into accepting some of their propaganda with some bogus terminology.

Erwin Schrödinger wrote in Schroedinger 1952 that there is no such thing as a quantum jump. See part I and part II. Not everyone agreed.


Wednesday, Jul 28, 2010
 
Evolutionist attack on free will
William Egginton is disturbed by experiments that claim to show that we have no free will:
In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be.

The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

Research of this sort can seem frightening. An experiment that demonstrated the illusory nature of human freedom would, in many people’s mind, rob the test subjects of something essential to their humanity.

You can read about the monkey experiment by Joshua I. Gold & Michael N. Shadlen in a 2000 abstract, a 2003 neuroscience review paper, and a 2007 paper.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne responds:

Egginton goes on to ponder the obvious: if we don’t have free will, then not only conventional ideas about morality but also a lot of religious doctrine—especially the Christian idea of free choice between good and evil—go out the window.

He’s right, of course. ...

We simply don’t like to think that we’re molecular automatons, and so we adopt a definition of free will that makes us think we’re free. But as far as I can see, I, like everyone else, am just a molecular puppet.

Einstein was also a big believer in determinism, and that is one reason he had trouble accepting quantum mechanics.

The evolutionist logic here is that science implies determinism implies atheism. The proof is the monkey experiment.

The experiment requires the monkey to make a decision, while that decision is detected in two different ways. If the decision is detected one way a few seconds ahead of the second way, then it is assumed that the second is determined by the first. If you did not know about the first detection, then you might think that the second detection was an expression of free will. Thus something that appears to be free will is actually determined.

This reasoning is flawed, of course. It only shows that the decision making process in the monkey brain occurs earlier than you might guess. It does not say anything about free will.

Science says very little about free will. Quantum mechanics has the Free will theorem, but it does not tell us whether humans have free will.

If Prof. Coyne believes that he is just a molecular puppet, that's fine with me, but I don't think that he should be teaching that it is a consequence of evolutionist science or monkey experiments.


Tuesday, Jul 27, 2010
 
Tolman on Einstein
Here is Einstein praise from the 1917 American book, The Theory of the Relativity of Motion by Richard Chace Tolman:
Since the year 1905, which marked the publication of Einstein’s momentous article on the theory of relativity, the development of sci- entific thought has led to a complete revolution in accepted ideas as to the nature of space and time, and this revolution has in turn pro- foundly modified those dependent sciences, in particular mechanics and electromagnetics, which make use of these two fundamental concepts in their considerations. [p.5]

It was Einstein who, with clearness and boldness of vision, pointed out that the failure of the Michelson-Morley experi- ment, and all other attempts to detect motion through the ether, is not due to a fortuitous compensation of effects but is the expression of an important general principle, and the new transformation equations for kinematics to which he was led have not only provided the basis for an exact transformation of the field equations but have so completely rev- olutionized our ideas of space and time that hardly a branch of science remains unaffected. [p.195]

173. In the present chapter we shall present a four-dimensional method of expressing the results of the Einstein theory of relativity, a method which was first introduced by Minkowski, ... [p.210]

Very little of this is true. In his later years, Einstein adamantly denied that Michelson-Morley had anything to do with his 1905 work. Einstein got that "general principle" from Poincare's 1902 book, and those "new transformation equations" have always been called the Lorentz transformations since 1905 as Lorentz studied them many years before. That "four-dimensional method" was first published by Poincare, as Minkowski's earlier papers cited him.

Tolman was a little more accurate with what he co-wrote in 1909:

This possibility being excluded, the only satisfactory explanation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which has been offered is due to Lorentz,[3] who assumed that all bodies in motion are shortened in the line of their motion by an amount which is a simple function of the velocity. This shortening would produce a compensation just sufficient to offset the predicted positive effect in the Michelson-Morley experiment, and would also account for the result obtained by Trouton and Noble. It would not, however, prevent the determination of absolute motion by other analogous experiments which have not yet been tried.

Einstein[4] has gone one step farther. Because of the experiments that we have cited, and because of the failure of every other attempt that has ever been made to determine absolute velocity through space, he concludes that further similar attempts will also fail. In fact he states as a law of nature that absolute uniform translatory motion can be neither measured nor detected.

But Einstein did not go a further step at all. Here is what Poincare wrote in 1895, 10 years before Einstein:
Experiment has revealed a group of phenomena that can be summarized as follows: It is impossible to detect the absolute movement of matter, or better, the relative movement of ponderable matter in relation to the aether; all that one can find evidence of is the movement of ponderable matter in relation to ponderable matter.
The earlier post-1905 relativity papers only credit Einstein with taking an extra step, and adding to the Lorentz theory. The later papers credit him with a bold new theory.

So why did it take several years for physicists to come to the view that Einstein was boldly proposing a revolutionary idea of space and time in 1905? If he were really so bold, wouldn't they get that immediately from his paper?

I think that the answer is obvious. It is not that physicists were slow to appreciate what Einstein did. Just look at Tolman's papers. He appreciated what Einstein did. The problem is that he credits Einstein for what Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski did.

It is not so clear why Tolman would over-credit Einstein in this way. Tolman cites the others, and ought to have been familiar with their work. Einstein had not yet become an international celebrity in 1917. My guess is that Tolman came under the influence of Germans who were already touting Einstein as a great genius.

Regardless of Tolman's motives, it is instructive to see how he credits Einstein. He credits Einstein for things done earlier by others. Before 1909, Einstein was just credited with adding to Lorentz's theory. Only later did physicists imagine that Einstein had some bold new theory of spacetime, and attribute ideas to Einstein that he never said.


Wednesday, Jul 21, 2010
 
Great American discoveries
MSNBC lists:
Eight great American discoveries in science

The discovery team, headed by Tim White of the University of California of Berkeley, said Ardi may be ancestral to Lucy. Such findings have brought scientists closer to identifying the common ancestors of chimpanzees and humans.

Ardi was found in Africa, not the USA. What that team did was to blockade access to the scientific data for 17 years, while they built a case for Ardi being a missing link. Afterwards, others found evidence that Ardi was not a human ancestor at all.

The list also says:

Then, in 1929, Hubble announced that the universe is expanding, based on observations of starlight from distant galaxies. The finding formed the basis of inflationary big-bang theory.
The expansion had already been discovered in 1927 by LeMaitre in Europe. That discovery was the basis of the big bang, but not the inflationary hypothesis, which did not come until the 1980s.

There is no mention of great American discoveries such as the atom bomb, or the Michelson–Morley experiment showing that the speed of light is the same in different frames of reference. Einstein said that Michelson–Morley was crucial for the invention of special relativity, but admitted that it played no role in his own work on the subject.


Tuesday, Jul 20, 2010
 
Why scientific evidence is less valid in law
Vox Day argues:
For there are at least three reasons scientific evidence is not only considered less reliable by the courts than eyewitness testimony, but it is CORRECTLY considered less reliable than eyewitness testimony.

1. The dynamic nature of science.
2. Science is not scientific evidence.
3. Science is not, as actual scientists keep trying to remind the science fetishists, in the business of providing proof.

No, I don't think that those are the reasons at all. The main reason is that the American legal system is based on holding individuals personally accountable for their actions and testimony. Testimony from a live witness may be right or wrong, but it at least has the merit that it is understandable to the jury and the witness can be punished if he is lying.

The 6A in the Bill Of Rights says that a man has the right to face his accusers. He cannot be convicted solely based on disembodied scientific evidence. There are reasons for that. It is not that science changes too much, or that science cannot prove anything. If we authorized non-scientist judges and juries to imprison people based just on alleged evidence on a piece of paper, then soon corrupt officials would be faking those pieces of paper. Even with live testimony, a lot of supposedly scientific evidence given in court is not very scientific as it is.


Sunday, Jul 18, 2010
 
Draining the tub
A global warming advocate claims to debunk some myths:
1) Draining water spins differently in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere

It is true that there is an apparent force caused by the earth’s rotation called the Coriolis Force ... What is NOT TRUE is that the Coriolis Force causes rotation in a sink or toilet bowl.

I do not agree with this explanation. It is true that the sink effect was demonstrated under lab conditions in 1908. In my experience, most but not all Northern hemisphere sinks drain counter-clockwise. So either I have been lucky, or this website is wrong.

There are a lot of websites on this issue, but none answer the following empirical question: Is there an ordinary off-the-self sink or bathtub that consistently drains counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern?

The magnitude of the applicable Coriolis force is small, but there is also an instability in the fluid flow equations. Only an experiment can settle this issue in a convincing manner.

The Myth No. 5 seems to be just a gripe about terminology, not science.

I am trying to get to the bottom of this bathtub issue. In the meantime, I am not impressed with these global warming blowhards who are always lecturing everyone about science. The site does not have a scientific resolution of the water draining question.


Thursday, Jul 15, 2010
 
The Greatest Physics Paper
Discover Magazine listed in 2006 the five greatest physics papers, based on a reader survey:
(1) A. Einstein, Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitaetstheorie, Annalen der Physik 49 (1916), 769-822.

(2) I. Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. 1687

(3) P. A. M. Dirac, The quantum theory of the electron, Proc. R. Soc. London A 117 610-612 (1928); The quantum theory of the electron Part II Proc. R. Soc. London A 118 351-361 (1928).

(4) A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? Phys Rev 47, 777 (1935).

(5) E. Noether, “Invariante Variationsprobleme,” Nachr. v. d. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen 1918, pp235-257.

The Einstein 1916 paper is the more famous general relativity paper. It had a similar content to one that Hilbert published at the same time. I think that a much more important general relativity paper was written by Grossmann in 1913. More important cosmological models were found by Schwarzchild, De Sitter,

The Einstein 1935 paper was just a philosophical comment on an aspect of quantum mechanics. It is widely cited by people who don't believe in quantum mechanics, but it did not influence much other physics. Here is a recent video by David Gross explaining that a lot of people have done experiments over the last couple of decades trying to show that there is some merit to Einstein's 1935 argument, but all such attempts have failed. Gross got the 2004 Nobel prize in physics, but not for string theory, which is his specialty now.

I liked Lee Smolin's vote:

Its hard to disagree with the choise of Newton’s Principia, but here are two for second best:

The Astronomia Nova, by Johannes Kepler, 1609, which proposed his first two laws. This one book combined bold physical intuition and insight (including the first proposal that the orbits were the result of a force from the Sun to the planets) with painstaking calculation and data analysis, leading to momentuous and far reaching conclusions.

The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), Galileo, April 1610 which reported on the discoveries he had just made with the telescope, including the mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter and the existence of many more stars. The book is brief, written in an elegant but straightforward style, and it electrified both academics and ordinary people throughout Europe and beyond. By both introducing a new technology and giving the first convincing evidence for Copernican astronomy, this book made the Newtonian revolution inevitable.

No publication in physics, even by Newton or Einstein, has so decisively and abruptly altered the direction of physics than either of these books.

Kepler and Galileo were not at the same level. Kepler's book was hard science, while Galileo's was soft science. These two books demonstrated the biggest advance in astronomy in 1300 years, by far.

Tuesday, Jul 13, 2010
 
String theorist denies gravity
The NY Times reports on a goofy new theory of gravity:
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases. ...

Dr. Verlinde is not an obvious candidate to go off the deep end. He and his brother Herman, a Princeton professor, are celebrated twins known more for their mastery of the mathematics of hard-core string theory than for philosophic flights. ...

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. ...

“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”

The string theorists have already gone off the deep end. They are the ones who are always claiming that string theory implies gravity, but the claim is bogus. So it makes sense that one of them would deny gravity.

Monday, Jul 12, 2010
 
The Democrat war on science
Adler writes:
The Bush Administration was often accused of waging a “war on science” ... So a “pro-science,” Democratic Administration would change things, right?  Not really.  As the Los Angeles Times reports, allegations of science politicization persist.  “We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” says Jeffrey Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
It will be interesting to see how the Bush-hating science activists respond to this.

Fox News reports:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden revealed his plans to improve relations between America's space exploration agency and the Muslim world to Al Jazeera before Congress, the Washington Examiner reported.

Bolden called a couple of lawmakers with the news on June 28, after his interview with the Middle East news organization but before it aired, the newspaper reported.

"He ran down some of the things from the president's new space policy, and mentioned outreach to Muslims," Rep. Pete Olson, the top Republican on the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics recalled to the newspaper. "That stunned me. I didn't believe it."

Bush did not do anything like this.

Sunday, Jul 11, 2010
 
Einstein was not humble
Sepp Hasslberger writes:
A committee of scientists hailed professor Albert Einstein (1879-1955) as the most important scientist of the 20th century. Another committee of 100 humanistic thinkers and religious leaders chose Einstein's own essays on the theory of relativity as the most important humanistic work in the same century! At his death in 1955 president Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed him as the most important scientist of the century and the most humble man that ever lived, 45 years before the century was closed (1)

1. Beckhard, A. Albert Einstein. Ernst G Mortens Publ., Oslo,1962

No, Einstein was not humble. He was an extreme egomaniac. He spent his whole life seeking credit and publicity for himself, in a way that was far in excess of what was typical for scientists. This should be apparent to anyone who has read any of the Einstein biographies.

Hasslberger also has many links to people who say that Einstein was wrong because of various alleged inconsistencies in relativity. There are no such inconsistencies. Those people all have some mathematical misunderstanding. The consistency of relativity can be proved. The theory may someday proved to be inaccurate for some reason, but it will take some new experiment to prove it.

Here is a NASA page about Einstein being wrong, but it really has nothing to do with Einstein. It is only vaguely related to the twin paradox, but even that has little to do with Einstein.

Einstein is sometimes said to be humble based on quotes like this:

Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
But this is just Einstein saying that he is not greater than God. What he did not do was to reasonably credit his fellow scientists and mathematicians.

He is another claim that Einstein was humble:

In his usual humble way, Einstein explained how he reinvented physics: "I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of Relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up." On Relativity, he said: "Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality."
This is an attempt to get credit for what he did not do. Einstein did not invent relativity, and he had no new ideas about space and time. You can read Einstein's famous 1905 paper to see what he is claiming. He has no references to previous work. He presents the work of others as if it is his own. And he does not claim to have a new theory of space and time as Minkowski claimed in 1908. After Minkowski died in 1909, Einstein got famous by claiming to have invented what Minkowski published.

Friday, Jul 09, 2010
 
String theorists say God without blushing
Physicist Michio Kaku writes:
Einstein said that the harmony he sees could not have been an accident. ... I work in something called String Theory which makes the statement that we are reading the mind of God. It’s based on music or little vibrating strings thus giving us particles that we see in nature. The laws of chemistry that we struggled with in high school would be the melodies that you can play on these vibrating strings. The Universe would be a symphony of these vibrating strings and the mind of God that Einstein wrote about at length would be cosmic music resonating through this nirvana… through this 11 dimensional hyperspace -— that would be the mind of God. We physicists are the only scientists who can say the word “God” and not blush.
Kaku says a lot of kooky things without blushing. He is probably the leading physics popularizer today. None of this stuff has any connection with reality. Physicists should repudiate some of this nonsense because Kaku is making them look silly.

Wednesday, Jul 07, 2010
 
Natural selection has not explained giraffes
Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have cited the giraffe as proof of natural selection. But this has never been scientifically demonstrated, as pointed out here:
Most people assume that giraffes' long necks evolved to help them feed. If you have a long neck, runs the argument, you can eat leaves on tall trees that your rivals can't reach. But there is another possibility. The prodigious necks may have little to do with food, and everything to do with sex.

The evidence supporting the high-feeding theory is surprisingly weak. Giraffes in South Africa do spend a lot of time browsing for food high up in trees, but elsewhere in Africa they don't seem to bother, even when food is scarce.

SciAm blogger John Horgan writes:
The philosopher Daniel Dennett once called the theory of evolution by natural selection "the single best idea anyone has ever had." I'm inclined to agree. But Darwinism sticks in the craw of some really smart people. I don't mean intelligent-designers (aka IDiots) and other religious ignorami but knowledgeable scientists and scholars.

Take, for example, the philosopher Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini of the University of Arizona in Tucson. In What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, reviewed here), these self-described atheists argue that the theory of natural selection is "fatally flawed." ...

I lump Darwin's secular critics into two camps: Some, such as the left-leaning biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (who are cited by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini), fear the political implications of Darwinian theory. If we accept evolutionary explanations of human nature, they suggest, we may come to believe that many insidious modern "-isms"—unbridled capitalism, racism, sexism and militarism—were highly probable outcomes of evolution and thus not easily subject to change. Given how genetic theories have been employed in the past, these concerns have merit.

Other critics object to Darwinism for precisely the opposite reason. They fear that evolutionary theory, even when buttressed by modern genetics and molecular biology, does not make reality probable enough. ...

Early in his career, the philosopher Karl Popper (yes, cited by F and P-P) called evolution via natural selection "almost a tautology" and "not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program." Attacked for these criticisms, Popper took them back. But when I interviewed him in 1992, he blurted out that he still found Darwin's theory dissatisfying. "One ought to look for alternatives!" Popper exclaimed, banging his kitchen table.

Natural selection seems to give a satisfying explanation for giraffes, but you probe a little deeper, and you learn that it really explains nothing at all about giraffes. I agree with Popper that it is more of a metaphysical research program.

Monday, Jul 05, 2010
 
Weyl on Einstein
The great mathematician Hermann Weyl starts his 1922 book, Space-Time-Matter, with this:
EINSTEIN'S Theory of Kelativity has advanced our ideas of the structure of the cosmos a step further. is as if a wall which separated us from Truth has and greater depths are now exknowledge, regions of which we had not even a presentiment. It has brought us much nearer to grasping the plan that underlies all physical happening. ...

Space and time are commonly regarded as the forms of existence of the real world, matter as its substance. A definite portion of matter occupies a definite part of space. It is in the composite idea of motion that these three fundamental conceptions enter into inti-mate relationship. Descartes defined the objective of the exact sciences as consisting in the description of all happening in terms of these three fundamental conceptions, thus referring them to motion. Since the human mind first wakened from slumber, and to give itself free rein, it has never ceased to feel the profoundly mysterious nature of time-consciousness, of the progression of the world in time, -- of Becoming. It is one of those ultimate metaphysical problems which philosophy has striven to elucidate and unravel at every stage of its history. The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science "more geometrico". Matter was imagined to be a substance involved in every change, and it was thought that every piece of matter could be measured as a quantity, and that its characteristic expression as a "substance" was the Law of Conservation of Matter which asserts that matter remains constant in amount throughout every change. This, which has hitherto represented our knowledge of space and matter, and which was in many quarters claimed by philosophers as a priori knowledge, absolutely general and necessary, stands to-day a tottering structure. First, the physicists in the persons of Faraday and Maxwell proposed the "electromagnetic field", contradistinction to matter, as a reality of a different category. Then, during the last century, the mathematician, following a differ-ent line of thought, secretly undermined belief in the evidence of Euclidean Geometry. And now, in our time, there has been un- loosed a cataclysm which has swept away space, time, and matter hitherto regarded as the firmest pillars of natural science, but only to make place for a view of things of wider scope, and entailing a deeper vision.

This revolution was promoted essentially by the thought of one man, Albert Einstein.

This is exaggerated, but I guess that it reflects some of the excitement about relativity at the time. Weyl must have been a buddy of Einstein to say such silly things. The book does not mention Poincare or Grossmann. I would take his praise for Einstein more seriously if he some specific arguments as to why Einstein's relativity work was any better than that of the others. But he does not seem to make any attempt to be historically accurate.

Here is how he explains special relativity:

Lorentz and Einstein recognised that not only equation (16) [4D wave equation] but also the whole system of electromagnetic laws for the aether has this property of invariance, namely, that these laws are the ex- pression of invariant relations between tensors which exist in a four- dimensional affine space whose co-ordinates are t, xl, x2, x and upon which a metrical structure the form (17). [p.165]
But this is false. Neither Lorentz nor Einstein had 4-dimensional space, or tensors, or the metric structure. They had primitive notions of invariance, but not the notion that you would expect.

Then he gives Einstein all the credit, but acknowledges that the big ideas came from Minkowski:

The solution of Einstein (vide note 6, 1905), which at one stroke overcomes all difficulties, is then this : the world is a four-dimensional affine space whose metrical structure is determined by a non-definite quadratic form which has one negative and three positive dimensions. ... The adequate mathematical formulation of Einstein's discovery was first given by Minkowski (vide note 7, 1908) : to him we are indebted for the idea of four-dimensional world-geometry, on which we based our argument from the outset. [p.173]
This doesn't make any sense. If Minkowski discovered the four-dimensional world-geometry in 1908, then how did Einstein use it to solve a paradox in 1905? Einstein did not, of course.

Here is some more over-the-top praise for Einstein:

The physical purport of this is that we are to discard our belief in the objective meaning of simultaneity; it was the great achievement of Einstein in the field of the theory of knowledge that he banished this dogma from our minds, and this is what leads us to rank his name with that of Copernicus. [p.174]
Poincare wrote about this 5 years earlier in 1900. He credited Lorentz with the closely related concept of local time.
We are indebted to Minkowski for recognising clearly that the fundamental equations for moving bodies are determined uniquely by the principle of relativity if Maxwell's theory for matter at rest is taken for granted. He it was, also, who formulated it in its final form (vide note 12). [p.196]
Yes, Minkowski realized this clearly in 1908, as did Poincare in 1905. Lorentz and Einstein did not. Einstein's relativity was not sufficient to deduce the theory of moving bodies from the theory of matter at rest.

It is strange that Weyl never mentions Poincare. Perhaps Weyl preferred to read German papers. It is not possible that he had not heard of Poincare's contributions.

It is also strange that Weyl give Einstein so much credit for special relativity when the book's arguments come from Lorentz or Minkowski.

Perhaps Weyl is one of those responsible for falsely inflating Einstein's reputation. A lot of people read Weyl's book, and figured that he knew what he was talking about.

I edited this paragraph from the Wikipedia article on the Lorentz transformation:

The Lorentz transformation was originally the result of attempts by Lorentz and others to explain observed properties of light propagating in what was presumed to be the luminiferous aether; Albert Einstein later reinterpreted the transformation to be a statement about the nature of both space and time, and he independently re-derived the transformation from his postulates of special relativity.
It is amazing that people say such nonsense. Maybe it partially came from Weyl's book. The Lorentz transformation had nothing to do with the aether. Einstein did not make it a statement about the nature of both space and time any more than anyone else, and he did not "independently" re-derive it. By his own admission, he learned it from Lorentz, altho he denies that he read Lorentz's later papers.

Weyl was a great genius, and probably understood relativity better than anyone at the time. He is right that the key concepts are the 4D geometry, indefinite metric, and tensors. Lorentz did not have these concepts, and Einstein was no better. Weyl's comments about Einstein are historically inaccurate because it is evident from Einstein's papers that he did not understand those concepts until after everyone else did. Weyl was a mathematician and theoretical physicist, not a historian.


Friday, Jul 02, 2010
 
Fastest Case of Human Evolution
More evidence that humans are still evolving:
Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

Just a few years ago, evolutionists said that this was impossible.

The paper is also claiming genes for long life:

Scientists studying the genomes of centenarians in New England say they have identified a set of genetic variants that predicts extreme longevity with 77 percent accuracy.
You'll want to wait for that to get replicated.

Update: (July 9, 2010) I am not the only one who is suspicious of that last study. The NY Times just reported:

A study on the genetics of centenarians that was published last week in Science, a leading scientific journal, has come under criticism from geneticists who say it has obvious weaknesses, is probably incorrect and should not have been published in a premier journal.

The study, which received broad press coverage, said that 150 genetic variants predictive of longevity had been identified among New England centenarians and that a test based on those variants could predict who would live to extreme old age.

This is a funny subject. There is wild enthusiasm for bogus results, and a strange reluctance to admit the obvious. The journals should require more evidence for these over-simplistic genetic explanations, because so many of them have failed.

Tuesday, Jun 29, 2010
 
Dirac had Einstein's disease
Scientific American magazine has temporarily reprinted The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature by Paul Dirac in 1963:
In this article I should like to discuss the development of general physical theory: how it developed in the past and how one may expect it to develop in the future. One can look on this continual development as a process of evolution, a process that has been going on for several centuries.

The first main step in this process of evolution was brought about by Newton. Before Newton, people looked on the world as being essentially two-dimensional-the two dimensions in which one can walk about-and the up-and-down dimension seemed to be something essentially different. Newton showed how one can look on the up-and-down direction as being symmetrical with the other two directions, by bringing in gravitational forces and showing how they take their place in physical theory. One can say that Newton enabled us to pass from a picture with two-dimensional symmetry to a picture with three-dimensional symmetry.

Einstein made another step in the same direction, showing how one can pass from a picture with three-dimensional symmetry to a picture with four dimensional symmetry. Einstein brought in time and showed how it plays a role that is in many ways symmetrical with the three space dimensions. ...

The special theory of relativity, which Einstein introduced, requires us to put all the laws of physics into a form that displays four-dimensional symmetry.

I am not sure which is goofier -- the Newton step or Einstein's.

Einstein missed the idea of a 4-dimensional symmetry. He used the Lorentz transformation, just like Lorentz and others years before, but he did not have the idea of a 4-dimensional spacetime or a symmetry group in 1905. He did not even understand these ideas when Poincare and Minkowski published them, and did not appreciate them until at least 1908 when lots of physicists did.

Dirac had Einstein's disease, and searched for grand top-down theories without paying much attention to experiment or the work of others:

This view provides us with another way in which we can hope to make advances in our theories. Just by studying mathematics we can hope to make a guess at the kind of mathematics that will come into the physics of the future. A good many people are working on the mathematical basis of quantum theory, trying to understand the theory better and to make it more powerful and more beautiful. If someone can hit on the right lines along which to make this development, it may lead to a future advance in which people will first discover the equations and then, after examining them, gradually learn how to apply them. It may well be that the next advance in physics will come about along these lines: people first discovering the equations and then needing a few years of development in order to find the physical ideas behind the equations. My own belief is that this is a more likely line of progress than trying to guess at physical pictures.

Of course, it may be that even this line of progress will fail, and then the only line left is the experimental one. Experimental physicists are continuing their work quite independently of theory, collecting a vast storehouse of information.

Dirac is famous for his early work, before he developed this attitude. Like Einstein, he wasted the later part of his life on dead-end ideas.

SciAm has podcasts on Dirac here and here.

Here is an amusing 1929 Dirac interview:

"What do you like best in America?", says I.

"Potatoes," says he.

"Same here," says I. "What is your favorite sport?"

"Chinese chess," says he. ...

"This is the most important thing yet, doctor," says I. "It shows that me and you are more alike than I thought. And now I want to ask you something more: They tell me that you and Einstein are the only two real sure-enough high-brows and the only ones who can really understand each other. I wont ask you if this is straight stuff for I know you are too modest to admit it. But I want to know this --- Do you ever run across a fellow that even you can't understand?"

"Yes," says he.

"This well make a great reading for the boys down at the office," says I. "Do you mind releasing to me who he is?"

"Weyl," says he.

Hermann Weyl may well have been the greatest genius actively working at the time. He produced at a higher level than Dirac or Einstein. He was primarily a mathematician but he wrote seminal books on relativity and quanturm mechanics. I will post some of his funny ideas on relativity.

Sunday, Jun 27, 2010
 
Bogus arguments for supersymmetry
Czech string theorist Lubos Motl writes:
By far the most important argument in favor of supersymmetry is the fact that it seems to be implied by string theory, the only known - and, most likely, the only mathematically possible - consistent unifying theory of fundamental forces including gravity.
No, string theory does not unify any of the forces, and has not been shown to be consistent. If that is not wacky enough, here is his second most important argument for supersymmetry:
The cosmological constant problem has often been presented as the greatest mystery of the contemporary high-energy physics. However, the role of supersymmetry has often been obscured.

In the Planck units, the observed cosmological constant is very tiny, something like 10^{-123}. An easy way to cancel the cosmological constant would be to have an exact supersymmetry. In that case, arguments showing that the C.C. is still equal to zero can work. The vacuum graphs (loops) with bosons would cancel against their superpartners.

However, SUSY is broken and the SUSY breaking scale is at least 300 GeV or so. Is that enough to make the cosmological constant tiny?

Well, it's not. The most natural value of the cosmological constant is something like 10^{-60} times the natural value that you would predict from the SUSY breaking at 300 GeV. And SUSY breaking can't be much lower than 300 GeV because the superpartners would otherwise be easily seen without big colliders - but they're not seen.

So with SUSY, the numerical problem survives. In fact, SUSY makes things more controllable so the statement that the natural value of the C.C. is different than the observed one becomes even more justifiable by mathematics.

Nevertheless, there is one point that pretty much everyone overlooks: 10^{-60} is less unnatural than 10^{-123}. By requiring low-energy SUSY, the fine-tuning problem for the cosmological constant has been reduced by 63 orders of magnitude or so. So much (10^{63} times) higher a fraction of the vacua with low-energy SUSY have a chance to predict a tiny enough vacuum energy so that it agrees with the observations.

Only a string theorist would brag about an experimental prediction that is only wrong by 63 orders of magnitude.

The Asymtotia string theorist blogger writes:

Here’s the really odd thing about all this (and an explanation of the post title): While this is a school on Quantum Gravity, after talking with the students for a while one learns that in most cases the little they’ve heard about string theory is often essentially over 20 years out of date and almost always totally skewed to the negative, to the extent that many of them are under the impression that string theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity at all! It is totally bizarre,
They are right. String theory has nothing to do with quantum gravity. I challenged him to cite the scientific paper that shows some connection, and he ignored it. There are string theorists who speculate that they may someday solve the problem of quantum gravity, but they have almost nothing so far, unless you want to count being wrong by 63 decimal places.

Friday, Jun 25, 2010
 
Stein on Poincare
Howard Stein wrote an unpublished essay on Physics and Philosophy Meet: the Strange Case of Poincaré:
Let me begin with a remark about the culminating event, Poincaré’s memoir of 1905/6 on the dynamics of the electron. I am by no means the first one to comment on that paper: there is a well known controversy over the question whether or not it de- serves to be considered as containing a statement of the special theory of relativity -- and if not, why not? -- i.e., the question, how does Poincaré’s theory differ from Einstein’s? That such a controversy should be possible at all is certainly a little odd; so prima facie, the case is strange. But I have not seen it pointed out just how strange; I know of nothing like it in the entire history of physics. There have been many instances of work inade- quately appreciated at first, on account of what might be called philosophical precon- ceptions or prejudices; but here we have to deal with a great work by a great scientist and philosopher of science whose own author failed to appreciate its true worth.
I think Stein is correct that there is no other example in the history of science like Poincare and relativity. There are lots of examples of geniuses who did get credit because their work was ignored. But Poincare was not ignored, he published more of the theory than Einstein, and he continues to be downplayed by physicists and historians to this day.

Stein goes on to discuss Poincare's physics and philosophy, and why the Poincare story is puzzling. He says Poincare did not believe in the aether, and objected to any argument depending on the aether. But "he does not suggest (explicitly, at any rate) that an electromagnetic theory of light can be formulated without an ether altogether." Stein attributes this to "Poincaré’s philosophical mistake", and explains:

And this is the crucial difference, as I see it, between Poincaré’s relation to the special theory of relativity and Einstein’s. Both of them discovered this theory -- and did so independently. So far as its mathematical structure is concerned, Poincaré’s grasp of the theory was in some important respects superior to Einstein’s. But Einstein “took the theory seriously” in the sense that he looked to it for NEW INFORMATION about the physical world -- that is, in Poincaré’s language, he regarded it as “fertile”: as a source of new “real generalizations” -- of empirically testable consequences. And in doing so, Einstein attributed physical significance to the basic notions of the theory itself in a way that Poincaré did not.
If Stein were correct, then it would indeed be puzzling that Poincare could discover relativity and not understand it. Stein justifies his conclusion by saying that Einstein found in 1915 that relativity affects the Mercury perihelion, and that Einstein badmouthed Poincare in 1911.

Stein has many references to Poincare's 1908 book, but obviously did not notice that it proposes using relativity to explain that Mercury perihelion deviation. Poincare was 7 years ahead of Einstein, even on Stein's best example.

It is absurd to suggest that Einstein took the physical applications of relativity more seriously. The best relativity experiments of the time were those of Kaufmann and others on relativistic mass. Those started in 1901, before Einstein said anything on the subject. Poincare considers them carefully in his 1905 paper, and admits that they might prove the theory wrong. Einstein ignores such matters.

Einstein badmouthing Poincare says more about Einstein than Poincare. Einstein obviously felt very threatened by Poincare, because recognition of Poincare's originality would be very damaging to his own reputation. It is bizarre for Stein to cite this Einstein remark as evidence that Einstein had some better understanding than Poincare. Stein could only say something so silly if he had a basic premise that Einstein was omniscient.

It seems to me that Stein is just applying his own philosophical prejudices. Even if he were right, he is still just saying that Poincare should be denied credit for relativity because of some obscure philosophical issues.

Much as these folks try, they are unable to give a coherent argument for crediting Einstein. Stein even has to add a footnote at the end of his essay admitting that he has had trouble convincing people that Poincare made a mistake, because there is no clear explanation of just what the mistake was.

Why would anyone be convinced by Stein's argument? Stein is essentially saying that Poincare independently discovered relativity theory and had a superior grasp of the theory, but Einstein should get the credit because of some philosphical argument that takes 24 pages to explain. Regardless of what that argument is, it would make more sense to credit Poincare with relativity, and credit Einstein with that philosophical argument, if indeed Einstein had some sort of superior philosophical view. But then Einstein would not be the world's greatest genius if all he did was to take Poincare's theory more seriously and to attribute physical significance to it.


Wednesday, Jun 23, 2010
 
The hunt for the God particle
The UK Guardian reports:
The idea of a hidden world might sound absurd, but physicists have good reason to believe it exists. Even with today's most advanced telescopes, astronomers can see only 4% of what makes up our cosmic neighbourhood. The rest is invisible to us, revealing itself only by the effects it has on the galaxies we can see. Around 70% of the unseen universe is labelled as "dark energy", a mysterious force that drives the expansion of the universe, making galaxies race away from us. The remaining quarter is chalked up as "dark matter", an obscure substance that clings to galaxies and exerts an unmistakable gravitational pull on them. The word "dark" means we cannot see it, but it also means scientists haven't the faintest clue what it is. ...

"Once you start considering these ideas actively, there's no theoretical reason to rule out a very interesting, dynamic and diverse dark or hidden world," says Neal Weiner, a physicist at New York University. "It leads to all sorts of conversations about the possibilities of dark people and dark planets. Now that is extremely unlikely, but it's something to think about. Once you open the box, it's not obvious where it will end." ...

The uncertainty over what exists in the hidden world has done nothing to dampen physicists' enthusiasm for the idea. John March-Russell, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, says proof of a hidden world could become the central plank of a scientific revolution that rivals any in history. When Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the solar system in the 16th century, and when Charles Darwin described evolution in the 19th century, they both knocked humans down a peg or two. The discovery of a hidden world would force us to reassess our place once more. The cosmos as we know it – with all its stars and planets – might turn out to be nothing more than a mediocre microcosm of a far richer and more complicated universe.

"Just as the Copernican revolution told us that the Earth isn't special, the same could be true for everything that we've so far discovered," says March-Russell. "All of this stuff around us, the stuff of our reality, is it the dominant and most complex part of the universe? It might not be."

This nonsense about knocking human down a peg comes up a lot. I call it the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian pedestal principle. I posted about it here, here, and here. Dark energy is probably the quantum vacuum, or what used to be called the aether. Dark matter is probably some sort of heavy neutrino. Finding these will not knock man off the pedestal.

There is an embarrassing correction at the end. The original said:

When Copernicus put the Earth at the center of the solar system in the 16th century, and when Charles Darwin described evolution in the 19th century, they both knocked humans down a peg or two.
The correction is still not right. Copernicus put the Sun near the center of the universe, but not at the center.

Tuesday, Jun 22, 2010
 
Latest Superstring Revolution
The June 2010 Scientific American Magazine reports:
"Twistor" Theory Reignites the Latest Superstring Revolution
A simple twist of fate: An old idea from Roger Penrose excites string theorists

In the late 1960s the renowned University of Oxford physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose came up with a radically new way to develop a unified theory of physics. Instead of seeking to explain how particles move and interact within space and time, he proposed that space and time themselves are secondary constructs that emerge out of a deeper level of reality. But his so-called twistor theory never caught on, and conceptual problems stymied its few proponents. Like so many other attempts to unify physics, twistors were left for dead.

In October 2003 Penrose dropped by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., to visit Edward Witten, the doyen of today’s leading approach to unification, string theory. Expecting Witten to chastise him for having criticized string theory as a fad, Penrose was surprised to find that Witten wanted to talk about his forgotten brainchild.

A few months later Witten posted a dense 97-page paper that tied together twistors and strings—bringing twistors back to life and impressing even the harshest critics of string theory. In the past few years theorists have built on Witten’s work and rethought what space and time are. They have already spun off calculational techniques that make child’s play of the toughest problems in ordinary particle physics. “I have never been more excited about physics in my life,” says string theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed, who recently moved to the institute from Harvard University to immerse himself in the emerging field. “It is developing at a blistering pace right now, with a group of roughly 15 people in the world working on it day and night.”

The history of string theory is marked by revolutions. There is never any progress in relating string theory to the real world or in making testable predictions. Just revolutions. I thought that the landscape was the third string theory revolution, but maybe it is twistor duality.

You know a subject is bogus when its leaders are always talking about revolutions and paradigm shifts.

One reader comments:

This is yet another instance where nonsensical speculations promoted by influential theorists fail to make connection with physical reality. There is no shred of observational evidence that what this article tries to sell has any merit whatsoever. Hypotheses that cannot be falsified belong to pseudo-science.
Another comment:
One suggestion: I would recommend referring to these various concepts which have not yet been experimentally tested as "hypotheses" or "concepts" rather than "theories", at least in public.

We already have enough trouble in the schools, with people of a certain persuasion claiming that evolution is "just a theory", and creationism is "creation science". As I said, just a suggestion.

No, it is a mistake to describe string theory as something that has not yet been experimentally tested. It has no hypotheses waiting to be tested. If this commenter is so concerned about creationism masquerading as science, why isn't he similarly concerned about string theory? The answer is that the string theorists are all atheists.

There are things that string theorists argue about, as you can see in this 2004 Smolin-Susskind debate.

For the most part, string theorists refuse to debate their critics. The popular physics preprint server has even been configured to show trackbacks to blogs supporting string, but not to the Not Even Wrong blog.


Monday, Jun 21, 2010
 
Only 20k human genes
I have commented before that the Human Genome Project vastly overestimated the number of human genes. Now Hawks explains:
While doing some other research, I ran across a remarkable short paper by James Spuhler, "On the number of genes in man," printed in Science in 1948.

We've been hearing for the last ten years how the low gene count in humans -- only 20,000 or so genes -- is "surprising" to scientists who had previously imagined that humans would have many more genes than this.

So here's the next to the last line of Spuhler's article:

On the basis of these speculations there are then some 19,890-30,420 gene loci in man.
Wow. 50 years of research, billions of dollars, many Nobel prizes, stunning technological advances, and a worse human gene count than a 1948 estimate. The project leaders should have just admitted that they were not really finding the genes.

Thursday, Jun 17, 2010
 
Wisdom of Feynman
From another blog:
"I do not understand why journalists and others want to know about the latest discoveries in physics even when they know nothing about the earlier discoveries that give meaning to the latest discoveries"

Richard Feynman (quoted by G.F.Giudice, "A Zeptospace Odyssey", Oxford University Press 2010)


Monday, Jun 14, 2010
 
No medical cures from human genome project
The popular leftist-atheist-evolutionist blog Pharyngula writes:
Nicholas Wade of the NY Times has written one of those stories that make biologists cringe — it just gets so much wrong. It's a look back at the human genome project, and I was turned off at the first paragraph. ... he makes this error-filled statement:>
The barely visible roundworm needs 20,000 genes that make proteins, the working parts of cells, whereas humans, apparently so much higher on the evolutionary scale, seem to have only 21,000 protein-coding genes.
Humans aren't high on the evolutionary scale…there is no evolutionary scale. We aren't the pinnacle of anything. It's also weird to see people still expressing astonishment that we "only" have about 20,000 genes.
What is astonishing is that evolutionist professors can deny that humans are high on the evolutionary scale.

Wade also says:

… despite all the hype, the contribution of the genome to human health has been pretty negligible. In other words, from a purely medical point of view, there isn’t much to celebrate.
The human genome project is loved and hated for the same reason -- it is a reductionist approach to the never-ending nature-nuture debate.

Sunday, Jun 13, 2010
 
Naming denialists
Megan Scudellari writes in the British journal Nature:
Scientists regularly debate hypotheses and interpretations, sometimes feverishly. But in the public sphere, a different type of dissension is spreading through media outlets and online in an unprecedented way—one that challenges basic concepts held as undeniable truths by most researchers. 'Science denialism' is the rejection of the scientific consensus, often in favor of a radical and controversial point of view. Here, we list what we see as a few of today's most vocal denialists spreading ideas that counter the consensus in health fields.
This is a scurrilous approach for a scientific journal. Some of those listed back up what they say with cites to scientific articles. They have legitimate opinions based on the research they cite. If they are wrong, then Nature could publish an article demonstrating their error. But it is not scientific to just publish an article with name-calling about how they are in a minority.

See Michael Fumento's reply.

It is true that the BMI of people who live the longest is in the overweight range, that swine flu was declared a pandemic only by changing the definitions, and the optimistic mainstream predictions for embryonic stem cell therapies have failed. We need people pointing these things out, without the science establishment branding them denialists.


Saturday, Jun 12, 2010
 
Vladimir I. Arnold dies
From Arnold's obituary:
A similar approach can also be applied to the motion of planets. If Earth were the only planet to circle the Sun, its orbit would follow a precise elliptical path, but the gravity of the other planets disturbs the motion. Scientists found that it impossible to calculate the precise motion of the planets over very long periods of time or even prove that Earth will not one day be flung out of the solar system.
Henri Poincare was the first to show the possibility of planetary orbits being chaotic.

Poincare and Arnold were geniuses. Einstein never did any mathematical physics with this depth.


Friday, Jun 11, 2010
 
String theory predictions
The June 2010 Scientific American magazine describes 12 Events That Will Change Everything. One of the 12 is possibility that the new Swiss particle collider will discover the extra dimensions of string theory. The author gives it a 50-50 chance. The online reader poll is similarly split.

But the string theory gurus are now less optimistic:

John Hockenberry, the panel’s moderator, asked Greene if he thought experimental evidence would come during his lifetime.

“I’d be surprised,” said Greene.

“And in your lifetime?” Hockenberry asked Kachru.

“…I’d be surprised,” conceded the young physicist reluctantly.

I think that the possibility is zero, as the theory has already been determined to be a big washout. But whether that is true or not, I don't see how the 6 or 7 extra dimensions could "change everything". A nuclear war or a global pandemic are 2 of the 12 things that might change everything. Those effects will be obvious to everyone. But how will anything be changed by someone saying that extra dimensions could help explain some particle collision? It is likely that someone else will find an explanation that is just as good, but does not use the extra dimensions.

The discover of quantum mechanics in the 1920s really did change everything, but most of the philosophical implications are fallacious. There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics, and not all of them are probabilistic or observer-dependent.


Saturday, May 29, 2010
 
Evolutionism requires opposition to all religion
Leftist-athiest-evolutionist Jerry Coyne (Why Evolution Is True) attacks all scientists who seek accommodation with religious believers. He writes on his blog:
Yes, one can believe in both evolution and God. Evolution is a well-confirmed scientific theory. Christians and other people of faith need not see evolution as a threat to their beliefs.
This is like saying “Gazelles and other antelopes need not see lions as a threat to their lives.”
So I guess Coyne is admitting that atheism is essential to evolutionism, and the goal of all good evolutionists is to wipe out religion.

Coyne follows up with this:

There are people of faith who see the theory of evolution and scientific cosmology as contrary to the creation narrative in Genesis. But Genesis is a book of religious revelations and of religious teachings, not a treatise on astronomy or biology.

According to Augustine, the great theologian of the early Christian church, it is a blunder to mistake the Bible for an elementary textbook of astronomy, geology, or other natural sciences. As he writes in his commentary on Genesis:

“If it happens that the authority of sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly.”

But who can say what the book of Genesis was supposed to mean?  I’ll give you ten to one that, when it was written, it was a treatise on astronomy and biology, at least as far as those things were understood by denizens of the Middle East two millennia ago.

And, frankly, I’m tired of Augustine being trotted out in these kinds of discussions, as if his interpretation of the Bible was obviously the correct one. I could trot out other theologians who would say the opposite.

The significance of St. Augustine's view is that it has been the view of the Roman Catholic Church for 1500 years, and that it is the theology of most Christians today.

The Middle East had many outstanding treatises on astronomy and biology two millennia ago. The ancient Babylonians and the Greeks could predict eclipses and the retrograde motion of the planets. They had observed and catalogued thousands of species of plants and animals. No, they did not think that Genesis was a treatise on astronomy and biology. Genesis is nothing like their scientific treatises. Coyne acts as if Darwin's book was the first scientific book ever written.

A Wash. Post book review says:

Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively oppose religion. Even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves "spiritual." ...

Creationist attacks on evolution "have polarized the public opinion such that you're either religious or you're a scientist!" a devout physicist complains.

I don't know whether that is true about creationists or not, but it is certainly true about the leading evolutionists like Dawkins and Coyne.

Friday, May 28, 2010
 
Schulmann on Einstein, and how Einstein still makes money
I just watched an interview of Einstein biographer and archivist Robert Schulmann by John McLaughlin. Schulmann agreed that it is "certainly true" Einstein's big 1905 papers would be rejected today. The viewer is led to believe that such radical papers would not survive the stodgy editors and reviewers of today.

In fact much more radical physics papers get published today all the time. Eg, see this.

It probably is true that Einstein's 1905 papers would be rejected, but only because the editors would require him to give references to the work in the field. Einstein describes the work of others without giving his sources. Modern papers are nearly always required to have references. Of course Einstein's papers would not seem so radical if he did that.

Apparently there is a lot of money in maintaining Einstein's legacy. AP reports:

Albert Einstein is among the world's top-earning dead people, and an Israeli university that holds rights to his image is asking General Motors Co. to pay for putting the physics pioneer in a magazine ad.

The Detroit automaker grafted the Nobel Prize-winning German scientist's head onto the body of a buff, shirtless man in a Nov. 30 ad in People magazine.

The ad had the slogan "Ideas Are Sexy Too."

On May 19, Hebrew University of Jerusalem filed suit against GM in U.S. District Court for central California. The suit quotes Forbes magazine in 2008 as saying Einstein earned $18 million a year, fourth among deceased celebrities. He died in 1955.

GM spokeswoman Ryndee Carney tells The Detroit News that GM paid for rights to Einstein's image.

It used to be that someone had to be in the business of licensing his image while he was still alive, in order for those rights to be enforceable after death. It seems crazy for some Hebrew university to be able to control Einstein's image.

With that kind of money at stake, you can be sure that someone like Schulmann will only be allowed to say positive things about Einstein. None of the official biographers and archivists will say correctly just what Einstein did that was original.

 
Ardi not a hominid
The breakthru of the year last year was a missing link named, but now it seems that Ardi may have been just an ape:
The fossil skeleton known as Ardi, hailed in some quarters as the scientific “breakthrough” of 2009, has now drawn critics who dispute claims that the species lived in dense woodlands rather than grassy plains, which have been long considered the favored habitat of early prehumans and perhaps account for their transition to upright walking.

Another scientist has stepped forward to challenge Ardi’s classification as a member of the human lineage after the divergence from African apes. Its primitive anatomy, he contends, suggests a species predating the common ancestor of the human and chimpanzee family trees.

I was suspicious when I found out that they kept Ardi secret for 17 years. I am also suspicious that they never seem to find any ape fossils. Every time they find an ape-like fossil, they claim that it is a human ancestor and get lot of publicity. No one cares about ape fossils. The researchers have too much incentive to classify the fossils as hominids.

Update: John Hawks has a discussion of some of the Ardi problems.


Thursday, May 27, 2010
 
Martínez on Einstein
Alberto A. Martínez writes:
Throughout the decades, Einstein made many comments and declarations concerning the origins of relativity theory. He was interviewed by biographers, psychologists, historians, physicists, journalists, and others. He voiced many details to friends, family members, and even to the public at large. We also have letters and recollections by his colleagues and contemporaries. Thus, we know of so many clear-cut influences that it would take us too far afield to review them here. To mention just a few as examples, some of the major influences, among many others, were: Lorentz’s work on electrodynamics, the ether-drift experiments, a key experiment by Fizeau, the admittedly crucial writings of Hume and Mach, and to some extent, those of Poincaré.
And Einstein denied that he read Lorentz's later works, that he ever read any of Poincare, and that he was influenced by Michelson-Morley.

Einstein did not just misrepresent his work in 1905, by not citing the previous work. He spent his whole life lying about it. The discovery of relativity is carefully documented as one of the great breakthrus of mankind, and yet everyone accepts Einstein's phony story about it.


Wednesday, May 26, 2010
 
Censorship is not the answer to health scares
A UK essay says:
‘How could this have happened?’ asks a splenetic editorial reflection on the MMR-autism controversy in the current issue of Vaccine, the leading scientific journal in the field of immunisation. The authors - Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic and Ray Spier from the University of Surrey – proceed to blame everybody but the scientific authorities for the scare that was launched in a notorious (and now withdrawn) Lancet paper by the former Royal Free gastroenterology researcher Andrew Wakefield who was finally struck off the medical register this week on charges of serious professional misconduct. ...

After a brief standoff with Elsevier, when Charlton refused to back down on his editorial independence, he was sacked this month as editor of Medical Hypotheses. Now that those who call for a clampdown on scientists who express sceptical views about global warming or the scaremongering about AIDS seek to extend the label of ‘denialism’ to include those, like Wakefield, who ‘deny’ the consensus that childhood vaccines are safe and effective, the editors of Vaccine seem to want to restrict the expression of such views in the media.

I think that the preoccupation with silencing Wakefield by the medical establishment is bizarre. Isn't it enough just to prove him wrong?

No, dissenting views on vaccines, AIDS, global warming, evolution, and a few other subjects are not tolerated. The more that certain views are censored, the more that people will legitimately complain that they are not getting the full story.


Monday, May 24, 2010
 
Astronomer Copernicus reburied as hero in Poland
AP reports:
FROMBORK, Poland — Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe's centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

No, his findings were never condemned as heretical. His book was published with the endorsement of the Catholic Church. About 75 years later, it said that nine sentences had to be corrected. That's all. Catholics were always free to study his book and use its model.

The corrections were not because of a "central position" argument. The Earth was not at the center in the Ptolemaic model either. There was a medieval belief that the Earth was stationary, but not that it was at the center of the universe.


Sunday, May 23, 2010
 
Another quantum crypto break
Any proof that quantum cryptography is perfect relies on idealized assumptions that don't always hold true in the real world. One such assumption is related to the types of errors that creep into quantum messages. ... The physicists say they have successfully used their hack on a commercial quantum cryptography system from the Geneva-based startup ID Quantique.
I have noted previous breaks here.

I point this out repeatedly because the promoters of quantum crypto are always claiming that it is superior to conventional crypto because we can be more sure about the correctness of the physics of quantum mechanics, or something like that. In my opinion, just the opposite is true, and dependence on physical principles quantum crypto much more difficult to do securely. The physical dependence also makes it impractical for most applications.


Thursday, May 20, 2010
 
Holton on Einstein
The book Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein By Gerald James Holton has a long argument for Einstein's originality:
6 ON THE ORIGINS OF THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

Continuity or Revolution?

EINSTEIN’S work in relativity is both typical and special. The rise of relativity theory shares many features with the rise of other important scientific theories in our time. But it is of course very much more. To find another work that illuminates as richly the relationship among physics, mathematics, and epistemology or between experi- ment and theory, or a work with the same range of scientific, philo- sophical, and general intellectual implications, one would have to go back to Newton's Principia. The theory of relativity was a key develop- ment both in physical science itself and in the philosophy of science. The reason for its dual significance is that Einstein’s work provided not only a new principle of physics, but, as A. N. Whitehead said, “a principle, a procedure, and an explanation." Accordingly, the com- mentaries on the historical origins of the theory of relativity have tended to fall into two classes, each having distinguished proponents: the one views it as a mutant, a sharp break with respect to the work of Einstein's immediate predecessors; the other regards it as an elabora- tion of then current work, for example, by H. A. Lorentz and Henri Poincaré.
191

Holton is an Einstein biographer who is credited with debunking Whittaker and others who describe a continuity in the history of relativity.

No, Einstein’s work did not provide a new principle of physics, or any of those other things.

Even if you don't know anything about relativity, this must strike you as hard to believe. Some people say that Einstein's 1905 relativity paper was the most important scientific paper in two centuries, and others say that it was just a rehash of previous work

Newton's Principia was not entirely original, as the inverse square law for gravity had been published by Hooke and others previously. Leibniz discovered aspects of mathematical calculus before Newton published, but Newton claims that his books has ideas that he invented 20 years earlier, and Newton and Leibniz could have influenced each other.

Einstein claims that he wrote his whole paper in a 6-week flash of brilliance, and immediately sent it to the publisher. So the priority issues are much more clear-cut for Einstein than for Newton. So how could there be any dispute? It should be a simple matter to look and see whether the formulas were published before Einstein. If Einstein had some new and different formula, then his supporters would just point to that.

But they cannot do that. Every single formula and concept was published before Einstein. Holton cannot deny that. Instead he babbles for pages about how Lorentz and Poincare did not really understand their own formulas.

Holton's argument is that Lorentz-Poincare and Einstein separately created the greatest theory in centuries, but Einstein should get all the credit because Lorentz and Poincare did not understand what they did.

Why would anyone believe anything so ridiculous? It is as if supporters of Leibniz or Hooke argued that Newton did not really understand what he wrote in his Principia. If Newton were able to produce such a great work without understanding it, then I would think that he must be even more brilliant.

If Lorentz and Poincare really didn't understand it, then they would have some wrong formulas mixed in with the correct ones. And the criticism would be based on those errors, not guessing about what they understood. In fact Lorentz did make a couple of errors that showed limits to his understanding. So did Einstein. But nobody cares about that. Because if Lorentz gets credit for everything but his mistakes, then there is not enough credit left for Einstein. And Poincare didn't make any major mistakes.

Reading these Einstein biographers is like reading some Catholic Church scholar claiming that some other scholar made a doctrinal error. It is just not something you can understand or verify on your own. You are supposed to believe these guys that Lorentz and Poincare had figured out all the physical principles, derived all the correct formulas, and explained all the experiments properly. But somehow they just weren't as good as Einstein.


Thursday, May 13, 2010
 
Katzir on Poincare
Katzir writes:
Since Poincaré's new relativistic theory therefore depends upon the validity of Maxwell's equa- tions, it is not as general as Einstein's special theory of relativity, which assumes only the prin- ciple of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light.
No, this is backwards. Here is how Einstein described his own assumptions, in his 1905 mass-energy paper:
The results of the previous investigation lead to a very interesting conclusion, which is here to be deduced.

I based that investigation on the Maxwell-Hertz equations for empty space, together with the Maxwellian expression for the electromagnetic energy of space, and in addition the principle that:--

The laws by which the states of physical systems alter are independent of the alternative, to which of two systems of coordinates, in uniform motion of parallel translation relatively to each other, these alterations of state are referred (principle of relativity).

With these principles* as my basis I deduced inter alia the ...

*    The principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is of course contained in Maxwell's equations.

As you can see, Einstein's theory depended on Maxwell's equations, and Einstein admitted it.

Katzir gives a very good account of what Poincare did, so it is odd that he would get this wrong. Poincare applied his relativity theory in 1905 to gravity, and that did not depend on electromagnetism at all. Poincare himself later said that electromagnetism cannot account for gravity. So Poincare's relativity was more general.

Katzir knows this; he even wrote an essay on Poincaré's Relativistic Theory of Gravitation. (Behind paywall here.)


Tuesday, May 11, 2010
 
Defining a siphon
A physicist complains:
"An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon," Dr Hughes said.

The most up-to-date version of the OED defines a siphon as:

"A pipe or tube of glass, metal or other material, bent so that one leg is longer than the other, and used for drawing off liquids by means of atmospheric pressure, which forces the liquid up the shorter leg and over the bend in the pipe."
I think that it is just as misleading to say that gravity is the operative force. Yes, both gravity and atmospheric pressure are needed to work a siphon. But the surprising part of the siphon is the liquid going up, and that is driven by the atmospheric at the bottom of the short leg and the lesser pressure at the top of the tube. Yes, the lesser pressure is caused by gravity, but I think that the OED definition is literally correct, and appropriately emphasizes the more subtle aspect of the siphon.

The scientific paper says:

It would be useful if someone could perform a demonstration of a siphon working in a vacuum. ...

It is hoped that this paper may assist in correcting the common misconception that the operation of a siphon is dependent on atmospheric pressure. ...

For example, the online edition (2009) of the Oxford English Dictionary quoted in the introduction could be modified to read: “A pipe or tube of glass, metal, or other material, bent so that one leg is longer than the other, and used for drawing off liquids by means of gravity, which pulls the liquid up the shorter leg and over the bend in the pipe.”

Huhh? It should not be hard to do that vacuum siphon demonstration, if he were correct.

Sunday, May 09, 2010
 
Science of ignorance
Science is not just about an accumulation of knowledge about the natural world. It is also about knowing the limits to that knowledge.

The best scientist is not the one who jumps to some conclusion on some issue like global warming, and is later proved correct. The best scientist is the one who correctly explains what is deducible from the available data, and correctly understands the limitations of the available knowledge.

The ancient Greeks understood that they could predict their view of the sky without knowing whether or not the Earth moves. Probably the Babylonians, Egyptians, and others also. Some of them, anyway.

The physics of motion was not really understood until around 1900. Until then, there were unexplained puzzles about whether the Earth moved or not. The best scientists realized this.

Here are some ignorance quotes:

Daniel J. Boorstin:
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Thomas Jefferson:
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Joe Theisman:
The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.)


Friday, May 07, 2010
 
Top 10 science and technology writers
He is a magazine's list:
1. Stephen Hawking 2. Richard Dawkins 3. Isaac Newton 4. Charles Darwin 5. Albert Einstein 6. Bruce Schneier 7. Guy Kewney 8. Isaac Asimov 9. Robert X. Cringely 10. John C Dvorak
They admit that they did not understand Hawking. Not sure about the others. The list is absurd.

Thursday, May 06, 2010
 
Europeans have Neanderthal genes
The NY Times reports:
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.

Experts believe that the Neanderthal genome sequence will be of extraordinary importance in understanding human evolutionary history since the two species split some 600,000 years ago.

This is contrary to what evolutionists have been telling us for years. They have said that Neanderthals were not human, that all human have the same out-of-Africa lineage, and that there has been no significance human evolution since. I don't know how convincing this evidence is, but we shall soon see.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010
 
Paty on covariance
The French professor Michel Paty writes in a 1992 essay, Physcial Geometry and Special relativity: Einstein and Poincaré:
Poincaré's and Einstein's respective conceptions about space (properties of distances), time (relativity of simultaneity), and on velocity (relativistic addition of velocities, the speed of light as a limiting velocity), concerning the mathematical formulation and the physical interpretation of these concepts as well as their relation to dynamics, were at the same time very close and very different.

Very close, because both of them came to exactly the same formulae of transformation, with an identical interpretation as to the truely physical character of the concepts considered in any (inertial) reference frame (i.e., in the usual case of two frames in relative motion, the one taken as at rest, and the one in 30 Title of his 1905 paper simultaneous to Einstein's one (Poincaré 1905 b and c, Einstein 1905).

But their views were very different concerning the theoretical meaning of these results, and only Einstein can be credited of having developped a theory of relativity, where the idea of covariance is basic and founding. Although the word was coined afterwards, it summarizes indeed the essential of Einstein's 1905 theory (and, so to speak, the ‘object’ of this theory) : covariance, as the condition put on physical quantities so that the principle of relativity is obeyed, entails the Lorentz formulae of transformation through a redefinition of space and time, and the covariant form of (electro-)dynamical laws. Poincaré also considered covariance, but not as the founding concept. It was entailed from Lorentz formulae of transformation, and these were a consequence of electrodynamical properties as evidenced experimentally (with a particular emphasis on Michelson-Morley experiment, at variance with Einstein)34. [p.16-17]

No, that is backwards. Poincare proved covariance in 1905, and Einstein did not. Covariance means transforming spacetime vectors and tensors as a consequence of spacetime coordinate transformations. This fundamentally important concept is absent from Einstein's famous 1905 paper. Einstein does not even have the concept of spacetime, and he certainly does not have the concept of a convariant vector or tensor field on spacetime. He deduces the transformation of electric and magnetic fields by assuming that Maxwell's equations hold in different inertial frames, just as Lorentz did ten years earlier. The main difference between Einstein and Lorentz on this point was that Einstein said that he was using the equations for empty space, while Lorentz said that he was using the equations for the aether.

Poincare invented 4-vectors on 4-dimensional spacetime in 1905, gave a covariant spacetime formulation of Maxwell's equations , and proved that the equations hold in different inertial frames by applying those spacetime coordinate transformations.

It is baffling how someone can write a scholarly essay on relativity, and get this difference so wrong. It is only possible because physicists have been getting it wrong for decades.


Saturday, May 01, 2010
 
Nobel prizewinner studies the paranormal
Via Woit comes this controversy:
An extraordinary spat has broken out after a Nobel prizewinning physicist was "uninvited" from a forthcoming conference because of his interest in the paranormal.

Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.

The prizewinner once wrote this paper:
A model consistent with string theory is proposed for so-called paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (ESP). Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special 'mental vacuum state', whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into account the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared 'thought bubbles' generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state. The paper concludes with a critique of arguments sometimes made claiming to 'rule out' the possible existence of paranormal phenomena.
It sounds wacky to me, but I am not sure why it is any wackier than a lot of other string theory and other fringe physics.

Here is a current argument over some untestable ideas in modern physics:

Gross called Guth's concept of eternal inflation somewhat speculative, noting that if other universes do exist, they are causally disconnected from ours — "every goddamn one of them." As such, Gross added, talk of other universes "does bear some resemblance to talking about angels."
Guth is sometimes mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate for his discovery of cosmic inflation theory in the 1980s. But there is still no hard evidence for inflation, and no good estimates for when it started, how big it was, or how long it lasted. It is just another goofy idea with no substantiation.

Friday, Apr 30, 2010
 
How textbooks worship Einstein
From a special relativity textbook by Claude Kacser:
The most satisfactory such theory was that developed by H. A. Lorentz between the years 1895 and 1904, since it was not ad hoc. Rather, this theory was based on Maxwell's equations, assuming the existence of an ether. Lorentz followed through in detail the changes brought about in these equations when looked at from the point of view of an observer moving ...

In its experimental consequences the theory of Lorentz as finally developed makes exactly the same predictions as the theory due to Eins-tein. However the physical models of the universe underlying the two theories are completely opposed. ... In fact all the predictions of Lorentz's theory were such that all observable effects depended only on the relative motion of different parts of the apparatus; the absolute motion of any part of the apparatus relative to the ether could never be detected.

At first Poincaré had believed in the ex-istence of the absolute ether, even though he agreed with Lorentz that its properties were such that absolute motion is undetectable in principle. In 1900, Poincaré went further and asked: "Our ether, does it really exist? I do not believe that more precise observations could ever reveal anything more than relative displacements." By 1904 Poincaré had stated the second half of the above as a postulate, the Principle of Relativity; and even went so far as to say that "from all these results there must arise an entirely new kind of dynamics, which will be characterized above all by the rule that no velocity can exceed the velocity of light." ...

It is very possible that Poincaré would himself have presented a com-plete theory of relativity had Einstein not done so. Lorentz did not see the need, and his theory should be classed as "pre-relativity." To Einstein most deservedly goes the fame for formulating the theory of relativity.

[Footnote] A much fuller historical account is given in Sir Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity; Vol. II: The Modern Theories (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953; paperback edition, New York: Harper & Row, Publi-shers, 1960). Some of our quotations are taken from this work (which, however, great-ly undervalues Einstein's contributions in the development of the special theory of relativity).

It is funny how his sources all say that Lorentz and Poincare and the ad hoc theorists did it all before Einstein, but he wants to credit Einstein anyway.

The commonly recited history of special relativity is so ridiculous that it is a wonder that anyone believes it.

It is impossible to read Kacser's book and understand why Einstein is credited with relativity. Einstein's theory was just as ad hoc as the ad hoc theories, and just as dependent on electromagnetism and the aether as Lorentz's theory. Kacser says that Lorentz uses electromagnetic theory to explain how the length contraction could be a real physical contraction, but that ought to be an advantage over Einstein's theory. Kacser also has language about how an "omniscient being" with "non-material meter sticks" might detect something different in Lorentz's theory, but Lorentz himself said no such thing. Even if Einstein's description had some aesthetic or terminological advantage, it is hard to see why a later theory with the same assumptions, formulas, and physical consequences should be considered so worthy of getting all the credit. A superior theory is not given until about halfway through the book where it starts to explain the geometry of spacetime, which Kacser attributes to Minkowski in 1908.


Wednesday, Apr 28, 2010
 
Einstein worship
From a book by Samuel K. K. Blankson:
How religious scientists play down the greatest of Einstein's achievements

The mind of Albert Einstein, properly understood, is probably the most extraordinary phenomenon ever to visit the earth -- where from, no one knows. But he certainly wasn't one of us earthlings tarnished with the seven sins.

This reminds me of The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film), where fellow soldiers were brainwashed to say:
Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
Somehow the physicists have all been brainwashed.

Monday, Apr 26, 2010
 
Natural selection is not like the germ theory
The leftist-atheist-evolutionist prof Jerry A. Coyne writes:
So why is it contemptible to reject germ theory but socially acceptable to reject evolutionary theory?

One answer is religion. Unlike germ theory, the idea of evolution strikes at the heart of human ego, suggesting that we were not the special object of God's attention but were made by the same blind and mindless process of natural selection that also built ferns, fish and rabbits. Another answer is ignorance: ...

But then he contradicts his own answers. He goes on to review two books by well-educated scholars and avowed atheists who seem to believe that the evidence for evolution by natural selection is less than the evidence for the germ theory.

A reader notes:

The biggest difference is that scientists studying germs can conduct controlled experiments, while scientists studying human evolution can only look at the fossil record.
Scientists can also gather DNA and other evidence, but their natural selection theories are never as convincing as their germ theories. That is not to say that natural selection is wrong. Natural selection is trivially correct, and obviously explains much of the biological world. The question is how much it explains, and no one can give a good answer to that.

Sunday, Apr 25, 2010
 
Hawking warns of space alien contact
The Discovery Channel reports:
Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, British scientist Stephen Hawking warned Sunday.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," said the astrophysicist in a new television series, according to British media reports. ...

Glowing squid-like creatures, herds of herbivores that can hang onto a cliff face and bright yellow predators that kill their prey with stinging tails are among the creatures that stalk the scientist's fantastical cosmos.

The Channel promoted this show as giving the opinion of "the greatest mind on the planet". The show presented an assortment of goofy ideas.

Thursday, Apr 22, 2010
 
Wikipedia on relativity terminology
The Wikipedia article on History of special relativity says:
However, although in his philosophical writings Poincaré rejected the ideas of absolute space and time, in his physical papers he continued to refer to an (undetectable) aether. He also continued (1900b, 1904, 1906, 1908b) to describe coordinates and phenomena as local/apparent (for moving observers) and true/real (for observers at rest in the aether).[23][52] So with a few exceptions[53][54][55] most historians of science argue that Poincaré did not invent what is now called special relativity, although it is admitted that Poincaré anticipated much of Einstein's methods and vocabulary.
I objected to this for reasons stated on the Talk page. Briefly, it attributes to Poincare terminology that he did not actually use.

The article later says that Einstein used the same terminology:

However, it was rather a dispute over words because, as Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli said, the kinematic length contraction is "apparent" for an co-moving observer, but for an observer at rest it is "real" and the consequences are measurable.
Put together, this says that Poincare, Einstein, and Pauli all used the same terminology. And yet it is because of that terminology that most historians say that Poincare should not be credited. Weird.

Even if you don't understand anything about relativity, it should be obvious that an army of Einstein-loving historians have only been able to give extremely weak arguments for Einstein over Poincare. Their main argument is a trivial gripe about terminology, and that gripe doesn't even make any sense.


Sunday, Apr 18, 2010
 
Geometry explains mechanics
Here is a review of a relativity philosophy book, mentioned below:
Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective
Harvey R. Brown, Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2005, 240pp, $55 (hbk), ISBN 0199275831.

Reviewed by Bradford Skow, University of Massachusetts ...

The geometry of spacetime explains length contraction because it places constraints on the structure of the dynamical laws.

This last claim is key, and it is the one that Brown disputes. Among his arguments that the geometry of spacetime does not explain why the laws are Lorentz invariant are these. First, Brown catalogues several geometrical structures that play a role in some physical theory or other, and claims that no one thinks that those geometrical structures do any explanatory work. For example, no one thinks that the geometry of configuration space for an N-body system in classical mechanics plays any role in explaining why that system evolves as it does (section 8.2).

No one thinks that?! Sure they do. Whole books have been written on the subject, including ones by Abraham-Marsden-Ratiu and V.I. Arnol’d.

The geometric structures include the symmetry groups, the metric, and the symplectic structure on the cotangent bundle. The symmetries explain the conserved quantities, like momentum. The symplectic structure, along with the Hamiltonian, determines the time evolution of the system. Geometry explains just as much as it does in special relativity. Brown doesn't know what he is talking about.

Meanwhile, I found a long French essay on Poincaré's epistemological writings: Obstacles to the diffusion of relativity? My French is rusty. He seems to be arguing that Poincare's popular science books sold well but only confused the public about relativity. Weird. Maybe they confused Brown, because he objects to geometrical interpretations. It is known that Einstein got a lot of inspiration from the books, and they seem to have influenced a lot of others also. Poincare's books are works of genius.

Here is another French essay that recites some facts about the history of special relativity:

So, why the work of Poincaré in Special Relativity is so ignored?

One point is that Poincaré did not realize the revolution implied by this new theory, as he had many others topics of interest especially in mathematics. His formal (maybe too speculative) approach did not reflect the “physical reality” implied by the theory. His position on the aether remains quite ambiguous, as he did not reject definitely the concept as Einstein did (at the beginning, as later Einstein had a more ambiguous position too, aether being a “hard to kill “concept). In some following papers, he expresses some doubts about the universality of the Relativity principle. In addition, he never published a so extensive treaty than Einstein.

Einstein approach more physical, more practical, was closer to the physical reality, and may be seen more striking than the Poincaré approach.

Most of this is false. Poincare described the theory as a revolutionary "new mechanics", while Einstein made no such claim in 1905. Poincare discussed the physical reality much more than Einstein, and rejected the aether more directly than Einstein. The only doubts Poincare expressed was that the theory needed to be tested by experiment, and that some experiments appeared to be contrary to the theory. Poincare published for popular and technical audiences; Einstein did not publish for a wide audience until after Poincare was dead. Einstein did not even attempt a physical explanation of what was really going on, as Poincare did.

Wednesday, Apr 14, 2010
 
TV show on Big Bang
Last night's PBS Nova on astronomy credited Hubble with discovering the expansion of the universe, when no one else believed it. Actually Hubble did not believe it either when it was discovered.

In fact Lemaitre discovered it before Hubble, as proved on the Cosmic Variance blog:

We’ve previously celebrated Father Georges-Henri Lemaitre on this very blog, for taking seriously the idea of the Big Bang. His name has come up again in the post expressing thanks for Hubble’s Law — several commenters, including John Farrell, who wrote the book and should know — mentioned that it was actually Lemaitre, not Hubble, who first derived the law. That offered me a chance to haughtily dismiss these folks as being unable to distinguish between a theoretical prediction (Lemaitre was one of the first to understand the equations governing relativistic cosmology) and an observational discovery. But it turns out that Lemaitre did actually look at the data!
Earlier Friedmann had published an expansionary model of the universe against which Einstein made a bogus attack. Einstein had to publish a correction for his error.

The Pope was ahead of the curve on this one, as reported by Discover magazine:

The Catholic Church, which put Galileo under house arrest for daring to say that Earth orbits the sun, isn't known for easily accepting new scientific ideas. So it came as a surprise when Pope Pius XII declared his approval in 1951 of a brand new cosmological theory -— the Big Bang. What entranced the pope was the very thing that initially made scientists wary: The theory says the universe had a beginning, and that both time and space leaped out of nothingness. It seemed to confirm the first few sentences of Genesis.

Eventually, astrophysicists followed the pope's lead, as evidence for the Big Bang became too powerful to ignore.

The TV show told about dark energy and dark matter. No mention of dark buzz.

Tuesday, Apr 13, 2010
 
Evolutionist tries to arrest the Pope
It seems that all the prominent evolutionists are at war with Christianity. Richard Dawkins is trying to arrest the Pope:
Leading atheist Richard Dawkins has backed a campaign to have the Pope arrested for "crimes against humanity" when he visits the UK later this year.

Professor Dawkins said he "whole-heartedly" backed the initiative led by atheist Christopher Hitchens.

Jerry Coyne has similar views, and writes:
Here’s the point. Virtually every religion that is practiced by real people ... makes claims that God interacts with the world. ...

Here is a short (and very incomplete) list of all the ways that science already has tested the supernatural assertions of faith:

* The earth was suddenly created, complete with all its species, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was falsified by science. The falsification likewise goes for other religions’ creation myths, like those of Hindus and the Inuits.
* God put the earth at the center of the solar system and the universe. Also falsified. ...

No, these are not assertions of faith in the major religions. The major Christian religion is the Roman Catholic Church, and it never made these assertions of faith, as far as I know.

Even under the Ptolemaic system, the Earth was not at the center of the solar system. It was near the center, but not at the center. Medieval Church scholars subscribed to the scientific thinking of the day, and changed when new evidence was shown.

The Church has endorsed some miracles that seem very improbable to me. And it does have some unscientific assertions of faith, such as Jesus Christ rising from the dead. But those are not on Coyne's list.

I guess that there are some Christians today who are Young Earth Creationists and who believe that the Earth is at the center of the universe. But I've never met any, and these are not the beliefs of any mainstream Christian religion. Coyne makes silly straw man attacks. You can also find medieval science books that say wrong things, but that does not make all scientists wrong.

For many evolutionists like Dawkins and Coyne, evolutionism and Darwinism are inseparable from atheism and leftism.


Monday, Apr 12, 2010
 
Brown on Poincare
British philosopher Harvey R. Brown got the Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science 2006 for his book Physical relativity: space-time structure from a dynamical perspective.

He credits Poincare for much of special relativity:

Of all the fin de siecle trailblazers, the one that came closest to pre—empting Einstein is Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) -- the man E. T. Bell called the `Last Universalist`. Indeed, the claim that this giant of pure and applied mathematics co-discovered special relativity is not uncommon, and it is not hard to see why.

(i) Poincaré was the first to extend the relativity principle to optics and elec- trodynamics exactly. 78 Whereas Lorentz, in his theorem of corresponding states, had from 1899 effectively assumed this extension of the relativity principle up to second-order effects, Poincaré took it to hold for all orders.

(ii) Poincaré was the first to show that Maxwell's equations with source terms are strictly Lorentz covariant. ...

{iii) Poincaré was the first to use the generalized relativity principle as a con· straint on the form of the coordinate transformations. He recognized that the relativity principle implies that the transformations form a group, and in further appealing to spatial isotropy. ...

(iv) Poincaré was the first to see the connection between Lorentz's `local time', (4.19) and the issue of clock synchrony. ... It is fair to say that Poincaré was the first to understand the relativity of simultaneity, and the conventionality of distant simultaneity.

[v) Poincaré anticipated Minkowski`s interpretation of the Lorentz transfor- mations as a passive, rigid rotation within a four-dimensional pseudo—Euclidean space-time. He was also aware that the the electromagnetic potentials transform in the manner of what is now called a Minkowski 4-vector.

(vi) He anticipated the major results of relativistic dynamics (and in particular the relativistic relations between force, momentum and velocity), but not E0 = mc2 in its full generality.

Taking all ofthis on board, is not the onus on the sceptic?

Sure enough, he has some convoluted explanation for why Einstein should be credited anyway!

His main beef with Poincare is that Poincare viewed relativity as a property of spacetime, instead of an artifact of electrodynamics. Actually both views are tenable, but it was Poincare's view that became adopted. Brown also says:

Although Poincaré understood independently of Einstein how the Lorentz transformations give rise to the non-Galilean transformation rules for velocities (indeed Poincate derived the correct relativistic rules), it is not clear that he had a full appreciation of the modern operational significance attached to coordinate transformations. Although it is sometimes claimed that Poincaré understood that the primed coordinates (part of Lorentz's 'auxiliary quantities') were simply the coordinates read off by rods and clocks stationary relative to the primed frame, he did not seem to understand the role played by the second-order terms in the transformation. (Note that the gammas do not appear in the velocity transformations.) Let me spell this out.

Compared with the cases of Lorentz and Larmor, it is even less clear that Poincaré understood either length contraction or time dilation to be a consequence of the coordinate transformations. Take length contraction first. in proving k = 1 for the k—Lorentz transformations in 1906, Poincaré at no point says that he has thereby shown that the deformation is indeed a longitudinal contraction. He doesn`t seem to connect the issues at all. A similar state of affairs is observed in his 1905 treatment of the deformability of the moving electron. One of the main results of his 1906 paper 'On the dynamics of the electron 85 was the demonstration that amongst the existing rival notions concerning the shape of the moving electron (assumed to take the form of a sphere at test) only the longitudinal contraction hypothesis of Lorentz is consistent with the relativity postulate. Once again, the argument made no appeal to the form of the coordinate transformations even after Poincaré had shown k = 1. The claim made hy Abraham Pais that `thc reduction of the FitzGerald—Lorentz contraction to a consequence of Lorentz transformations is a product of the nineteenth century’ in the context of Lorentz's 1899 work has been justly criticized by Janssen. 84 The claim is equally doubtful in relation to Larmor and wholly inappropriate for Poincaré. Pais himself emphasized the fact that as late as 1908, Poincaré still did not regard length contraction as a consequence of the relativity principle and Einstein's light postulate (of something close to it).85

Now take time dilation. 1t was claimed by Rindler in 1970 that Poincaré never recognized its existence, at least prior to Einstein. I have found nothing in Poincaré's writings which contradicts this claim.

This is wacky stuff. The History of Lorentz transformations goes back to 1887, long before Einstein's 1905 paper. It is true that Poincare's 1900 paper made a low velocity approximation, and the time dilation can be ignored in such an approximation. But he separately argued that the transformation was a perfect symmetry, and that is impossible unless it includes a length contraction and a time dilation.

Here is what Poincare says in his 1904 St. Louis lecture (1913 translation):

The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slow of the other. ...

Unhappily, that does not suffice, and complementary hypotheses are necessary; it is necessary to admit that bodies in motion undergo a uniform contraction in the sense of the motion. One of the diameters of the earth, for example, is shrunk by one two-hundred-millionth in consequence of our planet's motion, while the other diameter retains its normal length. Thus the last little differences are compensated.

Here is another 1905 translation:
The watches adjusted in that manner do not mark, there- fore, the true time; they mark what one may call the local time, so that one of them goes slow on the other.
And another 1905 translation:
Watches regulated in this way, therefore, will not mark the true time; they will mark what might be called the local time, so that one will gain on the other.
I read this as a reference to time dilation, but I could be wrong. Maybe I will check the original French. If he is referring to the low order approximation, then the watches get out of synchronization, but run at the same rate. With the full Lorentz transformation, they appear to run at slower rates than each other.

Anyway, Poincare is is clearly saying that the deformation is indeed a longitudinal contraction. So what is the problem? That he does not derive it from a coordinate transformation?

All of these criticisms of Poincare seem really strange to me. Poincare gives the correct equations, and gives the correct explanations. If Poincare failed to mention some aspect of the theory, isn't it more likely that he was just too busy emphasizing other aspects? If Poincare actually had some misunderstanding, isn't it likely that he would have said something that was actually wrong? Poincare's analysis is deeper and more thorough than Einstein's, and gets it all right.


Friday, Apr 09, 2010
 
Govt report drops science literacy questions
AAAS Science magazine complains:
In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the big bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang. ...

Board members say the decision to drop the text was driven by a desire for scientific accuracy. The survey questions that NSF has used for 25 years to measure knowledge of evolution and the big bang were "flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs," says Louis Lanzerotti, an astrophysicist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who chairs NSB's Science and Engineering Indicators Committee. ...

"I think that is a nonsensical response" that reflects "the religious right's point of view," says Jon Miller, a science literacy researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing who authored the survey 3 decades ago and conducted it for NSF until 2001. "Evolution and the big bang are not a matter of opinion. If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, even if scientists think it is not, how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate? Part of being literate is to both understand and accept scientific constructs."

No, scientific literacy means understanding scientific constructs, but it does mean necessarily accepting them. It is a basic premise of general relativity that allows coordinate systems that put the Earth at the center of the universe, and a science literacy researcher should understand that.

In fact the surveys show that millions of Americans do have sufficient scientific literacy to understand those issues, but choose to reject certain conclusions anyway.

The 2008 NSF report says:

Americans’ responses to questions about evolution and the big bang appear to reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science. The 2004 Michigan Survey of Consumer Attitudes administered two different versions of these questions to different groups of respondents. Some were asked questions that tested knowledge about the natural world ("human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" and "the universe began with a big explosion"). Others were asked questions that tested knowledge about what a scientific theory asserts or a group of scientists believes ("according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals" and "according to astronomers, the universe began with a big explosion"). Respondents were much more likely to answer correctly if the question was framed as being about scientific theories or ideas rather than as about the natural world. When the question about evolution was prefaced by "according to the theory of evolution," 74% answered true; only 42% answered true when it was not. Similarly, 62% agreed with the prefaced question about the big bang, but only 33% agreed when the prefatory phrase was omitted. These differences probably indicate that many Americans hold religious beliefs that cause them to be skeptical of established scientific ideas, even when they have some basic familiarity with those ideas.
If they really wanted to measure scientific literacy in their survey, then they would ask questions closer to observable facts, such as:
Are the stars spreading apart as if the universe has been expanding for a very long time?
I don't know why people are reluctant to accept the universe beginning with a big bang. Maybe they think that the universe existed before the big bang. Or maybe they think that it is an incredible extrapolation of current knowledge.

Scientists cannot really tell us much about the big bang anyway. There are inflationary and non-inflationary models, and they are a lot different. No one can tell which is better.

Likewise the evolution question could be replaced with something more straightforward, such as:

Humans have many genes and other hereditary traits in common with other mammals.
My guess is that the evolutionists would not be happy with this question, because it does not determine whether the person has adopted an evolutionistic worldview.

Monday, Apr 05, 2010
 
Singh on science
Simon Singh is apparently very opinionated about what is science. His book, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, attacks a gravitational theory with this:
Indeed, such ad hoc tinkering was indicative of the sort of blinkered logic that earlier resulted in Ptolemy adding yet more circles to his flawed epicyclic view of an Earth-centered universe. [p.128]
No, Ptolemy's epicyclic view was not false (as Singh says on p.82), and he did not add yet more circles. He only had geometrically necessary circles.

Singh has this appendix:

WHAT IS SCIENCE?

The words 'science' and 'scientist' are surprisingly modern inventions. In fact, the word 'scientist' was coined by the Victorian polymath William Whewell, who used it in the Quarterly Review in March 1834. The Americans took to the word almost immediately, and by the end of the century it was also popular in Britain. The word is based on the Latin scientia, which means 'knowledge', and it supplanted other terms such as ,natural philosopher'.

This book is a history of the Big Bang model, but at the same time it attempts to provide an insight into what science is and how it works. The Big Bang model is a good example of how a scientific idea is created, tested, verified and accepted. Nevertheless, science is such a broad activity that this book's description of it is incomplete. So, in an attempt to fill in some of the gaps, here is a selection of quotations about science.

Science is organized knowledge. HERBERT SPENCER (1820 1903), English philosopher

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. ADAM SMITH (1723 90), Scottish economist

Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know. BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872 1970), English philosopher

[Science is] a series ofjudgements, revised without ceasing. PIERRE EMILE DUCLAUX (1840 1904), French bacteriologist

[Science is] the desire to know causes. WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778 1830), English essayist

496 BIG BANG

[Science is] the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one upon another. THOMAS HOBBES (1588 1679), English philosopher

[Science is] an imaginative adventure of the mind seeking truth in a world of mystery CYRIL HERMAN HINSHELWOOD (1897 1967), English chemist

[Science is] a great game. It is inspiring and refreshing. The playing field the universe itself. ISIDOR ISAAC RABI (1898 1988), American physicist

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. JACOB BRONOWSKI (1908 74), British scientist and author

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. JACOB BRONOWSKI (1908 74), British scientist and author

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. KONRAD LORENZ (1903 89), Austrian zoologist

Truth in science can best be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one. KONRAD LORENZ (1903 89), Austrian zoologist

In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in. CORNELIUS VAN NEIL (1897 1985), American microbiologist

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions. CLAUDE LEVI STRAUSS (1908 ), French anthropologist

Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879 1955), German born physicist

WHAT IS SCIENCE? 497

Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world. RICHARD DAWKINS (1941 ), English biologist

Science is nothing but trained and organised common sense differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit; and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club. THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY (1825 95), English biologist

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. JOHN VON NEUMANN (1903 57), Hungarian born mathematician

The science of today is the technology of tomorrow. EDWARD TELLER (1908 2003), American physicist

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. JOHN DEWEY (1859 1952), American philosopher

Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense, ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant, iv) I always said so. J.B. S. HALDANE (1892 1964), English geneticist

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918 88), American physicist

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life. ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD (1889 1943), English philosopher


Friday, Apr 02, 2010
 
Simon Singh wins libel case
The British court quoted John Milton's Areopagitica arguing that England was freer than Italy:
There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.
Well, no. Galileo was never punished for thinking. He was free to publish balanced scientific arguments. He got into trouble when he put the Pope's arguments in the mouth of a fictional simpleton named Simplicio.

Singh said that the chiropractic profession ... happily promotes bogus treatments. I guess that it is safe to call chiropractors bogus in England again. The British court has struck a blow in favor of name-calling.

The Singh quote in dispute is:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.
The British BBC reports:
BBC News science correspondent Pallab Ghosh says that, had Justice Eady's ruling stood, it would have made it difficult for any scientist or science journalist to question claims made by companies or organisations without opening themselves up to a libel action that would be hard to win.
No, I don't think that is correct. Anyone was always free to say that chiropractic treatment of earaches is bogus. The problem occurred because Singh made a statement that some judge interpreted as implying that the chiropractors know that the treatment is bogus.

Our society is filled with quacks giving bogus treatments. I got one myself about a month ago. For all I know, the physician may have sincerely believed what he was saying. And they chiropractors probably believe whatever they were taught in chiropractic school. Scientists and journalists are on safe ground attacking what is bogus, and skipping the mindreading.


Thursday, Apr 01, 2010
 
Higher energies at LHC
The NY Times reports:
After two false starts due to electrical failures, protons that were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe. ...

Particle colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy — denoted in the physicists’ currency of choice, electron volts — that these machines can pack into their little fireballs, the farther back in time they can go, closer and closer to the Big Bang, and the smaller and smaller are the things they can see.

The collider does not really get its oomph from the equation E=mc2. The velocity of the light is the limit, as Poincare explained in his 1904 St. Louis lecture:
From all these results, if they were confirmed, would arise an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterized by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light,
The accelerator puts energy into the protons, and the energy comes out in the collisions. That is the basic physics, and Einstein didn't have anything to do with it.

The author explains further:

The collider, which is outside Geneva, is 17 miles around. Why is it so big?

Einstein taught us that energy and mass are equivalent. So, the more energy packed into a fireball, the more massive it becomes. The collider has to be big and powerful enough to pack tremendous amounts of energy into a proton.

Moreover, the faster the particles travel, the harder it is to bend their paths in a circle, so that they come back around and bang into each other.

Again, it really doesn't have anything to do with Einstein. They need high momentum for the collisions. It takes a big force to deflect a high-momentum particle. So they need a big circle to get high momentum. That would be true with or without relativity.

Wednesday, Mar 31, 2010
 
Trying to find animal pairings
The NY Times Magazine has a long article on Can Animals Be Gay?.

People are always trying to find animal homosexuality in an attempt to prove that human homosexuality is normal. But the animal behavior they find does not resemble the human behavior, and proves nothing.

Zaotar comments:

What an overhyped and overblown article. Same-sex *asexual* pairings are not equivalent to "homosexuality" in any way that people care about. Rather the issue is same-sex *sexual* pairings. And according to the article, these albatrosses don't engage in sex between members of the same sex. The article notes that central fact, and then promptly ignores it. But why are you comparing it to homosexuality if there's no sex? It's highly misleading; the underlying facts are far more boring.

By this same absurdly overblown line of implication, everybody who keeps a pet dogs is engaging in "beastiality" because they have chosen a committed life-long interspecies relationship. Talk about missing the point. What we want to know is whether there are examples of committed *sexual* relationships amongst other animals, and if so, how they operate.

They might look for uncommitted examples also.

Monday, Mar 29, 2010
 
Physics magazine honors Einstein
The Jan. 2005 issue of Physics World (partially mirrored here and here)
Questions of precedence

In addition to allegations that he plagiarized the work of Maric´, Einstein has also been accused of stealing ideas from Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré. Elements of Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity paralleled parts of a 1904 paper by Lorentz and a contemporary paper by Poincaré. Although Einstein read earlier papers by the two, he claimed not to have seen these later works before writing his first paper on special relativity.

A frequent criticism of Einstein is that this paper did not contain any references,which might suggest that he was consciously hiding his tracks. But Stachel is doubtful. “At the time, I do not think it was that unusual,” he says. “There is no evidence that he ever consciously took from some source and neglected to mention it in order to get the credit himself.

Equally, there are questions over general relativity. One frequent accusation is that David Hilbert completed the general theory of relativity at least five days before Einstein submitted his conclusive paper in November 1915. There are marked similarities between the two men’s work, and they did squabble for some time over primacy. But Stachel says that he and co-workers have found evidence that the first proofs for Hilbert’s paper did not include the crucial field equations for general relativity. He says that these proofs were also based on Einstein’s earlier rejection of the principle of general covariance, a central tenet of general relativity that shows that the laws of relativity hold for any inertial frame. Einstein’s 1915 paper, in contrast, showed that relativity could be made generally covariant by adopting a new geometric model of space–time.

There is plenty of evidence that Einstein consciously neglected to credit others, in order to get more credit for himself. He did it all his life. Not only do his famous relativity papers fail to cite his sources, but he continued to do so in followup papers and interviews. He also did it in private letters. Stachel is an Einstein biographer, and he must know this. He is just an Einstein idol worshipper.

Stachel's analysis of Hilbert's paper has been shown to be wrong. That Hilbert draft does indeed have a correct covariant formulation of general relativity. It appears that the draft does not have the field equations because Stachel or someone else removed that half-page. Stachel's article on the subject dishonestly omitted the fact that a critical half-page was missing.

So why has Einstein attracted so much criticism? Stachel has identified three general reasons, the first being anti-semitism. ... Stachel also points out that in recent decades some feminist critics have picked on Einstein ... Finally, according to Stachel, there is simple iconoclasm.
Oh no, there are many more reasons for disliking Einstein. He had many character defects. He was a publicity-seeking phony who was nothing like what he pretended to be.

Thursday, Mar 25, 2010
 
Science museum decides to be scientific
The UK Times reports:
The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.

The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.

The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate. ...

“You can argue about how much effect the carbon in the atmosphere will have on the system and what we should do about it,” he said. “The role of the museum should be to lay out honestly and fairly what the climate science community has found out about the science.

“There are areas of uncertainty which are perfectly reasonable to raise and we will present those. For example, the extent to which the climate is as sensitive to the CO2-loading that humans have put in or not.”

This is a good sign. A museum should just show the science, and skip the leftist political messages.

Meanwhile, the hot news is a new missing link:

A previously unknown kind of human group vanished from the world so completely that it has left behind the merest wisp of evidence that it ever existed — a single bone from the little finger of a child, buried in a cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia.

Researchers extracted DNA from the bone and reported Wednesday that it differed conspicuously from that of both modern humans and of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that inhabited Europe until the arrival of modern humans on the continent some 44,000 years ago.

The child who carried the DNA lineage was probably 5 to 7 years old, but it is not yet known if it was a boy or a girl. ...

But they say the genetic material extracted from the bone, an element called mitochondrial DNA, belonged to a distinct human lineage that migrated out of Africa at a different time from the two known archaic human species.

So they are claiming that this tiny bone fragment is from a new human species, but they don't even know whether it was a boy or girl.

I am skeptical about this. This is just the result that evolutionary anthropologists are always hoping to find, but it might just be a contaminated DNA. I'll wait for more evidence.

The Wired mag article is titled, DNA Reveals New Hominid Ancestor. The new find is not known to be an ancestor of anything. I guess they are just desperate to make it look like a missing link.


Wednesday, Mar 24, 2010
 
Einstein not a founder of quantum mechanics
Besides relativity, Einstein is also credited with being a founder of quantum mechanics. The Nobel Prize considered giving him a prize for relativity, and rejected him eight times. Ultimately they gave him a prize for his 1905 photon paper.

In a 1949 book honoring Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr wrote:

Einstein's great original contribution to quantum theory (1905) was just the recognition of how physical phenomena like the photo-effect may depend directly on individual quantum effects. With unfailing intuition Einstein thus was led step by step to the conclusion that any radiation process involves the emission or absorption of individual light quanta or "photons" with energy and momentum E = hf and P = hs (1) respectively, where h is Planck's constant, while f and s are the number of vibrations per unit time and the number of waves per unit length, respectively.
Bohr really was a founder of quantum mechanics, so his opinion is worth something. But it was Planck who said in 1900 that light was absorbed and emitted in quanta. After all, it is Planck's constant and not Einstein's constant. Planck got a Nobel prize for it, and Lenard got one for confirming it with the photo-electric effect.

Bohr is really crediting Einstein for recognizing what Planck did. A lot of others did not believe it. Einstein went further than Planck by arguing that light is composed of quanta while it is being transmitted. (The word "photon" was invented later.)

I am just wondering what Einstein's contribution has to do with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is more like what Planck said, than Einstein, because light is only quantized when it is emitted and absorbed. It behaves like a wave as it is being transmitted.

Einstein gets closer to the modern view in his 1909 paper:

When light was shown to exhibit interference and diffraction, it seemed almost certain that light should be considered a wave. Since light can also propagate through empty space, one had to imagine a strange substance, an ether, that mediated the propagation of light waves. Since light also propagates in material objects, one had to assume that this ether was also present in material objects, and was chiefly responsible for the propagation of light in material objects. The existence of the ether seemed beyond doubt. In the first volume of Chwolson's excellent physics textbook, he states in the introduction to ether, "The hypothesis of this one agent's existence is extraordinarily close to certainty."

Today, however, we regard the ether hypothesis as obsolete. A large body of facts shows undeniably that light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories. The purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of light is imperative.

This is a change from his 1905 opinion that light was a particle. His famous 1905 paper said:
In fact, it seems to me that the observations on “black-body radiation”, photoluminescence, the production of cathode rays by ultraviolet light and other phenomena involving the emission or conversion of light can be better understood on the assumption that the energy of light is distributed discontinuously in space. According to the assumption considered here, when a light ray starting from a point is propagated, the energy is not continuously distributed over an ever increasing volume, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta, localised in space, which move without being divided and which can be absorbed or emitted only as a whole.
This was at a time when physicists all believed that matter was made of atoms, but some were looking for better proof. So it was natural to conjecture that light was composed of some sort of atoms also.

I am questioning whether it has ever been shown that "the energy of light is distributed discontinuously in space." According to quantum mechanics (as discovered later), the energy is continuously distributed in a wave function until an observation is made. Then the light gets absorbed as a discrete photon.

Isaacson writes:

In his 1911 Solvay lecture, Einstein put these issues into the larger context of the so-called quantum problem. Was it possible, he asked, to avoid accepting the physical reality of these atomistic particles of light, which were like bullets aimed at the heart of Maxwell's equations and, indeed, all of classical physics?

Planck, who had pioneered the concept of the quanta, continued to insist that they came into play only when light was being emitted or absorbed. They were not a real world feature of light itself, he argued. Einstein, in his talk to the conference, sorrowfully demurred: "These discontinuities, which we find so distasteful in Planck's theory, seem really to exist in nature." [quote is from Einstein's 1911 paper on specific heats] [p.169]

Some physicists may disagree with me, but I would say that Planck's opinion is closer to what is accepted today.

Later in the 1909 paper, Einstein talks about relativity:

Superficial consideration suggests that the essential parts of Lorentz's theory cannot be reconciled with the relativity principle. ... the essence of Lorentz's theory ... can be reconciled with the relativity principle. These two principles lead to certain unambiguous transformation equations characterized by the identity ...
This path leads to the so-called relativity theory.
What Einstein is saying here is that Lorentz's theory is wrong, and that it can be fixed using a certain identity. What he does not say is that the identity is copied straight out of Poincare's 1905 paper, without citing Poincare. Einstein did not have the concept in his earlier papers.

Even if you think that Einstein's failure to cite Poincare in 1905 is forgivable, what possible excuse could there be for failing to cite him in 1909?

Note also that Einstein was apparently not comfortable with the name "relativity theory" in 1909. The name came from Poincare, not Einstein, and my guess is that Einstein thought that use of the name will give credit to Poincare.

I just don't see how Einstein was contributing anything to quantum theory. Physicists had debated for centuries whether light was a particle or a wave. Maxwells equations in 1870 or so provided strong evidence that light was transmitted a wave. Planck's theory of 1900 gave evidence that light was emitted and absorbed as discrete particles, with energy proportional to frequency. These were resolved by quantum electrodynamics in the 1940s. Einstein added nothing to that.


Tuesday, Mar 23, 2010
 
AGW and Copernicus
Frank J. Tipler writes:
The attacks against Copernicus are astoundingly similar to the attacks on scientists like myself who are critical of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). ... a friend of Copernicus sent a copy of On the Revolutions to Pope Paul III, the man to whom Copernicus had dedicated his great work. Paul III gave the book to his personal theologian Bartolomeo Spino who, we are told, “planned to condemn it” but died before he could do so. The task of criticizing Copernicus was transferred to Spino’s close friend, the Dominican Tolosani, who penned the following:
The book by Nicholas Copernicus of Torun was printed not long ago and published in recent days. In it he tries to revive the teaching of certain Pythagoreans concerning the Earth’s motion, a teaching which had died out in times long past. Nobody accepts it now except Copernicus. … Hence, since Copernicus does not understand physics … it is stupid to contradict a belief accepted by everyone over a very long time for extremely strong reasons, unless the naysayer uses more powerful and incontrovertible proofs, and completely rebuts the opposed reasoning. Copernicus does not do this at all. For he does not undermine the proofs, establishing necessary conclusions, advanced by Aristotle the philosopher and Ptolemy the astronomer.

Aristotle absolutely destroyed the arguments of the Pythagoreans. Yet this is not adduced by Copernicus in his ignorance of it.

Note that Copernicus was criticized was criticized on scientific grounds, not biblical. It is true that Copernicus does a lousy job of rebutting the arguments that came before him.

The current weekly (March 19) ScientificAmerican.com podcast makes an analogy between AGW and the Flat Earth of 500 years ago. (It starts about 2:20.) That was the time of Copernicus, and there was an argument about the motion of the Earth, but no one believed in a flat Earth.


Monday, Mar 22, 2010
 
Einstein on women
In a response to the protest of a women's organization against his visit to the U.S. (Mein Weltbild, 1934) Einstein wrote:
Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances; or if I have, never from so many at once.

But are they not quite right, these watchful citizenesses? Why should one open one's doors to a person who devours hard-boiled capitalists with as much appetite and gusto as the Cretan Minotaur in days gone by devoured luscious Greek maidens, and on top of that is low-down enough to reject every sort of war, except the unavoidable war with one's own wife? Therefore give heed to your clever and patriotic womenfolk and remember that the capitol of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling if its faithful geese.

Not sure what he means here, or why they were protesting. Earlier Einstein said that men are toy dogs for women.

Sunday, Mar 21, 2010
 
Wrong to say Darwin was wrong
A UK newspaper criticizes itself:
"Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong," bellows the headline in today's Guardian. Well rest easy, my anxious science fans, it's not. ...

Alas, in his feature, Oliver Burkeman has given, in my view, an insufficiently critical airing to some specious arguments put forward in a new book entitled What Darwin got Wrong. ...

"Nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism," says Burkeman. But he is doing just that. Unfortunately now, many people will again assert that evolution is wrong, but very few will understand that the fact that 8% of our own genome is derived from viruses enhances evolutionary theory, rather than subverts it, as Burkeman suggests.

Their dilemma is in finding a way to tell evolution news without giving ammunition to creationists. So they don't want to contradict Darwin. But no one wants to read news stories that just repeat what Darwin knew 150 years ago.

I think that they should just print the news stories, and not worry about whether the creationists are going to like them.


Saturday, Mar 20, 2010
 
Man overpwers nature
Leftist Bush-hating physicist Lawrence M. Krauss writes in Scientific American:
I don’t know how many e-mails I have received from children who are terrified that 2012 will somehow involve the end of life as we know it, all because of an unfounded fringe religious prophecy that has received mass-market exposure with the release of a recent Hollywood movie. I have tried to reassure those children ...
I guess you get emails like that if you write books on The Physics of Star Trek.
Sarah Palin ... twittered the world with the following: “arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature” ...

let’s consider something that is indisputable: the measured rise of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is numerically consistent with that predicted from the output of human industrial activity.

This fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute, apparently by Palin, is whether this rise will have any effect on “nature.” It already has.

No, Palin did not dispute that. It is funny how her critics rarely criticize what she actually says, but criticize invented meanings instead.
As that pH level continues to fall on its present trajectory, it will eventually reach a point where calcium carbonate —- a dominant component of shelled animals and coral reefs —- will dissolve in seawater.
This is an outlandish prediction about the future. To be scientific, he should give some reference to the assumptions and reasoning that went into it. It is out of Krauss's expertise, so he is obviously just relying on someone else. Krauss is the one being unscientific here.

Friday, Mar 19, 2010
 
Historians refuse to examine Poincare-Einstein dispute
A Yves Gingras article on Brittanica argues that historians should not credit Lorentz or Poincare over Einstein because physicists of the day credited Einstein. It says:
The task of evaluation should be left to the actors involved as it is highly probable that what historians now see as related or even identical was not seen that way by the actors involved at the time. ...

Hence it is frequent to read that it is "puzzling" that Poincare was not often cited by Lorentz or Minkowski or others, given his contribution, or that it is "surprising" that the collection of basic papers on relativity published in 1913 did not contain Poincare's 1906 paper. ...

As late as 5 July 1909, a long-time friend of Poincare, the Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler, wrote to Poincare: "You undoubtedly know the pamphlet by Minkowski `Raum und Zeit' published after his death as well as the ideas of Einstein41 and Lorentz on the same question. Now M. Fredholm tells me that you have touched upon similar ideas before the others, while expressing yourself in a less philosophical, more mathematical manner."42 He asked him if he could write a paper on the subject, which he would publish in his own mathematical journal (Acta mathematica). Written in a "language comprehensible by simple geometers", it would render "a great service to everyone". ...

Poincare was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.45 At about the same time, in 1912, the physicists Wilhelm Wien and Clemens Schaefer proposed that the prize be given jointly to Lorentz and Einstein for their work on relativity, a further indication that the dominant perception of physicists was that the theory of relativity originated essentially with these two.46 Following Poincare's death in July 1912, a series of eulogies were published and none of them raised the question of the lack of proper recognition for his contributions to electron theory or suggested that they were equivalent to Einstein's relativity theory, which was, by then, well known in physics. The question of `priority' was not yet an issue, not even for the French physicist Paul Langevin. In a very long analysis of "Poincare le physicien", published in 1913, ...

Gingras previously published some similar ideas here.

Yes, apparently most physicists credited Einstein for special relativity. But not everyone did, as apparently the mathematicians Mittag-Leffler and Fredholm credited Poincare for priority.

If the papers from 1910 cited both Poincare and Einstein and explained why Einstein's theory was better, then that opinion should be given some weight. But ignoring Poincare suggests that something else is going on. The above article says to accept the opinions of the time, but nobody at the time said that Einstein's theory was better than Poincare's.

Maybe most physicists did not understand Poincare's papers, until others had extracted the good ideas. Maybe some thought that Poincare's papers were wrong. Maybe the German physicists did not like the French. Maybe most physicists were just blindly following the opinions of others, as the above article suggests that we do now.

The core of special relativity theory is the spacetime geometry and electromagnetic covariance. Poincare published this, and Einstein did not. The Einstein apologists refuse to address this, and instead give kooky reasons for crediting Einstein.

There are two different views of science and scientific progress at work here. One is the view that science is the pursuit of objective knowledge about the natural world. Scientists make observations, find testable hypotheses, and test them. Scientific works can be evaluated by analyzing the reasoning, and replicating the experiments. This is how the scientific method has worked for millennia.

The other view denies this, and denies that there is any such thing as objective truth. Modern philosophers view science as a big popular contest of ideas, with no ideas being objectively better than any others. People with this view always credit Einstein because scientific correctness is defined by its popularity. Einstein is popular, so he must be a great scientist.

I think that there is overwhelming objective evidence that Poincare invented special relativity, and it can only be denied by those also deny that ideas can be scientifically evaluated.


Thursday, Mar 18, 2010
 
Kragh on the origin of relativity
Chapter 7 of Quantum generations: a history of physics in the twentieth century By Helge Kragh is on "Einstein's relativity, and others". Here is how he dismissed Lorentz:
The famous 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment was an attempt to mea- sure the motion of the earth relative to the ether by means of an advanced interferometer technique. ...

Lorentz’s first explanation of Michelson's result was clearly ad hoc and not even based on his electrodynamic theory. During the following decade he greatly developed the theory, and in 1899 the Dutch theorist ...

The Lorentz transformations make up the formal core of the special theory of relativity, and at first glance it might thus seem that Einstein's theory was preceded by the electron theories of Lorentz and Larmor. However, this was not the case at all. In spite of having obtained the same transformations as Einstein in l905. Lorentz interpreted them in a very different way. First. Lorentz's was a dynamic theory in which the transfomtations could be as- cribed a physical cause, the interaction between the ether and the electrons of the moving body. The length contraction was seen as a compensating effect arising because of the body's motion through the ether. The earth. according to Lorentz, really moved through the ether, only the ether wind was not measurable, in accordance with Michelson's result. Second, Lo- rentz`s ether was an essential part of his theory, in which it functioned as an absolute frame of reference. For example. he maintained (implicitly in 1904 and explicitly in 1906) the existence of absolute simultaneity. That this con- cept does not agree with the modem interpretation of the time transformation only illustrates the difference between the theories of Lorentz and Einstein. [p.88]

In other words, Lorentz does not deserve any credit because he attempted to give a physical explanation of relativity, and because his interpretation differs from the modern one.

Here are Lorentz's 1906 Columbia lectures (also here), and I don't read it as requiring the existence of absolute simultaneity. He talks about the aether and "effective" and "true" coordinates, whereas Einstein preferred terms like "time of the stationary system". Some people say that these terminological differences prove that Lorentz did not understand relativity, but I think that the terms are obviously equivalent and neither set of terms is any better than the other.

He also dismisses Poincare:

No sketch of the prehistory of relativity, however brief, can avoid men- tioning Henri Poincaré alongside Lorentz. Based on his conventionalist con- ception of science, around l900 the French mathematician questioned whether the simultaneity ot two events could be given any objective meaning. As early as 1898 he wrote. "Light has a constant speed .... This postulate can- not be verified by experience. ... it furnishes a new rule for the definition of simultaneity" (Cao 1997, 64). Two years later, at the Paris world congress of physics, Poincaré discussed whether the ether really existed. Although he did not answer the question negatively. he was of the opinion that the ether was at most an abstract frame of reference that could not be given physical prop- erties. In his Science and Hypothesis of l902. Poincaré declared the question of the ether to be metaphysical, just a convenient hypothesis that some day would be discarded as useless. In his address to the St. Louis congress in l904, he examined critically the idea of absolute motion, argued that Lorentz`s local time (t') was no more unreal than his general time (t), and formulated what he called the relativity principle, namely, the impossibility of detecting absolute, uniform motion. His formulation of l904 is worth quoting: "According to the Principle of Relativity the laws of physical phe- nomena must be the same for a ‘fixed' observer as for an observer who has at uniform motion of translation relative to him ... there must arise an entirely new kind of dynamics, which will be characterized above all by the rule, that no velocity cart exceed the velocity of light" (Sopka and Moyer l986, 293). Up to this point, Poincaré's intervention in the discussion had been mainly programmatic and semiphilosophical. In the summer of l905. without know- ing about Einsteins forthcoming paper, he developed an electrodynamic the- ory that in some respects went beyond Lorentz’s. For example, he proved the relativistic law of addition of velocities, which Lorentz had not done, and also gave the correct transformation formula for the charge density. Apart from restating the principle of relativity as "a general law of nature," Poin- caré moditied Lorentz's analysis and proved that the Lorentz transformations form a group with the important property that x2 + y2 + z2 — c2t2 is invariant, that is, remains the same in any frame of reference. He even no- ticed that the invariant could be written in the symmetric way x2 + y2 + z2 + tau2 if the imaginary time coordinate tau = ict was introduced. Poincaré's theory was an important improvement, a relativity theory indeed, but not the theory of relativity. Strangely, the French mathematician did not follow up on his important insights, nor did he show any interest in Einstein's simul- taneously developed theory of relativity. [p.89]
So Poincare does not get credit because he did not formulate relativity in the same way Einstein did, and because he ignored Einstein.

Poincare showed little interest in Einstein because there was no simultaneously developed theory. All of those aspects of the theory listed about were developed years ahead of Einstein, and Einstein added nothing of value. The only thing I can find that might have been independently developed is the velocity addition law. Poincare published it a few weeks before Einstein submitted his paper, but Einstein might not have read it.

Kragh goes on to propagate some Einstein myths:

Another puzzling fact about Einstein's paper is that it did not mention the Michelson-Morley ex- periment or, for that matter, other optical experiments that failed to detect an ether wind and that were routinely discussed in the literature concerning the electrodynamics of moving bodies. There is, however, convincing evidence not only that Einstein was aware of the Michelson—Morley experiment at the time he wrote his paper, but also that the experiment was of no particular importance to him. He did not develop his theory in order to account for an experimental puzzle, but worked from much more general considerations of simplicity and symmetry. These were primarily related to his deep interest in Maxwell's theory and his belief that there could be no difference in principle between the laws of mechanics and those governing electromagnetic phe- nomena. In Einstein`s route to relativity, thought experiments were more important than real experiments. [p.90]
There is a simple explanation for Einstein ignoring the experiments. He was just giving a presentation of the Lorentz-Poincare theory, which had already been built on the experiments, as Kragh described earlier.

Einstein says in his famous 1905 paper:

The theory to be developed is based -- like all electrodynamics -- on the kinematics of the rigid body, since the assertions of any such theory have to do with the relationships between rigid bodies (systems of co-ordinates), clocks, and electromagnetic processes. Insufficient consideration of this circumstance lies at the root of the difficulties which the electrodynamics of moving bodies at present encounters.
He was saying that he was giving a kinematical presentation of the Lorentz-Poincare theory. For that, there was no reason to give any lab evidence.

Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010
 
Myths about epicycles
From NewScientist mag in 2005:
Around AD 130 Ptolemy produced a hugely influential book, the Almagest, which proposed a series of circular "epicycles" operating on the circles to modify the positions of the planets.

This explained observed positions fairly well, but as the centuries went by into Renaissance times, more and more epicycles had to be added to explain the latest observations. The "dark force" of the epicycles was necessary to make an unquestioned theory work, but the reason for their existence was never explained. Even when Copernicus proposed putting the sun at the centre of the universe in the 16th century, this only reduced the number of epicycles needed from 80 to 34.

It was not until Kepler's calculations in the early 17th century that it became clear the planets were actually travelling in ellipses. Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation published in 1687 finally gave this mathematical and academic respectability and allowed the entire panoply of unexplained epicycles to be junked.

No, this is wrong. Epicycles did not modify the positions of the planets, they only affected their appearance from Earth. There was no unquestioned theory, as the ancient Greeks debated whether the Earth moved or not. Copernicus added epicycles and did not reduce the number of them. Kepler's ellipses did give better accuracy, but mainly because of better data.

Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010
 
Galileo misjudged stars
Nature mag reports (with full article here):
Galileo backed Copernicus despite data
Stars viewed through early telescopes suggested that Earth stood still.
Katharine Sanderson

Galileo Galilei was right: Earth moves around the Sun, just as Nicolaus Copernicus said it did in 1543. But had Galileo followed the results of his observations to their logical conclusion, he should have backed another system — the Tychonic view that Earth didn't move, and that everything else circled around it and the Sun, as developed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century.

This is an interesting argument about the evidence for the distance of stars in 1600, but I don't think Galileo paid any attention to the Tychonic view anyway. The Copernican system required that the stars are very far away, but Galileo got tricked by an optical effect that the stars were closer. If he had believed what he thought he saw, then he would have doubted the Copernican system.

You can find the Galileo story here, from a Catholic point of view:

At Galileo’s request, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit—one of the most important Catholic theologians of the day — issued a certificate that, although it forbade Galileo to hold or defend the heliocentric theory, did not prevent him from conjecturing it. When Galileo met with the new pope, Urban VIII, in 1623, he received permission from his longtime friend to write a work on heliocentrism, but the new pontiff cautioned him not to advocate the new position, only to present arguments for and against it. When Galileo wrote the Dialogue on the Two World Systems, he used an argument the pope had offered, and placed it in the mouth of his character Simplicio. Galileo, perhaps inadvertently, made fun of the pope, a result that could only have disastrous consequences. Urban felt mocked and could not believe how his friend could disgrace him publicly. Galileo had mocked the very person he needed as a benefactor. He also alienated his long-time supporters, the Jesuits, with attacks on one of their astronomers. The result was the infamous trial, which is still heralded as the final separation of science and religion.
Galileo's book did not even mention the Tychonic system, which had been the leading geocentric system for 40 years by then. He didn't mention Kepler either, who published his system in 1609. If Galileo had written a balanced book, or if he had presented the scientific state-of-the-art, then he would have had no problem.

Sunday, Mar 14, 2010
 
Einstein says American men are toy dogs for women
More newspaper archives are online, and searchable by Google. I found this funny July 8, 1921, Friday, NY Times story about Einstein. Here is a description in a book by Lewis Samuel Feuer:
ln many ways, Einstein was not a "modern." His attitude toward women, we might note, was much like that of Freud and Schopenhauer. Like Freud, he felt America was afflicted with petticoat government, a view that involved Einstein in an unpleas- ant interchange, widely publicized, shortly after his visit to the United States. On july 8, 1921, The New York Times carried a dis- patch from Berlin with arresting headlines: Einstein Declares Women Rule Here / Scientist Says He Found American Men the Toy Dogs ofthe Other Sex / People Colossally Bored / Showed Ex- cessive Enthusiasm Over Him for Lack of Other Things / He Thinks. Among its direct quotations was one that sounded like an echo of Sinclair Lewis's then popular Main Street and Babbitt: "There are cities with 1,000,000 inhabitants, despite which what poverty, intellectual poverty! . .. Above all things there are the women who, as a literal fact, dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet. For the rest they are the toy dogs of the women, who spend the money in a most unmeasurable, illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of extravagance. . . now quite by chance they have thrown themselves on the Einstein fashion." "The magic power of mys- tery," “of what they cannot conceive," he thought, had an allure for them. And he concluded with the remark: "[T]o compare the general scientific life in America with Europe is nonsense."

These ungenerous remarks were perhaps just another of the anti-American deprecations customary among European visitors from Charles Dickens to the worst of them, Bertrand Russell. The New York Times firmly rebuked Einstein by writing that "it is a well-known fact that high development in one direction has underdevelopment elsewhere to balance it," that a great physi- cist could be a superficial sociological observer, and that Einstein's remark was "ludicrously and offensively false." Perhaps Einstein was irritated, the editorial suggested, because he and Weizmann had largely failed in their American mission, having indeed aroused "antagonism" rather than approval. Nonetheless, Ein- stein’s bad manners and sociological ignorance said the Times, would not make them any "less ready" to honor his scientific achievement. Especially effective in rebutting Einstein was the editor of the Popular Science Monthly, Kenneth W. Payne. Ameri- cans had a higher average education than Europeans, Germans in particular he noted, and their interest in science was much greater. Payne pointed to the “over million and a half readers of the popular scientific magazines" and the three and a half million of technical magazines: "What European nation can even ap- proach such figures showing widespread popular interest in sci- ence? . . . And where are the European papers that give the same consistent play to scientific developments that we do?" Einstein "l1as completely misinterpreted the popular sensation accom- panying his reception here," he concluded.

Most of the stories after 1923 are copyrighted, and require payment.

This Jul 13, 1924 story makes fun of Einstein for miscounting his change on a street car. November 11, 1919 NY Times story

ACCEPTS EINSTEIN GRAVITATION THEORY;
Prof. Curries of Brown University Calls Eclipse Demonstration Great Achievement.
SOME SCIENTISTS CAUTIOUS
They Want Full Reports from theObservers Before Forming Their Final Conclusions. ...

"It was not until 1915," he said, "that the four-dimensional theory of the universe, with time as a fourth dimension, was definitely conceived. This was contained in Einstein's famous relativity theory."

A Vassar professor said that she does not understand the theory, but it must be accepted anyway.

An April 5, 1922 NY Times story said that some French scientists were snubbing Einstein, altho the reasoning is not entirely clear.

December 31, 1922 NYT book review of textbook skeptical of relativity:

In one sense the London press is responsible for the tremendous exploitation of Einstein's theory. ...

We say it with regret, but it is none the less true, that mathematicians and metaphysicians in Europe and America went over almost solidly to the new cult. ...

He sees in the doctrine of relativity a happy ending of the separation of philosophy and science. They now approach each other.

The reviewer hopes the union will be long delayed.

It says that the other 98% of the books have uncritically accepted relativity.

says "Einstein has been solemnly excommunicated by the Russian Communinsts." His theory was not materialist enough, and could lead to "pure idealism".

Happy Pi-Einstein Day.


Friday, Mar 12, 2010
 
Britannica on Poincare
Encyclopædia Britannica writes:
Henri Poincaré (French mathematician):
...of mechanics —- led him to write a paper in 1905 on the motion of the electron. This paper, and others of his at this time, came close to anticipating Albert Einstein’s discovery of the theory of special relativity. But Poincaré never took the decisive step of reformulating traditional concepts of space and time into space-time, which was Einstein’s most profound achievement.
This is crazy. Poincare combined space and time into spacetime in his 1905 paper, and Einstein did not.

The heart of special relativity is the spacetime geometry and the covariance of physical laws. Poincare had these in his 1905 papers, but Einstein failed to take these decisive steps.

Roger Cerf claims that this 1908 Poincare quote proves that he did not understand the physical meaning of the Lorentz/FitzGerald contraction:

This hypothesis, formulated by Lorentz and FitzGerald, will at first seem extraordinary; all we can say in its favor at the moment is that it is only the immediate translation of the experimental result obtained by Michelson, if we define lengths by the time light takes to traverse them.
Even a century later, it is impossible to find fault with Poincare's statement.

The logic is slightly different from Einstein's. Einstein ignored Michelson, and assumed the relativity postulate and the constancy of the speed of light. He defined length using measuring rods, instead of using light. From those and some hidden assumptions, he deduced the Lorentz contraction.

Poincare is more careful about saying what is testable. Michelson had an experimental result. The constancy of the speed of light allows him to define distance in terms of time. Then the Lorentz contraction is a testable hypothesis. Poincare likes to distinguish experiment from convention.

I previously criticized Cerf here. There is something very bizarre about Einstein that drives his defenders to say nonsense.


Thursday, Mar 11, 2010
 
Einstein treated like a god
The NY Times reported:
Albert Einstein personally rewrote the laws of physics in a sparsely furnished central Berlin apartment nearly a century ago and the resulting manuscript, profoundly human and surprisingly moving to examine, has been put on display here for the first time. ...

The display of the work, which forced a redefinition of gravity, predicted the existence of black holes and illuminated how galaxies are formed, ...

“We have set it up like the Dead Sea Scrolls, to protect them but also to give the feeling of entering a kind of holy of holies, which is how we view it,” said Hanoch Guttfreund, a physics professor, former president of the Hebrew University and curator of the exhibition. “And you can actually see Einstein work as you look at the pages.”

Einstein did not even believe in black holes, and certainly did not predict them.

This is really ridiculous. The main equations for general relativity were discovered by someone else two years earlier. These papers were the result of Hilbert explaining the theory to Einstein, and Einstein did not credit Hilbert of anyone else.


Wednesday, Mar 10, 2010
 
No science theory created by conceptual clarification
Alan Sokal interview:
Conceptual clarification can be useful for pushing science ahead, ...

Certainly Einstein spent a lot of time doing conceptual clarification in his own mind, leading him to general relativity and special relativity, and that played a crucial role. You can call that philosophy or you can call it deep thinking about physics. Quantum mechanics was born mostly without that kind of conceptual clarification, so it shows that you can get instrumental physics without clarifying the concepts – it can go both ways.

Sokal subscribes to the myth that Einstein created relativity with pure thought, as argued by Polanyi below.

A lot of physicists are so gullible as to believe that Einstein had some peculiar methodology (that Sokal calls conceptual clarification) to create relativity theory, but this methodology has never successfully created any other scientific theory. What makes them think that it worked for relativity?

The simple answer is that no physical theory was created by conceptual clarification. Lorentz and Poncare created relativity, not Einstein.


Tuesday, Mar 09, 2010
 
Philosophers Rip Darwin
Philosopher and self-proclaimed evolutionist Michael Ruse writes a long attack on fellow philosophers who are skeptical about Darwinism:
Plantinga is an open enthusiast of intelligent design, the belief that at some points in life's history an intelligent being intervened to move the process along. Why does Plantinga feel this way? In his view, Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history.

Jerry Fodor, no less distinguished than Nagel and Plantinga, is well known for his claim that the mind is composed of separately functioning modules. And he, too, has taken to criticizing Darwinian theory, first in an article in the London Review of Books and now in What Darwin Got Wrong. ...

To Fodor the notion of natural selection is flawed. He has long been on record arguing that metaphors in science are misleading, and that they must be eliminated as science matures. In the case of Darwinism, we have an analogy or metaphor at work, between the artificial selection that breeders use when they improve livestock ...

What does one say about these critics? One could certainly pick apart individual things, for instance Fodor's claims about selective breeding versus natural selection. ... But rather than work over the details, I want to draw attention to the way this crop of critics ignores evolutionary biology —- aside from the kind of cherry-picking in which Fodor engages.

And then there is Fodor. The final section of his new book is very revealing. As a dreadful warning to those who do not accept his main conclusions, Fodor prints passage after passage of claims by Darwinians that one can understand human nature and thinking as the product of natural selection: This is where we will all end up if we don't stop the rot right now. My suspicion is that Fodor doesn't really give a damn about fruit flies or finches or anything else out there. But when it comes to Homo sapiens, he wants no part of a naturalistic explanation that reduces design to the workings of blind law.

This seems weak to me. Fodor ought to be able to criticize Darwinian analysis of human nature without going into a detailed analysis of finches. And Ruse wrote a lot of words without rebutting very much.

Monday, Mar 08, 2010
 
Polanyi on Copernicus and Einstein
The Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote the book, Personal Knowledge (University of Chicago, 1958). He was interested in the separation between reason and experience, and argued that the scientific method was overrated. He said objectivity is a delusion, and he preferred reason.

His best examples were Copernicus and Einstein. His book says this on Copernicus:

1. THE LESSON OF THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

IN the Ptolemaic system, as in the cosmogony of the Bible, man was assigned a central position in the universe, from which position he was ousted by Copernicus. Ever since, writers eager to drive the lesson home have urged us, resolutely and repeatedly, to abandon all sentimental ego- ism, and to see ourselves objectively in the true perspective of time and space. ...

What is the true lesson of the Copernican revolution? Why did Coper- nicus exchange his actual terrestrial station for an imaginary solar stand- point? The only justification for this lay in the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the earth. Copernicus gave preference to man's delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses, which present us with the irresistible fact of the sun, the moon, and the stars rising daily in the east to travel across the sky towards their setting in the west. In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.

It becomes legitimate to regard the Copernican system as more object- ive than the Ptolemaic only if we accept this very shift in the nature of intellectual satisfaction as the criterion of greater objectivity. ...

It seems to me that we have sound reasons for thus considering theoretical knowledge as more objective than immediate experience. ...

Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures. We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason. In doing so, we claim the capacity to formulate ideas which command respect in their own right, by their very rationality, and which have in this sense an objective standing.

Wow. This explains how Thomas Kuhn got some of his bad ideas. I had blamed Kuhn for a lot of this Copernican Revolution nonsense, but now it appears that much of it was stolen from Polanyi.

On Einstein:

The story of relativity is a complicated one, owing to the currency of a number of historical fictions. The chief of these can be found in every text- book of physics. It tells you that relativity was conceived by Einstein in 1905 in order to account for the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment, carried out in Cleveland eighteen years earlier, in 1887. Michelson and Morley are alleged to have found that the speed of light measured by a terrestrial observer was the same in whatever direction the signal was sent out. ...

The usual textbook account of relativity as a theoretical response to the Michelson-Morley experiment is an invention. It is the product of a philosophical prejudice. When Einstein discovered rationality in nature, unaided by any observa- tion that had not been available for at least fifty years before, our posi- tivistic textbooks promptly covered up the scandal by an appropriately embellished account of his discovery. ...

But the historical facts are different. Einstein had speculated already as a schoolboy, at the age of sixteen, on the curious consequences that would occur if an observer pursued and kept pace with a light signal sent out by lifm. His autobiography reveals that he discovered relativity

after ten years* reflection ... from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest. However, there seems to be no such thing, whether on the basis of experience or according to Maxwell's equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how should the first observer know or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion? One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained.
There is no mention here of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Its findings were, on the basis of pure speculation, rationally intuited by Einstein before he had ever heard about it. To make sure of this, I addressed an enquiry to the late Professor Einstein, who confirmed the fact that *the Michelson-Morley experiment had a negligible effect on the discovery of relativity*.
This is breathtakingly stupid. Einstein did not discover relativity, and would have just said whatever fed his ego the most.

Einstein wrote a 1909 paper saying that Michelson-Morley was crucial because Lorentz's 1895 theory explained all the other relativity experiments. It was crucial to Lorentz and Poincare in their papers during 1899-1905. So Einstein contradicted himself.

It is not too hard to explain. Einstein was telling half-truths both times. In 1909 he needed to show that his relativity was better that Lorentz's 1895 theory, so he cited Michelson-Morley. After Lorentz was long gone and was no threat anymore, Einstein could claim even more credit for himself by acting like he was divinely inspired.

Polanyi seems like a nut, but he seems to have spread his foolishness. I think that he coined the term "Copernican Revolution" to mean something other than its original meaning, which was the revolutions of the planets around the Sun.


Sunday, Mar 07, 2010
 
Rush was right about missing link
Leading evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
On May 20 of last year, at a remarkable press conference in New York, a group of researchers announced—with much ballyhoo—that they’d found a 47-million-year-old primate fossil named Darwinius masillae (nicknamed “Ida”). Ida, the finest fossil primate in existence, was touted loudly as the missing link between the two major branches of primates, ...

Well, a paper just out in the Journal of Human Evolution, by Blythe Williams et al. (including my Chicago colleague Callum Ross), appears to drive the final nail in Ida’s coffin—at least regarding her status as a missing link between the major branches of primates. ...

I quoted Rush Limbaugh calling this BS, on the day of the announcement. He was right.

Saturday, Mar 06, 2010
 
Albert Einstein: A Selective Skeptic
Skeptical Inquirer magazine wrote in 2007 The Myth of Consistent Skepticism (also here). Even one of their biggest heroes, Einstein, was a commie sympathizer:
Albert Einstein’s scientific contributions, like those of Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton, have shaped the way we view the universe. Einstein had a great mathematical mind, and has become a scientific icon. Einstein, most likely because of his scientific achievements, was voted one of the ten outstanding skeptics of the twentieth century ...

Einstein, a professed believer in political liberty, virtually refuses to criticize the Soviet government and justifies the murders and creation of slave labor camps. The closest Einstein comes to criticism of the Soviet government is contained in the first sentence of the following quote. However, the next sentence speaks for itself. According to Einstein in 1948, “I am not blind to the serious weaknesses of the Russian system of government and I would not like to live under such government. But it has, on the other side, great merits and it is difficult to decide whether it would have been possible for the Russians to survive by following softer methods” (Einstein quoted in Hook 1987, p. 471).

Hook responded with a lengthy letter, pointing out many inconsistencies in Einstein’s reasoning when it came to the Soviet Union:

Precisely what methods have you in mind? I am puzzled on what evidence anyone can assert that cultural purges and terror in astronomy, biology, art, music, literature, the social sciences, helped the Russians to survive, or how the millions of victims in concentration camps of the Soviet Union, not to speak of the wholesale executions, contributed in any way to the Russian victory over Hitler. The Russians defeated Napoleon who was relative to his time even mightier than Hitler. But I don’t believe you would find it difficult to decide that this in no way constituted a historic justification of serfdom. (p. 473)
Einstein did not respond to Hook’s letter.
Einstein's FBI file says:
An investigation was conducted by the FBI regarding the famous physicist because of his affiliation with the Communist Party. Einstein was a member, sponsor, or affiliated with thirty-four communist fronts between 1937 and 1954. He also served as honorary chairman for three communist organizations.
Another article is on Special Relativity after 100 Years:
One hundred years after Albert Einstein gave us the theory of special relativity, we have made good progress in applying the equations he gave us, but we have difficulty absorbing his central message about time and simultaneity.
That central message was published five years ahead of Einstein.

From a Carl Sagan interview:

Einstein had some difficulties with special relativity. His Nobel prize was not even for relativity, it was for the photoelectric effect, because relativity was considered to be worrisome. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who recognized the value of what Einstein said. He was not challenging Isaac Newton; Isaac Newton was dead. The value of what Einstein said was there plain for anyone to see; nobody had thought of it before. As soon as people had worked through the arguments on the idea that simultaneity was a nonsensical idea, many were converted on the spot. I don’t say that everybody was; I don’t say that there weren’t some problems with it, but there is a reward structure built in. And Einstein, just a few years after his 1905 relativity paper, was Full Professor and at the top of his profession.
Sagan should have known better. Einstein's ideas were not new; people had published them before. Of course they were not convinced by pure reason; they wanted to see some experimental evidence. Einstein did not get the Nobel Prize for special relativity because the committee knew that he was not the inventor of it.

From a book review:

Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time. By Michio Kaku.

Kaku addresses these last few decades of Einstein’s life with great sympathy and admiration. Most biographers gloss over this period as the fading glory of a once-great scientist, but Kaku argues persuasively that the groundwork for much latter-day research was laid during these years. As Kaku writes, “crumbs that have tumbled off Einstein’s plate are now winning Nobel Prizes for oth- er scientists.”

No, Einstein's later work only fueled crackpots.

Friday, Mar 05, 2010
 
Father of modern physics
Someone just edited the Wikipedia article on Einstein to say that Einstein "is often regarded as the father of modern physics." The source is a book on Poincare that says:
Together with Einstein, Poincaré can therefore be regarded as the founding father of modern physics.
The book credits Poincare with doing work on Hamiltonian mechanics that helped inspire quantum mechanics. I knew that he did some early work on quantum mechanics, but I don't know how important it was.

I'll be interested to see if the edit sticks. Einstein is only credited for relativity by those who ignore Poincare, and they might not like any comparisons. Poincare's work on relativity was much more modern and sophisticated than Einstein's.

 
Knowing the mind of God
NewScientist reports:
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God".
The seven theories of everything are: String theory, Loop quantum gravity, CDT, Quantum Einstein gravity, Quantum graphity, Internal relativity, E8.

No, this is wrong. None of these theories say anything about dark matter, the arrow of time, or how gravity works. They don't even say anything testable.

This shows how much theoretical physics has degenerated. There are seven theories of anything, and no one can say how any of them are any better or worse than any of the others. And the list omits the theories that really do explain the experiments that we can do.


Thursday, Mar 04, 2010
 
Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets
The NY Times reports:
The linkage of evolution and global warming is partly a legal strategy: courts have found that singling out evolution for criticism in public schools is a violation of the separation of church and state. By insisting that global warming also be debated, deniers of evolution can argue that they are simply championing academic freedom in general.

Yet they are also capitalizing on rising public resistance in some quarters to accepting the science of global warming, particularly among political conservatives who oppose efforts to rein in emissions of greenhouse gases.

In South Dakota, a resolution calling for the “balanced teaching of global warming in public schools” passed the Legislature this week.

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” the resolution said, “but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life.”

The measure made no mention of evolution, but opponents of efforts to dilute the teaching of evolution noted that the language was similar to that of bills in other states that had included both. The vote split almost entirely along partisan lines in both houses, with Republican voting for it and Democrats voting against.

For mainstream scientists, there is no credible challenge to evolutionary theory. They oppose the teaching of alternative views like intelligent design, the proposition that life is so complex that it must be the design of an intelligent being. And there is wide agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring and that human activities are probably driving it. Yet many conservative evangelical Christians assert that both are examples of scientists’ overstepping their bounds.

This is funny. Why are they so afraid of “balanced teaching”? Real scientists are happy to explain the bounds of their knowledge. They should not be afraid that students would learn that carbon dioxide is a beneficial ingredient for plant life.

Every other area of science teaches the competing theories, even if they have been proved wrong. The germ theory of disease gets taught with the non-germ theory. The Copernican theory gets taught with the Ptolemaic. They teach the Bohr atom and Newtonian gravity, even tho these have been superseded. No one gets excited about it.

What's different about evolution and global warming is that there is a political agenda that goes with it. And some people want that political message undiluted.


Wednesday, Mar 03, 2010
 
A measure for the multiverse
NewScientist has a cover story on the multiverse:
Several strands of theoretical physics - quantum mechanics, string theory and cosmic inflation - seem to converge on the idea that our universe is only one among an infinite and ever-growing assemblage of disconnected bubble universes.

What's more, the multiverse offers a plausible answer to what has become an infuriatingly slippery question: why does the quantity of dark energy in the universe have the extraordinarily unlikely value that it does? No theory of our universe has been able to explain it. But if there are countless universes out there beyond our cosmic horizon, each with its own value for the quantity of dark energy it contains, the value we observe becomes not just probable but inevitable.

What it is saying is that the density of the vacuum is very small in units that are used to describe matter, and unified field theories like string theory cannot explain it.

Unlikely value? I think that the multiverse is a lot more unlikely.


Tuesday, Mar 02, 2010
 
Janssen on Einstein
I found Michael Heinrich Paul Janssen's 1995 dissertation on a server at the Max Planck Institute for the history of science in Germany.
In this dissertation, I want to compare the ether theory of the great Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853–1928) to Einstein’s special theory of relativity. To the end of his life, Lorentz maintained, first, that his theory is empirically equivalent to special relativity, and, second, that, in the final analysis, it is a matter of taste whether one prefers the standard relativistic interpretation of the formalism of the theory or his own ether theoretic interpretation (see, e.g., Nersessian 1984, pp. 113–119). I will argue that Lorentz’s first claim, when understood properly, should be accepted, but that the second should be rejected.
He seeks to justify this assertion published with Einstein's complete works:
Einstein was the first physicist to formulate clearly the new kinematical foundation for all of physics inherent in Lorentz’s electron theory. (Stachel et al. 1989, p. 253)
Here are some of Janssen's points:
  • Lorentz exhibits the wrong degree of adhocness, and hence he was not truly scientific.
  • Lorentz does not recognize his "local time" and other variables as being observables until after Einstein's 1905 paper.
  • Poincare wrote in 1900 and afterwards that Lorentz's local time was observable, and credited Lorentz, but Lorentz does not deserve the credit because he never acknowledged Poincare.
  • Lorentz even republished some of Poincare's ideas under his own name, without crediting Poincare.
  • Lorentz deduced his theory from electromagnetism, while Einstein took an axiomatic approach.
  • Einstein had a different ontology.
There are more papers on Janssen's home page.

Here is another contorted explanation of why Einstein's theory was better than Lorentz's:

The relation between Einstein's special theory of relativity and Lorentz's ether theory is best understood in terms of competing interpretations of Lorentz invariance. In the 1890s Lorentz proved and exploited the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations, the laws governing electromagnetic fields in the ether, with what he called the theorem of corresponding states. To account for the negative results of attempts to detect the earth's motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, had to assume that the laws governing the matter interacting with the fields are Lorentz invariant as well. This additional assumption can be seen as a generalization of the well-known contraction hypothesis. In Lorentz's theory, it remained an unexplained coincidence that both the laws governing fields and the laws governing matter should be Lorentz invariant. In special relativity, by contrast, the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws directly reflects the Minkowski space-time structure posited by the theory. One can thus produce a common cause argument to show that the relativistic interpretation of Lorentz invariance is preferable to Lorentz's interpretation.
Got that? Lorentz said that fields and matter had to be Lorentz invariant, but Einstein was better because he said all physical laws had to be Lorentz invariant. That is not only silly, but Einstein did not even say that. It was Poincare who said all the physical laws had to be Lorentz invariant, and he said it before Einstein said anything on the subject.

I don't think that it is correct to say that Lorentz separately assumed that matter and fields were Lorentz invariant. He believed that the basic properties of matter were electromagnetic in origin. In particular, he thought that the Lorentz contraction of a meter stick was a consequence of the contraction of the electromagnetic fields binding the atoms together. So he really just assumed that the fields were invariant.

He gives this explanation for historians not crediting Lorentz and Poincare:

The tendency to think of the dispute between Lorentz and Einstein in terms of competing research programmes etc. can be traced back, I think, to the myth of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which glorifies Einstein to the exclusion of everybody else. It is against this background, that Whittaker’s often quoted put-down of Einstein’s 1905 paper, as a “paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention” (Whittaker 1953, II, p. 40) must be seen. However, if Whittaker indeed tried to restore some balance in this way, he achieved just the opposite of what he intended. For years, historians writing on Lorentz and Poincaré understandaby felt the need to distance themselves from Whittaker’s preposterous remarks, often inadvertently giving Lorentz and Poincaré less than their fair share of the credit in the process. It is my impression that this situation is finally changing.
Really? The Einstein lovers have been artificially inflating his work because they are still mad about some 1953 book? I would think that the Einstein fans would be happy that a book on the aether did not credit him. Their main argument that Einstein created special relativity is that Lorentz and Poincare believed in the aether.

I conclude:

  • The Lorentz Aether Theory, as corrected by Poincare, was mathematically and observationally equivalent to Einstein's theory.
  • Einstein's point of view was superior to Lorentz's, but not to Poincare's.
  • Poincare generously credited Lorentz.
  • Lorentz and Einstein ignored Poincare, and plagiarized his work without crediting him.
  • Whittaker was right in 1953.
  • The Einstein fans will devise some very contorted arguments to support their hero.
The main problem in comparing LET to SR is in deciding whether to include Poincare's work in LET. If you do, the LET is really the same as SR, and there is no advantage to SR at all. If you don't, and say that local time is not real, then LET is no longer observationally equivalent to SR, as clocks would not slow down on a spaceship.

The natural solution would be to take Lorentz's own words for what LET meant, but I don't know what he thought of Poincare's work. Lorentz certainly knew about Poincare, as they exchanged letters on the subject. Lorentz did comment publicly on Einstein's work. But Lorentz is strangely silent on Poincare.

Regardless of what Lorentz may have thought, the more useful comparison is from the pre-Einstein Lorentz-Poincare theory to the Einstein 1905 theory. That is where everyone claims that Einstein made the big breakthru, and that is where everyone is wrong. The pre-Einstein theory is actually superior because it had the spacetime metric, Lorentz group, and Lorentz invariance applied to gravity.


Monday, Mar 01, 2010
 
Scientists reveal driving force behind evolution
New research from the British journal Nature:
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have provided the first experimental evidence that shows that evolution is driven most powerfully by interactions between species, rather than adaptation to the environment. ...

The study shows, for the first time, that the American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen was correct in his 'Red Queen Hypothesis'. The theory, first put forward in the 1970s, was named after a passage in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen tells Alice, 'It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place'. This suggested that species were in a constant race for survival and have to continue to evolve new ways of defending themselves throughout time.

Dr Steve Paterson, from the University's School of Biosciences, explains: "Historically, it was assumed that most evolution was driven by a need to adapt to the environment or habitat. The Red Queen Hypothesis challenged this by pointing out that actually most natural selection will arise from co-evolutionary interactions with other species, not from interactions with the environment.

Evolutionists have long told us that natural selection is well-understood as the main driving force behind evolution, with the other forces being mutation, random genetic drift and gene flow.

This article shows that natural selection is not so well understood. It is just a buzz phrase for whatever happens in nature, without telling us anything about what really happens.

I am not saying that natural selection is wrong. Just that there isn't much substance to it. Believing in natural selection is like believing in life. It just doesn't tell us much.

A couple of philosophers have a new book on What Darwin got Wrong. You can find part of the argument, with rebuttals, here. It seems to be mainly an attack on Darwin's reasoning, not his conclusions.


Sunday, Feb 28, 2010
 
Einstein was not dyslexic
It is common to claim that Einstein had learning disabilities:
The genius of Albert Einstein is legendary. His gift of intellect, world renowned. He was, by many accounts, a dyslexic.

Did you know that Albert did not learn how to tie his own shoelaces until he was nine, or thirteen, or possibly not ever?

This is back up by Researchers have learned that Einstein had developmental dyslexia. But Einstein's biographers deny it.

Much of this sort of speculation is driven by the fact there are incongruities in the story of Einstein's intelligence. Some say that he was the greatest genius who ever lived, and yet there is other evidence that he was not so smart.

The truth is very simple. Einstein did very well in school. He aced his classes and went on to get a doctoral degree in Physics. He had to be a very good student to do that. He went on to become a distinguished physicist.

But he never showed any sign of any great genius, either as a student or as a physicist. He is supposed to have invented relativity, but as I have shown on this blog, all the genius ideas were really from others.

Einstein also said a lot of foolish things. I am not sure that he ever understood what a mathematical proof is, as his papers make it very hard to understand what he is assuming and what he is proving, if anything. Once you realize that the truly ingenious parts of relativity were done by others, then there is no great disparity in the different assessments of his intelligence.


Saturday, Feb 27, 2010
 
Dyson on Poincare and Einstein
Dyson wrote:
Einstein afterward reported his impression of Poincaré: "Poincaré was simply negative in general, and, all his acumen notwithstanding, he showed little grasp of the situation." So far as Einstein was concerned, Poincaré belonged with the ether in the dustbin of history. But Einstein underestimated Poincaré. Einstein did not know that Poincaré had just then written a letter ...

Einstein never saw Poincaré's letter and never knew that he had misjudged him.

Separately, Dyson said, "Einstein... had no technical skill as a mathematician." Dyson was at the Princeton IAS for the last eight years of Einstein's life, but avoided him because he thought that Einstein's papers were junk.

It seems to me that Dyson must have had a very low opinion of Einstein's character. Einstein should have able to size up Poincare, and determine whether he belongs in the dustbin of history (whatever that means), by simply reading his papers. Instead Dyson suggests that Einstein was too petty and incompetent to do that, and instead formed an opinion of Poincare based on a faulty assumption that Poincare held a grudge against Einstein.

I think that this tells us more about Dyson than Poincare or Einstein. Dyson reveals himself in this article to be a Kuhnian who believes that science is subject to paradigm shifts that are like popular fads. In this view, he credits Einstein because others credit Einstein, and not because of any substantive reason about any objective reality. Einstein is better because his terminology was more popular, and because he was more of a backstabber. That's all.


Thursday, Feb 25, 2010
 
50 years and no aliens
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been a 50 year failure:
Here's how the late Lee DuBridge, science adviser to presidents, put it in a famous quote: "Either mankind is the most advanced intelligence in the galaxy; or not. Either alternative is mind-boggling." ...

The SETI era got its start on April 8, 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope into the skies over West Virginia and looked for patterns in the signals received. ...

"What's happening here is that the earth is growing quiet," Drake said. "If we are the model for the [intelligent] universe, that's bad news."

Waste of money. SETI is like looking for Noah's Ark. Even if space aliens were out there, they would not be beaming radio signals to Earth.

Wednesday, Feb 24, 2010
 
Lawsuit could stop Swiss collider
NewScientist magazine reports:
In 1999, physicists said no particle accelerator for the foreseeable future would have the power to create a black hole. But theoretical work published in 2001 showed that if hidden extra dimensions in space-time did exist, the LHC might create black holes after all. Thereafter, the argument for safety was changed. In 2003, it said that any black holes created would instantly evaporate. But when subsequent theoretical work suggested otherwise, the argument changed again. In 2008, CERN issued a report arguing a safety case based, ultimately, on astrophysical arguments and observations of eight white dwarf stars. These flip-flops on safety might cause a court to find current assurances less persuasive than they would otherwise be.
The simple explanation here is that the physicists do not really believe in those extra dimensions. They say they do, but they don't seem worried.

Tuesday, Feb 23, 2010
 
New string theory book
Peter Woit trashes a silly new book on string theory. The book refuses to assign credit because:
To illustrate the difficulties of doing a proper job of attributing ideas to people, let’s start by asking who figured out relativity. it was Albert Einstein, right? Yes -- but if we just stop with that one name, we’re missing a lot. Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré did important work that predated Einstein; Her- mann Minkowski introduced a crucially important math- ematical framework; David Hilbert independently figured out a key building block of general relativity; and there are several more important early figures like James Clerk Max- well, George Fitzgerald, and Joseph Larmor who deserve mention, as well as later pioneers like John Wheeler and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
I get the impression that it is well-known among physicists today that Einstein did not invent relativity, but they don't want to say it. The history of relativity is actually very well documented, and it is easy to look up who did what, and when. I do not think that there is any proof that anyone independently reinvented anything, so every idea can be credited.

Monday, Feb 22, 2010
 
Dyson on Poincare and Einstein
Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson relies on Freeman Dyson for the difference between Poincare and Einstein on relativity, as noted before. I just noticed that the quote was from a longer 2003 review of Peter Louis Galison's book, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. I have commented on Galison before.
Today the name of Einstein is known to almost everybody, the name of Poincaré to almost nobody. A hundred years ago the opposite was true. ... The theories discovered by Poincaré and Einstein were operationally equivalent, with identical experimental consequences, but there was one crucial difference. The difference was the use of the word "ether."
Dyson denies being a Kuhnian, but prefers to credit Einstein for relativity because the Einstein story better matches Kuhn's (mistaken) ideas:
Kuhn, in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, portrays the progress of science as a kind of punctuated equilibrium, like the evolution of species in the history of life. ... But at rare moments, new discoveries or new ideas arise that call the accepted dogma into question, and then a scientific revolution may occur. To cause a scientific revolution, the new discoveries must be powerful enough to overthrow the prevailing theory, and a new set of ideas must be ready to replace it. In Kuhn's view, it is new ideas that drive scientific revolutions. The big steps forward in the progress of science are idea-driven. ...

Einstein made the big jump into the world of relativity because he was eager to throw out old ideas and bring in new ones. Poincaré hesitated on the brink and never made the big jump. In this instance at least, Kuhn was right.

It is amazing that an otherwise-intellient mathematical physicist can fall for such nonsense. Dyson was reviewing a book on Poincare and Einstein, and his chief gripe is that it does not explain how Einstein's relativity was so much superior to Poincare's. Dyson is annoyed by one particular sentence that gives Poincare some credit:
Peter Galison is a historian and not a judge. His purpose is to understand the way in which Poincaré and Einstein arrived at their insights, not to hand out praise or blame. His book is an extended double portrait, describing their lives and times in detail. At the beginning, he complains of the unequal treatment given to them by biographers: "There are, to be sure, too many biographies of Einstein and not enough of Poincaré."
It is bizarre for Dyson to get so exercised about this Galison sentence. You can read the context here. Galison is not trying to say that Poincare is better and Einstein, or even to say that he is comparable. Galison is just trying to tell a story that has not been told many times already.

This demonstrates how Kuhnian physicists can be fanatical Einstein idolizers. If Galison merely mentions Poincare in the same sentence as Einstein, Dyson has to write a whole article trashing Galison for it.

I think that Einstein's reputation is propped up by Kuhnians who do not believe in objective reality.

But it is apparent that Dyson has only a superficial knowledge of the history of special relativity himself, saying:

Two years later, in 1905, Poincaré and Einstein simultaneously arrived at a solution to the problem. Poincaré presented a summary of his results to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, and in the same month Einstein mailed his classic paper, "Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," to the German journal Annalen der Physik. The two versions of the solution were in substance almost identical. Both were based on the principle of relativity, which says that the laws of nature are the same for a moving observer as they are for an observer standing still. Both agreed with the experimentally observed behavior of fast particles, and made the same predictions for the results of future experiments.
It is true that their theories were the same, but it was Einstein's 1905 theory that was the same as Poincare's pre-1905 theory. Poincare's 1905 paper had very little overlap with Einstein's 1905 paper. If Dyson thinks that these papers were identical, then he obviously has not read them.

It is not quite true that they agreed with "experimentally observed behavior". Kaufmann did experiments that some people claimed to give evidence for a rival theory. It is also not quite true that Poincare and Einstein gave the same predictions for "fast particles". Einstein only made predictions about electrodynamic forces on slow particles, because of approximations that he used. These points may seem like minor nitpicks, but they show that Dyson doesn't know what he is talking about.

Dyson's article also has some strange comments about Einstein misjudging Poincare, and badmouthing him. It appears that Einstein had a grudge against Poincare, but Poincare did not have a grudge against Einstein. That's what Dyson says, anyway.


Saturday, Feb 20, 2010
 
Conceptual advances made by Poincare
Some people argue that even if Einstein's mathematical arguments for special relativity were better done by others, Einstein should be credited for the conceptual advances.

But Einstein never made any conceptual advances. He merely had a way of presenting the advances of others

Here is a list of the special relativity conceptual advances made by Poincare. There is no record of any independently discovery of these concepts, and all were absorbed into mainstream physics in a way that can be directly traced to Poincare.

  • local clocks measure local time
  • electromagnetic relativity principle holds to all orders
  • universality of the speed of light
  • aether is unobservable
  • Lorentz group and its Lie algebra
  • spacetime metric
  • relativity as a consequence of the geometry of spacetime
  • imaginary time
  • covariance of Maxwells equations
  • simultaneity paradox
  • operational definition of time and space
  • 4-vectors
  • relativistic Lagrangian
  • Lorentz-invariant gravity
For most of these, Poincare was five years ahead of Einstein. I don't think that there is any serious argument about any of this.

A Cosmos magazine article asks Was Einstein a fake? It says not, but it does not mention Lorentz or Poincare. It is only concerned with those who do not believe relativity.


Wednesday, Feb 17, 2010
 
Weinberg on Einstein
The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an article Einstein's Mistakes in Physics Today, November 2005. It generated many letters. He writes mostly about the cosmological constant and quantum mechanics, which are probably the most famous examples of Einstein being wrong.

Weinberg ends with this:

Einstein was not only a great man, but a good one.

His moral sense guided him in other matters: He opposed militarism during World War I; he refused to support the Soviet Union in the Stalin years; he became an enthusiastic Zionist; he gave up his earlier pacifism when Europe was threatened by Nazi Germany, for instance urging the Belgians to rearm; and he publicly opposed McCarthyism. About these great public issues, Einstein made no mistakes.

Huhh? Einstein's FBI file is online, and you can read for yourself about his support for Stalinism:
An investigation was conducted by the FBI regarding the famous physicist because of his affiliation with the Communist Party. Einstein was a member, sponsor, or affiliated with thirty-four communist fronts between 1937 and 1954. He also served as honorary chairman for three communist organizations.
See this anti-Einstein page. Here is his May 1949 essay in favor of socialism.

Thus Einstein was a Communist fellow traveler who supported the Soviet Union in the Stalin years. He was not such a good man.


Tuesday, Feb 16, 2010
 
Hsu on relativity
A very good history of special relativity is in the first 100 pages or so of A broader view of relativity: general implications of Lorentz and Poincaré, by Jong-Ping Hsu, Leonardo Hsu. As the title indicates, he details the contributions of Lorentz and Poincare, but I still think that he over-credits Einstein.

He says:

Having said all this, Einstein is generally considered to have had a more profound understanding of physical space, time and relativity. ...

When Pauli discussed Einstein and the development of physics, he said: 'Nowadays we speak with some justification of the "Lorentz Group"; but as a matter of history it was precisely the group property of his transformations that Lorentz failed to recognize; this was reserved for Poincaré and Einstein independently. lt is regrettable that a certain amount of dispute about priority has arisen over this.'14 [p.77]

14. W. Pauli, Writings on Physics and Philosophy (Edited by (C. P. Enz and Karl von Meyenn, translated by R. Schlapp, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1994), p. 113: Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 12. Januar 1958. [p.84]

No, they did not recognize it independently. Poincare published a paper in 1905 saying:
The essential idea of Lorentz consists in that the equations of the electromagnetic field will not be altered by a certain transformation (which I shall further term the Lorentz transformation) of the following form: ...

In this transformation the x-axis plays a particular role, but it is clearly possible to construct such a transformation, in which this role will be assumed by a certain straight line passing through the origin. The set of all such transformations together with all spatial rotations should form a group; but for this to take place it is necessary that l = 1; hence one is led to assume l = 1, which is precisely the consequence obtained by Lorentz in another way.

Einstein had access to this paper two weeks before he submitted his first relativity paper, which only said this about the transformations forming a group:
If in addition to the systems K and k figuring in § 3 we introduce still another system of co-ordinates k' moving parallel to k ... [velocity addition law omitted] from which we see that such parallel transformations--necessarily--form a group.
As you can see, Einstein is only making a statement about a one-dimensional subgroup. He made no use of any group property, and probably did not appreciate its significance.

For Poincare, the group property is crucial and well understood. He gave the Lie algebra of the Lorentz group. He proved that Maxwell's equations are covariant under the group. His whole methodology is to study physics by studying the invariants of the Lorentz group. Einstein has none of this. Studying relativity thru the Lorentz group was entirely Poincare's invention.

Yes, some people consider Einstein to have had a more profound understanding, but only by people like Pauli who misunderstand the basic facts of who did what.

Hsu agrees with some of this, and says:

As a mathematician, Poincaré understood the Lorentz group completely as a group with six parameters, three for spatial rotations and three for constant linear motions, while Einstein viewed it as a group with one parameter for the constant motion in a given direction. The understanding of the group property is crucial because mathematically, the theory of special relativity is the theory of invariants of the Lorentz group and physically, the symmetry of the theory depends completely on the group properties. [p.76]
Poincare never said that he believed in the aether. Hsu defends him:
Poincaré believed in the existence of an as yet undetected ether, while Einstein did not believe in the ether. It was widely believed by most people that Einstein was right and Poincaré was wrong. However, this belief is no longer tenable from the viewpoint of modern gauge field theory and particle physics. Based on the unified electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics, the physical vacuum is quite complicated, contrary to Einstein's belief. [p.76]
Einstein changed his mind about the aether in about 1916, and believed in it after that.

Even tho Hsu credits Lorentz and Poincare in detail, he still talks about "Einstein's synchrononization" and "Poincare-Einstein principle of relativity". Everyone agrees that Poincare published these ideas five years ahead of Einstein, that Einstein read Poincare, and that Einstein's terminology on these two ideas is nearly identical to Poincare's.

Hsu says this on Lorentz and the aether:

8. ... of the equations for the free ether is contained in his paper.1" See H. A. Lorentz, The Theory of Electrons (ser. 169, Teubner, Leipzig, 1909; Dover, New York, 1952), p. 198, and, also, A. Pais, ref, 6, pp, 121-122.

9. Lorentz said in 1909 that he could not but regard the ether as endowed with a certain degree of substantiality, however different it may be from all ordinary mattter. See H. A. Lorentz, ref. 8, p. 230.

10. The main difference between Lorentz's and Einstein's attitude toward relativity can be seen clearly from Lorentz's statement: " .... the chief difference being that Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced, with some difficulty and not altogether satisfactorily, from the fundamental equations of the electromagnetic field. By doing so, he may certainly take credit for making us see in the negative result of experiments like those of Michelson, Rayleigh and Brace, not a fortultous compensation of opposing effects, but the manifestation of a general and iundanientai principle." See H.A. Lorentz, ref. 8, p. 230, Nevertheless, Lorentz believed ln the ether to the end of his life.

That is right that Einstein simply postulated that Maxwell's equations hold in all (inertial) moving frames. Lorentz and Poincare had proved it in publications years earlier. This is probably the most confused thing about Einstein's paper. People think that he actually proved something. Isn't that the point of using postulates?

Not for Einstein. He is just giving an explanation of Lorentz's theorem of corresponding states, without actually proving it.


Monday, Feb 15, 2010
 
Coyne attacks religion again
Leftist-evolutionist-atheist prof Jerry Coyne writes:
Once again we see that modern theology is the art of turning empirical necessities into spiritual virtues. Except for a few dissenters like Augustine and Calvin, the bulk of Christian theology up to the rise of science in the sixteenth century involved seeing the Bible literally -- in its entirety. Six-day creation, Noah, Adam and Eve -- the whole megillah. That held for cosmology, biology, and evolution. It was only when reason and empirical studies began to show phenomena in conflict with scripture that theologians began to realize that the Bible was not wholly inerrant. Today, every liberal theologian realizes this, ...
I doubt this. St. Augustine lived from 354 to 430 AD. His theology was mainstream in the Catholic Church for centuries. Those teaching a literal interpretation, contrary to St. Augustine, were always in a minority.

Coyne like to attack all religion as being equally opposed to science and reason. But he ignores the fact that most Christians have always accepted scientific advances.

Yes, there are stories like this:

This idea about the universe did not sit well with the Catholic Church. They lured Giordano Bruno to Rome with the promise of a job, where he was immediately turned over to the Inquisition and charged with heresy.

Giordano Bruno spent the next eight years in chains in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was routinely tortured and interrogated until his trial. Despite this, he remained unrepentant, stating to his Catholic Church judge, Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, “I neither ought to recant, nor will I.” Even a death sentence handed down by the Catholic Church did not change his attitude as he defiantly told his accusers, “In pronouncing my sentence, your fear is greater than mine in hearing it.”

Immediately after the death sentence was handed down, Giordano Bruno’s jaw was clamped shut with an iron gag, his tongue was pierced with an iron spike and another iron spike was driven into his palate. On February 19, 1600, he was driven through the streets of Rome, stripped of his clothes and burned at the stake.

But Bruno was no scientist. He was a Catholic monk who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Saturday, Feb 13, 2010
 
Poincare on the aether
Poincare is sometimes criticized for referring to the aether, even after Einstein declared it to be superfluous, and after Poincare himself declared it to be unobservable.

I looked for the most incriminating quote. Here is what Poincare wrote in 1907:

I imagined the dimensions of the world changing, but at least the world remaining always similar to itself. We can go much further than that, and one of the most surprising theories of modern physicists will furnish the occasion. According to a hypothesis of Lorentz and Fitzgerald,*[Vide infra. Book III. Chap. ii.] all bodies carried forward in the earth's motion undergo a de- formation. This deformation is, in truth, very slight, since all dimensions parallel with the earth's motion are diminished by a hundred-millionth, while dimen- sions perpendicular to this motion are not altered. But it matters little that it is slight; it is enough that it should exist for the conclusion I am soon going to draw from it. Besides, though I said that it is slight, I really know nothing about it. I have myself fallen a victim to the tenacious illusion that makes us believe that we think of an absolute space. I was thinking of the earth's motion on its elliptical orbit round the sun, and I allowed 18 miles a second for its velocity. But its true velocity (I mean this time, not its absolute velocity, which has no sense, but its velocity in relation to the ether), this I do not know and have no means of knowing. It is, perhaps, 10 or 1OO times as high, and then the deformation will be 100 or 10,000 times as great.

It is evident that we cannot demonstrate this de- formation. ...

The critics say that if he truly understood relativity, then he would not talk about "true velocity", "absolute velocity", and the aether. These are meaningless concepts. They also say that he would not use the word "hypothesis", if he really believed in the Lorentz contraction.

I think that Poincare's meaning is clear enough, and correct. He is making a point about the velocities not being observable, and about self-similar changes to space not being observable.

He says that "true velocity" is unknowable, and has no observable effect. All of this is correct.

Perhaps it is difficult for non-mathematicians to understand hypothetical scenarios like this, I don't know. But this is really a simple explanation at a high school level. I think that people are willfully misreading him to try to make him look bad, when they quote this to argue that he believed in the aether. Poincare had a conventionalist philosophy that allowed one to choose different concepts for convenience, when no observation could distinguish the concepts. So in his view, you could believe in the aether or not, as there was no known way to observe it anyway. He proved that it did not make any difference in relativity.

(Not that it would be wrong to believe in the aether. Almost all physicists believe in it today, altho they use other names for it.)


Thursday, Feb 11, 2010
 
Evolution before Darwin
I have commented before on evolution work that predated Darwin. Milton Wainwright has collected some old quotes to show that It's Not Darwin's or Wallace's Theory. He complains that he could not get published:
This experience has led me to conclude that any academic article proving that Darwin did not originate the theory of evolution, via natural selection, will be censored by the scientific community. This situation reminds me of the story (perhaps apocryphal) about the Russian scientist who stated that in the Soviet Union, he could criticise Darwin, but not the Government, while in the West, he was able to criticise the Government, but not Darwin.
Razib Khan writes:
I was shocked by the magnitude of Darwin's intellectual creativity, so many basic aspects of evolutionary biological orthodoxy are in evidence in Origin of Species, down to a very low level of specificity. Page after page I have encountered hypotheses and empirical observations which are seamlessly integrated into the body of conventional background wisdom within a modern biological education. ...

By contrast on occasion I did express some sympathy with the position that Charles Darwin had a rather obvious Big Idea (Natural Selection), which he only happened to stumble upon through luck or happenstance. After reading Darwin's most famous work I think that this is a ludicrous position to take.

Darwin's book actually credits some of this earlier work. I think that the book compiled an impressive set of arguments for evolution, but did not have much in the way of fundamental new ideas. Most all of what we understand as evolution came either earlier (like common descent) or later (like genes).

Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010
 
Appendix not example of bad design
Evolutionist Jerry Coyne has a podcast where he plugs his book on why evolution is true. I am sure his book has a lot of good arguments, but his favorite argument on the podcast was that humans suffer from bad design as evidenced by the appendix. But new research last year showed that the human appendix is not useless. It serves to reboot the digestive system with good bacteria, after diarrhea. The appendix appears not to be an evolutionary vestige of a second stomach, as Darwin claimed.

Monday, Feb 08, 2010
 
Reader says Sokal had moral courage
A reader from the other side of the world responds to my Second thoughts about the Sokal hoax
“But now I think that it was cowardly and dishonest.”

He was certainly dishonest. His dishonesty was, however, aimed at a bunch of scoundrels who spent their careers misleading the young with worthless claptrap. They richly deserved every sling and arrow with which Sokal pelted them.

Cowardly he was not; to take on a bunch of influential American academics requires a large measure of moral courage.

You seem, like the idiotors of Social Text, to argue with Sokal about the content of his self-confessed rubbish. If some of it seems to make sense, that is entirely the invention of the reader – it was written as rubbish, published as rubbish and remains rubbish. No amount of analysis can invest it with any sense. Indeed, were it possible to glean any meaning from Sokal’s document, Social Text’s vigilent editorial board would have rejected it out of hand.

aldousk

The argument is that the journal should have rejected the article, but I don't see how Sokal proved that at all. For that, he would have to show that his article was substantially below the standards used for other articles in the journal. If you are of the opinion that everything in the journal is rubbish, then how is Sokal's article any worse?

Sokal does use some confusing physics analogies, but so do a lot of others. For example, a WSJ article last week said this:

But with cars like the Prius, the forthcoming Chevy Volt and other Obamamobiles, electronic complexity will take another quantum leap. We're not just talking about more sensors, algorithms and look-up tables for the purpose of optimizing emissions, but to coordinate two completely different power systems, electric and gas-powered.
A quantum leap is small and discrete, and the above usage makes no sense. In my opinion, the WSJ editors should have corrected this term. But nobody asked me, and this error does not prove that everything in the WSJ is rubbish.

Maybe Sokal could have proved something by submitting two papers under different names, with one paper more scientifically correct and the other being more politically acceptable. Then he might have evidence that the editors favor the politics more than the science.

The reader says that the journal editors would have rejected Sokal's article if it were possible to glean any meaning from it. And how does he know that? Sokal might have tried to prove that by also submitting an article from which it is possible to glean meaning. But Sokal did not do that.

If Sokal really wanted to show off how scientists are superior to other academics, then he should have chosen an experiment with some scientific merit.

I don't think that it does take any courage to take on academic deconstructionists. Most educated people have no respect for them anyway.

The reader responds:

"The argument is that the journal should have rejected the article"

No, it is not.

The argument is that Social Text (along with many other uncounted journals none of which I can, or care to, name) and its intellectual contributors are in the business of promulgating nonsense. Sokal generated an "academic paper" comprising pure, unadulterated, meaningless ramblings. It was published, in an issue of Social Text, together with what I imagine was a collection of equally ink-and-paper wasting submissions, all of which, I surmise, demonstrated that "rootless urban intelligence", than which nothing, according to Spengler, is stupider.

"Quantum leap" has, thanks to our poorly-educated (some might unkindly suggest semi-literate) journos, become a popular expression that means "sudden and significant change". Journos do this. It is irritating, but unless journalists are properly educated by learning their trade through writing stuff and being bawled at by angry subs rather than being fed useless pap by poorly paid adjunct professors in bureaucrat-infested soi-disant universities, it's only going to get worse. And it isn't new: I recall many years ago a Time Magazine writer using the expression "social entropy" (which, it has just occurred to me, might be an improved title for Social Text). The writer, no doubt, had no idea what entropy was. I can only guess that he meant "disorder". So "quantum leap" is poor style, a bit puerile, but not confusing, at least in the puerile sense. It is a quaint echo of the 1920s when the idea of a "leap" arose from the image of an electron "leaping" from one "orbital" to another in an attempt to understand the origin of atomic spectra. Its use does not mean that WSJ is rubbish but rather that the writer is a bit out of touch with what was once called modern physics.

So it must be accepted that Sokal did not show that everything in Social Text is rubbish. Achieving this would be an interesting, if not particularly useful, exercise for a student, although perhaps not one from Duke.

I must apologise for my slightly sarcastic suggestion that the editorial board of Social Text would have rejected Sokal's paper had it contained anything that made sense. It is almost certainly not true - they would no doubt have celebrated a few comprehensible passages.

I do not think that Sokal intended to conduct a rigorous scientific experiment - that is not the way science works in practice. One starts by making a few preliminary pokes and turning over a few stones until something happens that causes the one to say "that's funny". Well, Sokal found something funny. Now a theoretician should devise a model, then a series of controlled experiments can begin. But the subjects can be a bit slippery.

Another reader writes:
I completely agree with your reader regarding Sokal. Sokal set out to make these people look like foolish purveyors of intellectual claptrap, and he succeeded hilariously. It was a brilliant effort.

Sunday, Feb 07, 2010
 
IPCC warmists admit errors
When the warmists say that global warming is proven science, they mean two things. That burning fossil fuels emits CO2, in excess of what plants are absorbing, and that CO2 in the air absorbs some heat energy that might otherwise be reflected into space.

The supposed consensus is from the IPCC, the UN agency that shared the Nobel peace prize with Al Gore. The IPCC report forecast a two-foot sea level rise in the next century, after a one-foot rise in the last.

The first major disagreement among the experts is over whether the feedback is positive or negative. If positive, then warming will cause more warming. If negative, then the warming will be partially compensated by cooling effects.

Without good science, we can look to the religion of Gaia. The Gaians believe that the Earth is one giant living organism. Some believe that anything humans do to the Earth is, by definition, harmful. Others believe that the Earth reacts to change by bringing itself back to equilibrium.

Global warming is only a concern if there is a positive feedback effect that will cause runaway global warming much worse than what the CO2 predicts. The IPCC consensus forecast is just not a crisis, and only a crisis would justify the drastic actions that the warmists want.

The IPCC was embarrassed by the UEA CRU emails that showed bad attitudes on the parts of the warmist scientists. These emails were widely reported as stolen, but now it turns out that the emails were required by law to be released. If anything, the scientists broke the law by trying to block their release.

More damaging was the computer codes released.

Now it turns

IPCC’s 2007 Working Group II report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” contains claims about the projected impacts of climate change that are completely unfounded, based upon non-scientific (let alone peer reviewed) sources, or misrepresent the underlying scientific literature.

The first revelation was that there was no scientific basis for the IPCC’s widely-hyped claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. This projection is off by a few centuries, at best. When an Indian climate researcher first challenged this claim, suggesting there is no evidence (yet) of warming-induced glacial retreat in the Himalayas, IPCC chief Rajenda Pachauri was dismissive. Now, however, he’s changed his tune, and the IPCC has acknowledged the error. This was more than a simple mistake, however, as it appears the IPCC was informed of the error before the report was finalized, but failed to make any changes, nor was Pachauri quick to acknowledge the error once it was brought to his attention.

It has also become clear that the IPCC report systematically misrepresents the peer-reviewed literature on the effect of climate change hurricanes and natural disasters. Specifically, the report falsely claims there is evidence that human-induced climate change is producing an increase in extreme weather events and associated losses and includes a graph that is not based upon published, peer-reviewed work. Yet the studies upon which the IPCC purports to base its claim — including one that was not peer-reviewed and should not have been cited at all — say no such thing. Worse, when the IPCC’s erroneous claims were challenged during the review process, an IPCC author fabricated a response to defend the erroneous claim.

Even if the IPCC report were scientifically valid, it is doubtful whether any political action is needed.

Since some people don't believe in global warming, one suggestion is that any carbon tax be linked to global temperatures. The genius of that idea is that no one would have to pay unless we actually have the warming. This should eliminate the objections of the skeptics. But so far, I haven't heard the warmists having sufficient confidence in their predictions to propose such a plan. If they really believe in their dire prediction, then they should be happy to have such a link.

Even the leftist AAAS Science magazine has an editorial saying:

In the wake of the [University of East Anglia] controversy, I have been contacted by many U.S. and world leaders in science, business, and government. Their assessments and those from various editorials, added to results from scattered public opinion polls, suggest that public opinion has moved toward the view that scientists often try to suppress alternative hypotheses and ideas and that scientists will withhold data and try to manipulate some aspects of peer review to prevent dissent. This view reflects the fragile nature of trust between science and society, demonstrating that the perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.
Some scientists publish their data and their models. The better ones do. We should not make public policy decisions based on the conclusions of the sloppy scientists who don't.

Update: There's more, from the London UK Telegraph:

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.

Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.

Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.

And from the London Times:
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed 'Glaciergate' by commentators.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.

This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself.

No one should accept such crappy science.

Friday, Feb 05, 2010
 
Whittaker on Einstein
The famous English mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker wrote a famous book that said:
Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention. [p.40]
This got the Einstein lovers very upset, and they have been attacking him ever since, and putting down the work of Poincare and Lorentz on relativity.

I assumed that Whittaker was some sort of Einstein hater, but he is not at all. The book is A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, Vol 2.

The book doesn't really say much about who deserves credit. It describes who did what. It is a history of the aether, so there is some emphasis on theories that were related to the aether. It also describes general relativity, and discusses Einstein more in connection with that.

Usually histories of relativity ignore Lorentz and Poincare. But if you include what they did, there just aren't any new formulas or concepts that Einstein added to special relativity.

Jansson gives this explanation for historians not crediting Lorentz and Poincare:

The tendency to think of the dispute between Lorentz and Einstein in terms of competing research programmes etc. can be traced back, I think, to the myth of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which glorifies Einstein to the exclusion of everybody else. It is against this background, that Whittaker’s often quoted put-down of Einstein’s 1905 paper, as a “paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention” (Whittaker 1953, II, p. 40) must be seen. However, if Whittaker indeed tried to restore some balance in this way, he achieved just the opposite of what he intended. For years, historians writing on Lorentz and Poincaré understandaby felt the need to distance themselves from Whittaker’s preposterous remarks, often inadvertently giving Lorentz and Poincaré less than their fair share of the credit in the process. It is my impression that this situation is finally changing.
If Whittaker’s remarks were truly preposterous, then someone would have refuted them back in 1953. No one has.

Saturday, Jan 30, 2010
 
Damour on Poincare
Thibault Damour wrote this 2005 paper, and he has a section on why Poincare should not be credited for special relativity. He studied Poincare's papers, and has some useful things to say about their contributions.

The first part reviews the work of Poincaré on the Theory of (Special) Relativity. One emphasizes both the remarkable achievements of Poincaré, and the fact that he never came close to what is the essential conceptual achievement of Einstein: changing the concept of time.
His strongest point is that Poincare never mentions the twin paradox. Damour claims that Poincare didn't really understand relativistic time. Furthermore, he says that one paper uses the term "apparent time" for something that is not really the local time that a clock would measure.
This conceptual revolution in the notion of time is encapsulated in the “twin paradox”, i.e. in time dilation effects, much more than in any change of synchronization conventions. Indeed, it was the idea that the variable t' was “time, pure and simple” which led Einstein, for the first time, to think and predict that, independently of any synchronization convention, a clock moving away and then coming back will not mark the same time when it reconvenes with its “sister clock” that remained in inertial motion. It is true that Poincaré’s discussion of synchronization in a moving frame seems close to Einstein’s synchronization process, but, when looking more carefully at what Poincaré actually wrote, one finds that there is a world of difference between the two.
The twin paradox used to be called the Langevin paradox, based on Paul Langevin formally presenting it in 1911.

I thought that the complaint about "apparent time" was that Poincare didn't accept relativistic time.

It might be interesting to hear what Poincare might have said about the twin paradox. Strictly speaking, it is not a direct consequence of special relativity, because at least one twin must be accelerated and special relativity does not predict how that effects clocks.

I do think that it is strange that people can read Poincare, and get hung up on such trivial terminological points. If Poincare really had such misunderstandings of relativity, and wrote 100s of pages on the subject, I would think that he would have said something that was actually wrong. And yet no one has found any errors in what he says.

Poincare credited Lorentz for changing the concept of time, and recommended him for a Nobel prize in 1902 for it. Poincare raved about it the "most ingenious idea" in his 1904 lecture:

The most ingenious idea has been that of local time. ... The watches adjusted in that manner do not mark, therefore, the true time; they mark what one may call the local time, so that one of them goes slow on the other. ... if we recall that this observer would not use the same clocks as a fixed observer, but, indeed, clocks marking "local time”.
This is as clear and as correct as anything that Einstein says about time.

Poincare emphasized that the Lorentz transformations form a group, and having the correct formula for time dilation is essential for that. So how is it that he could correctly do all those relativistic calculations, and not understand what he was doing?

My guess is that Poincare would have viewed the twin paradox as an extrapolation that could not be wholly justified based on the experimental evidence. Or perhaps he thought that the effect was too small to be measurable. He did talk a lot about the consequences of relativity, but always emphasized the experimental tests that were being done.

 
Campaign against vaccine critic continues
The British BBC reports:
The doctor who first suggested a link between MMR vaccinations and autism acted unethically, the official medical regulator has found.

Dr Andrew Wakefield's 1998 Lancet study caused vaccination rates to plummet, resulting in a rise in measles - but the findings were later discredited.

The General Medical Council ruled he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research.

Afterwards, Dr Wakefield said the claims were "unfounded and unjust".

The GMC case did not investigate whether Dr Wakefield's findings were right or wrong, instead it was focused on the methods of research.

I wonder if anyone is persuaded by this. Wakefield wrote a short 1998 paper suggesting a problem with the MMR vaccine, and the medical establishment spent the next 12 years in a systematic attempt to destroy him.

If the authorities are so scientific, why can't they just address what he said on the merits?

The obvious conclusion from all this is that Wakefield was probably wrong about MMR, but no one else will have to guts to speak up about other potential vaccine problems. That is what the authorities want, I guess.

It seems to me that they cannot restore vaccine confidence by destroying Wakefield. They would be better off thanking him for raising a concern, and proving him wrong about MMR.

Update: It seems that the main charge against Wakefield is that he collected some blood samples from kids at a private birthday. Supposedly this was some sort of ethical breach because he did not get the proper consent paperwork. I don't know why anyone would care about that, since it has nothing to do with the merits of the vaccine in question.


Thursday, Jan 28, 2010
 
Why people evolved no fur
This SciAm article says that the aquatic ape theory explain human hair loss, sweat glands, and fat under the skin. But it says the theory has been shown to be wrong because (1) not all aquatic mammals have these properties in the same way; (2) living in the water would have been vulnerable to crocodile attacks; and (3) the theory is not simple.

These arguments seem very weak to me. The theory is simple, in that one hypothesis explain three human attributes (and many others also). The article's hypothesis for fur loss does not do that.

Yes, there were predators in the water, but there were also lions and many other predators on land. And yes, sea otters have lots of fur, but maybe they need it because they are smaller. I don't know. But lots of species evolve differently, and other arguments have these problems also.


Wednesday, Jan 27, 2010
 
More of Pauli on Einstein
Here is is what Wolfgang Pauli says about the aether, in his 1921 relativity book:
4 I. Foundation: of Special Relativity
2. The postulate of relativity

The failure of the many attempts to measure terrestrially any effects of the earth’s motion on physical phenomena allows us to come to the highly probable, if not certain, conclusion that the phenomena in a given reference system are, in principle, independent of the translational motion of the system as a whole. To put it more precisely: there exists a triply infinite set of reference systems moving rectilinearly and uniformly relative to one another, in which the phenomena occur in an identical manner. We shall follow Einstein in calling them "Galilean reference systems" -- so named because the Galilean law of inertia holds in them. It is unsatisfactory that one cannot. regard all systems as completely equivalent or at least give a logical reason for selecting a particular set of them. This defect is overcome by the general theory of relativity (see Part IV). For the moment we shall have to restrict ourselves to Galilean reference systems, i.e. to the relativity of uniform translational motions.

Once the postulate of relativity is stated, the concept of the aether as a substance is thereby removed from the physical theories. For there is no point in discussing a state of rest or of motion relative to the aether when these quantities cannot, in principle, be observed experimentally. Nowa- days this is all the less surprising as attempts to derive the elastic proper- ties of matter from electrical forces are beginning to show success. It would therefore be quite inconsistent to try, in turn, to explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the elastic properties of some hypothetical med- ium." Actually, the mechanistic concept of an aether had already come to be superfluous and something of a hindrance when the elastic-solid theory of light was superseded by the electromagnetic theory of light. In this latter the aether substance had always remained a foreign element. Einstein has recently suggested an extension of the notion of an aether. It should no longer he regarded as a substance but simply as the totality of those physical quantities which are to be associated with matter-free space. In this wider sense there does, of course, exist an aether; only one has to bear in mind that it does not possess any mechanical properties. In other words, the physical quantities of matter-free space have no space co- ordinates or velocities associated with them.

It might seem that the postulate of relativity is immediately obvious, once the concept of an aether has been abandoned. Closer inspection shows however that this is not so. Naturally we cannot subject the whole universe to a translational motion and then investigate whether the phenomena are thereby altered. Our statement will therefore only be of heuristic value and physically meaningful when we regard it as valid for any and every closed system. But when is a system a closed system? Would it be sufficient to stipulate that all masses should be far enough removed?" Experience tells us that this is sufficient for uniform motion, but not for a more general motion. An explanation for the preferred role played by uniform motion is to be given at a later stage [see Part IV, § 62). Summarizing, we can say the following: The postulate of relativity implies that a uniform motion of the centre of mass of the universe relative to a closed system will be without influence on the phenomena in such a system. [p.3-4]

In his view, relativity does not reject the aether. For various reasons, electromagnetic cannot be explained by elastic mechanical properties of the aether.

I put in bold where Pauli credits Einstein:

3. The postulate of the constancy of the velocity of light. Ritz's and related theories

The postulation of relativity is still not sufficient for inferring the on- variance of all laws of nature under the Lorentz transformation. Thus, for instance, classical mechanics is perfectly in accord with the principle of relativity, although the Lorentz transformation cannot be applied to its equations. As we saw above, Lorentz and Poincaré had taken Maxwe1l's equations as the basis of their considerations. On the other hand, it is absolutely essential to insist that such a fundamental theorem as the covariance law should be derivable from the simplest possible basic as- sumptions. The credit for having succeeded in doing just this goes to Einstein. He showed that only the following single axiom in electro- dynamics need be assumed: The velocity of light is independent of the motion of the light source. If this is a point source, then the wave fronts are in all cases spheres with their centres at rest. For conciseness we shall denote this by "constancy of the velocity of light", although such a desig- nation might give rise to misunderstandings. There is no question of a universal constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, if only because it has the constant value c only in Galilean systems of reference. On the other band its independence of the state of motion of the light source obtains equally in the general theory of relativity. It proves to be the true essence ofthe old aether point of view. (See § 5 concerning the equality of the numerical values of the velocity of light in all Galilean systems of reference.)

As will be shown in the next section, the constancy of the velocity of light, in combination with the relativity principle, leads to a new concept of time. ... [p.4]

So the credit is for the deriving the "convariance law" from the simplest assumptions. By this he apparently means that Einstein assumes only that the speed of light is constant, and deduces that Maxwell's equations are valid in other frames of reference.

But Einstein does not prove the covariance of Maxwell's equations. He does not even claim to prove it. He explicitly assumes it as a postulate, in his 1905 paper:

They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate, ...
It is astonishing that a great and famous theoretical physicist like Pauli could write a book on the subject and get it so badly wrong.

Here is what Pauli wrote in 1956:

11. The Theory of Relativity and Science *

If we are to consider the theory of relativity in a more general context than that of physics including astrophysics, we shall be concerned primarily with its relation to mathematics on the one hand, and to epistemology or the philosophy of nature on the other. It may indeed be said that the relation of physics to these two fields - n relation which has left its characteristic mark on science since the l7th century — has once more been brought into the centre ofgeneral interest by the theory of relativity.

The special theory of relativity was linked up with the mathematical group concept, as it had already come to light in the mechanics of Galileo and Newton, now so lirmly established on an empirical basic. In this system of mechanics all states of motion of the observer, or, expressed mathematically, all coordinate systems which arise from each other by a uniform motion of translation without rotation, are equally privileged. Since the state of rest of a mass does not rcquirc any particular cause for its maintenance. the same assumption had to be made in classical mechanics for the state of uniform motion, since the latter arises from the state of rest by one of the transformations contained in the group ofrnechanics. This formulation of the law of inertia of classical mechanics is of course not the original one, but takes account of the later development of the group concept in the mathematics of the 19th century.

The development of electrodynamics during the same period culminated in the partial differential equations of Maxwell and H A. Lorentz. It was ev- ident that these did not admit the group of classical mechanics. since in particular the fact that the velocity of light in vacuo is independent of the state of motion of the light-sources is contained in them as a consequence.

* Helvetica Physica Arta, Supplement IV. pp. 282-236 (1956). [p.107]

Would it now be necessary to abandon as only approximately valid the prop- erty whereby the laws of nature admit a group, or is the group of mechanics perhaps only approximately valid, and should it be replaced by a more gen- eral group, valid for both mechanical and electromagnetic processes? The decision was in favour of the second alternative. This postulate could be arrived at by two paths. Either one could investigate by pure mathematics what is the most general group of transformations under which the equa- tions of Maxwell and Lorentz which were wellknown at this time, preserve their form. This path was followed by the mathematician. H. Poincaré. Or one could determine, by critical analysis, those physical assumptions which had led to the particular group of the mechanics of Galileo and Newton, This was the path followed by Einstein. He showed that, from the general standpoint of the equivalence of all coordinate systems moving with constant velocity with respect to each other. the invariance of simultaneity of spatially separated events, in the sense in which it is assumed in classical mechan- ics, involves the special additional supposition of the possibility of infinitely great signal velocities If this supposition is dropped and replaced by the as- sumption of a finite maximal signal velocity, time is also transformed, and the group, mathematically speaking, leaves invariant an indefinite quadratic form in four dimensions, three of space and one of time. The electrodynam- ics of Maxwell and Lorentz did in fact turn out to be invariant under the group of transformations determined by Einstein on the basis of these gen- eral considerations, if the maximal signal velocity was identified with the velocity of propagation of light in vacuo. Both Einstein and Poincaré took their stand on the preparatory work of H. A. Lorentz, who had already come quite close to this result, without however quite reaching it. In the agreement between the results of the methods followed independently of each other by Einstein and Poincaré I discern a deeper significance of a harmony between the mathematical method and analysis by means of conceptual experiments (Gedankenexperimente), which rests on general features of physical experi- ence.

These early papers of Einstein on the special theory of relativity already showed the success in physics of a method which does not proceed from an authoritative knowledge of what things are in and by themselves. Einstein has repeatedly shown us how the physicist must learn to swim in a boundless ocean of ideas without such supports, and without fixed rules -- ideas to which he may be inspired by an equally boundless ocean ofernpirical material, but which cannot be deduced from the latter by pure logic.

The physicist is not suppow to know a priori what the ether is; indeed, since Einstein`s time, he obeys the commandment "Thou shalt not make unto thee any image of the state of motion of the ether”. This fundamental propo- sition has been put in a fresh light in the relativistic theory of gravitation or ... [p.108]

Here Pauli give Poincare and Einstein more or less equal credit for simultaneously getting a relativity result, and credits Lorentz for getting quite close.

But what is that relativity result? Pauli states three things:

  • simultaneity depends on the frame
  • the symmetry group leaves invariant a 3+1 quadratic form
  • Maxwell's equations are invariant under the group.

    But Poincare published the first in 1900, and the latter two in 1905. Einstein was five years later on each point.

    I don't think that there is even any serious question about these three points. There was no independent discovery of these ideas, as far as anyone know. Poincare discovered them, and everyone else got them from Poincare.

    The only possible argument might be that many books say that Einstein proved Lorentz group invariance in 1905. But it is just not there. It is extremely doubtful that Einstein even understood the concept until years later.

    The proof is not hard once you have spacetime, Lorentz group, 4-vectors, and either a 4-vector potential, an electromagnetic field tensor, or an invariant Lagrangian. Poincare had it all, except for the field tensor. Einstein had none of it.


  • Tuesday, Jan 26, 2010
     
    Pauli on Einstein
    The famous physicist W. Pauli wrote (at age 21) a book on relativity in 1921. You can read portions on Google Books. After discussing the early work by Voigt and Larmor, he writes:
    We now come to the discussion of the three contributions, by Lorentz, Poincaré and Einstein, which contain the line of reasoning and the developments that form the basis of the thoory of relativity. Chrono- logically, Lorentz’s paper came first. He proved, above all, that Maxwell's equations are invariant under the coordinate transformation [formulas omitted] provided the field intensities in the primed system are suitably chosen. This, however, he proved rigorously only for Maxwell's equations in charge-free space. The terms which contain the charge density and current are, in Lorentz's treatement, not the same in the primed and the moving systems, because he did not transform these quatities quite correctly. He therefore regarded the two systems as not completely, but only very approximately, eequivalent. By assuming that the electrons, too, could be deformed by the translational motion and that all masses and forces have the same dependence on the velocity as purely electro- magnetic masses and forces, Lorentz was able to derive the existence of a contraction affecting all bodies (in the presence of molecular motion as well). He could also explain why all experiments hitherto known had failed to show any influence of the earth’s motion on optical phenomena. A less immediate consequence of his theory is that one has to put x = 1. This means that the transverse dimensions remain unchanged during the motion, if indeed this explanation is at all possible. We would like to stress that even in this paper the relativity principle was not at all apparent to Lorentz. Characteristically, and in contrast to Einstein, he tried to under- stand the contraction in a causal way.

    The formal gaps left by Lorentz’s work were filled by Poincaré. He stated the relativity principle to be generally and rigorously valid. Since he, in common with the previously discussed authors, assumed Maxwell's equations to hold for the vacuum, this amounted to the requirement that all laws of nature must be covariant with respect to the "Lorentz trans- formation"*. The invariance of the transverse dimensions during the motion is derived in a natural way from the postulate that the trans- formations which effect the transition from a stationary to a uniformly moving system must form a group which contains as a subgroup the ordinary displacements of the coordinate system. Poincaré further cor- rected Lorentz’s formulae for the transformations of charge density and current and so derived the complete covariance of the field equations of electron theory. We shall discuss his treat-ment of the gravitational problem, and his use of the imaginary coordinate ict, at a later stage (see §§ 50 and 7}.

    It was Einstein, finally, who in a way completed the basic formulation of this new discipline. His paper of 1905 was submitted at almost the same time as Poincaré’s article and had been written without previous know- ledge of Lorentz’s paper of 1904. It includes not only all the essential results contained in the other two papers, but shows an entirely novel, and much more profound, understanding of the whole problem. This will now be demonstrated in detail.

    [footnote] The terms ‘Lorentz transformation' and "Lorentz group' occurred for the first time in this paper by Poincaré. [p.2-3]

    This description is better than many. Pauli correctly points out the weakness in Lorentz's proof -- that it depends on choosing the field transformations properly. But he fails to notice that Einstein's paper has the same shortcoming.

    Pauli says that he is going to follow Einstein's novel formulation, but his explanation in the next few pages is actually a mixture of Poincare's and Einstein's. He uses the Poincare synchronization procedure as if it were Einstein's. He uses Poincare's metric on spacetime without attribution. He credits 4-dimensional spacetime to Minkowski, instead of Poincare.

    Pauli claims that Einstein's 1905 paper all the essential results of Poincare's 1905 paper. It appears that Pauli did not fully grasp what Poincare had done. He was only 21 years old.

    Einstein's 1905 paper does not have any of the results of Poincare's 1905 paper. The main results of Einstein's paper are contained in Lorentz's 1904 paper, which is the starting point of Poincare paper. Poincare's paper is about the action, Lorentz group properties, group invariance of Maxwell's equations, metric, and gravity. None of these topics are even mentioned by Einstein.


    Monday, Jan 25, 2010
     
    Dog evolution
    Evolution is going to the dogs. Apparently, Russian stray dogs are evolving:
    For every 300 Muscovites, there's a stray dog wandering the streets of Russia's capital. And according to Andrei Poyarkov, a researcher at the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the fierce pressure of urban living has driven the dogs to evolve wolf-like traits, increased intelligence, and even the ability to navigate the subway.

    Poyarkov has studied the dogs, which number about 35,000, for the last 30 years. Over that time, he observed the stray dog population lose the spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves, while at the same time evolving social structures and behaviors optimized to four ecological niches occupied by what Poyarkov calls guard dogs, scavengers, wild dogs, and beggars.

    Meanwhile, scientists have linked a gene to compulsive behavior — in dogs. They have never been able to find genes causing this sort of behavior in humans.

    Also, dog heads are evolving:

    When scientists examined the head shapes of different breeds, they found as much diversity in dogs as existed across the much wider group of animals called carnivora - which includes walruses, cats, skunks, and weasels as well as dogs.

    That was surprising, considering how fast this diversity came about in dogs, said biologist Abby Drake, lead author of the study. Most of the 400 known breeds emerged in just the last several centuries.

    And yet they haven't branched off into different species: Technically, most breeds can produce fertile offspring with any other breed (though size differences might make it tough for some).

    If dogs were extinct and our only knowledge came from bones, then dogs would probably be classified into dozens of species.

    Sunday, Jan 24, 2010
     
    Male research
    Here is today's research:
    Flashy males have superior xxxxx - at least in the xxxx world. A study of wild great xxxx suggests that xxxxxx ornamentation, in this case vibrant xxxxxxx, may reliably signal the quality of a male's xxxxx.
    I blocked some of the words because this is a family-friendly blog.

    Saturday, Jan 23, 2010
     
    Credit for the decisive step
    Here is a physicist blog who credits Einstein for general relativity:
    Yes, he did talk a bit about the so-called controversy over whether Hilbert published the correct field equations five days earlier. Well, he actually derived a variational principle which is equivalent to Einstein’s equations (actually, he was thinking only of the case of electromagnetic sources), and there is some question about the date. But his misses the point entirely…..Hilbert came into that game rather late, and was able to see more clearly the correct mathematics…..but we must not forget that he was able to build on all that Einstein had done over several years, putting all the right tools, principles and other pieces into place….nor must we forget Einstein’s great pains to compare what he was doing to Nature when he could, trying to derive observable consequences a several points.
    This is a legitimate argument for crediting Einstein over Hilbert for general relativity, but the exact same argument would favor crediting Lorentz over Einstein for special relativity. Lorentz had done all the hard work on the theory from 1892 to 1904, and Einstein came into the game late in 1905. Einstein saw special relativity more clearly than Lorentz, but only after Lorentz and others put all the tools in place and figured out the observable consequences.

    Instead, the physicists and historians like to credit Einstein for taking the decisive step on special relativity. Yes, that might also be a legitimate argument for crediting Einstein over Lorentz.

    But it makes no sense to credit Einstein for special and general relativity. The Einstein fans are contradicting themselves when they do.

    I think that Einstein does not deserve much credit for either, for reasons that I have posted elsewhere. Even under the above standard, more credit for general relativity should go to Poincare and Grossmann than to Einstein. Poincare published the spacetime metric and Grossmann the field equations.


    Friday, Jan 22, 2010
     
    Freud did not discover the unconscious
    More than anything else, Freud is credited with discovering the unconscious mind. I cannot find where he said anything new, or where he said any scientifically verifiable assertion about the unconscious.

    Allen Esterson writes:

    I never cease to be astonished at the confidence with which erroneous assertions about Freud are made in articles such as “Freud Returns” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American, written by Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuroscientist. For instance, Solms writes: “When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible.”

    This piece of psychoanalytic mythology has been shown to be false by historians of psychology since the 1960s and 1970s, yet it is still being propagated in popular articles by pro-Freud writers like Solms. Schopenhauer had posited something akin to the notion Solms ascribes to Freud before the latter was born. Francis Galton, writing in Brain in 1879-1880, described the mind as analogous to a house beneath which is “a complex system of drains and gas and water-pipes…which are usually hidden out of sight, and of whose existence, so long as they act well, we never trouble ourselves.” He went on to discuss “the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.” (Incidentally, Freud subscribed to Brain at that time.) The historian of psychology, Mark Altschule, wrote in 1977: “It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth century psychologist or medical psychologist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.”

    So apparently Freud was just reciting conventional wisdom when he wrote about the unconscious. Much of it is also false, to the extent that it has been testable.

    Thursday, Jan 21, 2010
     
    IPCC admits bogus claims in report
    CNN reports:
    The U.N.'s leading panel on climate change has apologized for misleading data published in a 2007 report that warned Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

    In a statement released Wednesday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said estimates relating to the rate of recession of the Himalayan glaciers in its Fourth Assessment Report were "poorly substantiated" adding that "well-established standards of evidence were not applied properly."

    Despite the admission, the IPCC reiterated its concern about the dangers melting glaciers present in a region that is home to more than one-sixth of the world's population.

    So the statement is wrong but we shold believe it anyway?
    "The other thing is that the report says the glaciers are receding faster than anywhere else in the world. We simply do not have the glacier change measurements. The Himalayas are among those regions with the fewest available data," Zemp said.

    In defense of the IPCC, Zemp says "you can take any report and find a mistake in it but it's up to the next IPCC report to correct it."

    If they don't have the data, then they do not know whether the glaciers are getting bigger or smaller.

    The arrogance of the IPCC is amazing. Why should I wait for the IPCC to correct itself in the next report? This error was only found by warming skeptics, and the IPCC only admitted error after public pressure.

    The IPCC acts like it has a monopoly on climate knowledge, and like we should believe what it says whether it has any data or not.

    Update: Fumento explains it.


    Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010
     
    Poincare links
    A couple of previous links to Poincare's papers are no longer valid. Here are some of Poincare's papers in French. You can use Google translate to get them in English. Some translated papers (1898, 1904, 1908) are here, and some Google digitized works are here. The latter has his books, translated to English. The 1904 St. Louis lecture is also here.

    Here is Einstein's famous 1905 paper, E = mc2, and some other old relativity papers.

    See also the Wikipedia articles on History of special relativity, Relativity priority dispute, and Henri Poincaré. Here is a page of relativity links.

    This French page has about 20 of Poincare's papers in French, and a partial English translation of the 1906 paper. A partial translation is also here.

    Poincare's 1906 paper, in English, divided into Part I, Part II, and Part III. Poincare's 1900 paper on Lorentz theory in French and English. Here is his 1904 book on electromagnetism.

    This 1983 article by Keswani and Kilmister (behind paywall, but Msft doc file here) has an appendix claiming to be the first English translation of Poincare's 1905 article.

    See also Logunov's books Henri Poincare and Relativity Theory (includes Poincare 1900 translation) and The Theory Of Gravity (includes Poincare 1905 translation), and his How Were the Hilbert-Einstein Equations Discovered?.


    Sunday, Jan 17, 2010
     
    Defining relativity
    I have expressed opinions on the origin of relativity, so I define my terms. Here is what I mean by relativity.

    Mathematically, general relativity is theory that spacetime is a 4-dimensional manifold with a 3+1 metric that is Ricci-flat in a vacuum. Special relativity is the linearized theory. The laws of physics are defined on the manifold, which means that they are independent of the choice of coordinates.

    Physically, special relativity is characterized by: using light signals to relate space and time, and to synchronize clocks; determining the spacetime symmetry group to be the Poincare group; and reformulating the laws of mechanics and electrodynamics so that they are invariant under the Poincare group. In particular, moving objects have the property that distance contracts, time slows, and mass increases.

    Primarily, special relativity is a way of understanding electromagnetism, and general relativity is a way of understanding gravity. The theories apply to other forces as well.

    Historically, Newton and others said that the laws of mechanics are the same in a uniform velocity frame. Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism cast that into doubt in around 1870. Special relativity was born when Lorentz and others tried to apply Maxwell's equations in moving frames.

    I have previously outlined special relativity in Feb. 2007 and Oct. 2009, and given dates on who invented what.


    Friday, Jan 15, 2010
     
    Men are evolving faster than women
    The NY Times reports:
    A new look at the human Y chromosome has overturned longstanding ideas about its evolutionary history. Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.

    This is “a result as unexpected as it is stunning — truly amazing,” said Scott Hawley, a chromosome expert at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Mo.

    The Y chromosome makes its owner male because it carries the male-determining gene. Boys are born with one Y and one X chromosome in all their body’s cells, while girls have two X’s. The other 22 pairs of chromosomes in which the human genome is packaged are the same in both sexes.

    The Y chromosome’s rapid rate of evolutionary change does not mean that men are evolving faster than women. But its furious innovation is likely to be having reverberations elsewhere in the human genome.

    Why is anyone surprised? It seems to me that it is a simple consequence of evolutionary theory that men are evolving faster than women.

    In evolutionary terminology, the fittest humans have the most offspring. Evolution is faster when fitter humans have a lot more offspring. In all of human history, the variation in offspring of males has been much greater than the variation for females. It is a consequence of children being a greater investment for the woman than for the man. The same applies to chimps. I thought that this had been figured out 50 years ago.

    The British magazine Nature quotes one of the researchers as saying that there has been active discrimination in the scientific community against the Y chromosome. I think that the whole field has a lot of overt biases and sloppy science.

    Here is another example of evolution being politicized:

    Abstract: It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way ‘‘race’’ was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now fashionable and widely regarded as cogent.
    Another expert reaction:
    Indeed, at 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation.

    So much for 98 percent. Let me just repeat part of that: humans and chimpanzees, "comparable to the difference ... in chicken and human".


    Wednesday, Jan 13, 2010
     
    False pandemic to sell vaccines
    The London Daily Telegraph reports:
    THE swine flu scare was a "false pandemic" led by drugs companies that stood to make billions from vaccines, a leading health expert said.

    Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, claimed major firms organized a "campaign of panic" to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic, UK tabloid The Sun reports. ...

    "It's just a normal kind of flu. It does not cause a tenth of deaths caused by the classic seasonal flu," Dr Wodarg said.

    "The great campaign of panic we have seen provided a golden opportunity for representatives from labs who knew they would hit the jackpot in the case of a pandemic being declared.

    "We want to clarify everything that brought about this massive operation of disinformation.

    "We want to know who made decisions, on the basis of what evidence, and precisely how the influence of the pharmaceutical industry came to bear on the decision-making."

    "A group of people in the WHO is associated very closely with the pharmaceutical industry."

    The WHO recently reaffirmed its stance that the pandemic is not over.

    However, the number of swine flu deaths is dramatically lower than expected.

    In an interview with France's L'Humanite on Sunday, Dr Wodarg also raised concerns about swine flu vaccines.

    "The vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested," he said.

    "But there is worse to come. The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now.

    I do think that the swine flu (or H1N1 flu or Mexican pig flu) is a false pandemic because there was never any scientific evidence that it would be as bad as the regular seasonal flu.

    In the USA, official vaccine decisions are also dominated by vaccine industry representatives. The CDC defends this, saying that the vaccine industry has the most expertise on the subject. Maybe so, but then we get policies designed to promote vaccine sales more than anything else.

    Michael Fumento reports that public officials are taking credit for the pandemic not being worse. He does not use the word "hoax", but you might infer that from his columns on the swine flu.


    Monday, Jan 11, 2010
     
    H.M. Schwartz on Poincare
    Poincare's contribution to special relativity was explained in a 1964 physics article by Charles Scribner II, the famous book publisher. The American Journal of Physics published a rebuttal by H.M. Schwartz. Schwartz did note that published compilations of relativity papers omitted Poincare's, so he decided to translate and publish Poincare's papers himself.

    Schwartz attacks Poincare by quoting his 1904 St. Louis lecture:

    We come to the principle of relativity: this not only is confirmed by daily experience, not only is it a necessary consequence of the hypothesis of central forces, but it is imposed in an irresistible way upon our good sense, and yet it also is battered.
    Then Schwartz says, "Does not this statement speak for itself?"

    Yes, it does. Poincare goes on to explain that theoretical physicists had abandoned the principle in favor of aether theories, but Michelson's experiments confirmed it. Then he explains the relativity of time and space, and how that resolves the electromagnetic problems.

    Schwartz attacks Poincare for sticking to the older concept of Galilean relativity, and then goes on to attack his Last Essays for saying this:

    The principle of relativity, in its former aspect, has had to be abandoned; it is replaced by the principle of relativity according to Lorentz.
    I don't see the problem. In Galilean relativity, there is no length contraction or time dilation or simultaneity paradox. That was the former aspect of relativity that was stated by Newton and others. The new relativity uses Lorentz transformations. What Poincare says is completely correct.

    This article shows that rediscovering Poincare's relativity theory is nothing new, and neither is the idiotic knee-jerk defense of Einstein.

    I wonder why Schwartz even bothered responding to Scribner, because Scribner gives excessive amounts of credit to Einstein already. Scribner concludes:

    In short, Einstein`s paper represented thc most powerful argument yet introduced in favor of the universal validity of the principle of relativity in all branches of physics, and as such it suggested a number of important new investigations for both theory and experiment. Its creation of a modified theory of space and time led directly to Minkowski’s mathematical reinterpretation of relativistic kinematics in terms of four—dimensional space—time, an innovation which, in turn, paved the way {or further developments including the General Theory of Relativity.
    This is not right. Four-dimensional space-time was Poincare's 1905 creation, not Minkowski's. Minkowski did not say it until 1908. He cited Poincare in 1907, so we know he knew about Poincare's work. Minkowski learned it from Poincare.

    Scribner's credit for Einstein is largely for using slightly different terminology. More precisely, the credit is for using scare quotes! Scribner wrote:

    Actually, the whole Kinematical part of Einstein's paper could ber rewritten in terms of the ether theory with surprisingly few changes. Einstein, himself, for the sake of verbal clarity referred to a "stationary" and a "moving" system, but he was careful to place such expressions within quotation marks to indicate that the distinction had no physical significance. Were he to have made a theoretical distinction between a fixed primary system and a system in absolute motion, then it would have been appropriate to eliminate the quotation marks and the whole derivation of the Lorentz transformation would have assumed a quite different meaning.

    Einstein uses the words "stationary" 62 times in his famous 1905 paper, and 10 of them are in quotes, usually as part of defining a longer phrase.

    Einstein doesn't really say whether the aether has physical significance. He just says that it is superfluous to his derivation.

    Here Scribner summarizes the second half of Einstein's paper, and noted that it is only considered original if you assume that Einstein did not know what Lorentz had published the year before:

    Inasmuch as the new kinematics entailed by the joint validity of his two principles was ex— pressed in the transformation equations, the second or Electrodynamicai part of Einstein's paper consisted in showing how the requirement of invariance of physical laws with respect to that transformation permitted one to derive thc electrodynamics of moving bodies directly from the electrodynamics of the stationary body. In the various sections of this part, Einstein demonstrated how existing laws had to be corrected or reinterpreted and how the whole theory of electrodynamics could he unified and completed by this approach.

    In considering the original aspects of Einstein's theory, one must note that, unknown to him, the transformation equattionss deduced in the Kine- matical part of his paper had appeared in almost identical form the year before in a paper by Lorentz."

    There are reasons for thinking that Einstein had Lorentz's 1904 paper. He certainly had a review of it that had the Lorentz transformations, because Einstein himself had published reviews in the same journal. Possibly Einstein ignored it. But more importantly, Einstein did not really proved the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations, as Scribner and others say. Einstein assumed it in his first postulate.

    This misconception about Einstein's paper is widespread. It is a subtle point mathematically, so perhaps I will explain it in greater detail later. But it is definitely the case that Poincare proved the above invariance in 1905, and Einstein did not.

    Scribner does not want to give full credit to Poincare because:

    Poincaré's adoption of the principle of relativity seems now to have been provisional ... First, although Poincare was ready to postulate the exact validity of the principle with respect to all physical laws, he was troubled by the possible exception presented by gravitational phenomena. ... The second respect in which Poincaré's acceptance of the principle of relativity seems provisional as compared with Einstein's lay in his belief that it might itself be explainable by a suitable revision of current electrodynamics.
    But Poincare was ahead of Einstein on these points. Einstein only applied the relativity principle to electrodynamics in 1905, and it took him ten years to figure out how to apply it to gravitation.

    It is to Poincare's credit that he specifically considered the possibility that some experiment might prove him wrong, or that some theory might give an alternate explanation. Poincare admitted the possibility of an aether, but then so did Einstein ten years later.

    This is exchange is just another in a long list of examples of physicists and others rushing to Einstein's defense on originality in relativity, but giving bogus and incredibly strained arguments. You would think that these guys could find better arguments than that Einstein used scare quotes or that Poincare looked at the bigger picture.


    Sunday, Jan 10, 2010
     
    Mooney is a pseudoscientific writer
    Science writer Michael Fumento writes:
    You've heard of pseudoscience, of course. Well, Chris Mooney is a pseudoscientific writer. He twists and bends and remolds data any way he can to come to the "proper" conclusion. "Yeah, I kinda make 'em up as I go along!"

    Among his works, a book called "The Republican War on Science." It was actually just a criticism of anything Mooney doesn't like, portrayed as if emanating from the GOP. Another work of his was the 2007 book "Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming." ...

    Well, the years went by and the 2005 season proved to be a total anomaly. Indeed, by the end of the 2009 season hurricane activity was at a 30 year low.

    I am siding with Fumento on this one.

    Saturday, Jan 09, 2010
     
    String theory predicts wrong value for pi
    A UK article has interview with a string theorist, and says:
    Beautiful as the idea sounds, when string theory is applied in the ordinary three spatial dimensions it doesn’t work mathematically, predicting the wrong numbers for constants such as pi and the speed of light. It also predicts that the whole Universe should disappear. And if the strings were vibrating in ordinary space, we should be able to measure the effects. Fail!
    Wrong value for pi? Can anything be more ridiculous? But Woit's blog points out that there actually is a string theory paper on how the value of pi might be changing. It is getting harder to tell what is or is not a joke. I think the paper is a joke, but the UK Times article seems to be serious.

    Friday, Jan 08, 2010
     
    Penrose on Einstein
    Roger Penrose wrote an essay on relativity in the 2002 book It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, edited by Graham Farmelo. (Granta Books) He is a leading expert on relativity, so his opinion should be taken seriously. He writes:
    Einstein based his 1905 special theory of relativity on two basic principles. The first was already referred to earlier; for all observers in uniform motion the laws of nature are the same. The second was that the speed of light has a fundamental fixed value, not dependent upon the speed of the source. A few years earlier, the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré had a similar scheme (and others, such as the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, had moved some way towards this picture). But Einstein had the clearer vision that the underlying principles of relativity must apply to all forces of nature.
    He is comparing Einstein's 1905 theory to the Lorentz-Poincare theory of 1900 or so. It is commonly said that Einstein's big innovation was to separate the kinematics from the electromagnetism in the Lorentz-Poincare theory. But Einstein did not really separate the kinematics, as explained below.
    Historians still argue about whether or not Poincaré fully appreciated special relativity before Einstein entered the scene. My own point of view would be that whereas this may be true, special relativity was not fully appreciated (either by Poincaré or by Einstein) until Hermann Minkowski presented, in 1908, the four dimensional space time picture. He gave a now famous lecture at the University of Goettingen in which he proclaimed, 'Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.'

    Einstein seems not to have appreciated the significance of Minkowski's contribution initially, and for about two years he did not take it seriously. But subsequently he came to realize the full power of Minkowski's point of view. It formed the essential background for Einstein's extraordinary later development of general relativity, in which Minkowski's four dimensional space time geometry becomes curved.

    Penrose does not realize that Poincare presented the four dimensional space time picture in 1905. As Penrose says, Einstein did not appreciate it until 1910. And Penrose admits that Poincare may have fully appreciated special relativity before 1905.

    Penrose does credit Einstein, but when you look at the details of what he says, he acknowledges that Poincare was five years ahead of Einstein on all the major points.

    Penrose also mentions the general relativity dispute in an endnote:

    9 The mathematician David Hilbert also came upon this equation at a similar time to Einstein, but by a different route, in the autumn of 1915. This has resulted in an uncomfortable priority dispute. But Hilbert's contribution, though technically important, does not really undermine Einstein's fundamental priority in the matter. See, in particular, J. Stachel (1999), New Light on the Einstein Hilbert Priority, Question in Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy, Volume 20, Numbers 3 and 4, December 1999, 91-101. (pdf)
    Stachel was the editor of Einstein's complete works, and is an Einstein idolizer. His argument has been refuted by Logunov and others.

    Penrose's treatise, The Road to Reality, says:

    This apparent contradiction between the constancy of the speed of light and the relativity principle led Einstein -- as it had, in effect, previously led the Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and, more completely, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré -- to a remarkable viewpoint whereby the contradiction is completely removed. [p.400]

    The full 10-dimensional symmetry group group of Minkowski space M is called the Poincaré group, in recognition of the achievement of the outstanding French mathematician Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), in building up the essential mathematical structure of special relativity in the years between 1898 and 1905, independently of Einstein's fundamental input of 1905. [p.417]

    The name is not just to honor Poincaré; he was the first to define it. Poincaré is the first to define and give properties of the 6-dimensional symmetry group, and he names it the "Lorentz group", in his long 1905 paper. Poincaré was honoring Lorentz, and Lorentz did not explicitly consider this group. Poincare also mentions the 10-dimensional group as the full symmetry group.

    A footnote again mentions "Minkowski's 4-dimensional perspective of 1908", without realizing that Poincare published it in 1905.

    Penrose doesn't want to take sides in the priority dispute, but he acknowledges that Poincare had the essence of special relativity before Einstein. It seems to me that Penrose would have given Poincare the entire credit, if Penrose had known about Poincare's 1905 paper.


    Wednesday, Jan 06, 2010
     
    Great artists steal
    Nokia accuses Apple Computer of patent infringement, and says:
    In 1996, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs appeared in the PBS documentary ‘Triumph of the Nerds’ and freely acknowledged Apple’s use of other’s ideas. ‘Picasso had a saying,’ Jobs stated in the interview, ‘”good artists copy, great artists steal.”‘ Jobs then added, ‘and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.’
    I've noticed that when someone points out that Einstein stole all his greatest ideas, it doesn't bother people admit. Here's the explanation. Great artists steal, or so they think.

    The media coverage of the new Google phone has focussed on whether the product is revolutionary. Eg, the Si Valley paper reports:

    But with Google's Android software currently offering only about 20,000 mobile apps, about one-fifth the number available for the iPhone, analysts said the Nexus One is hardly a revolutionary device on par with the introduction of the iPod in 2001 or the 2007 introduction of the iPhone.
    This is really a crazy comment. Nobody wants 100k apps for a cell phone. A larger number of apps does not make a phone revolutionary. The Apple iphone did not have a lot of apps when it was introduced.

    The Apple phone has a lot of apps because it is so crippled. It has a web browser, but you cannot view sites with Flash, Java, or Silverlight. It is not really a smart phone, because you cannot acquire and install apps on your own. You can only use Apple-provided apps. Those 100k Apple apps is a reflection of the limitations of the phone. They are less needed on other smart phones that let you browse the web unrestricted.

    The Apple ipod was not a big deal in 2001. There were other better products. It did not really catch on until Apple managed to corner the online music market with its iTunes DRM store in 2003. Now there are better places to buy online music, but millions of Apple customers are hooked on iTunes anyway.

    One of the paper's columnists writes:

    In Silicon Valley, we thirst for that magic moment when a new thing appears and it's immediately clear the world will never be the same. This was not one of those moments.

    Google tried to tap into those dreams, but fell well short. This announcement was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

    He does not seem to realize that this is about the 20th Google Android phone to hit the market. It is version 2.1.

    The Apple formula seems to be to steal great ideas, and hype the product to the press as being revolutionary. I think that Apple customers are all part of some gigantic mind control experiment. And people who talk about products being revolutionary are probably crackpots.

    C-Net says:

    "When we examine the iPhone users' arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome--a term invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here, hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing by defending the people that had held them hostage for six days," Strand declared.

    The implication is surely that Apple has mugged millions of people with its beauty, dragged them off to a very dark cellar in some barren land, turned them into slightly bonkers Barbarellas, and then recruited them as soldiers for the cause.

    John Dvorak writes:
    The iPhone is Ruining the Country

    Really, the iPhone is only the greatest handset around because it has more ways to waste time than any phone, ever.

    With the economy in the tank, this is probably as good a use of idle time as anything. But let's face it, this whole phone thing is about wasting time. Productivity gains and other rationalizations are bogus excuses for what is really going on here.

    Cell phones are ruining the country. The economy has tanked in proportion to the growing popularity of the iPhone. This is no coincidence, as far as I'm concerned. This is only going to get worse as we're programmed to waste more time. The proof, to me, is the endless chatter about cell phones ...

    There are, of course, lots of other phones on the market, and some of them do not lock you into a long-term contract.
     
    Quantum crypto broken again
    Here a research announcement:
    This presentation will show the first experimental implementation of an eavesdropper for quantum cryptosystem. Although quantum cryptography has been proven unconditionally secure, ... Quantum cryptography, as being based on the laws of physics, was claimed to be much more secure than all classical cryptography schemes.
    There are people who claim that quantum cryptography must be the only absolutely secure system because it is based on the laws of physics. I say the opposite, and the whole field is a sham. There are no laws of physics that make a system like them unconditionally secure, and the systems keep getting broken.

    Tuesday, Jan 05, 2010
     
    Poincare on Einstein
    In 1911, Einstein got an ETH (Swiss) faculty job, with this recommendation from Poincare:
    The future will show more and more, the worth of Einstein, and the university which is able to capture this young master is certain of gaining much honor from the operation. [White & Gribble, p. 109 and Isaacson, pp.168-171.]
    The same text is here and here.

    Hmmm. I think he is trying to say that Einstein's work seems great to lesser minds, but in the long run people will realize his lack of originality.

    There is not much record of Poincare saying anything else about Einstein. Poincare's papers on relativity predated Einstein's, so Poincare did not cite Einstein.

    Update: A reader says that my interpretation is a preposterous reach. Maybe so. I do not know Poincare's intentions. I am just saying that his sentence is artfully ambiguous in the style of these letters. Sometimes professors deliberately make these ambiguous comments when they are too polite to use blunt language.


    Monday, Jan 04, 2010
     
    Many books celebrate Darwin anniversary
    I thought that Einstein was supposed to be the greatest genius of all time, but apparently he is chopped liver compared to the evolution idol. Steven Shapin writes in the London Review of Books:
    The New York Times announced that ‘the theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology,’ but that’s rather modest in the context of current celebratory hype. In now canonical versions, Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection – his ‘dangerous idea’ – was, as Daniel Dennett famously said, ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’. Better than any idea of Newton’s or Einstein’s, and better than any idea had by Jesus or Aristotle or Hume or that other great 12 February 1809 birthday boy, Abraham Lincoln. It ‘unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law’. ...

    The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,’ and now an anthropologist claims that ‘nothing about humans makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ (Nothing.)

    There are other claimants for the prize of towering scientific genius, and for ‘making the modern world’, but none of them has been the occasion for global festivities on anything like this scale. The 400th anniversary of Galileo’s birth was 1964, and Descartes’s 1996; Newton’s Principia turned 300 in 1987; Einstein’s Wunderjahr papers in Annalen der Physik, changing the way physicists think about space, time and matter, had their centenary in 2005. All were duly marked, mainly by historians, philosophers and physicists, but there was nothing remotely approaching Darwin 200. Even if we had an unambiguous metric for ranking scientific genius and modernity-making – one by which Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Einstein were chopped liver compared to Darwin – neither genius nor influence would be a sufficient explanation for the events of 2009.

    The article points out that rival books outsold Darwin at the time. There was even a pro-evolution book outselling Darwin.
    The centre of gravity of Darwin Year has been a celebration of secularism, a crusade against rampant religiosity and ‘public ignorance of science’. Darwin has been figured as the Scourge of the Godly. The National Secular Society notes that ‘Darwin’s 200th birthday has become a rallying point for scientists opposing creationism.’ ‘Is it important to celebrate Charles Darwin today?’ the Independent asked, answering that ‘Darwin’s legacy is threatened by proponents of creationism. By commemorating him we defend it … No advance has so upended our worldview since the realisation that the world was not flat’ – a claim that sits awkwardly alongside complaints about the limited grip of Darwinism on modernity’s collective ‘worldview’.
    This is such nonsense I don't know where to start. I am not sure that the realization that the world was not flat upended anyone's worldview.

    Darwin's scientific contributions were not so great. Others said similar things. I think that Darwin is idolized because he is credited with making atheism respectable, more than any other single person.


    Sunday, Jan 03, 2010
     
    Cerf on Einstein
    The Frenchman Roger Cerf wrote this 2006 article in the American Journal of Physics:
    On the occasion of the centenary of special relativity, several publications have argued that Poincaré, and not Einstein, was the discoverer of special relativity. Attacks have simultaneously been directed at Einstein, whose 1905 article on the electrodynamics of moving bodies was alleged to be a forgery. These attacks praise Lorentz and Poincaré for their results and neglect Poincaré's failure to make the necessary conceptual leap and understand the fundamental consequences of the principle of relativity. I identify what was missing in Lorentz's and Poincaré's views and contrast them with Einstein's insights. [Am. J. Phys., Vol. 74, No. 9, September 2006]
    The full paper is on Google docs here.

    I was hoping that the paper would have some new arguments, but it does not. It is largely a response to a French paper that I have not seen, and it relies on quotes from Einstein biographers and others.

    Almost all physicists attribute the discovery of special relativity to Albert Einstein, although claims have periodically been made since the publication of Edmund Whittaker’s monograph2 that priority in the field belongs either to the mathematician Henri Poincaré alone or to Poincaré and the physicist Hendrik-Antoon Lorentz.
    The priority question goes back to 1905. Einstein was considered for a Nobel prize and denied one several times, in part because of priority issues.

    Cerf has two main arguments: that von Laue, Pauli, and de Broglie credited Einstein, and that Poincare used slightly different terminology.

    von Laue credited Lorentz for the relativity of electromagnetism, but said that Einstein first applied it to all natural phenomena. Pauli credited Poincare for most of relativity, but said that Einstein derived the theory from simpler assumptions. de Broglie said that "Poincaré did not take the decisive step", whatever that means. Cerf explains:

    Poincaré’s thinking stopped short of the crucial step, the one that makes the contraction of lengths and Michelson’s experimental data follow from the principle of relativity and from the new conceptions of time and space that stem from it.
    This is just meaningless babble. Poincare had all those concepts. The complaint is that he presented them in a slightly different order, I guess.

    It seems to me that Pauli gives more credit to Poincare than Einstein, but even if he preferred Einstein, it is just an opinion. There were plenty of other comtemporary physicists who thought that Einstein was a big phony.

    Wikipedia has an article on German Physics:

    During the early years of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity was met with much bitter controversy within the physics communities of the world. There were many physicists, especially the "old guard," who were suspicious of the intuitive meanings of Einstein's theories. ... Many of these classical physicists resented Einstein's dismissal of the notion of a luminiferous aether, which had been a mainstay of their work for the majority of their productive lives. They were not convinced by the empirical evidences for Relativity: ...
    There are no sources for any of this. I really doubt that anyone resented Einstein dismissing the aether. But regardless, it shows that some physicists, including Nobel prize winners, were unimpressed with Einstein.

    The main terminology difference is between Poincare's "hypothesis" and Einstein's "postulate". I don't get the point. I guess Cerf's idea is that Poincare's use of "hypothesis" shows that he was not a true believer in relativity.

    Cerf quotes someone as complaining about Lorentz's terminology for time, and then saying that Poincare discussed clocks measuring time but somehow the time is "fictitious". Poincare did not say that the time was fictitious, but "Nevertheless, this time remains fictitious, always comparable to the time of the ether". Cerf's argument makes no sense.

    Cerf also repeats the claim of an Einstein biographer that Poincare did not understand relativity.

    Cerf also criticizes a 1904 Poincare quote saying light has no mass. I am not sure why this is so wrong. Physics textbooks today say that light is massless, because the rest mass of a photon is zero. Light does have inertia, and that 1904 lecture seems to recognize that.

    Cerf mentions this French article, saying that it is very likely that Einstein read Poincare's first 1905 paper two weeks before submitting his own relativity paper, because a copy were sent to the Berne library and Einstein had been writing reviews of similarly published works. I agree that Einstein did not write his whole 1905 paper in two weeks, plagiarized from Poincare's 1905 paper. Einstein based his paper on what Lorentz and Poincare had published several years earlier. Poincare's 1905 paper would have just clarified some of the concepts for him.

    Cerf claims to identify Poincare's missing conceptual leap, but he doesn't. There is no substance to his argument.

    It is amazing to me that a mainstream historical physics journal publishes an article so strongly in favor of Einstein, and yet filled with such weak arguments. Even if Cerf is correct in everything he says, it proves nothing. He quotes Pauli's opinion that Einstein gave a formulation of special relativity with fewer assumptions, but that would only say that Einstein had a better presentation of the theory, not that he did it first.

    Complaining about the word "hypothesis" is even more bizarre. This just convinces more than ever that Poincare deserves the credit, not Einstein. Einstein-worshipping journals publish articles on how Einstein's theory was superior, and yet the best arguments they can find are these weird terminological complaints.


    Saturday, Jan 02, 2010
     
    Predicting life on alien planets
    Seth Shostak of SETI writes:
    It's an idea that's had a long run, dating back to those distant days when Aristotle strolled Athens with his students: namely, that Earth is unique. True, we no longer believe that our planet's astronomical position is special, that we sit like a queen bee in the central court of the cosmos. But serious people still contend that our terrestrial environment might be singular — that Earth is one of the few places in the universe where life could arise.

    Well, I'll bet you cash to crullers that — within a thousand days — this idea, too, will be deposed.

    Great. I hope we can stop listening to him after three years.

    He goes on to describe the spectacular discoveries of distant planets in the past few years. But I don't see how any of those discoveries makes intelligent alien life more likely.

    It took three billion years for life on Earth to evolve from one-celled organisms to two-celled organisms. For this to happen, the Earth had to be geologically alive and stable over a long time. The stability comes from, among other things, having a single large Moon, and having at least one large outer planet (Jupiter).

    Meanwhile, researchers continue to find new planets, and with increasing efficacy. A decade ago, only 5 percent of stars examined by these planet hunters actually showed evidence of orbiting worlds. Today, thanks to improved instruments, it's nearly 50 percent.

    The implication is astounding: Planets are stupefyingly plentiful.

    Maybe all of those stars have orbiting worlds. The question is whether any of them have the Earth-Moon-Jupiter configuration that seems to essential to intelligent life on Earth. So far none of them do. They all have a large inner planet that makes such a configuration impossible for that star.

    Suppose that you were a European explorer in the 1500s, and you just learned that there were 1000s of islands in the south Pacific ocean. You would naturally speculate that there could be people living on those islands. But then you started exploring those islands, and discovered that half of them have no fresh water and were incapable of supporting life. Would that make you more or less optimistic about finding people on the other islands?

    Less optimistic, of course. And yet that is the situation of the planet hunters. They found planets, but they are all inhabitable.

    Shostak may argue that they found inhabitable planets because the inhabitable ones are easier to find. That is true, but it conceals the fact that finding a large inner planet implies that there is no Earth-like planet in that system.

    It is funny the way these folks seem to have a religious belief in extraterrestial life. No matter what the evidence, they claim that it supports their views. At least we have one of their leading spokesmen betting on results within 1000 days.


    Friday, Jan 01, 2010
     
    Second thoughts about the Sokal hoax
    I looked again at Sokal's hoax from 1996.

    Physicist Steven Weinberg argues that Sokal's original parody article is nonsense, giving this as his first example:

    But for some postmodern intellectuals, "linear" has come to mean unimaginative and old-fashioned, while "nonlinear" is understood to be somehow perceptive and avant garde. In arguing for the cultural importance of the quantum theory of gravitation, Sokal refers to the gravitational field in this theory as "a noncommuting (and hence nonlinear) operator." Here "hence" is ridiculous; "noncommuting" does not imply "nonlinear," and in fact quantum mechanics deals with things that are both noncommuting and linear.
    No, it is not so ridiculous. The gravitational field is indeed a nonlinear operator on the potential function, and the nonlinearity is a direct consequence of the local symmetry group being non-commuting. The use of the word "non-commuting" by Sokal is a little sloppy, but it would be clumsy and irrelevant to explain precisely what is non-commuting. The point being made is not even Sokal's point, but an explanation of a quoted sentence from Derrida. I don't think that Sokal's explanation is obviously ridiculous.

    Derrida's point is obscure, but he was just a French non-scientist giving an extemporaneous answer to a question after a lecture.

    Weinberg doesn't actually argue that Sokal's parody article is nonsensical. He says:

    I thought at first that Sokal's article in Social Text was intended to be an imitation of academic babble, which any editor should have recognized as such. But in reading the article I found that this is not the case. ... Where the article does degenerate into babble, it is not in what Sokal himself has written, but in the writings of the genuine postmodern cultural critics quoted by Sokal.
    I agree with Weinberg on this point. The article is not so ridiculous that the editors should have rejected it based on the physics.

    To me, this point really undermines the value of the hoax. Sokal bragged that his article was babble that no one should have published. But it is the philosophy and the quotes that are silly; his physics explanations are not so bad by comparison. The editors could have had a physicist like Weinberg review it before publication, gotten his report that the physics metaphors are somewhat distorted, and published it anyway.

    Weinberg replies to critics, including:

    He expresses surprise that no physicist has yet presented string theory as a form of Platonic mysticism, but I think I can explain this. It is because we expect that string theory will be testable -- if not directly, by observing the string vibrations, then indirectly, by calculating whether string theory correctly accounts for all of the currently mysterious features of the standard model of elementary particles and general relativity. If it were not for this expectation, string theory would not be worth bothering with.
    That was 1996, and string theory is no closer to accounting for any of those particles.

    Sokal gave this explanation of his motives in term of his own far leftist politics:

    Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; ...

    The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. ...

    I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua).

    Hmmm. I infer that "leftist" is an understatement. He sounds like a hard-core Marxist.

    His sidebar has this excerpt from his original parody article:

    Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
    The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game.
    Sokal's complaint is that this quote is nonsense. He tries to give an explanation of the quote in his parody paper, assuming that the Einstein constant is the gravitational coupling constant G.

    Of course it is literal nonsense to say that a constant is not a constant. We don't need a physicist for that. It is not even clear whether the constant is supposed to be G, or the speed of light c. The out-of-context quote seems to show that a French deconstructionist used a sloppy metaphor, but that's all. I don't see how he could be blamed for getting the physics wrong, when the reader cannot even tell which constant is the Einsteinian constant.

    I've changed my mind about this so-called Sokal hoax. (Funny how "Sokal" sounds like "so-called".) At first I cheered that a physicist had humiliated some pretentious phony intellectuals. But now I think that it was cowardly and dishonest. Sokal has made a second career out of this silly stunt, and has coauthored a 2008 book on the subject.


    Wednesday, Dec 30, 2009
     
    Evolutionists censor movie again
    The LA Times reports:
    L.A.'s California Science Center will start the new year defending itself in court for canceling a documentary film attacking Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

    A lawsuit alleges that the state-owned center improperly bowed to pressure from the Smithsonian Institution, as well as e-mailed complaints from USC professors and others. ... On Oct. 5, the science center, one of 165 national affiliates of the Smithsonian that enjoy special access to loans from its massive collection, received an alert -- and a complaint -- from Harold Closter, director of the Smithsonian's affiliates program. Closter gave the science center the head's-up about a news release that had been issued not by the AFA but by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design and whose researchers are featured in "Darwin's Dilemma." ...

    The AFA's suit, filed Oct. 14, contends that the contract issue was a "false pretext" and ... The AFA says that it should not have been held responsible for a release that it didn't issue itself.

    The Discovery Institute replies here.

    As I understand it, the AFA (whoever they are) paid to rent a public movie theater in LA. The movie is critical of Darwinism, and features some DI scholars. DI issued a press release that might have mischaracterized another govt agency. Evolutionists pressured the govt agency controlling the movie theater to cancel the showing.

    I don't know anything about the movie, but even if it is as fictional as a Hollywood movie, it is hard to see any justification for censorship.

    The evolutionists really hate the DI. I get that. They are like medieval inquisitors going after agents of the devil. Even if the DI is entirely wrong in all their opinions, it is no threat to anyone. Those who try to censor the DI only expose themselves as unreasonable.


    Tuesday, Dec 29, 2009
     
    Einstein and the anti-relativity cranks
    In the October 2006 Cosmos magazine article, Was Einstein a fake?, John Farrell writes:
    In his book Cranks, Quarks and the Cosmos, science writer and physicist Jeremy Bernstein points out that one of the criteria that always defines crank 'science' is its lack of correspondence with the body of scientific knowledge that has gone before it.

    "I would insist that any proposal for a radically new theory in physics, or in any other science, contain a clear explanation of why the precedent science worked," he writes. Einstein did this, as the first page of his paper on special relativity, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", illustrates perfectly. [p.18]

    In contrast, "the crank," Bernstein writes, "is a scientific solipsist who lives in his own little world. He has no understanding nor appreciation of the scientific matrix in which his work is embedded ... In my dealings with cranks, I have discovered that this kind of discussion is of no interest to them." [p.20]

    Here is that 1905 Einstein article, and he doesn't explain the precedent science at all. He mentions "Maxwell's electrodynamics" and "motion of the earth", but he failed to mention the Lorentz transformations that started in about 1887, the Lorentz aether theory which started in 1892, the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, and experiments detecting the relativistic mass of an electron.

    Even in later life, Einstein denied that he even knew about Poincare's work and only admitted to knowing about one of Lorentz's papers on Lorentz transformations. He said, "The Michelson-Morley experiment had no role in the foundation of the theory." and "..the theory of relativity was not founded to explain its outcome at all." See Michael Polanyi's book.

    By Bernstein's definition, Einstein was a crank, and not a good example for proposing new theories.

    I am wondering why Einstein get praised for something that he did so terribly. He never showed an appreciation for what Poincare and others did, and in his later life he was the worst example of a "scientific solipsist" who was frequently announcing crackpot theories that showed no relation to the work of others.

    Bernstein says:

    As one might imagine, the comprehension and acceptance of Einstein's early work broke down along generational lines. Physicists -- at least the good ones -- of about Einstein's age understood almost immediately the importance of at least some of what he had done. [p.25]
    Here are the ages in 1905 of those who are credited with contributing to the theory of special relativity: Einstein 26, Lorentz 52, Minkowski 41, Poincare 51, Planck 47, Kaufmann 44, Bucherer 42, Laue 26, Lewis 30. As you can see, they were not that young.

    Bernstein says that Einstein got his first of many honorary degrees in 1909! [p.24] Those decisions are made by committees of old people, so it was not just the young who understood and accepted relativity.

    Bernstein's main point is to say that he thinks that it is remarkable that the journal editors accepted Einstein's 1905 papers, when they were so bold and original, and from an unknown physicist. I say that there is a simple explanation -- the papers were not so bold and original. I am sure that the editors were familiar with Lorentz aether theory, and may have even heard Poincare's lectures on relativity.


    Monday, Dec 28, 2009
     
    The strangest man
    From a book review of a recent biography of Paul Dirac:
    One of the more interesting themes to run through this book is the contrast of two ways of doing physics, which might be called “bottom-up” and “top-down.” In the former, one gathers data by experiment, then looks for a mathematical theory that describes the data. In the latter, one contrives beautiful mathematical theories, then looks to see if nature conforms. Dirac was very much in the “top-down” camp. His confidence in his theories derived exclusively from their mathematical elegance.
    Maybe this explains why he was so unproductive past age 30. Just like Einstein.
    Farmelo writes: “[W]hat is most remarkable about the story of antimatter is that human beings first understood and perceived it not through sight, smell, taste and touch, but through purely theoretical reasoning inside Dirac's head.”
    This is a little exaggerated. Dirac published a theory of electrons and protons in 1929. In 1931 he realized the particles had to have the same mass, so he said that it was maybe a theory of electrons and some new particle. The anti-electron was observed in 1932. Other antimatter came much later, and was not predicted from Dirac's theory.
    The same might be said about Einstein's theory of general relativity, which was conceived in his head before any experiment indicated its necessity, and today's string theory, which is awaiting empirical verification. In the end, of course, observation is the ultimate test of any theory.
    No, string theory is not awaiting empirical verification. There is nothing to verify because it does not make any testable predictions. The general relativity story is a little more complicated, and I will write about that later.

    Here is proof that experiment suggested the necessity of somthing like general relativity. This is from Weinberg's reply to his article trashing paradigm shift theory:

    From the eighteenth century on there were astronomers who speculated about possible departures from the Newtonian theory of gravitation. Take a look at the article on the planet Mercury in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, written by the noted astronomer Simon Newcomb before the advent of Einstein's General Relativity. You will find Newcomb speculating that Newton's inverse square law of gravitation may be only approximate.
    For decades, Mercury's orbit was the main quantitative evidence for general relativity. There was also eclipse evidence, but it was inaccurate.

    Sunday, Dec 27, 2009
     
    CDC advisors still biased towards vaccines
    The NY Times reports:
    WASHINGTON — A new report finds that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a poor job of screening medical experts for financial conflicts when it hired them to advise the agency on vaccine safety, officials said Thursday.

    Most of the experts who served on advisory panels in 2007 to evaluate vaccines for flu and cervical cancer had potential conflicts that were never resolved, the report said. Some were legally barred from considering the issues but did so anyway.

    In the report, expected to be released Friday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the centers failed nearly every time to ensure that the experts adequately filled out forms confirming they were not being paid by companies with an interest in their decisions.

    The report found that 64 percent of the advisers had potential conflicts of interest that were never identified or were left unresolved by the centers.

    This is an old story, and Congress has even had hearing about it. The CDC's response is that they cannot find anyone to recommend the vaccines, except for those on the drug company payroll. They are in the business of promoting vaccines, not objectively evaluating them.

    Some of these vaccines could be worthwhile, even if they are promoted by greedy drug companies. But you cannot trust a CDC recommendation. CDC panel experts have sometimes said that they were voting to recommend a vaccine in order to force govt funding for it.


    Saturday, Dec 26, 2009
     
    Perfect Rigor
    A reader asks me about the recent book, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. The title seems to come from Poincare's (long) 1905 relativity paper:
    If the inertia of matter is exclusively of electromagnetic origin, as generally admitted in the wake of Kaufmann’s experiment, and all forces are of electromagnetic origin (apart from this constant pressure that I just mentioned), the postulate of relativity may be established with perfect rigor. This is what I show by a very simple calculation based on the principle of least action.

    But that is not all. In the article cited above, Lorentz judged it necessary to extend his hypothesis in such a way that the postulate remains valid in case there are forces of non-electromagnetic origin. According to Lorentz, all forces are affected by the Lorentz transformation (and consequently by a translation) in the same way as electromagnetic forces.

    It was important to examine this hypothesis closely, and in particular to ascertain the modifications we would have to apply to the laws of gravitation. We find first of all that it requires us to assume that gravitational

    A lot of people assume that Perelman turned down the $1M prize, but it hasn't been offered yet, AFAIK. I don't know why not. The rules say:
    Before consideration, a proposed solution must be published in a refereed mathematics publication of worldwide repute (or such other form as the SAB shall determine qualifies), and it must also have general acceptance in the mathematics community two years after.
    This has been clearly satisfied. It has now been 3.5 years since such publication, and since general acceptance.

    I haven't seen the book, but it seems consist of a lot of gossip, innuendo, and amateur psychoanalysis about how Perelman is crazy. It does not attempt to explain any of the math alluded to in the title. It is a biography of Perelman, but the author did not interview him.

    This is the latest example of a book about a mathematician that portrays him as crazy without reporting what he has to say or what he really accomplished. Another recent example is The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. I think that these books are offensive.


    Thursday, Dec 24, 2009
     
    Current Nobel physics prize went to wrong guys
    There is a controversy about the recent Nobel physics prize:
    In the 1960s there were four men who worked together at Bell Labs in New Jersey: Willard Boyle, George Smith, Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett. In 2009, Smith and Boyle were awarded the Nobel prize.

    Boyle and Smith were lauded for their creation of

    "... the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device). The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 year's Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time. The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized photography, as light could now be captured electronically instead of on film.
    79 year old Eugene Gordon said that Tompsett's patent was for the CCD, and that Smith and Boyle had patented a charge-coupled device shift register, which had nothing to do with imaging.
    I don't know who did the more important work, but the prize went for inventiong the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device), but the recipients did not do that. You can read Boyle-Smith Patent No. 3858232 for a CCD that does not mention imaging at all, and Tompsett Patent No. 4085456 Here is another story about Michael Francis Tompsett not getting credit.

    Wednesday, Dec 23, 2009
     
    Who created the standard model for high-energy physics?
    Our best theory of physics is the standard model of elementary particles. It combines electromagnetism, weak, and strong forces into a geometric quantum gauge theory, and became accepted in the 1970s. Who is the Einstein credited for this theory?

    Sheldon Lee Glashow said this (pdf) in a recent CERN talk:

    Why did it take until 1967 for Steve Weinberg (and Abdus Salam, a year later) to use the Higgs mechanism to explain the breaking of electroweak gauge symmetry? And why was this work ignored until the suspected renormalizability of the theory was established? (There were just two citations to Weinberg’s paper prior to 1971, but over 7000 afterward!) ...

    When we visited MIT to explain our work to Weinberg, he was amiable but showed little interest. At the time, we ourselves were blissfully unaware of his 1967 electroweak paper and Steve himself seemed to have forgotten about it.

    The next crucial event took place at the Amsterdam Conference in 1971, where Gerard ’tHooft announced his proof of the renormalizability of the electroweak model with spontaneous symmetry breaking provided by the Higgs mechanism.

    Weinberg's 1972 general relativity textbook said:
    However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and the theory of elementary particles. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and that too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics.
    Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam got the Nobel Physics Prize in 1979, and 'tHooft got it in 1999.

    It appears to me that 'tHooft make the big breakthru. He proved that the nonlinear gauge theories were consistent at a time when the other experts had given up on them. He did the hard work while others made lucky guesses. And yet 'tHooft's prize came 20 years after the others were recognized.

    Weinberg's 1967 paper was disregarded by others and even himself, and he even implies in 1972 that his whole approach was wrong. What saved him was not new experimental data, but someone proving a mathematical theorem. That theorem turned a lucky guess equation into a consistent theory. Experimental confirmation came later in the 1970s.

    I think that there is something seriously wrong with the way that science is credited. Why is Weinberg so much more famous than 'tHooft? Actually, I am surprised that 'tHooft won a Nobel prize at all. His prize is one of the few prizes that have gone for theoretical work.

    The Nobel committee prefers experimental work, and that is fine with me, but Weinberg is not an experimentalist. Maybe they thought that 'tHooft's work was too mathematical, and that Weinberg's was easier to understand. But it was 'tHooft's work that showed that nonlinear gauge theories could be turned into a consistent quantum theory, and that paved the way for the current theories of both the weak and strong interactions.

    Salam also got the prize for independently saying the same thing that Weinberg did. When two people do the same thing independently, it is a sign that maybe the ideas were in the air and the work was not so original.

    Update: Here is Weinberg's account (pdf).


    Monday, Dec 21, 2009
     
    Great ideas from old scientists
    John Derbyshire writes that we should Trust Science, altho he is not sure about the warmists. He says that only young scientist lead scientific revolutions:
    There have been scientific revolutions aplenty, and there will surely be more. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Faraday, Darwin, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein, Hubble, and Wegener are not revered for their defense of a consensus. To overthrow a consensus, or force major changes on it, is the dream of every young scientist. Older scientists may settle for tenure, rank, political patronage, and a quiet life, but there will always be younger ones ready to fight from the contrarian corner.
    His examples are unconvincing. I looked the ages of these guys when they first published something great that went against conventional wisdom. Here is what I got:

    Darwin 50, Galileo 68, Hubble 42, Kepler 38, Lavoisier 35, Newton 44, Pasteur 44, Planck 42, Wegener 35.

    I wasn't sure what age to put for Faraday. He did a lot of brilliant and cutting-edge experimental work, but I am not sure it took any guts to publish any of it. Perhaps his most radical and ultimately useful idea was his lines of force, which he proposed in a publication at age 54.

    I skipped Einstein because I don't think he ever published any great works. Instead Poincare published his first version of special relativity at age 46 in 1900.

    Einstein was 26 in 1905 when he published his first important papers. Apparently the Einstein myth is so powerful that it fools an otherwise intelligent writer like Derbyshire. Apparently he thinks that Einstein revolutionized science as a young man, and so all the other great science must have been similarly done by young men also.

    That is why it is so important to get the Einstein story right. Somehow the Einstein myth has not only given people a distorted idea about what relativity is all about, but it has also given a distorted idea about how all of science works.


    Sunday, Dec 20, 2009
     
    Bodanis on Poincare
    The historian David Bodanis wrote the book E=mc2: A Biography of the Worlds Most Famous Equation. The book is really a biography of Einstein, as it does not even mention the work done on the equation before and after Einstein's short 1905 paper on it.

    He has some nonsense about Poincare:

    In time a few scientists did begin to hear of his work, and then jealousy set in. Henri Poincaré was one of the glories of Third Republic France, and, along with David Hilbert in Germany, one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. As a young man Poincaré had written up the first ideas behind what later became chaos theory; as a student, the story goes, he'd once seen an elderly woman on a street corner knitting, and then, thinking about the geometry of her knitting needles as he walked along the street, he'd hurried back and told her that there was another way she could have done it: he'd independently come up with purling.

    By now, though, he was in his fifties, and although he could still get some fresh ideas, he increasingly didn't have the energy to develop them. Or maybe it was more than that. Middle aged scientists often say that the problem isn't a lack of memory, or the ability to think quickly. It's more a fearfulness at stepping into the unknown. For Poincaré had once had the chance of coming close to what Einstein was doing.

    In 1904 he'd been in the large group of disoriented European intellectuals invited to the World's Fair being held in St. Louis. (Max Weber, the German sociologist, was also there, and he was so startled by the raw energy he saw in America he described Chicago as being "like a man whose skin has been peeled off" that it helped jolt him out of a depression he'd been suffering for years.) At the fair, Poincaré had actually given a lecture on what he'd labeled a "theory of relativity," but that name is misleading for it only skirted around the edges of what Einstein would soon achieve. Possibly if Poincaré had been younger he could have pushed it through to come up with the full results Einstein reached the next year, including the striking equation. But after that lecture, and then the exhausting schedule his St. Louis hosts had for him, the elderly mathematician let it slide. The fact that so many French scientists had turned away from Lavoisier's hands on approach and instead insisted on a sterile over abstraction only made it harder for Poincaré to be immersed in practical physics.

    By 1906, realizing that this young man in Switzerland had opened up an immense field, Poincaré reacted with the coldest of sulks. Instead of looking closer at this equation, which he could have considered a stepchild, and bringing it in to his Paris colleagues for further development, he kept a severe distance; never speaking of it; seldom mentioning Einstein's name. ... [p.78-79]

    The few researchers around 1905 who had uncovered a small part of what he later deduced had no chance of matching him. Poincaré got closer than almost anyone else, but when it came to breaking our usual assumptions about time's flow or the nature of simultaneity, he backed off, unable to consider the consequences of such a new view.

    Why was Einstein so much more successful? It's tempting to say it was just a matter of being brighter than everyone else. But several of Einstein's Bern friends were highly intelligent, while someone like Poincaré would have been off the scale on any IQ test. ... [p.85]

    This is ridiculous. Poincare did not back off after 1904. The next year he published a 50-page paper on relativity that introduced spacetime and the Lorentz group. It was bolder, more thorough, and more advanced than what Einstein wrote.

    It is true that Poincare barely mentioned Einstein. Einstein probably never wrote anything that was of use to Poincare. Poincare did write a letter of recommendation once for Einstein. That would be the place to look if you suspect Poincare of jealousy.


    Friday, Dec 18, 2009
     
    Isaacson on Poincare
    Walter Isaacson wrote the biggest-selling Einstein book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, in 2007. He idolizes Einstein far out of proportion, of course.

    I looked at what the book says about Poincare.

    Einstein, who was still not yet enamored of math, at one point described Minkowski's work as "superfluous learnedness" and joked, "Since the mathematicians have grabbed hold of the theory of relativity, I myself no longer understand it." But he in fact came to admire Minkowski's handiwork and wrote a section about it in his popular 1916 book on relativity. [p.133]
    He is talking about the idea of combining space and time into a four-dimensional spacetime. It is credited to Minkowski in 1908 but is actually due to Poincare in 1905. It does not just get a section in Einstein's book; most of the book depends on it.

    What this is saying is that Poincare published the essence of special relativity in 1905, and Einstein still did not understand it in 1908.

    Once again, it's worth asking why Einstein discovered a new theory and his contemporaries did not. Both Lorentz and Poincaré had already come up with many of the components of Einstein's theory. Poincaré even questioned the absolute nature of time.

    But neither Lorentz nor Poincaré made the full leap: that there is no need to posit an ether, that there is no absolute rest, that time is relative based on an observer's motion, and so is space.

    This is just a lie. Poincare explicitly says all of those things several years before Einstein.
    Poincaré never made the connection between the relativity of simultaneity and the relativity of time, and he "drew back when on the brink” of understanding the full ramifications of his ideas about local time. Why did he hesitate? Despite his interesting insights, he was too much of a traditionalist in physics to display the rebellious streak ingrained in the unknown patent examiner," "When he came to the decisive step, his nerve failed him and he clung to old habits of thought and familiar ideas of space and time," Banesh Hoffmann said of Poincaré.
    Poincare explicitly made those connections in 1900, 5 years before Einstein. There is no "full leap" or "decisive step" that Poincare failed to make.
    Even more surprising, and revealing, is the fact that Lorentz and Poincaré never were able to make Einstein's leap even after they read his paper. Lorentz still clung to the existence of the ether ...

    For his part, Poincaré seems never to have fully understood Einstein's breakthrough. Even in 1909, he was still insisting that relativity theory required a third postulate, which was that "a body in motion suffers a deformation in the direction in which it was displaced." In fact, the contraction of rods is not, as Einstein showed, some separate hypothesis involving a real deformation, but rather the consequence of accepting Einstein's theory of relativity. [p.134-135]

    This is really wacky. Relativity textbooks today often admit that Einstein's two postulates are insufficient, and a third postulate is needed. This is evidence that Poincare understood it better, not worse.

    Isaacson has only a shallow understanding of relativity, and he relies on quotes of the opinions of others to badmouth Poincare. His strongest quote is this unsource quote from the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson:

    The essential difference between Poincaré and Einstein was that Poincaré was by temperament conservative and Einstein was by temperament revolutionary. When Poincaré looked for a new theory of electromagnetism, he tried to preserve as much as he could of the old. He loved the ether and continued to believe in it, even when his own theory showed that it was unobservable. His version of relativity theory was a patchwork quilt. The new idea of local time, depending on the motion of the observer, was patched onto the old framework of absolute space and time defined by a rigid and immovable ether. Einstein, on the other hand, saw the old framework as cumbersome and unnecessary and was delighted to be rid of it. His version of the theory was simpler and more elegant. There was no absolute space and time and there was no ether. All the complicated explanations of electric and magnetic forces as elastic stresses in the ether could be swept into the dustbin of history, together with the famous old professors who still believed in them.
    Note that Dyson is not claiming that Poincare said anything that was incorrect, inadequate, or at odds with observation. Dyson criticizes Poincare's temperament, attitude, and terminology. His comments are consistent with the view that Poincare invented the whole of special relativity before Einstein, and then Einstein found a better way of explaining it to physicists.

    I doubt that Dyson ever even read Poincare. Poincare never advocated absolute space or elastic stresses in the ether or any of that stuff. Dyson is just repeating how 20th century physicists make fun of 19th century physicicsts. I would take his opinion of Poincare more seriously if there were some indication that he actually read Poincare.

    Dyson probably would have gotten a Nobel prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics, if he had been considered a physicist instead of a mathematician. Being a mathematician, he was subject to the prejudices that physicists have against mathematicians. So it is funny to see him buying into similar prejudice against Poincare.

    This is the same Dyson who said all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated, and that Einstein had no technical skill as a mathematician.


    Thursday, Dec 17, 2009
     
    Einstein was not peer reviewed
    Here is an example of Einstein's arrogance:
    How many of Einstein’s 300 plus papers were peer reviewed? According to the physicist and historian of science Daniel Kennefick, it may well be that only a single paper of Einstein’s was ever subject to peer review. That was a paper about gravitational waves, jointly authored with Nathan Rosen, and submitted to the journal Physical Review in 1936. The Physical Review had at that time recently introduced a peer review system. It wasn’t always used, but when the editor wanted a second opinion on a submission, he would send it out for review. The Einstein-Rosen paper was sent out for review, and came back with a (correct, as it turned out) negative report. Einstein’s indignant reply to the editor is amusing to modern scientific sensibilities, and suggests someone quite unfamiliar with peer review:
    Dear Sir,

    We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the in any case erroneous comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

    Respectfully,

    P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.

    As it turns out, the referee was completely right, and Einstein was wrong. Einstein was claiming to have proved that gravity waves do not exist. He later resubmitted the paper else, but changed his conclusion to saying that gravity waves exist after all. I am sure he didn't credit that ten-page referee report.

    For an even more indignant letter telling off academic referees, see the Roy F. Baumeister letter.


    Wednesday, Dec 16, 2009
     
    Why people are gullible
    Half Sigma blog writes:
    Humans have a pretty powerful herding instinct. The Gaians know this, which is why they are trying so hard to promote the idea that there’s a “consensus,” because they know that the perception of consensus will sway people to their side. After all, 99% of the people who believe in global warming believe because of social reasons and not because they’ve done their own independent assessment of the facts. For women, the herding instinct is even more powerful than it is for men. Men can be loners, but women are never loners.

    The reason why ad hominen arguments are used is because they are effective at swaying opinions, and their effectiveness lies in the herding instinct. People want to believe what the in-group believes, and not what the weirdos or the evil people believe.

    Without brave men like Galileo Galilei or Martin Luther or Charles Darwin to challenge the status quo when they know that the status quo is wrong, there would be no advancement of society. We’d still be in the dark ages with all thought controlled by the Catholic Church.

    He sure picked three lousy examples.

    Luther attacked the Catholic Churrch, but it was mainly to promote a more literal interpretation of the Bible and to argue certain theological points, such as gaining salvation by faith alone. Whether this was a great "advancement of society" is a matter of opinion. It was Luther, not the Catholic Church, who said that the Bible requires geocentrism.

    For examples of great advances, it would be better to cite great scientific advances or great inventions. But then it is hard to find an example of the Catholic Church in opposition.


    Tuesday, Dec 15, 2009
     
    AP gives opinion on emails
    The AP reports:
    LONDON — E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

    The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

    Are we supposed to accept the opinion of five AP journalists over that of 1000s of scientists? The AP statement shows that they do not understand the issues.

    I am already convinced that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are increasing in the atmosphere, and are trapping infrared radiation in the form of heat. The warming issues have to do with how great is the effect, whether there is positive feedback, whether it is making the world better or worse, whether we are headed toward a catastrophe, and what might be done about it.

    Frankel saw "no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very 'generous interpretations.' "

    The e-mails were stolen from the computer network server of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia in southeast England, an influential source of climate science, and were posted online last month.

    The AP studied all the e-mails for context, with five reporters reading and re-reading them — about 1 million words in total.

    These five reporters did not look at any data. They just looked at emails.

    We don't know for sure that the emails were "stolen". The term "leaked" is more accurate. Maybe they were lawfully released to comply with a FOIA request.

    The more important leak was the computer codes that showed how the raw data was manipulated. The reporters did not look at that.

    Paul Kotta, a leftist writer for a top-secret govt nuclear weapons labs and part-time mail-order premium green tea seller has written this letter:

    So, climate change deniers, let me get this straight: The same scientific community that has made this country prosperous and strong with innovations like the microcircuitry and telecommunications that power your blogs, the aeronautical advancements that whisk you to tea party rallies and the medical technologies that prolong your life (assuming your insurer covers the procedure) is now scheming to perpetrate an enormous hoax to ruin the American economy?

    Such a broad-based, coordinated deception would be unprecedented in science’s history — but is quite common outside of science. A perfect example is the propaganda machine that has convinced you that, in this one case, science is plotting against us while the oil, coal and other polluting industries have the nation’s long-term interests at heart.

    The scientists who made this country great never destroyed raw data and asked us to believe manipulated data. Well, maybe they did that at the nuclear weapons lab, but not for the technologies he mentions.

    Saturday, Dec 12, 2009
     
    The Black Hole War
    String theorist and Stanford professor Leonard Susskind has a new book titled, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. It is 470 pages about a seemingly trivial philosophical difference. He justifies it at the beginning with:
    The Black Hole War was a genuine scientific controversy nothing like the pseudodebates over intelligent design, or the existence of global warming. Those phony arguments, cooked up by political manipulators to confuse a naive public, don't reflect any real scientific differences of opinion. By contrast, the split over black holes was very real. Eminent theoretical physicists could not agree on which principles of physics to trust and which to give up. Should they follow Hawking, with his conservative views of space time, or 't Hooft and myself, with our conservative views of Quantum Mechanics? Every point of view seemed to lead only to paradox and contradiction. Either space time the stage on which the laws of nature play out could not be what we thought it was, or the venerable principles of entropy and information were wrong. Millions of years of cognitive evolution, and a couple of hundred years of physics experience, once again had fooled us, and we found ourselves in need of new mental wiring.

    The Black Hole War is a celebration of the human mind and its remarkable ability to discover the laws of nature. It is an explanation of a world far more remote to our senses than Quantum Mechanics and relativity. Quantum gravity deals with objects a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton. We have never directly experienced such small things, and we probably never will, but human ingenuity has allowed us to deduce their existence, and surprisingly, the portals into that world are objects of huge mass and size: black holes. [p.9-10]

    The black hole war is nothing like the global warming debate because the latter has immediate testable predictions and public policy consequences. The climate data will soon tell us who is right and who is wrong.

    Intelligent design is less clear-cut, as some hypotheses are testable and some are not. Susskind wrote his own 2005 book on The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, where he made his own peculiar arguments for intelligent design.

    But the black hole war is not going to be decided by any observation or other objective standard. It is only a question about the opinions that may be adopted by the "eminent theoretical physicists", whoever they are. Susskind sounds like a theologian arguing about which god to pray to, not a scientist.

    He admits that we "probably never will" have any data to decide these issues, and he celebrates the ability of the human to quibble about such esoteric issues anyway.

    An Amazon reviewer writes:

    If we accept the argument that something that a falling observer (someone who cannot return nor communicate with the rest of the world) can observe is considered as a valid scientific observation, we then lose our ability to criticize people for believing that the dead go to Heaven. The dead person (one who cannot return nor communicate with the rest of the world) observes Heaven. We scientists must be very careful about our scientific reasoning, and not give others the opportunity to twist it to make it sound as if we support religion, as is, unfortunately, often the case.
    I think that Susskind abandoned scientific reasoning long ago.

    Friday, Dec 11, 2009
     
    Hawking on Einstein
    Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking gave a lecture at Caius College in May 1992 that was published in Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. He said:
    The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in the categories that the philosophers and historians of science subsequently invent for them. I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg, and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists. They were simply concerned that the existing theories didn't fit together. In theoretical physics, the search for logical self consistency has always been more important in making advances than experimental results. Otherwise elegant and beautiful theories have been rejected because they don't agree with observation, but I don't know of any major theory that has been advanced just on the basis of experiment. The theory always came first, put forward from the desire to have an elegant and consistent mathematical model. The theory then makes predictions, which can then be tested by observation. if the observations agree with the predictions, that doesn't prove the theory; but the theory survives to make further predictions, which again are tested against observation. If the observations don't agree with the predictions, one abandons the theory. [p.42]
    No major theory from experiment? What is he talking about? All the major physics theories I know were based on experiment.

    He goes on with his only example, relativity:

    Or rather, that is what is supposed to happen. In practice, people are very reluctant to give up a theory in which they have invested a lot of time and effort. They usually start by questioning the accuracy of the observations. If that fails, they try to modify the theory in an ad hoc manner. Eventually the theory becomes a creaking and ugly edifice. Then someone suggests a new theory, in which all the awkward observations are explained in an elegant and natural manner. An example of this was the Michelson Morley experiment, performed in 1887, which showed that the speed of light was always the same, no matter how the source or the observer was moving. This seemed ridiculous. Surely someone moving toward the light ought to measure it traveling at a higher speed than someone moving in the same direction as the light; yet the experiment showed that both observers would measure exactly the same speed. For the next eighteen years people like Hendrik Lorentz and George Fitzgerald tried to accommodate this observation within accepted ideas of space and time. They introduced ad hoc postulates, such as proposing that objects got shorter when they moved at high speeds. The entire framework of physics became clumsy and ugly. Then in 1905 Einstein suggested a much more attractive viewpoint, in which time was not regarded as completely separate and on its own. Instead it was combined with space in a four dimensional object called spacetime. Einstein was driven to this idea not so much by the experimental results as by the desire to make two parts of the theory fit together in a consistent whole. The two parts were the laws that govern the electric and magnetic fields, and the laws that govern the motion of bodies.

    I don't think Einstein, or anyone else in 1905, realized how simple and elegant the new theory of relativity was. It completely revolutionized our notions of space and time. [p.43]

    No, this is quite wrong. Einstein did not combine time and space into a four dimensional object in 1905. He did not suggest any more attractive viewpoint than what Poincare had already presented. I think Poincare understood relativity in 1905, but not Einstein.

    It is true that Einstein was not so concerned with experimental results, but that is only because he was just writing an exposition of the theory that Lorentz and Poincare created, and they were directly inspired by the Michelson Morley experiment.

    I know that Hawking knew about Poincare's contributions to special relativity, because he wrote about them in his 1988 bestselling book, A Brief History of Time.

    Hawking does not mention Poincare in this essay because it would destroy his argument. Poincare actually was very explicitly concerned with those philosophical categories and with those puzzling experiments.

    Hawking's view is probably typical of theoretical physicists today, both in terms of drawing the wrong lessons from the relativity story and in believing in ignoring experiment. Hawking's own favorite research topic is the black hole information paradox, where there is no possibility of any experimental evidence. This attitude is ruining physics.


    Thursday, Dec 10, 2009
     
    There is no empty space
    This blog explains the modern aether. If you think that the vacuum is empty space, read this.
    It is the view of modern physics that there is no such thing as truly empty space. When I first heard this, I thought that the person saying it was some kind of crackpot. Didn’t we move past the aether theory in the 19th century? But apparently it is the honest belief of most professional physicists that what we call empty space, or “vacuum”, is really some kind of infinite, space-filling “fabric” upon which ripples can be created that carry force from one object to another. This is the idea of the quantum field.
    Some people say that Einstein was a great genius because abolished the aether, and taught that light propagates thru empty space. Einstein did believe that from 1905 to 1916, but it was disproved in the 1930s. All modern theories of light require an aether.

    Tuesday, Dec 08, 2009
     
    String theory is not even wrong
    The leading criticism of string theory is Not Even Wrong, a 2006 book and blog by Peter Woit. His Chapter 14 starts:
    Is Superstring Theory Science?

    No matter how things turn out, the story of superstring theory is an episode with no real parallel in the history of modern physical science. More than twenty years of intensive research by thousands of the best scientists in the world producing tens of thousands of scientific papers has not led to a single testable experimental prediction of the theory. This unprecedented situation leads one to ask whether one can really describe superstring theory research as scientific research in the field of physics. This question tends to take on two different forms. One form of the question that many physicists ask is whether superstring theory should not perhaps be described as mathematics rather than physics. A second form of the question asks whether the theory is a science at all.

    Since I spend most of my time in a mathematics department, it's very clear to me how my mathematician colleagues would answer the question whether superstring theory is mathematics. They would uniformly say, "Certainly not!" Mathematicians see the defining activity of their discipline to be the making of precise statements of theorems about abstract mathematical entities and the construction of rigorous proofs of these theorems. The fact that superstring theory research refers to speculative physical entities is not really a problem, since mathematicians are masters of abstraction, and can easily change any precise theoretical framework into one expressed in the language of abstract mathematics. The problem is that superstring theory is not really a theory, but rather a set of hopes that a theory exists. To a mathematician, a set of hopes that a theory exists, hopes that come purely out of physical motivations, is definitely not mathematics at all. Just as in physics, such a set of hopes can in principle be used as motivation for making a precise set of conjectures about what is true, but until the conceptual framework reaches the point of one's being able to do this, it is not clear how one can really use it.

    On the other hand, many physicists who don't work on superstring theory often characterize it as being mathematics. In the majority of cases, this is meant as a negative characterization, since many physicists share the attitude Gell Mann once held that abstract mathematics is some form of self abuse. Superstring theory is to a large degree thought of by mainstream physicists as mathematics and by mainstream mathematicians as physics, with each group convinced that it makes no sense within their frame of reference but presumably does within someone else's.

    As this was a direct attack on the dominant subfield of theoretical physics, you would expect a serious academic rebuttal to have been published. There has been just All Strung Out? by Joseph Polchinski, an unpublished review Aaron Bergman, and some incoherent rants by Lubos Motl. Polchinski is a famous string theorist, and he also reviews The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin. They have some technical gripes with these books, but cannot refute the arguments that string theory is unscientific. Some other reviews were in the Economist, New Yorker, SciAm, and this blog. Other string theorists have ignored these books, or just made ad hominem attacks against the authors.

    None of these articles refute Woit's main claims.

    Bergman writes:

    It is worthwhile at this point to provide a brief overview of what string theory is. As alluded to above, the biggest issue bedeviling fundamental theoretical physics is the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and gravity. Such a unification is called a theory of quantum gravity. The problem, however, is that this incompatibility has proven to be almost completely impenetrable to experiment. This is fairly unique in the history of physics. In this field, there have been almost no unexpected experimental results coming for three decades. ...

    Such a situation is not entirely without precedence, however. At the turn of the twentieth century, Einstein was presented with the incompatibility of Newton’s theory of gravitation and his newly developed theory of special relativity. Almost without experimental input, and with a little help from mathematicians, Einstein was able to reconcile these two theories into his theory of general relativity, a profound new understanding of the nature of space and time.

    The hope then is that we could, as a field, be like Einstein and solve our current conundrum by thought alone.

    No, this is really wrong. The history of physics is filled with examples of theoretical conundrums that could not be experimentally resolved. Examples in past centuries include the theory that matter is made of atoms, the theory that the Earth moves, the question of what could be burning within the Sun, etc. Many of these questions must have seemed hopeless difficult.

    What is unique about string theory is not the difficulty with experiment, but the broad adoption of a theory that can never be tested.

    The analogy to Einstein is bogus. The first papers on black holes, deflection of starlight, precession of Mercury's orbit, and gravity waves were all written before Einstein ever wrote anything on gravity. The development of general relativity was directly concerned with explaining these things. It was never anything like string theory.

    Bergman goes on:

    It is true, as Dr. Woit states in this chapter, that there really is no such thing as ‘string theory’. It is, rather, a collection of partial theories and calculational techniques bound by physical intuition and conjecture. The amazing and beautiful thing, for those of us who study it, is that this skein is remarkably robust. Calculations that have the possibility of destroying this structure invariably turn out to reinforce it. One cannot help believe that, while we may not know what it is, there is a theory out there waiting for us. It is in this way that string theory is a labor of hope. ...

    It is not worth spending much time on whether or not string theory is ‘science’. String theory is a hope to do science ...

    He seems to be conceding Woit's point that string theory is not science, but arguing that it is a consistent mathematical structure. Bergman seems to be one of those physicists that Woit describes. He admits that it is not physics but argues that it is mathematics.

    The trouble with Bergman's argument is that all mathematical structures are consistent. The argument is vacuous. Only a physicist would make such a silly argument.

    Time magazine said in 2006:

    That lack of specificity hasn't slowed down the string folks. Maybe, they've argued, there really are an infinite number of universes--an idea that's currently in vogue among some astronomers as well--and some version of the theory describes each of them. That means any prediction, however outlandish, has a chance of being valid for at least one universe, and no prediction, however sensible, might be valid for all of them.

    That sort of reasoning drives critics up the wall. It was bad enough, they say, when string theorists treated nonbelievers as though they were a little slow-witted. Now, it seems, at least some superstring advocates are ready to abandon the essential definition of science itself on the basis that string theory is too important to be hampered by old-fashioned notions of experimental proof.

    And it is that absence of proof that is perhaps most damning. ...

    "It's fine to propose speculative ideas," says Woit, "but if they can't be tested, they're not science." To borrow the withering dismissal coined by the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli, they don't even rise to the level of being wrong. That, says Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago, who has worked on strings, is unfortunate. "I wish string theorists would take the goal of connecting to experiment more seriously," he says. "It's true that nobody has any good idea of how to test string theory, but who's to say someone won't wake up tomorrow morning and think of one? The reason so many people keep working on it is that, whatever its flaws, the theory is still more promising than any other approach we have."

    No, no one is going to wake up tomorrow with an idea for testing whether anything is possible in an alternate universe. The theory is just too wacky. There is no test for alternate universes.

    The idea that string theory is the only game in town is really wrong also. It is not. Even if it were, that is no justification. I wonder whether astrologers and Freudian dream interpreters ever used such silly justifications.


    Sunday, Dec 06, 2009
     
    Warmists are doubling down
    The British mag Nature editorializes:
    The theft highlights the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers. ...

    The e-mail theft also highlights how difficult it can be for climate researchers to follow the canons of scientific openness, which require them to make public the data on which they base their conclusions.

    No, it shows how easier compliance would be. All UEA CRU had to do was to allow public access to a server.

    Of course following those scientific canons properly would have been to manage the data much better in the first place.

    Another article in it quotes:

    Science and science institutions should be transparent, but they are not a 24-hour help service for climate sceptics who lack fundamental scientific and technical skills. [Thomas Stocker, University of Berne]
    This elitism is offensive. People spent two years asking for the data and data manipulation programs, and were stonewalled. It was a completely reasonable request. What we found was that those who managed the data and wrote the programs are the ones who lack the necessary skills. The work is extremely sloppy.
    Given the overwhelming scientific evidence for climate change, we should deal less and less with climate sceptics. Otherwise we should also deal with folks who think Elvis Presley is still alive, that Earth is less than 6,000 years old and that we cannot possibly have descended from monkeys. [Eric Rignot, University of California, Irvine]
    Another elitist and dishonest approach. Everyone agrees that there is solid evidence for climate change. The climate has been changing for millions of years, and will continue to change for millions of more years.

    This statement is like saying that we should ignore anyone who is skeptical about a manned mission to Mars because there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is not flat, and people who believe in a flat Earth are like folks who think that Elvis is still alive. It is a nonsensical straw man attack.

    The more I hear warmists say stupid stuff like this, the more I want to disbelieve their policy recommendations.

    SciAm mag has its own anti-skeptic rant in Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.


    Saturday, Dec 05, 2009
     
    Darrigol on Einstein
    Olivier Darrigol wrote a 2005 paper (pdf) on why Einstein should be credited with special relativity over Poincare. His article is pretty good, as he looks at what Poincare did in detail. Darrigol summarizes Poincare:
    To sum up, in 1905/6 Poincaré obtained a version of the theory of relativity based on the principle of relativity and the Lorentz group. He believed this symmetry should apply to all forces in nature. He exploited it to derive the dynamics of the electron on a specific model and to suggest a modification of the law of gravitation. He nevertheless maintained the ether as the medium in which light truly propagated at the constant velocity c and clocks indicated the true time. He regarded the quantities measured in moving frames as only apparent, although the principle of relativity forbade any observational distinction between a moving frame and the ether frame. He understood the compatibility of the Lorentz transformations of coordinates with the optical synchronization of clocks and the invariance of the apparent velocity of light, but hesitated on the physical significance of the Lorentz contraction and never discussed the dilation of time.
    It may sound as if he is saying that Poincare's theory was different from Einstein's, but elsewhere he says:
    both theories are internally consistent and have the same empirical predictions (for the electrodynamics of moving bodies).2

    [Footnote] The empirical equivalence of the two theories simply results from the fact that any valid reasoning of Einstein's theory can be translated into a valid reasoning of Poincaré's theory by arbitrarily calling the time, space, and fields measured in one given frame the true ones, and calling all other determinations apparent.

    In other words, the theories are identical except for some minor terminological differences.

    Darrigol seems to be criticizing Poincare for thinking that relativistic changes to space and time were "apparent", and possibly not the real changes that Einstein recognized. But elsewhere Darrigol says of Poincare:

    There is no doubt, however, that he regarded the transformed fields and coordinates as the ones measured by moving observers.
    So Poincare correctly used "apparent" to mean what the observer would measure.

    Darrigol criticism of Poincare's use of the aether is a little stranger. He is referring to this in the previous paragraph:

    Some commentators have speculated that he meant a revision of the concept of time, in Einstein's manner. This is not very likely, because the context of Poincaré's suggestion was length measurement instead of time measurement, and also because he ignored Einstein's point of view to the end of his life. More likely he was alluding to a suggestion he had earlier made at the Saint-Louis conference: "that the ether is modified when it moves relative to the medium which penetrates it."
    Here is the context, from Poincare's St. Louis speech:
    Thus in place of supposing that bodies in motion undergo a contraction in the sense of the motion, and that this contraction is the same whatever be the nature of these bodies and the forces to which they are otherwise submitted, could we not make an hypothesis more simple and more natural?

    We might imagine, for example, that it is the ether which is modified when it is in relative motion in reference to the material medium which it penetrates, that when it is thus modified, it no longer transmits perturbations with the same velocity in every direction. It might transmit more rapidly those which are propagated parallel to the medium, whether in the same sense or in the opposite sense, and less rapidly those which are propagated perpendicularly. The wave surfaces would no longer be spheres, but ellipsoids, and we could dispense with that extraordinary contraction of all bodies. I cite that only as an example, ...

    As you can see, the aether quote is just some hypothetical argument that Poincare is rejecting.

    Poincare's papers are more equivocal than Einstein's. Poincare discusses alternate hypotheses, and how experiments might prove him wrong. Einstein doesn't bother, and just gives an explanation of the Lorentz-Poincare theory. This doesn't make Einstein's papers better; it just means that Poincare was looking at the bigger picture.


    Friday, Dec 04, 2009
     
    We are evolving smaller brains
    Anthropologist Peter Frost writes:
    We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

    Surprisingly, based on skull measurements, the human brain appears to have been shrinking over the last 5,000 or so years.

    "When it comes to recent evolutionary changes, we currently maybe have the least specific details with regard the brain, but we do know from archaeological data that pretty much everywhere we can measure - Europe, China, South Africa, Australia - that brains have shrunk about 150 cubic centimeters, off a mean of about 1,350. That's roughly 10 percent," Hawks said.

    "As to why is it shrinking, perhaps in big societies, as opposed to hunter-gatherer lifestyles, we can rely on other people for more things, can specialize our behavior to a greater extent, and maybe not need our brains as much," he added. (source)

    It’s usually assumed that humans have steadily increased in intellectual capacity. But what if this trend reversed with the advent of civilization? As societies grow more complex, perhaps the average human has not had to know so much. He or she can ‘delegate’ tasks (not that such delegation is always voluntary). Perhaps civilization has made us dumber, not smarter. ...

    I’m increasingly convinced that extreme social stratification—i.e., the creation of a small class of intellectuals and a much larger helot class—is inimical to true scientific progress. The intellectuals are too few in number, and too dependent on the system, to make any real contribution.

    He also writes:
    Since the mid-20th century, ‘skin bleaching’ has become more and more common among dark-skinned populations. It involves lightening skin color by means of topical preparations that contain hydroquinone, cortisone, or mercury.

    Thursday, Dec 03, 2009
     
    Texas schools revise standards
    The Texas Education Agency Social Studies TEKS pages has some draft recommendations for Historical Figures by Grade Level (pdf). They are dropping Copernicus, Galileo, Freud, and Einstein, and they are adding Phyllis Schlafly!

    I am glad to see that someone is reading my blog. The scientific contributions of Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein are vastly overrated, and I don't know why they would be mentioned in a Social Studies class anyway, except maybe to make some dubious point about how stupid other people were.


    Tuesday, Dec 01, 2009
     
    The big climate issue is positive feedback
    MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen writes:
    The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.

    Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback.

    So the warmist argument goes like this. Science proves that CO2 causes Earth warming, via the greenhouse effect. Burning fossil fuels has increased the CO2 in the atmosphere. The is a scientific consensus that much of the warming of the last 50 years is attributable to CO2. The models predict that continued emissions could have catastrophic consequences in the 21th century.

    As Lindzen explains, a weak link in the argument is that the models assume positive feedback, and there is little evidence for that.

    I'd like to see the positive feedback quantified. Suppose that an increase in CO2 causes an x-degree temperature increase based on the physics of infrared absorption, and a y-degree actual increase when secondary effects are included. Then I would say that the feedback is +10% if y is +10% more than x, and -10% if y is -10% less than x.

    What is the feedback? Is there a consensus that the feedback is in some particular range? Maybe Al Gore, the IPCC, and the UEA CRU have a good answer to this, but based on Lindzen, I doubt it.

    Positive feedback would be dangerous because it would mean that the Earth's climate is unstable. A small change could be magnified into a big change. It would be like standing a pencil on its end. As it starts to topple over, it gets more unbalanced, and topples more rapidly.

    The long term history of the Earth (over millions of years) is that CO2 has had many ups and downs. This suggests negative feedback. Once CO2 gets out of balance, something or some combination of forces brings the CO2 back into balance. So the Earth would presumably correct itself after many 1000s of years. But it is possible that there is a positive feedback for the first few 100 years before the negative feedback kicks in.

    I don't even know what the feedback factors are, but feedback estimation seems to be the biggest scientific issue. I would like to see more debate on it.


    Monday, Nov 30, 2009
     
    Which climate conspiracy
    The leftist SciAm mag explains the warmist email scandal:
    There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. ...

    As physicist and climate historian Spencer Weart told The Washington Post: "It's a symptom of something entirely new in the history of science: Aside from crackpots who complain that a conspiracy is suppressing their personal discoveries, we've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers." Well, probably they did, but point taken.

    The conspiracy link is to this book which claims to have discovered "premeditated prevarications about the threat of greenhouse gas emissions by the oil and coal industry".

    I certainly hope that the old and coal industries have been funding their own research, and promoting their views. I mainly hear the warmist views.

    The London UK Times reports:

    Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

    It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

    The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

    The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

    The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

    In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

    I could not find this remarkable statement on the CRU website. This is no excuse for this. They are not real scientists if they just have "value-added" data and not raw data.

    Another London paper reports:

    Leading British scientists at the University of East Anglia, who were accused of manipulating climate change data - dubbed Climategate - have agreed to publish their figures in full.

    The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.

    In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said it would make all the data accessible as soon as possible, once its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had negotiated its release from a range of non-publication agreements.

    Why did the CRU ever negotiate such agreements in the first place?

    The FOIA requests to CRU started in 2007. If this were really a legitimate excuse, then CRU would have released the agreements in 2007 to justify the non-compliance. The leaked FOIA documents do not have any such agreements, as far as I know. Either this story is another smokescreen, or the warmist conspiracy just got worse.


    Sunday, Nov 29, 2009
     
    Warmist email contradicts testimony
    Michael Fumento quotes the IPCC head Kevin Trenberth:
    It has become evident that the planet is running a 'fever' and the prognosis is that it is apt to get much worse. 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal' and it is 'very likely' due to human activities. [2007 testimony]

    We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," and "any consideration of geoengineering [is] quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! [2009 leaked emails]

    I think that warmist is a good concise neutral name for the global warming alarmists or those who argue that global warming will have catastrophic consequences. This includes Al Gore.

    I think that the most shocking thing about the leaked emails is that the warmists had been stonewalling FOIA requests for their data and computer codes for two years. And even after two years of trying to cover their tracks, the codes reveal an assortment of indefensible hacks.

    I think that all govt science grant applications should have a couple of checkboxes. They should ask: Does this research have any public policy implications? Will you post all relevant data and data manipulation tools?

    We should not be deciding important public policy matters based on hockey stick charts, when the data has not had public scrutiny.


    Friday, Nov 27, 2009
     
    Ernst Mayr on Darwin
    SciAm has just reposted this 2000 article by the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr:
    Clearly, our conception of the world and our place in it is, at the beginning of the 21st century, drastically different from the zeitgeist at the beginning of the 19th century. But no consensus exists as to the source of this revolutionary change. Karl Marx is often mentioned; Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor; Albert Einstein’s biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein’s theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.”
    No, Einstein did not invent any theories that profoundly changed anyone. He just popularized the theories of others. Marx and Freud was also big phonies.
    Darwin founded a new branch of life science, evolutionary biology. Four of his contributions to evolutionary biology are especially important, as they held considerable sway beyond that discipline. The first is the nonconstancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin. Up until 1859, all evolutionary proposals, such as that of naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, instead endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection that had been in vogue since Aristotle’s concept of Scala Naturae, the chain of being. Darwin further noted that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. Finally, he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was natural selection.
    Darwin doesn't even claim to be original on the first three ideas. On the fourth, he says that he published it after Wallace wrote the same idea, but Darwin claims to have had the idea independently.
    Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. ... First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations.
    Occasionally I hear some evolutionist reject the term "Darwinism" because it suggests philosophical ideas. This proves that the usage is endorsed by mainstream Darwinists.
    Sixth, Darwin provided a scientific foundation for ethics. ... We now know, however, that in a social species not only the individual must be considered --— an entire social group can be the target of selection.
    No, there is still no consensus on this point. David Sloan Wilson backs group selection, while Dawkins denies it.
    Let me now try to summarize my major findings. No educated person any longer questions the validity of the so-called theory of evolution, which we now know to be a simple fact. Likewise, most of Darwin’s particular theses have been fully confirmed, such as that of common descent, the gradualism of evolution, and his explanatory theory of natural selection.
    A simple fact? Dawkins denies that part about group selection, to the extent that it differs from kin selection.

    This article is a good example of how mainstream evolutionists idolize Darwin.

    Meanwhile, the same magazine has this article on human testicle evolution. Far from scientific fact, it is wildly speculative and amusing.


    Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
     
    Galison on Einstein
    I have commented before on Peter Galison here and here. I take him seriously because he is a distinguished Harvard professor and historian, and because he looks at the original sources himself and does not just regurgitate conventional wisdom.

    In a 2000 essay on Einstein, he wrote:

    Poincaré's first exploration of simultaneity came in 1898, when he argued that simultaneity was not an absolute concept, insisting that we have no direct intuition to any such notion. What we do have are certain rules, rules that we must invoke in order to do the quite concrete technical work of, for example, longitude determination. ...

    Sometime after the spring of 1902 Einstein might have read Poincaré's "The Measure of Time. We know from Einstein's friend Maurice Solovine that their little discussion group (grandly titled the Olympia Academy) definitely read a later Poincaré work, Science and Hypothesis, that cited the 1898 work.41 Critical as Poincaré was of any attempt to pretend that time coordinating conventions were intuitive absolutes, on practical grounds, as he suggested in the remarks above, he did not militate for the abandonment of Newtonian kinematics. Ordinary rules of simultaneity, "the fruit of an unconscious opportunism," were "not imposed upon us and we might amuse ourselves in inventing others; but they could not be cast aside without greatly complicating the enunciation of the laws of physics, mechanics and astronomy" ("M," p. 13; "MT17 P. 36). Corrections to the Newtonian world, Poincaré believed, would be small and complicated, so "theoretical necessity" would be trumped by the demands of simplicity. Einstein looked at distant simultaneity almost exactly as had Poincaré. But where Poincaré saw the new light signal synchronization as leading to inevitable complexity, Einstein saw it as the harbinger of a vastly simpler physics. 42

    [footnote] 42. Between 1900 and 1904 Poincaré kept his programmatic statements about simultaneity largely separate from his explorations into the details of electrodynamics. But even when Poincaré did introduce his notion of local time into his electrodynamics to insist on the conventionality of judgments of simultaneity, he did not, as Einstein did, use light signal coordination to reorganize mechanics and electrodynamics in such a way that force free analysis of space and time clearly begin before any considerations of electron deformations and molecular forces come into play. For Einstein, it was precisely the point that kinematics, the play of temporal and spatial measures, would enter before dynamics. But here is not the place to sort out the relative contributions of these two physicists. Compare Henri Poincaré, "Relations entre la physique expérimentale et la physique mathématique:' in Rapports presentés au Congré International de Physique, ed. Ch.td. Guillaume and L. Poincare, 4 vols. (Paris, 1900), 1:1-29, and Henri Poincaré, 'L’Etat actuel et Favenir de la physique mathématique," Bulletin des sciences mathematiques 28 (1904): 302 24. For a comparison of Einstein and Poincaré's understanding of the electrodynamics of moving bodies, see Miller, Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, and Pais, Subtle Is the Lord. [Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time, by Peter Galison, in Critical Inquiry, 2000]

    This is an article praising Einstein for discovering special relativity, and emphasizing his notion of time as being the crux of the theory. And yet he concedes that Poincare did the same thing years earlier, and that Einstein might have gotten the idea from Poincare.

    So what exactly was the merit in what Einstein did? For that, read the carefully worded sentence in boldface above. It is an incredibly strained defense of Einstein.

    The sentence is incorrect, for reasons I will explain later. But even if it were correct, it would not be saying that Einstein had any new or better theories. He merely presented Poincare's ideas in a way that was preferable to some people.

    You would think that if Einstein really did such great work, it would be easier to point to just what he did that was original.

    In a review of another book, Galison writes:

    Looking back on the early 20th century, Bohr wistfully reflected that Einstein had done so much of relativity theory by himself, while quantum mechanics took a whole generation of physicists 30 years.
    No, this is really wrong. The first relativistic theory was Maxwell's equations in the 1860s. Experiments by Michelson and others showing a contradiction with the prevailing aether theories were in the 1880s. Theoretical explanations started to appear around 1890 with work by Larmor, Voigt, FitzGerald, Lorentz, and others. Poincare figured out the relativity of time around 1900. Einstein wrote his famous special relativity paper in 1905, and his famous general relativity paper in 1915. The expansion of the universe was figured out in the 1920s by Lemaitre and Hubble. I think that relativity took about 30 years, and Einstein's contribution was minor.

    (The book has fictionalized dialog, so Bohr probably didn't really say that.)


    Monday, Nov 23, 2009
     
    Hawking on Einstein
    A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking is the world's most famous physicist. He wrote Galileo and the Birth of Modern Science, in Ameritage's Invention & Technology, saying:
    Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.
    This is a crazy exaggeration. See the post below.

    Hawking wrote a 1988 book, A Brief History of Time sold 9M copies. It is the best-selling physics book ever. I looked to see whom it credits for special relativity. Chapter 2 says:

    Between 1887 and 1905 there were several attempts, most notably by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, to explain the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment in terms of objects contracting and clocks slowing down when they moved through the ether. However, in a famous paper in 1905, a hitherto unknown clerk in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, pointed out that the whole idea of an ether was unnecessary, providing one was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time. A similar point was made a few weeks later by a leading French mathematician, Henri Poincare. Einstein’s arguments were closer to physics than those of Poincare, who regarded this problem as mathematical. Einstein is usually given the credit for the new theory, but Poincare is remembered by having his name attached to an important part of it.

    The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. ... If one neglects gravitational effects, as Einstein and Poincare did in 1905, one has what is called the special theory of relativity.

    This is pretty good, except that Poincare had done all those things by 1902. His 1902 book said that the aether was unnecessary, that there is no absolute time, and that the laws of physics are bound by the principle of relativity. In his 1905 paper, Poincare actually did consider gravitational effects.

    The oddest statement is "Poincare ... regarded this problem as mathematical." Is this supposed to be some sort of put-down? Hawking himself is known for mathematical physics.

    Poincare's work is more mathematically rigorous, but it is also closer to the physics. He explicitly says that he is trying to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, while Einstein doesn't mention it. Historians aren't sure that he even knew about that experiment.


    Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
     
    Bogus Galileo story
    A common science textbook story is Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment:
    Vivani's early biography of Galileo informs us of the story that Galileo dropped two objects of different mass from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He did so as an experiment to disprove Aristotle's theory of gravity, which states that objects fall at a speed relative to their mass. It is generally accepted that this is not a true story, but rather a fictional tale passed down among other scientific folklore.
    I knew that this was an embellishment, but I thought that Galileo really did refute Aristotle. See this extract from Galileo's Two New Sciences:
    SALV. ... Aristotle says that "an iron ball of one hundred pounds falling from a height of one hundred cubits reaches the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen a single cubit." I say that they arrive at the same time. You find, on making the experiment, ...
    I have wondered about this quote, because I didn't think that Aristotle's physics made any quantitative predictions. Now I learn from this book that the quote is bogus. Aristotle did make some hard-to-explain statements about heavier objects, but not about them falling. Here is the closest thing the book finds:
    The facts are that fire is always light and moves upward, while earth and all earthy things move downwards or towards the centre. .' . . The palpable fact ... is that the greater the quantity, the lighter the mass is, and the quicker its upward movement} and, similarly, in the reverse movement from above downward, the small mass will move quicker and the large slower. Further, since to be lighter is to have fewer of these homogeneous parts and to be heavier is to have more, and air, water, and fire are composed of the same triangles [according to the argument Aristotle here combats], the only difference being in the number of such parts, which must therefore explain any distinction of relatively light and heavy between these bodies, it follows that there must be a certain quantum of air which is heavier than water. But the facts are entirely opposed to this. The larger the quantity of air the more readily it moves upward, and any portion of air without exception will rise out of water.
    I am not sure what this means, but it is not the silly straw man argument that Galileo refutes. The book also traces the myth about dropping cannonballs from the Tower of Pisa.

    Friday, Nov 20, 2009
     
    Cave men understood the tides
    I just watched the new PBS TV Nova Becoming Human Part 3. It seemed to have many speculative opinions stated as fact, such as:
    NARRATOR: The Neanderthals were just one of many species that disappeared when we arrived. ..., 28,000 years go. Then they vanished, leaving no legacy but their fossilized bones. For the first time there was only one type of human on the planet.
    There are some who claim that Flores Man was another type of human at that time. Going back further in time, the show pretty much claimed that all of the hominids of the last 5M years were very closely related. Eg, Lucy was assumed to be very closely related to human ancestors. Maybe the narrator would say that Lucy was a hominid and not a human, so his statement about the "first time" does not apply. These shows have an annoying tendency to make these statements that sound profound but are actually meaningless.

    The show argued that S. African cave men were smart enough to understand the relationship between the Moon and the tides:

    CURTIS MAREAN: ... Seventy-six thousand years ago somebody had a nice shellfish dinner there.

    NARRATOR: Here was a population that was broadening its diet away from meat, requiring ingenuity unknown among earlier ancestors.

    CURTIS MAREAN: If you go out to collect shellfish at the wrong time, you're dead. You have to be able to time your access to the coastline so that you're here when the tides are right to collect those shellfish.

    NARRATOR: The best time to collect shellfish is at extreme low tides, and to predict those it helps to understand the cycles of the moon.

    Wow. Galileo's dispute with the Pope was over whether the tides were caused by the motion of the Earth or the Moon. The Church scholars said that it was the Moon. Galileo was wrong.

    I figured that the ancients knew about the Moon and the tides, but it is news to me that African cave men might have known it 76k years ago.

    Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo, and understood that the Moon's gravity caused the tides. According to a Virginia physics prof Michael Fowler's page:

    Kepler stated flatly that the traditional Aristotelian doctrine that heavy things strive toward the center of the world was completely erroneous. He stated that gravity was a mutual tendency between material bodies toward contact, so the earth draws a stone much more than the stone draws the earth. Heavy bodies are attracted by the earth not because it is the center of the universe, but simply because it contains a lot of material, all of which attracts the heavy body.

    To prove he really understood, he wrote: "If two stones were placed anywhere in space near to each other, and outside the reach of force of (other bodies), then they would come together...at an intermediate point, each approaching the other in proportion to the other's mass."

    This is actually a completely accurate statement about gravity. Kepler realized that gravity was the key to understanding the tides---that the tides were caused by the waters of the oceans being attracted by the moon's gravitational pull. He wrote: "If the earth ceased to attract the waters of the sea, the seas would rise and flow into the moon..." and went on to add: "If the attractive force of the moon reaches down to the earth, it follows that the attractive force of the earth, all the more, extends to the moon and even farther..."

    The above quotes are all from Kepler's introduction to Astronomia Nova, and can be found on pages 342 and 343 of The Sleepwalkers. [Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Arkana Books, London, 1989.]

    Occasionally Galileo is called the "father of modern observational astronomy", or even "the father of modern science". He does not deserve these titles. His contemporary Kepler did astronomy that was vastly superior any way you want to measure it.

    Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009
     
    Einstein on Minkowski space
    I say that Poincare's 1905 theory of special relativity was superior to Einstein's, and you don't have to take my word for it. Just look at what Einstein himself wrote.

    Einstein wrote in chapter 17 of his 1920 relativity book (also here):

    These inadequate remarks can give the reader only a vague notion of the important idea contributed by Minkowski. Without it the general theory of relativity, of which the fundamental ideas are developed in the following pages, would perhaps have got no farther than its long clothes.
    He is talking about Minkowski spacetime, which Minkowski announced in 1908 as a 4-dimensional version of special relativity. He began with this bold announcement:
    The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
    I am not sure what Minkowski did that was original, as Poincare had already introduced spacetime. I believe that Minkowski was the first to combine the electric and magnetic field into a tensor on spacetime. Maybe he also combined energy and momentum into a 4-vector.

    Poincare did not wholly buy into Minkowski's view, as he said this in a 1912 lecture shortly before his death:

    The new conception … according to which space and time are no longer two separate entities, but two parts of the same whole, which are so intimately bound together that they cannot be easily separated… is a new convention [that some physicists have adopted]… Not that they are constrained to do so; they feel that this new convention is more comfortable, that’s all; and those who do not share their opinion may legitimately retain the old one, to avoid disturbing their ancient habits. Between ourselves, let me say that I feel they will continue to do so for a long time still.
    In Poincare's philosophy of science, a some scientific principles are a matter of convention, and are neither empirical facts nor theoretical necessities. His point was that you can think of space and time as being separate or as being unified. Either way, you would have to accept the spacetime symmetries, so there may be no practical difference. A century later, space and time are still distinguished for most purposes.

    But what Einstein actually described was entirely contained in Poincare's 1905 paper. He described the spacetime metric as being formally Eucldean if you use imaginary time.

    Apparently Einstein did not understand what Poincare wrote in 1905, because in early 1908 he complained:

    A physical theory can be satisfactory only if its structures are composed of elementary foundations. The theory of relativity is ultimately just as unsatisfactory as, for example, classical thermodynamics was before Boltzmann interpreted entropy as probability.
    Einstein soon learned about spacetime from Minkowski, but did not appreciate it:
    Einstein's reaction to Minkowski's work was interesting. It's well known that Einstein was not immediately very appreciative of his former instructor's contribution, describing it as "superfluous learnedness", and joking that "since the mathematicians have attacked the relativity theory, I myself no longer understand it any more". He seems to have been at least partly serious when he later said "The people in Gottingen [where both Minkowski and Hilbert resided] sometimes strike me not as if they wanted to help one formulate something clearly, but as if they wanted only to show us physicists how much brighter they are than we".
    In Einstein's 1949 autobiographical notes, he wrote:
    Gradually I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and more desperately I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.
    So Einstein was dissatisfied with his 1905 explanation of special relativity, and desperately searched for a more constructive one. When Poincare's 1905 explanation in terms of a spacetime metric became popular in 1908, he rejected it. By 1912, Grossman convinced him that it was essential to understanding gravity. By 1920, Einstein admitted that he would have been helpless without it.

    Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009
     
    Creationist liars
    I had offered to post examples of anti-evolutionists lying to promote their cause, and someone sent me an example. Creationist Ray Comfort distributed free copies of Darwin's Origin Of Species, but it was missing four (out of 15) chapters. His web site promised the whole book. He includes a correct table of contents, so I don't see how he could be fooling anyone.

    I am not sure what the point is. I have never heard of this guy. The original book is in the public domain, and you can download it here.

    I have noted before that evolutionist criticism of others nearly always centers on dubious claims of dishonesty. This appears to be an example of a creationist being dishonest.

    Update: Comforts says that the second printing will include the entire book. The books are being distributed on college campuses.


    Monday, Nov 16, 2009
     
    Galison on Einstein
    Harvard science historian and genius prize winner Peter Galison writes:
    Einstein's removal of these philosophical absolutes [of space and time] was more than a contribution to relativity; it has become a symbol of the overthrow of one philosophical epoch for another. To physicists such as Henri Poincaré, Hendrik Lorentz, and Max Abraham, Einstein's special relativity was startling, almost incomprehensible, because it began with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion -- it began, in short, by assuming what these senior physicists had hoped to prove with starting assumptions about the structure of the electron, the nature of forces, and the dynamics of the ether. Soon a generation of physicists, including Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, patterned its quantum epistemology around Einstein's quasi-operational definitions of space and time in terms of rulers and coordinated clocks. For the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Philipp Frank, Einstein’s special relativity paper was also a turning point, an ever present banner to be flown for scientific philosophy.

    For all these reasons, Einstein's 1905 "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" became the best-known physics paper of the twentieth century. Einstein’s argument, as it is usually understood, departs so radically from the older, "practical" world of classical mechanics that the work has become a model of the revolutionary divide. Part philosophy and part physics, this rethinking of distant simultaneity has come to symbolize the irresolvable break of twentieth-century physics from that of the nineteenth. [Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time, by Peter Galison, in Critical Inquiry, 2000]

    No, Einstein's 1905 paper did not startle Poincare by removing absolute space and time. Poincare had already written a popular book in 1902, “Science and Hypothesis”, where he said:
    “Absolute space does not exist. We only perceive relative motions”. ...

    “Absolute time does not exist”.

    Einstein's friends report that he was deeply affected by this book in 1904. Einstein's rethinking of simultaneity was entirely contained in Poincare's papers of 1898 and 1900.

    I agree that Einstein's 1905 paper is the best-known 20th century physics paper, but I deny that it was a radical break from the past. It was nothing but a recapitulation of the special relativity theory that Lorentz and Poincare had published over the previous ten years.


    Saturday, Nov 14, 2009
     
    Will on Einstein
    The physicist (and general relativity experimentalist) Clifford M. Will writes in this 2005 essay:
    Much has been written about why Einstein was able to arrive at this new view of time, while his contemporaries, including great men like Lorentz and Poincaré were not. Henri Poincaré is a case in point. By 1904 Poincaré understood almost everything there was to understand about relativity. In 1904 he journeyed to St. Louis to speak at the scientific congress associated with the World’s Fair, on the newly relocated campus of my own institution, Washington University. In reading Poincaré’s paper “The Principles of Mathematical Physics” [5], one senses that he is so close to having special relativity that he can almost taste it. Yet he could not take the final leap to the new understanding of time.
    What final leap? Lorentz was accused of inventing local time, and then not realizing that moving clocks would actually measure local time. But not Poincare. Here is what he says in that 1904 lecture:
    The most ingenious idea has been that of local time.

    Imagine two observers who wish to adjust their watches by optical signals; they exchange signals, but as they know that the transmission of light is not instantaneous, they take care to cross them. ...

    It is clear that whatever time he is talking about, it is the time that observers see on their watches.

    Will also argues:

    The first postulate merely adopts the wisdom, handed down from Galileo and Newton, that the laws of mechanics are the same in any inertial frame, ... Furthermore, there existed a set of transformations, found by Lorentz, under which Maxwell’s equations were invariant, with an invariant speed of light. In addition, Einstein was presumably aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment (although he did not refer to it by name in his 1905 paper) which demonstrated no effect on the speed of light of our motion relative to the so-called “aether” [4]. While the great physicists of the day, such as Lorentz, Poincaré and others were struggling to bring all these facts together by proposing concepts such as “internal time”, or postulating and then rejecting “aether drift”, Einstein’s attitude seems to have been similar to that expressed in the American idiom: “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”.
    Will is essentially saying the Lorentz and Poincare did not understand relativistic time, and the proof is that they called it "internal time"! This argument is so idiotic. It is like saying that Poincare did not say what Einstein said because Poincare wrote in French while Einstein wrote in German. Their terminology is nearly identical, after doing the obvious translation.

    Poincare and Lorentz did not propose or endorse aether drift; others did. Poincare used the term "local time" to give credit to Lorentz, as Lorentz used that term. It is a good term, as it measures time in the local frame.

    Poincare and Lorentz use the exact same formulas for relativistic time as Einstein. (In their later papers, that is. Lorentz's 1895 paper used approximations.) There is no difference. It is amazing how Will can spend 40 years worshipping Einstein, and then base his claim of Einstein's superiority on such an obviously stupid point.


    Friday, Nov 13, 2009
     
    Supersymmetry
    NewScientist mag tells about supersymmetry:
    If supersymmetry does smooth the way for string theory, however, that could be a decisive step towards a theory that solves the greatest unsolved problem of physics: why gravity seems so different to all the rest of the forces in nature. If so, supersymmetry really could have all the answers.
    No, string theory is not going to explain why gravity is so different. Gravity is different because it is the curvature of spacetime, while other fields are the curvatures of other (nontangential) bundles. String theory adds nothing to that understanding.
     
    Einstein wrote well
    The Super-Freakonomics guys were just interviewed on Charlie Rose, and one of them said:
    Dubner: There are all these brilliant academics out there, and they are not writing books. Einstein I wish had written well. I'd like to hear from him.

    Rose: He didn't write well?

    Dubner: Einstein did not write well.

    No, that is not true. Einstein wrote a pretty good 1920 book on relativity and it is now in the public domain (and free to read online). There are also lots of modern academics who write well.

    Of course Prof. Levitt has the advantage of a full-time professional writer promoting his work. So he has publicity and sales far beyond other academics who are just as good.

    Update: The same Rose show also interviews Malcolm Gladwell, a similarly overrated author of best-selling books. He tells entertaining stories with seemingly insightful lessons, but those insights are often wrong. See Steven Pinker's review of Gladwell's latest book:

    An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
    There is more criticism here and here.

    Update: Gladwell complains about the review, but eventually concedes that Pinker was right. Somehow Gladwell is one of the popular essayists and speakers in the USA today. And yet he appears to be wrong about much of what he says.


    Thursday, Nov 12, 2009
     
    Science in two minutes
    Discover magazine has contest winners for a two-minute video teaching evolution. They previously had a contest for string theory.

    What do evolution and string theory have in common? Are these two theories particularly hard to communicate for some reason?

    Yes, I think that they are hard to communicate for different reasons. The basic ideas of evolution are simple, easy to explain, and uncontroversial. But when evolutionists say that the theory explains all life on earth, then it gets difficult.

    The videos have an ad for a PBS Nova series on human evolution. I am currently watching it, and it has new evidence about hominid fossils. This is the first time I have seen a show like this admit that the African savannah theory had fallen out of favor. That theory had been the core of human evolution for a century. The new theories seem about equally speculative to me.

    The show used the word hominid to mean a human relative that postdates the human-ape split of about 6M years ago. It did not comment on this definition even tho most of the evolutionists today insist on using the term hominid to include all the great apes. It seems that they want to emphasize that we are just apes. Using the word hominid to mean a non-ape human relative makes much more sense to me.

    String theory also purports to be a theory of everything. The basic idea is fairly simple, but there is no good theory or evidence to back it up, so explanations of string theory tend to be vacuous.

    I think what they have in common is that both subjects try to evangelize a quasi-religious worldview where the proponents have reasons to convince you that go beyond the scientific merits of the theory.

    Based on that, I predict that the next contest will be on Climate Change.


    Wednesday, Nov 11, 2009
     
    E.T. phone Rome
    The AP reports, in USA Today:
    VATICAN CITY – Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church. ...

    The Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science has come a long way since Galileo was tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant his finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

    Today top clergy, including Funes, openly endorse scientific ideas like the Big Bang theory as a reasonable explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.

    Earlier this year, the Vatican also sponsored a conference on evolution to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

    No, Galileo was not locked up for challenging that view. The Vatican asked him to write a book challenging that view. He was not locked up, but put in house arrest with a pension. He was not declared a heretic. It was not just Church teaching that put Earth at the center, but most astronomers at the time did.

    It is not news that the Vatican clergy "openly endorse scientific ideas like the Big Bang". The Vatican astronomer Georges Lemaître invented the Big Bang theory!

    Some myths just won't go away.


    Monday, Nov 09, 2009
     
    Top-down theories
    Kevin Brown quotes Einstein's 1919 essay:
    We can distinguish various kinds of theories in physics. Most of them are constructive. They attempt to build up a picture of the more complex phenomena out of the materials of a relatively simple formal scheme from which they start out. ...

    Along with this most important class of theories there exists a second, which I will call "principle-theories." These employ the analytic, not the synthetic, method. ...

    The advantages of the constructive theory are completeness, adaptability, and clearness, those of the principle theory are logical perfection and security of the foundations. The theory of relativity belongs to the latter class.

    Brown goes on to show that Einstein plagiarized this distinction from Poincare!

    I prefer to think of this distinction as that of top-down and bottom-up design. The constructive theory is bottom-up, and the principle theory is top-down.

    This is one of those philosophical distinctions that is confusing because sometimes the same theory can be described as either top-down or bottom-up, depending on how it is presented. This terminology comes from computer software. If you read a book top-down, you would read the title, then the table of contents, and then the text of the book. Reading it bottom-up would start with the text.

    A better is example is writing an essay. The top-down method is to write the title, then a short outline, then progressively more detailed outlines until you have a complete essay. The bottom-up method would be to immediately write paragraphs of text, and then piece them together into an essay. Both approaches have merit, of course.

    Einstein is saying that his presentation of relativity was that of a top-down theory. He gave some abstract postulates (indistinguishability of frames, constancy of light speed), and worked out the details as consequences.

    Lorentz's approach was bottom-up. Lorentz studied the electromagnetic experiments, and then the differential equations for electrodynamics, and then the experiments testing those equations, and then looked for transformations that explained those experiments. The existence of those transformations became Einstein's postulate. His approach was the reverse of Einstein's because he did the detailed theory first, and then abstracted out the abstract principles.

    Poincare did special relativity both ways. He wrote technical papers improving on Lorentz's results, and he wrote philosophical papers discussing the high-level principles. It was Poincare's idea to look for theories that are Lorentz invariant, and that has turned out be one of the most principle-driven ideas of 20th century physics.

    If you like top-down better than bottom-up, then I can see why you would like Einstein's approach better than Lorentz's. But surely Poincare had the superior top-down approach. Among other approaches, Poincare proposed deriving relativity from Minkowski spacetime. That is the approach that was necessary for general relativity at the time, and it remains the preferred approach today.

    There are pedagogic advantages to a top-down approach, and perhaps that explains why Lorentz gets so little credit today. But it does not explain why Poincare gets even less credit.


    Saturday, Nov 07, 2009
     
    Eddington on Einstein and the Copernican Revolution
    The physicist Arthur S. Eddington wrote in a 1922 essay:
    Every one now admits that the Ptolemaic system, which regarded the earth as the centre of all things belongs to the dark ages. But to our dismay we have discovered that the same geocentric outlook still permeates modem physics through and through, unsuspected until recently. It has been left to Einstein to carry forward the revolution begun by Copernicus -- to free our conception of nature from the terrestrial bias imported into it by the limitations of our earthbound experience. ...

    If I have succeeded in my object, you will have realized that the present revolution of scientific thought follows in natural sequence on the great revolu-tions at earlier epochs in the history of science. Einstein's special theory of relativity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on nature; Einstein's general theory of relativity, which reveals the curvature of non-Euclidean geometry of space and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those earlier astronomers who first con-templated the possibility that their existence lay on something which was not flat. These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come when Einstein's amazing revela-tions have likewise sunk into the commonplaces of educated thought.

    Wow, I thought that Eddington was a competent physicist. What reduces him to such drivel?

    Relativity teaches that the laws of physics are valid in any frame, including the Ptolemaic system or geocentric outlook. It does not crown the work of Copernicus because it is contrary to what Copernicus said. None of this stuff makes any sense.

    Eddington was British, Quaker, and a World War I draft evader. He led the 1919 team to measure the gravitational deflection of light during a solar eclipse. He was trying to convince the authorities that he was doing something more worthwhile than joining the army. He exaggerated the significance of his findings, and made Einstein famous. Following Einstein, Eddington spent the next 20 years on a silly and fruitless search for a unified field theory.


    Friday, Nov 06, 2009
     
    The experiment that led to relativity
    A relativity page explains:
    In this sub-section we discuss a famous experiment done in the late nineteenth century by Michelson and Morley. ...

    In is ironic that Michelson himself wrote in 1899, "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical reality have all been discovered and they are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote .... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the 6th place of decimals." At this time there were a couple of small clouds on the horizon. One of those clouds was his own experiment with Morley that we describe in this sub-section. As we shall see, the experiment played a part in the development of the Special Theory of Relativity, a profound advance. ...

    However, although the evidence is not certain it seems quite likely that in 1905 Einstein was unaware of the experiment (cf. Gerald Holton, "Einstein, Michelson and the 'Crucial' Experiment," which has appeared in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, pg. 261. and also in Isis 60, 1969, pg. 133.).

    So how is it that special relativity is always taught as a consequence of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and Einstein didn't even know about it?

    The explanation is simple. Lorentz developed his Lorentz transformations directly to explain Michelson-Morley. Poincare was led to his Principle of Relativity from Michelson-Morley also. They said so in their papers.

    If Einstein had developed relativity by himself, it would not make any sense that he would not know about Michelson-Morley. But if Einstein plagiarized it from Lorentz and Poincare, then he would not need to know anything about Michelson-Morley. He just needed what Lorentz and Poincare deduced from that experiment.

    It is amazing how much trouble historians and philosophers have with explaining how Einstein discovered special relativity. Einstein was a patent clerk who spent all day looking up inventions in libraries. If he wanted to learn about relativity, wouldn't he just look up the published papers on the subject?


    Wednesday, Nov 04, 2009
     
    Einstein explains himself
    Historians have tried to figure out how Einstein created special relativity. Eg, Peter Galison wrote this in his book, Einstein's Clocks:
    The reader is referred to an excellent short synthesis in Stachel et al., "Einstein on the Special Theory of Relativity," editorial note in The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900Ð1909, vol. 2 of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, ed. Stachel et al. (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 253Ð74, esp. pp. 264Ð65, which argues that the rough sequence of Einstein's work was (1) conviction that only relative motion of ponderable bodies was significant; (2) abandonment of Lorentz's assignment of physical significance to absolute motion; (3) exploration of alternative electrodynamics justifying emission hypothesis of light relative to source; (4) abandonment of this alternative electrodynamics as Einstein assumes velocity of light independent of the velocity of the source; (5) critique of the usual conception of temporal and spatial intervals, and especially of distant simultaneity; and (6) physical definition of simultaneity and the construction of a new kinematic theory.
    The curious thing about this summary is that there is no mention of the Lorentz aether theory, of Poincare's relativity, or of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

    Special relativity is often taught as Einstein trying to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, but Einstein's famous 1905 paper does not mention that experiment, and his account of the matter is confusing. Prof. R. S. Shankland reported:

    The several statements which Einstein made to me in Princeton concerning the Michelson-Morley experiment are not entirely consistent, as mentioned above and in my earlier publication. His statements and attitudes towards the Michelson-Morley experiment underwent a progressive change during the course of our several conversations. I wrote down within a few minutes after each meeting exactly what I recalled that he had said. On 4 February 1950 he said,"...that he had become aware of it through the writings of H. A. Lorentz, but only after 1905 had it come to his attention." But at a later meeting on 24 October, 1952 he said, "I am not sure when I first heard of the Michelson experiment. I was not conscious that it had influenced me directly during the seven years that relativity had been my life. I guess I just took it for granted that it was true." However, in the years 1905-1909 (he told me) he thought a great deal about Michelson's result in his discussions with Lorentz and others, and then he realized (so he told me) that he "had been conscious of Michelson's result before 1905 partly through his reading of the papers of Lorentz and more because he had simply assumed this result of Michelson to be true."...
    Einstein biographer and fan J. Stachel says:
    We do have a number of later historical remarks by Einstein himself, sometimes transmitted by others (Wertheimer, Reiser- Kayser, Shankland, Ishiwara, for example), which raise many problems of authenticity and accuracy; and some very late Einstein letters, answering questions such as whether he had prior knowledge of the Michelson-Morley experiment, what works by Lorentz he had read, the influence of Poincaré, Mach, Hume, etc., on his ideas; Einstein's replies are not always self-consistent, it must be noted.
    Stachel has written detailed articles about where Einstein got his ideas for special relativity, but just says this about Poincare:
    Here, I believe, Einstein was really helped by his philosophical readings. He undoubtedly got some help from his readings of Mach and Poincaré, ...
    This is strange. Poincare was a mathematician and he special relativity papers that are more mathematically sophicated than Einstein's, and yet Stachel only credits him with some philosophical influence on Einstein. No, Einstein got his math from Poincare also.

    Einstein gave his own explanation in a 1922 Kyoto Japan lecture, titled "How I Created the Theory of Relativity". A translation was published by the journal Physics Today in 1982.

    It was more than seventeen years ago that I had an idea of developing the theory of relativity for the first time. While I cannot say exactly where that thought came from, I am certain that it was contained in the problem of the optical properties of moving bodies. Light propagates through the sea of ether, in which the Earth is moving. In other words, the ether is moving with respect to the Earth. I tried to find clear experimental evidence for the flow of the ether in the literature of physics, but in vain. ...

    I had a chance to read Lorentz's monograph of 1895. ...

    By chance a friend of mine in Bern (Michele Besso) helped me out. It was a beautiful day when I visited him with this problem. I started the conversation with him in the following way: "Recently I have been working on a difficult problem. Today I come here to battle against that problem with you." We discussed every aspect of this problem. Then suddenly I understood where the key to this problem lay. Next day I came back to him again and said to him, without even saying hello, "Thank you. I've completely solved the problem." ...

    Within five weeks the special theory of relativity was completed.

    Notice how Einstein egotistically claims all the credit for himself. He claims to have searched the literature, but does not admit to reading anything but Lorentz's 1895 paper. He does not mention Poincare, Minkowski, Planck, Levi-Civita, or Hilbert at all. Each of them contributed more to relativity than Einstien. He mentions Michelson, but not Michelson-Morley. He mentions his friend Besso, who is thanked in the 1905 paper, but only to say that Besso did not do anything but listen. He mentions Grossman, who co-authored Einstein's biggest general relativity paper, but only credits him with teaching Riemann theory.

    Overall, Einstein promotes the myth that he discovered special relativity in a flash of brilliance in 1905, with hardly any help from any papers, theory, experiments, or anything. He refuses to even acknowledge the work of Poincare and others. He also claims all the credit for general relativity, admitting only that it took him a few years.

    At the time of Einstein's lecture, he was the most famous physicist in the world. His future was secure. Poincare was dead. It would have cost him nothing to honestly credit others. But he did not.


    Monday, Nov 02, 2009
     
    Reany on Einstein
    Patrick Reany has a defense of Einstein's originality. He quotes this post on sci.physics.relativity:
    "Tom M-G"  wrote in message
    news:XN6ga.1108$ls4.642902@newsfep2-win.server.ntli.net...
    So let's sum up: E=mc^2, the relativity of simultaneity, the suggestion that
    the speed of light is the highest attainable speed, and the principle of
    relativity originate in work by Poincaré which predates relativity (this I
    learn from George Burniston Brown, Bulletin of the Institute of Physics and
    Physical Society, Vol 18 (March, 1967) pp.71-77). In contrast, Einstein gave
    immediate and full acknowledgement to the contributions that follow:
    The constancy of the speed of light irrespective of velocity comes from
    the Maxwell-Lorentz electromagnetic theory, the formula for time dilation
    comes from Lorentz, the idea of length contraction comes from Lorentz, the
    amalgamation of space and time comes from Poincaré, the gravitational
    redshift follows from Mach's principle, and Newton is believed to hae
    considered it (Brown, 1967), idea of the expanding universe comes from A.A.
    Friedmann, the mathematics for space-time topology comes from Riemann, the
    idea of space-time geodesic and thus the curvilinear path of light comes
    from Minkowsky, the 4-dimensional space-time comes from Minkowsky.
    The gravity-inertia equality was already established by Eötvös in 1888,
    and the equivalence between gravity, acceleration and rotation was
    established by Newton by way of the term 'force'. The increase in mass with
    velocity had already been established by Kaufmann (Einstein's formula
    appears to have been in error, if particle accelerator results are tp be
    believed).
    Is there a single conceptual innovation that can be fully attributed to
    Einstein, with relation to relativity?
    Tom 
    
    Reany responds:
    But just to answer the poster: It is obvious what Einstein has done for physics. He unified into ONE damn theory all of the above stuff that sat around in remote and obscure clumps, disunited -- a little bit here, a little bit way over there, no one knowing what to make of the motley collection. Then came Einstein and it was cleared up! It was the unity achievable to those that had true faith in the heuristic of the pure principle of relativity to unify physics by forcing humans to give up their a priori metaphysical prejudices which were a hold-over of the naive common sense of pre-sceintific thought.
    Well, no. Several of those ideas were not only not original to Einstein, but Einstein wrote papers attacking them. Eg, Einstein opposed the amalgamation of space and time and the expansion of the universe, until after everyone else accepted these concepts.

    Reany goes on to claim that various 20th century philosophers stole from Einstein. Reany admits that Einstein got the bulk of his philosophy from Poincare, but then argues that the philosophers Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend stole from Einstein. He also argues that those philosopher got it wrong, because their ideas differed from Einstein's. He makes no sense.

    On the priority for relativity, Reany argues:

    Arguably, the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, both by popular and scientific standards, is Albert Einstein (1879--1955). I intend to argue that the greatest philosopher of science of the twentieth century is also Einstein. I will present as proof of this two categories of examples: The first is that Einstein apparently had a complete methodology of science which has stood the test of time, and second, that those who have been recognized as the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century have been granted this status primarily on their work which in fact added nothing appreciably to what Einstein had long before them preached on the philosophy of science. ...

    The priority of certain equations in special relativity of 1905 is irrelevant. Einstein NEVER claimed that the equations he had done in special relativity were new, but rather he boasted that he had succeeded in unifying many results under the umbrella of one theory: ...

    Bjerknes seems to think -- erroneously -- and in company of millions of other people, that two theories with the same physical content are "really the same theory." This is completely false, but a mystery to those that don't acknowledge the role of the research program. Lorentz's ether theory was the culmination of the mechanical program. ...

    Poincare did not produce more than a good idea toward special relativity. The prize went to him that did invent and publish the theory, and that was Einstein. This is the way it goes for all physicists, not just for Poincare and Einstein. Poincare knew that too. By the way, it is completely irrelevant whether or not Einstein knew of the Lorentz transformation equation prior to his invention of special relativity. Einstein was mucking with the general laws of physics, which Lorentz did not. Einstein produced a simple and consistent theory which did not owe anything to Lorentz's absolute rest space of the ether. Lorentz did not, neither did Poincare. If you don't appreciate what I just said then that's because you don't value the attributes of "simple" and "consistent" as Einstein valued them. ...

    We will never really know to what extent Einstein knew about all of these effects prior to submitting his 1905 paper for publication, but one thing's for sure: Einstein worded his introduction to his relativity paper so as to subtly brag about the foundation to the theory, not to the nonintuitive results that it predicts, that seem to interest everyone else much more than they did Einstein himself. Einstein was a foundations connoisseur, not a crass rip-off artist. It makes no difference whether everything predicted in SR was already known or not for SR to be important. It is important anyway, because of its fresh minimal foundation.

    So Einstein is the 20th century's greatest scientist and philosopher, but not because he had any new equations or new predictions or a theory with any new physical content. He is the greatest because he had a fresh way of looking at the foundation of relativity theory. That is what Reany is saying.

    You don't have to take my word for what an overrated phony Einstein was. Just look at what the folks say who are idolizing him, and look for a precise description of just what Einstein did that was original.

    Reany also argues:

    Christopher Jon Bjerknes has told us that Einstein was not inclined to give any other physicists any praise, and he did so only reluctantly. What follows is a direct disproof of this false claim.
    He goes on to quote Einstein praising Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and Lorentz. All of this praise was after they were dead, and were no threat to him. Consider the praise for Lorentz:
    His genius led the way from Maxwell's work to the achievements of contemporary physics, to which he contributed important building stones and methods. ... His never-failing kindness and generosity and sense of justice, ...
    This was after Lorentz had credited Einstein for relativity, and Lorentz had died. Notice still how the praise is limited. He only credits Lorentz with "building stones", and not with a coherent theory. Einstein had a long history of badmouthing Lorentz's contributions to relativity. This praise is really nothing but a clever put-down to boost Einstein's own reputation.

    Notice also that there no praise for the main people he stole from, Poincare and Hilbert.


    Saturday, Oct 31, 2009
     
    Evolutionist states his goals
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne writes:
    5. I think that, in the long run, the best way to rid our country of creationism –- and, more important, of irrational views on many issues like stem cell research, condoms as preventors of HIV, and the like —- is to diminish the hold of religion on America. I want Americans to become more rational, and I think that working for atheism is a good way to do it.

    6. People like Dawkins and myself have two goals: diminishing the influence of faith, and helping people accept and see the wonders of evolution.

    So he wants to teach atheism and evolutionism so that people will vote to spend federal tax money on cloning and condoms.

    I post this just to point out that he sees these issues as being tightly related. It seems to me that there are a lot of arguments for and against using tax money to clone human embryoes, besides atheism and evolution.

    To Coyne, making people more rational means selling them on evolution, and then atheism, and then leftist political programs.


    Thursday, Oct 29, 2009
     
    Speed of light proves to be constant
    Today's NY Times reports:
    Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, or energy; its direction; or how you yourself are moving.

    “I take it as a confirmation that Einstein is still right,” Peter F. Michelson of Stanford ...

    Einstein? 1905? Here is what Poincare said in a 1898 philosophical essay on time:
    When an astronomer tells me that some stellar phenomenon, which his telescope reveals to him at this moment, happened nevertheless fifty years ago, I seek his meaning, and to that end I shall ask him first how he knows it, that is, how he has measured the velocity of light.

    He has begun by supposing that light has a constant velocity, and in particular that its velocity is the same in all directions. That is a postulate without which no measurement of this velocity could be attempted. This postulate could never be verified directly by experiment; it might be contradicted by it if the results of different measurements were not concordant. We should think ourselves fortunate that this contradiction has not happened and that the slight discordances which may happen can be readily explained.

    The postulate, at all events, resembling the principle of sufficient reason, has been accepted by everybody; what I wish to emphasize is that it furnishes us with a new rule for the investigation of simultaneity, entirely different from that which we have enunciated above.

    Poincare's point is that once astronomers started measuring distances in light-years, they were tacitly assuming that the speed of light was constant.

    This paper was cited in Poincare's 1902 book, where he discusses the Relativity Principle. Einstein is known to have read that book as part of his book club, and his friends say that he was very impressed by it. Einstein spent the rest of his life denying that he had read Poincare.

    By 1905, Poincare was using c for the speed of light in his papers, and sometimes setting c = 1 for convenience, as is often done in modern textbooks.

    Here is what Einstein said in his 1905 paper:

    We ... also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.
    So Poincare made an astute observation, said that it was "accepted by everybody", and called it a postulate. Seven years later, Einstein publishes the same postulate, but does not cite any sources. For that, Einstein is still being hailed as a great genius a century later. Genius is the art of concealing your sources.

    Physicist Brian Cox was on the Comedy Channel Colbert Report last night, plugging his latest book on Einstein. He said:

    Relativity is the basis on which all of our understanding of modern physics rests. So without relativity, we would not understand how transistors work, how cell phones work, [and] we wouldn't understand the universe at all without relativity. It is the foundation on which [all modern science] rests.
    If it is so important, can't these guys bother to figure out who did it?

    Update: Lubos Motl has additional links here. He emphasizes the experimental evidence for Lorentz invariance, but of course that was a pre-Einstein concept also. Originated by Lorentz, perfected by Poincare, and partially understood by Einstein.

    Update: The Nature mag podcast on this story said:

    Albert Einstein's most important contribution to physics was that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. [at 16:42]
    So I am not just accusing Einstein of copying minor stuff. I say that the things that are regarded as Einstein's best were done by others.

    Update: I didn't notice, but the Michelson quoted above is the grand nephew of the more famous Michelson that led Poincare to the relativity principle.


    Wednesday, Oct 28, 2009
     
    Galileo published a silly straw man argument
    Galileo is sometimes called the Father of Modern Science, and is best known for his dispute with the Catholic Church. Galileo was suspected of heresy for his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Everyone knows this as a story of a great scientist being punished because a religion could not accept a truth that contradicted the Bible.

    I am wondering what Galileo said that was so scientific. Here are the facts. Galileo sought Church endorsement for his book on heliocentrism. Wikipedia says:

    Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism.
    Galileo's submitted the book with the title, "Dialog on Tides". His main argument for the motion of the Earth was that it caused the tides.

    The Church quite properly rejected his tidal argument as fallacious, and required him to remove "Tides" from the title. As we know now, the tides are caused by the Moon, and not the motion of the Earth.

    The book still seriously misrepresented the "Two Chief World Systems". The two systems were the heliocentric, as represented by Copernicus's 1534 book, and the geocentric, as represented by Ptolemy's model from centuries earlier. But Galileo was writing in 1632, and his systems were seriously out-of-date.

    Kepler had the leading heliocentric system of the day, and the Catholic scholars mostly subscribed to the geocentric Tychonic system that was developed in the 1580s.

    Galileo ridiculed the geocentric system by having a character named Simplicio saying stupid things in favor of Ptolemy's system. But none of Galileo's arguments showed any superiority of any heliocentric system over the Tychonic system.

    The book pretended to be a balanced view in order to get the Church endorsement, but it was really was a one-sided polemic against a straw man.

    The Church's position was that both geocentric and heliocentric systems were useful for computation, but that neither had been proved correct with the science of the day. That position seems entirely correct. The Church did not want to endorse a view that required certain Bible passages to be reinterpreted, unless it was sure about it.

    Everyone agrees that the Church overreacted, but how did Galileo get to be the father of modern science out of this? He was not creating any new astronomy models and he was not even up to speed on the state-of-the-art models of the day. His arguments were entertaining but silly. And ultimately he was wrong in much of what he said. In particular, he was entirely wrong on the actual point of dispute with the Church -- whether he had proof of heliocentrism.


    Tuesday, Oct 27, 2009
     
    Why Einstein did not invent relativity
    I have posted many items on this subject, so I am posting a brief summary for those who do not want to read the details.

    Here are the top reasons for rejecting the idea that Einstein invented special relativity in his famous 1905 paper.

    1. Maxwell's equations were published in 1861, and were fully relativisic.
    2. Lorentz published his "local time" idea in 1895.
    3. Poincare published the essence of special relativity in 1900.
    4. Kaufmann started experimental tests of relativistic mass in 1901.
    5. Lorentz gets a Nobel Prize for his relativistic electrodynamics theory in 1902.
    6. Poincare announced an "entirely new mechanics" at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
    7. Poincare announces Lorentiz metric, 4-vectors, and relativistic gravity in Paris in 1905.
    8. Einstein publishes his famous relativity paper, and cites no references.
    9. His only mention of previous work is a cryptic "has already been shown".
    10. Einstein wrote paper in 1907 attacking the idea of time being the fourth dimension.
    11. Einstein spent the rest of his life denying that he had read Lorentz and Poincare.
    12. Einstein wrote in 1920 that special relativity is compatible with the aether.
    13. Poincare was 3 to 5 years ahead of Einstein on every single aspect of relativity.
    Here are some online sources to read:

    Monday, Oct 26, 2009
     
    Dawkins says evolution is a fact, not a theory
    Nicholas Wade writes in a NY Times review of Dawkins' book:
    The theory of evolution really does explain everything in biology. ... no serious biologist doubts that evolutionary explanations exist or will be found for every jot and tittle in the grand script. ...

    Since the theory of evolution explains and is in turn supported by all the known facts of biology, it can be regarded as seriously robust. There’s no present reason to think it has any flaws.

    This brings me to the intellectual flaw, or maybe it’s a fault just of tone, in Dawkins’s otherwise eloquent paean to evolution: he has let himself slip into being as dogmatic as his opponents. He has become the Savonarola of science, condemning the doubters of evolution as “history-­deniers” who are “worse than ignorant” and “deluded to the point of perversity.” This is not the language of science, or civility. Creationists insist evolution is only a theory, Dawkins that it’s only a fact. Neither claim is correct.

    Philosopher Daniel Dennett replies:
    physicists might grow impatient if they had to devote half their professional time and energy to fending off claims that quantum mechanics is the work of the devil.
    Actually, there is a lot of goofy nonsense written about quantum mechanics, and physicists do not seem to care.
    In the wake of Judge John E. Jones III’s decision in the Dover, Pa., case that intelligent design is a religious viewpoint that may not be taught in public schools, one would think The Times would finally recognize that the intelligent design campaign is a hoax and dishonest to the core, and stop giving it respectability in its pages.
    This is the first time I have seen a philosopher professor say that we should rely on the authority of a lowly trial judge on a philosophical opinion. But say I accept that judge's opinion. Dennett is saying that if something is a religious viewpoint then it must be a hoax and dishonest, and should not be allowed in the newspaper.

    Maybe there are no religious viewpoints in his philosophy department, but the newspaper has readers with religious viewpoints. And they do not believe in censoring ideas just because they might be inspired by a religious viewpoint.

    I am not sure who is worse here. Yes, evolution is a theory. It explains a lot, but not everything. If it explained everything already, then Wade would not be predicting that explanations will be found.

    I think that all these leftist-atheist-evolutionists would be better off if they fairly represented what is known and what is unknown, and did not try to censor other points of view.

    There are more letters here. One Dawkins defender physician writes:

    Nicholas Wade states in his review that Richard Dawkins “doesn’t know what a theory is” when Dawkins says that “evolution is a fact in the sense that it is a fact that Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere.” But it is Wade who is mistaken about the meaning of the word theory in this context. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation, ...
    No, Wade accepts that evolution is a theory in the sense of a well-substantiated explanation. It is Dawkins who has a problem with that, and wants to call evolution a "fact" instead.

    I do think that it is silly for evolutionists to get so hung up on definitions. The average person knows what these terms mean well enough, and their energy would be better spent on substantive matters.

    I do disagree with part of Wade's defense of Dawkins. He says:

    Instead of concentrating on how Western culture emerged from the institutions of the Roman state, the teacher must spend time combating a school board that insists he give equal time to their alternative view that French has been spoken from time immemorial and that Caesar never came or saw or conquered. This is exactly analogous to the plight of the biology teacher trying to acquaint students with the richness of modern biology in states where fundamentalist opponents of evolution hold sway.
    What states are those? There is no state that requires biology teachers to give equal time to creationism, and certainly no state that requires teaching of alleged historical facts that are so demonstrably false. All 50 states teach evolution in the public schools, and none teach creationism. But the evolutionists will not be satisfied until they have censored the newspapers and everyone else from promoting alternate points of view.

    Meanwhile, Dawkins' latest rant calls the Roman Catholic Church the greatest force for evil in the world.


    Sunday, Oct 25, 2009
     
    Arrogant string theorist badmouths critics
    Stephen Hawking has retired, and string theorist Michael Green has been appointed to replace him:
    Michael Green: Master of the universe

    Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge – following in the footsteps of Newton and Hawking. So does the pioneer of string theory think he holds the answers to life's mysteries? ...

    possible solutions have proliferated so much that, by one estimate, there are now 10500 of them, ie, 1 and 500 zeros (Green suggests there could be even more). Which, from a lay person's point of view, takes things into the realms of absurdity. Partly because of this, the past few years have seen increasing criticism of string theory as an expensive blind alley; ...

    Green dismisses these criticisms out of hand. "A couple of years ago there were a couple of books by two particular people who don't have any particular reason to be knowledgeable about the subject," he laughs. ... he's an ex-physicist, a PhD I think ... he's not a professional physicist.

    I have noted before that elitist string theorists refuse to respond to criticism.

    Green has the highest-status professorship in the world, and all he can say in his defense is to arrogantly put down the credentials of his critics.

    This should be a tip-off that string theory is intellectually bankrupt. Real scientists with real theories are only too happy to explain the merits of their theories.

    Peter Woit responds here.


    Saturday, Oct 24, 2009
     
    Why Freud Isn't Dead
    I have wondered how an obvious charlatan like Sigmund Freud could ever have passed for a scientist. It turns out that it is not just modern neuroscience that proved him wrong, but a lot saw thru him from the beginning.

    John Horgan writes about Freud in The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation:

    From the moment Freud began propounding his theories a cen¬tury ago, his work has been subjected to unrelenting attacks. In 1896 Freud's brand new theories about the sexual roots of hysteria were derided as "a scientific fairy tale" Four years later a member of the Vienna Medical Society mocked Freud in a skit: "If the pa¬tient loved his mother, it is the reason for this neurosis of his; and if he hated her, it is the reason for the same neurosis. Whatever the disease, the cause is always the same. And whatever the cause, the disease is always the same. So is the cure: twenty one hour sessions at So Kronen each."

    A 1913 review of what many consider to be Freud's greatest work, The Interpretation of Dreams, found in it "a total lack of the characteristics which lead to scientific advance". In 1916 The Nation complained that psychoanalysis was "well founded neither theoretically nor empirically," and that same year the periodical Current Opinion likened Freud's "sex theory" to "the green cheese hypothesis of the composition of the moon" The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov called Freud a "witchdoctor" and "Viennese quack" Nabokov decried "the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud with ... its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents".

    Attacks on Freud reached a crescendo during the 1990s, as authors of books such as Freudian Fraud, Why Freud Was Wrong, Freud Evaluated, and Unauthorized Freud attempted to drive a stake through Freud's heart. In 1995 the Library of Congress postponed a long-planned exhibit on Freud after a coalition of protesters includ¬ing Freud's own granddaughter, Sophie complained that it was too adulatory. When the exhibit finally opened in the fall of 1998, its catalogue included contributions from several leading Freudophobes. One was the British historian Frank Cioffi, who compared belief in psychoanalysis to belief in the Loch Ness monster. [p.49]

    Horgan looks for evidence that might validate anything that Freud said, and found this:
    One aspect of Freuds work that has fared well, according to Greenberg, is the categorization of personalities into anal and oral types. "There has been some fairly decent research suggesting that those personality types and the traits that he associated with them seem to hold up when you look at the research evidence" Greenberg said. Anal traits such as obstinacy, parsimony, and orderliness .seem to occur together in the same people, and they do seem to be related to anal concerns" Freud had alleged that parents foster these traits in their children by subjecting them to excessively early or strict toilet training.

    But just how reliable are the studies linking toilet training to anal characteristics in adults? In his 1992 book, Freudian Fraud, the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey examined studies of Freud's anal hypothesis, including some cited by Greenberg and Fisher. Most of the studies presented no data on the toilet training of the subjects, and those that did often found no correlation between the severity of toilet training and anal characteristics. [p.57]

    Horgan says that Freud is not dead because of lot of other theories of the mind are just as bogus, and Freud has followers who are unpersuaded that anything else is better. Freudian psychoanalysis doesn't work, but Prozac doesn't work either.

    It is amazing how some people are able to build their reputations even the face of people who expose them as frauds.


    Friday, Oct 23, 2009
     
    Invention of the theory of evolution
    I just learned that the biggest selling book on evolution in the 1800s was not Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Furthermore, it was published in 1844, 15 years ahead of Darwin. Vestiges was originally published anonymously, and the author was later identified as Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist. He also published a followup book, and responded to criticism.

    Chambers' view of evolution is not just the history of life, as he discusses changes in cosmology and geology by natural causes. His view is similar to that of some modern evolutionists, according to these quotes:

    In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. [Futuyma D.J., 1979]

    Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe: the cosmic, biological, and human or cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous. Life is a product of the evolution of inorganic nature, and man is a product of the evolution of life. [Dobzhansky T.G., 1967]

    I knew that Alfred Russel Wallace wrote an essay on evolution by natural selection ahead of Darwin. Darwin got the manuscript, claimed that he had the same theory, and rushed his own essay into print so that publication would be simultaneous. Nobody claims that Darwin stole the whole theory from Wallace, as Darwin had obviously been working on his book for years. Some say that Darwin may have gotten the crucial idea of natural selection from Wallace. Wallace acknowledges being influenced by Vestiges.

    Patrick Matthew published a theory of natural selection in 1831, in the context of naval timber, whatever that is. Wood for making ships, I guess. Others have suggests that different forms of life are related. Matthew's book did not get much attention, but Vestiges was a very popular book that outsold Darwin's.

    This was all before genes and DNA were discovered, so no one knew how evolution really worked. Darwin did have the concept of natural selection, but that is just another way of saying that organisms lived and died according to natural causes.

    Now I am wondering why Darwin is credited so much. I thought that at least he had written the most popular books, but apparently he did not even do that.


    Thursday, Oct 22, 2009
     
    Vaccine shills endanger us all
    Wired mag writes:
    To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. ...

    But the underlying argument has not changed: Vaccines harm America’s children, and doctors like Paul Offit are paid shills of the drug industry.

    To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None.

    Yes, there is evidence that Offit is a paid shill of the drug industry. The article even admits that he has made millions of dollars from vaccine makers.
    “Kaflooey theories” make him crazy, especially if they catch on. Fisher, who has long been the media’s go-to interview for what some in the autism arena call “parents rights,” makes him particularly nuts, as in “You just want to scream.” The reason? “She lies,” he says flatly.

    “Barbara Loe Fisher inflames people against me. And wrongly. I’m in this for the same reason she is. I care about kids. Does she think Merck is paying me to speak about vaccines? Is that the logic?” he asks, exasperated.

    The long article does not explain the logic. If Offit were really an anarchist who believed in parents rights, he would not have so many enemies. But he has sat on govt panels that created new vaccine mandates at the same time that he was receiving money from vaccine makers to promote vaccines. We know this because he had to get a conflict of interest waiver, and it was exposed in a congressional investigation.

    I do think that when the CDC hires an outside panel to endorse vaccine mandates, it should get unbiased scientists and a balance of points of view. The CDC does not. It hires people like Offit.


    Wednesday, Oct 21, 2009
     
    Einstein's influence
    I am wondering just what Einstein's contribution to modern physics is. Is there some idea that (1) can be unambiguously attributed to Einstein, and (2) was useful for some significant development in physics?

    The most influential idea to come out of Einstein's work was Lorentz invariance. That was crucial for the development of quantum field theory. But that was certainly not original to Einstein, as Lorentz and Poincare worked that out 5 to 10 years ahead of Einstein.

    Another big idea was that photons has energy equal to Planck's constant times the frequency. But that was Planck, of course, not Einstein.

    Another idea might be the equivalence principle, that inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass. But that is what Newton said 200 years earlier. We used the same term "mass" for both concepts because no one thought that there was any difference.

    Some historians have investigated special relativity and still assert Einstein's originality. They say that Einstein abolished the aether and gave his own derivation of the Lorentz transformation. I don't really agree with this, but suppose I accept this. Did any good physics ever come out of saying that there is no aether? Did any ever come from Einstein's derivation?

    I doubt it. I've never heard of anyone claim that anything came out of these two ideas.

    Some people say that Einstein's derivation was important because it showed that relativity is a property of space and time, and not a property of electromagnetism. But Poincare had already said that years earlier, with different reasoning.

    Abolishing the aether might be seen as confirmation of the Copernican principle. However that is not really correct. Lawrence Krauss wrote:

    But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.
    I don't know about this correlation, but various aether theories have been proposed regardless of Einstein. There is no accepted theory of physics that depends on there not being an aether.

    When asked by reporters to summarize general relativity, Einstein said:

    People before me believed that if all the matter in the universe were removed, only space and time would exist. My theory proves that space and time would disappear along with matter.
    Einstein had a knack for these seemingly-profound nonsense statements. I don't know what he meant by this. Maybe nobody did, because it hasn't been incorporated into physics, as far as I know. I would say that if you remove matter from general relativity, you get special relativity, because special relativity is a theory about empty space.

    Einstein did seem to inspire people to waste their lives searching for a unified field theory or rejecting quantum mechanics. Yes, Einstein had influence. But I am looking for some actual useful contribution to physics.

    You could say that Einstein had his own derivation of the Lorentz transformations from his two postulates, but where did that ever get used to develop more physics? I realize that special relativity is often taught that way, but it is not what convinced people. It was the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations that sold physicists on the Lorentz transformations, and that was done by Lorentz and Poincare.


    Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009
     
    Humans are still evolving
    NewScientist reports:
    Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving. ...

    Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

    Evolutionists have been claiming for decades that humans are not evolving.

    Monday, Oct 19, 2009
     
    Karl Radl on Einstein
    I discovered a recent dispute between Karl Radl and Christopher Jon Bjerknes over the invention of relativity. Both of them seem to be concerned about Jewish racism, but I will ignore that aspect. (I prefer to look at facts, not alleged motives.)

    One the main disputes concern quotes from Max Born, a close personal friend of Einstein who wrote a book on relativity. Born says:

    [Einstein's] paper 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper' in Annalen der Physik... contains not a single reference to previous literature. It gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true.
    Born describes contributions by Lorentz, Poincare, and others, but he does not directly accuse Einstein of plagiarism, and Born was very impressed with Einstein's 1905 paper. Born also says things like "Einstein's way of thinking has not only led to the summit of the classical period but has opened a new age of physics.” But he also says that it is "possible" that Poincare had all of special relativity before Einstein.

    I conclude from this that Born liked Einstein, and liked Einstein's presentation of special relativity, but had to concede that the essence of it was done earlier by others.

    Radl has his own arguments for defending Einstein. He says:

    Poincaré, for example, was actually nothing less than the most important mathematician of his times. Hence it would be borderline impossible for anyone to steal/plagiarize his work. Since anything he put forth were, and are, well known in the world of physics. Therefore: the thesis purported by Bjerknes that Einstein had just taken it, somehow retracting credit from the creators of the given tools, is glaringly fraudulent.
    I think this explains why Poincare did not make a public issue out of the credit for SR. Poincare was already famous, and his writings were well-known, so there was no need to go around telling people what he had published.

    Fortunately, there is no need to trust anyone's opinions on the subject. The papers were all published, and anyone today can read them and decide for himself.

    Radl relies on Darrigol to say that Einstein had a better theory, but what Darrigol really says is this:

    On several points -— namely, the relativity principle, the physical interpretation of Lorentz’s transformations (to first order), and the radiation paradoxes -— Poincare´’s relevant publications antedated Einstein’s relativity paper of 1905 by at least five years, and his suggestions were radically new when they first appeared. On the remaining points, publication was nearly simultaneous.
    Darrigol goes on to give evidence that Einstein got his best ideas directly from Poincare, but concludes that it is wiser not to ask such questions. I guess criticizing Einstein could be a bad career move.

    Radl notes that Lorentz credited Einstein in 1916:

    If I had to write the last chapter now, I should certainly have given a more prominent place to Einstein's theory of relativity by which the theory of electromagnetic phenomena in moving systems gains a simplicity that I had not been able to attain. The chief cause of my failure was my clinging to the idea that the variable t only can be considered as the true time, and that my local time t' must be regarded as no more than an auxiliary mathematical quantity.
    Lorentz is mainly crediting Einstein with a simpler explanation of the theory, and not with making any original predictions. Lorentz did not realize that clocks would show the "local time", but Poincare explicitly said so in 1900. Einstein did not get it until five years later.

    Radl says:

    Similarly: one must realize that aspects of Poincare's remarks on the principle of relativity were inconclusive. He remarked that no experiment would reveal our motion with respect to the ether. That is fully compatible with continuing to believe that there is ether with a distinct state of rest. If Poincare had the special theory of relativity and believed that processes unfold against a space and time governed by a kinematics different from Newton's: why did he not just say it?
    Poincare did say that he had a new mechanics, different from Newton's, in his 1904 St. Louis lecture:
    From all these results, if they are confirmed, would arise an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterised by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature could fall below the zero absolute, because bodies would oppose an increasing inertia to the causes, which would tend to accelerate their motion; and this inertia would become infinite when one approached the velocity of light.
    It is to Poincare's credit that he avoided making unnecessary hypotheses. With his formulation of SR, he gets the whole theory without an assumption about whether there is an aether with a distinct state of rest. We now have cosmological reasons for believing that cosmic background radiation does have a distinct state of rest, and it is important to understand that it does not contradict SR.

    Radl concludes:

    I'm sure all that Bjerknes cares about is that SR [Special Relativity] 'merely reproduces the equations of LET' [Lorentz Ether Theory], so he regards Einstein as a thief. The problem is that such an appraisal of what Einstein accomplished is completely stupid. Without SR, theoretical physics in the 20th century would have required the constant bending of the knee to the concept of absolute velocity, yet with SR, it did not. In fact, theories built on SR require (locally) the improved heuristic that they must be derivable from a Lagrangian using Lorentz covariance. Thus the practical and philosophical differences between LET and SR as a foundation to modern physics are not only substantial but fundamental. Most physicists since 1905 got it and still get it. Bjerknes does not apparently.
    Radl is the one who is completely stupid. Poincare is the one who abolished absolute velocity in 1899, and he did it six years ahead of Einstein. It was Poincare who used a Lagrangian argument in his 1905 paper, not Einstein. It was Poincare who argued that the laws of physics should be covariant under the Lorentz group, not Einstein. Einstein, in his 1905 paper, did not say that the Lorentz transformations formed a group and did not discuss any laws of physics except electromagnetism. It was Hilbert who first derived general relativity from a Lorentz covariant Lagrangian, not Einstein.

    Yes, 20th century physics has built on SR, but it has built on Poincare's version of the theory, not Einstein's. General relativity was built on spacetime having a Lorentz metric, a concept in Poincare's 1905 paper but not in Einstein's 1905 paper. Quantum electrodynamics was built on Lorentz invariance, and R.P. Feynman explicitly credits Poincare for inventing that concept before Einstein.

    In his 1964 lectures, Feynman said:

    But time after time experiments indicated that the speed is 186,000 miles a second no matter how fast you are moving. The question now is how that could be. Einstein realized, and Poincaré too, that the only possible way in which a person moving and a person standing still could measure the speed to be the same was that their sense of time and their sense of space are not the same, that clocks inside the space ship are not the same, that the clocks inside the space ship are ticking at a different speed from those on the ground, and so forth. [The Character of Physical Law, p.85-86 in the 1994 edition]
    After some discussion of moving frames, he said:
    I bring this particular example up in such detail because it is really the beginning of the study of symmetries in physical laws. It was Poincaré's suggestion to make this analysis of what you can do to the equations and leave them alone. It was Poincaré's attitude to pay attention to the symmetries of physical laws. The symmetries of translation in space, delay in time, and so on, were not very deep; but the symmetry of uniform velocity in a straight line is very interesting, and has all kinds of consequences. Furthermore, these consequences are extendable into laws that we do not know. For example, by guessing that this principle is true for the disintegration of a mu meson, we can state that we cannot use mu mesons to tell how fast we are going in a space ship either; and thus we know something at least about mu meson disintegration, even though we do not know why the mu meson disintegrates in the first place. [p.88]
    You can watch the video of Feynman's original lectures here. The above is from Lecture 4. This idea of Poincare's was one of the most important in 20th century physics.

    Sunday, Oct 18, 2009
     
    Maher and skeptics on vaccination
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists are particularly upset that one of their own, talk show host and comedian Bill Maher, is a vaccine skeptic. See PZ Myers and Michael Shermer, who writes an "open letter" to a "fellow skeptic":
    Vaccinations are not 100% effective, nor are they risk free. But the benefits far outweigh the risks, and when communities in the U.S. and the U.K. in recent years have foregone vaccinations in large numbers, herd immunity is lost and communicable diseases have come roaring back. This is yet another example of evolution at work, but in this case it is working against us. (See www.sciencebasedmedicine.org for numerous articles answering every one of the objections to vaccinations.) ...

    Please reconsider both the evidence for vaccinations, as well as the inconsistencies in your position, and think about doing one of the bravest and most honorable things any critical thinker can do, and that is to publicly state, “I changed my mind. I was wrong.”

    I would be happy to reconsider the evidence and change my mind, but where is that evidence?

    In particular, where is that scientific study that quantifies the benefits and risks of various vaccination programs, and shows that "the benefits far outweigh the risks"? If that is indeed a scientific fact, then it ought to be demonstrable in writing. Especially when billions of dollars are being spent to promote vaccines. Shermer does cite a blog for pro-vaccine arguments, but I could not find any risk-benefit study there.

    If I had such a study, then I could decide cooly and rationally whether to get a vaccine. Don't tell me that it is always better to get the vaccine, because the CDC typically only recommends a vaccine for people in certain age ranges and certain other conditions.

    Yes, I hold Myers and Shermer to a higher standard than Maher. Maher is just a comedian with kooky leftist views. Myers and Shermer are scientists who claim to have science on their side. I say, where's the science? If vaccination policy were really scientific, I would not have to take some govt agency recommendations on age ranges for vaccination. I could read the tradeoffs myself, and make my own decision.


    Saturday, Oct 17, 2009
     
    A Poincare Einstein analogy
    Here is an analogy to help explain why I think that the pro-Einstein arguments are so silly. Suppose the following:
    Scientist A says that the Moon is 100 times as far away as New York, and says that it doesn't matter whether you measure the distances in miles or meters.

    Five years later, scientist B says that he does not need the exact length of the meter stick to show that the Moon is 100 times as far away as New York.

    Decades later, scientist C says that scientist B is the greatest genius of all time for his Moon theory, and that scientist A could not have understood Moon theory because he still talked about meter sticks after scientist B did his work.

    You would say that scientist B said the obvious, and that scientist C is an idiot. There is nothing wrong with talking about meters, even if the meter stick is an arbitrary unit of measure that could be replaced by another unit.

    Poincare published special relativity, and showed that it did not depend on the aether. Five years later, Einstein wrote the same thing, with slightly different terminology. Today, historians say that Poincare didn't get it because he continued to talk about the aether as a convenient hypothesis.

    I say that the historians are idiots. Talking about the aether as a convenient hypothesis is about like talking about meter sticks.

    Anyone who says that special relativity requires that there is no aether has missed the point of SR. SR says that the laws of physics are invariant under the Poincare group (ie, Lorentz transformations and more obvious symmetries). It does not say anything about whether light requires a transmission medium, or about whether one can choose a frame of reference. It only says that any such choice will look the same under the laws of physics as in any other frame.


    Friday, Oct 16, 2009
     
    Henri Poincare on relativity
    Here are Poincare's main relativity papers, translated to English. Poincare does not get praise like this:
    Albert Einstein is the only scientist who's genius was comparable to that of Newton's. Their personalities and lifestyles were completely different, but they were both consumed by the desire to know. In 1905, the miracle year, Einstein gave quantum mechanics its true beginning by working out the theory of photoelectricity, created a new statistical mechanics by studying Brownian motion, gave a fully formed theory of special relativity, and derived his famous mass-energy equation. This monumental accomplishment was matched only by Newton's work during the plague years.
    Note that Einstein is credited with his first paper on relativity being a "fully formed theory". He had the advantage that Lorentz and Poincare had spent ten years developing the theory. The Lorentz and Poincare papers refer to earlier work, and are not so easy to digest. But some of Poincare's papers above are written for the general public, and have a minimum of mathematics. Others are on a mathematically higher level than Einstein's paper.

    As a sample, Poincare says this in his 1904 St. Louis lecture:

    From all these results, if they are confirmed, would arise an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterised by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature could fall below the zero absolute, because bodies would oppose an increasing inertia to the causes, which would tend to accelerate their motion; and this inertia would become infinite when one approached the velocity of light.
    Perhaps that lecture should be considered the birth of special relativity as a fully-formed theory.

    Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
     
    Sponges are lesser animals
    Evolutionist Matthew Cobb writes:
    Aristotle thought they were plants; ...

    Argument rages over exactly how old the earliest sponge is. Some fossils that are claimed to be sponges have been dated back to around 710 MY ago, but not everyone accepts these. Everyone agrees, however, that they were around shortly before the Cambrian Explosion, around 560MY.

    They now cover every part of the ocean, and can account for up to 75% of the biomass on the floor of the Antarctic ocean. ...

    Sponges have no neurons, no muscles, no cell-cell junctions, no gut, no front/back, no reproductive organs. ...

    But that doesn’t make sponges “primitive”, or in any way lesser beings. They have been on our planet for longer than any other animal – around 10,000 times longer than our species. They have survived repeated mass extinction events, and that suggests they will probably be around for at least another 600 MY. Not bad for an animal that Aristotle took for a plant.

    These evolutionists lose me whenever they stray from the science into value judgments. Only an ideological leftist-atheist-evolutionist would say that sponges are not "in any way lesser beings" than human beings. What's next -- voting rights for sponges?

    You don't have to be a religious creationist to believe that humans are greater than bottom-dwelling ocean sponges.

    (The post also lost me where it said that sponges having non-overlapping body types means they don’t form distinct evolutionary lineages. But I think that he just explained it wrong. Maybe it was a typo.)


    Wednesday, Oct 14, 2009
     
    Wacky theories from a string theorist
    The NY Times reports:
    Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather. ...

    Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

    Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

    The paper is attacked as nonsense by Woit and Motl, who rarely agree on anything.

    String Theory itself is a crazy idea, and yet its proponents have tenure at the most prestigious universities. There does not seem to be any limits to the nutty stuff these folks will say.

    Update: In Jan. 2008, the same NY Times reporter wrote this:

    It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

    If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

    It is impossible to tell whether these theories are hoaxes or not.

    Tuesday, Oct 13, 2009
     
    Citing sources would have been artificial and disingenuous
    The Wash. Univ. (St. Louis) physicist John S. Rigden wrote the book Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness and explains:
    In this famous June paper, Einstein included no citations. Much of his source material was "in the air" among scientists in 1905, and some of these ideas had been published. Einstein could have cited the work of Lorentz and Poincaré; however, to do so would have been a bit artificial and perhaps even disingenuous. In the development of his special theory of relativity, Einstein did not draw from or build upon the work of others. He adopted two principles as axiomatic, and by means of his intellectual prowess, he brought the unseen consequences of the two principles into full view. At the end of the paper, he thanked his friend, Michele Besso. [p.95]
    This is a remarkable admission for a book with 180 pages of unrestrained praise for Einstein. He used ideas that were well-known and published, but he did not cite his sources. Here is some typical praise:
    Although Einstein died in 1955, he remains the standard of greatness. Smart kids are often nicknamed "Einstein." "Hey Einstein," we ask the class genius, "what did you get on the test?" When television commentators want to refer to real intelligence, they mention Einstein. Why Einstein? He was certainly smart, but many people are smart. Einstein, however, is more than simply a symbol of intelligence. When Einstein recognized truths about the natural world by pure acts of mind, he exemplified what is best about being human. And when, through it all, he exuded a noble modesty, he entered the consciousness of all people. [p.16]
    No, Einstein did not recognized truths by pure acts of mind; he recognized them by stealing them from Lorentz and Poincare without crediting them. He did not exude a noble modesty; he dishonestly got famous on the works of others.

    This is a strange thing about Einstein. The experts seem to know that special relativity was already "in the air" when Einstein wrote his famous paper. Einstein either knew about all the special relativity work or he was willfully ignorant. Nevertheless, the Einstein fans turn his dishonesty and lack of originality into praise for his character.

    This sort of nonsense is particular strange coming from a St. Louis professor. Everyone in St. Louis knows about the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair as being St. Louis's finest year. At that fair, Poincare and others lectured about those special relativity ideas that were in the air, just a couple of miles from where Prof. Rigden teaches. He could have told a better story by writing a book about what happened in 1904, not 1905.

    Here is all he says about that World's Fair:

    These strange ideas were invented to patch over the problems engendered by the ether concept. The patches were offensive, but physicists believed the ether was required in order for light to travel from place to place. In addition to ad hoc remedies, basic ideas were looked at afresh. In 1898, for example, Henri Poincaré raised questions about time: "We have no direct intuition about the equality of two time intervals. People who believe they have this intuition are the dupes of an illusion." And in 1904, at the St. Louis World's Fair, Poincaré asked, "What is the aether, how are its molecules arrayed, do they attract or repel each other?" During his remarks about time, Poincaré talked about clock synchronization; Lorentz defined "local time," which Poincaré elaborated further; Poincaré brought the Galilean Newtonian relativity principle into the discussions. [p.83]
    What he is saying that Lorentz and Poincare had already figured out that clocks slow down in moving frames. They showed that electromagnetism and optics behaved the same way whether you use the aether or not. They showed the relativity of space and time. Their ideas were "offensive" because hardly anyone else beside Poincare believed that clocks would really slow down.

    What Einstein did, according to this description, was to take two of the Lorentz-Poincare principles as axiomatic, and then showed how other aspects of the Lorentz-Poincare theory could be deduced. And then not cite Lorentz or Poincare because that would have been a bit artificial and perhaps even disingenuous. By doing that, he exemplified what is best about being human. Sigh. I think that Einstein worship has become a religion.


    Monday, Oct 12, 2009
     
    The Incorrigible Plagiarist
    I just looked at the 2002 book Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist by Christopher Jon Bjerknes. I had heard of this book, but I assumed that it was an incoherent rant.

    To my surprise, it is a thoroughly documented and serious book. It is a little over-the-top in places, but he had detailed quotes and sources for everything. Eg, he gives quotes from Poincare and Einstein where they both describe the same synchronization procedure, and you can decide for yourself if it looks like plagiarism.

    Bjerknes credits HG Wells for saying that time is the fourth dimension. I thought that was a little ridiculous. Wells was a novelist, not a scientist, and he had no understanding of special relativity. But Bjerknes explains himself:

    . . .Neither Minkowski, nor the Einsteins, nor Poincare, hold priority on the concept of four-dimensional space-time. H.G. Wells, in 1894, expressly stated it in a popular novel, The Time Machine, long before Minkowski claimed priority,
    "'Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?' Filby became pensive. 'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and -- Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.'"
    This is a clearer statement of time being the fourth dimension than anything Einstein ever said, until after Minkowski and others accepted the concept in 1907 as the best way to understand special relativity.

    Wells did not have the concept of spacetime symmetries including Lorentz transformations, as Poincare did, but Wells was certainly prescient for a novelist. Wells also wrote a 1914 novel where he predicted "atomic bombs", inspiring Leó Szilárd to invent the atomic bomb about 20 years later. (No, Einstein had nothing to do with it, except for signing a letter to FDR.)

    Bjerknes has a longer book on Saint Einstein that you can read online for free. That book has some chapters on Zionism that I did not read. There is also a claim that Einstein's physicist wife contributed to his papers. I did watch a PBS documentary on that subject. PBS said that it was possible, but the main argument against it is that she never did anything else so original. Of course I now know that the paper was not so original anyway. She probably did contribute some small amount to the paper, but we will never know exactly.


    Sunday, Oct 11, 2009
     
    Einstein's laws
    Berkeley (LBL) physicist Richard W. Kadel writes in the Jan. 2007 Physics Today:
    Since my undergraduate days, I have been puzzled by the fact that we have Newton's laws of motion but only Einstein's theory of special relativity. We have finished celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of the theory of special relativity, and it seems to me that after a century of validation, it's time to rename it as more than just a theory.

    I propose that we, as physicists, define a set of Einstein's laws, just as we have Newton's laws, Coulomb's law, or Faraday's law. I begin the discussion by offering the following three laws:

    1. The laws of physics are identical in all non-accelerating (that is, inertial) frames.
    2. The vacuum speed of light, c, is the same for all inertial frames.
    3. The total energy E of a body of mass m and momentum p is given by E2 = [m2c4 + p2c2].
    A reader informed him that Einstein did not invent this stuff, and Kadel replied:
    One reader wrote to me indicating the contributions of Henri Poincaré, ... Recollecting from my undergraduate education, I believe it is correct to state that Einstein was the first to derive special relativity without reference to electromagnetism and the first to write down what we sometimes call the equivalency of mass and energy, or what I referred to in my previous letter as Einstein's third law.
    He goes on to say that Relativity Theory should have a name with higher status than Superstring Theory.

    He is probably right that he was taught that Einstein was the first to derive those things. It is not true. But even if it were, so what?

    Lorentz deduced his theory from experimential and theoretical knowledge about electromagnetism. Poincare gave alternate derivations in terms of Maxwell's equations, an action principle, a symmetry group, and an indefinite (Lorentz) metric.

    Einstein was able to explain the theory in terms of just one electromagnetism postulate (constant speed of light) and Poincare's principle of relativity. Does that make Einstein better somehow? It may mean that Einstein's explanation has a different pedagogic value but it does not that it is any more valid or correct or worthy of credit. Lorentz's ability to find electromagnetic evidence for his theory was a good thing, not a bad thing. Poincare's use of alternate derivations was also a good thing.

    Poincare was the first to apply special relativity to something outside electromagnetism, as he proposed a relativistic gravity theory in 1905.


    Saturday, Oct 10, 2009
     
    Do not trust the experts
    One argument I get for crediting Einstein is that I should just trust all the experts who have credited Einstein. Indeed, there are many brilliant physicists who have heaped great praise on him.

    But there are just too many counterexamples to this idea.

    Someday, people may argue that Barack Obama was a great peacemaker, as proved by the fact that he won a Nobel Peace Prize. But hardly anyone can tell me how Obama's foreign policy is significantly different from GW Bush's.

    There are also many distinguished big-shots who are turned out to be charlatans. Examples are Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead. I am sure that there are many big-shots who have heaped great praise on Freud and Mead. Karl Marx is another example of someone who is praised and credited far beyond his accomplishments. Universities are filled with professors writing and teaching nonsense about Freud, Mead, and Marx.

    Another overrated guru is Charles Darwin. I just watched a 2-hour PBS Nova show on Darwin. Darwin did a lot of worthwhile research, but he is mainly famous for originating the theory of natural selection. But as the show admitted, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote up the theory of natural selection in a paper for public presentation, and he sent the paper to Darwin before Darwin published anything on the subject. The usual explanation is that they independently discovered the same idea. Apparently the idea goes back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, and there is not much evidence of anything thinking anything else, except for Jean Baptiste Lamarck's idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

    The truly great innovations are when someone has a new idea, publishes it in the face of conventional wisdom that it is wrong, and then produces some convincing demonstration that the idea is correct.

    Here is what physicist Banesh Hoffmann wrote about Einstein:

    But the real key to the theory of relativity came to him unexpectedly, after years of bafflement, as he awoke one morning and sat up in bed. Suddenly the pieces of a majestic jigsaw puzzle fell into place with an ease and naturalness that gave him immediate confidence. ... What flashed on Einstein as he sat up in bed that momentous morning was that he would have to give up one of our most cherished notions about time.
    No, this did not happen to Einstein in 1905. Lorentz had already published his theory of local time in 1895, and got a Nobel prize in 1902. Poincare had written a book for the general public in 1902 where he denied absolute time. So that cherished notion of time had already been abandoned by those who understood Lorentz and Poincare.

    Friday, Oct 09, 2009
     
    Using conflicting solar system models
    I just learned this:
    Before Copernicus, these alternative representations of the motion of a planet were not accorded any physical significance. One of Copernicus’s predecessors, for instance, had the sun moving around the earth for one planet and the earth moving around the sun for another.
    It is funny how so many otherwise intelligent people could say that Ptolemy was wrong for using a model of the Sun revolving around the Earth, or for using epicycles. He was predicting the apparent motion of the planets, and he was doing it successfully. More successfully than anyone else, for over a millennium.

    Thursday, Oct 08, 2009
     
    Poincare rejected absolute time
    One of the main arguments for Einstein's priority over Poincare is the claim that only Einstein rejected absolute time. The claim is completely false.

    Poincare said this in his 1902 book:

    These are the questions which naturally arise, and the difficulty of solution is largely due to the fact that treatises on mechanics do not clearly distinguish between what is experiment, what is mathematical reasoning, what is convention, and what is hypothesis. This is not all.

    1. There is no absolute space, and we only conceive of relative motion; and yet in most cases mechanical facts are enunciated as if there is an absolute space to which they can be referred.

    2. There is no absolute time. When we say that two periods are equal, the statement has no meaning, and can only acquire a meaning by a convention.

    3. Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two periods, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in two different places. I have explained this in an article entitled "Measure of Time."

    4. Finally, is not our Euclidean geometry in itself only a kind of convention of language? Mechanical facts might be enunciated with refer ence to a non-Euclidean space which would be less convenient but quite as legitimate as our ordinary space; the enunciation would become more complicated, but it still would be possible.

    Thus, absolute space, absolute time, and even geometry are not conditions which are imposed on mechanics. All these things no more existed before mechanics than the French language can be logically said to have existed before the truths which are expressed in French. We might endeavour to enunciate the fundamental law of mechanics in a language independent of all these conventions; ...

    Einstein always denied having read Poincare, but we know otherwise from his buddies in his book club:
    A close friend of Einstein's from his days in Berne, Maurice Solovine, recalled that in 1904 Poincare's La Science et l'Hypothese "profoundly impressed us and kept us breathless for weeks on end!"
    So Poincare published the rejection of absolute time 3 years ahead of Einstein, and Einstein got the idea directly from Poincare's book. Poincare also discusses events, the term for the points of 4-dimensional spacetime, and and simultaneity of events. Einstein did not write about these until 1905.

    Note how prophetic Poincare's suggestion is of using non-Euclidean geometry for mechanics. Einstein didn't pick up on this idea until 1913. It became crucial for general relativity.

    I agree with Poincare that even today, physics books are confusing for not distinguishing experiment, math, convention, and hypothesis. Poincare understands this issue better than Einstein. For example:

    Experiment. The speed of light is constant for all observers. An electric charge causes an electric field according to Maxwell's equations.

    Math. The Lorentz transformations are symmetries of the Lorentz metric. The Lorentz transformations are deducible from Einsteins two postulates, if certain hidden assumptions are added.

    Convention. Time is the fourth dimension. Light is a particle. Distance is measured in meters.

    Hypothesis. There is no way to detect the aether.

    If someone claims that Einstein's theory was superior to Poincare's somehow, then ask how. More specifically, in which of these four areas was it better? Did it agree with experiment more precisely? Was the math more rigorous? Did he adopt better conventions? Did he have some better hypothesis?

    I can't get a straight answer to this question, because there is no argument that Einstein's theory was any better in any of these four respects. At best you might get an argument that Einstein used better terminology, or that Poincare's use of math showed that he did not really understand the physics. That's all. In any substantive respect, the theories were either the same or Poincare's was superior.


    Wednesday, Oct 07, 2009
     
    Ginzburg on Einstein
    Physicist Vitalii Lazarevich Ginzburg discusses the origin of the special theory of relativity (STR) in his 2001 autobiography, The physics of a lifetime: Reflections on the Problems and Personalities of 20th Century Physics. You can read some of it on Google Books.

    Ginzburg is a big Einstein fan, and is very upset that some people credit Poincare and Lorentz for special relativity. He writes:

    it should be emphasized once again that the STR is a theory based precisely on the relativity principle and the Lorentz transformations. Once this basic premise is understood we can discuss the origin of the theory, its authors, and their intentions. ...

    The most radical innovative concept of the STR is that time is not absolute any more (this concept was put forward by Einstein). In its significance and intellectual challenge this concept can be compared to the rejection of the absolute immobility of the Earth, on which Copernicus built his heliocentric system. [p.226-227]

    These premises and concepts were put forward by Poincare five years ahead of Einstein. This is even Poincare's terminology. Poincare's popular 1902 book explicitly said, "There is no absolute time." Einstein's famous 1905 special relativity paper says that there is no absolute rest and says:
    It is essential to have time defined by means of stationary clocks in the stationary system ...
    Einstein explains that clock times depend on the frame, but does not explicitly deny absolute time. So Poincare rejected absolute time more explicitly than Einstein, and did it three years earlier.

    Ginzburg rejects credit for Lorentz because Lorentz does not claim the credit himself:

    In 1927, a year before he died, Lorentz made an even more definite statement in the following words. "Only the true time existed for me. I regarded my transformation of time merely as an heuristic working hypothesis. Thus, the theory of relativity is, in fact, exclusively Einstein's product."
    Lorentz's local time applied to moving electrons, and it wasn't clear whether he thought about what would happen if there were a clock attached to the electron measuring time. Lorentz was being modest. But Poincare wrote papers in 1900 and 1904 in which he explicitly talked about applying this concept of local time to clocks, and clearly implied that the clocks would show the local time, just as special relativity predicts.

    Ginzburg goes on:

    I must add here that I have reread recently the original papers by Poincaré and Lorentz and it was difficult for me to understand how the invariance of the electrodynamics equations with respect to Lorentz transformations that was proved in these papers could be regarded as evidence of the validity of the relativity principle. It should be emphasized that I was reading the papers seventy years after their publication and I knew beforehand their results (which is known to facilitate understanding considerably). Moreover, Poincaré and Lorentz believed that the relativity principle merely amounted to the statement that it was impossible to notice uniform motion of a body with respect to the ether. We can make a transition from this definition to the concept of absolute equivalence of all inertial frames of reference (this is the modern understanding of the relativity principle) easily only if we treat the Lorentz transformations as converting over to a moving frame of reference.
    Here is how Poincare defined his principle of relativity in his 1904 St. Louis lecture:
    The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.
    He said it this way in his 1902 book:
    The law of the phenomena which will be produced in this system will depend on the state of these bodies, and on their mutual distances; but because of the relativity and the inertia of space, they will not depend on the absolute position and orientation of the system. In other words, the state of the bodies and their mutual distances at any moment will solely depend on the state of the same bodies and on their mutual distances at the initial moment, but will in no way depend on the absolute initial position of the system and of its absolute initial orientation. This is what we shall call, for the sake of abbreviation, the law of relativity.
    He also starts Chap. 7 with this:
    The Principle of Relative Motion. Sometimes endeavours have been made to connect the law of acceleration with a more general principle. The movement of any system whatever ought to obey the same laws, whether it is referred to fixed axes or to the movable axes which are implied in uniform motion in a straight line. This is the principle of relative motion; it is imposed upon us for two reasons: the commonest experiment confirms it; the consideration of the contrary hypothesis is singularly repugnant to the mind.
    As you can see, this is not merely a statement about the aether. It says the laws of physics are valid in all inertial frames. It implies that the aether cannot be detected, but it is more general than that.

    Here is Einstein's 1905 version:

    They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate,
    Note that Einstein is not even claiming something entirely new. He is referring to Lorentz 1895 proof that Maxwell's equations are Lorentz invariant to first order. He is also using Poincare's terminology for "Principle of Relativity", altho he is not explicitly crediting Lorentz or Poincare or anyone else.

    In fact much better Lorentz invariance theorems were proved by Poincare in 1900 and by Lorentz in 1904, and Einstein ignores these.

    The point here is that Ginzburg is wrong about Einstein having some sort of new relativity principle. He is talking about the same one that Lorentz and Poincare used.

    I don't know why Ginzburg does not understand how Lorentz invariance is evidence of the validity of the relativity principle. The relativity principle is that the laws of physics are valid in all inertial frames, and the Lorentz transformations take you from one from to another. Once you accept Poincare's notion of spacetime, Lorentz invariance is more or less the same thing as the relativity principle.

    His paper of 1905- 1906 merely states that the equations of electrodynamics can be "subjected to the marvelous transformations discovered by Lorentz which explain why no experiment is capable of revealing the absolute motion of the Earth." In my opinion, this ‘explanation’ does not go further than the explanation given by Lorentz himself. ...

    Poincaré was first and foremost a mathematician. It was therefore especially difficult for him to concentrate on elaborating clear-cut definitions of all the concepts and quantities which matter so much in physics. ... Somehow Poincaré never made the decisive step ... Poincaré had a somewhat skeptical attitude to physical theories.

    I guess Ginzburg doesn't like mathematicians. He never says what that "decisive step" was. Poincare predated Einstein on every single point that he attributes to Einstein.

    The clincher for Ginzburg is his worship of Einstein and his trust in what Einstein says. Ginzburg writes about Einstein:

    That he was the greatest of the great physicists of our century and, perhaps, of all time is of course, important but hardly everything. Einstein always strove for justice, for liber- ty, and for other human rights, he despised the dark forces, and was a model of noble human dignity. lt would be unimaginable for Einstein to start a dis— pute, let alone a squabble, over priority issues. The same is true for Lorentz and Poincaré. ... Einstein always emphasized the roles played by Poincaré and Lorentz. ... The greatest physicists in the last hundred-odd years — Maxwell, Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, and Bohr — were exceptionally moral persons. A typical characteristic of their morality was aptly expressed by Einstein in one of his mottos, “An honest person must be respected even if he shares opposite views." [p.233,239]
    No, this is crazy idol worship. Einstein got into several priority disputes, and he never properly credited Lorentz and Einstein. His personal morals and his politics were not so great either.

    Just look at Einstein's papers, and you can see for yourself that he never credits Lorentz and Poincare. His famous 1905 paper has no references at all.

    Ginzburg quotes Einstein, 2 months before his death:

    Recalling the history of the special theory of relativity we may defi- nitely state that its discovery had been prepared by 1905. Lorentz had been aware of the fact that the transformation later called after him was of an especial significance for analyzing the Maxwell equations and Poincaré followed up on that. As for myself I knew only the fundamental paper written by Lorentz in 1895 but l did not learn of his later study and Poincaré's paper related to it. In this sense my work was independent. A new idea in it was that the relevance of the Lorentz transformations went outside the scope of the Maxwell equations and concerned the basic properties of space and time. My conclusion that the 'Lorentz invariance' was a general feature of any physical theory was also new. It was especially significant in my opin- ion because I had realized earlier that Maxwell’s theory did not de- scribe the microscopic structure of radiation and therefore was not valid under all circumstances.
    Einstein was continuing to lie about what he knew. The main technical result in Einstein's 1905 paper was Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations. Lorentz proved a weak version of this result in 1895, and improved versions in 1899 and 1904. Poincare also published improvements in 1900 and 1905. Larmor also published a couple of papers on it. Voigt had an early and unappreciated paper. You can read it in the History of Lorentz transformations.

    Einstein never acknowledged this work properly. His 1905 paper does not cite any of it. His later papers continued to refuse to cite the prior work.

    Einstein was also lying when he talked about his "new idea". His 1905 paper did indeed have a section applying Lorentz transformations to motion in space and time, without depending on electrodynamics. He then applies it to electrodynamics. But Poincare was ahead of him on this point. As quoted above, Poincare had already said that his relativity principle to all "laws of physical phenomena". His 1905 paper not only constructs a Lorentz invariant theory of electromagnetism, but he also proposes a Lorentz invariant theory of gravity. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who stressed that physical theories should be invariant under the Lorentz group.

    Ginzburg writes:

    What is utterly useless is idle speculation on dubious questions, such as whether Einstein was aware of the 1904 paper by Lorentz. In his time Einstein directly and repeatedly noted that he had not known of the paper when he had been working cn his theory of relativity. But in the collection of papers under re- view J. Kissuany states that “there is no direct evidence on thc subject” but still goes on analyzing the terminology for a few pages, attempting to prove that Einstein knew of the paper by Lorentz even though it was published in a little-known journal. [p.236]
    Whether or not Einstein read that 1904 paper, we can be sure that Einstein was dishonest about his sources, and special relativity had already been invented. If special relativity was really the greatest discovery of the century, then the credit should go to those that actually discovered it. Einstein's paper added nothing to those who had read and understood Lorentz's and Poincare's papers.

    Ginzburg's attitude is probably typical of modern physicists. He worships Einstein and denies that Einstein can do any wrong, even when presented with ice cold evidence. He gives kooky reasons for badmouthing anyone who might have been a rival to Einstein. He has no respect for mathematicians, especially when he does not understand them. And yet, for every single point of special relativity that supposedly made Einstein the greatest physicist, Poincare said the same thing, and published it earlier and better. I think that it is obvious that Einstein plagiarized Lorentz and Poincare, but whether he did or not, it is completely crazy not to give more credit to Lorentz and Poincare.


    Tuesday, Oct 06, 2009
     
    Early books on relativity
    The great mathematical physicists Max Born and Wolfgang Pauli wrote early books on relativity, so I wondered what they said about Poincare. Pauli's book is partially available from Google Books.

    Born credits Einstein for everything, but he later admitted that it is "possible" that Poincare had all of special relativity before Einstein.

    Pauli correctly credits Poincare for the principle of relativity, and for proving the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations in 1905. He also credits Lorentz for proving most of the invariance in 1904, but says that Einstein did not know about either of these papers when he wrote his own 1905 paper. But Pauli is wrong about that. While Einstein denied knowing about that 1904 paper, he actually wrote and published a review of it in early 1905, according to Logunov.

    Pauli does not accusing Poincare of misunderstanding the aether, or local time, as some Einstein fans do. Pauli does argue that Einstein had a pedagogically better understanding of the problem. The reason seems to be that covariance is so important that it should be proved from as few assumptions as possible. Pauli says that he will do that in the next few pages.

    Pauli then explains special relativity in terms of the relativity principle, constancy of the speed of light, Einstein simultaneity, and the Lorentz metric. But Pauli does not seem to realize that Poincare was 3 to 7 years ahead of Einstein on all of these points. Pauli only seems to know about Poincare's 1905 paper. Even so, it is strange because Poincare's 1905 paper has the Lorentz metric, but Einstein's 1905 paper does not. Pauli does credit Poincare with the Lorentz metric in connection with gravity and general relativity. And Pauli also credits Poincare with being the first with the "Lorentz group".

    It is possible that Born and Pauli are responsible for some mistakes in the history of special relativity that got replicated in later textbooks, such as Feynman's.


    Monday, Oct 05, 2009
     
    Typical idiot historian on credit for Relativity
    Arthur I. Miller wrote in his 1994 paper:
    What Albert Einstein and Henri Poincare accomplished in 1905 continues to fascinate historians and philosophers of science. Everyone agrees that Einstein and Poincare confronted the same empirical data for which they formulated identical mathematical formalisms. Most scholars agree that whereas Einstein interpreted the mathematics as a theory of relativity, Poincare considered it as an improved version of H. A. Lorentz's theory of the electron. Others contend that both men arrived at the special theory of relativity and, consequently, Poincare ought to share the accolades with Einstein.
    So Poincare and Einstein discovered the same theory, with the main difference being that Poincare gave due credit to prior work.

    Miller goes on to conclude:

    Although it turns out that the affect of Poincare on Einstein might have been substantial, the honors for special relativity go to Einstein, alone.
    So maybe Einstein stole the theory, but he gets all the credit anyway!

    I recapitulate. Lorentz publishes a new theory explaining some electromagnetic anomalies. Poincare reads Lorentz, and publishes a new theory citing Lorentz. Einstein reads Lorentz and Poincare, publishes a theory identical to Poincare's, fails to cite either Lorentz or Poincare, and gets all the credit!

    Miller's argument seems to be that, since Poincare presented his theory as an improvement of Lorentz's, Poincare should not get credit for doing something new. But because Einstein plagiarized Lorentz and Poincare and pretended that it was his own work, Einstein should be the one credited with a new theory.

    There is no need to take my word for any of this. Just look at the arguments given by the Einstein fans, and notice that they do not even make any sense. Just look at what the actual facts about who did what when, and ignore the illogical conclusions.


    Sunday, Oct 04, 2009
     
    Poincare explained relativistic mass first
    Somebody cited this as evidence that Einstein's special relativity was superior to Lorentz's and Poincare's:
    To give just one example, we may note that prior to the advent of special relativity the experimental results of Kaufmann and others involving the variation of an electron’s mass with velocity were thought to imply that all of the electron’s mass must be electromagnetic in origin, whereas Einstein’s kinematics revealed that all mass – regardless of its origin – would necessarily be affected by velocity in the same way.
    Here is what Einstein says in his famous 1905 paper. He discusses mass in section 10, which starts:
    Let there be in motion in an electromagnetic field an electrically charged particle (in the sequel called an ``electron''), for the law of motion of which we assume as follows:--
    So he is talking about electromagnetism. He does not do the derivation in sections 1-5, which are devoted to "kinematics", independent of electromagnetism.

    He does say:

    With a different definition of force and acceleration we should naturally obtain other values for the masses. This shows us that in comparing different theories of the motion of the electron we must proceed very cautiously.

    We remark that these results as to the mass are also valid for ponderable material points, because a ponderable material point can be made into an electron (in our sense of the word) by the addition of an electric charge, no matter how small.

    But he continues to talk about electromagnetism only for the rest of the section.

    But Poincare had already addressed the issue directly and correctly in his 1904 St. Louis speech the previous year:

    Now, the calculations of Abraham and the experiments of Kaufmann have shown that the mechanical mass properly so called is nothing, and that the mass of the electrons, at least of the negative electrons, is purely of electrodynamic origin. This is what compels us to change our definition of mass; we can no longer distinguish between the mechanical mass and the electrodynamic mass, because then the first would have to vanish; there is no other mass than the electrodynamic inertia; but in this case, the mass can no longer be constant; it increases with the velocity; and indeed it depends on the direction, and a body having a considerable velocity will not oppose the same inertia to forces tending to turn it off its path that it opposes to those tending to accelerate or retard its motion.

    There is indeed another resource: the ultimate elements of bodies are electrons, some with a negative charge, others with a positive charge. It is understood that the negative electrons have no mass; but the positive electrons, from what little is known of them, would seem to be much larger. They perhaps have besides their electrodynamic mass a true mechanical mass. The real mass of a body would then be the sum of the mechanical masses of its positive electrons, the negative electrons would not count; the mass defined in this way might still be constant.

    Alas, this resource is also denied. Let us recall what we said concerning the principle of relativity and the efforts made to save it. And it is not only a principle that is to be saved; the indubitable results of Michelson's experiments are involved. And so, as was above seen, Lorentz, to account for these results, was obliged to suppose that all forces, whatever their origin, are reduced in the same ratio in a medium having a uniform translatory motion. But that is not sufficient; it is not enough that this should take place for the real forces, it must also be the same in the case of the forces of inertia; it is necessary, therefore--so he says--that the masses of all particles be influenced by a translation in the same degree as the electromagnetic masses of the electrons.

    Hence, the mechanical masses must vary according to the same laws as the electrodynamic; they can then not be constant.

    As you can see, Poincare was way ahead of Einstein, and Einstein seems to have missed the main point.

    I also post this to point out that Poincare was not just a mathematician who corrected Lorentz's mathematical errors without understanding the physics, while Einstein understood the physics. In the above, he addresses the physics more directly than Einstein, and has the guts to say that the other physicists' theory was wrong.


    Saturday, Oct 03, 2009
     
    Comparing Poincare-Einstein priority
    It is sometimes argued that Poincare's and Einstein's special relativity theories should be considered independent discoveries, because their big 1905 papers were nearly simultaneous.

    Einstein's famous paper was received on June 30 and published in German in Sept. 1905. Poincare's paper was published in two parts and in French. The 5-page summary was delivered at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris on June 5, 1905. The detailed 48-page second part was received in final form on July 23, printed on Dec. 14, and published on Jan. 1906.

    While it is possible that Einstein got Poincare's whole 1905 theory by attending that Paris meeting and using that to write his own famous 1905 paper, I am not going to assume that. Einstein did not speak French very well, and he was living in Bern, Switzerland at the time.

    Here is what we do know. Einstein's 1905 paper did not include any references. He only mentioned Lorentz's work and conversations with he friend Besso. Einstein spent the rest of his life denying that he had read any of Lorentz's or Poincare's papers, except for Lorentz's 1895 paper on the approximate invariance of Maxwell's equations under what are now called Lorentz transformations (after Poincare).

    We know that Einstein was lying, because he regularly wrotes reviews for a journal that published a review of Lorentz's 1904 paper showing the exact invariance. (Logunov documented this.) Also, Poincare's 1902 book, "Science and Hypothesis", explained what he called the Relativity Principle. It was translated into German in 1904, and read by a Einstein's book club. Einstein's friends say that he was fascinated by the book. We also know that Einstein mentioned Poincare's peculiar term cosmic pressure in a 1919 letter to Hilbert, and later denied seeing the paper that used that term.

    So we cannot trust Einstein's word. Maybe he attended that Paris meeting. Maybe his friend Besso did. Maybe Besso got the theory from someone who did attend. Maybe Besso talked to Lorentz or a colleague or Lorentz, as Poincare was corresponding privately with Lorentz.

    But the argument for Poincare's priority is not just based on his announcing the results three weeks ahead of Einstein. Poincare's 1905 paper was much more advanced than Einstein's, and included ideas that Einstein did not get until years later. Most of Einstein's theory had been published by Lorentz and Einstein years earlier. Poincare's priority is measured in years, not weeks.

    I have assembled a list of dates for the major elements of special relativity. Some of the dates are a little fuzzy because the concepts improved over time. Eg, the early work on Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations only used approximations for the transformations and the invariance. Also, it ignores the work of others. Minkowski improved the notion of 4-vectors, and Planck improved the understanding of E = mc2. And Lorentz had some of these ideas before Poincare or Einstein.

    Discovery Poincare Einstein
    Speed of light is constant for all observers 1898 1905
    Method for synchronizing clocks, simultaneity paradox 1898, 1900 1905
    Used the term Relativity 1902 1908
    Indistinguishibility of inertial frames 1902 1905
    Lorentz contraction, time dilation 1900 1905
    Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations 1900, 1905 1905
    E = m c2 1900 1905
    Relativistic mass is not electromagnetic 1904 1905
    Aether is superfluous to relativity 1902 1905
    Time is fourth dimension, 4-vectors 1905 1907
    Metric structure of spacetime 1905 1908
    Spacetime is homogeneous and isotropic 1905 1908
    Relativity requires gravity waves 1905 1912?
    Group structure of spacetime symmetries 1905 1908?
    curved space in mechanics 1902 1912

    Einstein did, of course, eventually come around to Poincare's view of the metric struction of spacetime, as Poincare's 1905 view is essential for gravity and general relativity. But it is absent from Einstein's 1905 paper.

    The inescapable conclusion is that credit for special relativity should goto Poincare and Lorentz, not Einstein. Einstein contributed nothing, except an alternate explanation of what had already been done.


    Friday, Oct 02, 2009
     
    Wasting some of our best minds on lawyering
    Justice Antonin Scalia said:
    I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

    I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

    ... I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.

    Simple answer: money. There is more money in lawyering that in producing things.

    Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
     
    Study: Man did not evolve from apes
    UPI reports:
    KENT, Ohio, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- A U.S. biological anthropologist says he's determined humans did not evolve from apes, but, rather, apes evolved from humans.

    Kent State University Professor C. Owen Lovejoy, who specializes in the study of human origins, said his findings came from a study of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what now is Ethiopia.

    "People often think we evolved from apes, but no, apes in many ways evolved from us," Lovejoy said. "It has been a popular idea to think humans are modified chimpanzees. From studying Ardipithecus ramidus, or 'Ardi' (a partial female skeleton) we learn that we cannot understand or model human evolution from chimps and gorillas."

    You can find more info here, but I have not yet seen the paper to be published. I have just a couple of preliminary observations.

    Nobody ever finds an ape fossil, because no one cares about ape fossils. You have to claim that your fossil is a hominid to get attention. My guess is that this fossil is just another ape that someone is pretending to be a human ancestor.

    One of the premises seems to be that bipedality is the essence of humanity. I think that is ridiculous. There were probably bipedal apes that were not human ancestors.

     
    Historians badmouth Poincare
    An Einstein biographer wrote:
    In 1905 Einstein and Poincare stated independently and almost simultaneously (within a matter of weeks) the group properties of Lorentz transformations and the addition theorem of velocities. Yet, both Lorentz and Poincare missed discovering special relativity; they were too deeply steeped in considerations of dynamics. Only Einstein saw the crucial new point; the dynamic ether must be abandoned in favour of a new kinematics based on two new postulates. Only he saw that the Lorentz transformations, and hence the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, can be derived from kinematic arguments. Lorentz acknowledged this and developed a firm grasp of special relativity, but even after 1905 never quite gave up either the ether or his reservations concerning the velocity of light as an ultimate velocity. In all his life, Poincare never understood the basis of special relativity. [Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord, biography of Albert Einstein, 1984, p. 21]
    Normally I would ignore someone like Pais as a kook, but he wrote a leading biography. Somehow Poincare was smart enough to independently invent Einstein's greatest theory, but not smart enough to understand it.

    Special relativity is taught to bright freshmen college students. It is not that complicated. Poincare was one of the smartest mathematicians alive. If Poincare did not understand something, then it is very unlikely that this joker Pais would understand it.

    In fact Poincare's explanation of special relativity is on a higher level than Einstein. Poincare had concepts that Einstein did not understand. It is generally recognized that Poincare was a much smarter mathematician than Einstein.

    I say Poincare's theory was better because he had simultaneity, Lorentz invariance, E=mc2, 4-vectors, and Lorentz metrics all several years ahead of Einstein. If Pais thinks that Einstein's version of special relativity were superior, you would think that he could point to some superior aspect. He cannot.

    All Pais can say is that Einstein derived the Lorentz transformation in a manner different from the ways that Lorentz and Poincare did. Lorentz derived it from electromagnetic theory, Poincare derived it from the structure of spacetime, and then Einstein derived it from his "kinematic" postulates. Einstein's derivation wasn't even correct, as extra postulates are needed.


    Wednesday, Sep 30, 2009
     
    Nobel Prizes for Relativity
    If you are asking the question of who should be credited for some 20th century Physics breakthru, you can consult the Nobel Prize record. So who got the prize for Relativity?

    Einstein got the prize in 1921 after he had become world-famous for relativity, but the citation did not mention relativity. It appears that there was substantial resistance to giving Einstein a prize for relativity because some people said that Einstein was not the inventor, and because some preferred to give prizes for more empirical work. However it is fair to say that Einstein's fame over relativity theory was a huge factor in him getting the prize.

    Prizes were also given to Dirac in 1933 and Hulse and Taylor in 1993 for work in relativity.

    What I don't know is whether relativity was a factor in Lorentz getting the prize in 1902. The citation was "in recognition of the extraordinary service they rendered by their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena". Wikipedia says:

    In his recommendation of Lorentz for the Nobel Prize in 1902, Poincaré argued that Lorentz has convincingly explained the negative outcome of the aether-drift experiments by inventing the "diminished time", i.e. that two events at different place could appear as simultaneous, although they are not simultaneous in reality.
    Lorentz's theory of "diminished time" was perhaps the most startling prediction of special relativity. It is the idea that moving clocks slow down. Poincare credited Lorentz for the idea in 1904 and said, "The most ingenious idea has been that of local time." Einstein first published the idea in 1905.

    I think that it is possible that the Nobel committee did not want to give the prize to Einstein for his 1905 work on relativity because they thought that they had already given the prize for those ideas in 1902.

    No one ever considered giving Einstein another prize for relativity after 1921, even tho the 1921 citation did not mention relativity. People would have said that he got his prize, and that his relativity reputation contributed to that prize even if it wasn't mentioned, and therefore there is no reason to give him another prize. It seems to me that the same could be true about Lorentz.


    Tuesday, Sep 29, 2009
     
    Non-mathematicians on Poincare
    Henri Poincaré was primarily a mathematician, not a physicist, and the Einstein fans are usually non-mathematicians who misunderstand basic math terminology and methods.

    Arthur I. Miller complains

    As we might expect, to the end of his life Poincare maintained the necessity of an ether in electromagnetic theory. If he had not then we may well have expected him to be a convert to Einstein's special relativity. That Poincare continued to take for granted the existence of the ether is well demonstrated by the fact that in a 1912 lecture "Relations Between Matter and Ether," the ether is nowhere mentioned.
    No, I don't think that Poincare ever maintained the necessity of an ether in electromagnetic theory. Miller's proof of this is that Poincare gave a lecture without mentioning the aether? The argument does not even make any sense.

    Miller goes on:

    Moreover, Poincare commences a series of lectures presented in July 1912, "La Dynamique de l'Electron,' with the statement: "Let us assume an immobile ether. .. ".
    Math lectures start with statements like that all the time. It does not mean that an immobile aether is physically observable, or that it is necessary for electromagnetism. Poincare always said that the aether was undetectable and unnecessary.

    If mentioning the aether means that Poincare did not understand Special Relativity, then Einstein didn't understand it either, as he argued for an aether in 1920.

    In his 1902 book, Science and Hypothesis, Poincare wrote:

    Does our aether actually exist? We know the origin of our belief in the aether. If light takes several years to reach us from a distant star, it is no longer on the star, nor is it on the earth. It must be somewhere, and supported, so to speak, by some material agency.
    It seems to me that Poincare is defining the aether to be whatever medium transmits light from the stars to us. You might say that no medium is needed because light can be transmitted thru a vacuum. But according to our best theory of light, quantum electrodynamics, light never goes thru empty space. It goes thru some sort of quantum vacuum state that actually includes a sea of virtual particles. Poincare didn't know that in 1902, but it is still reasonable to define the aether as whatever transmits light, and then investigate whether the aether is observable or has any observable properties.

    The word aether was also used to describe the frame of reference in which Maxwell's equations were written. Mathematicians later figured out how to write the equations without choosing a frame, but they were always written in terms of a chosen frame in Poincare's lifetime.

    To a mathematician, there is nothing the slightest bit unusual or unorthodox in defining a mathematical construct that may or may not have physical significance. Poincare sometimes used the aether in the same way that Einstein used the term "stationary system" in his famous 1905 paper.


    Thursday, Sep 24, 2009
     
    Marxists on Einstein
    The folks who are really preoccupied with revolutions in history are the Marxists. I don't know much about Marxism, but Marxist philosophy is based on a dialectical and materialist concept of history, The critique of capitalism, and a theory of revolution. They even like revolutions in science, and the Marxists are big fans of Einstein because they perceive him as a revolutionary. Eg, this Marxist page says:
    In the last century, Marxists debated the revolutionary work of Albert Einstein and the Big Bang theory of the universe, with its origins in the observations of Edwin Hubble. Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Big Bang theory combined to overturn every last remnant of the old Newtonian science, which was saturated with the belief in the "absolute immutability of nature", as Engels emphasises. It is these two revolutionary theories, the theory of relativity and the Big Bang, ...

    For two-and-a-half millennia, many philosophers have supported the view that infinity is an imaginary concept which has no actual existence. Hegel arrived at a dialectical proposition which can be expressed like this: you can always imagine an unending series of galaxies following one after another, but in concrete reality, at a certain point, quantity turns into quality and a new phenomenon emerges.

    I don't even know what this means, or if the Marxists have any political influence. But there are a lot of academics who subscribe to a Marxist revolutionary view of science history. Most of them do. According to Wikipedia, only a minority don't:
    In the history of ideas, the continuity thesis is the hypothesis that there was no radical discontinuity between the intellectual development of the Middle Ages and the developments in the Renaissance and early modern period. Thus the idea of an intellectual or scientific revolution following the Renaissance is —- according to the continuity thesis —- a myth. ... Despite the many points that have been brought up by proponents of the continuity thesis, a majority of scholars still support the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution occurring in the 16th and 17th centuries ...
    The academics usually also subscribe to the closely related Paradigm Shift theory of scientific revolutions. (A notable dissent is this Steven Weinberg essay, but he is the exception that proves the rule.)

    I agree with the continuity thesis. The invention of the printing press certainly radically improved the dissemination of knowledge, but I think that science had been progressing continually for thousands of years. But I am in the minority and, as the above suggests, no set of facts will convince the Marxists and other revolutionaries.

    Apparently the Marxists idolize Einstein as a revolutionary scientist, but not Poincare. They like Einstein's socialist political views also.

    I am not sure how much this Marxist/revolutionist view accounts for Einstein's fame, but nearly all of Einstein's fans will make a point of saying that Einstein was a revolutionary while his contemporaries (Lorentz, Poincare, Planck) were not. Such views seem to be entirely based on misunderstandings, as the work of those contemporaries was much more original than Einstein's.


    Wednesday, Sep 23, 2009
     
    Relativity and the Copernican Revolution
    The Einstein fans are always talking about how his 1905 papers created a revolution in physics and even in human thought. I call such people paradigm shifters. As early as 1909, Max Planck already compared the discovery of special relativity to the Copernican Revolution in 1543. Here is a typical philosophical essay discussing the analogy.

    Kevin Brown uses this analogy to explain why Poincare is not credited with special relativity, even tho he made all the breakthrus. He says:

    In a sense, the failure of Poincare to found the modern theory of relativity was not due to a lack of discernment on his part (he clearly recognized the Lorentz group of space and time transformations), but rather to an excess of discernment and philosophical sophistication, preventing him from subscribing to the young patent examiner's inspired but perhaps slightly naive enthusiasm for the symmetrical interpretation, which is, after all, only one of infinitely many possibilities. Poincare recognized too well the extent to which our physical models are both conventional and provisional. In retrospect, Poincare's scruples have the appearance of someone arguing that we could just as well regard the Earth rather than the Sun as the center of the solar system, i.e., his reservations were (and are) technically valid, but in some sense misguided.
    Brown goes on to explain:
    The novelty of Einstein’s interpretation was in the idea that the evident relativity of all physical phenomena transcended the properties or behavior of any substance (aether), and was instead a consequence of the structure of space and time.
    So Brown is saying that Poincare and Einstein created essentially identical theories, and correctly understood what they were doing, but they differed on an obscure philosophical point. They both give the exact same formulas for the relations between space and time, and they both give dynamical theories that have all the same physical consequences. The difference is that Einstein attributed space-time relations to some unseen structure to space and time, while Poincare attributed it to some undetectable aether.

    Got that? I don't. In modern terminology, Relativity is characterized by spacetime being a pseudo-riemannian manifold. As I read Poincare and Einstein, I think that Poincare is much closer to that concept than Einstein. Poincare clearly describes the symmetry group action, the pseudo-riemannian (Lorentz) metric, and uses 4-vectors in his 1905 paper. Einstein doesn't have any of that until many years later. Einstein (with co-author Laub) even wrote a paper in 1908 where he rejected the idea of using 4-vectors in a 4-dimensional spacetime.

    Even if Brown is right, it means that Poincare invented all of special relativity, and Einstein reformulated it with some slightly different terminology. Einstein gets the credit, according to him, in the same way that the astronomy of the solar system is credited to Copernicus, and not Ptolemy. Poincare is somehow correct and misguided at the same time, he says. This is really wacky. It is like rejecting a scientific result because the author prays to the wrong God.

    The Einstein fans are going to be disappointed to learn that Poincare discovered special Relativity, and Einstein's novelty was to replace the term "aether" with "stationary system".

    It turns out that Poincare was the first to make this analogy between the discoveries of relativity and heliocentrism. His big 1905 paper on special relativity discusses Lorentz's definition of the equality of two lengths, and says:

    Maybe it would suffice to give up this definition, to turn upside down the theory of Lorentz as completely as the Ptolemaic system has been turned upside down by Copernicus. If this happens one day, this will not mean that the efforts of Lorentz had been vain; because, whatever one might think, Ptolemy has not been useless to Copernicus.
    He is saying that his new theory of special relativity is a new point of view towards spacetime, and differs from the Lorentz aether theory in a way that is analogous to Copernican theory having a different point of view from Ptolemaic theory.

    Ptolemaic and Copernican theory had similar observational consequences, and the Lorentz aether theory and special relativity theory also have similar observational consequences.

    Poincare is not saying this to brag about the great significance of his accomplishment; he saying it to credit Lorentz for producing the forerunner theory.

    This is heresy to the Einsteinians. They will babble at great length about how Einstein proved that there was no aether, and that his relativity is a great and profound truth on the level of Copernicus discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Ptolemy and Lorentz were dead wrong, they'll say, and their work was an obstruction to scientific progress.

    They view is crazy. It is precisely because of relativity theory that 20th century physics considers the Copernican theory no more true than the Ptolemaic theory. Relativity teaches that all coordinates frames are valid, and the laws of physics are the same in each, when properly expressed.

    Maybe this gives another reason people have credited Einstein instead of Poincare. They subscribe to a philosophy that says that the essence of science is to knock man off his pedestal. Those folks idolize Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. Poincare does not fit the pattern because he was not claiming to have found a radical new discovery based on some untestable hypothesis.

    The paradigm shifters don't really believe in scientific progress in the sense of better understanding the world. They have some sort of Marxist belief in analyzing history thru revolutions. Each revolution is some sort of political and social shift to a different paradigm, but not a rational switch to a theory that is demonstrably superior. The new theory must be one that has adherents who dogmaticly assert faith in its truth, but does not necessarily have any experiment that proves it to be true. And if the new theory devalues Man, so much the better.

    Poincare would have thought this philosophy to be nonsense. He presented relativity as an incremental improvement of existing theories by Newton, Maxwell, and Lorentz. He acknowledged that experiment could prove the theory wrong. He was in his 50s and too old to be considered a revolutionary.

    Einstein was different. He had the potential to be an icon and a cult hero. By pretending to have done radical new work, he was happy to play the role of someone leading a revolution in physics.

    I am not sure Einstein ever even intended to deny the aether. His 1905 paper does not say that there is no aether. It only says that the aether is superfluous to his derivation. But he must have quickly figured out that Poincare had scooped him with the theory, and he would have to distinguish himself somehow. Poincare was associated with the aether because Lorentz used the aether and Poincare credited Lorentz. Einstein could deny the aether and be different.

    The aether is undetectable anyway in both Poincare's and Einstein's version of Relativity, so you would think that no one would pay much attention to it. But the aether is a metaphor for God. By denying the aether, Einstein became an inconoclast.

    You may think that this is a farfetched explanation for idolizing Einstein. I am not sure I believe it myself. But the majority of academic philosophers of science really are paradigm shifters as I have described here. I don't think that most scientists are, but they sit quietly while others spout this nonsense.

    Most people who credit Einstein today are just reciting what they learned in their textbooks and on the Discovery Channel. Those who have carefully studied Poincare and Einstein either say that Poincare was the true inventor of Special Relativity, or they say that Poincare and Einstein discovered essentially the same thing, but that Einstein boldly declared that there was no aether while Poincare merely said that the aether was perfectly undetectable if it even exists. Somehow that difference allows them to say that Einstein was the greatest genius of all time, and Poincare was just a misguided and clueless dope. There must be some reason why taking sides on such an abstract, unscientific, and untestable hypothesis would excite people so much. I am becoming convince that science has been infected with a truly horrible philosphy.


    Tuesday, Sep 22, 2009
     
    Wikipedia on Einstein
    I tried to correct some of the Wikipedia pages on Relativity, but the Einstein fans have reverted most of my edits.

    Wikipedia philosophy is to prefer secondary sources over primary sources, and the majority of historians credit Einstein for Special Relativity. According to the historians, the editors argue, Poincare published all the equations for Relativity but he never really understood them. The proof that he never understood them was that he continued to write about apparent time and absolute time, even after Einstein proved these concepts wrong in 1905.

    I challenged the Wikipedia editors to show me where Poincare used these terms, and they could only find where he used "local time", "apparent mass", and similar terms.

    Here is what Poincare said in his popular 1902 book:

    There is no absolute time. To say that two durations are equal is an assertion which in and of itself has no meaning, and can acquire one only by convention.
    These seems clear to me, and correct. Poincare did favor the term "local time". His famous 1904 lecture said:
    The most ingenious idea has been that of local time.
    The only mention of "real time" is later:
    The watches adjusted in that manner do not mark, therefore, the true time; they mark what one may call the local time, so that one of them goes slow on the other.
    The WP editors say that this proves that Poincare believed in the false concept of real time. I say the opposite. The Poincare sentence says that watches measure local time and not true time. The sentence does not say anything about whether true time exists. If I say, "the animal in the picture is a gorilla and not a bigfoot", then the statement says nothing about whether bigfoot exists. If anything, it is a denial of evidence for bigfoot.

    The editors say that this sentence proves that Poincare believed in the false concept of "apparent velocity":

    Nor for an observer carried along himself in a translation he did not suspect could any apparent velocity surpass that of light; there would then be a contradiction, if we recall that this observer would not use the same clocks as a fixed observer, but, indeed, clocks marking "local time”.
    Again, I say that they are misreading Poincare. The sentence does not endorse any concept of "apparent velocity" that is different from ordinary velocity. What he is saying here is that no observer could measure a velocity that is faster than the speed of light. He uses the word "apparent" to mean that nothing can appear to an observer as going faster than light. This is all rock-solid correct relativity.

    The criticism of Poincare for using the terms "apparent mass" and "apparent inertia" is also strange. I don't think that there is agreement even today about what is the best terminology, and people continue to use terms like "relativistic mass" and "rest mass". Some people say that mass increases with velocity, and some don't. They agree on the physics, but not the terminology. See this John Baez essay for an explanation.

    It is surprising that the Einstein fans cannot find more actual mistakes in Poincare's papers. Pioneering work is nearly always sloppy. There is a whole book on mistakes in Einstein's papers. But the alleged Poincare mistakes are completely correct statements.

    In spite of the bias, the Wikipedia articles on Relativity are quite good. For material related to my recent postings, see History of special relativity and Relativity priority dispute.


    Monday, Sep 21, 2009
     
    Olivier Darrigol on Einstein
    One of the stranger aspects of the history of special relativity is that many people concede Poincare developed the theory before Einstein, and that Einstein almost certainly got the key concepts from Poincare, but that Einstein should get the credit for inventing the theory anyway for various bizarre reasons. One of those is Olivier Darrigol who wrote The Mystery of the Einstein–Poincaré Connection in 2004 and The Genesis of the Theory of Relativity in 2005.

    Darrigol gives Einstein the major credit:

    Most of the components of Einstein's paper appeared in others' anterior works on the electrodynamics of moving bodies. ... None of them fully understood the physical implications of these transformations. It all was Einstein's unique feat. [Darrigol, 2005]
    He concedes that Poincare had all those components, and published them first:
    By 1905 Poincaré's and Einstein's reflections on the electrodynamics of moving bodies led them to postulate the universal validity of the relativity principle, according to which the outcome of any conceivable experiment is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which it is performed. In particular, they both assumed that the velocity of light measured in different inertial frames was the same. They further argued that the space and time measured by observers belonging to different inertial systems were related to each other through the Lorentz transformations. They both recognized that the Maxwell-Lorentz equations of electrodynamics were left invariant by these transformations. They both required that every law of physics should be invariant under these transformations. They both gave the relativistic laws of motion. They both recognized that the relativity principle and the energy principle led to paradoxes when conjointly applied to radiation processes. On several points - namely, the relativity principle, the physical interpretation of Lorentz's transformations (to first order), and the radiation paradoxes - Poincaré's relevant publications antedated Einstein's relativity paper of 1905 by at least five years, and his suggestions were radically new when they first appeared. On the remaining points, publication was nearly simultaneous. [Darrigol, 2004]
    So somehow Poincare did all that, and did not understand what he was doing? Bizarre.

    Darrigol explains that Poincare and Einstein presented their theories differently, but they were equivalent:

    These differences between the two theories are sometimes regarded as implying different observable predictions even within the domain of electromagnetism and optics. In reality, there is no such disagreement, for Poincaré’s ether is by assumption perfectly undetectable, and every deduction made in Einstein’s theory can be translated into a deduction in Poincaré’s theory ...
    He does not have the nerve to accuse Einstein of plagiarism, in spite of the circumstantial evidence:
    In sum, then, Einstein could have borrowed the relativity principle, the definition of simultaneity, the physical interpretation of the Lorentz transformations, and the radiation paradoxes from Poincaré. ... The wisest attitude might be to leave the coincidence of Poincaré’s and Einstein’s breakthroughs unexplained, ...
    To argue that there is a significant difference between Poincare's and Einstein's versions of relativity, Darrigol recites a Poincare synchronization argument, and then says that the reasoning is "very odd" because it uses the local time of one frame to do a computation in another frame. Darrigol says that this sort of computation is a "mathematical fiction", concludes:
    This means that the conceptual basis of Poincare's theory is not compatible with Einstein's, even though both theories are internally consistent and have the same empirical predictions (for the electrodynamics of moving bodies).

    [Footnote] The empirical equivalence of the two theories simply results from the fact that any valid reasoning of Einstein's theory can be translated into a valid reasoning of Poincare's theory by arbitrarily calling the time, space, and fields measured in one given frame the true ones, and calling all other determinations apparent.

    Darrigol is arguing that Poincare developed a complete theory of special relativity that could do everything that Einstein's theory could, and did it before Einstein, but Einstein should get the credit because Poincare sometimes gave a mathematical argument that seems odd to physicists.

    I think that Darrigol is wrong, and that Poincare's mixed use of coordinates is no different from what Einstein did in his papers. Einstein also mixed coordinates, such as comparing time in one frame to another. But let us suppose that Darrigol is right, and that Poincare used a mathematical argument that seems odd to physicists, and that a step in that argument does not have a direct physical interpretation. Why would that be a bad thing? How is that evidence that Poincare did not understand what he was doing? Why should that be used to deny Poincare credit for what he did?

    Writers on this subject seem to have a peculiar anti-Mathematics bias. Poincare gives a mathematically correct argument for something, and people say that it shows his lack of understanding. Einstein gives mathematically incorrect arguments, and people say he is the greatest genius who ever lived.

    To understand this issue of who should get credit for special relativity, you do not have to read the original papers. Just read the papers of those who have and who give ridiculously strained arguments in favor of Einstein, such Miller below. The arguments do not pass the simplest critical analysis. They reveal the authors to have adopted bizarre philosophies of science in order to justify worshipping their idol Einstein. If you read Darrigol for his facts, and skip his opinions, you get a much clearer picture.


    Sunday, Sep 20, 2009
     
    Arthur I. Miller on Einstein
    A 2001 NY Times book review said:
    This Arthur I. Miller is the one who finally disposed of Edmund Whittaker's claim that Poincaré was the true discoverer of special relativity. His flagship of a book, ''Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity: Emergence (1905) and Early Interpretation (1905-1911),'' was escorted by a convoy of scholarly articles in journals favored by professional historians and philosophers of science.
    This is not the commie playwright who married Marilyn Monroe. (And Whittaker is not the Ed Whitacre who was an AT&T phone company executive until Pres. Barack Obama installed him as Chairman of General Motors.) This Miller is a historian and Einstein fan. Most of those who have actually looked at the record have concluded that all of the essential tenets of special relativity were published by Poincare before Einstein. It must be tough for someone who has spent many years idolizing Einstein to discover that Poincare was the real genius.

    Whittaker was a famous mathematician who wrote a 1953 history of Physics that credited Special Relativity to Poincare. So everything I am saying here is really old news, except that there has been a resurgence of interest in this issue in just the last ten years. A 2004 article says, "the last twenty years have brought significant progress in our understanding of Albert Einstein’s and Henri Poincaré’s contributions to relativity theory."

    I just got my hands on Miller's 1994 article on Why did Poincaré not formulate Special Relativity in 1905? Sure enough, it gives Einstein all the credit. It concludes:

    The verdict of archival and primary historical evidence is that Einstein, and not Poincare, is the discoverer of the special theory of relativity.
    The first thing that surprised me was that Miller rejects the idea that Poincare and Einstein discovered Relativity separately. Even tho Einstein denied knowledge of Poincare, the evidence is otherwise. Miller says:
    Poincare's La Science et l'Hypothese? which Einstein read in 1904: and Poincare's 1900 essay "La Theorie de la Reaction et la Theone de Lorentz",' which Einstein cited in 1906, could have influenced Einstein's thoughts on simultaneity and the characteristics of light pulses. ...

    The concept of an "event" is central to Einstein's analysis of time and simultaneity in 1905. In its larger sense, Einstein's event is similar to Poincare's, namely, a phenomenon occurring at a point in space and time measured relative to a reference system. Might Poincare's passage quoted above from La Science et l'Hypothese be the source for Einstein's use of the term "event," and for his focusing on the distant simultaneity of two events? The similarity between Poincare's and Einstein's conclusions on how to distinguish between local and distant simultaneity is astonishing.

    ... the important topic of what Einstein might have learned from Poincare's papers, particularly concerning the notion of events, distant simultaneity, the importance of attributing a physical interpretation to the local time, the structure of science, frontier issues in physics, and the physics of light pulses emitted from moving sources. This information may well have been significant to Einstein's formulation of the special theory of relativity.

    Okay, Miller does not quite accuse Einstein of plagiarism, but it seems clear that Einstein was substantially influenced by Poincare's theory, and Einstein tried his best to conceal that influence, at the least. According to others, Einstein got the whole theory special relativity from Poincare.

    Here are Miller's reasons for not crediting Poincare. They are really strange. You would think that he would find some aspect of special relativity that Einstein did and Poincare did not, but he does not. A Russian physicist named Logunov wrote a textbook on Henri Poincare and Relativity Theory, and he concludes that Poincare's theory is superior to Einstein's because Poincare has some great ideas that are absent from Einstein's papers. So Miller's reasons are:

    1. Einstein never wrote to Poincare, or expressed gratitude to Poincare, or engaged in debate with anyone who claimed that Poincare discovered Special Relativity.
    2. Poincare's 1900 relativity paper had much of the theory, but it had certain technical shortcomings that were not corrected until his 1905 papers.
    3. Poincare sought a more ambitious theory, including gravity, while Einstein was concerned with the electrodynamics of an electron.
    4. "Although worded similarly, the principles of relativity of Poincaré and Einstein differed in content and intent."
    5. "Poincaré never elevated the principle of relativity in the physical sciences to a convention, nor did he ever disavow the ether."
    6. Poincare ignored Einstein.
    Regarding items 1 and 6, this is just what you would expect from the personalities of Poincare and Einstein, if Einstein stole Poincare's ideas. If Einstein had done anything to recognize Poincare, it would have detracted from his own ego and fame.

    Regarding item 2, note that Poincare's 1905 papers still predated Einstein's relativity work.

    Regarding item 3, Poincare did indeed make some useful progress on the gravity problem, and was about 5 years ahead of Einstein on that subject. How this is a black mark against Poincare, I don't know.

    Regarding item 4, you can compare how they expressed the principle of relativity in my post below. Or read this, from Einstein's famous 1905 paper:

    Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the ``light medium,'' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate, ...
    As you can see, Poincare predated Einstein, Einstein read Poincare's works, and Einstein said nearly the same thing as Poincare without crediting Poincare.

    You might argue that this principle is much older, as even Isaac Newton said some similar things centuries earlier. So did Galileo, I think. But most physicists had abandoned it after Maxwell's electromagnetism for some simple reasons. A stationary electric charge causes an electric field but no magnetic field. A moving charge causes a magnetic field. Therefore it appears that the laws of Physics cannot be true in both frames, because there is a magnetic field in one and not the other. (We now know that magnetism is a relativistic effect.)

    Regarding item 5, Miller is really in strange territory. He uses the word "convention" to mean some physical principle that is so fundamental that we should believe it regardless of the physical evidence. As noted below, Poincare listed it as one of the 5 or 6 most fundamental principles in Physics. But there was someone named Kaufmann (and maybe someone else) who had claimed to have done an experiment disproving it, and Poincare conceded that the theory might have to be abandoned if Kaufmann turns out to be correct. It turned out that Kaufmann's experiment was flawed.

    Miller argues that Einstein was more of a believer in Poincare's relativity principle than Poincare himself, because Einstein was willing to believe it regardless of the physical evidence. Miller claims that Poincare's and Einstein's "ultimate goals" were different because of "Poincare's empirical bias".

    Remember that Poincare was the mathematician and Einstein was the physicist. Usually it is the physicist who has an empirical bias, not the mathematician. Miller is completely off base here.

    On the aether, Poincare said nearly the same thing as Einstein, and Poincare said it 5 years earlier, as I explain here, here, here, and here. I guess Poincare conceded the possibility that some future experiment might detect the aether, and Miller would say that Einstein's view was superior because he was so certain of his ideas that he did not admit the possibility that he might be proven wrong.

    If this were really a philosophical difference between Poincare and Einstein, then Poincare's view is surely the much more scientific view. The existence or non-existence of the aether is only a meaningful question to the extent that we can do some experiment to detect it. Any physical theory is subject to experimental testing.

    Poincare invented Special Relativity under the assumption that the aether was perfectly undetectable, and Einstein gave a derivation of the theory assuming that the aether was superfluous. Either way, neither of them depended on the aether, and neither supplied any proof that it does or does not exist.

    The modern view of the aether is that it is one of those anachronistic words like phlogiston. Phlogiston was a word for the stuff that burns in a fire. We now have a much more sophisticated understanding of the chemistry of combustion and oxidation, and no one talks about phlogiston, but it is still correct that there is stuff that burns in fire, whatever you want to call it.

    Likewise, there is an aether, whether you want to call it that or not. The famous physicist Paul Dirac, in a 1951 letter to Nature magazine, explained that quantum electrodynamics requires an aether. For electromagnetic properties of what seems like empty space, read about the Dirac sea and the Impedance of free space. (See also Zero-point energy, Vacuum energy, and Casimir effect.) The term aether could also be used for dark energy. quintessence, or CMB radiation, as explained below. If you asked me whether there is an aether, I would have to say that 20th century physics requires it, altho it is a little different from what people expected in 1900. Our concepts of atoms, light, gravity, and a lot of other things are different from what people had in 1900, so I don't see anything wrong with continuing to use the term aether.

    Here is another NY Times opinion from 2003, influenced by Miller:

    As a mathematician and astronomer, Poincaré helped invent chaos theory, Dr. Galison said, and as a philosopher and follower of the French Enlightenment he championed a scheme of decimalizing time.

    Among his noteworthy feats now is what he did not do: he did not invent relativity, even though he had some of the same ideas as Einstein, often in advance, and arrived, with the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz at a theory that was mathematically identical.

    The difference was that Poincaré refused to abandon the idea of the ether, the substance in which light waves supposedly vibrated and which presumably filled all space. The ether provided a definition of absolute rest, and of "true" time -- the time measured by a clock not moving relative to the ether. "He was truly a universal man; he was one step away from relativity," said Dr. Arthur Miller, a relativity historian at the University College London.

    Isn't it obvious how crazy this opinion is? Poincare is credited with inventing a theory that is mathematically equivalent to relativity, and doing it before Einstein, but there is always some sort of wacky claim that Poincare should not get credit for it.

    This is a bit like saying that China invented gunpowder, but it should not get credit because the Chinese were not Christians.

    No, it is more ridiculous than that. It is not just that Poincare is denied credit. Nearly every discussion of relativity goes out of its way to falsely give Einstein credit. And the comparisons to Poincare do not just give opinions; they made demonstrably false statements that anyone can check by looking at what Poincare and Einstein published. Furthermore, Einstein is not just credited; he is elevated into the world's greatest genius for (supposedly) discovering relativity. Poincare is ignored.

    There are lots of examples of people who get credit that they don't really deserve. But I have never heard of any case this extreme. I would have said that it is impossible for science to such a story so completely wrong.


    Saturday, Sep 19, 2009
     
    Why are we the naked ape?
    NewScientist reports:
    Right from the start of modern evolutionary science, why humans are hairless has been controversial. "No one supposes," wrote Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, "that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man: his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection."

    If not natural selection, then what? Despite his book's title, Darwin had little to say about human origins.

    The article says this is still an unsolved problem.
    One proposal which few considered worth examining came from Alister Hardy at the University of Oxford. His field was marine biology, and he had noted that human skin was not only naked but lined with a layer of fat, and that this was true of a number of aquatic mammals. His article (New Scientist, 17 March, 1960, p 642) asked simply: "Was Man more aquatic in the past?" But this was rejected out of hand, largely because the savannah theory was considered unchallengeable.

    Towards the end of the century, however, doubts were raised about the savannah theory, ... That proved bipedalism did not evolve on the savannah, ...

    It is funny how the aquatic ape hypothesis is rejected, even as mainstream theories get shot down. They take seriously this silly lice theory. even tho it does not really explain much.
    None of this affects Hardy's theory that humans lost their body hair during an aquatic interlude. But his theory claims to offer one explanation for a whole range of enigmatic human features: bipedality, hairlesslessness, fat layer, descended larynx, loss of olfaction, and so on. If it turns out that the big two - bipedality and nakedness - arose at roughly the same time, that might shift the balance of probability some little way toward Hardy.

    Only one thing is certain: the question is not going to go away.

    That's right, it won't go away. If I had to bet, I would bet on the aquatic ape hypothesis. It explains a lot. Even if it turns out to be wrong, we should demand a better theory. Unless some theory explains more, then it will not be convincing.

    Friday, Sep 18, 2009
     
    Einstein ignored prior relativity work
    Albert Einstein did not cite any sources in his famous 1905 papers, and there has long been speculation on how much he knew of Poincare work on Relativity. Einstein always refused to acknowledge that he knew any of it.

    Einstein was almost certainly lying. Poincare wrote about simultaneity of clocks and mass-energy equivalence in 1900, and Einstein's 1905 work seems like plagiarism. Einstein's friends say that he was fascinated by Poincare's 1902 book, Science and Hypothesis, where Poincare discusses his principle of relativity. Einstein had a job writing reviews of current physics, and could not have avoided relativity papers by Lorentz and Poincare.

    Poincare did not detail his relativity theory until two papers in 1905, and only the first one was published before Einstein's 1905 relativity. So it seems possible that Einstein did not know about those two papers before his own paper.

    I just ran across a translation of Einstein's 1909 review paper of his famous ideas on light and relativity. And it does not even cite Poincare! He says:

    This contradiction was chiefly eliminated by the pioneering work of H. A. Lorentz in 1895. ... Only one experiment seemed incompatible with Lorentz's theory, namely, the interference experiment of Michelson and Morley.
    This is really dishonest. Lorentz and Poincare had improved their theory a lot since 1895, and it was completely compatible with Michelson-Morley. Their theory was explicitly designed to explain Michelson-Morley, and there is no way Einstein could have misunderstood that.

    He goes on:

    This state of affairs was very unsatisfying. The only useful and fundamentally basic theory was that of Lorentz, which depended on a completely immobile ether. The Earth had to be seen as moving relative to this ether.
    Poincare explicitly said that the aether was perfectly undetectable, and that the concept would probably eventually be discarded. His theory did not depend on the aether at all.
    Michelson's experiment suggests the axiom that all phenomena obey the same laws relative to the Earth's reference frame or, more generally, relative to any reference frame in unaccelerated motion. For brevity, let us call this postulate the relativity principle.
    Einstein acts like he invented the relativity principle from Michelson's experiment. In fact, Poincare seems to have coined the term, and had been calling it that for years. Poincare wrote an essay on relativity as early as 1897. At the time, almost all the physicists believed that more accurate aether-drift experiments would prove the relativity principle wrong.

    It was Poincare, not Einstein, who wrote in 1905 about the invariance of x2 + y2 + z2 - c2t2. Einstein cites this invariance and then says, "This path leads to the so-called relativity theory." But again, no mention of Poincare.

    Some of Poincare's ideas about mathematical physics were presented at the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair. Here is an English translation, with another copy here. He lists the 5 or 6 most important physical laws, and one is:

    The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.
    He explains, in words, Lorentz contractions and time dilations, and how they are consistent with Maxwell's equations and the principle of relativity.

    This paper was published in a volume with many other distinguished lectures from the 1904 Worlds Fair, and it was considered one of the most important scientific books ever published.

    It seems clear to me that Einstein is so famous today because he stole the work of others, and did not give credit. Poincare should be considered the creator of Relativity Theory, with help from Lorentz.


    Wednesday, Sep 16, 2009
     
    Say "bogus" and get sued for libel in UK
    The NY Times reports on the Simon Singh case:
    He wrote, “The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.” ...

    The case at present hinges on the meaning of “bogus.” In a preliminary hearing, the judge ruled that bogus means deliberately dishonest, rather than a lack of evidence; he also ruled that Singh had written a statement of fact, not opinion, something that will make the case much harder to defend.

    Accusing chiropractors of using bogus treatments seems fair to me. If the treatment does not work, and I think that the chiropractors should know better, then I would call it bogus. It should not matter whether the chiropractors are deliberately dishonest.

    It is scary to get sued for calling something bogus, as I call things bogus all the time. But Singh really did go beyond that. He implied that the chiropractors know that the treatments are bogus and they do them anyway. He is going to have a hard time proving that.

    By itself, bogus does not mean deliberately dishonest. But Singh said "happily promotes bogus treatments". It is the word "happily" that suggests that the dishonesty is deliberate. It is possible that the chiropractors learned the treatments in chiropractor college, and accepted their validity on faith.


    Tuesday, Sep 15, 2009
     
    Dolphins with Conscious Metacognition
    Science news:
    ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2009) — J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist at the University at Buffalo who has conducted extensive studies in animal cognition, says there is growing evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition -- that is, they may share humans' ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind. ...

    He says "comparative psychologists have studied the question of whether or not non-human animals have knowledge of their own cognitive states by testing a dolphin, pigeons, rats, monkeys and apes using perception, memory and food-concealment paradigms. ...

    Smith recounts the original animal-metacognition experiment with Natua the dolphin. "When uncertain, the dolphin clearly hesitated and wavered between his two possible responses," he says, "but when certain, he swam toward his chosen response so fast that his bow wave would soak the researchers' electronic switches.

    "In sharp contrast," he says, "pigeons in several studies have so far not expressed any capacity for metacognition. In addition, several converging studies now show that capuchin monkeys barely express a capacity for metacognition.

    So hesitation is proof of a higher state of conscious awareness? Maybe the dolphin is just confused, and not showing conscious metacognition, whatever that is.

    Of course I am dubious whenever comparative psychologists discuss paradigms in non-human animals. Is that just a fancy phrase for doing animal research? They have combined three bogus phrases into one sentence.


    Friday, Sep 11, 2009
     
    Skeptical about climate change
    Physics World reports:
    As the scientific community has moved towards a stronger consensus that man made climate change is happening, the general public must have become less sceptical about the issue - right??

    Wrong.

    Well, wrong in the case of the British public, according to social scientist Lorraine Whitmarsh, who carried out separate opinion surveys in 2003 and 2008.

    Over this five year period, the number of respondents who believe that claims about the effects of climate change have been exaggerated has risen from 15 to 29 per cent.

    What’s more, over half of respondents in the latest survey feel that the media have been too “alarmist” in their reporting of the issue.

    Sceptics are more likely to be men, older people, rural dwellers and - perhaps surprisingly - higher earners.

    No, it is not that surprising. According to the best available climate data, the Earth's climate did heat up in the 1990s, and reached a peak in 1998. Since then, the temperature has been flat. The 2000s have not been any hotter than the 1990s. See this article Richard S. Lindzen.

    Maybe there is global warming, but the actual data has not matched the alarmist predictions. There is good reason for more people to be skeptical.


    Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009
     
    Ptolemy accused of fraud
    The NY Times, in an article about rivals making bogus claims to have discovered the North Pole a century ago, writes:
    Mr. Rawlins who is the editor of Dio, a science history journal, says he cannot think of any modern scientific fraud that has been so profitable and popular and endured a century.

    The only longer-lived example that comes to mind, he says, are the second-century astronomical “observations” of Ptolemy that were apparently derived not from the sky but from his theories.

    Ptolemy’s tables were used for more than 14 centuries, which seems like a hard record to beat.

    I had no idea Ptolemy was thought to be such a great fraud. The International Journal of Scientific History says:
    For centuries, astronomers have known that the famous ancient astrologer-mathematician Claudius Ptolemy faked observations and stole Hipparchos' star catalog — which is the main reason why the recent great modern star catalogs are named for Hipparchos (127 BC) & Tycho (1601), skipping Ptolemy (137 AD).

    Ptolemy ought by now to be notorious for having insisted that the Earth was the center of a tiny universe — in stubbornly uncomprehending (DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡7 §B1) opposition to his famous predecessor, the genuinely perceptive astronomer, Aristarchos of Samos (280 BC).

    Aristarchos was (among other credits) a heliocentric pioneer in promoting realization of the Earth's place in a huge universe. (Also, he evidently was aware of precession well before Hipparchos: DIO 11.2 [2003] ‡4 App.2.) He is not known to have been into astrology or theft. He bucked the establishment of his day, which threatened him for his new findings — an ancient dry run for the Galileo affair. Meanwhile Ptolemy stole, mutilated, and fabricated data in order to fake the truth of the geocentric astronomy of the governmental (Serapic) religion which employed him.

    Given their relative merits, one would think that the modern science establishment would admire Aristarchos and condemn Ptolemy. One would think.

    However, Ptolemy's massive (and often-valuable) Almajest has been a moneycow for certain modern academic cults.

    This journal documents its arguments, but the more mainstream science press has ignored them.

    I always assumed that Ptolemy's book was a compilations of the works of many others. So I am not sure it matters much that he fudged some of the figures. I guess that Rawlins is suggesting that if it were not for Ptolemy's poor behavior, Aristarchos's heliocentric model might have prevailed a millennium ahead of Copernicus.

     
    Dawkins writes book defending Evolution
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Prof. Richard Dawkins' new book is out, and you can read the first couple of chapters here. It is supposed to be the proof that evolution is a fact, just as his last book was supposed to be the proof that there is no God.

    The book opens:

    Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, ... Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses ... who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire.
    When he makes analogies like this, I wonder whether he has some sort of paranoid disorder. There are anti-evolutionists in our society, but they have no significant political or financial support. Every American public school and every major college teaches evolution. None of them teach that evolution is false. Govt and universities spend billions of dollars every year in pro-evolution research and education. They don't spend anything against evolution.

    A better analogy might be to conspiracy theorists who argue that we never landed on the Moon, or that the 9/11 attack was an inside job, or that space aliens have abducted humans and infiltrated our society. Yes, you can find polls showing people agreeing to these beliefs, but they are no significant political or financial support.

    Dawkins goes on:

    Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. ...

    Why, then, do we speak of “Darwin’s theory of evolution”, ...? Evolution is a theory in the same sense as the heliocentric theory. In neither case should the word “only” be used, as in “only a theory”.

    That is another wacky analogy. No one would say that heliocentric theory is a fact. No one with any understanding of 20th century physics anyway. That would mean that the Sun being at the center of the Universe would be a fact. But it is not even at the center of our galaxy, and it is not stationary with respect to the Big Bang radiation. Heliocentric theory remains a useful theory for calculating planetary orbits, but it is not fact.

    I am surprised that Dawkins does not start the book with a careful definition of what he means by evolution. If evolution is such a rock-solid fact, then it should be stated precisely so we know exactly what is indisputable. Maybe that comes later in the book, I don't know.

    My theory is that leftist-atheist-evolutionists like Dawkins deliberately do a sloppy job of explaining what evolution is, so they can trick you into believing more than what can really be proved.

    A related problem occurs with quantum mechanics. People will argue that quantum mechanic is true because it has been experimentally verified to great accuracy in many ways. And yet we cannot be sure of certain commonly stated implications of the theory because those aspects of the theory have not really been adequately tested. An example is quantum computers. Conventional wisdom is that the theory shows that they are possible, but we won't know for sure until somebody builds one. A lot of people have been working on it for the last 20 years.

    In Chapter 2, Dawkins presents a theory by someone named Coppinger about how dogs might have been domesticated from wolves. A related theory is in today's NY Times:

    A new study of dogs worldwide, the largest of its kind, suggests a different answer, one that any dog owner is bound to find repulsive: wolves may have first been domesticated for their meat. That is the proposal of a team of geneticists led by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

    Sampling the mitochondrial DNA of dogs worldwide, the team found that in every region of the world all dogs seem to belong to one lineage. That indicates a single domestication event. ...

    Dr. Savolainen said wolves probably domesticated themselves when they began scavenging around the garbage dumps at the first human settlements, a theory advocated by Ray Coppinger, a dog biologist at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. As the wolves became tamer, they would have been captured and bred. Given local traditions, Dr. Savolainen suggests, the wolves may have been bred for the table.

    Thus, dogs may have thus insinuated themselves into human life by means of garbage and dog meat, but they quickly assumed less demeaning roles. Once domesticated, they rapidly spread west from the eastern end of the Eurasian continent.

    This is all good stuff, but it is theory, not fact. There are other hypotheses about how dogs might have evolved from wolves. If it happened by humans breeding experiments, then that would be artificial selection, not Darwinian natural selection. I suppose that dogs make a good example because everyone knows dogs, but I am not sure that the example supports his thesis very well.

    Sunday, Sep 06, 2009
     
    US Govt endorses healthy foods
    The NY Times reports:
    A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation’s largest food manufacturers, is “designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.”

    The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including — to the surprise of many nutritionists — sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops. ...

    In joining Smart Choices, the companies agreed to discontinue their own labeling systems, Ms. Kennedy said.

    The official web site says:
    The new symbol will be allowed only on those products that meet strict science-based nutrition criteria derived from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, reports from the Institute of Medicine, and other sources of consensus dietary guidance.
    The terms "science-based nutrition criteria" and "consensus dietary guidance" are contradictory. If they really had scientific rules, then they would not have had to spend so much time collecting votes from industry lobbyists. There is no solid evidence that these foods are any healthier than any others. They have just made deals to designate certain foods that the public will accept as healthy.

    Saturday, Sep 05, 2009
     
    Amazon.com Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Book
    The NY Times reports:
    Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers.

    Amazon said in an e-mail message to those customers that if they chose to have their digital copies restored, they would be able to see any digital annotations they had made. ...

    But neither the refunds nor the subsequent apology were enough for some critics, who said the incident underscored the amount of restrictions built into the Kindle. Digital books for the Kindle are sold with so-called digital rights management software, which allows Amazon to maintain strict control over the copies of electronic books on its reader and prevents other companies from selling books for the device.

    Amazon appears to be keeping its remote kill switch. That is the real issue here, not the differences in international copyright law that put Orwell in the Australian public domain but not the American public domain.

    The broader question is whether a company like Amazon can offer a product with a cloud computing service, without having a duty to police the cloud by mediating assorted legal claims.

    Tivo has won a patent infringement lawsuit against Dish/Echostar DVR products, and an injunction against use. Dish presumably has a remote kill switch, and Tivo is trying to force Dish to use it.

    I say that the public should object to these remote kill switches. When I buy a product, I expect it to work, and I don't expect the maker to remotely disable it. If they made their products so that remote kill switches were impossible, then even a court order could not force the vendor to remotely disable the products.

    My guess is that the vendors like these remote kill switches because they want to be able to cut off customers who don't pay their bills, and other freeloaders. That may be worth more to Amazon than the occasional embarrassment like the Orwell incident.

    Update: It turns out that Amazon and other vendors refuse to use their kill switch on thieves because they hope to sell products to the thief:

    Specifically, rage at the gadget makers, which often know exactly who has a missing or stolen device, because in many instances it has been registered to a new user.

    But many tech companies will not disclose information about the new owners of missing devices unless a police officer calls with a search warrant. Even a request to simply shut down service — which would deter thieves by rendering their pilfered gadget useless — is typically refused.

    The public needs to wise up, and demand control over these kill switches. If I buy a gadget, any kill switch should be usable for my benefit, not against me. The gadget makers like Amazon have it exactly backwards.

    Thursday, Sep 03, 2009
     
    Refusing to debate scientific issues
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists are trying to censor alternative views again. I agree with science writer John Horgan who writes:
    My attitude was that the best way to counter this stuff is to confront it, point out where it’s wrong or misleading, make fun of it, move on. I feel this way not only about religious superstition but also about homeopathy, astrology and parapsychology–not to mention psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, multi-universe theories, string theory and the Singularity.

    Well, the debate over how—or whether–to handle bad ideas has boiled over once again on Bloggingheads.tv as a result of two recent chats involving Paul Nelson, a young-earth creationist (the earth is young, not Nelson), and Michael Behe, an intelligent-design proponent (the design is intelligent, not Behe). Two regular correspondents on Science Saturday—the biology writer Carl Zimmer and the physicist Sean Carroll–were outraged that BHTV gave a platform to religious nuts. They quit after Bob Wright, the founder of BHTV, refused to promise to keep creationism and other fringe topics—not even astrology!–off the site in the future.

    I watched the Behe interview, but it is hard to see what the excitement is about. His views are clearly and repeatedly labeled as being outside the mainstream. He accepts most of evolution, and is not a young-Earth creationist. He is a Christian, but does not seem to have any Christian objections to evolution. He was mainly arguing that there are limits to what evolution can explain, and pushing a book he wrote on the subject.

    None of these evolutionists bothers to rebut anything Behe actually says. He has to have a disclaimer on his Lehigh web site, as well as one for the department. Weird. Even if he is entirely wrong, academia is filled with crackpots with far wackier views, and they are not censored or ostracized.

    In comparison, Forbes magazine has an article on String Theory:

    String theory took off in the mid-1990s, following some important insights from a physicist, Edward Witten. It quickly became the rage among the world's elite theoretical physicists. The best graduate students devoted their studies to it, and the work was profiled in books and pbs documentaries. Nobel Prizes were assumed to be waiting in the wings. ...

    Peskin says he believes that, despite any current lack of progress in string theory, nature will eventually be shown to be made of strings, just as the theory predicts. But even if that doesn't happen, Peskin said, string theory will not have been in vain. "It's common in physics for people to have incredibly ambitious ideas that don't pan out but lead to rich mathematical ideas that end up being very useful," he says.

    Many mainstream nonstring physicists would agree with much of Woit's critique. But they're also unwilling to engage him, for reasons having more to do with sociology than science. ...

    Princeton's Witten declines to discuss Woit, saying in an e-mail that he prefers to debate these issues only with "critics who are distinguished scientists rather than with people who have become known by writing books."

    That sounds like elitism.

    There will not be any Nobel Prize for Witten because the theory has proved to be a total failure. It is incapable of making any predictions about the physical world. Witten is revered for his accomplishments in Mathematics, not Physics.

    If scientists wanted to censor unscientific ideas, then they would censor string theory. And if Witten were a real scientist, then he would be willing to defend his work against his critics.

    It should be obvious that these scientist wannabes are phonies when they claim that because their ideas have become accepted into the mainstream scientific establishment, they should not be defended or debated with critics. You hear this from the proponents of evolutionism, string theory, global warming, mandatory vaccination, water fluoridization, and a few other topics.

    Update: Some other leftist-atheist-evolutionists have joined the boycott.

     
    Environmentalist cause fires
    Once again, environmentalists contribute to wildfires. AP reports:
    LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities failed to follow through on plans earlier this year to burn away highly flammable brush in a forest on the edge of Los Angeles to avoid the very kind of wildfire now raging there, The Associated Press has learned.

    Months before the huge blaze erupted, the U.S. Forest Service obtained permits to burn away the undergrowth and brush on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest. But just 193 acres had been cleared by the time the fire broke out, Forest Service resource officer Steve Bear said.

    The agency defended its efforts, saying weather, wind and environmental rules tightly limit how often these "prescribed burns" can be conducted. ...

    "This brush was ready to explode," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose district overlaps the forest. "The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today."

    I am beginning to think that much of the wildfire destruction in the USA is caused by environmentalists. They oppose fire prevention strategies at every opportunity.

    Monday, Aug 31, 2009
     
    Free speech in school
    Missouri school news:
    Sedalia — T-shirts promoting the Smith-Cotton High School band’s fall program have been recalled because of concerns about the shirt’s evolution theme.

    Assistant superintendent Brad Pollitt said parents complained to him after the band marched in the Missouri State Fair parade. Though the shirts don’t violate the school’s dress code, Pollitt noted that the district is required by law to remain neutral on religion.

    “If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections’ and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing,” Pollitt said. ...

    “I was disappointed with the image on the shirt,” said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

    Here is a picture of the shirt.

    This seems ridiculous, but it is the logical consequence of the political, legal, and religious positions of the leftist-atheist-evolutionists. A case on Bong Hits 4 Jesus went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Blogger Jason Rosenhouse blames this on folks like Dawkins who encourage use of Evolution as an atheistic and anti-religious statement.

    Speaking of free speech in the schools, here is Florida news:

    SPRING HILL — Heather Lawrence didn't know the name of the girl with the Muslim head covering, or where she was from.

    But as Lawrence walked by a classroom at Springstead High School on Wednesday, the 16-year-old junior did know one thing: The girl wasn't standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

    Lawrence, an JROTC member who plans to enlist in the Army next summer, says she was aghast.

    "That's one of the most disrespectful things you can do," Lawrence recalled Friday. "Even the kids who are anarchists, who hate our government, still have respect to stand."

    A few bells later, Lawrence was on her way to English class when she saw the girl wearing a hijab in the hallway. Lawrence confronted her.

    She told her she should stand for the pledge. And, according to Lawrence's own account and a school referral on the incident, said, "Take that thing off your head and act like you're proud to be an American."

    A teacher overheard the encounter. Now Lawrence is serving a five-day, out-of-school suspension, and her parents are considering legal action.

    It sure seems to me that a student ought to be able to express an opinion to another student.

    Update: It now appears that Lawrence lied about the other girl not standing for the Pledge.

     
    Arguing against public debate
    John Timmer
    The US Chamber of Commerce is upset that the EPA has chosen to regulate CO2 emissions as a pollutant, and are calling for a public trial on both the policy decision and the science behind it. It's hard to imagine a worse way to help clarify the status of climate science. ...

    In discussions with the Los Angeles Times, Chamber representatives explicitly reference the Scopes trial, held in Tennessee, which created a media circus focused on the first of many US legal actions over the teaching of evolution.

    The Scopes trial should provide ample historic precedent that a public trial like this neither clarifies the science nor unites the public. But disagreements over science fundamentally don't lend themselves to resolution via public opinion, ...

    In the 1925 Scopes Trial that Clarence Darrow wanted to present evidence for evolution, but only if his expert witnesses were not cross-examined. He did not want them to have to account for their racist and anti-religious views.

    Wednesday, Aug 26, 2009
     
    Einstein used "stationary system" instead of the aether
    I tried to edit some Wikipedia pages to more accurately give credit for the discovery of special relativity, but Einstein fans reverted most of my changes.

    There is a whole article on Einstein synchronisation, even tho Poincare published the whole thing five years ahead of Einstein.

    Here is a typical denigration of Poincare's work on special relativity:

    Poincaré developed a similar physical interpretation of local time and noticed the connection to signal velocity, but contrary to Einstein he continued to use the ether-concept in his papers and argued that clocks in the ether show the "true" time, and moving clocks show the "apparent" time. So Poincaré tried to bring the relativity principle in accordance with classical physics, while Einstein developed a completely new kinematics based on the relativity of space and time.
    This is wrong. Einstein continued to use the aether concept. Einstein did not develop any new kinematics that had not already been published by Poincare. It was Poincare who more directly based his theory on the relativity of space and time. Poincare coined the term "relativity", and put space and time coordinates on an equal footing.

    The suggestion is that Poincare's use of the aether concept shows that he still falsely believed in absolute space and time. But in his 1902 book, Science and Hypothesis, Poincaré argued that there is no absolute space, that there is no absolute time, and that no physical experience can detect any inertial motion.

    In his famous lecture at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Poincaré said:

    The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.
    Poincare does use the term aether as a mathematical device to describe a particular reference frame. That is not wrong. Furthermore, Einstein uses the same concept. In Einstein's famous 1905 special relativity paper, he uses the term "stationary system" instead. He talks about particles that are "at rest relatively to the stationary system". He uses the word "stationary" throughout the article and says things like:
    It is essential to have time defined by means of stationary clocks in the stationary system, and the time now defined being appropriate to the stationary system we call it ``the time of the stationary system.''
    A casual reader might infer that Einstein believed in absolute time. But a more careful reading shows that Poincare and Einstein are talking about the exact same thing. Poincare wrote in French while Einstein wrote in German, so maybe it is just a translation problem that some people think that they are talking about something different.

    Thus both Poincare and Einstein denied that there was any absolute space or time, but still found it useful to assume a preferred frame of reference in papers. Poincare called it the aether while Einstein called it the stationary system. They meant the same thing.


    Sunday, Aug 23, 2009
     
    Reasons for crediting Einstein
    An Einstein fan wonders how I explain how Einstein got so much credit, including credit from his colleagues during his lifetime, if he did not really invent special relativity.

    Einstein did not get so much credit while he was alive. Only today does he get honors like Time Man of the Century. He did not get an academic job until three years after his famous papers. He did get a Nobel Prize, but only many years later and the prize citation did not mention relativity. Many people at the time did not believe that he deserved credit for relativity.

    The question is not one with a single answer. It is a bit like asking why the Beatles were so popular. It was a combination of many factors.

    • Einstein was a jealous egomaniac, who aggressively argued for credit, while his rivals were modestly deferential.
    • Einstein was a German at a time when the best Physics was done in Germans, and Germans liked to credit one of their own.
    • Einstein was also a Jew, and was credited by other Jews. He later became an ex-German and an American, which might have endeared him to influential ex-Germans and Americans.
    • Starting in 1919, the NY Times promoted him as the smartest scientist in the world. Few people have ever been promoted as the NY Times promoted him. It credited with all sorts of bogus discoveries, such as unified field theory.
    • Einstein had political and religious views that were popular with liberal academics.
    • The true creator of special relativity, Henri Poincaré, died a few years later and did not live long enough to enjoy the credit.
    • Poincaré was a French mathematician, and was thus underappreciated by physicists.
    • Einstein fit the mold of a young heroic type, and those people always get much more credit than they deserve once they achieve a certain amount of fame.
    After reading some of the convoluted explanations given for not crediting Poincare, I think that people also have some funny ideological beliefs about the nature of scientific truth. In particular, some people do not appreciate this basic fact:
    If two theories are mathematically equivalent, then no experiment can distinguish them.
    This is obvious, isn't it? And yet people will argue that even tho Poincare's theory of relativity was mathematically equivalent to Einstein's, Einstein's was physically correct and Poincare's was not. They will argue that Einstein was correct because he said that there was no aether, and Poincare was wrong to refer to a perfectly undetectable aether.

    The argument is nonsense. If there is no experiment to differentiate Einstein's view from Poincare's, then what makes Einstein more correct?

    It often happens that a physical theory has more than one interpretation. For example, you can think of light as a wave or a particle. Both views have merit, as light has both wave and particle properties. But what is it really? You can think of light as really being a wave that sometimes looks like particles, or you can think of it as being particles that sometimes look like waves. Einstein is sometimes credited with the latter view. But neither view is more correct than the other, as long as you subscribe to a theory that predicts the known wave and particle properties.

    So there are people who argue that Einstein's view of relativity was somehow more correct than Poincare's, but those people are wrong.


    Friday, Aug 21, 2009
     
    Appendix not useless
    An argument for evolution has always been that we have vestigial organs that are now useless but inherited from useful traits millions of years ago. The best example has been the appendix, which was thought to be a useless little pouch in your intestines that just causes appendicitis.

    Now new research shows that the appendix is useful, and it apparently evolved for useful purposes:

    Using a modern approach to evolutionary biology called cladistics, which utilizes genetic information in combination with a variety of other data to evaluate biological relationships that emerge over the ages, Parker and colleagues found that the appendix has evolved at least twice, once among Australian marsupials and another time among rats, lemmings and other rodents, selected primates and humans. "We also figure that the appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin's ideas about the appendix were correct."

    Darwin theorized that the appendix in humans and other primates was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which was used by now- extinct ancestors for digesting food. The latest study demonstrates two major problems with that idea. First, several living species, including certain lemurs, several rodents and a type of flying squirrel, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum which is used in digestion. Second, Parker says the appendix is actually quite widespread in nature. "For example, when species are divided into groups called 'families', we find that more than 70 percent of all primate and rodent groups contain species with an appendix." Darwin had thought that appendices appeared in only a small handful of animals.

    This appears to be yet another wrong argument for evolution that has been taught for decades.

    DNA sequencing now has much better arguments for evolution anyway. Our DNA has pieces that appears to be useless mutations of something that was useful millions of years ago. But a naysayer might argue that these DNA fragments just appear useless like the appendix, and might someday be proved to be useful.


    Tuesday, Aug 18, 2009
     
    Evolutionist says scientific truth is social
    The Why Evolution Is True blog quotes an anthropologist to explain why an evolution sub-theory is not true:
    Is the Aquatic Ape Theory fairly described as pseudoscience? Every statement of natural causes is potentially scientific. What distinguishes science from pseudoscience is social. Pseudoscience is supported by assertions of authority, ... I think that the Aquatic Ape Theory in 2009 fits the description.
    So evolution is true because it is science, and it is science because all the other scientists say so. The AAT is not science because the mainstream evolutionists don't like the proponents of AAT.

    This is lame. The way to prove AAT wrong is to find some fossil or DNA or other evidence that contradicts the theory. Or find some better theory that explains what AAT explains.

    I don't know whether AAT is true or not, and I don't think that anyone else does either. It is a theory with some remarkable explanatory power. I hope that someone proves it true or false. But in the meantime, scientists should take it as seriously as the other explanations.

    This is the problem that I have with a lot of these evolutionists. They are so dogmatic about what is true or false. When they have no evidence, they will launch into a lecture about what is or is not scientific. If they were really scientific, then they would be willing to admit it when they don't have any good evidence for or against a theory.

    The Wikipedia evolutionists devote a lot of energy into editing the page on Pseudoscience, and into maintaining lists of pseudosciences. But for various reasons, there is no real agreement about what is or is not pseudosciences. These pages exist largely as a way of putting down other beliefs. And if you take the view that definition of pseudoscience is social, then saying that some theory is pseudoscience is just another way of saying that the theory is out of favor among the mainstream scientists.


    Monday, Aug 17, 2009
     
    Jewish paranoia about code words
    There is currently a Wikipedia edit war over what NY Times columnist Judith Warner said Phyllis Schlafly:
    Critchlow points out that Schlafly "never identified Jews as part of any conspiracy," but then she didn't have to: phrases that invoke godless, countryless "well-financed" minorities are a well-recognized code among those who fear world domination by Wall Street and the Trilateral Commission. But Critchlow, a professor of history at St. Louis University, lets all this wink-winking go on without comment.
    I say both sides are wrong. Warner is a feminist, a Jew, and a kook. This paragraph is just a slimy smear. No reviewer with any integrity would write anything so ridiculous.

    Warner does not actually say who uses the code phrases. She says that some people recognize the code phrases, but does not say whether Schlafly and Critchlow are among those who recognize them.

    I realize that Warner is Jewish, and the NY Times is a largely Jewish newspaper, but Warner was reviewing a book that was not about Jews at all. It is strange for her to launch into a vague and incoherent rant about Jewish conspiracies, and to complain that the book does not similarly write about Jewish conspiracies.


    Wednesday, Aug 12, 2009
     
    Evolutionists are feuding
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
    And now Mooney and Kirshenbaum have published an equally shallow and unreflective editorial in the L. A. Times. It’s a rambling, confused piece, accusing the new atheists of hurting science literacy, implying that Richard Dawkins has, in the main, impeded the acceptance of evolution, and even invoking the ghost of Charles Darwin against us. (Why are we supposed to worship everything that Darwin ever said? He was a man, not a god.)
    It is amusing to see these leftist-atheist-evolutionists bicker about how best to promote their goals. For months, the new atheists have been feuding with the accommodationists. The new atheists believe that all religion is equally evil, and must be attacked. The accommodationists try to solicit the mainstream Christians to join in the attack against the Young Earth Creationists.

    I think that these folks are trying too hard to promote their ideology, and not hard enough to promote scientific truths.

    Richard Dawkins is working on a pro-evolution book to follow up his pro-atheism book, and here he interviews creationist Wendy Wright. I was expecting to agree with Dawkins, but I think that Wright got the better of him. Instead of confronting her with facts and explanations, Dawkins ended up launching an attack on her motives. Why would anyone care about her motives? I just want to know what the evidence proves.

    Unfortunately, Dawkins' attitude is very common among evolutionists. They are more interested in rooting out some religious belief than actually explaining some science. I am not sure who is worse -- the new atheists or the accommodationists. Neither is willing to fairly deal with the scientific issues without ideology.

    Here is what Chris Mooney and another accommodationist say:

    It all might sound like a petty internecine squabble, but the stakes are very high. The United States does not boast a very healthy relationship between its scientific community and its citizenry. The statistics on public scientific illiteracy are notorious -- and they're at their worst on contentious, politicized issues such as climate change and the teaching of evolution.
    Those subjects -- evolution and global warming -- are the most politicized because they are promoted by scientists and scientist wannabes who are simultaneously pushing a political-religious agenda. Maybe if the scientists in those fields would stick to the science, then people would accept the science.

    Monday, Aug 10, 2009
     
    Dieting could lead to a positive test for cannabis
    Dope smokers have long denied any long term effects. However it is a basic biochemical fact that marijuana stays in the system far longer than alcohol.

    NewScientist reports:

    CANNABIS smokers beware: stress or dieting might trigger "reintoxication", resulting in a positive drug test long after you last used the drug.

    The main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), and once in the body it is readily absorbed into fat cells. Over the next few days it slowly diffuses back into the blood. Since THC is taken up by fat more readily than it diffuses out, continual intake means some THC can remain in the fat cells.

    It has been suggested that stored THC can be released at a later date in situations where the body's fat is rapidly broken down. This is based on anecdotal reports of spikes in blood cannabinoid levels in people who have not taken the drug recently but have experienced extreme stress or rapid weight loss.

    The phenomenon has just been proved in rats.
     
    The Selfish Genius
    I thought that Richard Dawkins was the leading proponent of evolutionism. He provokes a lot of people with his leftist-atheist-evolutionist views, and he is trashed on Conservapedia, but there are also mainstream evolutionists who disagree with his theories.

    There is a new book, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy, with some details.

    Also David Sloan Wilson trashes Dawkins on group selection.

    The issue, as I understand it, is that Dawkins argued that evolution acts on the gene level only. That is, evolution produces the genes that best replicate themselves. Others say that an organism in a group can act for the good of the group, and such behaviors will evolve because they help the group to survive. An example might be an ant colony, where ants seem to be programmed to act for the good of the colony. Dawkins acknowledges that there could be kin selection, where ants work to help genetically similar ants, but he denies that there is ever group selection.

    This reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould, who for many years was the most famous evolutionist, and maybe the most famous scientist of any kind. And yet he frequently denounced as being wrong by experts.


    Friday, Jul 31, 2009
     
    Finding fault with Poincare
    The Einstein fans like to say that there is something wrong with Poincare's explanation of special example. Here is a typical example of what they criticize in Poincare:
    “. . . Imagine two observers, who wish to compare their clocks with the aid of light signals; they exchange signals, but, knowing that light does not propagate instantaneously, they exchange them, so to say, by a crossfire method. ...

    Then the clocks will be synchronized. And, indeed, they show the same time at the same physical instant, but under the condition that both points were at rest. Contrariwise, the durations of transmission will not be the same in both directions: in the case, when, for example, point A moves toward the optical perturbation leaving B, and when point B moves away from the perturbation leaving A.

    Clocks compared in this way will not show the true time, they will show the so-called local time: one clock will be slower, than the others. But this is irrelevant, since we have no means to notice this. All phenomena, proceeding, for instance, at A, will be retarding, but identically, and the observer will not notice it, since his clock is slower; thus, as it follows from the relativity principle, he will have no means to know whether he is in a state of rest or of absolute motion.

    The Einstein fans will quote passages like this to argue that Poincare did not really understand relativity. They would say that there is no such thing as "state of rest" or "absolute motion", because all motion is relative. They would also say that there is no such thing as "true time", as there is no true rest frame.

    Instead of denying that there is any state of rest, Poincare makes the weaker argument that no observer would ever be able to tell whether he is in a state of rest or not.

    Somehow a lot of people have come to believe that the essence of special relativity is that there is no aether. Even if you define the aether as whatever medium transmits light in a vaccuum, they will assert with religious fervor that there can be no rest frame. That is, there can be no definition of what is motionless.

    I don't know where this comes from. Einstein did not deny the aether in his famous relativity papers. He merely said that it was "superfluous" to his derivation. In later life, he made conflicting statements about the aether.

    The essence of special relativity is the principle that the laws of physics are mathematically valid in all coordinate frames, and that space and time are related by a Lorentz metric. Also (and consequentially) that the speed of light is the same for all observers, and that velocity distorts apparent distance, time, and mass. The essence of relativity is not to make some unverifiable statement about the existence of some aether that may not be detectable anyway. That would be philosophy, not physics.

    At this point, you are probably thinking that it is a scientific fact that there is no cosmic rest frame, whether Einstein believed in one or not. But that is not true either. The most common cosmological models today do have a rest frame, and the rest frame is accepted without controversy. The rest frame is the frame of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Wikipedia says:

    From the CMB data it is seen that our local group of galaxies (the galactic cluster that includes the Solar System's Milky Way Galaxy) appears to be moving at 627 ± 22 km/s relative to the reference frame of the CMB (also called the CMB rest frame) in the direction of galactic longitude l = 276 ± 3°, b = 30 ± 3°. This motion results in an anisotropy of the data (CMB appearing slightly warmer in the direction of movement than in the opposite direction).
    Even with the benefit of a century more of physics knowledge, it is hard to find much fault with what Poincare said. You might argue that he was wrong to say that it is impossible to determine absolute motion, because we can now measure absolute motion by using the CMB rest frame. But it is really crazy to argue that Poincare was wrong for not more aggressively arguing for the impossibility of a rest frame.

    And yet that is the main criticism of Poincare. Everyone agrees that Poincare published all the main ideas of special relativity before Einstein, and in some cases, five years ahead of Einstein. For proof, see Relativity priority dispute. It has a link to this textbook by A. A. Logunov which explains the whole theory and where each part came from. The only way to give Einstein credit is to claim that Poincare's description or understanding was defective in some way.

    I think that these critics of Poincare are profoundly mistaken.

    I am still trying to figure out why so many people have such wrong view of Einstein and relativity, when the facts have been available for so long. Among other explanations, I wonder if some people have some sort of ideological purpose in saying that there is no aether.


    Thursday, Jul 30, 2009
     
    The ugliest theory
    Physicist Michio Kaku says in a magazine interview:
    What happened was we physicists began to smash atoms, and we have a pretty good understanding of the theory of particles. It’s called the Standard Model. Except it is the ugliest theory known to science. Why should mother nature at a fundamental level create this ugly theory called the standard model? It has 36 quarks, it has eight gluons, it has three W bosons, it has a whole bunch of electrons, a whole bunch of neutrons, it just goes on and on and on.
    His description is odd. There are not 36 quarks. Quarks come in 6 flavors. Even if you count anti-quarks, that would only be 12 quarks. There is only one electron. A basic premise of quantum theory is that all electrons are identical. Neutrons are not even elementary particles, as each is made of 3 quarks.

    The really strange part is calling it the "ugliest theory". On the contrary, it is the greatest and most beautiful accomplishment of 20th century science.

    If Kaku had been alive in 1900, he probably would have said that periodic table was the ugliest theory. He would have complained that there were dozens of elements, ignoring the fact that it was a vast simplification over what was known before.

    The SM is not that complicated. The only particles are quarks, leptons, and bosons. The quarks are mainly the up and down quarks. A proton is composed of two up quarks and a down quark, and a neutron is one up quark and two down quarks. The leptons are mainly the electron and the neutrino, a tiny particle that is emitted in radioactive decay. There are also other flavors of these particles, and anti-particles. The bosons are the photon, particles that transmit other forces, and the Higgs. The Higgs is a conjectural particle that gives mass to the others, and doesn't do much else. The new Swiss accelerator could find the Higgs in the next couple of years. If so, it will be one of the most spectacular confirmations of theory ever.

    Kaku is pushing an alternate theory called String Theory. I argue that ST is the ugliest theory. It has accomplished nothing, and it has corrupted theoretical physics like no other theory in history. It is much more complicated than SM, and yet it has no quarks, electrons, or any other known particle in it. Instead it has extra dimensions and other things that have never been observed. It is so ugly and complicated that no one has figured out how to connect it to the real world. The idea that it unifies physics is a big hoax. It has no tangible connection to physics.

    Update: It occurred to me that maybe Kaku is counting colored quarks, so if each of 12 quarks can have each of 3 colors, then he gets 36 quarks. But color is not even observable, and that just makes it seem more complicated. It would make better sense to say that there is just one kind of quark, with different possible attributes.


    Tuesday, Jul 28, 2009
     
    Two crippling blows to humanity's self-image
    Leftist-evolutionist-atheist Jerry A. Coyne launches into an attack on religion with an essay starting:
    Over its history, science has delivered two crippling blows to humanity's self-image. The first was Galileo's announcement, in 1632, that our Earth was just another planet and not, as Scripture implied, the center of the universe. The second -- and more severe -- landed in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, demolishing, in 545 pages of closely reasoned prose, the comforting notion that we are unique among all species -- the supreme object of God's creation, and the only creature whose earthly travails could be cashed in for a comfortable afterlife.
    This is wacky stuff, but common among leftist-atheist-evolutionists. Stephen Jay Gould said stuff like this frequently.

    Galileo argued that the Sun was at the center of the universe, and that Scripture was consistent with that. Darwin's book did not say much at all about human uniqueness.

    And yet Coyne sees these as science delivering two crippling blows to humanity's self-image.

    Coyne is entitled to his opinions, of course. I am just pointing that when this prominent professor advocates teaching the cold hard facts of science, he is also advocating teaching that the Bible is wrong and that humans have no souls.


    Monday, Jul 27, 2009
     
    New element Copernicium
    The UK BBC reports:
    Discovered 13 years ago, and officially added to the periodic table just weeks ago, element 112 finally has a name.

    It will be called "copernicium", with the symbol Cp, in honour of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

    Copernicus deduced that the planets revolved around the Sun, and finally refuted the belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

    The team of scientists who discovered the element chose the name to honour the man who "changed our world view". ...

    Copernicus was born 1473 in Torun, Poland. His finding that the planets circle the sun underpins much of modern science. It was pivotal for the discovery of gravity, and led to the conclusion that the stars are incredibly far away and that the Universe is inconceivably large.

    ScienceDaily writes:
    Furthermore, the new world view inspired by Copernicus had an impact on the human self-concept in theology and philosophy: humankind could no longer be seen as the center of the world.
    Copernicus is overrated, and the above opinions are silly.

    The ancient Greek debated whether the Earth goes around the Sun, as Aristotle taught, or the Sun goes around the Earth, as Aristarchus and Archimedes taught. They each had good arguments based on what they knew at the time.

    I just this about Heraclides Ponticus:

    Like the Pythagoreans Hicetas and Ecphantus, Heraclides proposed that the apparent daily motion of the stars was created by the rotation of the Earth on its axis once a day. According to a late tradition, he also believed that Venus and Mercury revolve around the Sun. This would mean that he anticipated the Tychonic system, an essentially geocentric model with heliocentric aspects.
    I just don't see that Copernicus added that much. He did work out the mathematical details of applying a Ptolemy-like system of orbits and epicycles to a solar system model with the Sun near the center, but nothing was extraordinary. The work of Tycho and Kepler was far more important, both in terms of predicting observations and paving the way for future work.

    Sunday, Jul 26, 2009
     
    Arguments for giving Einstein credit
    An Einstein fan gives a couple of arguments for Einstein getting the credit that he has.

    He says that people at the time treated him as a great genius, and they were in a better position to judge him.

    Actually, Einstein wrote his famous papers in 1905 in the highest status German physics journal, but it was not until three years later that he got an academic job. Planck and Lorentz got Nobel prizes, but Einstein did not until many years later.

    He also argues that when there is a dispute over credit, it is usually the big-shots stealing credit from the little-known scientists. Planck, Lorentz, and Poincare were big shots, while Einstein was an unknown.

    Einstein was an unknown in 1905, but by 1920 the NY Times had made him one of the most famous scientists in the world. He was the biggest of the big-shots when he got that Nobel Prize, and Poincare was dead. So Einstein was a big-shot stealing credit at that point. NY Times articles went on to give him credit for all sorts of things, undeservedly. Eg, it gave him credit for creating a unified field theory, which he never successfully did.

    It may seem odd to suddenly decide in 2009 that Einstein should not get so much credit for ideas published a century ago, but almost everything I am saying has been known for a century. There were well-known contemporaries of Einstein who thought that he was a big phony, and that others deserved the credit for relativity.

    Anyway, the things I say about Einstein are based on cold hard facts that have been known for a century. The key ideas about relativity were published by others before Einstein. Einstein helped popularize the theory, but did not invent it.


    Thursday, Jul 23, 2009
     
    Comparing Poincare to Einstein
    One of my Wikipedia edits got reverted, and this was put in:
    Poincaré's work in the development of special relativity is well recognised, though most historians stress that despite many similarities with Einstein's work, the two had very different research agendas and interpretations of the work. Poincaré developed a similar physical interpretation of local time and noticed the connection to signal velocity, but contrary to Einstein he continued to use the ether-concept in his papers and argued that clocks in the ether show the "true" time, and moving clocks show the "apparent" time. So Poincaré tried to bring the relativity principle in accordance with classical physics, while Einstein developed a completely new kinematics based on the relativity of space and time.
    Different research agendas? One was trying to explain nature, and what was the other trying to do?

    Poincare's use of the aether concept was to say that it was perfectly undetectable.

    Whoever wrote the above Wikipedia paragraph is badly confused about relativity. It appears that a lot of other people are confused also. Let me discusse a few principles that are sometimes considered part of relativity theory.

    The laws of physics are valid in any inertial frame. Poincare coined the phrase Relativity Principle for this. Einstein copied it, without crediting Poincare. True, as far as we know.

    The laws of physics are valid in any coordinate frame. Einstein wrote several papers against this idea, until David Hilbert showed him how it could be done for gravity. Thereupon Einstein reversed himself, and called it using covariant equations. True, as long as the laws are properly formulated, as far as we know.

    There is no medium for the transmission of light. Late 19th century physicists hypothesized a massless rigid medium called the aether that filled all of space. This was abandoned in the early 20th century when relativity theory showed that it was unnecessary for Maxwell's equations. In the mid 20th century, quantum electrodynamics showed light is transmitted by a quantum vaccuum state that actually contained a sea of virtual particles. Dark energy was discovered at the end of the 20th century. It is unknown how dark energy relates to the aether and to the quantum vaccuum energy.

    There is no way to prefer one inertial frame over any other frame. I do not think that this was ever an essential part of relativity theory. But even if it were, it is not considered true today. A Stanford relativity page explains:

    If astronomers can use the cosmic background radiation as a reference frame doesn't that invalidate special relativity?

    Yes, because the expansion of the universe is not covered by special relativity, ... The cosmic background radiation will represent a fixed frame of reference for any object that is 'at rest' with respect to the expansion of the universe.

    The point is that relativity theory teaches us how to transform the laws of physics into different coordinate frames. That is essential for understanding nearly all of 20th century physics. That is the essence of relativity.

    But when you start making hypotheses about things that appear to be undetectable, or when you claim that there is no reason for preferring one thing over another, then you have moved outside the realm of physics and into philosophy.

    If you were taught that essence of relativty was non-existence of the aether, then you were taught the wrong thing. It was never an important part of relativity theory, and we are not even sure about the nature of the aether today.

    The funny thing is that some people will list Copernicus and Einstein among the great accomplishments in the history of science. They'll say that the great breakthrus were Copernicus and Galileo showing that the Earth was not at the center of the Universe, and Einstein showing that there was no aether. Together, these show that Earth is insignificant in the Cosmos.

    This misunderstands both Copernicus and Einstein. If people really understood relativity theory, then they would know that it teaches that an Earth-centered coordinate system is completely legitimate.

    Science only tells us about what is observable. When scientists make statements about some non-observable phenonemon, such as about existence of an undetectable aether, there is no scientific way of saying whether they are correct or not. It is philosophy. The importance of scientific theories is for their physical consequences.


    Wednesday, Jul 22, 2009
     
    Quoting Jefferson instead of Darwin
    Stephen C. Meyer writes this op-ed in the Boston Globe:
    In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.
    Harvard leftist-atheist-evolutionst Steven Pinker replies:
    SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise.
    I am not agreeing with Meyer, but it seems to me that a Harvard prof could come up an argument on the merits, instead of attacking the motives of his sponsor. How would he know that the D.I. "aims to sow confusion"? Meyer's article does not seem confusing to me.

    It is especially bizaare to see a Harvard prof complain that someone else is supported by a "well-funded" institution. Harvard is the most well-funded institution in the world, with an endowment of about $35 billion. The D.I. has an entire budget of only a million dollars a year or so.

    Pinker goes on with some name-calling:

    The judge referred to the theory’s “breathtaking inanity,’’ which is a fine description of Stephen Meyer’s July 15 op-ed “Jefferson’s support for intelligent design.’’
    Apparently it is okay to celebrate Darwin, but not Jefferson:
    Thomas Jefferson died 33 years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species.’’ ... In a year in which other serious publications are celebrating the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentennial of “Origin,’’ the Globe sees fit to resurrect his long-buried opposition.
    It is true that Jefferson might have had a different opinion if he had more modern knowledge, but the same could be said about Darwin.

    Another reply:

    But here is Stephen C. Meyer using every kind of phony rhetoric to pretend ID has validity ... Intelligent design is nothing more than a Trojan horse for replacing science with religion. But it isn’t science, it’s fraud.
    Another blogger attacks Meyer's column by accusing him of dishonesty.

    I don't know what is so inflammatory about the D.I., but its critics are strangely preoccupied with attacking its motives, and avoid what it actually has to say. It is as if the opponents of Pres. Obama's health care plan spent all their time talking about his birth certificate or his Marxist father.

     
    Human Stabbed a Neanderthal
    Science news:
    Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals.

    The probable weapon of choice: A thrown spear.

    The evidence: A lethal wound on the remains of a Neanderthal skeleton.

    Scientists are now sequencing and reconstructing Neanderthal DNA. They may try to clone a Neanderthal, if they think that we wrongfully wiped them out.

    Tuesday, Jul 21, 2009
     
    Public agreed with Bush v Gore
    A law prof blog says:
    One important exception to this conclusion must be noted: 2001, a time at which the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to enjoy a slight upward spike in its legitimacy. As it turns out, that particular survey, conducted around the time the U.S. Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election via its decision in Bush v. Gore, has been the object of considerable study and has generated some important conclusions about how support is formed and maintained.

    Gibson, Caldeira, and Spence ... discovered that the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court was not harmed by its decision in Bush v. Gore. Indeed, while it is not surprising that support for the Court rose among Republicans – the winners in the decision – our findings indicate that support did not decline among Democrats.

    This is amazing because all the law profs and media pundits have bombarded us with opinions that the Bush v Gore decision was not legitimate. It is hard to find someone who will defend it.

    Note that even this blogger is biased against the court decision. He says that the US Supreme Court decided the election, which is not what happened at all. The voters decided the election. All the US Supreme Court did was to keep the Florida Supreme Court from stealing the election thru procedures that had never been codified, approved, used, or considered legal before.

    Debunking another election myth, the Census Bureau now reveals that voter turnout, as a percentage of the eligible voters, went down in 2008, not up.


    Saturday, Jul 18, 2009
     
    5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole
    The Wired mag list:
    1) HOLY GRAIL
    2) SILVER BULLET (and smoking gun)
    3) SHEDDING LIGHT
    4) MISSING LINK
    5) PARADIGM SHIFT
    The readers add quantum leap, light years ahead, Rosetta Stone tip of the iceberg, gold standard, and seminal.

    I think that some of these terms are quite useful is used properly. But it seems silly to say something like Embryonic stem cells still gold standard, as is very commonly said.


    Thursday, Jul 16, 2009
     
    Not crediting plagiarists
    AP reported in Dec. 2008:
    Coldplay has fired back against accusations they copied another artist's work for their hit "Viva La Vida."

    In a statement released on Tuesday, the band responded to a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by guitarist Joe Satriani last week in federal court in Los Angeles. That lawsuit says the Grammy-nominated song contains "substantial, original portions" of his 2004 song, "If I Could Fly."

    "With the greatest possible respect to Joe Satriani, we have now unfortunately found it necessary to respond publicly to his allegations," read the statement. "If there are any similarities between our two pieces of music, they are entirely coincidental, and just as surprising to us as to him.

    The songs are extremely similar. I don't know whether Coldplay copied Satriani; there is some evidence that they both copied someone else. Regardless, the song is not original and should not have won album of the year honors.

    The book Catch-22 was once thought to be brilliantly original. Then much of the same material was discovered in a novel published ten years earlier. We don't know whether Joseph Heller plagiarized that novel, but we do know that he was not so brilliantly original. His book should not be considered one of the greatest novels ever written.

    Likewise, people should not crediting Einstein with being the greatest genius of the 20th century for inventing relativity. There is stone cold evidence that it was invented by others. We don't know for sure how much Einstein plagiarized others, because Einstein did not credit his sources. But even if Einstein independently discovered some of the ideas, he was not the inventor.


    Tuesday, Jul 14, 2009
     
    Mindreading the Discovery Institute
    Wikipedia articles are very critical of evolution skeptics Discovery Institute
    At the foundation of most criticism of the Discovery Institute is the charge that the institute and its Center for Science and Culture intentionally misrepresent or omit many important facts in promoting their agenda. Intellectual dishonesty, in the form of misleading impressions created by the use of rhetoric, intentional ambiguity, and misrepresented evidence, form the foundation of most of the criticisms of the institute. It is alleged that its goal is to lead an unwary public to reach certain conclusions, and that many have been deceived as a result. Its critics, such as Eugenie Scott, Robert Pennock, Richard Dawkins and Barbara Forrest, claim that the Discovery Institute knowingly misquotes scientists and other experts, deceptively omits contextual text through ellipsis, and makes unsupported amplifications of relationships and credentials, and are often said to claim support from scientists when no such support exists. A wide spectrum of critics level this charge; from educators, scientists, and the Smithsonian Institution, to individuals who oppose the teaching of creationism alongside science on ideological grounds.
    This criticism is very strange. The Discovery Institute website has many opinions on many subjects, and there is much to criticize. But most of the criticism of the DI is based on some sort of dishonesty claim, and not a refutation of what the DI actually says.

    The DI critics will invariably argue that the DI does not really believe what it says, that it is secretly motivated by sinister Christian beliefs, and that it is part of an anti-science conspiracy.

    It seems to me that if the DI critics really wanted to be scientific, then they would just prove the DI wrong, and not waste time trying to analyze the DI motives. Science does not advance by character assassination against those with a contrary view.

    The Wikipedia references are to people like Chris Mooney. He is an over-opionated science journalist, not a scientist. He wrote a whole book attacking the Bush administration, and for the last couple of years, he has been writing articles on how scientists should spin their public statements in order to promote their leftist agendas.

    A typical dishonesty claim is that DI says that it is not creationist, but it really is. You can find DI explanations of why it says that Intelligent Design and Creationism aren't the same here, here, and here. I see no reasons to doubt the sincerity of these opinions.

    Let me give an analogy. Suppose that most of the critics of Pres. Obama devoted most of they energy to arguing that Obama is intellectually dishonest because he claims that he is not a socialist when he really is. Such an argument convinces no one. It certainly doesn't convince me because I don't even think that anyone knows Obama's motives for sure. If Obama is promoting a socialistic policy, then tell me what is bad about it. You should be able to convince me that it is bad, regardless of whether it comes within the formal definition of socialism, or whether Obama is concealing his true motives.

    Imagine if Rush Limbaugh came on the radio every day claiming that Obama is lying about not being a socialist. None of that would convince, and it would not matter if he did convince you. You would conclude that Limbaugh had nothing substantive to say.

    Likewise, these people who so rabidly attack the DI motives just seem like anti-science crackpots to me. Even if the DI turns out to be wrong in everything it says, I would still think that the attacks are unscientific and embarrassing.


    Monday, Jul 13, 2009
     
    Michael Jackson's medical problems
    Evolutionist blogger Peter Frost speculates:
    Michael Jackson had probably been taking mega-doses of vitamin D. This regimen would have started when he began bleaching his skin in the mid-1980s to even out blotchy pigmentation due to vitiligo. Since this bleaching made his skin highly sensitive to UV light, his dermatologist told him to avoid the sun and use a parasol. At that point, his medical entourage would have recommended vitamin D supplements. How high a dose? We’ll probably never know, but there are certainly many doctors who recommend mega-doses for people who get no sun exposure.

    Such a recommendation would have dovetailed nicely with Michael’s fondness for vitamins.

    There has been a lot of new medical research on vitamin D, but it is a sensitive subject because it relates to skin color. Maybe it is related to Jackson's death.
     
    China and India are biggest global warming threats
    The NY Times reports:
    L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.

    As President Obama arrived for three days of talks with other leaders of the Group of 8 nations, negotiators for 17 leading polluters abandoned targets in a draft agreement for the meetings here. ...

    If he cannot ultimately bring along developing countries, no climate deal will be effective.

    Here, "climate change" is a euphemism for "global warming". Nobody is trying to reverse climate change. The climate has always been changing, and always will. They are trying to reverse global warming from CO2.

    The global warming threat is almost entirely coming from China and India. Those are the countries that are breeding out of control, rapidly increasing CO2 emissions, and not doing anything about it.

    The USA is the leader in developing green technologies. We don't just consume resources; we use those resources to make the world a better place. Our population is stable, except for immigration from countries like Mexico.

    If you are concerned about the environment and global warming, your number one concern should population growth in countries that cannot handle it. Like China, India, Mexico, and much of the Third World. Those are the countries that are almost entirely responsible for the future global warming threat.


    Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
     
    More attacks on Christians
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist Harvard prof Steven Pinker writes in a press release:
    many of [Francis] Collins’s advocacy statements are deeply disturbing.

    For example, I see science as not just cures for diseases and better gadgets but an ideal for how to think about the most important issues facing us as humans -– in particular, the ideal that we should seek truth through reason and evidence and not through superstition, dogma, and personal revelation. Collins has said that he came to accept the Trinity, and the truth that Jesus is the son of God, when he was hiking and came upon a beautiful triple waterfall. Now, the idea that nature contains private coded messages from a supernatural being to an individual person is the antithesis of the scientific (indeed, rational) mindset. It is primitive, shamanistic, superstitious. The point of the scientific revolution was to do away with such animistic thinking.

    This is not just autobiographical. Collins, in his book, eggs on fellow evangelical Christians in their anti-scientific beliefs. He tells them that they are “right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible” and to “the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.” Granted, he is not a young-earth or intelligent-design creationist. But he has stated that God interacts with creation, in particular, that he designed the evolutionary process to ensure that human intelligence, morality, and Judaeo-Christian religious belief would evolve.

    That is far more than just expressing an opinion. That is advocacy, which gives incalculable encouragement the forces that have been hostile to science for the past eight years.

    He is complaining that Pres. Obama appointed a Christian to head the NIH! Doesn't he realize that Obama and most of our other political leaders are also Christians?

    These folks are giving atheists a bad name. If Collins wants to accept the Trinity, that's his business. Collins is not claiming that the Trinity is a scientific fact, and is not forcing his beliefs on anyone. His beliefs are harmless.

    And yet the leftist-atheist-evolutionists get hysterical when they hear a simple statement of mainstream Christian beliefs. They are entitled to their leftist-atheist-evolutionist beliefs, of course. I am just pointing out leftism, atheism, and evolutionism are all coupled in the views of these academics.


    Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
     
    Errors about the Copernicus book
    The Wikipedia article on Andreas Osiander cites a book by Stephen Hawking to describe Osiander's Forward to Nicolaus Copernicus De revolutionibus orbium coelestium:
    He deleted important passages and added his own sentences which diluted the impact and certainty of the work.
    No, Osiander did not delete anything.

    I had to edit other statements that misrepresented what Osiander said, even tho the English translation is available for anyone to read. Some people say that he contradicted Copernicus.

    I posted this summary:

    Osiander added an unauthorised and unsigned preface, defending the work against those who might be offended by the novel hypotheses. He explained that astronomers may find different causes for observed motions, and choose whatever is easier to grasp. As long as a hypothesis allows reliable computation, it does not have to match what a philosopher might seek as the truth.
    I say that there is nothing unusual about this preface at all, except that it is unsigned. Osiander's view is entirely defensible, even today with all that we have learned in the last 465 years.

    Consider this analogy. Suppose someone wrote a book today on Flores Man, and gave detailed descriptions of the fossil and claimed that it was a new species. The publisher might very well hire someone else to write a preface, and that preface might say that the book is a valuable description of Flores Man even if you don't believe that it was a new species. Nobody would think that was unusual.

    For some reason, people keep promoting a myth that heliocentric scholars were persecuted, and stubborn Middle Age authorities would not accept the truth. It is crazy. Copernicus's book was published, with approval of the Church, and well-received at the time even tho it was contrary to the prevailing wisdom.

    The Hawking book is criticized here.


    Friday, Jul 10, 2009
     
    String theory compared to Darwinism
    String theorist Leonard Susskind writes Physics World magazine:
    The value of theorizing is often dismissed in the biological sciences as less important than observation; and Darwin was the master observer.

    I think that view misses something essential, namely the great formal beauty and almost mathematical inevitability of Darwin’s ideas. Like Einstein’s greatest ideas, the theory of evolution is based on a simple gedankenexperiment: start with a very simple reproducing organism, add Mendel’s laws of heredity and mutability, and follow the system as it inescapably branches out into a tree of life.

    Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”.

    True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. ...

    Let us begin with the DNA of a universe. What is it and why do we believe such a thing makes sense? String theory is the key. It supposes that at extremely small distances space is a complicated higher-dimensional manifold with many — typically six — tiny “extra” dimensions in addition to the three we see in everyday life. ...

    Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space, will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

    String theory is nothing like DNA. Scientists had done experiments to demonstrate the genetic importance and chemical structure of DNA before anyone lept to discussing Darwinian consequences. No part of string theory has been verified in any way. Believing in those six extra dimensions is a big superstition of the sort that Susskind claims to be ejecting.

    Even Czech string theory evangelist Lubos Motl rejects Susskind's analogy. His enemy, Peter Woit, writes:

    Lenny Susskind gives new depth and meaning to the word “chutzpah” with an article in Physics World on Darwin’s Legacy. It seems that Darwin’s legacy for physics is the field of string theory anthropic landscape pseudo-science. Luckily, I don’t think creationists normally read Physics World.
    Susskind must be saying something wacky if he is being attacked by both Motl and Woit. But Susskind is a mainstream string theorist, I am afraid.

    Physics used to be the greatest of the sciences. I am afraid that it is being taken over by kooks.

     
    String Theory collapsed
    String theorist Lubos Motl writes:
    Nevertheless, the public is gullible enough and many ordinary people still believe that the "string wars" were a phenomenon affecting real science - rather than what they really were, namely a nonsensical media-created bubble building on two pseudointellectual kibitzers.

    If you don't know, string theory has won the string wars and the two haters of theoretical physics have largely become invisible after a year of a mad hysteria that has become uninteresting for the readers because they're still much more sensible than what many dumb journalists seem to believe. Nevertheless, theoretical physics has been hurt in the eyes of the most gullible members of the broader public, much like the World Trade Center was hurt by the Muslims back in 2001, despite the bold proclamations that they have actually strengthened the U.S. ;-)

    So the enemies of physics have won, too. Much like the hijackers above Manhattan who didn't believe that they would survive and become the real winners in this world, the enemies of physics never intended to do anything more than to hurt someone else, either. And they have done so.

    More generally, the episode has shown that it is likely that the media are able and willing to distort the very essence of reality in their goal to create (fake) stories and they do influence the broader society. Such things will probably occur with an increasing frequency and they will be increasingly hurting our civilization.

    He admits that theoretical physics was hurt like the WTC! The WTC collapsed into a pile of rubble.

    String theory was supposed to explain all the fundamental particles and forces, and unify them into a theory of everything. It turned out to be hopelessly inconsistent with all of that. It has not explained anything.

    If Motl had some evidence that we live in an 11-dimensional world, he would be giving that, instead of the name-calling.


    Wednesday, Jul 08, 2009
     
    Marriage on trial
    Opposite sex marriage is on trial in a California federal court, and the judge ruled:
    To reach a decision on the merits, it appears that the court will need to resolve certain underlying factual disputes raised by the parties. The court has identified several questions ...
    He then gave a long list of factual issues to be resolved at a speedy and inexpensive trial, including:
  • whether the characteristics defining gays and lesbians as a class might in any way affect their ability to contribute to society
  • whether sexual orientation can be changed, and if so, whether gays and lesbians should be encouraged to change it
  • the relative political power of gays and lesbians, including successes of both pro-gay and anti-gay legislation
  • whether the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage leads to increased stability in opposite-sex marriage or alternatively whether permitting same-sex couples to marry destabilizes opposite-sex marriage
  • whether a married mother and father provide the optimal child-rearing environment and whether excluding same-sex couples from marriage promotes this environment
  • whether and how California has acted to promote these interests in other family law contexts
  • whether the availability of opposite-sex marriage is a meaningful option for gays and lesbians
  • whether the ban on same-sex marriage meaningfully restricts options available to heterosexuals
  • whether requiring one man and one woman in marriage promotes stereotypical gender roles
  • the voters’ motivation or motivations for supporting Prop 8, including advertisements and ballot literature considered by California voters
  • Wow. These issues vary from the obvious to the unanswerable. I would say that nearly all of these issues are irrelevant, but I guess the judicial supremacists who brought this lawsuit have made arguments that depend on establishing facts related to the above issues.

    This case is getting a lot of publicity, so I suppose that I can look forward to judicial pronouncements on the above issues.


    Tuesday, Jul 07, 2009
     
    How Wikipedia compares Poincare to Einstein
    Here is a recent Wikipedia edit intended to give Einstein more credit:

    In his History of the theories of ether and electricity from 1953, E. T. Whittaker claimed that relativity is the creation of Lorentz and Poincaré and attributed to Einstein's papers only little importance. However, most historians of science, like Gerald Holton, Arthur I. Miller, Abraham Pais, John Stachel, or Olivier Darrigol have other points of view. They admit that Lorentz and Poincaré developed the mathematics of special relativity, and many scientists originally spoke about the „Lorentz-Einstein theory“. But they argue that it was Einstein who completely eliminated the classical ether and demonstrated the relativity of space and time. They also argue that Poincaré demonstrated the relativity of space and time only in his philosophical writings, but in his physical papers he maintained the ether as a privileged frame of reference that is perfectly undetectable, and continued (like Lorentz) to distinguish between "real" lengths and times measured by observers at rest within the aether, and "apparent" lengths and times measured by observers in motion within the aether. Darrigol summarizes: ...

    In other words, the Einstein supporters admit that Poincare created special relativity before Einstein, but Poincare failed to mix his philosophy with his physics the way Einstein did. Poincare explained his philosophy in his philosophical writings, and his physics in his physical papers.

    These Einstein fans must have a very odd view of science. If the aether is undetectable, as Poincare said in 1900 and Einstein echoed five years later, then any discussion of it is just philosophy. Everybody agrees that there were no observable differences between Poincare's relativity theory and Einstein's. If Poincare discussed the philosophical aspects in philosophical writings, then he probably had a better and clearer understanding than Einstein.


    Sunday, Jul 05, 2009
     
    Evolutionists push leftism and atheism
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers (the Pharyngula blogger) writes:
    Other sources, like Lavender Magazine, have noticed that the atheists in their communities have a rather reliable political and social position. Here's a review of Atheists Talk radio (which is no more, I'm sorry to say).
    Many radio programs broadcast locally are queer-inclusive. But aside from KFAI's Fresh Fruit, which is total queer content, no program is as fully queer-supportive as Atheists Talk.
    People dependent on religion like to claim that atheism is just another religion, and they argue that we can't know that we'd have a better society if we got rid of god (and usually go the other way and claim we'd be immoral without our imaginary cosmic policeman in the sky), but you know, I look around at all the atheist communities springing up around the country, and I see the people who are most committed to tolerance and equality joining them, and I am convinced. A godless America would be a better America, ...
    PZ Myers' expertise is in evolutionary biology, and writes the most popular blog on the subject. He does not separate his scientific views from his religious and political views.

    He is entitled to his opinions, of course. I just point out that nearly all of those who are agressively promoting evolutionary biology in our society are also pushing leftist and anti-religion agendas.

    It sure seems to me that you could believe in evolutionary biology and be religious or have right-wing views. But that is just not the way most of the prominent evolutionists see it. When they teach evolution, they will also be teaching leftism and atheism.


    Saturday, Jul 04, 2009
     
    Why Einstein is falsely credited
    I have posted before on how Einstein did not invent Relativity. A lot of physicists concede that Poincare discovered special relativity before Einstein, but Einstein deserves credit for rejecting the aether. But that is not really right, as I explain here. Einstein did not really reject the aether, as he said in 1920:
    More careful reflection teaches us, however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether.
    Wikipedia has an excellent page on the Relativity priority dispute. The editors cannot agree on who should get the credit for relativity, so the page has a lot of documented facts and quotes.

    There is a subtlety here that is hard to explain to non-mathematicians. If a mathematician proves that hypothesis A and hypothesis B are mathematically equivalent, then he won't waste time discussing which theory is more physically correct.

    There are a lot of examples of equivalent theories in physics. Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian mechanics seem very different, but they are mathematically equivalent. Sometimes one theory will rely on a concept that disappears in the equivalent theory. Then would you say that the concept is real or not? It is a meaningless question.

    Physicists will sometimes argue that Poincare did not discover special relativity. Instead, they say, he discovered a mathematically equivalent theory. They'll say that Poincare's theory used an aether hypothesis, and he showed mathematically that it did not depend on the aether, but he never showed physically that it did not depend on the aether. Only Einstein understood physically that there could be no aether, and so Einstein deserves credit for discovering special relativity. Or so they say.

    This argument from physicists is just nonsense. It displays a conceptual misunderstanding of mathematics. Poincare made mathematical reference to the aether concept, but that says nothing about whether the aether is real or whether his theory depends on the aether. In fact, Poincare said that the aether was perfectly undetectable.

    Suppose I were to make some simple physical statement like, "a nickel weighs about the same as two dimes". One way to demonstrate this would be to weigh the nickel and dime in grams, and show that one figure is about twice the other figure. Another way might be to put a nickel on one side of a balance, and two dimes on the other side, and show that they approximately balance. The latter method is arguably conceptually simpler because it does not require the concept of a gram. But it is not any truer.

    Likewise Einstein's explanation of special relativity has the conceptual advantage that it does not mention the aether. But it is not any more correct. Poincare and Einstein had the same opinion about the aether, as far as we know.

    There is also an editor on Wikipedia who wants to explain that all the criticism of Einstein's priority is based on an anti-Jewish conspiracy. I guess this is because Einstein was Jewish, and Lorentz and Poincare were not. I don't know how to get any neutral info on this subject. There are lovers and haters of Einstein, and both camps may have been influenced by his Jewishness. Einstein's public image was created by the NY Times, a newspaper with a large Jewish market, but I don't know if the paper was trying to create a Jewish hero.

    My personal opinion is thet Einstein is overrated. I think that it is an incontrovertible fact that the principle ideas that made Einstein famous were published and understood by others before Einstein. He still deserves credit for recognizing and explaining those ideas, and for other ideas.

    Here is the view of Olivier Darrigol, who traced the history of special relativity carefully:

    On several points —- namely, the relativity principle, the physical interpretation of Lorentz's transformations (to first order), and the radiation paradoxes -— Poincaré's relevant publications antedated Einstein's relativity paper of 1905 by at least five years, and his suggestions were radically new when they first appeared. On the remaining points, publication was nearly simultaneous.
    Darrigol ends saying that it is impossible to determine whether the similarities between Poincaré's and Einstein's theories of relativity can be best explained by common circumstances or by direct borrowing. The latter is a euphemism for Einstein plagiarizing Poincare. It is known that Einstein did not credit his sources and that he had read some of Poincare's work, but it is know known how much. But whether Einstein stole a little or a lot, he did not have the ideas first.

    My opinion is that it is extremely likely that Einstein had read and was influenced by all of Poincare's papers and his book. These were very high-profile works that were widely read and appreciated. Einstein was a patent examiner, and patent examiners always make it their business to study the prior art. Einstein's denials are the denials of a guilty man. We know that he was lying about not reading Poincare because he had friends who said that he was excited about reading Poincare's book. Einstein's famous 1905 special relativity paper had no references at all, an obvious attempt to conceal his sources. Maybe if Einstein had later come clean and given some plausible story about his sources, then I might believe it, but he did not. His later life showed him to be one who jealously claimed credit he did not deserve. So I assume that he had good reasons for covering up what he knew about Poincare's work.


    Thursday, Jul 02, 2009
     
    No good science books
    Haven't any good science books been written in recent years? Newsweek magazine recommends 50 books and the top science book is an anti-science book:
    17. THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS by Lee Smolin

    Smolin covers string theory and other topics in modern physics as no other has dared: showing that scientific advances are as much about personalities as data.

    There are just a couple of others on the list, such as an anti-science sci-fi book (19) and an evolution book by a leftist-atheist-evolutionist on the warpath against religion.

    A NY Times columnist asks for a great modern science book, and the suggestions are pathetic. They include “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. These are more anti-science books. Aren't there any real science books by real scientists?

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist "War on Science" Chris Mooney has coauthored a new book where he blames other leftist-atheist-evolutionists for alienating the public against science.


    Wednesday, Jul 01, 2009
     
    Respect for Scalia and Thomas
    The NY Times gives this analysis of the recent Supreme Court term:
    If there were surprises, they came from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

    “For all the talk about Scalia and Thomas being the most conservative justices on the court, they are the justices most likely in play,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford who has argued several important criminal cases before the court.

    Justices Scalia and Thomas are apt to follow what they understand to be the original meaning of the Constitution, even when the consequences might not align with their policy preferences. In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, for instance, Justices Scalia and Thomas joined three members of the court’s liberal wing to say that the Constitution’s confrontation clause requires crime laboratory analysts to appear at trial rather than submit written reports.

    It is funny the way Scalia and Thomas are hated by the liberal media. It is not that they are the most conservative, or the most influential, or the most biased. The biased and unprincipled justices get their share of scorn, but true hatred is reserved for those who are faithful to the US Constitution and their responsibilities to decide cases accordingly.

    Tuesday, Jun 30, 2009
     
    Treason against the planet
    The House just passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill, one of the most complex economic plans ever considered. Economist and NY Times columnist writes:
    And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

    To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

    The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate.

    You would think that an economist would comment on the economics of trading carbon credits, but he does not. Instead he babbles about scientific matters, and he has no expertise on that.

    Moreover, he seems to deny that there is even an economic issue. It is a moral issue. Not the moral issues of human harm, but he is saying that we are somehow offending the Gaia goddess.


    Sunday, Jun 28, 2009
     
    Obama EPA suppressed report
    C-net reports:
    The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

    Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

    The Obama war on science continues. I predict that soon Obama will have suppressed more science that Bush ever did.

    Update: Jonathan Adler agrees. Here are some commenters who got hung up on evolution:

    There's no doubt that politicians of both parties are willing to subvert good science for political gain, but I just don't think you're going to find the equivalent of significant numbers of Republican senators denying evolution. The climate change debate is one thing, but denying the existence of evolution is the realm of real crack pots, and something significantly beyond putting political pressure on scientific reports (as despicable as that is).

    Other than a few local school boards, there is no case that the government was brought to bear to attack evolution.

    Denial of biologic evolution has no policy consequences regarding anything other than the teaching of evolution itself. Not so for many other science controversies.

    Well, yeah, and Holocaust Denial has few, if any, policy consequences either.

    I think that we are seeing opinions that are more religious than scientific. The leftist-atheist-evolutionists really hate Christian Republicans, and it has very little to do with any scientific issue that has any bearing on anyone.

    The issue of anthropogenic global warming doesn't even have any direct policy consequences. The current policy issue is whether to adopt cap-and-trade carbon taxes. The question is whether climate benefits will be worth the harm, and whether it will be worth the cost. Reducing carbon output may or may not be worthwhile regardless of whether man-made CO2 has caused significant warming in the past.

     
    Comparing science skepticisms
    A Physics prof complains about this sticker that some Georgia schools used a few years ago:
    This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
    He compares it to the Forward that Lutheran minister Andrew Osiander wrote for Copernicus' 1543 book.

    It turns out that there is a long history of complaining about Osiander's forward. For centuries people have complained that Copernicus was onto the truth, but Osiander negated it all with a forward saying that it was only a theory with no bearing on reality.

    In fact, Osiander's forward is completely reasonable. It defends the work against those who might be offended by its novel hypotheses. It explains that astronomers may find different causes for observed motions, and choose whatever is easier to grasp. As long as a hypothesis allows reliable computation, it does not have to be the truth in some philosophical sense. Astronomical models need not necessarily describe the true causes for motion, but may still be useful as mathematical devices for calculating the movement of planets.

    I guess I just don't see the Forward as being so denigrating towards Copernicus. Osiander makes a couple of completely valid philosophical points. They do not undermine Copernicus, but attempt to make the book appealing to a wider audience. Maybe it expresses views that Copernicus would not have expressed. But none of this is the slightest bit unusual for a book with a preface written by someone else. The only thing unusual is that the Forward is unsigned. (It was also unauthorized, but I don't know whether it was unusual for a publisher to solicit a Forward without the author's approval.)

    I also reject the idea that Osiander was somehow watering down the Truth. Copernicus does not explain the causes for the planetary motions. He argued for the uniform circular motion of the planets, as opposed to the established Ptolemy model which had non-uniform motions. Kepler later discovered that the motion are non-uniform. Osiander was correct when he said that Copernicus' model was appealing because his hypothesis was easy to grasp, and his computations were consistent with observation. I think that Osiander's forward holds up pretty well, and does not deserve the criticism.

    I think that it is strange that many scientists have such a dogmatic view of what is true and false in science. They are eager to say that certain ideas represent an absolute truth that must never be questioned. Examples include Copernican astronomy, evolution, and anthropogenic global warming.


    Friday, Jun 26, 2009
     
    More on science v religion
    The current war between the accommodationist and non-accommodationist leftist-atheist-evolutionists has spilled into the WSJ with an essay by Lawrence Krauss. It is criticized by Jerry Coyne and Chris Mooney.

    Krauss is the guy who writes books on the physics of Star Trek, and claims that he was quoted "out of context" when he told a reporter that string theory was "a colossal failure". He is not a biologist, but he is on the pro-evolution warpath. His university says:

    Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose research is so broad that it covers science from the beginning of the universe to the end of the universe, will join Arizona State University in August to assume a leadership role in an emerging research and educational initiative on “origins.”

    “Lawrence Krauss has been at the forefront of trying to unify particle physics and cosmology; of trying to use the universe itself as a laboratory to understand fundamental interactions, fundamental science and fundamental physics,” says ASU President Michael Crow. “His ability to address fundamental questions of life, of origins – Where did we come from? Why are we here? – and to seek an understanding of the long-term sustainability of life on Earth, will facilitate this new research and educational initiative at Arizona State University.”

    I don't care that all these folks are leftist-atheist-evolutionists, but I do object when they start claiming that their views are the only ones compatible with science, and when they actively support the suppression of other views. They say that they just want to teach science, but their idea of science is to also teach leftism and atheism.
     
    Why we went to war
    I occasionally hear people say that the USA went to war against Iraq on false pretenses, as if that were a recognized historical fact. It is not.

    The stated reasons for the Iraq War are described here:

    These reasons have not been proven false, as far as I know. They are as valid as they ever were.

    I sometimes hear silly things like, "But Iraq did not have the WMD be an imminent threat to the USA." There were Congressmen who expressed the opinion that we should only goto war if Iraq is shown to have WMD or to be an imminent threat. They were outvoted. That is not why we went to war.

    In fairness, here are some quotes from various White House spokesmen emphasizing the threat from Iraq. Some of these quotes are a little sloppy and misleading. I haven't checked the context. But if you want the actual justifications for war, check the actual sources above.


    Thursday, Jun 25, 2009
     
    Ape fossil found
    John Hawks writes:
    Instead of arguing that Asia was the home to an undiscovered diversity of hominids, he instead argues that the hominids have been overestimated (in part by himself) and that some fossils represent an undiscovered diversity of apes.
    It should not be news that someone expressed an opinion that a fossil is an ape fossil, but it is. It seems no one is interested in ape fossils. No matter how ape-like the bones look, the scientists always call them hominid fossils.
     
    Abortion crime link debunked again
    A new paper argues:
    Ten years have passed since John Donohue and Steven Levitt initially proposed that legalized abortion played a major role in the dramatic decline in crime during the 1990s. ... I argue that the most straightforward test given available data involves age-specific arrest and homicide rates regressed on lagged abortion rates in the 1970s or indicators of abortion legalization in 1970 and 1973. Such models provide little support for the Donohue and Levitt hypothesis in either the US or the United Kingdom.
    It is amazing how a couple of academics can get rich and famous based on a completely fallacious idea. Donohue and Levitt (of Freakonomics) based their hypothesis on what has now been shown to be a data mistake, and while they cling to the idea, others say that abortion had no significant impact on crime.

    Tuesday, Jun 23, 2009
     
    Letting computers control your medical records
    The LA Times reports:
    Accessing your own medical records should be as easy as checking your online bank account, a new health-data group contends, and Monday it launched a website to promote better access.

    The site, HealthDataRights.org, was established by a group that is boosting greater personal use of electronic medical records. Only 15% of physicians track the records electronically, said James Heywood, a group founder.

    The main driving force behind this appears to be startup companies who want to more easily sell your personal medical info to insurance companies and other medical gatekeepers.

    Adam Bosworth, formerly heading up Google's effort to spy on your medical records, supports:

    A Declaration of Health Data Rights

    In an era when technology allows personal health information to be more easily stored, updated, accessed and exchanged, the following rights should be self-evident and inalienable. We the people:

    1. Have the right to our own health data

    2. Have the right to know the source of each health data element

    3. Have the right to take possession of a complete copy of our individual health data, without delay, at minimal or no cost; If data exist in computable form, they must be made available in that form

    4. Have the right to share our health data with others as we see fit

    That last one is the key point. They want you to share your health data with Google and other data aggregators who can then sell ads or insurance or other products. They oppose medical privacy, according to their faq:
    Does this Declaration suggest people should have exclusive rights to their data?

    No, we are not suggesting that, although this is a thorny issue.

    It is a thorny issue, because people want medical privacy, but the data wholesalers don't want to give it to them.

    The mindset of the folks at Google is to never delete any data. Google keeps a record of every search that has ever been ordered.

    State law (in California, at least) already requires medical providers to give you copies of your records. The last time I got medical assistance, I got an MRI, a radiologist report, and I saw an orthopedist. I hung onto the data the whole time. I showed the MRI and report to the orthopedist, and let him keep a copy of the report, but I still have the MRI and the report. I paid for it and it is my to do with as I please. It is true that I do not have a digitized copy of the MRI film, but that would really be mainly of use to others, not me.

    Bosworth complains that things like cholesterol scores are not readily available in an XML format. That would be useful to medical data aggregators who are putting the data into databases, but who else cares? Your cholesterol score is just a number, like 200.

    I would have favored a declaration that said that medical data aggregators had to treat you as the owner of your medical data. In particular, they should have to delete the data if you request it.

     
    The campaign against AIDS denial
    NewScientist magazine writes:
    Why, in 21st-century California, would a middle-class woman and her young daughter die like this when there is tried-and-tested treatment for their illness? The answer lies in a bizarre medical conspiracy theory that says AIDS is not caused by HIV infection (see Five myths about HIV and AIDS). ...

    The origins of the AIDS denialism movement can be traced back to 1987, four years after the discovery of HIV. Peter Duesberg (see image) was then a renowned researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who had shown that some cancers were triggered by retroviruses. In March that year, Duesberg performed an about-face, publishing an article in which he questioned his original finding that retroviruses caused cancer, and also whether HIV (another retrovirus, although not one that he had studied) caused AIDS.

    I think that it is pretty crazy to blame Duesberg for some foolish women not following medical advice. If he was wrong, then the proper thing is to just prove him wrong. All he did was to publish an idea. He should be credited for that, not blamed.

    I remember 1987. AIDS quickly became a politicized disease, and anyone who said anything that was not politically correct was ostracized. A lot of unscientific nonsense was reported. There was a journalist named Michael Fumento who wrote some completely reasonable articles on the subject, but he somehow stepped on some toes, and he got blackballed.

    Evidence was accumulating that HIV causes AIDS, but the relevant science was sloppy. They never did give a Nobel prize for it. Soon AIDS was redefined as including a finding of a positive test for HIV, so it did not matter.

    When 99% of the experts say one thing, and 1% say something else, then I go with the 99%. It does bother me that there are a few dissenters. All healthy academic fields have dissenters. But when I find out that the 99% is trying to censor and silence the 1%, then I get concerned. I get suspicious because there could be a lot more dissenters who have already been intimidated into keeping quiet. I can no longer read why the experts might be wrong, and so I don't know why they are right either.

    Who will have the guts to criticize the establishment when you not only risk losing your job and your reputation, but 20 years later science magazines will still be writing articles blaming your for people dying.

    Most fields allow dissent, and don't have this problem. But some fields do, and you cannot trust the authorities in those fields. Vaccination has the problem. The medical establishment does not tolerate any dissent about official vaccine policy.

    Another field with this problem is global warming theory. Anyone who does not toe the official line is equated with a Holocaust denier.

    The leading vaccine and global warming experts may well be 80% correct in what they say. But they are not 100% correct. The more they attempt to silence their critics, the more they cast doubt on their own authority and the ability of their ideas to stand on their own.

    I say that we should encourage men like Duesberg, even if they are wrong (as Duesberg almost certainly is).


    Sunday, Jun 21, 2009
     
    Huge patent case pending
    The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear Bilski v Doll. At issue is a Federal Circuit ruling that:
    A process is patent-eligible only if "(1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943, 954 (Fed. Cir. 2008).
    I once (unsuccessfully) challenged some cryptography patents in Schlafly v Caro-Kann v PKP and RSA Data Security. My guess is that the patents would be declared invalid under the new standard. The RSA patent was not tied to any particular machine or apparatus. The inventors would argue that the invention transforms one signal to another. But the signal is not a radio signal or anything as physical as that. It is just a number, and the transformation is just some arithmetic. The number is not a measure of anything. It is just a sequence of bits that corresponds to some randomly generated cryptographic key.

    The ruling might also threaten my patent on a number.

    However ridiculous you might think that these cryptography patents are, the business method patents are much more ridiculous. The Bilski invention is a business method, and the Supreme Court might stick to ruling on that.


    Saturday, Jun 20, 2009
     
    Debunking the unconscious
    There has been research claiming that the unconscious mind can make superior decisions:
    The "unconscious thought" theory for making complex decisions was proposed in a 2006 study by Ap Dijksterhuis ..., leading the researchers to conclude that it is best to leave tough choices to the unconscious.
    But others have refined the experiment, and declared:
    This is evidence against the idea that unconscious deliberation is superior to conscious decision-making.
    I think that the idea of the unconscious mind is one of those stupid ideas that Sigmund Freud famously promoted and people accepted, even tho there is a lack of any empirical evidence supporting the idea. Every once in a while someone claims to have some proof for the unconsious, and it is always shot down.

    George writes:

    The existence of the unconscious is an obvious fact. You are unconscious when you sleep. Your brain directs your heart to beat without conscious direction. How can you deny the unconscious?
    Yes, there are unconscious mental processes. The question is whether the unconscious mind has higher reasoning powers, or the ability to cause neuroses, without awareness by the conscious mind. If that were true, then I would expect someone to prove it somehow.

    Thursday, Jun 18, 2009
     
    Scientists are cheering for Obama
    A reader wonders why I commented on the Scientific American 10 without also noting that Pres. Obama is also on the SciAm 10.

    I am waiting to see whether Pres. Obama's science policies are really any better than Pres. Bush's. So far, Pres. Obama's new stem cell policy has provoked some leftwing protests because of some restrictions on federal funds. There is a campaign to relax the rules because the new proposal requires the mother to give consent. The complaint is that it was easier to do federally-funded embryonic stem cell research under the old rules.

    The NY Times now reports:

    A distinct gulf exists between Obama's overall standing and how some of his key initiatives are viewed, with fewer than half of Americans saying they approve of how he has handled health care and the effort to save General Motors and Chrysler. A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results.
    That's right, there is a "distinct gulf". The public is somehow hypnotized by Obama, even tho people don't really agree with what he is doing. I am willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt for now, but I will be commenting on what Obama actually does.

    Here is NY Times column about how Obama is doctoring the global warming data.

     
    Obama claims to support states rights
    President Barack Obama signed a pro-gay executive order, and AP reports:
    Obama has refused to take any concrete steps toward a repeal of a policy that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, even though as a candidate he pledged to scrap the Clinton-era rules. He similarly has refused to step in and block the dismissal of gays and lesbians who face courts-martial for disclosing their sexual orientation.

    Obama said he wants to see the Defense of Marriage Act repealed and in its place a law that would give the partners of gay and lesbian federal employees health insurance and survivor benefits, among other things.

    "I believe it's discriminatory, I think it interferes with states' rights, and we will work with Congress to overturn it," Obama pledged, flanked by lawmakers and advocates.

    So Obama supports states' rights?! The term states' rights has primarily been used by southern Democrat racial segragationists in the 1960s.

    Conservatives do not support states' rights, and do not believe that states even have rights.

    The primary effect of DOMA is to let each state decide for itself whether to recognize same-sex marriages. It seems to me that someone in favor of states rights should also favor DOMA. Obama also campaigned as being against same-sex marriage. I guess we cannot expect him to make much sense on this subject.

     
    Another bogus gene theory
    The NY Times reports:
    One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.

    The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair. ...

    The original study was so compelling because it explained how nature and nurture could collude to produce a complex mood problem. ...

    The authors reanalyzed the data and found “no evidence of an association between the serotonin gene and the risk of depression,” no matter what people’s life experience was, Dr. Merikangas said.

    I am sure that some day scientists will have all sorts of genetic explanations for things, but the genetic explanations for human behavior have all failed. So far.

    Tuesday, Jun 16, 2009
     
    No gay animals found yet
    A reader sends this story as evidence that human homosexuality is innate:
    Examples of same-sex behavior can be found in almost all species in the animal kingdom — from worms to frogs to birds — making the practice nearly universal among animals, according to a new review of research on the topic.
    Yes, there is some same-sex behavior, but they don't find a same-sex sexual preference that resembles human homosexuals at all.

    It mentions fruit flies with a genetic defect where they cannot tell males and female apart. So? There are other animals who don't distinguish much of anything, and will copulate with anything in sight. That is just blind hornyness, not homosexuality.

    It mentions animals that exhibit non-sexual buddy behavior with animals of the same sex. Yeah, and there are men who play basketball together and women who go shopping together, but that has nothing to do with homosexuality.

    Those male bonobos and penguins only have sex with each other when there are no females available.

    The article says that the study is in this journal issue, but it is not. The closest I could find was an article titled, Birds gone wild: same-sex parenting in albatross.

    Some people will see all this as evidence that human homosexuality is innate, but I see it as just the opposite. A lot of smart people have worked really hard to find homosexuality in the animal world, and that haven't found much that relates to human beings.


    Sunday, Jun 14, 2009
     
    America's first Mohammedan president
    Frank J. Gaffney Jr. writes in the Wash. Times:
    During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton -- someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a "white male" -- was dubbed "America's first black president" by a black admirer. Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America's first Muslim president. ...

    With Mr. Obama's unbelievably ballyhooed address in Cairo Thursday to what he calls "the Muslim world" (hereafter known as "the Speech"), there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself. Consider the following indicators:

    • Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to "the Holy Koran." Non-Muslims -- even pandering ones -- generally don't use that Islamic formulation.

    • Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, "I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed." Again, "revealed" is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad. ...

    I would not call Obama a Muslim or a Mohammedan, but his father was a Mohammedan, and much of the Mohammedan world would say that he should not be permitted to reject Mohommedanism.

    I did not like Obama's repeated references to "aspirations". He kept expressing support for Palestinian (arab) aspirations, and how we should help them realize those aspirations. But those aspirations are to exterminate the jews! When they talk about a Palestinian state, they always mean a Palestinian arab state which expels the jews. And they want to repopulate Israel with arabs.

    I think that it is fine for Obama to urge the Muslims to live in peace, but he should not be endorsing their aspirations.

    Today's Jerusalem Post reports that even Egypt acknowleges that the Palestinian arab will not agree to peace until Israel is destroyed:

    Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak blasted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday saying "Netanyahu's demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state is ruining the chance for peace," Egyptian news agencies reported on Monday.

    Mubarak further added that "not Egypt, nor any other Arab country would support Netanyahu's approach."


    Friday, Jun 12, 2009
     
    The swine flu hoax
    The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared swine flu a pandemic but M. Fumento explains:
    So how could the WHO do it? Simple. In 2005 it rewrote the definition of "influenza pandemic," which formerly required "enormous numbers of deaths and illness." Under its new definition, a handful of cases and zero deaths can nonetheless constitute a "pandemic." And that's pretty much what we've seen.
    The swine flu has turned out to be a trivial threat that has hardly effected anyone. You would probably be better off getting the swine flu so that you'll get immunity to other H1N1 viruses.

    Thursday, Jun 11, 2009
     
    The wise Latina woman
    When Samuel Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court several years ago, the liberal press attacked him for belonging to an obscure conservative college group 35 years earlier. Now Sonia Sotomayor has been nominated, and she is being critized for a pattern of racist comments she has made. But hardly anyone is mentioning her membership in La Raza, a Mexican-American racist group.

    Sotomayor complains that college admission test scores are culturally biased, and that is why she needed affirmative action to get into Princeton and Yale. This is nonsense. She grew up in the Bronx. The tests have no such bias. I wonder about someone who has gone thru life with such an attitude.

    Sotomayor will get approved, but someone at least ought to ask her some tough questions at her hearings.


    Wednesday, Jun 10, 2009
     
    No one cares about climate change
    U.S. Rep. Michael Honda, D-Campbell, writes:
    The irony is that the majority of Americans believes climate change is happening, is seriously concerned and wants Congress to do more. A recently published study by Yale and George Mason universities, entitled "Global Warming's Six Americas," found that a growing majority of Americans — 67 percent — want the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of other countries' reticence toward reduction. ...

    Yet an underwhelming number of citizens have written, e-mailed or phoned government officials in the last 12 months to urge them to take action on global warming. Even among those who support a vigorous national response, only 10 percent had contacted their elected officials.

    So maybe they all understand climate change, and think that it is no big deal. Or that Congress cannot do anything about it. Or that Congress will just make it worse. Or that there is no need to write your Congressman to recite trend conventional wisdom.

    Honda's solution:

    Educate. I reintroduced legislation this year to fund the National Science Foundation in educating our nation about the impacts of climate change and ways to prevent it through energy efficiency, conservation and renewable energy initiatives.
    So instead of funding science, he wants to fund propaganda.

    To convince the public, they will follow this research that suggests using over-confident spokesmen even if they have a history of being wrong:

    The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

    Sunday, Jun 07, 2009
     
    Acupuncture is worthless
    The Chicago Tribune reports:
    People suffering from chronic low back pain who received acupuncture treatments fared better than those receiving only conventional care, according to a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

    Interestingly, the study also showed that people receiving simulated acupuncture — toothpicks were used instead of needles — also fared better than those receiving conventional care.

    What gives?

    Researchers wish they knew.

    Wish they knew? Of course they know. This is the standard placebo effect.

    The typical randomized medical study uses a group getting the proposed treatment that some people think is superior, a group getting some sort of fake or simulated treatment or placebo, and a group getting neither. The placebo group often does better than the last group. The real test is whether the first group does any better than the placebo group.

    In this study, the acupuncture group did no better than the placebo group. It also looked at the placement of the needles, and found that it did not make any difference either.

    Acupuncture might make you feel better if you think that it is going to work, but there is objective scientific evidence of any medical benefit.


    Saturday, Jun 06, 2009
     
    Mooney's war on science
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Chris Mooney used to complain that pro-evolution TV programs did not promote atheism enough:
    But PBS’s mainstreaming of Darwinism also trims back some of the theory’s more controversial implications. ...

    Evolution’s attempt to divorce Darwinian science from atheism, though well intentioned, is finally naive. Darwinism presents an explanation for life’s origins that lacks any supernatural element and emphasizes a cruel and violent process of natural selection that is tough to square with the notion of a benevolent God. Because of this, many students who study evolution will find themselves questioning the religions they have grown up with. What’s insidious is that Evolution allows fundamentalists to say this, but not evolutionists.

    Now he says:
    The basic point that I will develop will be that reconciliationism played a key role in the biggest pro-evolution victory in this decade, Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling in the 2005 Dover trial. This on its own doesn’t make the court-endorsed accommodationist position true–judges are not our ultimate arbiter on either science or philosophy. But it does suggest that if we care about the teaching of evolution, we ought to think very, very hard before undermining a position that has succeeded so well in court.
    At issue is whether govt science programs should teach that science and religion are compatible. See the Berkeley evolution site for a typical such view. The leftist-atheist-evolutionists would really like to denounce religion at every opportunity, but Mooney has realized that such a school policy would leave them vulnerable to religions complaining that their views are being misrepresented, and they might demand equal time.

    That Dover court case was based on a judge's determination that evolution is compatible with religion, but the evolution critics are religiously motivated. The public should realize that the evolutionists have some anti-religion motivations.

    Update: Here are the links to the accommodationist debate over whether evolutionists should be hostile to religion.


    Wednesday, Jun 03, 2009
     
    Stem cell quacks
    CNN reports on overseas quacks offering bogus stem cell remedies:
    The family says it got most of its information from a Web site called China Stem Cell News, at stemcellschina.com, which boasts of dozens of anecdotal testimonials from loved ones who say their children or family members showed improvement after the stem cell treatments. The site offers no scientific evidence and no means of making contact except through a Web form. CNN used the form, but as of yet has received no reply.

    Stem cell therapy is routinely performed at clinics in China. When CNN correspondent John Vause reported on one stem cell therapy clinic near Beijing in December, the clinic refused to release its records or put its cases forward for peer review.

    The International Society of Stem Cell Researchers and the FDA discourage Americans from traveling overseas for stem cell therapy. But clinics are operating worldwide -- many in China, and several in Russia, Latin America and Mexico.

    Meanwhile, American stem cell scientists are complaining that Pres. Obama's embryonic stem cell funding conditions are more restrictive than Pres. Bush's.

    I think that all this embryonic stem cell therapy hype is voodoo. There are no such effective therapies. There might be in the future, but you can be sure that they will find some therapies in rats long before they do people. And there is a good chance that human embryoes will never be needed. In the meantime, embryonic stem cell research is an overfunded area of science.


    Tuesday, Jun 02, 2009
     
    How Cooking Made Us Human
    Richard Wrangham has a new book on how A cooking explains human evolution:
    He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.

    There were other benefits for humanity’s ancestors. He writes: “The protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. While other habilines” — tool-using prehumans — “elsewhere in Africa continued for several hundred thousand years to eat their food raw, one lucky group became Homo erectus — and humanity began.”

    Students of evolution often ask, "Why did human evolve, and apes and monkeys did not?" The usual answer is that it is a stupid question. All living plants and animals have evolved. Humans are just animals. For all we know, apes have had as many mutations to their genomes as humans have in the last 5M years. We have adapted to a technologically advanced environment, but chimps are just as well adapted to their environment, and cockroachs and sharks have adapted to theirs. All adaptations are of equal merit, according to the standard leftist-atheist-evolutionist view.

    And yet it is difficult to even convince a child of such foolishness. The Planet Of The Apes was just a silly movie that no one would take seriously. Somehow humans have evolved in a way that no other species has.

    A great deal of speculation has been written about what might have put our human ancestors on the evolutionary fast track. The Lucy theory says that the breakthru was walking upright about 3M years ago. Use of language is another theory. There are many others, such as the aquatic ape hypothesis. With this book, add cooking to the list of theories.

    I think that humans are qualitatively different from other animals, and the explanation of how that evolved is an open scientific question. Evolutionists sometimes act like they have answers to questions like this, but they don't.


    Monday, Jun 01, 2009
     
    How not to do a cross-exam
    I commented below about how the cross-examination of Ill. Senator Roland Burris failed. I elaborate here. From the Senate hearing transcript:
    REPRESENTATIVE DURKIN: Did you talk to any members of the Governor's staff or anyone closely related to the Governor, including family members or any lobbyists connected with him, including let me throw out some names, John Harris, Rob Blagojevich, Doug Scofield, Bob Greenleaf, Lon Monk, John Wyma, did you talk to anybody who was associated with the Governor about your desire to seek the appointment prior to the Governor's arrest?
    Fair question.
    MR. WRIGHT: Give us a moment.

    MR. BURRIS: I talked to some friends about my desire to be appointed, yes.

    Evasive and unacceptable answer. If you get a non- answer like this, you have to repeat the question until you get an answer.
    REPRESENTATIVE DURKIN: I guess the point is I was trying to ask, did you speak to anybody who was on the Governor's staff prior to the Governor's arrest or anybody, any of those individuals or anybody who is closely related to the Governor?

    MR. BURRIS: I recall having a meeting with Lon Monk about my partner and I trying to get continued business, and I did bring it up, it must have been in September or maybe it was in July of '08 that, you know, you're close to the Governor, let him know that I am certainly interested in the seat.

    Answer is incomplete. You have to ask for ALL such conversations.
    REPRESENTATIVE DURKIN: Okay. Did you speak to any individuals who -- any individuals who were also seeking the appointment of the United States Senate seat, otherwise people we've referred to as Senate candidates one through five?

    MR. BURRIS: No, I did not.

    REPRESENTATIVE DURKIN: Okay. At any time were you directly or indirectly aware of a quid pro quo with the Governor for the appointment of this vacant Senate seat?

    MR. BURRIS: No, sir.

    REPRESENTATIVE DURKIN: Okay. If you were aware of a quit pro quo, what would you have done?

    These are stupid questions. A quid pro quo would be a crime. Burris is not going to admit to a crime. He as might as well have asked, "Did you commit a crime?" Useless.

    The next question should have been, "Was money discussed in any of those conversations?". Then Burris would have had to commit perjury, or admit that he had conversations which discussed both his possible appointment and him donating money. Then you have Burris sweating bullets. You then force him to explain exactly why it would be impossible for anyone to interpret his conversation as a quid pro quo.


    Sunday, May 31, 2009
     
    No crime to taunt a zoo animal
    San Jose Mercury News columnist Scott Herhold writes:
    Taunting

    Did they taunt the tiger? Well, probably. Although they were never charged criminally, the father of a third buddy slain in the attack, Carlos Sousa Jr., said Paul Dhaliwal told him the three had yelled and waved at the animal from atop a railing.

    All of these things entered into the settlement. If the Dhaliwals had been Boy Scouts in uniform, they would have gotten twice as muchTaunting

    Did they taunt the tiger? Well, probably. Although they were never charged criminally, the father of a third buddy slain in the attack, Carlos Sousa Jr., said Paul Dhaliwal told him the three had yelled and waved at the animal from atop a railing.

    All of these things entered into the settlement. If the Dhaliwals had been Boy Scouts in uniform, they would have gotten twice as much.

    What? Is it a crime to yell and wave to a zoo animal? Does the zoo even have any rules against kids yelling and waving? The zoo had a wall that was shorter than the standard requirements for enclosing tigers. That is all you need to know. I don't see how Herhold can blame the kids for allegedly yelling and waving, when no one had any way of knowing that yelling and waving could be harmful.

    Saturday, May 30, 2009
     
    Explaining superconductors
    NewScientist magazine claims that it has finally learned What string theory is really good for.
    High-temperature superconductors behave as they do because of the way electrons organise themselves in the material, but 20 years and hundreds of thousands of research papers on from their discovery, we are no closer to knowing exactly how that is. "If someone genuinely knew the microscopic description of a high-temperature superconductor, they would already have a Nobel prize," says Joe Bhaseen, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Cambridge.
    No, string theory doesn't tell us anything about particle physics or gravity, but maybe it will give us an alternate way of looking at condensed matter. This is not really string theory, and even if it turns out that there is some merit to the view, it does not say that particles are really strings.

    String theory seems to be not so much a theory, but a buzz phrase used by theoretical physicists who leap from one fad to another. Peter Woit reports:

    Strings 2009 is about three weeks away, and it will bring 450 or so string theorists to Rome. ...

    One topic that is not hot is anything mathematical, with no research talks by mathematicians or Witten, and little about mathematically significant topics such as mirror symmetry. What also seems to no longer be hot is either string cosmology or the landscape. No cosmology, multiverse or Boltzmann Brains are to be found among the research talks, although Brian Greene will give a public lecture about the issue of possible multiple universes.


    Friday, May 29, 2009
     
    USA using resources
    Rush Limbaugh recently said:
    RUSH: I have been hearing this statistic my whole adult life, as evidence of the immorality and greed of the United States of America. We make up less than 5% of the world's population, but we use 25% of the world's resources. Now he's tailoring it specifically to oil. Well, the way to look at that is not to say that the United States is immoral and unjust and greedy and selfish. The way to look at it is how did that happen in the first place? Did we not create lifestyles and prosperity and wealth for all of our citizens that is the envy of the world? We have liberated billions of people from oppression, slavery, and bondage. We have developed with our wealth and our freedom the cure for lots of diseases, and we have shared our successes with people all over the world. We have used our success in utilizing energy to expand our economy, to feed the world. Our agriculture outproduces anyplace else in the world. We are the one nation on earth that can help rebuild entire nations after disasters or wars, and we have done it. Now, you don't do that on the cheap.

    The idea that we are 5% of the world's population but using 25% of the world's resources, that statement is made specifically to convince you that we are, by that definition, evil, that, by that definition, we are wrong, by that definition, we alone are guilty. We were not entitled to these resources.

    If you really believe that the USA is unfairly using up a disportionate share of world resources, then the obvious policy consequence would be to stop immigration. The more people we let in, the more resources will get used up.
     
    The weak case against Roland Burris
    Illinois Senator Roland Burris is being accused of lying to the Senate to cover up his dealings with Gov. Blagojevich, based on newly released wiretaps. You can find his Senate testimony here, and the wiretap transcript here.

    I see two problems here. First, the US Attorney should never have kept the wiretaps secret. The people had a right to know whether they had a corrupt governor and a corrup senator.

    Second, the Senate committee was too incompetent to cross-examine Burris properly. It failed to ask him the necessary questions, and now it does not have a good perjury case against him.

    I think that cross-examination technique is a lost art. Most lawyers just don't know how to do it.


    Monday, May 25, 2009
     
    Explaining the motivations of others
    The GNXP blog writes, about mindreading:
    I think the reality is that most people misunderstand the motivations of others, and, importantly most people probably misunderstand their own motivations! When it comes to intellectual topics that deal with humanity we pretend as if it's like physics, with billiard balls following predictable paths. The reality is very different, human affairs, human motivation, and so forth, are much more complex. Not only is it important to move beyond our own projections derived from our own mental models, but we have to acknowledge that individuals themselves have a difficult time in teasing apart the variables which lead them to conclude what they do. We have such a tenuous grasp on our own motivations when it comes to religion and politics that it is folly to presume that we'd be any good at deconstructing others.
    I think he is correct. People are ridiculously bad at explaining the motivations of others. Statistician By Andrew Gelman couple of examples of faulty explanations of political motivations.

    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist psychiatrist Andy Thomson gives a talktitled 'Why We Believe in Gods' at the American Atheist 2009 convention in Atlanta, Georgia. He cites some neuroscience and does some evolutionistic theorizing to try to explain why people believe in religion. The neuroscience is interesting, but does not relate directly to religion.

    One of his premises is that any human tendency to believe in religion must be a byproduct of adaptations of our ancestors to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle 50K years ago. He appears to have fallen for the myth that humans stopped evolving 50K years ago.

    He got his biggest applause when he attacked the Bush administration.

    His real purpose was to eventually force the school science classes to teach that religious belief is explained by evolution. He wanted another Scopes trial so that the leftist-atheist-evolutionists could humiliate the religious believers in court again.

    One of his arguments was that religion than natural selection is easier for our caveman minds to understand, so our poorly-evolved brains succumb to religion. I doubt that. No one has any trouble understanding natural selection. Natural selection is just survival of the fittest. No one ever expects anything else to happen. Religious theology is a whole lot more complex than that. Maybe people would rather believe in religion for various reasons, but I don't think that religion is any easier to believe.


    Friday, May 22, 2009
     
    Abortion polls
    The New Republic magazine writes:
    As Barack Obama ponders who to appoint to the Supreme Court, recent polls from Pew and Gallup are showing that Americans have become less supportive of abortion rights. In the Gallup poll, more Americans chose to call themselves "pro-life" than "pro-choice"--by 51 to 42 percent. That's the first time pro-lifers have outpolled pro-choicers since Gallup began asking this in 1995. ...

    The tilt toward pro-life sentiment doesn't necessarily imply a changed view of whether the Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, a recent CNN poll shows that Americans, by 68 to 30 percent, do not want to overturn it; the Gallup and Pew polls are thus gauging personal sentiment, not policy preferences. Americans can be expected to embrace a more conservative social ideology during this period without endorsing conservative social policies.

    The CNN poll is misleading. It got 68% answering negative to this question:
    The 1973 Roe versus Wade decision established a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe versus Wade decision, or not?
    If I weren't sure what Roe v Wade decided, I would take this question as asking whether I would make abortion illegal in the first 3 months, in all cases. If it was Roe v Wade that made abortion legal in the first 3 months, then a complete reversal would make it illegal.

    The recent Gallup poll showed only 22% of the public said that abortion should be legal under any circumstances. That was the central holding of Roe v Wade -- making abortion a constitutional right during all 9 months as long as an abortionist was willing to do the operation. So it appears to me that only 22% agree with Roe v Wade.

    When people talk about overturning Roe v Wade, they usually mean the Supreme Court allowing the states to regulate abortion. That would leave abortion readily available nearly everywhere in the USA, in the first 3 months at least.

     
    No innocent person has been executed
    The NY Times admits:
    The decline in newsroom resources has also hampered efforts by death-penalty opponents to search for irrefutable DNA evidence that an innocent person has been executed in America. ...

    Since 1992, 238 people in the United States, some who were sitting on death row, have been exonerated of crimes through DNA testing. But proving with scientific certitude that an innocent person has been executed is difficult.

    Yes, that's right. There is no proof that anyone has been wrongly executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

    I suspect that this number (238 people) includes all overturned convictions, and not just exonerations.

    Our legal system has many flaws, and it seems likely that an innocent person will be executed someday. When that happens, the anti-death-penalty folks will make a big deal out of it. You will hear about it. It is remarkable that it has not happened yet.


    Wednesday, May 20, 2009
     
    Rush doubts missing link
    SciAm magazine anounces:
    Ten researchers, politicians, business executives and philanthropists who have recently demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity ...

    Eugenie Scott ...

    She headed a grassroots movement in Lexington to prevent creationism from being taught in the public schools there.

    In 2005 she served as a pro bono consultant in the landmark Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, in which Judge John Jones ruled that “intelligent design” was a form of creationism and was therefore unconstitutional to teach in public schools.

    Last year Scott and the NCSE faced an uphill battle over the Academic Freedom Act in Florida, which allows educators to teach about “controversies” related to evolution.

    So Scott's "outstanding commitment" is to suppressing and censoring certain views about evolution. Surely SciAm could have found ten people who were actually contributing something positive to science or society.

    Rush Limbaugh said this about the Ida fossil now on display.

    RUSH: Drudge had as a lead item up there this morning on his page a story from the UK, Sky News: "Scientists Unveil Missing Link In Evolution." It's all about how Darwin would be thrilled to be alive today. "Scientists have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution." It's a one-foot, nine-inch-tall monkey, and it's a lemur monkey described as the eighth wonder of the world. "The search for a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom has taken 200 years - but it was presented to the world today --" So I guess this is settled science. We now officially came from a monkey, 47 million years ago. Well, that's how it's being presented here. It's settled science. You know, this is all BS, as far as I'm concerned. Cross species evolution, I don't think anybody's ever proven that. They're going out of their way now to establish evolution as a mechanism for creation, which, of course, you can't do, but I'm more interested in some other missing link. And that is the missing link between our failing economy and prosperity.
    First, this isn't settled science. There are others views about how monkeys and apes split. NewScientist mag says Ida is not a missing link.

    The term "missing link" is more commonly used for the split between humans and apes. The settled science says that human and chimp ancestors split about 6 million years ago, but there is no 6 million year old fossil that anyone thinks is a common ancestor.


    Monday, May 18, 2009
     
    No risk benefit analysis
    The NY Times reports:
    With health authorities now gearing up for what could be a huge vaccination campaign against a new strain of swine flu, the experience of 1976 is raising a note of caution.

    The feared swine flu epidemic of 1976 never materialized. And several hundred people, including Ms. Kinney, who is now 68 and lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes temporary muscle weakness or paralysis. More than 30 of those people died. ...

    Others say there are lessons to be learned ...

    Another is that risks have to be weighed against benefits. Had there been a swine flu epidemic in 1976, the number of lives saved by a vaccine would have dwarfed the small number of cases of Guillain-Barré. But in 1976, the vaccine was given even though the epidemic did not materialize.

    So who has learned the lesson? Childhood vaccines are still given today without risk-benefit analyses.

    Tuesday, May 12, 2009
     
    Natural selection not proved
    Coyne cites this Richard Lewontin review of his book:
    Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True is intended as a weapon in that struggle.

    Coyne is an evolutionary biologist ...

    Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we can “determine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation.”But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always “find” (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature.

    Lewontin is a well-known Harvard Marxist evolutionist buddy of the late S.J. Gould.

    The essence of Darwinism is that natural selection is the driving force of evolution. Nobody has ever doubted natural selection, but evolutionists argue endlessly about whether it is the driving force of evolution. It seems likely to me, but apparently there is no real proof.

    Coyne has more on the subject here.


    Sunday, May 10, 2009
     
    Evolutionist refuses religion dialogue
    Prominent evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
    The organizers of the World Science Festival in New York invited me to participate on a panel that would discuss the relationship between faith and science. ...

    What was more distressing was that one of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, whose implicit mission is to reconcile science and religion (and in doing so, I think, blur the boundaries between them). ...

    So, I ain’t going, which would have been fun, especially because E. O. Wilson will be there for an 80th birthday fete. But I just couldn’t see myself taking money from an organization that is devoted to promulgating a futile -— indeed, dangerous —- dialogue between science and religion.

    He can do what he wants, of course. I am just noting the extreme hostility towards religion among prominent evolutionists. Scientists in other fields do not have such hostility. Other religions (eg, Catholics) do not have such hostility towards science.

    Coyne brags that PZ Myers agrees with him, and also describes how his fellow leftist-atheist-evolutionists are upset with the National Academy of Sciences for "accommodationism" of religion for saying things like this:

    Acceptance of the evidence for evolution can be compatible with religious faith. Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history.
    They believe that evolutionists should oppose religion on every front.

    Thursday, May 07, 2009
     
    Another goofy evolutionist theory
    ScientificAmerican.com has announced that Evolutionary psychologists decipher the "Rosetta stone" of human sexuality.

    The article reads like an April Fool's joke. I cannot tell whether there is an validity to any of it, but it is amusing to read.


    Wednesday, May 06, 2009
     
    Rebutting anecdotal evidence with more anecdotes
    The Bad Astronomer writes:
    If you think Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and the rest of the ignorant antiscience antivax people are right, then read this story. I dare you. David McCaffery writes about his daughter, Dana, who was four weeks old when she died.
    So he tries to rebut anecdotal evidence with another anecdote. This is not science, and vaccination is way out of an astronomer's expertise.

    He argues that parents should vaccinate babies for pertussis (whooping cough) in order to help protect other babies who are not yet vaccinated.

    Why, I wonder. Did he or anyone else present evidence to those parents that pertussis vaccinations were needed to benefit other babies?

    Before you say that it is obvious, it is not. Pertussis vaccination immunity wears off at about age 7, and pertussis is common in teenagers. It is not a disease that has been eradicated, even in communities that are 100% vaccinated according to the schedule. The baby in the story may have gotten pertussis from a teenager or adult.


    Monday, May 04, 2009
     
    The Google book deal
    The federal court should kill the Google book deal.

    The whole lawsuit against Google is based on the idea that book indexing should be opt-in, and not opt-out. After all, if an author wanted to opt-out, he would not need to join in a lawsuit. The copyright owner could just send a DMCA demand to Google, and Google would remove its copy of the book. The lawsuit is a class action supposedly representing authors who don't want to be bothered to opt-out.

    The essence of the Google settlement is to pay the lawyers $30M and require authors to opt-out of Google copying! Once the lawyers agreed to opt-out, they were no longer representing the class of book authors that they were supposed to be representing. The judge should decertify the case as a class-action, and only make it binding on the actual parties who overtly signed on as plaintiffs in the case.

    There is a good argument for Congress to enact some relaxed copyright rules for orphan books, but a judge should not be giving a monopoly on orphan works.


    Sunday, May 03, 2009
     
    Judge rules against evolutionist bigot
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers writes:
    James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, was found guilty of referring to Creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.

    I am astounded that Corbett was found guilty of anything.

    First of all, he told the truth: creationism is religious, it is a product of superstition, and it is nonsense — it doesn't fit any of the evidence we have about the history fo the world or life on it. We have to have the right to tell students not only that something is wrong, but that it is stupidly wrong.

    Secondly, we are being told over and over again that Christianity is not equivalent to creationism. This teacher has specifically said that creationism is nonsense, and this judge has equated a dismissal of a weird anti-scientific belief with making a rude remark about Christianity. So…where are all the Christians rising in outrage at the slander of their faith?

    The outrage is in the court decision. It was the teacher, not the judge, who equated creationism with religious nonsense, and it was the teacher who made a number of anti-Christian comments.

    Another leftist-atheist-evolutionist makes similar comments.

    I wouldn't mind if the teacher separated creationism from religion and said that creationism was nonsense from a scientific point of view. But there is no need for his attack on Christianity. This is just another example of how prominent evolutionists regard attacking religion as essential to their cause.

    I am not saying that the courts ought to micromanage the teaching of evolution. But if the leftist-atheist-evolutionists are going to argue that the schools should never say anything positive about creationism because it is a religion, and if the courts are going to agree with that view and declare that it is unconstitutional to say anything about creationism, then the schools should not say anything negative about creationism either.


    Wednesday, Apr 29, 2009
     
    How GPS uses relativity
    Pres. Obama said:
    The calculations of today’s GPS satellites are based on the equations that Einstein put to paper more than a century ago….
    GPS receivers work by listening to times being broadcast from 4 or more GPS satellites, and triangulating a location based on using the speed of light to calculate the distance to each of those 4 satellites. For this to work, the satellites must have extremely accurate clocks. (The receivers don't because they can infer the time from the satellites.)

    The satellite clocks keep time differently in space because of a couple of relativistic effects. The clocks slow down because they are moving faster (special relativity) and speed up because there is less gravity (general relativity). The effects are tiny, but they are significant compared to the precision needed for GPS.

    There are some other tiny errors as well. The clocks are not perfect, the satellite locations are not known perfectly, there are irregularities in the Earth's gravitational field, etc.

    When the GPS satellites were first put up in space, there was some controversy over whether the relativistic effects were significant. So the satellites were programmed both ways. They soon found that they got higher accuracy with the relativistic calculations. This is commonly cited as experimental proof for relativity, as in Obama's remark.

    However, it is not really true that we could never have a GPS system without relativity. To get higher accuracy than before, the GPS satellites are now re-calibrated on a daily basis. With these frequent corrections, it does not matter much if the relativistic corrections are used or not. If relativity had never been invented, GPS would work just as well, but physicists would be baffled as to why the daily corrections were necessary.

     
    Backup that DVD
    A pro-Hollywood op-ed says:
    Finally, the availability of a DVD-ripping tool from a "real" company like Real would signal to consumers that copying DVDs is OK — a message that is contrary to the law and that will undermine the market for legal content. Despite pleas from Real and its allies on the copyleft, no court has ever held that it is "fair use" to copy a prerecorded DVD.
    Fair use isn't the only argument. From the US copyright code, 17 USC 117 says:
    (a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. — Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:

    (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or

    (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

    This would not apply if DVDs just had movies on them, in the way that music CDs just have music on them. But Hollywood insisted that they be computer programs, so that they could control regional distribution and play other games on consumers. If Hollywood made the DVDs to be computer programs with full knowledge that they would be subject to 17 USC 117, then we should be able to make backup copies.
     
    Propaganda video contest
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers writes:
    Discover Magazine is running a contest: make a video that explains evolution in two minutes or less. They've done this before, with string theory, ...
    There is a funny similarity between evolution and string theory. Both fields are populated with zealots who are always trying to convince us that the theory is true, without actually telling us what is true about it.

    There are many things that are true about evolution and string theory, but that is not what the video contest is for. The string theory videos did not explain anything that was true. The idea is to hype the theory as a grand theory of everything.


    Friday, Apr 24, 2009
     
    Jared Diamond story apparently bogus
    AP reports:
    NEW YORK (AP) — Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond wrote a New Yorker magazine article that falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.

    Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp say in a single-page filing in Manhattan's state Supreme Court that Diamond's article published April 21, 2008, accused them "of serious criminal activity ... including murder."

    The article was titled, "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

    Stinkyjournalism.org has more details. An anthropologist adds:
    Many like to hold out Diamond as a know-nothing dilettante, but the main thing that distinguishes this case is that it was published in the New Yorker, which gets read by people. Monographs of fieldwork in anthropology don't get read by people. They are peer-reviewed, but not usually fact-checked
    I have criticized Diamond before, such as here. It is amazing how he can keep publishing these grand theories, get wide public acclaim, and not have any hard evidence for anything. When he says stuff that can be checked, it is wrong, and he is treated as a great genius.

    I also wonder how the New Yorker magazine can maintain a reputation for fact-checking. Somehow it can publish these bogus stories, see them get disproved, and yet stand by the stories as if nothing is wrong.

    Update: Steve Sailer points out that the lawsuit is being pushed by Stephen Jay Gould's widow. This is getting bizarre. Gould and Diamond were two of the most famous and widely read American scientists. Both got famous for publishing dubious theories that were praised for their political correctness. This lawsuit is going to be interesting. Too bad no one ever sued Gould for libel.


    Wednesday, Apr 22, 2009
     
    Recognizing randomness
    The Bad Astronomer does a terrible job of explaining randomness:
    Question for you: which of these two images shows dots that are placed at random, and which does not? ...

    Another great example is this one: imagine you flip a coin ten times, and you keep track. Which of these sequences is more likely? HHHHHTTTTT or TTHHTHHTTH

    He says the coin example shows equal randomness but he claims that one of the dot images is more random than the other! He does not see the contradiction between the examples.

    If you follow his links, you will see that both dot images were randomly generated. They differ in how the dots are correlated, but not in how random they are. Occasionally you will hear a layman say that something is not "random" because of some sort of observable correlation. That is a mistake. All sorts of random variables show correlations.

    For example, suppose I have a weighted coin that turns up heads 2/3 of the time, and tails 1/3. Some people might say that it is not random. But of course it is random. It certainly isn't deterministic. You might call it a biased coin or something else, but it is certainly also a random coin unless you can predict the outcome correctly each time.


    Friday, Apr 17, 2009
     
    Torture memos released
    The Angry Left Bush-haters are all excited with this news:
    The Bush Administration Office of Legal Counsel authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to put insects inside a confinement box as part of the Administration's "harsh interrogation" practice, as well as throwing detainees into walls, according to memos released by President Barack Obama on Thursday.

    Read the full memos here.

    "You would like to place Zubadayah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us he has a fear of insects," the Bush White House said.

    "As we understand it, no actually harmful insect will be placed in the box. Thus, though the introduction of an insect may produce trepidation in Zubaydah (which we discuss below), it certainly does not cause physical pain."

    But, the memo cautioned, to comply with the law, the CIA "must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain."

    More precisely, these memos expressed an opinion about whether the insect would violate 18 USC 2340 which is the law that would make it "torture" if it were "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering".

    Keep in mind that the FBI and military forces do not do any of this stuff. It was only done to 2 or 3 known terrorists who were refusing to talk about pending attacks. This is no big deal.


    Thursday, Apr 16, 2009
     
    Right to self-defense
    Law prof E. Volokh gives this example of fallacious legal reasoning:
    Third, defendant claims that the statute prohibiting the possession of stun guns impermissibly infringes on defendant's right to keep and bear arms for his own defense. We disagree. Const. 1963, art. 1, § 6 provides: “Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state.”

    The right to regulate weapons extends not only to the establishment of conditions under which weapons may be possessed, but allows the state to prohibit weapons whose customary employment by individuals is to violate the law. [People v. Brown, 235 N.W. 256 (Mich. 1931) (upholding a ban on carrying blackjacks).] The device seized from defendant was capable of generating 50,000 volts. Testimony in the lower court established that such weapons can not only temporarily incapacitate someone but can result in temporary paralysis. Our Supreme Court in Brown explained that the power to regulate is subject to the limitation that its exercise be reasonable. We conclude that the Legislature’s prohibition of stun guns is reasonable and constitutional.

    He says that the judge has a "blindness" to the possibility of using a stun gun for self-defense. I don't think so. The judge pretends to directly address the point. Then he quotes some valid law, and gives a cite. He gives a couple of facts about stun guns. Then he just declares that the law is reasonable.

    This type of faulty reasoning is so common in appeal courts that the judges must take a seminar in how to write such opinion. Note that the above opinion does not really address the defendant's argument at all. Yes, stun guns are dangerous and they can be banned if they are customarily used for illegal purposes. But using a dangerous weapon for self-defense is usually legal, and that is the only reason people carry stun guns, as far as I know.

    The judges argument follows this pattern:

    Defendant argues that he has a right to do X. Case law is against the right to do Y if conditions A and B are met. X is similar to Y. The facts show that condition A is met. Thus there is no right to do X.
    This is faulty because the judge should look to see if condition B is met.

    Tuesday, Apr 14, 2009
     
    Google immigration propaganda
    The NY Times has this article in favor of letting in more immigrants:
    Mr. Mavinkurve, a 28-year-old Indian immigrant who helped lay the foundation for Facebook while a student at Harvard, instead works out of a Google sales office in Toronto, a lone engineer among marketers.

    He has a visa to work in the United States, but his wife, Samvita Padukone, also born in India, does not. So he moved to Canada.

    “Every American I’ve talked to says: ‘Dude, it’s ridiculous that we’re not doing everything we can to keep you in the country. We need people like you!’ ” he said.

    So what makes this guy so brilliant? It goes on to explain:
    But back in late 2006, maps produced by the service were taking too long to download and appear on phones. As customers waited for the maps to form, they racked up huge bills from cellphone providers, which at the time were charging for every minute or every byte of data transferred.

    Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. The user would not see the difference, but the load times would be reduced 20 percent.

    Mr. Mavinkurve used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering and an understanding of graphics to find a solution that had eluded the rest of the team, said Mark Crady, a manager in the maps group.

    No, that is not rare genius. There are millions of American programmers who know that trick. Maybe Google should hire more Americans.

    Saturday, Apr 11, 2009
     
    50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
    An English prof trashes one of the most widely used college textbooks ever written:
    It's sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can't tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.
    The book does have a strange popularity that goes far beyond any reason.

    Saturday, Apr 04, 2009
     
    Honest debate on same-sex marriage
    The Boiled Frog Blog posts this open letter to Phyllis Schlafly:
    Americans deserve an honest debate on gay marriage.

    Today, in response to the Iowa Supreme Court's decision to strike down the ban on gay marriage, you issued a press release titled "Eagle Forum: Iowa's Supremacist Judges Overturn State Law and OK Gay Marriage." The Iowa Supreme Court issued a very detailed 69 page ruling. Your press release fails to address a single aspect of the ruling.

    If you want a detailed legal argument, then I suggest Judge Zarella' dissent in Conn., in HTML or PDF. (The other Conn. opinions are here.)
    Similarly, your pleading for "the will of the people" is intellectually dishonest. In this country, civil rights are not dependent upon the largess of the majority. Our judiciary is charged with the responsibility of preventing the tyranny of the majority over the minority.
    Actually, civil rights have nearly always come from the majority. It took a war and a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, while the Supreme Court was trying to expand slavery. It was primarily by vote that bans interracial marriage were ended in the USA. The courts were responsible for forced racial busing, but I would not brag about that.
    In your press release you go on to say "We can never allow the definition of marriage to simply mean two consenting persons who agree to share quarters and start applying to the government for benefits," I have idea what you are referring to when you say "applying to the government for benefits." It would appear that you are trying to imply that gay marriage is somehow connected to social welfare programs. That is dishonest.
    It is legal throughout the USA for gays to share quarters and do what they want in private. The whole legal argument of same-sex marriage is based on same-sex couples wanting government benefits, such as being able to file a joint tax return and pass property without inheritance taxes.
    While it is abundantly clear that you don't like same-sex marriage, it is entirely unclear why you feel that way. Even less clear is why you feel that you are entitled to impose your beliefs on everyone else.
    She is not imposing her beliefs. Her position is that marriage law should be defined by the legislature, just like any other law. It is the majority of the American people who oppose same-sex marriage, including Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore.

    I am not speaking for Phyllis Schlafly. I am just addressing this argument that opposition to same-sex marriage is dishonest. It is not just her view; it is the dominant view in the USA today and has been the dominant view on Earth for thousands of years. If you want to know why, just ask your friends and neighbors.

    There is no true same-sex marriage in the USA today. While several states have court-ordered arrangements that approximate same-sex marriage for certain purposes under state law, there are no same-sex couples that are married under federal law. I think that it is dishonest for any American same-sex couple to call themselves married. They are not. The federal Defense Of Marriage Act does not permit it.

     
    Is evolution used in medicine?
    Evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes:
    I have sometimes written that evolutionary biology doesn’t have much practical value in medicine or other areas impinging on humanity’s material well being.
    I said something similar here. He now retracts this opinion.

    One of his blog readers, David Hillis, sent him some papers that use "evolutionary analyses". They seem to be just mean genetics. Does any of this depend on any Darwinian principle or on what some people call macro-evolution? I'd like to see an example that explains just what evolutionary principle is being used, and for what purpose.

    Update: Coyne has another post on what counts as evidence for evolution. I think that he is right that altho we have all sorts of DNA evidence for all sorts of fascinating things, it is not necessarily evidence for evolution unless it somehow contradicts what the evolution skeptics are saying.

    Hillis has posted some followup messages defending his view, but he doesn't have much in the way of practical medicine that is really evidence for evolution. He says that the Discovery Institute rejects “natural selection, mutation, and common ancestry”, but if you follow his link you'll find that the DI spokesman merely endorsed encouraging Texas students to "analyze, evaluate, and critique some of the core evolutionary concepts like natural selection, mutation, and common ancestry." I am still waiting for a good example.


    Thursday, Apr 02, 2009
     
    Black does not reflect
    Snopes denies that California is planning to ban black cars in order to curb global warming. A letter to the editor objects:
    You're not taking my black car away

    The California Air Resources Board has insisted that it never intended to ban black cars, only cars bearing low-reflectivity paint. Further, according to CARB spokesman Stanley Young, CARB has shelved its plan to require more reflective paint until manufacturers can find a way to make black paint more reflective.

    Reflective black? Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll get right on that, after they finish the anti-gravity flying cars. Can these fine folks at CARB actually be that ignorant of basic high school physics? If so, why are they empowered to make decisions that should be based on science and technology?

    CARB can have my black-on-black Mini Cooper when they pry the keyless-entry remote from my cold, dead fingers.

    Mark Magee
    Campbell

    The guy has a point. If the paint is more reflective, then it is not black.

    Tuesday, Mar 31, 2009
     
    98% of public complies with policy
    The LA Times has this alarmist story:
    A rising number of California parents are choosing to send their children to kindergarten without routine vaccinations, putting hundreds of elementary schools in the state at risk for outbreaks of childhood diseases eradicated in the U.S. years ago.

    Exemptions from vaccines -- which allow children to enroll in public and private schools without state-mandated shots -- have more than doubled since 1997, according to a Times analysis of state data obtained last week. ...

    Statewide, only 2% of kindergartners had exemptions.

    So 98% are complying with the official recommendations, and the authorities are complaining? Even a highly contagious disease like measles cannot spread if more than 90% of the kids have been vaccinated.

    What seems to really infuriate the authorities is that many of those opting out are the more well-educated parents. The poor people get their free vaccines and the public school crowd does what they are told.

    California makes it very easy to opt out of vaccines. The requirements are stricter in most other states, and compliance there is closer to 99%.


    Saturday, Mar 28, 2009
     
    Dyson is a global warming skeptic
    The NY Times Magazine profiles Freeman Dyson:
    Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. ...

    IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, ...

    Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.” ...

    Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology.

    Dyson is a genius on mathematical physics, but not a climate expert. Dyson is right about climate change having become more ideology than science.

    On another science ideology front, the Houston paper reports:

    The move represented something of a victory for pro-evolutionists, who wanted the State Board of Education to drop a 20-year-old requirement that both "strengths and weaknesses" of all scientific theories be taught.

    But the board's 13-2 vote also means students in public school will be encouraged to scrutinize "all sides" of scientific theories. That left some of the pro-evolution crowd upset.

    I am all in favor of teaching scientific evolution in the schools, but these pro-evolutionists are pushing some sort of worldwide secular religion or ideology, just like the global warming crowd. No real scientist would get so upset at the mere possibility of some public scrutiny.

    The Bad Astronomer says that Texas is doomed because "They put in language to weaken the Big Bang theory".

    Here is a leftist-evolutionist Salon rant on the subject. It objects to this:

    Casey Luskin, a Discovery Institute lawyer, and its guy on the Austin scene, was psyched by the outcome. "These are the strongest standards in the country now," he says. "The language adapted requires students to have critical thinking about all of science, including evolution, and it urges them to look at all sides of the issue."

    One amendment calls for students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record."

    I don't know how anyone could get so excited by such innocuous language.

    Friday, Mar 27, 2009
     
    Libby's crime
    I keep seeing people misstate the Scooter Libby conviction, such as .

    Libby told the grand jury that he learned about Valerie Plame from VP Cheney, and then she was alluded to in discussions with Judy Miller, Tim Russert, and Matt Cooper. Libby was indicted for lying about all three discussions. He was acquitted on the Miller and Cooper charges. Libby said that Russert told him about Plame, and Russert said that she was not mentioned. The jury believed Russert. You can find more details here.

    Nobody has explained what Libby had to gain by lying about Russert. Russert, tho, had an obvious possible incentive to lie. Russert could have heard about Plame before talking to Libby, and could be lying to protect that source.

    The trial never determined whether Plame was a covert agent.


    Wednesday, Mar 25, 2009
     
    Skepticism called a disorder
    A UK mag essay writes:
    University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear.

    Sunday, Mar 22, 2009
     
    The Obama war on science
    President Barack Obama has the scientists all excited. He said that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values", and pledged that his administration will “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology”.

    His science advisor, John P. Holdren, is more of a leftist policy advocate than a scientist.\ He is sometimes described as a Harvard physicist, but he actually worked in the Kennedy School of Government. He is known for making apocalyptic predictions about future environmental disasters that never happened.

    Supposedly Obama is going to do something about global warming, but it does not look good so far. He got elected by promising farmers in Iowa and elsewhere that he would continue to subsidize ethanol. Most solar power is also inefficient, and has to be subsidized:

    If you count the full-interest cost without the tax subsidy, residential solar panels never pay for themselves.
    There is only one technology that can produce large-scale nuclear power without carbon emission, and that is nuclear. Obama wants to kill it because the waste problem has not been solved, but the waste problem was solved decades ago. We spent billions to build a waste storage facility in Yucca Mountain Nevada, but Obama wants to shut it down.

    People claim that nuclear power is subsidized, but I don't believe. Every other energy techology is subsidized more. The ethanol and solar power industries would not even exist without govt subsidies. Mideast oil is supported our army to protect the arabs, and our navy keeping those shipping lanes open. The nuclear power industry has paid the USA about $44B in special fees to create a waste storage facility, and the industry is not going to get the benefit of it if Yucca Mountain gets shut down.

    If it weren't for the anti-science leftists who are allied with Obama, we wouldn't even have much nuclear waste to store. Most of that waste can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel for other nuclear power plants. France and Japan do it, and I am sure we can do it also. Supposedly we are not doing it because of proliferation concerns, but that argument is bogus. We are worried that Iran and N. Korea might get a nuclear bombs, but nuclear reprocessing doesn't seem to have much to do with the risk.

    Now Obama wants to subject us to a carbon tax, and to sign international treaties that China and India emit as much carbon as they want. If carbon is really causing harmful climate change, then China is the biggest offender and India may soon be number two. Any treaty that fails to limit China and India will cause a lot more harm than good.

    Even the new stem cell policy does not seem to be based on science, as Charles Krauthammer points out. Obama favors one type of cloning and opposes another type of cloning.

    The new Obama stem cell policy is unlikely to even make much difference, as the NY Times explains. It expands somewhat the available embryonic stem cell lines available for federal research money, but by now the researchers have obtained non-federal funding for the more promising research. And the real action is in adult stem cells, and there was never any funding restriction on those.

    I am still waiting for Obama to make some science-based decisions.


    Friday, Mar 20, 2009
     
    The Lucy fossil expains nothing
    I mentioned below that the Seattle Lucy (missing link) exhibit has been a flop. The NY Times explains:
    Attendance had been less than half of what was projected. ...

    But the sour economy does not seem to explain all of Lucy’s troubles. A rare December snowstorm played a role, and Bryce Seidl, the center’s president and chief executive, has suggested less intuitive reasons like the feverish focus this liberal city had on the election of President Obama and his transition to office. ...

    Yet Donald C. Johanson, the paleoanthropologist who plucked Lucy out of an Ethiopian ravine 35 years ago ... noted a lighter feature he liked, a display that used soda bottles, filled with varying amounts of fluid, to show the difference in brain capacity between humans and Lucy.

    Johanson is interviewed here, and he continues with his false claims that Lucy was a human ancestor, and that Lucy proves that the essence of humanity is walking upright. Lucy may have been just a chimp.

    When asked about the aquatic ape hypothesis, Johanson got very negative. I guess he does not like the hypothesis because it would make his whole life's work irrelevant, but the hypothesis explains a whole lot more than Lucy ever did. The hypothesis hasn't been proved, and it may be wrong, but it sure hasn't been disproved either.


    Wednesday, Mar 18, 2009
     
    Alchemy compared to String Theory
    The Boston Globe reports on alchemy:
    Alchemists might have been colossally wrong in their goals, but they were, in some fundamental way, part of the story of science, these scholars say. Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, fathers of modern chemistry and physics, were also serious students of alchemy. ...

    What they all shared was a belief that one natural substance could be transmuted into another. ...

    It is alchemists who gave Europe some of its key discoveries. Alchemists discovered zinc and metallic arsenic. A German alchemist named Hennig Brand isolated phosphorus in 1669. The alchemist Johann Bottger, working for the Dresden court, stumbled on a material that allowed German workshops to make their own porcelain and break China's monopoly on one of the world's most lucrative industries. ...

    Albert Einstein tried, and failed, to cap his career by formulating a single theory that explained all the universe's forces. And at the cutting edge of modern physics, string theory purports to offer a complete but possibly unprovable explanation of the universe based on 11 dimensions and imperceptibly tiny strings.

    Alchemy was a whole lot more scientific than string theory. It wasn't wrong to think that all matter may be made of the same stuff; we now know that all matter is made of quarks and leptons. On the other hand, string theory tells us nothing about the observable universe, and there is no hope that it ever will.

    Tuesday, Mar 17, 2009
     
    Gun right decision was no big change
    The NY Times reports:
    About nine months ago, the Supreme Court breathed new life into the Second Amendment, ruling for the first time that it protects an individual right to own guns. ...

    “The Heller case is a landmark decision that has not changed very much at all,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, ...

    Maybe that is because the Supreme Court just affirmed what had been the position of previous high court decisions, the US DoJ, most legal scholars, most people, most state courts, most legislators, etc. It only reversed the kooky positions that some federal judges adopted several decades ago. Before that, respect for 2A gun rights was universal.

    Tuesday, Mar 10, 2009
     
    Science based on facts
    The NY Times reports on Obama:
    Pledging that his administration will “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” President Obama on Monday lifted the Bush administration’s strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research.
    More precisely, Bush expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research by allowing federal research to use a couple of dozen embryonic stem cell lines. Obama's new order does not fund creation of new lines, nor specify which existing lines can be used. The expectation is that a few hundred lines will be available for federal research.

    Private researchers can clone embryoes all they want, just as they could under Bush. No doubt Obama will allow federal funds to use lines created from leftover embryoes at test tube baby clinics. It remains to be seen whether he will allow federal funds to buy lines from embryoes that were created solely for the purpose of stem cell research.

    The biggest stem cell promises are in adult stem cells, and there have never been any funding restrictions on those.

     
    Did biologists really think that human evolution stopped?
    Yes, says John Hawks. Responding to criticism, he quotes Stephen Jay Gould:
    Since modern Homo sapiens emerged 50,000 years ago, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed. “There have been no biological changes. Everything we’ve called culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
    He quotes other bigshots also. Human evolution is actually accelerating, and no one was saying that.

    Scientists often complain that a low percentage of Americans believe in evolution. I think that the best explanation is that the leading evolutionists have been kooks spouting misinformation.


    Monday, Mar 09, 2009
     
    Darwin set the standard
    Peter Woit reports:
    The central tenet of Susskind’s talk was that string theorists should look to Darwin because he “set the standard for what an explanation should be like”.
    This is pathetic. Darwin knew nothing about genes and did not produce the sort of quantitative and testable hypotheses that physicists are accustomed to looking for to explain nature. He is mainly credited with the theory of natural selection, but that is just a tautology that no one has been able to test.

    I guess that is Susskind's point. He is conceding that string theory is not testable but it might somehow gain credence as a universal explanation for everything if the public is somehow suckered into following Darwin's example.

    Physics World writes:

    “Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.”

    That is the definition of ‘science’ according to Britain’s Science Council, an organisation representing over 30 learned and professional bodies in the UK ranging from the Royal Astronomical Society to the Association of Clinical Biochemistry.

    Apparently the council has spent a whole year deciding on this new meaning to provide a distinction between genuine science and psuedoscience.

    So let us look at the alternatives. According to my Chambers dictionary, ‘science’ means the “knowledge ascertained by observation and experiment, critically tested, systematised and brought under general principles, esp in relation to the physical world.”

    One notices in the council’s definition that science is the ‘pursuit’ of knowledge rather than that ‘ascertained’, as well as the inclusion of the ‘social’ world.

    It appears that the new definition is meant to include things like string theory and extraterrestial life, where knowledge is pursued but is not ascertained by any observation and experiment.

    Friday, Feb 27, 2009
     
    DC wants a voting black congresswoman
    The Wash. Post reports:
    The bill squeaked past the 60-vote threshold it needed to pass, under a bipartisan agreement that sped up the process. Six Republicans voted "aye" to produce a 61 to 37 result.
    No, 6 Republican votes from nearby states does not make a bill bipartisan. Giving DC a vote in Congress is clearly unconstitutional. And if they were really following the constitution, they would not be arguing about DC gun rights either. The US Supreme Court has clearly ruled that DC citizens have 2A gun rights.

    Monday, Feb 23, 2009
     
    Accusing politicians of creationism
    Randy Barnett writes:
    [Louisiana Gov. Bobby] Jindal actually did: he promoted and signed a creationism bill ... While at it, you can read about GOP Governors Mark Sanford and Tim Pawlenty's creationist sympathies here. Republicans be warned: No demonstrably creationist politician will be elected President of the United States.
    I don't want a creationist President either, but the folks complaining about Jindal are the same leftist-atheist-evolutionists who spent 8 years claiming that Pres. G.W. Bush was a creationist. Barbara Forrest complains that Jindal once answered “yes” when asked whether he favored teaching the “scientific weaknesses of evolution”, and that he is friends with someone who attacks the separation of church and state. Jindal also signed an “academic freedom” bill that would allow teachers to supplement their classes with someone that deviates from the official party line.

    This is not creationist. It is just name-calling. Creationism refers to a biblical belief that Earth and Man were created as in the book of Genesis. Real scientists are not afraid of being confronted by scientific weaknesses. Show me where Bush or Jindal said something that was demonstrably incorrect.

     
    Prosecutorial misconduct throws an election
    The WSJ reports on how US Sen. Ted Stevens got an unfair trial:
    The Justice Department this week took the highly unusual step of replacing the team handling posttrial litigation in the case. This followed last week's bizarre turn, when the chief of the public integrity section at Justice, William Welch, and his deputy, Brenda Morris -- the federal prosecutors who won the Stevens conviction -- were held in contempt of court. ...

    Chad Joy claimed prosecutors covered up evidence and tried to keep a witness from testifying. He also said his partner, Mary Beth Kepner, had an unspecified "inappropriate relationship" with the state's star witness, Bill Allen, and other potential witnesses.

    One excuse heard at Justice is that prosecutors didn't expect Mr. Stevens to get such a quick trial after his July indictment, and were rushed. That raises the more relevant question -- why was the Senator indicted so close to an election? The Stevens case emerged out of a broader corruption inquiry in Alaska overseen by Alice Fisher, a Bush appointee who headed up the Criminal Division. She left last May. The Stevens indictment was unveiled in July by Matthew Friedrich, tapped by the Bush Administration to run the division. He had served on the Enron task force, helping bring down Arthur Andersen. That verdict was later overturned by the Supreme Court, albeit too late for Andersen. He exited Justice on Inauguration Day, leaving the current mess.

    Stevens was convicted of failing to report a loan of some household goods, and was narrowly voted out of office. But if he got an unfair trial, then he also got an unfair election.

    Since when are prosecutors allowed to interfere with elections like this? I am all for exposing corruption, but unless they have a clear-cut case of some serious crimes, I think the voters should be able to decide on who to represent them.


    Tuesday, Feb 17, 2009
     
    Legitimacy of IQ research
    The UK science mag Nature has published a commentary by Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams arguing that research linking race and IQ is both morally defensible and important for the pursuit of truth. This is in a special issue devoted to Darwin Day. They say:
    In today's world, subjective perceptions of scientists' intent seem to determine a study's acceptability — work is celebrated if perceived as elevating under-represented groups (as with focuses on women and minorities in the search for personalized medicine), but reviled if perceived as documenting sex and race differences in intelligence without a focus on interventions to eliminate them.
    Of course the authors explain that they themselves have liberal views, and their beliefs were that the research would help promote liberal causes. There is a rebuttal essay saying that “there is no valid knowledge to be found in this area at all.”

    Well there obviously is valid knowledge in this area, and you can easily find it on the web. Because the mainstream science organizations consider this field too sensitive politically, you have to look at second-tier publications.

    I don't think that the scientists' intent should matter at all. You should not have to be a political liberal to have an opinion on this subject, or to do research on the subject. As long as the mainstream scientists censor data on racial differences, the public will conclude that racial differences are being covered up for political reasons.


    Friday, Feb 13, 2009
     
    Cloning Neanderthal Man
    Here is Neanderthal news:
    Scientists report that they have reconstructed the genome of Neanderthals, a human species that was driven to extinction some 30,000 years ago, probably by the first modern humans to enter Europe. ...

    Possessing the Neanderthal genome raises the possibility of bringing Neanderthals back to life. Dr. George Church, a leading genome researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said Thursday that a Neanderthal could be brought to life with present technology for about $30 million. ...

    He said he would start with the human genome, which is highly similar to that of Neanderthals, and change the few DNA units required to convert it into the Neanderthal version.

    This could be done, he said, by splitting the human genome into 30,000 chunks about 100,000 DNA units in length. Each chunk would be inserted into bacteria and converted to the Neanderthal equivalent by changing the few DNA units in which the two species differ. The changed lengths of DNA would then be reassembled into a full Neanderthal genome. To avoid ethical problems, this genome would be inserted not into a human cell but into a chimpanzee cell.

    The chimp cell would be reprogrammed to embryonic state and used to generate, in a chimpanzee’s womb, a mutant chimp embryo that was a Neanderthal in many or most of its features.

    To avoid ethical problems? This sounds like a joke. He is going to clone a Neanderthal Man, but avoid ethical problems by putting human and fossil Neanderthal DNA in a mutant chimp embryo?

    Any discussion of cloning Neanderthals seems to provoke the nuttiest ideas about ethics. One academic ethicist says that we should first determinine whether humans wrongfully wiped out the Neanderthals, so that cloning could be seen as righting that wrong!


    Wednesday, Feb 11, 2009
     
    Vaccine researcher accused of fraud
    The London Times claims to have found some inaccuracies in some vaccine research:
    The doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found....

    The [original] research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. ... In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records.

    Some of the commenters on this have suggested criminally prosecuting the lead author, Andrew Wakefield, for raising doubts about vaccine safety. They want to hold him responsible for any unvaccinated person who gets sick. One even called Wakefield a fraud 35 times.

    Mandatory vaccination is one of the great sacred cows of modern medicine. Anyone who says anything critical of vaccines is vilified. All Wakefield do was to publish a very small study ten years ago that raised some suspicions for further research. He also collected some expert witness fees as a paid consultant. For that, the vaccine establishment has done everything it can to destroy him.

    I think that it is startling that vaccine medico attacked him for ten years, and none of them even looked at his data! The current allegations of discrepencies are based on a newspaper reporter looking at the data.

    We now know that there is no significant correlation between MMR vaccine and autism. But the progress of science depends on people like Wakefield challenging the conventional wisdom, and putting forth hypotheses. The cause of autism is still unknown, and there is no good explanation for the rapid increases in autism diagnoses in the last 20 years.

    It doesn't really matter whether Wakefield had a conflict of interest. The true test of his ideas is whether they can be replicated in other studies of more significant numbers of kids.

    If you are concerned about objectivity in vaccines, a far bigger concern is the the USA FDA and CDC still use paid lobbyists for the vaccine industry on their vaccine expert panels, and no consumer representatives. The meetings are not even open to the public. When you hear that MMR or some other vaccine is on the official schedule of vaccine recommendations, it got there because of folks with admitted conflicts of interests. The feds have to grant them waivers to avoid violating federal conflict-of-interest laws. In the last ten years, about 5 or 10 vaccine have had to be recalled because of safety concerns, and in most cases these expert panels knew about the safety concerns and covered them up at the request of the vaccine industry.

    The history is vaccines is that many safety concerns are not even considered until someone has the guts to stand up to the vaccine establishment. We have safer vaccines today as a result of vaccine controversies that the authorities tried to suppress.

    The federal court of claims has now ruled against a link between MMR vaccine and autism:

    In this case, the studies described above, taken as whole, show very clearly that the MMR vaccine does not cause any substantial portion of the cases of autism in the studied countries. And while those studies cannot completely rule out any possibility that the MMR vaccination might play some causative role in a tiny fraction of autism cases (a fraction too small to be detected by even the largest studies), it seems to me that the failure of so many studies to find any association between MMR vaccines and autism at least casts some doubt upon the proposition that the MMR vaccine ever plays a role in causing autism.
    I don't doubt this, but it still does not tell parents whether the MMR vaccine is worthwhile. Measles has been eradicated from the USA, and there is only an occasional case that creeps in from overseas. If the parent is trying to decide whether MMR benefits outweigh the risks, there is still no clear-cut answer.

    Update: See also: The witch-hunt against Andrew Wakefield.


    Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009
     
    The New Deal didn't work
    Karl Frisch writes this San Jose op-ed:
    Those who have watched cable news lately have undoubtedly noticed conservative media figures attempting to rewrite history by denigrating the successes of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies. This amounts to an orchestrated effort to derail the economic recovery plans of President Barack Obama.

    Fox News' Brit Hume recently claimed that "everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed."

    He goes on to explain that FDR brought down the unemployment rate from 25% in 1933 to 19% in 1938.

    What he does not show is that New Deal policies lowered unemployment at all. Most recessions just last a year or two. Had there been no New Deal, unemployment would have dropped even more.

    The USA economy did really start recovering, in terms of typical Americans being able to get peacetime jobs and buy consumer goods, until after World War II. That was 15 years of a bad consumer economy. I think that the evidence strongly shows that we could have only had such a prolonged depression by bad economic policy by FDR.

     
    Darwinism Must Die
    Carl Safina writes in the NY Times:
    Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. ...

    Almost everything we understand about evolution came after Darwin, not from him. He knew nothing of heredity or genetics, both crucial to evolution. Evolution wasn’t even Darwin’s idea.

    Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus believed life evolved from a single ancestor.

    I agree with this. I think that it is strange that prominent evolutionists like Richard Dawkins call themselves Darwinists and seem to worship Darwin. I even see people with cars having a symbol on the back that is similar to A Christian fish except that it has the word "Darwin" and some little feet. They celebrate Darwin Day as if it were a religious holiday.

    The same section of the newspaper has four other article on Darwin today. Anthropologist John Hawks responds that the term Darwinist is fine with him. Some of his theories about human evolution are quoted in this LA Times Darwin story.


    Sunday, Feb 08, 2009
     
    Sweden stays nuclear
    The German magazine Spiegel reports:
    Sweden's government announced on Thursday it was reversing its pledge to phase out nuclear energy. ...

    The decision has angered the Swedish opposition as well as environmentalists around the world. "To rely on nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions," Greenpeace spokeswoman Martina Kruger said, "is like smoking to lose weight. It's not a good idea."

    Nuclear power is the cleanest energy technology we have. Any environmentalist who is anti-nuclear is not really promoting the environment. We would be better off if we just did the opposite of whatever the environmentalists are pushing.

    Saturday, Feb 07, 2009
     
    Forbes publishes evolution comments
    Jonathan Wells writes in Forbes:
    Darwinism is now facing a serious challenge from intelligent design, or ID, the theory that some features of living things are explained better as the work of an intelligent cause than by unguided natural processes. ...

    Nevertheless, since ID opens the door to non-materialistic causes, Darwinists oppose it regardless of the evidence.

    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers is upset that Forbes would publish such ideas, and writes:
    We aren't going to accept immaterial, supernatural claims as evidence, no matter how much Jonathan Wells whines ...
    I think that they actually agree on that last point. PZ Myers will not accept non-materialistic causes. So why is he so excited? Why does it bother him so much that some religious folks have some non-materialistic beliefs?

    Thursday, Feb 05, 2009
     
    Obama's war on science
    Jonathan Adler reports:
    The LA Times reports ...
    California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday. ...
    For years we've heard complaints about how the Bush Administration waged a "war on science" by, among other things, distorting or misrepresenting scientific findings in order to support its policy positions. If the LA Times accurately reported on Chu's remarks, it seems like Obama Administration officials are already doing the same thing (and even before John Holdren is confirmed).
    Wine quality is very sensitive to the weather. Any change in the climate will some areas better for growing grapes, and some areas worse. In the worst case, the vineyards might move to the next county. No big deal.

    Chu is grossly distorting the science in order to promote a political agenda. When did the Bush administration ever do that? It did not send out cabinet secretaries to tell phony science scare stories like that.

     
    No one wants to see Lucy
    An AP story reports:
    SEATTLE – Who loves Lucy? Far fewer people than a Seattle science center hoped when officials paid millions to show the fossil remains of one of the earliest known human ancestors.

    Halfway through the five-month exhibit, the Pacific Science Center faces a half-million-dollar loss resulting in layoffs of 8 percent of the staff, furloughs and a wage freeze, President Bryce Seidl said Friday.

    Lucy is a 3.2 million-year-old fossilized partial skeleton of a species with chimplike features that walked upright. The discovery in 1974 in Ethiopia forced a major revision of theories about the evolution of Homo sapiens. ...

    "Lucy may not be anywhere other than Ethiopia after Seattle," Seidl said.

    But Donald Johanson, the American anthropologist who discovered Lucy, said fascination with the skeleton remained strong.

    "As I travel around the country lecturing, people seem to have a deep interest in their origins, in their roots," Johanson said.

    People are interested in their origins, but there is no proof that their origins have anything to do with Lucy. Lucy was just a small-brained chimp that is very unlikely to have been a human ancestor. The fossil is a fraud.

    The only reason for even thinking that Lucy might be a human ancestor is that some people claim that Lucy could walk somewhat more upright than modern chimps usually walk, and that there is a scarcity of missing link fossils. But there is one other fossil from the same time that seems more likely to have been a human ancestor.


    Saturday, Jan 31, 2009
     
    Solar eclipse coincidence
    New Scientist magazine reports on solar eclipses:
    At the height of totality, the fit of sun and moon is so perfect that beads of sunlight can only penetrate to us through the rugged valleys on the lunar surface, creating the stunning "diamond ring" effect.

    It is all thanks to a striking coincidence. The sun is about 400 times as wide as the moon, but it is also 400 times further away. The two therefore look the same size in the sky - a unique situation among our solar system's eight planets and 166 known moons. Earth is also the only planet to harbour life. Pure coincidence?

    Almost undoubtedly, say most astronomers. ...

    But the presence of a large moon - one large enough to cause total eclipses - might also have been crucial. If so, that has important consequences for the search for life on other planets.

    It is a fact that life on Earth is dependent on a large number of unexplained coincidences. Life on other planets might be extremely unlikely.
     
    US prosecutors are out of control
    The LA Times reports:
    The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles has launched a federal grand jury investigation into Cardinal Roger M. Mahony in connection with his response to the molestation of children by priests in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the case.

    The probe, in which U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O’Brien is personally involved, is aimed at determining whether Mahony, and possibly other church leaders, committed fraud by failing to adequately deal with priests accused of sexually abusing children, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.

    Authorities are applying a legal theory in an apparently novel way. One federal law enforcement source said prosecutors are seeking to use a federal statute that makes it illegal to "scheme . . . to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."

    In this case, the victims would be parishioners who relied on Mahony and other church leaders to keep their children safe from predatory priests, the source said.

    To gain a conviction on such a charge, prosecutors would have to prove that Mahony used the U.S. mail or some form of electronic communication in committing the alleged fraud, the source said.

    This is the same law that is being used against impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and others.

    This is crazy. The evidence for sex abuse is extremely thin. One priest pled guilty to a couple of molestations back in 1986. Nothing else has been proved in court. Even if you personally disapprove of how the LA bishop has been running the church there, since when did that become a crime? Maybe he did what he thought was best. Maybe he even had poor judgment. Maybe he was lousy at predicting who would become a good priest. Since when does a US prosecutor have the power to second-guess such decisions? Why don't they prosecute Pres. Barack Obama for pushing a flawed fanancial stimulus plan instead of more directly addressing the financial problems? That would make as much sense to me.

    Here are some more US prosecutors who are out of control:

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twenty federal agents raided the home of the mother-in-law of Barry Bonds' personal trainer on Wednesday.

    Madeleine Gestas and her daughter Nicole Anderson, the trainer's wife, are the target of a tax investigation that the lawyer for Greg Anderson said was aimed at pressuring the trainer to testify at Bonds' upcoming trial.

    Bonds, Major League Baseball's career home run leader and a seven-time MVP, has pleaded not guilty to charges he lied to a federal grand jury in 2003 when he denied knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs.

    "Even the mafia spares the women and children," said Anderson's lawyer, Mark Geragos.

    Lead prosecutor Matthew Parrella didn't immediately return a telephone call on Wednesday.

    Geragos said he believes the raid was in response to his refusal to tell prosecutors whether Anderson would testify. Geragos said he ignored a letter faxed to his Los Angeles office on Monday by prosecutors that asked about Anderson's plans for the Bonds' trial.

    Anderson served more than a year in prison for refusing to testify against Bonds before a federal grand jury. Geragos said that on the day after her husband was released from prison, Anderson's wife received a so-called target letter informing her that she was under investigation.

    A lot of people resent Bonds for breaking baseball records that were held by Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and others. It appears that federal agents will stop at nothing to try to discredit his achievements.
     
    New Scientist says Darwin was wrong
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers is upset:
    Pity Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, which published an issue in which the cover was the large, bold declaration that "DARWIN WAS WRONG". He has been target by a number of big name scientists who have been hammering him in a small typhoon of outraged private correspondence (I've been part of it) that his cover was a misdirected and entirely inappropriate piece of sensationalism.
    It is funny how these guys seem to have a need to deify Charles DarwinDarwin. The NY Times reports:
    Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.
    This is wacky. Darwin's famous book was titled, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In The Descent of Man he wrote:
    At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.
    I don't know whether Darwin was a racist or not, and I think that it is odd that anyone cares. The two new books claimed that he opposed the slave trade. So what? Nearly everyone opposed the slave trade in Darwin's day. Real scientists would be interested in Darwin's scientific ideas, and not worshipping him for his political or moral views.

    I mentioned before that human evolution is speeding up and now the book has been released and the author has been interviewed on the 2blowhards blog.


    Wednesday, Jan 28, 2009
     
    Blago is innocent
    Here is why I think that Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is innocent.

  • He was not allowed to call defense witnesses, such as Obama'a buddy Rahm Emmanuel who has said publicly that they had many discussions about the Senate appointment, and no one suggested anything improper.
  • U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has not yet even been able to get an indictment against Blago.
  • Blago has raised many millions of dollars, but no one has ever found that he has pocketed a dime of it.
  • Fitzgerald's arrest warrant was not for bribery or any generally recognized crimes, but for depriving the people of Illinois of "honest services".
  • The FBI agent who testified against Blago about the authenticity of certain wiretaps refused to answer questions about whether there are other wiretaps that would exonerate Blago, or to explain the context for the wiretaps.
  • Blago has the guts to publicly defend himself, and has refused to negotiate a plea bargain.
  • Fitzgerald has a history of unfair prosecutions, such as against Scooter Libby.
  • Fitzgerald has demanded that certain witnesses not testify, saying that such testimony might interfere with his attempts to elicit the testimony that he wants. It seems clear that he is threatening Blago's associates with prosecution, but will offer them immunity if they accuse Blago of crimes. If those associates tell the truth under oath before Fitzgerald makes deals with them, then he may lose his chance to get the statements that he wants.
  • The Fitzgerald arrest and press conference last month was so over-the-top that it is clear that we have some overzealous prosecutors who will twist the facts to get public support for their ambitions.
  • The wiretaps don't actually say anything criminal. This is typical quote from Blago:
    I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. You hear what I’m saying. And if I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself.
    If he is talking about cash for himself, that would be a bribe. But he could be talking about political favors for the people of Illinois, and there would be nothing wrong with that.

    Yes, I know that no one is defending Blago. The strongest defense of him on TV has been Geraldo Rivera, who called Blago a dirtbag but also said that bluster is not a crime. Here are the Blago blogs, where a couple of law profs defend him.


  • Tuesday, Jan 27, 2009
     
    Science writer goes gooey
    NY Times science reporter Dennis Overbye writes:
    When the new president went on vowing to harness the sun, the wind and the soil, and to “wield technology’s wonders,” I felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.

    Wow. My first reaction was to worry that scientists were now in the awkward position of being expected to save the world.

    Barack Obama campaigned in opposition to what scientists say is the cleanest, cheapest, and surest way to harness nature for energy -- nuclear energy. I don't see any reason to believe that he will be any more pro-science than G.W. Bush.

    Monday, Jan 26, 2009
     
    Promise, peril seen with embryonic stem cells
    The San Jose newspaper reports:
    At first glance, that might seem a potential gold mine for biotech companies, particularly in California. Indeed, a 2004 study commissioned by Proposition 71's proponents predicted the measure's passage would generate more than 2,000 jobs a year on average during the stem-cell institute's first five years. ...

    And because so little is known about embryonic cells, most of the $635 million the institute has handed out so far has been for basic research on those cells or to new laboratories at universities and other nonprofit entities. Companies have received less than $6 million.

    That ballot proposition committed California to spend $3B on stem cells, but it has been a gigantic failure so far. As the article explains, there is plenty of money for embryonic stem cells, but hardly any worthwhile applications. The most exciting human stem cell research and therapies do not even involve embryonic stem cells.

    Sunday, Jan 25, 2009
     
    Unfair impeachment trial
    Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich goes on an impeachment trial tomorrow. The Chicago Tribune reports:
    Blagojevich again today restated his innocence as part of a media blitz in which he portrayed himself as the victim of unfair impeachment trial rules.

    If the Senate grants approval for Cain's testimony, the FBI agent will be able to testify that his affidavit was an accurate reflection of what was on the secret recordings as well as the procedures used the verify the accuracy of the intercepted conversations. If Cain testifies, an assistant federal prosecutor will accompany him to Springfield to instruct the FBI agent "not to answer questions" that go beyond the scope of Fitzgerald's authorization.

    Yahoo News reports:
    But the governor and his lawyers are boycotting the trial on grounds that it has been stacked against him.

    "As much as I'd love to participate in the Senate trial and in the Senate process, under the current rules that the Senate provides, they're not allowing me to participate in that process," Blagojevich said. "To participate in a process that denies fundamental fairness, fundamental due process -- to be part of a process that doesn't allow for calling of witnesses and, worse than that, doesn't allow for me or any citizen to challenge charges that brought against me -- is a fundamental violation of the Constitution. It is a trampling of the Constitution."

    Though the impeachment trial rules do not actually prevent Blagojevich from calling witnesses on his behalf, the governor objected to a rule that bars testimony of any person whom U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald thinks "could compromise" his criminal investigation of the governor. He also objected to a rule that says that "no objection ... may be made against all or any part of the House impeachment record."

    Also:
    The governor said the impeachment rules prevented him from calling witnesses to refute the charges. Among those he wants to call are White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and US Republican Jesse Jackson Jr.
    Bush holdover U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald should not have the power to dictate the rules under which the Illinois governor is tried. Blagojevich should have the right to cross-examine any witness against him, and to present his own witnesses in his defense.

    The federal case against Blagojevich is based on an obscure law (18 USC 1346) that makes it a crime to use the mail or a telephone wire to to deprive the Illinois citizens of the intangible right of honest services. Here is a 2002 essay on this dubious legal theory and why it is controversial. There is currently a petition for the US Supreme Court to hear the issue as it was applied to convict Conrad Black, a Canadian newspaper man who mismanaged his business. The court threw out this "honest services" nonsense once before, and I hope they do it again.

    I don't know whether Blagojevich is a crook or not, but I think that he is getting railroaded. If he took a bribe or committed some real crime, then they should prove it using the same court procedures that are used to convict real criminals.

    This whole episode reminds me of what happened to Arizona governor Evan Mecham about 20 years ago. There was a national campaign against him because he had refused to declare an MLK holiday, even tho it would have been illegal for him to do so. The state legislature had already decided against the idea. He also made some insensitive comments such as saying that some visiting Japanese businessmen got round eyes after seeing the nice Arizona golf courses. The Arizone legislature impeached him on various corruption charges and threw him out of office. He faced those same charges in a criminal court, and was acquitted on all grounds.


    Wednesday, Jan 21, 2009
     
    Hobbit too symmetrical to be human
    Science news:
    ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2009) — In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Scienes at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the “Hobbit,” is not human. ...

    The results of the analysis of the asymmetry of the skulls, which refers to differences between the right and left sides of the skull, refutes the suggestion that the LB1 skull was that of a modern human with a diagnosis of microcephaly. In modern humans, a high degree of asymmetry may indicate that the individual was diseased. ...

    “The degree of asymmetry in LB1 was within the range of apes and was very similar to that seen in other fossil skulls,” says Dr. Baab. “We suggest that the degree of asymmetry is within expectations for this population of hominins, particular given that the conditions of the cave in Indonesia in which the skull was preserved may have contributed to asymmetry.”

    So let me get this straight. Some African missing-link ape-man from millions of years ago migrated to some little Indonesian island where it lived like cave men until 17k years ago. It looked like a small-brained human but it was not human. And this is all based on finding one skull and Karen Baab declaring that the skull looks symmetrical!

    This is way too wacky for me. If there were really a whole new species of ape-man that lived for millions of years, then there should be a long trail of fossils from Africa to Indonesia. Finding one lousy symmtrical skull doesn't prove anything. Aren't all skulls symmetrical?


    Monday, Jan 19, 2009
     
    Atwood novel too brutal, sexist
    A Canadian newspaper reports:
    TORONTO — A Toronto parent says if students repeated some of the words from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the school halls, they’d be suspended, so he questions why it is OK in the classroom.

    Robert Edwards, who launched a formal complaint about the Canadian novel, says the foul language, anti-Christian overtones, violence and sexual degradation probably violate the Toronto board’s policies of respect and tolerance.

    “If you look at the board’s policies, it goes to these great lengths to talk about respect and not using profane language, and in fact so do the policies at Lawrence Park Collegiate,” where Edwards’ 17-year-old son was studying the book in his Grade 12 English class.

    “The board is adamant about those policies, but then puts books like this in places.”

    The book is an example of leftist bigoted hate speech. Using it for a school reading assignment makes as much sense as reading the Turner Diaries.

    Sunday, Jan 18, 2009
     
    Obama gets goofy science advise
    Jeff Jacoby has Questions for Obama's science guy, John Holdren, such as:
    2. You have advocated the "long-term desirability of zero population growth" for the United States. In 1973, you pronounced the US population of 210 million as "too many" and warned that "280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many." The US population today is 304 million. Are there too many Americans?
    Those American population increases have been almost entirely from legal and illegal immigration. If he were really serious about his environmentalist views, then he would advocate tight immigration limits.

    But of course the science alarmists are heading in a different direction. Marc Sheppard writes:

    When word first broke that the remarkable Hudson River emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 was caused by a flock of Canadian geese, two thoughts immediately occurred.

    One – Somehow PETA would focus more on the agony of the geese that were sucked into both of the plane’s jet engines than the safety of the 150 passengers and five crew members, perhaps even suing US Air and hero pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger for animal cruelty.

    And Two – Somehow, somewhere, global warming would be blamed.

    Well — no word yet from the animal advocates.

    But their fellow greenies in the climate alarm department didn’t disappoint.

    Here is a scientific paper with ominous claims about how climate change will cause bird strikes.

    Monday, Jan 12, 2009
     
    Human evolution is speeding up
    One of the big frauds perpetrated by 20th century evolutionists has been that humans stopped evolving when they left Africa 50 to 200 thousand years ago.

    Newsweek says:

    And Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field "may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over" 50,000 years ago, Pinker says.
    Jonathan Haidt says faster evolution means more ethnic differences.
    It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide "races") adapted to local circumstances by a process known as "co-evolution" in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other.

    … No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well - the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.

    … traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event.

    And Pinker says in the NY Times magazine:
    The most prominent finding of behavioral genetics has been summarized by the psychologist Eric Turkheimer: “The nature-nurture debate is over. . . . All human behavioral traits are heritable.” By this he meant that a substantial fraction of the variation among individuals within a culture can be linked to variation in their genes. Whether you measure intelligence or personality, religiosity or political orientation, television watching or cigarette smoking, the outcome is the same. Identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins (who share half their genes that vary among people). Biological siblings (who share half those genes too) are more similar than adopted siblings (who share no more genes than do strangers). And identical twins separated at birth and raised in different adoptive homes (who share their genes but not their environments) are uncannily similar.
    Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending have written a new book on The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Their site has these teasers for the first couple of chapters:
    In this chapter, we consider the accepted belief that human evolution stopped 40,000 years ago. Then we dispel it; in fact, it looks as if human evolution has become more and more rapid. ...

    Unlike Alien, despite the title, this chapter argues that interbreeding between Neanderthals and emergent modern humans was likely, and shows how even a small amount of interbreeding would have caused humans to pick up useful Neanderthal genes.


    Thursday, Jan 08, 2009
     
    NY Times created the Einstein myth
    I happened to see a book of prominent NY Times front pages in the last 150 years. It is fascinating to see how historical events were reported.

    One thing that surprised me was a 1929 front page story about a new theory of electromagnetism from Albert Einstein, and how it was his most important theory yet. The article started:

    EINSTEIN EXTENDS RELATIVITY THEORY; New Work Seeks to "Unite Laws of Field of Gravitation and Electro-Magnetism." HE CALLS IT HIS GREATEST "Book," Consisting or Only Five Pages, Took Berlin Scientist Ten Years to Prepare. Origin of Matter Theory Seen. His Relativity Theory. EINSTEIN EXTENDS RELATIVITY THEORY

    Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.

    January 12, 1929, Saturday

    Page 1, 930 words

    BERLIN, Jan. 11.--Professor Albert Einstein, author of the theory of relativity, general and special, issued the following statement today explaining his new "book," consisting of five pages, upon which he has labored for the past ten years and which will be published next week:

    The NY Times archives have many other such silly articles about Einstein, including this:

    EINSTEIN ANNOUNCES A NEW FIELD THEORY; He Introduces a Vector of 5 Components Into 4-Dimensional Space-Time Continuum. ABANDONS WORK OF 1929 His New Mathematical Concept Is an Outgrowth of Kaluza's Hypothesis. Old Unitary Theory Abandoned. EINSTEIN ANNOUNCES A NEW FIELD THEORY Comment of Professor Wills. Einstein's Statement.

    October 26, 1931, Monday

    Page 1, 1496 words

    A preliminary announcement by Professor Albert Einstein of the completion by him, in collaboration with Dr. Walter Mayer, his assistant, of part of his work on a new unified field theory, supplanting the one announced by him in 1929, upon which he had spent more than ten years...

    This is bogus. Einstein never found a new field theory. Physics was creating quantum mechanics at that time, and that should have been front page news. But Einstein played no part in that. I suspect that the NY Times did more than anyone else to create a false myth about Einstein. Even when it wrote about quantum mechanics, the NY Times gave the impression that it was Einstein's invention, as in this 1931 article.

    The NY Times seems to have started this nonsense in 1919:

    LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS; Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations. EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry. A BOOK FOR 12 WISE MEN No More in All the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein When His Daring Publishers Accepted It.
    This was pretty absurd. Einstein once published a paper saying that the relativistic deflection of starlight would be exactly the same as expected under Newtonian theory. The actual 1919 experiment was inconclusive.

    Here was the long 1919 followup:

    DON'T WORRY OVER NEW LIGHT THEORY; Physicists Agree That It Can Be Disregarded for Practical Purposes. NEWTON'S LAW IS SAFE At Most It Suffers Only Slight Correction, Says Prof. Bumstead of Yale University.

    ... Einstein is a great Swiss mathematician and physicist, who holds a professorship in Germany at present. His trump card was the "principle of relativity," which is the new theory that has set the world agog. "Lorentz's theory is a side issue," claimed Einstein. The fundamental thing is the principle of relativity which expressed simply is this: The universe is so constituted that it is impossible to detect the absolute velocity of the motion of any body through space.

    It was Poincare who coined the "principle of relativity", derived the Lorentz contraction, and published it before Einstein.

    Meanwhile, the distinguished mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson writes:

    This talk is called the Einstein lecture, and I am grateful to the American Mathematical Society for inviting me to do honor to Albert Einstein. Einstein was not a mathematician, but a physicist who had mixed feelings about mathematics. On the one hand, he had enormous respect for the power of mathematics to describe the workings of nature, and he had an instinct for mathematical beauty which led him onto the right track to find nature’s laws. On the other hand, he had no interest in pure mathematics, and he had no technical skill as a mathematician. In his later years he hired younger colleagues with the title of assistants to do mathematical calculations for him. His way of thinking was physical rather than mathematical.
    Contrary to the myth, Einstein always got excellent math grades in school. Dyson appears to be aware of the fact that the theory of relativity was primarily created by mathematicians, not Einstein.

    I have wondered how Einstein could get so much credit for things that he did not do. It was partially because he was an egomaniac who dishonestly claimed credit and concealed his sources. But he had to have had a lot of help to get such a fancy reputation. It now appears that the NY Times was the biggest benefactor to his reputation.


    Monday, Jan 05, 2009
     
    Obama is corrupting a Senate appointment
    I think that Barack Obama should get more grief for manipulating the appointment of a US Senator. I don't just mean his lying about contacts with Gov. Blagojevich.

    It has been reported that Blago offered the appointment to Rep. Danny Davis, but he turned it down under pressure from Obama and Dem. Majority Leader Reid. If so, then it is Obama and Reid who have corrupted the process. The governor has the power and the duty to make the appointment, and he has not been indicted or impeached. Obama and Reid have threatened not to seat any Blago appointment, and I don't think that they have any constitutional authority to veto an appointment. Now it appears that Burris will become a senator instead of Davis, and will be because of improper tampering by Obama and Reid.


    Tuesday, Dec 30, 2008
     
    Spinors
    I missed the Christmas newspaper Jumble because my anagram for INSORP was SPINOR instead of PRISON.

    Spinor is a legitimate dictionary word. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

    a vector whose components are complex numbers in a two-dimensional or four-dimensional space and which is used especially in the mathematics of the theory of relativity
    That is a strange definition. Spinors are used in relativity, but they are most famously to describe the quantum mechanics of electron spin. Spinors were invented by mathematicians about a century ago, and they have been crucial to 20th century physics. Much of what we know about chemical bonds, for example, depends on spinors.

    You can find more info in the Wikipedia article on spinors. (The article is not easy to understand.) You can think of a spinor as some sort of a square root of a vector.


    Monday, Dec 29, 2008
     
    Embryonic stem cell research is obsolete
    The AAAS Science mag announces
    BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR: Reprogramming Cells

    This year, scientists achieved a long-sought feat of cellular alchemy. They took skin cells from patients suffering from a variety of diseases and reprogrammed them into stem cells. The transformed cells grow and divide in the laboratory, giving researchers new tools to study the cellular processes that underlie the patients' diseases. The achievement could also be an important step on a long path to treating diseases with a patient's own cells.

    The feat rests on a genetic trick, first developed in mice and described 2 years ago, in which scientists wipe out a cell's developmental "memory," causing it to return to its pristine embryonic state and then regrow into something else. In 2008, researchers achieved another milestone in cell reprogramming. In an elegant study in live mice, they prompted cells to make the leap directly from one mature cell into another -- flouting the usual rule that development of cells is a one-way street. These and other advances in tweaking cells to assume new identities add up to make the now flourishing field of cellular reprogramming Science's Breakthrough of the Year.

    This was the research that made human embryonic stem cell research obsolete. No useful therapies have ever been developed from human embryonic stem cells, and because of this, none may ever be developed. All stem cell therapies are based on adult stem cells.
     
    Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience
    A new study debunks some neuroscience imaging research:
    The newly emerging field of Social Neuroscience has drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation obtained using fMRI. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible ...
    There are a lot of exaggerated claims on what can be done with brain scans.

    Sunday, Dec 28, 2008
     
    Darwin's dangerous idea
    NewScientist mag is plugging its evolution articles:
    Since its redesign in November, NewScientist.com is making the last 12 months' of articles free for everyone to read. Here, in case you missed them, are our top 10 in-depth articles about evolution. ...

    Reclaiming the peppered moth for science

    The peppered moth used to be the textbook example of evolution in action. Then, about a decade ago, creationists began an orchestrated a campaign to discredit it - and with it the entire edifice of evolution. Now biologists are fighting to take it back…

    Uncovering the evolution of the bacterial flagellum

    The whip-like tail of some bacteria has become the cause célèbre of the "intelligent design" movement and a focal point in science's ongoing struggle against unreason. It doesn't seem possible to come up with one via Darwin's "numerous, successive, slight modifications", they say. Now science is coming up with an answer…

    This is pathetic. No, the peppered moth article is not online for free. Surely they can find better examples of evolution in action, and better justifications for the struggle against unreason.

    One story says that it is really important for our leaders to understand evolution, because Stalin was duped by Lamarkianism, while another says that Lamarkism is correct after all.


    Monday, Dec 22, 2008
     
    Obama appoints kooky science advisor
    NY Times science blogger writes:
    Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday.
    A lot of scientists supported Obama and claimed that Pres. Bush was anti-science. I think that they should be more worried about scientific ideologues like Holdren.

    Saturday, Dec 20, 2008
     
    Who did most to knock man off his pedestal?
    New Scientist mag compares Galileo to Darwin:
    The question is simple: who has done more to knock humanity off its pedestal? The man who showed humans to be the latest in a long line of animals? No, says Lawrence Krauss: anyone who was looking could have seen that humans were animals. So, then, the man who demonstrated beyond doubt that the Earth is not at the centre of anything? Not for Matt Ridley: "Who cares which ball of rock goes round which?" he asks.
    The article goes on to compare who did more to stand up to religious authorities.

    It is funny how the leftist-atheist-evolutionists like to worship anyone who can claimed to have knocked man off his pedestal.


    Thursday, Dec 18, 2008
     
    Mark Felt was not a hero
    Mark Felt just died, and I hope I don't have to hear people saying that he was a Watergate hero. He is alleged to have been the anonymous source code-named Deep Throat, but I doubt it. He illegally leaked some FBI files to the Wash. Post, but much of what was attributed to Deep Throat appears to have come from someone else.

    Felt did not tell us anything that we would not have found out otherwise. He was just abusing his authority out of personal spite for Pres. Richard Nixon. In some ways, Felt was the worst Watergate criminal of them all. He ordered illegal break-ins of the homes of innocent people, and he undermined the Watergate investigation by illegally leaking to the Wash. Post. He was pardoned for the break-ins. I think that he deserved a prison sentence.

     
    The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom
    Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott have a SciAm article attacking creationism. As usual, they brag about the Dover PA case:
    Such a careful inspection occurred in a federal courtroom in 2005, in the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. At issue was a policy in a local school district in Pennsylvania requiring a disclaimer to be read aloud in the classroom alleging that evolution is a “Theory...not a fact,” that “gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence,” and that intelligent design as presented in Of Pandas and People is a credible scientific alternative to evolution.
    The disclaimer did say that ID was an alternative, but not that it was credible or scientific.
    Eleven local parents filed suit in federal district court, arguing that the policy was unconstitutional. After a trial that spanned a biblical 40 days, the judge agreed, ruling that the policy violated the Establishment Clause and writing, “In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether [intelligent design] is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that [intelligent design] cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
    That's right, the ruling hinged on the book having religious antecedents. The same reasoning would have banned a Boy Scout handbook, if earlier editions mentioned God.
    The expert witness testimony presented in the Kitzmiller trial was devastating for intelligent design’s scientific pretensions. Intelligent design was established to be creationism lite: at the trial philosopher Barbara Forrest, co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, revealed that references to creationism in Of Pandas and People drafts were replaced with references to design shortly after the 1987 Edwards decision striking down Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment Act was issued.
    So the strongest argument against the school policy was that a textbook had been edited in order to bring it into compliance with a US Supreme Court decision.

    Another article in the same issue says:

    The big-brain vision has no real scientific basis. The fossil record of skull sizes over the past several thousand generations shows that our days of rapid increase in brain size are long over. Accordingly, most scientists a few years ago would have taken the view that human physical evolution has ceased.
    If these evolutionists really want to promote evolution and erase falsehoods, then they should be fighting those scientists who deny that humans are still evolving.

    Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008
     
    The Day the Earth Stood Still
    I just watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), the remake of the 1951 movie.

    In the original, a humanoid space alien and a terminator robot land a flying saucer in Washington DC. The alien wants to address the United Nations so that Earth will join a federation of planets. When that fails, he makes friends with a 12-year-old boy as in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and the boy introduces him to a leading physicist, who then finds an audience for him. The movie ends with the alien giving a speech about how earthlings must become slaves to the terminator robots who kill anyone who commits the crime of aggression. Liberals love this movie because it stands for world govt and peace.

    In the remake, the alien is on a mission to exterminate the humans in order to make room for alien colonization. The boy recognizes that the alien is a threat to humanity, and turns him into the military authorities, even tho his stepmom is naively helping the alien. The alien never delivers a message to Earth, and is ambivalent about exterminating humanity.

    I wonder why they even remade the movie. The original was silly and childish, but the remake abandons the few appealing qualities that the original had.


    Friday, Dec 12, 2008
     
    Bush-hater looks to PLO for quotes
    From the land of the Bush-haters, James Konsevich writes in the San Jose newspaper:
    Bush's conflicting statements on God

    In the Mercury News article on George W. Bush (Page 3A, Dec. 9), you quote President Bush as saying, "... the decision to go to war in Iraq was not connected to his religious beliefs." Yet Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine's president, related that Bush said, " "... God would tell me, 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did.

    You really have to wonder about the sanity of these Bush-haters who form their beliefs about the US President based on the claims of some arab terrorist on the other side of the world.

    Pres. Bush has explained the Iraq War many times. Yet this guy claims that he only told to truth to Mahmoud Abbas?

    The writer does not even quote correctly what Bush said this week. Bush doesn't really refer to himself in the third person. Here is what Bush really said:

    "I did it based upon the need to protect the American people from harm," Bush said.

    "You can't look at the decision to go into Iraq apart from, you know, what happened on Sept. 11. It was not a religious decision," he said. "I don't view this as a war of religion. I view this as a war of good, decent people of all faiths against people who murder innocent people to achieve a political objective."

    Bush said that it was not a religious decision, not that the decision was not connected to his religious beliefs.

    Wednesday, Dec 10, 2008
     
    The American Bomb
    The NY Times reports on new atomic bomb books:
    "Since the birth of the nuclear age," they write, "no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise." ... All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly.
    Add the atomic bomb to the long list of uniquely American inventions. The chief inspiration came from Leo Szilard who patented the nuclear chain reaction and persuaded Einstein to write the letter to FDR that initiated the Manhattan project.
     
    How rich schools teach foolishness
    A wealthy NY school district has abolish AP courses:
    SCARSDALE, N.Y. — The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year’s class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon — items not covered by the exam. ...

    For instance, art students have been newly liberated to draw large-scale works rather than adhere to the College Board’s 18-by-24-inch parameters. Physics students now study string theory — a hot topic in some college courses that is absent from the Advanced Placement exam. And the advanced government class takes a three-day field trip to conduct primary research at Harvard’s Kennedy School, something teachers say would have been impossible with the intense Advanced Placement schedule.

    My hunch is that the teachers don't want to have to be judged by whether their students actually learn anything. Learning string theory is the biggest possible waste of time for a physics student.

    Thursday, Dec 04, 2008
     
    Take a nap
    Here is health news that you can use:
    A cup of strong coffee might make you feel wide awake, but a small study suggests that for improved physical and mental performance, an afternoon nap works better. ...

    Those who had caffeine had worse motor skills than those who napped or had a placebo. In the perceptual task, the nappers did significantly better than either the caffeine or placebo group. On the verbal test, nappers were best by a wide margin, and the caffeine consumers did no better than those given a placebo.

    Companies should offer nap rooms instead of free coffee.

    Tuesday, Nov 25, 2008
     
    Law degree negatives
    The National Law Journal report:
    When Dina Allam graduated last spring from Ohio State University with a joint law and master of business administration degree, she thought the combination would catch the eye of employers who could appreciate a mix of analytical skills and business know-how.

    But after months of looking for a nonlawyer job that would put all that education to work and help pay off some of the nearly $85,000 in student loan debt, Allam began to think she'd made a mistake by going the law degree route.

    "People don't see the value in the joint degree. They think I'm confused," she said.

    They think worse things than that. There are some explanations here.

    Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
     
    Another intolerant leftist gets fired
    Charles Karel Bouley, aka "Karel", was recently fired by KGO AM talk radio in San Francisco, for saying “F__G__D__ Joe the G__D__M__F__ plumber! I want M__F__ Joe the plumber dead.” He said it over a news story about Joe the plumber. You can hear it yourself here.

    I listened to Karel on another radio station this morning, and he was unrepentant. He blamed the radio station for not hiring more experienced engineers to monitor and block his offensive comments. He continued to rant about how much he hates Joe the plumber. Karel is a flaming gay man, and talks about gay issues a lot.

    KGO is the same radio station that had to fire Bernie Ward when he was indicted (and later convicted) of distributing child pornography.

    Karel and Ward were prime examples of leftist hate speech. They are always giving monologues about how evil the Republicans are, how they hate the Republicans, and how Republican views should not be tolerated. I think that those two jerks should have been fired long ago.


    Wednesday, Nov 19, 2008
     
    Judicial supremacists are confused
    Just a few months ago, California Supreme Court Justice Kennard said this about same-sex marriage:
    Whether an unconstitutional denial of a fundamental right has occurred is not a matter to be decided by the executive or legislative branch, or by popular vote, but is instead an issue of constitutional law for resolution by the judicial branch of state government. Indeed, this court's decision in Lockyer made it clear that the courts alone must decide whether excluding individuals from marriage because of sexual orientation can be reconciled with our state Constitution's equal protection guarantee.
    Today, she voted not to hear any same-sex marriage cases, now that the California voters have spoken. Has she learned a lesson in judicial supremacy?

    Sunday, Nov 16, 2008
     
    Human evolution deniers
    Here is another example of a prominent evolutionist who denies that humans are evolving:
    4:53 pm: Sydney Brenner is about to come up. He’s gonna tell us if this was a successful talk.

    4:54 pm: Starts off with a zinger: “Biological evolution for humans has stopped.” ... He uses an analogy about how if we feel cold, we don’t ‘adapt’ we just kill an animal, skin it, and wear its pelt as evidence of relaxed natural selection.

    Brenner won a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his genetic research.

    No, humans are evolving faster than ever. I have previously commented here and here.


    Saturday, Nov 15, 2008
     
    More on Ptolemy
    A reader points out that portions of Ptolemy's Almagest can be found here and here, and Ptolemy does say in the Almagest that the Earth is stationary and at the center of the universe. But he bases it mostly on terrestial arguments and acknowledges that others hold a different view.

    I still don't agree with those who are so eager to say that Ptolemy was wrong to use a geocentric system, or to use epicycles. His system was brilliant, and as scientific as those from later astronomers like Copernicus.

    Ptolemy believed in astrology and other kooky things that we do not accept today. One could still use his system to predict the night sky whether you believe in the Earth being stationary or not. Even today, planetariums are built with a geocentric system, and nobody says that they are wrong.

    In some ways, Ptolemy was ahead of Copernicus. Ptolemy's system used an equant to create eccentric planetary orbits and variable speed planets. Copernicus kept the epicycles but eliminated the equants.


    Thursday, Nov 13, 2008
     
    Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
    A UK paper reports:
    Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

    The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

    The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

    We need more nuclear energy. Unfortunately Barack Obama has allied himself with leftists who hate nuclear energy.

    Wednesday, Nov 12, 2008
     
    The bailout boondoggle
    The financial bailout has been a failure before it even started. The NY Times reports today:
    Mr. Paulson said the $700 billion would not be used to buy up troubled mortgage-related securities, as the rescue effort was originally conceived, but would instead be used in a broader campaign to bolster the financial markets and, in turn, make loans more accessible for creditworthy borrowers seeking car loans, student loans and other kinds of borrowing.
    This is amazing. There were lots of economists and citizens who said all along that the bailout was foolish and that it would not help for the feds to buy the troubled securities.

    I think that John McCain should be kicking himself for not opposing the bailout. We now have Paulson himself admitting that it was a bad idea.

    Instead, Paulson wants to give away money in other ways, such as this:

    With attention focused on the $700 billion bailout plan for banks, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quietly slipped the banking industry an additional $140 billion tax windfall in late September, Washington Post reports.

    Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008
     
    Lawyers take over
    A law journal reports:
    Better Question: Who Isn’t a Lawyer on Obama’s Transition Team?

    President-elect Barack Obama and his VP-elect Joe Biden wasted no time assembling their transition team, which features a number of attorneys. (Graduates of Harvard Law School, Obama's alma mater, also proliferate.)

    It then lists all the lawyers.

    Monday, Nov 03, 2008
     
    Why I am voting for John McCain
  • McCain is a patriot. Obama has a history of associations with America-haters. I just don't trust Obama to act in America's interest.
  • Foreign policy. McCain has been right about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and would be an excellent commander-in-chief. Obama shows no grasp of what is going on over there.
  • Taxes. McCain has a long history of voting for lower taxes, and Obama has a history of raising taxes.
  • Character. McCain is exactly what he appears to be. Obama is a phony. Obama's main accomplishment is his autobiography, but it was ghostwritten. His main qualification is his 2002 Iraq War speech, but his Iraq story is a fairy tale, as Bill Clinton said. Obama's racial attitudes are disturbing.
  • Courts. McCain voted for Justices Roberts and Alito, who have turned out to be excellent. Obama voted against them, with no good explanation. Obama taught constitutional law, so he should know something about the subject, but all he says is goofy leftist platitudes.
  • VP. Joe Biden may turn out to be the dumbest VP in my lifetime. He makes Sarah Palin look like a genius.
  • Energy. McCain wants nuclear power while Obama wants ethanol subsidies. McCain's policies will be better for the economy, better for the environment, and better for global warming considerations.
  • Economy. Obama is more interested in redistributing the wealth than in growing the economy. McCain has a record of pro-growth policies.
  • Kool-aid. I have never seen so many people follow a leader so blindly. Nobody can tell me why Obama would be a good president, except that he advocates change, he's not G.W. Bush, and he is an inspiring speaker. It seems like mass hypnosis to me.

  • Sunday, Nov 02, 2008
     
    Ptolemy was not wrong
    I am wondering whether Ptolemy ever really said that the Sun orbits a stationary Earth.

    Ptolemy was a 2nd century Greek/Roman who wrote great treatises on astronomy, geography, astrology, and other subjects. His astronomy Almagest had a mathematical model of the Sun, Moon, stars, and planets. His geography had an atlas with maps of the known regions of Earth. Those works were preserved by the Arabs and used for well over a millenium.

    Of course, his maps were wildly inaccurate by today's standards, and he did not even know about the Americas. But he did know that the Earth was round and yet he drew flat maps anyway.

    Does anyone ever say that Ptolemy was wrong because his atlas portrayed a flat Earth? No, because people understand that flat maps have practical utility.

    So why does anyone ever say that Ptolemy was wrong for saying that the Sun revolves around the Earth? Geocentric models have practical utility in much the same way that flat maps do.

    Here is the introduction to Ptolemy's astrology treatise, where he starts by explaining the difference between astronomy and astrology:

    Of the means of prediction through astronomy, O Syrus, two are the most important and valid. One, which is first both in order and in effectiveness, is that whereby we apprehend the aspects of the movements of sun, moon, and stars in relation to each other and to the earth, as they occur from time to time; the second is that in which by means of the natural character of these aspects themselves we investigate the changes which they bring about in that which they surround. The first of these, which has its own science, ...
    He goes on to explain that astronomy, as described in his own Almagest, is much more scientific than astrology.

    The point here is that he defines astronomy as how we view the sun, moon, stars, and planets relative to the Earth. (He uses the word "stars" to include both stars and planets.)

    Assuming that this translation is accurate, it is possible that Ptolemy never even expressed an opinion about whether the Earth really goes around the Sun, or the Sun really goes around the Earth. He may have taken the completely correct position that he was modeling relative motion.

    Encyclopædia Britannica says:

    Ptolemy was preeminently responsible for the geocentric cosmology that prevailed in the Islamic world and in medieval Europe. This was not due to the Almagest so much as a later treatise, Hypotheseis ton planomenon (Planetary Hypotheses). In this work he proposed what is now called the Ptolemaic system -- a unified system in which each heavenly body is attached to its own sphere and the set of spheres nested so that it extends without gaps from the Earth to the celestial sphere.
    The Almagest was the book that astronomers used for a millenium to predict planetary positions. This suggests that the Almagest itself may have been neutral on whether the Earth moved. Putting the Earth at the center of the universe may have been just a hypothesis that he published later, but it was not essential to his theory or something that he necessarily believed in.

    I mention this because Ptolemy is always used as an example of someone who was unscientific and wrong. His astrology was a little misguided, but that is not the complaint. People say that he was wrong because he was too stupid to realize that the Earth moved, and because he invented epicycles to help explain planetary motion. But he was a brilliant astronomer, and not wrong.


    Saturday, Nov 01, 2008
     
    Foreign mag pushes leftist agenda
    The British journal Nature has endorsed Barack Obama.

    The only specific issues mentioned were carbon emissions and ethanol subsidies, and the editorial actually likes John McCain on both of those issues. So what does it like about Obama? It says:

    On a range of topics, science included, Obama has surrounded himself with a wider and more able cadre of advisers than McCain. ... But a commitment to seeking good advice and taking seriously the findings of disinterested enquiry seems an attractive attribute for a chief executive.
    In other words, they would drink the kook-aid if they see their friends drinking the kool-aid. I would think that a science journal could do better than this.

    Thursday, Oct 30, 2008
     
    PBS show on Mandelbrot
    I just watched the PBS Nova special on fractals. It treated Benoit Mandelbrot as the creator of the field, and said:
    NARRATOR: Designers and artists, the world over, have embraced the visual potential of fractals. But when the Mandelbrot set was first published, mathematicians, for the most part, reacted with scorn.
    I think that the scorn was just for Mandelbrot's exaggerated claims and lack of mathematical rigor. He really just popularized the Mandelbrot set as it had already been published by others before he even studied it.

    Monday, Oct 27, 2008
     
    Einstein did not discover the photon
    I ran into some arguments that Einstein deserves the credit for discovering that light is quantized into particles (now called photons), even tho Planck published it first.

    Einstein was trying to understand phenomena like the photoelectric effect, in which light shining on a metal can sometimes induce electricity. In 1900, Planck published the idea that the energy emitted or absorbed by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency f is hf where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant. In 1902, Lenard showed that the energy of electrons in the photoelectric effect depended only on the frequency of the incident light. In 1905, Einstein showed that Planck's formula could be used to give a heuristic explanation of Lenard's results.

    Here are the arguments that Einstein deserves all the credit.

  • Planck only said that energy emissions and absorptions were quantized, while Einstein said that light itself was quantized.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica says:

    Planck did not mean to say that electromagnetic radiation itself is quantized, or as Einstein later put it, “The sale of beer in pint bottles does not imply that beer exists only in indivisible pint portions.”
    Light is just electromagnetic radiation that happens to be in the visible range of frequencies. Planck certainly did mean to say that electromagnetic radiation is quantized as it is emitted or absorbed, but may not have expressed an opinion about whether it is quantized while it propagates.

  • This work of Einstein was the reason he got a Nobel Prize.

    By the time he got the prize, Einstein was the most famous physicist in the world. The Nobel committee really wanted badly to give him a prize, but a prize for relativity theory would have been controversial because he did not really invent relativity.

    Planck had already gotten a Nobel Prize for proposing that light emissions are quantized, and Lenard got a prize for demonstrating it with the photoelectric effect. So Einstein getting a prize does not show that he is more worthy of credit than Planck or Lenard.

  • Planck generously credited Einstein, but Einstein did not give much credit to Planck and Lenard.

    Planck may have been generous with credit. A lot of older scientists give excess credit to younger scientists. Einstein is peculiar in that he was well known for being very jealous about crediting anyone but himself.

  • Planck and Lenard did not truly understand what they had done. It took a younger physicist like Einstein to realize the revolutionary implications of his theories.

    This argument is silly. Planck was one of the most distinguished physicists of the day. He contributed to special relativity and considered one of the early founders of quantum mechanics. He was a genius.

    The only argument that has some merit is that Einstein said that light itself was quantized, not just the emission and absorption of light. His 1905 paper said:

    The wave theory of light, which operates with continuous spatial functions, has worked well in the representation of purely optical phenomena and will probably never be replaced by another theory. It should be kept in mind, however, that the optical observations refer to time averages rather than instantaneous values. In spite of the complete experimental confirmation of the theory as applied to diffraction, reflection, refraction, dispersion, etc., it is still conceivable that the theory of light which operates with continuous spatial functions may lead to contradictions with experience when it is applied to the phenomena of emission and transformation of light.

    It seems to me that the observations associated with blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related phenomena connected with the emission or transformation of light are more readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space. In accordance with the assumption to be considered here, the energy of a light ray spreading out from a point source is not continuously distributed over an increasing space but consists of a finite number of energy quanta which are localized at points in space, which move without dividing, and which can only be produced and absorbed as complete units.

    The debate over whether light is a wave or a particle is one that had gone on for centuries. Isaac Newton said that light was a particle. 19th century physics had conclusively proved that light was a wave, as Maxwell's equations described the quantitative properties of the waves. Now light is understood as a wave and a particle. It propagates as a wave and gets observed as a particle. Ditto for everything else. All particles exhibit wave-like properties and are best described by wave functions. All waves appears to be composed of particles. Waves and particles are just two different ways of looking at the same thing.

    So was Einstein correct? His statement that light "can only be produced and absorbed as complete units" is more or less what Planck had already said, and is consistent with our modern view of photons. But Einstein goes further, and says that "the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space". I am not sure it makes any sense to say whether that is correct or not. Our best theory of light (quantum electrodynamics, or QED) uses wave functions that are continuously distributed in space. Every time we observe some light, we use some device to absorb some light, and it always looks like discrete photons. But whether the photons are discrete when nobody is looking is hard to say. You certainly cannot think of them as ordinary particles, unless you are willing to allow particles to be two places at the same time, and other quantum mechanical oddities. So I think that the difference between Planck's and Einstein's views is a philosophical one of no consequence.

    According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Poincare played a part in convincing physicists of the photon theory:

    In October 1911 [Einstein] was among the group of prominent physicists who attended the first Solvay conference in Brussels. The discussions there stimulated Henri Poincaré to provide a mathematical proof that Planck’s radiation law necessarily required the introduction of quanta -— a proof that converted James (later Sir James) Jeans and others into supporters of the quantum theory.
    Einstein must have been glad that Poincare died the next year.

    Here is another article that credits Einstein, not Poincare, for relativity theory:

    Marchal, contra Damour, asserts that Poincaré did grasp the relativity of time and space. ... and point out that he was the first to have introduced the mathematical structure of spacetime in July 1905.

    Einstein was revolutionary while others were not because he inverted the conventional procedure. ... Poincaré never considered his mathematical structure of spacetime to be seriously important for physics ...

    In other words, Poincare had the whole theory of special relativity before Einstein. But Einstein presented the info in a different order and Poincare was not an egotistical megalomaniac, so Einstein deserves the credit. I think that Einstein is vastly overrated.

  • Saturday, Oct 25, 2008
     
    McCain's mistakes
    I think that the McCain-Palin campaign has not attacked Barack Obama aggressively enough. I would have directly attacked the reasons that Obama supporters give for his fitness to be US President. They are:

  • He was editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Chicago lecturer in Constitutional law.

    This might have some merit if he had published some scholarly papers, or if he demonstrated some expertise in the subject. The President does get to appoint federal judges, and Obama might have told us about his judicial philosophy, why he voted against Justices Roberts and Alito, and whether he disagrees with any of their opinions. But his campaign statements show no more expertise than Sarah Palin has. More here.

  • He wrote a widely-praised and best-selling memoir.

    There is now overwhelming evidence by Jack Cashill that Obama's memoir was ghostwritten, and probably by 1970s terrorist Bill Ayers.

  • He was right about the Iraq War by opposing it from the beginning.

    No. Bill Clinton was right to call this a big fairy tale. I wrote more here.

  • He is a black American who transcends race and will unite our nation.

    Obama's DNA and upbringing have nothing in common with American blacks. His books and his friends show some very divisive racial attitudes. George W. Bush and John McCain have track records of making deals with the opposite political party, but Obama does not.

  •  
    Court favors homeschooling choice
    A Penn court ruled that family court ought not to presume that public school is preferable to homeschooling.

    I think that the decision is correct, but of little consequence. Usually family court judges and shrinks apply a prejudice against homeschoolers without making their reasoning explicit.

    There is some discussion at the above blog from lawyers who seem to have real trouble understanding how divorced parents could ever rear kids without running to family court judges to resolve assorted disputes.


    Wednesday, Oct 22, 2008
     
    Some judges hate gun rights
    A couple of gun-hating judges are complaining that the DC gun case was an activist decision because it created a novel right that had never existed before: the right to keep and bear arms. The NY Times gloats. Somebody should tell those jokers that those words are straight out of the US Constitution, and the majority of gun owners have considered the 2A to be a protection of their individual right to have a gun ever since.

    I have more comments on Volokh's blog.


    Monday, Oct 20, 2008
     
    Most published research findings are false
    Most research is wrong:
    The assumption is that, as a result, such journals publish only the best scientific work. But Dr Ioannidis and his colleagues argue that the reputations of the journals are pumped up by an artificial scarcity of the kind that keeps diamonds expensive. And such a scarcity, they suggest, can make it more likely that the leading journals will publish dramatic, but what may ultimately turn out to be incorrect, research.

    Dr Ioannidis based his earlier argument about incorrect research partly on a study of 49 papers in leading journals that had been cited by more than 1,000 other scientists. They were, in other words, well-regarded research. But he found that, within only a few years, almost a third of the papers had been refuted by other studies.

    The problem is mainly in the soft sciences.
     
    Powell endorses Obama
    Colin Powell mostly endorsed Barack Obama mostly for reasons of style and symbolism, not policy. Powell’s chief expertise is in military and foreign policy. It would have been better if he had compared the candidates in those areas where he is an expert.

    This is just another example of experts pontificating outside their expertise. Economist Paul Krugman just won a Bank of Sweden Prize (sometimes erroneously called a Nobel Prize) for his work on international trade. Most people know him as a Bush-hating NY Times columnist. But all I ever see in his columns are standard Democrat talking points; I have never seen him criticize GW Bush on international trade where Krugman actually knows something.

    Over on mathematician Terry Tao's blog, Wal wrote:

    Some of the most distinguished mathematicians have taken political positions: Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Alexander Grothendieck to name three twentieth century examples.
    I answered:
    You are joking, right? Those guys never did anything worthwhile again after polluting their minds with politics. Please don’t encourage Terry to go down that path.
    A couple of mathematicians there took offense.

    Saturday, Oct 18, 2008
     
    Obama does not understand economic incentives
    Barack Obama said:
    I haven’t looked at all the details of his capital gains proposal. I will tell you that nobody one really has capital gains right now – so if the idea is the cut capital gains taxes, when I don’t know anybody, even the smartest investors who right now are going to be experiencing a lot of capital gains. That probably is not going to be particularly useful in solving the financial crisis. But I will review the plan and I’m sure that Sen. McCain will have more to say about it tomorrow.
    Obama has a typical leftist mentality. He doesn't recognize that people create wealth when they have sufficient economic incentives. All he can think about is how to take money away from rich people.
     
    People like free services, but don't want to pay
    Newsday reports:
    HONOLULU (AP) _ Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

    Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

    "People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don't believe that was the intent of the program."

    Sometimes you hear people call something like this a consequence of the law of unintended consequences. But any idiot could have predicted that people might want to stop paying for something, if they can get away with it.

    Friday, Oct 17, 2008
     
    What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers?
    John Tierney writes:
    If the United States really has a critical shortage of scientists and engineers, why didn’t this year’s graduates get showered with lucrative job offers and signing bonuses? That’s the question that comes to my mind after reading about Barack Obama’s plans to address the “shortage” we keep hearing about from blue-ribbon commissions of scientists and engineers.
    He is right. We have plenty of scientists and engineers. People only say we have a shortage when they lobby for importing more cheap labor from overseas.

    Thursday, Oct 16, 2008
     
    Obama's legal theory
    Barack Obama's main field of expertise is the law, and he gave his legal theory in last night's debate:
    I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through...I think that it's important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will.
    He disagreed with a Supreme Court case that applied a statute of limitations to say that employers did not have to go back 20 years to try to prove that they paid their employees fairly. Employees have to file a claim within the limits specified by the statute.

    He is signalling that he will appoint judges who ignore the law and rule based on ideological allegiance to left-wing causes.

    He also flip-flopped on abortion again. In July he said he was in favor of some limits on late-term abortions. Now he says that he is not.


    Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008
     
    Museum exhibit on race
    The Science Museum of Minnesota recently developed an exhibit called "Race: Are we so different?" ... The exhibit was funded to the tune of some four million dollars by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, overseen by Mary Margaret Overbey of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and a committee consisting of a wide range of experts on race, racism, and related topics.

    There is no such thing as race (biologically), race is a social construct used as a political and economic tool, even efforts to use race in a "positive" way such as in medicine or forensics are doomed to failure because of the lack of biological validity of the concept, and so on and so forth. ...

    The AAA story couches racism in the context of American colonial history, slavery, etc. etc. It states that racism is a purely Western invention, and distinguishes racism from other forms of hating your fellow human being. The rise of the modern capitalistic system, the nation state, the colonial and post colonial economies and societies, and slavery are the kitchen and racism is the bitter and poisonous buffet, manifest in myriad ways.

    It appears to be based on politics more than science.

    Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
     
    Humans are evolving faster than ever
    Evolutionists frequently claim that all life is evolving, except for humans. Anthropologist John Hawks explains why this is wrong, and we are evolving faster than ever.

    Saturday, Oct 11, 2008
     
    Why Freud Still Isn’t Dead
    Science writer John Horgan writes:
    Ever since Freud invented psychoanalysis a century ago, critics have viciously attacked it as pseudo-science and pseudo-medicine–“the treatment of the id by the odd,” as one wag put it. But in spite of the current dominance of genetic, neural and pharmacological approaches to the mind and its disorders, psychoanalysis refuses to fade away. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine—the world’s premier medical journal—reports that psychoanalysis works as well as more modern talking cures, such as cognitive therapy, in treating common disorders such as anxiety and depression.

    The evidence is overwhelming that treatments for depression and other common disorders work, when they work, primarily by harnessing the placebo effect, the tendency of patients' expectations to be self-fulfilling. In other words, modern psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts are really no better than witch doctors at exorcising our demons. That’s why Freud still isn’t dead.

    He is correct. The modern treatments at least have the advantage that they are testable. Most Freudian concepts are not even scientifically testable.

    Thursday, Oct 09, 2008
     
    Court hears domestic violence case
    The US Supreme Court is hearing United States v Hayes. It is about someone who lost his gun rights as a result of a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence. The case turns on how a comma is parsed in the Lautenburg Amendment. The US DoJ and ten federal circuits interpret it to more broadly extinguish gun rights, and only a 2-1 majority in one circuit take a narrower interpretation.

    The trouble with the govt interpretation is that it is not only grammatically incorrect, but it endangers about five different constitutional rights. It is contrary to 2A gun rights, 5A due process, 6A jury trial, and limits on the Commerce Clause.

    The US DoJ is probably expecting a 9-0 decision to bring the one oddball circuit into line with the others. I don't think so. That one circuit is correct. The law is a horrible law, and it ought to be interpreted narrowly.


    Tuesday, Oct 07, 2008
     
    Obama says some dumb things
    From the second presidential debate:
    Obama: And we can do it, but we're going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.
    He is mixed up. The computer was not invented this way.
    Obama: So we've got to deal with that right away. That's why I've called for an investment of $15 billion a year over 10 years. Our goal should be, in 10 year's time, we are free of dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

    And we can do it. Now, when JFK said we're going to the Moon in 10 years, nobody was sure how to do it, but we understood that, if the American people make a decision to do something, it gets done. So that would be priority number one.

    No, we got to the Moon by throwing a lot of money at the problem. We can energy, such as ethanol, by spending a lot of govt money, but that will not make us free of Mideast oil.
     
    Ayers ghosted Obama's "Dreams"
    Jack Cashill makes a strong argument that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's autobiography.

    Monday, Oct 06, 2008
     
    Prize for HIV discovery
    NewScientist reports:
    Two virologists who discovered HIV and a third who showed that a virus causes cervical cancer share this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

    Two French researchers, Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, share half the prize for discovering, in 1983, that the virus now known as HIV causes AIDS.

    No, not exactly. The official announcement says:
    Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). ... Soon after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause of acquired human immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).
    The Frenchmen are not credited with proving that HIV causes AIDS. That was established by later groups, and now AIDS is defined in terms of HIV infection.
     
    Obama-Biden have no experience
    Harvard psychology prof Steven Pinker writes:
    The impression fits with the overall theme that Ms. Palin and Senator John McCain have been trying to advance: that expertise is overrated, homespun sincerity is better than sophistication, conviction is more important than analysis.
    Huhh? McCain has already won the votes of those who value expertise. Obama's expertise is in teaching constitutional law, reading a teleprompter, and provoking racial animosity. McCain's political and military expertise is far more valuable.

    Palin appeals to those who want change in Washington. To the extent that she draw attention to the issue of presidential expertise, I think that it helps McCain-Palin. I hope she keeps talking about her foreign policy expertise in particular, as it draws attention to Obama-Biden weaknesses.


    Saturday, Oct 04, 2008
     
    New pro-vaccine book
    Paul Offit has a new book on Autism's False Prophets:
    Dr. Offit notes two likely causes of the increase in autism diagnoses. One is that the definition of the disorder has broadened over time, so that children with mild symptoms are now being diagnosed when once they would have been regarded as merely quirky. ...

    The second cause of the rise in autism diagnoses, according to Dr. Offit, is that in earlier times children with severe symptoms of what we now recognize as autism were more likely to be diagnosed, often incorrectly, as mentally retarded.

    He is on the warpath against those who say that vaccines cause autism, and laments that people don't always believe experts like him.

    He may be right about autism, but I can tell him why people don't always believe him. He is a paid lobbyist for the vaccine makers. He has collected millions of dollars from them. All the while, he has sat on official govt advisory committees that are responsible for the vaccine mandates.

    The official govt advisory committees consist mostly of vaccine researchers who are on the payrolls of the vaccine makers, and they have no one representing consumer interests. The mandates exist to further the interests of the vaccine makers. That is why I don't trust them.


    Friday, Oct 03, 2008
     
    Biden misstatements
    Jon Roland says that Sarah Palin won the VP debate, when you consider Biden's erroneous or misleading statements:
    1. Constitutional provisions on VP not in Art. I.
    2. VP has authority to preside over Senate, not just break ties.
    3. Equal benefits for same sex couples not in the Constitution. (Equal protection does not extend to benefits of that kind.)
    4. Credit crisis the fault of Bush administration. (Began before, continued through Dem domination of Congress.)
    5. Economic crisis about the stock market. (No, the credit market.)
    6. Crisis the result of "deregulation". (No, the key activities were never regulated, and most have or would occur offshore -- beyond the reach of U.S. jurisdiction.)
    7. Credit crisis result of lack of liquidity. (No, result of loss of confidence and bad accounting practices.)
    8. Bankruptcy court changing interest rates and principal balances. (Only as alternative, subject to consent, otherwise a violation of Contracts Clause.)
    9. Misstatements of McCain votes. (I counted at least 3.)
    10. Put 100,000 cops on the street. (Actually less than a quarter of that, and extended federal control into local law enforcement, besides being unconstitutional.)
    11. Palin tax in AK was a "windfall profits" tax. (No, it was really an extraction fee.)
    12. Called for "safe nuclear" power. (No such thing, as evidenced by refusal of investors to build or operate without tort immunity with liability not accepted by government under respondeat superior.) (Also is disagreement with Obama.)
    13. No oil from ANWR for 10 years. (Could get some in 2 years, but never enough to make much difference for prices at the pump.)
    14. Elocution: "Bosniacs".
    15. Elocution: "Polarized caps".
    16. U.S. not greeted as liberators in Iraq. (Actually, most Iraqis did, but a violent minority didn't.)
    17. Confused Gaza and West Bank on election of Hamas.
    18. U.S. and France did not kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon. (Neither did Israel.)
    19. Spending ratio between Iraq and Afghanistan.
    20. Overpromised benefits of "rescue" package. (Palin did also.)
    It is amusing to see people try to claim that Biden proved that he was smarter than Palin. Biden just proved that he is doofus. Biden has been running for President or VP since 1987, and he really should have his facts a little better.

    Here is a less obvious error:

    BIDEN: Can I respond? Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody ... Look, the people in my neighborhood, they get it. They get it.
    Katie's Restaurant went out of business 20 years ago.
     
    Quantum crypto broken again
    NewScientist reports:
    Quantum cryptography is supposed to be unbreakable. But a flaw in a common type of equipment used makes it possible to intercept messages without detection.

    Quantum cryptography has been used by some banks to protect data, and even to hide election results in Switzerland last year. But it has been discovered that shining bright light into the sensitive equipment needed makes it possible to hijack communications without a trace.

    "It turns the equipment into a puppet-box that an eavesdropper can control," says Vadim Makarov from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who uncovered the vulnerability.

    I have commented previously on quantum crypto vulnerabilities in Apr 2007, May 2008, and Nov 2006.

    All of these insecurities result from the attempt to use quantum mechanics to achieve security properties. There are lots of secure systems that do not use quantum mechanics. Using quantum mechanics is technically much more difficult and limited in its applicability. The only reason to use quantum cryptography is the claims of provable security. But the claims are just not true.


    Thursday, Oct 02, 2008
     
    Biden makes a fool of himself again
    Here is a video of Biden and Palin answering questions about the Supreme Court.
    Could there be a better example of a comparison between (1) an impressive sounding answer that is absolutely full of nonsense (and dangerous nonsense at that) and (2) a pathetic-sounding answer that is absolutely correct?

    Anyone else notice that Biden got Roe wrong? He claims that states are allowed "some impact" during the second trimester to regulate women's health, but forgets that Roe's companion case, Doe, ensures that "health" means anything which would convince a doctor that an abortion is in a women's best interests. Functionally, states have almost no control over the second trimester, either. Finally, Biden seems to imply that the government must prevent third-trimester abortions ("weight is on the foetus being carried"), as opposed to the reality, in which state governments are perfectly free to allow abortion right up until birth.

    Biden's answer is shockingly bad. He is talking about stuff that he has discussed for decades, and yet he gets it completely wrong.

    If the feds have jurisdiction over wife-beating under the interstate commerce clause, then the fedus have jurisdiction over anything. That is what the Supreme Court correctly said. Biden's view would wipe out 220 years of the Constitution creating a federal govt with limited powers. Ordinary criminal matters are under jurisdiction of the states.

    Biden is also wrong when he says Roe v Wade is as "close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours." Hardly anyone agrees with what Roe v Wade actually says. It appears that Biden does not, and I noted here that Obama does not either.

    Palin dodged the request to name other decisions with which she disagreed, but her answer had the virtue of being correct as far as it went. There were a couple of other decisions that she had previous criticized, and some people are assuming that she could not remember their names. My guess is that she did not want to attack a specific decision without checking with the McCain campaign.

    It is possible that Palin has never actually read a Supreme Court decision, but Barack Obama has read hundreds of them. The constitutional law is Obama's main area of expertise. What is really strange is that Obama seems to be unable to criticize specific decisions. He voted against Roberts and Alito, and says that his disapproves of Thomas. It seems to me that if he is really an expert on this subject, and he wants to sustain a view that those justices have done a bad job, then he ought to be able to explain the errors in particular opinions that Roberts, Alito, and Thomas have written. He has not.

    Update: Brian Kalt has some similar comments.


    Wednesday, Oct 01, 2008
     
    Stop the bailout
    If there were really a strong case for the banking bailout, then there would be some hard numbers to back it up. But there isn't:
    Where did the $700 billion figure come from, a figure that Paulson insisted on when members of Congress suggested that perhaps they could authorize some of the money right away, and then provide more later?

    "It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

    Data show that current credit is at record levels:
    I'm still skeptical we face a credit crunch requiring unprecedented government intrusion into the financial services industry. Today the Fed released the latest data. The weekly updates are current as of September 17 and they are instructive.

    Total Loans and Leases of Commercial Banks reached $7.026 trillion, the highest amount in history.

    If the bailout props up unsustainable borrowing levels, then we will just have a worse crash later.

    There are dozens of reputable economists who oppose the bailout. The bailout is so unpopular that Congress has had to limit its email:

    The CAO issued a “Dear Colleague” letter Tuesday morning informing offices that it had placed a limit on the number of e-mails sent via the “Write Your Representative” function of the House website. It said the limit would be imposed during peak e-mail traffic hours.

    “This measure has become temporarily necessary to ensure that Congressional websites are not completely disabled by the millions of e-mails flowing into the system,” the letter reads.

    In case you are wondering how we got into this mortgage mess, consider this 1999 NY Times article:
    In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

    Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

    That's right, the feds had an affirmative action lending program for people who cannot repay their mortgages.

    I agree with this comment:

    The burden of proof is on the folks advocating the bailout. And they haven't met it.

    Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, Pelosi, Obama, McCain - None of them have presented the facts in a way that makes it clear (a) which current symptoms are indicating the potential for a meltdown, (b) what a meltdown would look like exactly, (c) why the government's actions would make a meltdown less likely, and (d) why the unintended negative consequences of government action are unlikely to outweigh the positives.

    In addition, they're all talking in terms of certainties, rather than probabilities. Which makes me suspicious of everything they say.

    I want someone who advocates a bailout to articulate the potential downside for the American economy...because there's got to be one. All that risk doesn't just disappear as the result of the government becoming a major player in the financial sector. *Maybe* the risk to our economy is mitigated by these massive interventions, and maybe the risk gets transformed (e.g., into a risk of significant dollar devaluation), but I have a hard time believing that all that risk simply disappears.


    Monday, Sep 29, 2008
     
    Foreign policy experience
    It is funny to see people continue to complain about Sarah Palin's foreign experience, and claim that she is unfit because of the way she explained herself to Katie Couric.

    Obama's foreign policy experience argument is far more ridiculous. A few months ago, Obama bragged that "foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident" and then cited "having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa".

    If this election gets decided based on foreign policy experience, then it should be an easy win for McCain-Palin. To the limited extent that Obama and Biden have such experience, it is all bad.


    Sunday, Sep 28, 2008
     
    Curvature of Constitutional Space
    Tulane astrophysicist Frank J. Tipler writes:
    The Obama-Tribe 'Curvature of Constitutional Space' Paper is Crackpot Physics

    The Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe published a paper entitled "The Curvature of Constitutional Space," wherein he argued that the strict constructionist interpretations of the U.S. Constitution were obsolete, being based on a Newtonian world-view, and need to be replaced by a more modern relativistic and quantum mechanical world-view. ...

    Tribe's physics is not post-Newtonian but pre-Newtonian, the physics of Aristotle, in which the arbitrary will of the powerful is the dominant influence in reality. Tribe's politics is, like his physics, profoundly reactionary, replacing unalterable law with the ever changing personal preferences of judges.

    This article appears to be as funny as Tribe's original article. I am not sure how much Barack Obama had todo with the article, but it seems to be his only academic credit. He has no scholarly article published under his own name.

    Meanwhile, 61 Nobel prizewinners have endorsed Obama:

    The country urgently needs a visionary leader ... During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. ... We have watched Senator Obama's approach to these issues with admiration.
    There are no specifics. I guess they expect Obama to pump more money into their pet projects. Apparently Obama is doing very well among the elitist snobs, along with his core constituency of people who do not pay taxes. He is not doing so well among middle class white married people.

    One prizewinner, Phil Anderson, gave this explanation:

    There are too many obvious reasons to pick one. Let me name three. 1. Torture; 2. Tax cuts for the rich; 3. A [running mate, Sarah Palin] who believes in the Apocalypse and not in evolution.
    This is what happened when experts give opinions outside their expertise -- they say idiotic things. McCain has done more to abolish torture than anyone. And McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts.

    Friday, Sep 26, 2008
     
    Obama lies again about his Iraq War positions
    In tonight's Presidential debate Obama said:
    Now six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so because I said that not only did we not know how much it was going to cost, what our exit strategy might be, how it would affect our relationships around the world, and whether our intelligence was sound, but also because we hadn't finished the job in Afghanistan.

    We hadn't caught bin Laden. We hadn't put al Qaeda to rest, and as a consequence, I thought that it was going to be a distraction. Now Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment.

    And I wish I had been wrong for the sake of the country and they had been right, but that's not the case.

    Not exactly. Here is what he opposed in that speech six years ago:
    What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

    What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. ...

    I also commented on this speech here and here.

    As you can see, Obama did not oppose the war. He did not take a political risk, because everyone is against a dumb war. If the war turned out to be popular, he would just say that he expressed some reservations about it.

    He did not say that the Iraq War would be a distraction from the hunt for bin Laden, or anything like that. He did mention the uncertain costs of war, but he said nothing about whether our intelligence was sound or how the war might affect our relationships around the world.

    I wish McCain or someone would confront Obama with his deception. Obama falls back on his 2002 speech as his chief qualification to be president, just as John Kerry liked to cite his Vietnam record. It was a lame and stupid speech, and it should not qualify Obama for anything.

    George writes:

    That speech was very anti-war. Obama gave it at an anti-war rally. He said that Iraq was not an imminent threat. He attacked Karl Rove. He supported hunting bin Laden. He said that he is opposed to dumb wars. He supported UN inspections. He said that we ought not to follow a path to war blindly.
    And what part of that was politically risky? That is just a recitation of conventional wisdom that most people agreed with. Even Pres. Bush said that Iraq was not an imminent threat in his 2003 SOTU speech. In his 2004 Democrat Convention speech, Obama said that he did not know how he would have voted on the Iraq War.

    I think that a fair summary of Obama's 2002 speech would be has some reservations about the Iraq War because he disagrees with the ideological agendas of the Bush administration, because an invasion would be risky, and because Iraq might be contained by other means. He does not want to rush into war blindly. Okay, those are fair points, but Obama did not take the gutsy and prescient political stand that he now pretends that he did.

    I am not the only pointing out Obama's inconsistencies in his Iraq War stance. In January, Reuters reported:

    "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen," Clinton had said in accusing Obama of distorting his stance on the war.
    The Obama supporters claimed that this Bill Clinton comment was racist, but Clinton was exactly correct. Obama's story about his Iraq War opposition is a big fairy tale.

    Wednesday, Sep 24, 2008
     
    Supporting comprehensive sex education
    Movie critic Roger Ebert defends writing a creationist article, and writes:
    Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us.
    Huhh? Barack Obama certainly did support a bill for "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten children, and he defended his vote in a political debate.

    The error in the McCain ad was that it describe the bill as Obama's only legislative accomplishment. In fact the bill did not pass, and Obama had no legislative accomplishments.


    Tuesday, Sep 23, 2008
     
    From our idiotic VP candidate
    Here is the latest gaffe from Joe Biden:
    "Part of what being a leader does is to instill confidence is to demonstrate what he or she knows what they are talking about and to communicating to people ... this is how we can fix this," Biden said. "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"
    The 1929 crash was before FDR was even elected President. FDR was famous for his fireside chats on the radio, not TV. Biden is not instilling confidence in anyone.
     
    We got our brains from Neanderthals
    There is more and more evidence that Neanderthals were smart:
    Paleontologists digging in sediments at two large caves on a Gibraltar beach have found clear evidence that more than 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals ate mussels and other mollusks, fish and even marine mammals like seals and dolphins. And it was not that this bounty just fell into their lap: there are other signs that they actively hunted some of their seafood, just as they did with land animals.
    According to recent research, human African ancestors were separated from European Neanderthals for 500K years, but it takes 2M years of separation for mammals to split into species that cannot interbreed. They are sequencing the Neanderthal genome, and finding genes that were previously thought to be unique to human intelligence.

    Evolutionists have said for decades that Neanderthals were a separate species that did not interbreed with human ancestors. They refused to accept that Neanderthal big brains could have anythtng to do with intelligence, and pretended that it was just concidence that Neanderthals vaguely resembled modern Europeans.

    Maybe in the next couple of years they'll get more DNA from Neanderthal fossils and figure out whether we descended from Neanderthals.


    Monday, Sep 22, 2008
     
    Don't believe the financial doomsayers
    I don't believe that we are in such a financial crisis. I think that the proposed bailout is a terrible idea, and if it passes, it will be one of the biggest boondoggles in history.

    If we really had a serious problem deserving of such a bailout, then the bailout proponents would be able to give us some specifics of just exactly what the problem is, and exactly why the bailout is the best way of addressing that problem. They cannot do that. I hope that Congress refuses to give them a dime.


    Saturday, Sep 20, 2008
     
    What is the shape and color of a Yield sign?

    About 30 years ago, when nobody was paying attention, an army of govt agents changed all the yield signs in the USA from yellow to red and white. Everyone was hypnotized into not noticing. Don't believe me? Try asking your friends. They will adamantly claim that yield signs are yellow. Even when you show them a yield sign, they will claim that it must be a recent change.


    Wednesday, Sep 17, 2008
     
    Britannica on Einstein
    Encyclopædia Britannica Online writes:
    Other scientists, especially Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz, had pieces of the theory of special relativity, but Einstein was the first to assemble the whole theory together and to realize that it was a universal law of nature, not a curious figment of motion in the ether, as Poincaré and Lorentz had thought.
    That is crazy. Poincare had published arguments that the ether was unobservable, and Einstein had read them three years publishing his own ideas about special relativity.

    Britannica also says this about Poincare:

    This paper, and others of his at this time, came close to anticipating Albert Einstein’s discovery of the theory of special relativity. But Poincaré never took the decisive step of reformulating traditional concepts of space and time into space-time, which was Einstein’s most profound achievement. Attempts were made to obtain a Nobel Prize in physics for Poincaré, but his work was too theoretical and insufficiently experimental for some tastes.
    No, it was Einstein who resisted combining space and time into spacetime. He rejected it until a couple of years after Poincare and Minkowski published it. Einstein even ridiculed the concept, until he was eventually persuaded.

    I have edited the Conservapedia page on Einstein to describe his original work more accurately, and to list various false attributions.

    I wonder whether Einstein even deserves any credit for the photoelectric effect, for which he got the 1921 Nobel Prize. It was Max Planck who discovered that light was quantized in 1900, with the photon having an energy proportional to the frequency, and got the Nobel Prize for it in 1918. It was Philipp Lenard who did the experimental verification of Planck's ideas by measuring the photoelectric effect in 1902, and got the 1905 Nobel Prize. Einstein wrote a paper on the subject in 1905, and got a prize in 1921 after he became an international celebrity.

    Britannica says:

    In 1905, independently of Planck’s work, Einstein argued that under certain circumstances radiant energy itself seemed to consist of quanta (light quanta, later called photons), ... The discussions there stimulated Henri Poincaré to provide a mathematical proof that Planck’s radiation law necessarily required the introduction of quanta -- a proof that converted James (later Sir James) Jeans and others into supporters of the quantum theory.
    No, Einstein's work was not independent of Planck's. Einstein's 1905 paper cites Planck's 1900 paper in the second footnote. The term "quanta" is Planck's term. Planck said that the energy of a photon is equal to hf, where f is the frequency and h is now known as Planck's constant. Planck is considered one of the founders of quantum mechanics. I am not sure yet what was Einstein's original contribution, but it was certainly not the idea that light is quantized. My guess is that Einstein's defenders will say that he deserves the credit anyway, because he was the only one who truly understood what he was saying. It seems unlikely to me. Einstein got the prize because of his celebrity status more than anything else.

    Monday, Sep 15, 2008
     
    Searching for a theory of everything
    Physicist Michio Kaku writes:
    At the very least, physicists hope to find a new particle, called the Higgs boson, the last piece of the Standard Model of particles. But some physicists hope to do even better. The LHC might shed light on the "theory of everything," a single theory which can explain all fundamental forces of the universe, a theory which eluded Albert Einstein for the last 30 years of his life. This is the Holy Grail of physics. Einstein hoped it would allow us to "read the Mind of God."

    Today, the leading (and only) candidate for this fabled theory of everything is called "string theory," which is what I do for for a living.

    No, not really. The Standard Model is a single theory that explains all known particle physics. It is a theory of everything. String theory is no longer a candidate for any real world explanations.

    I expect the LHC to find the Higgs, but no other new particles.


    Friday, Sep 12, 2008
     
    Obama on the WTC attack
    Here is what Barack Obama published, shortly after 9-11-2001, in a Chicago newspaper:
    We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.
    No, he was wrong on every point. The suicide terrorists are not poor, or ignorant, or lacking in empathy. They are Mohammedans from the Middle East.

    We need a President who recognizes evil when he sees it.


    Thursday, Sep 11, 2008
     
    ABC News tries to sandbag Palin
    Charlie Gibson of ABC News tried to trick Sarah Palin:
    GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?
    No, that is not the Bush Doctrine. VP Dick Cheney said in 2003:
    The Bush Doctrine asserts that states supporting terrorists, or providing sanctuary for terrorists, will be deemed just as guilty of crimes as the terrorists themselves.
    There is a big difference.

    Charles Krauthammer says that there are four Bush doctrines.

    Gibson also misquoted Palin. Palin suggested praying that the Iraq War is a task from God, not that she was declaring it to be a task from God.

    George writes:

    You are ignoring the fact that Bush has been widely criticized for ordering a preemptive strike on Iraq. He has talked about actions against other hostile countries. That is what the news media attributes to Bush.
    We did not just act preemptively against Iraq. We acted to enforce post-Kuwait-War agreements and UN weapons inspections. Preemption is not a good description of what happened. We have not attacked Iran or N. Korea preemptively.

    Preemption is not a Bush doctrine. A White House National Security Strategy did say, in September 2002:

    The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction— and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
    That was just a restatement ofIt is longstanding policy. Even John Kerry said, in the 2004 Presidential Debate:
    KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

    No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

    Gibson's description of the Bush Doctrine was wrong.

    You can find more news media distortions of Palin here here.

    Here is another version of the Bush Doctrine:

    In an interview, Bush press secretary Dana Perino said that "the Bush doctrine is commonly used to describe key elements of the president's overall strategy for dealing with threats from terrorists." She laid out three elements:

    "The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor terrorists. . . . We will confront grave threats before they fully materialize and will fight the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them at home. . . . We will counter the hateful ideology of the terrorist by promoting the hopeful alternative of human freedom."

    Bush, she added, "is comfortable with the way I just described it."

     
    Mohammedan terrorism
    CAIR spokesman Saqib A. Zuberi writes:
    Last week, former presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani stated: "For four days in Denver, the Democrats were afraid to use the term 'Islamic terrorism.' I imagine they believe it is politically incorrect to say it. I think they believe they will insult someone. Please tell me who they are insulting if they say, 'Islamic terrorism.' They are insulting terrorists!"

    These statements refute the post-Sept. 11 efforts of all hard-working, loyal Muslim-Americans who have denounced terrorism from all groups and in all forms. The words actually encourage those terrorists who hijacked the Islamic faith.

    The rhetoric used against terrorism must be directed toward real terrorists and not toward the Islamic faith that their actions contradict. Associating the word "Islamic" with "terrorism" lumps in all Muslims. ...

    "Islamic terrorism" is a myth. Perpetuating the term is an affront to the principle of religious freedom upon which the United States was founded.

    No. Islam is opposed to American religious freedom. CAIR has repeatedly been shown to support terrorism, as has been shown here.

    Tuesday, Sep 09, 2008
     
    Only Republicans believe in the US Constitution
    Here is aRasmussen poll:
    Should the Supreme Court make decisions based on what's written in the Constitution and legal precedents or should it be guided mostly by a sense of fairness and justice?

    While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

    This is a striking difference. I think that the burden should really be on Barack Obama to explain his legal philosophy. He has said that he disapproves of Justices Roberts, Alito, and Thomas, but he hasn't really explained how his appointments would decide cases, if not according to the US Constitution.

    Saturday, Sep 06, 2008
     
    Susskind exaggerates String Theory
    In a Lenny Susskind interview broadcast on C-SPAN2 today, he said:
    Let me say waht the current state of play is. ... String Theory is a mathematical theory, it's a highly consistent -- nobody doubts its internal consistency, mathematical internal consistency -- having nothing to do with whether its a theory of the real world. It is a mathematically internally consistent theory that has quantum mechanics in it, and it has gravity. And in it we can prove that black holes do not lose information.
    No, this is just not right. No one has shown that String Theory is a mathematical internally consistent theory. It does not have quantum mechanics in it, and it does not have gravity in it.

    If someone disputes these points, just ask to see the research papers that prove the points. They do not exist.


    Friday, Sep 05, 2008
     
    Obama admits the surge succeeded
    Here is how Obama defended his opposition to the Iraq surge:
    Barack Obama made his long-anticipated debut on Fox News' "O'Reilly Factor" Thursday night, where he talked about the Iraq war and national security.

    "I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated," Obama told O'Reilly in an interview taped Thursday in York, PA. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

    No, it has succeeded as John McCain anticipated. More than anything else, the Iraq surge is the defining issue of this presidential campaign. McCain bet his career on the surge, and did everything he could to support it. Most political observers believed that it would end his presidential chances, because they did not believe it would work. Obama opposed the surge at every chance. Obama voted in favor of Iraq War funding until the surge, at which point he opposed the war and the funding for the surge.

    Obama's admission is stunning. He refused to admit that he was wrong about the surge, showing a stubbornness that exceeds Pres. Bush's. But he plainly was wrong, and continues to be wrong.


    Thursday, Sep 04, 2008
     
    Want change, Democrats? Stop nominating lawyers
    Victor Davis Hanson writes:
    The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. ...

    In fact, every Democratic nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections — except Gore, who dropped out of law school to run for Congress — has been a lawyer.

    The problem is that lawyers usually do not run companies, defend the country, lead people, build things, grow food or create capital.

    He's right. Lawyers are trained to give legal advice. A lawyer might be an excellent trusted advisor, but is rarely put in any position of real responsibility.

    The Democrats have nominated two clueless elitists with no real world experience. Barrack Obama has never done anything of consequence. Joe Biden has cast some votes on some important issues, but he has been wrong most of the time. They do not even seem to have any opinions about reforming our legal system, or be able to tell us what kind of judges they will appoint. No one at the Democrat Convention even mentioned judges. And when you get off the subject of law, they know even less.


    Tuesday, Sep 02, 2008
     
    Obama never made a tough decision
    From the Aug. 16 TV interview:
    Rick Warren: What's the most significant -- let me ask it this way. What's the most gut-wrenching decision you ever had to make and how did you process that to come to that decision?
    Barrack Obama: Well, you know, I think the opposition to the war in Iraq was as tough a decision as I've had to make. Not only because there were political consequences, but also because Saddam Hussein was a real bad person, and there was no doubt that he meant America ill. But I was firmly convinced at the time that we did not have strong evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and there were a lot of questions that, as I spoke to experts, kept on coming up. Do we know how the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds are going to get along in a post-Saddam situation? What's our assessment as to how this will affect the battle against terrorists like al Qaeda? Have we finished the job in Afghanistan?
    So I agonized over that. And I think that questions of war and peace generally are so profound. . . .
    This is pathetic and dishonest. It is pathetic because Obama was just an Illinois politician who did not have to vote on whether to goto war or not. And he did not take a firm stand. He cowardly recited some of the arguments for and against the war, without taking a side.

    Obama is dishonest because he never doubted the WND evidence, or gave any of those other arguments against the Iraq War. If you don't believe it, read his famous Oct. 2002 speech on the subject. He said:

    I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

    But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. ...

    The consequences of war are dire, ...

    These are mostly statements that Pres. Bush would have agreed with. Bush explicitly said that Saddam was not an imminent threat, but he defied UN resolutions and did those other things.

    We had a vigorous war debate back in 2002. The way some people tell the story today, you would get the impression that it was a debate between those who believed the WMD evidence and those who did not, with the believers winning because Pres. Bush lied about the evidence.

    But that was not the debate. Yes, the intelligence was imperfect, but better intelligence would not have changed many votes. Everyone agreed that Iraq was defying UN resolutions and not complying with weapons inspections. The main issue was whether to give Iraq an ultimatum, or to give Iraq more time to comply.

    Congress had to actually vote on whether or not to declare war. Obama was not in Congress and just mouthed some generalities that he could defend whether the war turned out well or not. And now he lies about it.

     
    Addiction Doesn’t Discriminate? Wrong
    Psychiatrist Sally Patel writes in the NY Times:
    We’ve heard it before. “Drug abuse is an equal opportunity destroyer.” “Drug addiction is a bipartisan illness.” “Addiction does not discriminate; it doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, famous or unknown, a man or woman, or even a child.”

    The phrase “addiction doesn’t care” is not meant to remind us that addiction casts a long shadow — everyone knows that. Rather, it is supposed to suggest that any individual, no matter who, is vulnerable to the ravages of drugs and alcohol.

    The same rhetoric has been applied to other problems, including child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism — even suicide. Don’t stigmatize the afflicted, it cautions; you could be next. Be kind, don’t judge.

    The democratization of addiction may be an appealing message, but it does not reflect reality. Teenagers with drug problems are not like those who never develop them. Adults whose problems persist for decades manifest different traits from those who get clean.

    So while anyone can theoretically become an addict, it is more likely the fate of some, among them women sexually abused as children; truant and aggressive young men; children of addicts; people with diagnosed depression and bipolar illness; and groups including American Indians and poor people.

    The article also debunks the idea that addicts will always be addicts. It is common to say that alcoholics are still alcoholics, even if they have not consumed alcohol in years.

    Monday, Sep 01, 2008
     
    Vaccine policy still flawed
    There have been a lot of attacks on vaccine skeptics in the news because of a trivial measles outbreak.

    It is still the case that national vaccine policy is determined by drug industry lobbyists. There are no independent watchdogs on the FDA or CDC expert panels. Their meetings are not open to the public. They do not do any risk-benefit or cost-benefit analyses. They promote vaccine mandates instead of explaining the advantages of vaccination. They have a history of foolish and irresponsible vaccine recommendations, including several that have had to be resinded in just the last ten years.

    I think that we'd be better off if more people refused the vaccines until we have a more open and scientific procedures for setting vaccine policy.

    Here is some new research on the flu vaccine:

    The influenza vaccine, which has been strongly recommended for people over 65 for more than four decades, is losing its reputation as an effective way to ward off the virus in the elderly.

    A growing number of immunologists and epidemiologists say the vaccine probably does not work very well for people over 70, the group that accounts for three-fourths of all flu deaths.

    The latest blow was a study in The Lancet last month that called into question much of the statistical evidence for the vaccine’s effectiveness. ...

    [Dr. Kristin Nichol, chief of medicine at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis.] “I really feel, and I feel very strongly about this, that the public health message should be that vaccines are effective,” she continued. “I don’t think that science is necessarily best hashed out in the media.” ...

    There has been only one large study that compared the flu vaccine with a placebo for two random groups of older people in which neither the patients nor the scientists knew which group was receiving which injection. It came to a different conclusion from the observational studies. ...

    But the influenza vaccine was never put through more placebo-controlled trials, which are considered the gold standard in medical evidence. “I think the evidence base we have leaned on is not valid,” said Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist and visiting professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington who was not connected with the Lancet study. ...

    Despite these findings, Dr. Shay said the C.D.C. had no plans to change its vaccine recommendations, ...

    In other words, the scientific studies show that the flu vaccine is ineffective in the elderly, but the vaccine promoters want to tell the public that the vaccines are effective anyway.

    Sunday, Aug 31, 2008
     
    Palin is not a creationist
    The evolutionists are already attacking Sarah Palin as a creationist. When asked about teaching alternatives to evolution, she said:
    Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information.

    Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.

    And, you know, I say this, too, as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject -- creationism and evolution.

    It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.

    This does not make her a creationist. I am not a creationist, but she is right. Don't be afraid of information. Real scientists are not afraid of mentioning alternate theories.

    She later clarified that she is not advocating teaching creationism in science classes.


    Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
     
    Artificial brains in the multiverse
    Peter Woit writes:
    A burning question in theoretical physics these days is that of whether Boltzmann Brains dominate the string theory anthropic landscape.
    If this does not make any sense to you, don't worry. It doesn't make any sense to anyone. It is just another idiotic Physics fad that has no bearing on reality.

    Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
     
    Trial of Galileo back in the news
    The WSJ has resurrect the trial of Galileo for a page 1 story:
    Nearly 400 years after the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for insisting the Earth revolves around the sun, an anonymous donor to the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences has offered to foot the bill for a statue of the Italian astronomer. ...

    Today, the church insists it has no problem at all with modern science, and even science fiction. In May, for example, the Vatican's chief astronomer declared that Christian theology can accommodate the possible existence of extraterrestrials. The Bible, he said, "is not a science book."

    Not just today, but the church has encouraged and accepted science for 100s of years. It was the Protestant Reformation, not the Catholic Church, that advocated a more literal reading of the Bible.

    Here is the WSJ account of the trial:

    Galileo and the church initially got on well. Celebrated across Europe for his scientific writings, his development of an early telescope and other achievements, Galileo had many friends in the church, which, when not pursuing heretics, played a big role in nurturing intellectual talent.

    Even Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who would later, as Pope Urban VIII, condemn him, once dedicated a poem to Galileo.

    The Inquisition, a network of ecclesiastical tribunals charged with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy, took issue with some of Galileo's early writings but let him off with a slap on the wrist. But things got more serious following his publication in 1632 of "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems."

    The text defended the then novel notion of a sun-centered universe -- known as heliocentrism -- that had been developed by Poland's Nicolaus Copernicus. This view, according to Vatican doctrine at the time, was "false and altogether contrary to scripture." Galileo's book presented what he considered incontrovertible proof that Copernicus, not the church, was correct.

    The Church did not really say that the Copernicus theory was false. It said that nine sentences in Copernicus's book had to be correct in order to retain its Church approval.

    The Church's position was that heliocentrism might be a valid computational device, but it is not necessarily more correct than an Earth-based frame of reference. That view did not become accepted until the 20th century, when relativity showed that the laws of gravity can be applied in any coordinate system.

    Then the WSJ gets to the meat of the matter:

    Galileo became a global icon, the Che Guevara of secular science. ... "More than Darwin or any other figure, he represents the idea that there is a conflict between science and the church," says Monsignor Sánchez.
    Che Guevara was a commie and a killer.

    Yes, Galileo will represent that idea for the foreseeable future. His story is just not the conflict that most people think it is.


    Tuesday, Aug 26, 2008
     
    New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth
    Research news:
    ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2008) — Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens). The research team has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.

    Published in the Journal of Human Evolution, their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years.

    Neanderthal had big brains, as large as those of rival humans. Contrary to writings of evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould, there is solid evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence.

    I think that there has been a prejudice against Neanderthals because they were European. Politically correct anthropologists and evolutionists were all to eager to say that they were outsmarted by Africans.


    Monday, Aug 25, 2008
     
    Biden's record is bad on copyrights and encryption
    C-Net reports on how Sen. Biden has made a lot of enemies in the tech community:
    He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. ... A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." ...

    Biden's bill -- and the threat of encryption being outlawed -- is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who's now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden's legislation "that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups."

    Biden has also been a big supporter of intrusive federal feminist laws like VAWA. Until today, his web site said:
    What I'm most proud of in my entire career is the Violence Against Women Act. It showed we can change people's lives, but the change is always one person at a time. There are many more laws and attitudes that need changing so women are treated with equal opportunities at work, in the classroom, and in our health care system.
    Part of VAWA was found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. The rest of it has caused much more harm than good.

    Another site explains:

    Obama picks Hollywood sock-puppet for running mate ...

    He ranks toward the bottom of CNET's Technology Voters' Guide, and has come up with some of the worst anti-privacy legislation.

     
    Evolution consensus
    The NY Times reports, in a story on teaching evolution in Florida:
    Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.
    The NY Times writes on this subject a lot, and it nearly always has some sort of statement that there is a scientific consensus in favor of evolution. Eg, see here. But usually the consensus view is described in terms of meaningless generalities with no real scientific content.

    This is the first time, that I have noticed, that the claimed consensus says that all life on Earth descended from a single common ancestor. It also says that this has been the consensus for a "long" time.

    I deny that there is any such scientific consensus. If it were, then there would be some scientific paper establishing the fact, and maybe some Nobel Prize or something equivalent for whoever proved it. There is not. The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) theory is just a hypothesis that some scientists believe and some don't. It might be true, but usually even hard-core evolutionists do not make such a strong statement. Eg, the evolutionist site National Center for Science Education has an essay that makes this weaker claim:

    Briefly, the theory of organic evolution holds that all organisms are related by common ancestry to one or a very few original cells.
    I am all in favor of teaching scientific consensus views, but there should be some documentation to show that the view is really a consensus.

    Evolutionists are always complaining about how evolution is taught in the schools, but they do not explain just what the scientific consensus is, and what the support is for that consensus.


    Friday, Aug 22, 2008
     
    String Theory is still a failure
    Peter Woit reports on the latest String Theory conference, and finds that the theory still fails to explain any aspect of Physics. The new Swiss LHC particle accelerator is unlikely to produce any evidence for string theory. The leaders in the field have moved on to goofy side topics, while still maintaining a religious belief that String Theory is the one true path to salvation.

    Jonathan writes:

    I've read that upcoming tests with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may conceivably provide some tentative evidence in favor of String Theory (or at least one variant thereof), but that "negative" results won't necessarily disprove ST. Also, one source indicates that even at the high energies achieved, the energies needed to truly vet ST are way way beyond what they're doing at the LHC, while another source claims that the LHC will in fact be energetic enough to give ST a fair shake. I've also read some stuff about a lawsuit to shut down the LHC because some folks think it will create a black hole or something similar which could end all life as we know it; a scientist was quoted as saying that the folks behind the lawsuit weren't crackpots, but distinguished physicists. Do you have a definitive take on whether we'll still be alive when they start taking data, and, if the LHC doesn't obliterate us, what sort of robust test it will be for ST?
    No, there is no known experiment at any energy level that will give any evidence for or against ST. ST has no known relationship to the real world.

    The LHC is not going to end the world. That lawsuit was based on some silly papers by physicists who got a little too excited by the LHC.


    Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
     
    Scientists still denying that race exists
    NewScientist reports:
    When they weren't competing to map the human genome, it often seemed like James Watson and Craig Venter were vying for the title of world's most candid scientist. Now their genomes are doing battle, and the loser seems to be the biological concept of race. ...

    Watson's genome hosts a mutation in a drug-metabolising gene rarely found in Caucasians. "It shows that James Watson has some Korean blood in him, or some Asian blood anyway," says Howard McLeod, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. "He wouldn't get good pain relief from codeine." ...

    Venter used the analysis to make a simple point:

    "Race-based medicine doesn't have any real basis in science," he told New Scientist. "You can look at somebody's skin colour, but it doesn't necessarily tell you much about the rest of their genome or how they'll respond to drugs or which drugs they'll respond to."

    Huhh? It sure appears to me that race is telling you something in this example. Apparently the big majority of caucasians get good pain relief from codeine, and Koreans do not.

    This argument is like saying that you cannot look at a sprinter's race and tell how good he is, because in the 100m Olympics, a Japanese runner was 16th and a white guy was 17th. (All the good ones were of West African black descent.)


    Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
     
    HPV vaccine may not be worthwhile
    The NY Times reports:
    Two vaccines against cervical cancer are being widely used without sufficient evidence about whether they are worth their high cost or even whether they will effectively stop women from getting the disease, two articles in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine conclude.

    Both vaccines target the human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted virus that usually causes no symptoms and is cleared by the immune system, but which can in very rare cases become chronic and cause cervical cancer.

    Another article said:
    Dr. Abramson said he thought his C.D.C. advisory committee did the right thing in recommending Gardasil. ... Still, he said he was shocked to hear of proposals to mandate the vaccine for students. “Are you really going to say a girl can’t start school because she hasn’t had this vaccine?” he said. ...

    Said Dr. Raffle, the British cervical cancer specialist: “Oh, dear. If we give it to boys, then all pretense of scientific worth and cost analysis goes out the window.”

    The science behind these new vaccines is really weak, and there is no justification for school mandates. The right-wing skeptics were right about this vaccine.
     
    The audacity of resume-padding
    The Jerusalem Post reports:
    It seems that Obama recognizes that while his résumé titles are impressive, his actual accomplishments are weak. ...

    A few examples? Take Obama's first general election ad. We are told that Obama "passed laws" that "extended healthcare for wounded troops who'd been neglected," with a citation at the bottom to only one Senate bill: The 2008 Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the Senate by a 91-3 vote. Six Senators did not vote-including Obama. Nor is there evidence that he contributed to its passage in any material way. So, his claim to have "passed laws" amounts to citing a bill that was largely unopposed, that he didn't vote for, and whose passage he didn't impact. Even his hometown Chicago Tribune caught this false claim. It's classic résumé-padding--falsely taking credit for the work of others.

    Obama's record of accomplishment is thin not because of lack of opportunity, but in spite of it. For twenty years, Obama has walked the floors of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, but has left no footprints other than those from his runs for whatever office came next.

    It's been said that some people want to be President so they can do something; and some want to be President so they can be something. Obama has accomplished nothing noteworthy despite the golden opportunities and positions he's had; why should we believe he'd be a different man in the White House?

    No company would hire anyone with Obama's empty track record, pattern of underachievement and padded résumé to be CEO. Is America really ready to hire him as President?

    I don't know why I have to look to some foreign newspaper to get the straight dope on Barack Obama. The guy is all talk and no action. The emperor has no clothes.

    Tuesday, Aug 19, 2008
     
    Does the ether exist?
    To many Albert Einstein fans, his greatest accomplishment was banishing the ether from Physics. But what was it, and is it really gone?

    In the 1800s, physicists discovered that light was a wave, and that it obeyed Maxwell's equations just like radio waves. Waves were understood to be disturbances in some medium, and the ether, or luminiferous aether, was defined to be whatever medium transmitted light and radio waves. The emptiness of outer space included the ether, whatever it was.

    Then theorists discovered that while Maxwell's equations had translational and rotational symmetry, it did not have a symmetry for transforming to a constant velocity frame of reference. This meant that, if the equations were correct, there must be some way to determine whether an object is truly at rest. This was not too surprising, as it was thought that the Sun and the stars were all at rest, so Maxwell's equations must be formulated for the frame of reference of the fixed stars. The ether was also at rest with respect to the fixed stars.

    But the Earth is not at rest in that frame, and so light experiments should be able to detect the motion of the Earth. The Michelson-Morley experiment was supposed to detect the motion, and failed. Separately, it was discovered that Maxwell's equations really did have a symmetry for a change of velocity frame, using what is now known as a Lorentz transformation.

    Lorentz and Poincare put all this together, and discovered Special Relativity to explain it. Poincare said that the ether was unobservable, and that its existence was a philosophical question. He occasionally called it a convenient hypothesis, but predicted that it would ultimately be regarded as useless.

    In 1905, Einstein published an alternate explanation of Poincare's theory. The main difference is that he said that the ether was "superfluous", and he explained how to apply Lorentz transformations without explicit reference to the ether. Years later, Einstein reversed himself a couple of times over whether the ether was necessary to understand gravity.

    In the 1940s and 1950s, a quantum theory of light (QED) was developed to supersede Maxwell's equation. In it, light does not travel in empty space, but in a quantum mechanical vacuum state that has various electromagnetic properties. The theory has been expanded to include strong and weak forces, and a nontrivial vacuum state is an essential part of the theory.

    In 1998, cosmologists discovered that dark energy is everywhere and is accelerating the expansion of the universe. It may or may not be related to the quantum vacuum state, and it may or may not be gravitational in origin. It is not understood. Nobody calls it the ether, but it is really just another ether theory.

    So is there an ether or not? It is safe to say that there is no ether that is tied to the frame of the fixed stars, as was thought in the 1800s, as there aren't even any fixed stars. But it is also safe to say that empty space is not really empty, and it has quantum properties that are essential to the transmission of light. Whether you want to call it the ether or not is still a metaphysical question, just as Poincare said over 100 years ago.

    For sources on the history of special relativity, see the Wikipedia article on Relativity priority dispute.

    So why is Einstein given so much credit for an unoriginal idea that may not even be true? I am not sure, but there are a lot of Einstein worshippers who desperately give him credit for anything they can. Also, Poincare was a mathematician, and not everyone understands that his theory of special relativity was mathematically equivalent to the one that Einstein published later. Perhaps also it is misguided attempt to support the silly Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle that the essence of science is knocking Man off his pedestal.

     
    Law school students drink the Kool-Aid
    Ever wonder how lawyers get such a warped view of life? It is because they drink the Kool-Aid in law school.
    6) Drink the Kool-Aid. Joining a profession is a little like learning a new language, and a lot like joining a cult. (Or "new religious movement," for the scholars.) Don't resist it. There's a wonderfully awful book called Anarchy and Elegance, about a year spent by a journalist as a Yale 1L. He writes quite accurately about how law school changes your mindset, but by standing outside the process and resisting it almost entirely, he fails to learn half of what he could and to understand most of the other half.
     
    The Phelps conspiracy
    Not everyone believes Michael Phelps won all those gold medals fair and square. See the conspiracy theory.

    Update: I thought that this was a fringe theory, but now a NY Times article has joined in the conspiracy theorizing.


    Monday, Aug 18, 2008
     
    Be careful recording a cop in Massachusetts
    Here is an evil law:
    On October 26, 1998, Michael Hyde was pulled over by Abington, Massachusetts police for an excessively loud exhaust system and unlit license plate on his white Porsche. The stop should have ended in a fix-it ticket at worst, but escalated when Hyde accused the cop of pulling him over for his hippie hair. That was just the beginning: Apparently, Hyde was secretly recording the show and filed a complaint over the incident...which is unfortunate, since secretly recording a traffic stop is illegal in Massachusetts. The cops pressed charges and Hyde was sent up the river. His conviction was confirmed by the Massachusetts State Supreme Court on appeal.
    I do not believe that this has happened in any other state. Usually you have a right to record confrontations with govt agents.

    Friday, Aug 15, 2008
     
    Fully informed juror
    A federal judge presiding over a cocaine trial did not like jurors thinking for themselves:
    The jury sent a note to the trial judge with the following query: Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”
    The judge then proceeded to smoke out whoever was trying to follow the Constitution. The juror, Thomas R. Eddlem, was dismissed as a rogue juror after being asked this question:
    Would you be able to set aside your own reading of the Constitution, the judge’s past instructions, and judge the facts based solely upon the judge’s explanation of the law?
    I think that the next time that federal prosecutor tries a case, he will check the blogs of the prospective jurors.

    Wednesday, Aug 13, 2008
     
    Israel proposes West Bank deal
    The UK BBC reports:
    Israel has offered a peace deal to the Palestinians which would annex 7.3% of the West Bank and keep the largest settlements, Israeli reports say.

    In return the Palestinians would be given land equivalent to 5.4% of the West Bank in the Negev desert, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

    Palestinian officials confirmed that such a plan had been put forward, but called it totally unacceptable.

    Why is this news? Israel has been trying to give the West Bank to the Palestinian arabs ever since Israel was created in 1948. The arabs have always refused, and made absurd counter-demands.

    I just hope that the West Bank arabs never get a better deal than they have been offered in the past, because I would not want them to gain by terrorism.

     
    Anti-gun judge attacks court
    The US Constitution says, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed." The US Supreme Court says, in DC v Heller, than DC citizens have a constitutional right to own guns. So Judge Richard Posner argues that this proves that the Supreme Court rulings are just politcal:
    The true springs of the Heller decision must be sought elsewhere than in the majority's declared commitment to originalism. ... I cannot discern any principles in the pattern of the Supreme Court's constitutional interpretations.
    Posner is the most widely cited legal scholar alive, but he not a conservative and not one to follow the actual text of the law.

    Monday, Aug 11, 2008
     
    California approves homeschooling after all
    The California courts have succumbed to public pressure, as reported here:
    SAN JOSE, Calif. — Home-schoolers across California won't need to rush back to class themselves to continue educating their children.

    In a highly unusual move, a state appeals court on Friday reversed its earlier decision and declared that home-school parents don't need teaching credentials.

    The decision by the Los Angeles-based second district court of appeals had home-schooling advocates rejoicing in California — home of more than 160,000 home-schooled students — and across the nation.

    Here is what the actual opinion says:
    As the trial court’s ruling was based in part on its understanding that parents’ home schooling in this case was largely in compliance with the law, we first consider whether home schooling is permitted under California statutes. We conclude that it is. ...

    We close with an observation that the fact that home schooling is permitted in California as the result of implicit legislative recognition rather than explicit legislative action has resulted in a near absence of objective criteria and oversight for home schooling. ...

    A few states have comprehensive regulations ... In contrast, California impliedly allows parents to home school as a private school, but has provided no enforcement mechanism. As long as the local school district verifies that a private school affidavit has been filed, there is no provision for further oversight of a home school.

    The reasoning is a little strange, but the result is good. The fact is that it is not just the homeschoolers who are unregulated. The regular private schools are also unregulated. They have to keep an attendance log and check out employees, but there are no curriculum or testing requirements.

    The only thing that seems odd about the California law is that private tutors have to be certified teachers. But my guess is that the ones using private tutors are rich Hollywood child stars and people like that, and they probably ought to be using certified teachers. Their parents and business managers are apt to neglect their educations otherwise.

    Many homeschoolers have amazingly good results. Here is an example of a homeschooled kid who should probably goto regular school.


    Sunday, Aug 10, 2008
     
    Einstein's mistakes
    A new book, titled Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, says that Einstein published seven different derivations of E = m c2, and all of them have mistakes. I guess it is supposed to prove that even geniuses can make errors.

    Robert A. Herrmann explains the early history of this equation, and why it is more correct to credit Poincare, Planck, and others.

    Sometimes Einstein's defenders say that he should get all the credit for relativity theory because he was the only one who truly understood it. They try to prove that by pointing to minor errors in the papers of others. It is worth noting that Einstein's papers also had errors and deficiencies.

    Wikipedia has more info on Relativity priority dispute.

    Olivier Darrigol wrote on The Genesis of the theory of relativity pdf, and explains that what Einstein did on mass-energy is not much different from what Poincare published in 1900. He concludes:

    Thus, Einstein was neither the first nor the last contributor to relativity theory. He learned much by reading the best authors of his time, and he partly duplicated results already obtained by Lorentz and Poincare.
    He ends up giving Einstein most of th credit for special relativity, but if you read the article for who did what, it turns out that Einstein's original contributions were very small. The main argument in favor of Einstein is that he "eliminated the ether" and that Poincare had not "fully understood the physical implications of these [Lorentz] transformations. It all was Einstein's unique feat."

    But these claims are ludicrous. Darrigol quotes Poincare as publishing in 1889:

    It matters little whether the ether really exists: that is the affair of the metaphysicians. ..., whereas, no doubt, some day the ether will be thrown aside as useless.
    There is no significant difference between this and Einstein's 1905 statement that the ether was superfluous. Einstein returned to the ether in 1920. To this day, there is no general agreement as to whether the ether exists. Quantum theory teaches that there is no such thing as a vacuum that is truly empty, and cosmologists say that there is some ether-like medium called dark energy.

    One big difference between Poincare and Einstein was that Poincare was a mathematician. If a mathematician says a precise and true mathematical statement like 2+2=4, then there is no need to give a physical argument in favor of its truth. On the other hand, physicists often do not understand or believe mathematical proofs, and prefer physical arguments.

    Another difference was that Einstein was a dishonest egomaniac who concealed his sources and aggressively argued for credit.


    Friday, Aug 08, 2008
     
    Mindreading leftists
    The leftist-evolutionists are frequently complaining that right-wingers do not really believe what they say. It is funny how they claim mindreading abilities. Here is a recent example:
    Are right wing legislators acting as agents for the religious right or are they acting of their own will?

    I think some of the leaders behind these antiscience arguments really do believe these things. I think the vast majority are really making a political calculation, ...

    I can't think of any other explanation why they would so thoroughly politicize every aspect of sex and reproduction. I think they want to have a society where it's really God's will whatever happens.

    The speaker is a big advocate of cloning research, and was pushing a book on the subject. It is really not that hard to understand why people would be against human cloning. She is the one who is antiscience.

    Saturday, Aug 02, 2008
     
    Analogizing judging to baseball umpiring
    The year before Chief Justice John Roberts testified before the US Senate with an analogy between judges and baseball umpires, Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book on the Supreme Court that said this in the preface:
    We need judges for the same reason that baseball needs umpires. Someone has to call the balls and strikes and resolve close plays. But umpires are never allowed to change the rules of the game.
    Ilya Somin found an earlier reference to the analogy.

    I am sure that many people have thought of the analogy for many years.


    Monday, Jul 28, 2008
     
    Nutty string theory ideas
    Czech string theorist Lubos Motl has attacked me  as a creationist, geocentrist, and string theorist!

    No, I am none of those things. I sometimes criticize evolutionsts, but never out of support for creationism. He calls me a geocentrist because of my support for relativity theory. I criticize string theory as a big flop. It has never successfully explained anything in the real world, and it never will. It has been recognized as a failure for at least ten years.

    Here is the kind of kookiness we get from string theory, from a WSJ book review:

    And what was the outcome of the black-hole war? A Susskind victory, it would appear. It seems that information is not lost, even when black holes evaporate. In 1997, a young theorist named Juan Maldacena showed how, in certain cases, questions in quantum gravity can be "translated" into equivalent questions in a different-looking theory, one that doesn't involve gravity at all -- a theory, moreover, in which it is perfectly clear that information is never lost. So we don't know exactly how information escapes when a black hole evaporates. But we can start with a black hole, translate it into the new theory (where we do know how to keep track of information), let the black hole "evaporate" and translate it back. A bit indirect, but the logic seems solid.
    No, the logic is not solid. Info appears to be lost in the real world all the time. Whether or not itis really lost is impossible to say. Whether info can escape a black hole is pure speculation, and there is no scientific experiment that can resolve the matter one way or the other. The Maldacena transformation has nothing to do with the question. Only string theorists who are totally disconnected from reality would say such unscientific nonsense.

    I am criticizing physicists here, but that doesn't mean that I subscribe to some religious alternative to Physics. There is a lot of good Physics. But theoretical physics has been taken over by wacky string theorists who cannot face the subject's failure. Just look at Lubos Motl's blog to see what a lunatic he is. See, for example, his latest post on Susskind's new book, where he blames a left-wing conspiracy for getting fired at Harvard. Don't bother leaving a critical comment, because he deletes those.

     
    Obama is not the American dream
    American History prof Albert Camarillo writes:
    Obama's rise epitomizes the best of the American Dream ...

    Consider the symbolic power of Obama's candidacy, a person who, as a black man, represents America's troubled racial past. But he also came of age in the post-civil rights era, the product of a Kenyan immigrant father and white mother from Kansas. In Obama, America's fabled immigrant saga meets its racialized past, and its increasingly multiracial present and future.

    No, Obama does is not a black man who represents America's troubled racial past. He is half-Kenyan, and has no relation to the descendants of West African slaves. He never suffered any racial discrimination. His only connection to America's troubled racial past is that he was a huge beneficiary of affirmative action policies that were designed for real black Americans.

    It is also false to say that Obama had an immigrant father. An immigrant is someone who moves to the USA to live here permanently. Obama's father was a Kenyan who impregnated a white woman while in Hawaii on a student visa. He soon moved back to Kenya to rejoin his African wife. Even his mother didn't stay here, and moved to Indonesia.

    I am not trying to blame Obama for his wacky parents, but I am afraid that a lot of people will be fooled into voting for him under a misguided belief that his background symbolizes the "best of the American Dream" or that he is "more American than Apple pie". He is the most anti-American candidate we've had in a long time.


    Saturday, Jul 26, 2008
     
    Bogus study claims girls do math as well as boys
    The NY Times reports:
    Although boys in high school performed better than girls in math 20 years ago, the researchers found, that is no longer the case. ...

    The findings, reported in the July 25 issue of Science magazine, are based on math scores from seven million students in 10 states, tested in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

    The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.

    No, the study did not find that girls did as well in every category. Girls are less than 5% of the most gifted students. The study found that the NCLB tests do not even have any complex math problems. The study said:
    For most states and most grade levels, none of the items were at levels 3 or 4. Therefore, it was impossible to determine whether there was a gender difference in performance at levels 3 and 4.
    It says that it also looked at NAEP data, but those tests did not have any level 4 (hardest) problems either.

    Boys do better on the Math SAT, and the study tries to explain that by saying that a lot more girls take the test. (The printed study does not mention the SAT, but the supporting online material says that the SAT is taken by 700k boys and 800k girls.) But if you look at the SAT data, you will notice that a lot more boys than girls get high scores.

    The study concludes:

    Conclusion. Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis (19). There is evidence of slightly greater male variability in scores, although the causes remain unexplained.
    The second sentence contradicts the first. If there is greater male variability, then that is a gender difference.

    The Gender Similarities Hypothesis is the idea put forward by the study's lead author, Janet Shibley Hyde, that John Gray’s 1992 book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is all wrong, and that males and females are similar on most psychological variables.


    Friday, Jul 25, 2008
     
    Obama's war position makes no sense
    A Wash. Post editorial attacks Obama:
    Yet Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.
    Obama acts like he can get both the pro-war vote and the anti-war vote by favoring the Afghan War and opposing the Iraq War. The newspaper is supporting Obama for President, so it is delicately describing his position as "eccentric". Substitute "idiotic".

    Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
     
    Fox News is fair and balanced
    Jonathan sends this academic study of news media bias, but the study actually confirms what I said about the NY Times being more partisan than Fox News. He writes:
    The study says, in relevant regard, only that Brit Hume's show is less partisan than the New York Times (and various other media). The study did not conclude, or even seek to prove, that Fox News shows "across the board" are less radically partisan than the NYT.

    My first point here is that if you believe Brit's show is a fair representative of Fox News as a whole, that belief is (a) wrong, and (b) unfair extrapolation from too small a data set. We have to consider all of the other Fox News shows. In that regard, sure, you can always point to Alan Colmes and say "There's a liberal on Fox News" -- but that's another error of mistaking one part for being representative of the whole. Brit and Alan are exceptions. Exceptions sometimes prove rules.

    Ever watch the late late late show on Fox called Redeye, with Greg Gutfeld? Fabulous show. I'm a big fan. But it's on at 2 a.m., so not a lot of folks will see it, and it would therefore be likewise unfair to claim that Redeye is somehow representative of FNC. (Same point, I'm just making it with a more interesting show!)

    Fox has always sought the benefits of being considered "fair and balanced", and it does so in part by simply making the claim as if it were some sort of trademark: "We're fair and balanced" -- a claim which IMHO should go without saying for a news organization (and, if it is an actual trademark, would seem to some extent to be vulnerable to the "merely descriptive" legal attack which, as you know, militates against certain varieties of marks -- BTW, if you haven't noticed, not long ago MSNBC also began using the words "fair and balanced" in its on-air spots, and I for one haven't heard of Fox suing them on any sort of Lanham Act grounds). It seems to me that Fox also tries to claim, implicitly if not explicitly, that it's "fair and balanced" via an ability to point to, e.g.: (1) a Liberal host like Alan Colmes; (2) an "Anything Goes" show like Redeye, and (3) the fact that folks such as O'Reilly and Hannity do feature liberal-leaning guests from time to time on their shows. But Colmes is merely a straw-man, a Token Liberal; Redeye is Fox's Token Free-For-All; and the guests who do fare well with the likes of Hannity and O'Reilly are generally only those who espouse conservative views -- guests on those shows get shouted at bigtime when they espouse some liberal views. Colmes invariably gets drowned out by Hannity, Redeye invariably gets drowned out by other FNC shows which air at much more viewable times-of-day, and liberal-leaning guests on Hannity and O'Reilly shows get drowned out by a curious combination of out-shouting and studio control room tactics. These kinds of token suggestions of objectivity don't prove Fox is "fair and balanced". They only prove that Fox is "not 100% entirely lopsided if you want to get technical about it."

    Fox isn't trying to be objective, primarily, which is what news organizations are supposed to do. Their primary objectives seem more to make money (as all such programs must) and forcefeed the viewers with Rupert Murdoch's political agenda, while simultaneously securing a secondary objective of getting folks to believe they field objective news programs -- only so that they are able to reap the tangible legal benefits which accrue to news organizations generally (think of Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case). Fox News runs on an overwhelmingly conservative agenda, but always adds: "Don't forget, we're neutral, fair and balanced."

    I believe the most valuable interpretation of the Groseclose and Milyou study runs something like this: "If even as deadpan and 'straight newsy' a show like Brit Hume's was determined to be conservative by a suitably objective enough study, then seasoned observers can quite well imagine how off-the-charts-to-the-right shows like O'Reilly's and Hannity's would have scored in the event that Groseclose and Milyou had included them in the study."

    I just don't see the hard evidence that Fox News is so partisan. If Bill O'Reilly were a partisan Republican, then he would defend Pres. Bush. But he does not.

    I checked a left-wing blog that specializes in documenting right-wing media bias, and its latest example is quoting O'Reilly saying:

    Viagra is used to help a medical condition -- that's why it's covered. Birth control is not a medical condition, it is a choice.
    O'Reilly was just reciting conventional wisdom.

    Monday, Jul 21, 2008
     
    NY Times is partisan
    The NY Times attacks Fox News as partisan:
    The portrait of them as secret Muslims, in cahoots with terrorists and harboring virulent anti-American sentiments, exists for the most part either on the lunatic fringe or in what some might call the lunatic establishment: radically partisan entities like Fox News.”
    And yet the NY Times refuses to print John McCain's rebuttal to Backtrack Obama's op-ed. The NY Times is much more radically partisan than Fox News.

    The NY Times article also blames the New Yorker:

    The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing.
    Ridiculing Obama is just beginning. Every other modern presidential candidate has gotten it worse.

    Jonathan writes:

    From what you've written here it sounds like Fox News and the NYT are both partisan. But I don't see where it follows logically, based only on the evidence described by what you wrote, that the partisanship of the NYT is worse than that of Fox News. You seem to imply that failure to publish a rebuttal is itself more partisan than an outright partisan attack. Why is that conclusion more logical than viewing both techniques as roughly equal in terms of a partisan bias? Fox News is infamous, in the eyes of many, it seems, for showing folks like Bill O'Reilly shouting down their guests while aiming the camera lens primarily Bill's way during such shouting matches. Like most Big Media, Fox takes a cue (no pun) from Ronald Reagan -- Fox is paying for the microphone, so they control what goes in. No different than the NYT.
    Fox News is careful to present balanced views. Hannity is partisan, but he is balanced by the left-winger Colmes. O'Reilly does tough interviews, but he does tough interviews on everyone. He is not a Republican partisan. He takes strong stands on some pet issues of his, like locking up child molesters, but not partisan issues.

    Yesterday, O'Reilly credited Obama with being right about opposing the Iraq War, and criticized McCain for being wrong. O'Reilly has fallen for a Democrat Party talking point. If O'Reilly were really a Republican partisan, he would not say that, because it is not true.


    Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
     
    NY Times idolizes Einstein
    NY Times science reporter Dennis Overbye writes
    Einstein is always with us, and that is to the benefit of science. I can imagine a lot of worse candidates to be the icon for such a major human activity. We like him because he really did seem to be out for Truth, he was funny and he didn't make a big deal of himself and of course he shouldered the burden of guilt for the atomic age.
    Albert Einstein certainly did make a big deal of himself. He was an egomaniac who dishonestly covered up his sources in order to make exaggerated claims for what he did.

    Overbye's article mentions Einstein about 30 times. He sounds like a crackpot. I guess it is not entirely his fault, and he got Einstein questions from his readers. But Einstein did not invent relativity; he just stole the credit for it.


    Saturday, Jul 19, 2008
     
    Indian Removal Act of 1830
    I ran across this US State Dept. description of the Indian treaty and removal act of 1830.

    It looks like anti-American Indian propaganda to me. It is filled with factual errors, such as saying that Andrew Jackson was President in 1838. It discusses irrelevancies, such as court cases that had nothing to do with federal Indian policy. It says that the Indians were democratic, but complains that its leaders did not represent their interests. It complains that treaties were violated, but also gives arguments for the treaties never being valid in the first place. It refers to Indian property rights, but also says that Indians did not recognize property rights.

    I don't know whether the Indian removal was good or bad, but a site like this should accurately describe the facts, and the reasons behind the policy.


    Friday, Jul 18, 2008
     
    Cannot have a photo of a squashed bug
    I did not know that there was a federal law against depiction of animal cruelty:
    The statute was enacted as an attempt to stop the distribution of so-called "crush videos," which generally depict a woman's legs and feet, often in high heels, stepping on insects, mice, or kittens; ...
    Wow. So it is legal for me to step on a bug, but illegal to take a picture of what I am doing? This seems wacky to me.
     
    Myths of mental health science
    The blog Different Thoughts writes:
    The following list is a collection of facts from peer-reviewed scientific journals and several research-based books.

    I. A chemical imbalance for mental illness has never been found in anyone’s brain.

    II. Long-term studies from around the world demonstrate that the majority of people diagnosed with major mental illness – including schizophrenia – significantly improve or completely recover over time.

    III. Adverse childhood events can lead to mental health problems in adulthood – including psychosis, bipolar affective symptoms, depression, borderline traits, and so on – and the vast majority of people diagnosed with major psychiatric disorders have histories of trauma, neglect, or abuse. Thus, in many cases, the cause of psychiatric symptoms is childhood trauma. In this context, saying “mental illness is just like diabetes” or “mental illness is a physical brain disease that is no one’s fault” is inaccurate.

    IV. A large subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia fare better with little or no medication usage.

    V. The brain can heal, and the biological abnormalities linked to psychiatric symptoms are often reversible or can be compensated for by other areas of the brain.

    VI. According to repeated studies by the World Health Organization, people diagnosed with schizophrenia living in developing countries have significantly better outcomes than those living in developed countries.

    VII. Antidepressant medications are no more effective than a sugar pill for people with mild to moderate depression, and only slightly more effective than a sugar pill for people with severe depression.

    VIII. Efforts to increase a person’s awareness of their diagnosed mental illness – known as “illness insight” – may lead to self-stigmatization that decreases self-esteem and hope. Research shows that the “mental illness is like any other physical disorder” message behind many anti-stigma campaigns actually increases the public’s fear, prejudice, and desire for distance from people who are diagnosed.

    IX. Psychiatric diagnoses are not based on medical testing, but instead on self-report and professional interpretation according to culturally-defined notions of disease. They are therefore arbitrary and often unreliable, especially over time, being prone to racism, sexism, classism, and Eurocentric bias. Many people receive different diagnoses from different doctors, which muddles treatment options and can lead to unnecessary or mismatched medication usage.

    He has references for all these statements.

    Wednesday, Jul 16, 2008
     
    District Gun Registration Starts
    The Wash. Post reports:
    D.C. police will start the gun registration process at 7 a.m. tomorrow, when it opens an office at police headquarters at 300 Indiana Ave. NW.

    It is the start of the 180-day amnesty period in which residents may register handguns they have had illegally, or guns from other states.

    An officer from the gun unit will meet the applicant at the door and take temporary possession of the gun to ensure safety at headquarters.

    No, the residents have not had handguns "illegally". The US Supreme Court just ruled that DC residents were entirely within their 2A constitutional rights to have those handguns. It was the city that was confiscating them illegally.

    I would be a little wary of that "temporary possession". DC residents don't need amnesty. They need the city to recognize their constitutional rights.

    Update: DC rejected Heller's application for a gun permit.

     
    Evolutionists disagree
    The NY Times reports:
    Dr. [Edward O.] Wilson was not picking a fight when he published “Sociobiology” in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavor led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.
    This illustrates the sorry state of evolutionary science. The field has been dominated by Marxist evolutionists who refused to accept legitimate genetic research because of ideological beliefs about what Marxist revolution can accomplish.

    The article continues:

    The new fight is one Dr. Wilson has picked. It concerns a central feature of evolution, one with considerable bearing on human social behaviors. The issue is the level at which evolution operates. Many evolutionary biologists have been persuaded, by works like “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the only level at which natural selection acts. Dr. Wilson, changing his mind because of new data about the genetics of ant colonies, now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group.
    You can find more on the dispute here.

    It is remarkable that there is such a fundamental disagreement about what natural selection is. Apparently it is just a meaning buzz phrase that can be applied to life however it is observed.


    Tuesday, Jul 15, 2008
     
    Myths about epicycles
    Czech physicist Lubos Motl writes:
    Epicycles have become one of the labels that the laymen often use to identify what they consider to be a bad science.

    However, it turns out that virtually every single layperson - and, in fact, not only a layman - misunderstands what the epicycles were, ...

    Depending on the celestial bodies and the required accuracy, they needed different numbers of epicycles. ... There is nothing wrong whatsoever with this description.

    He is correct about epicycles. Yes, there are non-scientists who have been taught that epicycles were bad science somehow. The main idea behind epicycles is the same idea that is behind Fourier Analysis, and that idea is used throught the hard sciences today. The use of epicycles in the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems was excellent science.

    Some people say that Copernicus was a great astronomer because he got rid of epicycles, but his system also had epicycles.

    George writes:

    Epicycles were bad science because the planets do not really move in epicycles. The epicycles were just mathematical constructs that did not have the physical significance of ellipses.
    You are going to be in for a rude shock if you ever take a college science course. If epicycles were bad science, then so is nearly all of modern science.

    Monday, Jul 14, 2008
     
    Obama is anti-American
    Backtrack Obama writes in an op-ed today:
    Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
    No, Obama did not oppose the Iraq War, as I have explained here and here. He is not only lying about his record, but he is perpetuating the myth that we went to war against Iraq because Pres. Bush claimed that Iraq posed an imminent threat and contributed to the 9/11 attacks.

    In fact, everyone agreed that there was no imminent threat. Bush's famous speech said, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." Obama said that he was against "dumb wars", but so is Bush and everyone else. Obama did not express disagreement with Iraq policy at the time.

    The worst part of this is how unamerican and unpatriotic Obama is. No real American would constantly try to undermine the legitimacy of the American role in the Iraq War, as Obama does.

    Like it or not, the Iraq War had the support of the President, the Congress, most of our Democrat and Republican leaders, a solid majority of the American people, and the UN. The decision was made five years ago, after a prolonged public debate. It is a done deal. Get over it. It is as legitimate as any war decision the USA has ever made. Obama is anti-American for denying this.

    BYW, Obama's op-ed is currently the most emailed NY Times article. No. 8 on the list is a week-old silly Maureen Dowd column in which the 56-year-old old maid quotes a 79-year-old Catholic priest to support her view that no men are good enough for her!


    Saturday, Jul 12, 2008
     
    Racist newspaper columnist
    Chicago Sun-Times column Mary Mitchell claims to have found the smoking gun that proves that white men have special privileges in our society. The evidence: two old white guys got into a scuffle with each other on the street one day, and the cops did not arrest anyone!

    Yes, she is part black, a big Obama fan, and sees racial injustice whereever she looks.

     
    Would Darwin Censor Intelligent Design?
    Jerry Pournelle writes:
    If in fact the arguments for ID are ludicrous, I do not see why there is so much pressure for censorship and suppression. Either one believes in rational discussion or one does not. If ID is easy to refute, then refute it. Who knows, the ID people may give up, or refine their arguments; and the refutation should be instructive.

    If 100 mostly mid-western school districts required that alternatives to Darwinism be taught in school, would the Republic come to an end? Would that be worse than centralized control of subject matter? And where does the central control end? With jail for Global Warming Denial?

    I weary of the Intelligent Design in Schools argument, because apparently there is a small number of apparently intelligent and articulate people who simply do not understand what they are saying. No, they say, we don’t want central control of curricula in all the public schools through the nation. But the Intelligent Design advocates are so stupid, their arguments so vapid, that we simply cannot afford to allow them to be presented in the hundred or so school districts that would mandate ID to be taught along with Darwinism, lest America lose her soul.

    He is right. Whatever the merits of ID, the anti-ID zealots are a menace. Real scientist welcome other points of view, and do not try to censor small minorities who have mild criticisms of the mainstream view.

    Thursday, Jul 10, 2008
     
    The AA prayer
    The NY Times has a whole article about the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, but fails to say it. Here it is:
    God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
    The courage to change the things I can,
    And the wisdom to know the difference.
    But the article does not include the text of the prayer! What goes? Does the paper think that we are all alcoholics and know it already? Or it is worried about copyrights? Or is it not fit to print for some reason? Weird.

    John writes:

    The Drudge Report has only had to make 1 retraction in his 12 years on the Web. The NY Times, by contrast, issues 5 to 10 retractions every day, and they publish many more errors which they fail to retract. There's almost a cottage industry of people who find errors in the NY Times.

    To take just one recent example, on June 30 the NY Times had an article that tried to exonerate Kerry from charges by the Swift Boat Veterans.

    The article stated as a fact that "Navy documents contradicted many of their accusations." The article did not elaborate, but I don't think even one (let alone "many") of the charges were ever "contradicted" by "Navy documents."

    The NYT published a correction admitting that they misspelled the name of Swift Boat Veteran Roy Hoffmann as Hoffman, but they have not corrected the much more serious factual error, or even published a letter to the editor disputing it. This is so typical.

    The same NYT article also erroneously said that T. Boone Pickens had promised to pay $1 million to anyone who refuted any of the Swift Boat Veterans' charges. In fact, Pickens only made that offer to anyone who could disprove the contents of the TV ads that Pickens helped to finance. The NYT has not corrected that error either.

     
    Louisiana passes science law
    The evolutionists got all upset when a Louisiana school district adopted this policy:
    Teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.
    The proposed law said:
    (3) That an important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills that they need in order to become intelligent, productive, and scientifically informed citizens.

    (4) That the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects. ...

    Toward this end, teachers shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught.

    C. Neither the Louisiana Department of Education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, superintendent of schools, or school system administrator, nor any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course or courses being taught.

    Scientists really look bad when they whine about a law like this.

    As the law actually passed, it was made clear that the authorities can prohibit some textbooks, and that the law cannot promote religion. The actual law says:

    C. A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board unless otherwise prohibited by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

    D. This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

    This sounds innocuous, but NewScientist calls it a New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US. That's ridiculous. The evolutionist just sound as if they are trying to stifle legitimate scientific criticism. Likewise for global warming proponents.

    Wednesday, Jul 09, 2008
     
    Strongest evidence of White House censorship
    The San Jose Mercury News reports:
    WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's office last year blocked testimony on how global warming endangers public health, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said Tuesday.

    It was the strongest evidence yet of White House efforts to censor data on climate change.

    Good. The angry left Bush-haters have been complaining about this years, and maybe we'll finally see something of substance. The article goes on:
    In October, Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was prepared to testify before Boxer's committee that climate change "is likely to have a significant impact on health," warning of extreme heat and weather, water-borne diseases and food and water scarcity.

    But Cheney's office and the Council on Environmental Quality effectively deleted six pages of Gerberding's testimony, Burnett said: "CEQ requested that I work with CDC to remove from the testimony any discussion of the human health consequences of climate change."

    That's it?! That is the big smoking gun? This is old news. As I reported last year, here is a sample of the deleted testimony:
    Some Americans may suffer anxiety, depression, and similar symptoms in anticipating climate change and/or in coping with its effects. Moreover, the aftermath of severe events may include post-traumatic stress and related problems, as was seen after Hurricane Katrina. These conditions are difficult to quantify but may have significant effects of health and well-being.
    If VP Cheney killed that testimony, then he did the right thing. It is much more likely that people will suffer anxiety about exaggerated doomsday warnings about global warming. Global warming itself is much too gradual to cause any mental health problems.

    Monday, Jul 07, 2008
     
    500 tons of uranium removed from Iraq
    AP reports:
    The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

    The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

    There are still people who claim that Pres. Bush lied about Iraq trying to buy yellowcake, but it is still supported by the UK Butler report FactCheck.org.

    Sunday, Jul 06, 2008
     
    Justice Kennedy's evolution based on errors
    As noted below, Justice Kennedy got the facts wrong in his 5-4 Supreme Court decision banning the execution of child rapists. He claimed that there was an evolving consensus against such a death penalty, but the facts show otherwise.

    The Wash. Post has called for a rehearing based on an "Irony of ironies", whatever that means. It doesn't want to execute anyone, but wants to save Kennedy from ridicule.

    John writes:

    Jan Crawford Greenburg gives a good reason why the Supreme Court will decide not to rehear the child rape death penalty case, despite the sloppy mistake which goes to the heart of Kennedy's opinion.
    The reason is that the court has been ignoring military justice for a long time. But the military justice example is more important in this case, because the whole case depends on an evolving consensus that is disproved by the military law.

    This seems like deja vu to me. The mistake is by the same Kennedy who wrote a 2005 5-4 opinion against the juvenile death penalty, and similarly misstated the facts supporting an evolving consensus back then. There was no rehearing or correction. Orin Kerr wrote:

    If I understand the statistics correctly, the move to abolish the juvenile death penalty in five states since 1989 is essentially symbolic: none of those states have executed a juvenile in many decades, if ever, and the five states are mostly states that have capital punishment in theory but not in practice. If the "evolving standards of decency" inquiry of the Eighth Amendment focuses on actual practices, then there seems to be virtually no evidence of a changed standard since 1989.
    This is also the same Kennedy who wrote Lawrence v Texas in 2003 and misstated colonial law, according to Clayton Cramer.

    So it appears that Kennedy isn't bothered by a few bloggers pointing out errors.

    Kennedy isn't the only one to make mistakes. Justice Stevens made a couple of errors in the DC gun case.


    Saturday, Jul 05, 2008
     
    ACLU opposes gun rights
    The ACLU still tries to deny your gun rights:
    The ACLU interprets the Second Amendment as a collective right. Therefore, we disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in D.C. v. Heller.
    Don't believe it when someone tries to tell you that the ACLU is just a defender of constitutional rights.

    Friday, Jul 04, 2008
     
    Evolutionists back data secrecy
    The evolutionists blogs like Pharyngula are still attacking Conservapedia for asking about the data underlying some recent evolution research. Conservapedia asked Richard Lenski for this missing data, and got this response.

    Briefly, Lenski agreed to put some of the missing data on his website, but held back on other data because some people on Conservapedia had misunderstood his research. The good stuff is reserved for competent scientists, he says.

    Lenski's attitude is a little strange. Most scientists are happy to clarify their research to those who have misunderstood it. Most bloggers are usually in favor of releasing scientific data. I would think that they would be especially eager for the DNA sequence data, as that would more precisely explain how the e.coli in Lenski's lab have evolved.

     
    Obama opposes Roe v Wade
    AP reports:
    WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says "mental distress" should not qualify as a justification for late-term abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights.

    In an interview this week with "Relevant," a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain "a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother."

    Obama then added: "Now, I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term."

    Last year, after the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on late-term abortions, Obama said he "strongly disagreed" with the ruling because it "dramatically departs form previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women." ...

    A leading abortion opponent, however, said Obama's rhetoric does not match his voting record and his previously stated views on abortion rights.

    David N. O'Steen, the executive director of National Right to Life, said Obama's remarks to the magazine "are either quite disingenuous or they reflect that Obama does not know what he is talking about."

    "You cannot believe that abortion should not be allowed for mental health reasons and support Roe v Wade," O'Steen said.

    O'Steen is correct. The essence of Roe v Wade is that a pregnant woman has a constitutional right to get a late-term abortion for mental health reasons. If a woman tells the abortionist that she has some mental distress about the pregnancy, then that suffices to justify the abortion, and there can be no further inquiry about it.

    While a number of cases have been brought to the US Supreme Court in attempts to limit this doctrine, the court has not budged. Obama has now aligned himself with those who want to overturn Roe v Wade.

    I don't think that Obama would appoint the justices to overturn Roe v Wade, but it sure is funny to see him try to pretend that he is anti-abortion, pro-gun, against same-sex marriage, anti-tax, etc. His advisors have obviously told him that his record is far to the left of the independent voters that he needs.


    Wednesday, Jul 02, 2008
     
    The secret of the greatest-ever student prank
    When engineers were engineers, some bold and clever students put a car on a rooftop. Amazing.

    Tuesday, Jul 01, 2008
     
    Judges are afraid of science
    According to a NY Times interview:
    Q. ARE JUDGES THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE AFRAID OF SCIENCE?

    A. This is a huge issue. Yes! A lot of judges report that they did prelaw in college because it did not involve science. One of my favorite judges, a brilliant man, is fond of telling people he “flunked science in kindergarten.”

    Yes, that is common. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in Daubert (1993):
    The Court then states that a "key question" to be answered in deciding whether something is "scientific knowledge" "will be whether it can be (and has been) tested." Ante, at 12. Following this sentence are three quotations from treatises, which speak not only of empirical testing, but one of which states that "the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability," ante, pp. 12-13.

    I defer to no one in my confidence in federal judges; but I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is saidthat the scientific status of a theory depends on its "falsifiability," and I suspect some of them will be, too.

    Much of science is concerned with finding evidence in the natural world to support hypotheses. Judges are concerned with evaluating courtroom evidence to support some prosecutor's indictment or plaintiff's claim for monetary damages. You would think that training to be a judge or a lawyer would include gaining some understanding of how scientists treat evidence.

    But it does not. Just the opposite. Judges tend to have a phobia about science, and have a very hard time with scientific evidence. I don't just mean that they don't understand scientific terminology; they lack a good grasp on how things are proved with evidence. I think that they should have to understand science on at least a high school level before becoming judges.


    Monday, Jun 30, 2008
     
    ANWR oil
    A reader send the truth about ANWR drilling. The pictures tell the story. Ten years ago we were told that the oil would not do us any good because it would not be available for ten years.

    Friday, Jun 27, 2008
     
    Only four constitutionalists
    From the latest US Supreme Court decisions, it has become increasingly clear that we only have four reliable constitutionalists on the court. In Boumediene v Bush, the court ruled 5-4 that enemy combatants in Gitmo can file claims in US federal court. It ignored where the Constitution says that Congress has the power to define federal court jurisdiction. John McCain said that it was one the court's worst decisions, and Barack Obama praised the possibility of Osama bin Laden filing court petitions, if he is captured alive.

    In Giles v California, the court affirmed the 6A right of a criminal defendant to face and cross-examine his accusers.

    A 5-4 majority in Kennedy v Louisiana said that the Constitution forbids the death penalty for child rape because of a consensus on the issue, even tho a recent poll found that about half of Americans favor such a penalty.

    Justice Scalia delineated in DC v Heller what gun-loving Americans have always believed, that the 2A guarantees an individual right to own guns. The four liberal dissenters again show their contempt for the Constitution, and for precedent. Lucky for us, Justice Kennedy joined the four constitutionalists. Scalia wrote:

    Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right.
    Remember this whenever you hear someone talk about states rights. There is no such thing. Only liberals talk about it, and not those who believe in following the text of the Constitution.

    All this adds up to the fact that Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito are the only justices who reliably follow the text of the Constitution. Obama voted against Alito's confirmation, and it is safe to say that if Obama had been President, his appointments would have zeroed out our 2A gun rights.

    Update: The NY Times reports that the supposed "national consensus" against executing child rapists is contradicted by the fact that the US military currently has a death penalty for child rapists, and the last person executed was a child rapist.


    Thursday, Jun 26, 2008
     
    More quantum gravity nonsense
    SciAm magazine another wacky and unscientific cosmology article. It is titled Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime, formerly, "The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe".

    The article claims that, while searching for quantum gravity, a computer simulation showed that spacetime should have 4.02 dimensions. The model does not include any matter, gravity, or quantum mechanics. This stuff is not any more scientific than Intelligent Design.


    Tuesday, Jun 24, 2008
     
    No customers offended by video game
    The NY Times reports:
    Lawyers who sued the makers of the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas profess to be shocked, simply shocked, that few people who bought the game were offended by sex scenes buried in its software. ...

    Far bigger than the payout to plaintiffs will be the fees sought by the lawyers who brought the class action. Mr. Lesser and his colleagues at 10 other law firms have asked for more than $1.3 million — compared with less than $30,000 that Take-Two Interactive’s lawyers say it will spend to resolve the claims for $5 to $35 each (and, sometimes, a sanitized copy of the game).

    The judge should dismiss the case. The lawyers could not even find many people to say that they have been damaged, even when offered free money. Lawyers fees should not be greater than the alleged damages.

    Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
     
    Another gay brain study is distorted
    William Saletan of Slate mag writes:
    Last month, when the California Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage a constitutional right, it repeatedly invoked the precedent of interracial marriage. An attorney involved in the case protested, "There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race."

    He's wrong. There's lots of evidence. More of it just came out this week. It's been driving the gay rights debate all along, away from the clutches of religion and into the clutches of science. ...

    A new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hints at what's coming. Previous gay-brain studies focused on structures or responses that might have been shaped by social interactions. To screen out social factors, authors of the new study relied on brain scans rather than behavioral responses, and they targeted structures known to form during or shortly after gestation. "That was the whole point of the study, to show parameters that differ, but which couldn't be altered by learning or cognitive processes," the lead author explains.

    The sample consisted of 25 straight men, 25 straight women, 20 gay men, and 20 lesbians. In overall symmetry and amygdala activity, the brains of gay men resembled the brains of straight women, whereas the brains of lesbians resembled the brains of straight men. Previous work has connected such differences to fear, anxiety, aggression, and verbal, spatial, and navigational ability. It's not just a matter of preferring men or women. The broader implication, one expert argues, is that "in gay men, the brain is feminized."

    No, Saletan is wrong. This latest study does not establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race. First, it only looked at 20 gay men, and may not generalize to larger populations. Second, it did not study immutability, only brain characteristics that are thought to be formed early in life.

    More importantly, the study does not find any discrete difference between heteros and homos. While it finds certain average differences, the vast majority of people fall into a big gray area which would be consistent with being hetero or homo, according to this study.

    It is hard to say precisely, because the study did not release the raw data. According to this observer, the study is consistent with the following:

    Rightward hemispheric asymmetry was found in the brains of 14 of 25 heterosexual males and 11 of 20 homosexual females, but in only 13 of 25 heterosexual females and 10 of 20 homosexual males.
    If that is correct, then the study doesn't really even provide a good way of distinguishing heteros from homos.

    That blog also points out that a major finding of the study was that heteros (both men and women) had much bigger brains than homos. Not sure if that is significant.

    Another big problem is that no causal mechanism is proposed. It is possible, for example, that certain brain characteristics channel homos into certain occupations, and then cultural influences in those occupations lead them to become homosexual. If so, then the brain data would not say anything about the immutability of the homosexuality.


    Saturday, Jun 21, 2008
     
    Synthetic diamonds are not fake
    The NY Times has an article on fake gems, except that the gems are not fake at all. Fake gems are made of cubic zirconium or glass. The article is about real diamonds that are composed of the same face-centered cubic carbon crystals that make up every other diamond.

    Friday, Jun 20, 2008
     
    Unlicensed driver was illegal
    I commented below about an illegal alien who killed a child in a traffic accident last weekend. Today, that same new newspaper reports that it has now discovered that the driver was an illegal alien! The front page story says:
    Why driver in fatal crash was unlicensed

    Not only was the driver of a Ford Bronco that fatally struck a 12-year-old girl unlicensed, but San Jose police say she is also an illegal immigrant, renewing the debate over whether undocumented people should be allowed to apply for driver's licenses.

    The revelation that Adriana Fierro De Marin, 31, is in the country illegally struck yet another chord with the family of Breanna Slaughter-Eck, still reeling from the loss of the Hoover Middle School sixth-grader.

    "I'm worried that she just might flee now and walk away from all this," said Joe Castro, the man who raised Breanna for the last four years. For her part, Breanna's mother simply wants justice.

    Who are they kidding? The city is crawling with unlicensed drivers, and they are all illegal aliens. It should not have taken four days for the newspaper to figure that out.

    Thursday, Jun 19, 2008
     
    Right to defend yourself
    Until today, a criminal defendant had a constitutional right to defend himself in court without a lawyer. The US Supreme Court in Indiana v Edwards just ruled 7-2 that can lose that right if a judge and a psychiatrist agree to take the right away from you. Then you have to let a lawyer represent you.

    Scalia and Thomas dissented, said:

    In my view, the Constitution does not permit a state to substitute its own perception of fairness for the defendant's right to make his own case before the jury -- a specific right long understood to a fair trial.
    Thomas and Scalia are still the best men on the court. There is more discussion of the case here. The oral argument concerned belief in Martians.

    A better solution would be to force the states to give pro se defendants fair trials. Prosecutors should not be depending on tricky lawyering in order to outsmart defense lawyers.

    We should get the DC gun case result on Monday. That will really tell us where the justices stand on individual constitutional rights.


    Tuesday, Jun 17, 2008
     
    How judges get appointed
    How do judges get their jobs? I thought that they were either elected, or appointed by elected officials. Nope. This article explains:
    The issue of how we get our judges bubbles up again because the state of Missouri has a new job opening for a supreme court justice. Justice Steven Limbaugh -- Rush’s cousin -- has left, taking an appointment to the federal bench.

    But the governor now picks a person to be confirmed by the state senate, right?

    Wrong. Not in Missouri. Instead, the Appellate Judicial Commission, in a closed process, chooses three nominees. The governor is then forced to take one of their picks.

    You can see what this seems like: an insider game, a stacked deck.

    The seven member commission -- composed of three lawyers elected by members of the Missouri Bar, three people appointed by the governor and the state’s chief justice -- is essentially controlled by the Missouri Bar Association. Current Governor Matt Blunt has made only one appointment to the commission.

    Is it really a good idea to have our most powerful judges determined largely by a private organization?

    No, it is not a good idea. A lot of other states follow the Missouri plan, as you can see in this map.

    Monday, Jun 16, 2008
     
    Illegal alien kills child
    The San Jose newspaper reports:
    Police confirmed today that the woman who struck and killed San Jose middle-school student Breanna Slaughter-Eck, who was riding her bicycle home on the last day of school, does not have a driver's license.

    The 31-year-old driver, Adriana Fierro De Marin, did not have a driver's license, nor was one ever issued in the state of California, according to police Sgt. Mike Sullivan.

    Note how the police and paper avoid telling us that she is an illegal alien.
     
    That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise
    The NY Times reports:
    She is, in other words, a victim of “green noise” — static caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long. ...

    Leaders of Greenpeace also decided to help its audience prioritize environmental concerns, said Kate Smolski, a senior legislative coordinator. So instead of asking people to juggle disparate concerns — including nuclear waste, coal pollution, deforestation and ocean wildlife endangerment — the group now tries to bundle them under the umbrella of climate change.

    So now, when the group campaigns against nuclear energy, it labels reactors a “false solution” to global warming. When the group talks about deforestation, the focus is on its contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

    “It’s very helpful,” Ms. Smolski said, “to show that it’s all connected.”

    Green noise is a good term for it. White noise is a term for a audio signal which is an incoherent mixture of all frequencies, just as white light is a mixture of all colors. It sounds a little like a hissing sounds, and you cannot hear any actual musical notes in it.

    Green noise describes the conflicting messages of the environmentalists. A lot of their messages, such as their opposition to nuclear energy, just don't make any sense. With climate change, they finally have the perfect cause that is irrefutable and compatible with whatever silly advice they give.


    Friday, Jun 13, 2008
     
    Environmentalists cause more destruction
    The San Jose paper reports:
    BONNY DOON -- State officials attempted to clear brush two years ago on the piece of land a where a fire now raging in Santa Cruz County began, but much of the work was delayed and ultimately not finished because of opposition from two local environmental groups.

    The fire began in an area of sandstone outcroppings known as Moon Rocks on the 550-acre Bonny Doon Ecological Reserve, commanders for Cal Fire confirmed. The reserve, an ancient seabed famed for its rare plants and trees, has not had a significant fire since 1948. As a result, dead trees and brush were piled high.

    The Martin fire has so far burned 10 houses and 600 acres, just a few miles from my house. I can see the smoke from my yard. It is 25% contained.

    This is not an isolated incident. Many forest fires every years are caused or worsened by environmentalist actions. The tree-hugger folks are actually destroying the trees.

     
    Commie judge stops executions
    USA Today reports:
    ELYRIA, Ohio (AP) — A judge in Ohio says the state's method of putting prisoners to death is unconstitutional because two of three drugs used in the lethal injection process can cause pain.
    The article has a picture with a caption:
    Lourain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge speaks in his office in Lorain, Ohio as posters of Che Guevara and Barack Obama hang on his wall.
    Guevara is mainly famous for the dozens of innocent people he executed in the name of Communism.

    Wednesday, Jun 11, 2008
     
    All science theories have strengths and weaknesses
    evolutionary biologist, is professor of psychology David P. Barash writes:
    No reputable college or university will teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of atomic theory or the theory of gravity. Evolutionary theory is no different, ...
    I wonder if this guy has ever taken a Physics class. Of course they teach the strengths and weaknesses of atomic theory and the theory of gravity. They did while I was in college. Currently, a major weakness of the theory of gravity is that it does not explain dark energy. Another is that gravitons and gravity waves have never been observed.

    Monday, Jun 09, 2008
     
    The myth of heterosexual AIDS
    Joe sends this:
    A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

    In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO's department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

    Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

    Dr De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia – China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn't look likely. ..."

    and asks, "How can it be over if we never had one?"

    The guy who really nailed this issue was journalist Michael Fumento. He wrote a whole book 20 years ago giving a clear-eyed explanation of why there would be no global heterosexual AIDS pandemic. You can read his papers on the subject here. He was widely vilified by AAAS Science magazine and the rest of the science establishment, but he was ultimately proved correct.

    Fumento now reports on the Iraq War.

    The above article quotes a UN WHO epidemiologist named Dr. De Cock, saying:

    But the factors driving HIV were still not fully understood, he said.

    "The impact of HIV is so heterogeneous. In the US , the rate of infection among men in Washington DC is well over 100 times higher than in North Dakota, the region with the lowest rate. That is in one country. How do you explain such differences?"

    This sounds like a parody. The UN AIDS expert is some joker named Dr. De Cock who is just now figuring out what Fumento published 20 years, but still cannot figure out why Washington DC might be different from North Dakota! (Yes, De Cock seems to be his real name.)

    Thursday, Jun 05, 2008
     
    New evolutionist paranoia
    The NY Times reports:
    Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are “creationism” or “intelligent design” or even “creator.”

    The words are “strengths and weaknesses.”

    Starting this summer, the state education board will determine the curriculum for the next decade and decide whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution should be taught. The benign-sounding phrase, some argue, is a reasonable effort at balance. But critics say it is a new strategy taking shape across the nation to undermine the teaching of evolution, ...

    The evolutionists must be really insecure in their beliefs, if they want to outlaw teaching the strengths and weaknesses. Real scientists are eager to explain the strengths and weaknesses of their theories.
     
    Obama's DNA
    In a prepared speech on Rev. Wright, Barack Obama started with this:
    Hello everybody. Before I start taking questions I want to just open it up with a couple of comments about what we saw and heard yesterday. I have spent my entore adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA. Trying to promote mutual understanding. to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am. That's what I believe. That's what this campaign has been about.
    Obama is indeed obsessed with his DNA, as he wrote a whole book on race and inheritance.

    But where has Obama ever bridged any gaps? Republican John McCain has a long history of making deals with Democrats, but where has Obama even tried to make a deal with Republicans, or compromised with Republicans?

    Obama invites scrutiny of his DNA, but it is not so good. He was born in Hawaii. His father was a Mohammedan Kenyan economist who had a wife in Africa at the time. His mother was an atheist anthropology student. Both were hard-core leftists. His father soon went back to Africa.

    Obama lived for a few years in Indonesia, and then attended elite schools in the USA. He never suffered from racial discrimination, and benefited from affirmative action. As a Mohammedan convert to Christianity, he would face the death penalty in some arab countries. He has chosen to identify with black Americans, even tho his DNA has little to do with those Americans of West African descent.

    If there is one common thread to Obama's background, it is his anti-Americanism. His parents were America-haters. He joined a racist and anti-American church. His wife badmouths America. He gets most of his support from those who oppose American military power. His campaign slogan is "Change", and he has little to say about what he wants to change, except that he is unhappy with America as it is.

    I do think that electing Obama would be terrible for race relations in this country. Black Americans will discover that they have little in common with Obama. Yes, some of them belong to an anti-American radical church like Obama's, but most do not.

    Tom Sowell writes:

    Senator John McCain has been criticized in this column many times. But, when all is said and done, Senator McCain has not spent decades aiding and abetting people who hate America. ... The choice between him and Barack Obama should be a no-brainer.

    Wednesday, Jun 04, 2008
     
    More on defending Karl Rove
    A challenges my defense of Karl Rove below, and writes:
    The problem is that when McClellan was working as (deputy) WH press secretary, McClellan told the press, repeatedly and categorically, that neither Karl Rove nor any other senior WH official (including Cheney's staff) was "involved" in any way in the disclosure of Valerie Plame's identity.

    Of course, that was not the whole truth. Both Rove and Scooter Libby were "involved" in the disclosure of Valerie's identity, even if their involvement was merely to "confirm" rather than to initially "leak" her identity. ...

    McClellan then went out and told the press in effect: "I just spoke to Karl Rove and Karl assured me that he was not involved in any way, shape or form with the leaking or disclosure of the fact that Joe Wilson went to Africa partly because of his wife who works at the CIA. And furthermore, other senior staff of the White House and the Vice President have all given me the same assurance. So I can categorically assure the American people that as far as anyone knows, nobody at the White House was involved in any way, shape or form in this matter."

    As we now know, McClellan's statements were untrue -- either because Rove and Libby (and perhaps Bush and Cheney) deliberately misled McClellan -- or at least they allowed McClellan to misunderstand what they told him, which then allowed McClellan to mislead the press.

    I don't blame McClellan for feeling burned and abused by his former colleagues. There is still no good explanation for why everyone involved did not tell the whole truth from the get-go. What purpose was served by secretly divulging this information about Valerie, then attempting (in Libby's case, unsuccessfully) to deny having done so?

    This otherwise inexplicable behavior suggests there may be some truth to leftwing conspiracy theories that there was a much bigger nefarious strategy going on here, namely to cover up how the neocons lied us into the Iraq war.

    You misstate what McClellan said. He said that Rove told him that he was not involved in the leaking of classified info. There is a big difference.

    Rove has consistently denied leaking any classified info. He told the same story to the grand jury. Fitzgerald did everything he could to trap Rove in a lie, but failed. I am not sure that Rove even knew Valerie Plame's name, or had any classified info about her. All he did was to confirm that Joe Wilson's wife had a role in the CIA sending him to Africa.

    There was a very legitimate purpose for what Rove did. Joe Wilson wrote a damaging NY Times op-ed, and the Democrats were circulating the story that Cheney sent Wilson to Africa and then ignored his report. Rove and Libby wanted to rebut that story by saying that it was Wilson's wife who sent him to Africa, and Cheney never even knew about it or saw the report.

    Rove and Scooter Libby were under orders from the White House not to talk about the Plame leak, pending the criminal investigation. What they could do was to deny being involved in a crime. That is what they did. As far as we know, that was the truth. (Lewis was convicted for perjury, but not for leaking Plame's name. His lie was that he said that Plame was mentioned in a particular phone call with Tim Russert, while Russert said that she was not mentioned.)

    As I see it, Fitzgerald caught Rove and Libby with minor and inconsequential inconsistencies in their testimony. Rove chose to amend his testimony, while Libby chose to stick to his story. Rove got the better legal advice. Neither did anything illegal or wrong.


    Tuesday, Jun 03, 2008
     
    Dark energy
    The NY Times has an article on dark energy:
    “The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. ...

    As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know. ...

    Zero can be a fundamental number, he said, but not a 1 with 59 zeroes between it and the decimal point.

    As a result, he said, maybe physicists should give up trying to explain that number and look instead for a theory that generates all kinds of universes, a so-called multiverse.

    The article mentions Einstein 14 times, even tho he never had anything to say about dark energy. The article does not mention dark buzz.

    What Witten is saying here is that String Theory has been a total failure at explaining dark energy or anything else in the real world. The discovery of dark energy has been a crippling blow to the theory. So instead, Witten and others have moved on to saying that string theory might explain other universes that are not observable.

    According to muliverse advocates, all of the movies (that don't have some logical inconsistency) have actually happened in some alternate universe, just as we saw them in the theater. We cannot communicate with the other universes, so there is no way we can know for sure that the other universes even exist.


    Monday, Jun 02, 2008
     
    No labor shortage
    Half Sigma writes:
    There's a NY Times article about how there's a labor shortage in Iowa. I think that this one sentence explains the whole "shortage":

    Companies want to be in Iowa because wages are lower than elsewhere in the nation or region, except South Dakota.

    I was ready to move there until I read that sentence. If there were a genuine labor shortage in Iowa, wages would be higher than elsewhere in the nation.
    He is correct. Iowa has a surplus of immigrants, not a shortage.

    Sunday, Jun 01, 2008
     
    McClellan lies about what Bush said
    Scott McClellan's new book seems to be just an unoriginal recitation of Democrat talking points. But I am now adding him to my list of lying Bush-haters. On today's NBC Meet the Press:
    MR. RUSSERT: The president said at the time that "if someone committed a crime, they'd no longer work in my administration." Do you believe the president should have fired Karl Rove?

    MR. McCLELLAN: That's a, that's a question that the president had to make, and he chose not to.

    MR. RUSSERT: But what do you think?

    MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I, I think he should have stood by his word. I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which is if you were involved in this any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it. That would be a tough decision. I don't know if, if there was any crime committed. I don't--I say I just don't know that in the book. But we had higher standards at the White House. The president said he was going to restore honor, integrity. He said we were going to set the highest of standards. We didn't live up to that. When it became known that his top adviser had been involved, then the bar was moved. And the bar was moved to "if anyone is indicted, they would no longer be here."

    No, Bush never promised to fire anyone for just being "involved". Russert's quote is more accurate, as I explained before here and here. I even defended McClellan, but I now have to consider the possibility that he was deliberately lying to embarrass Pres. Bush. He certainly lying now. The Fitzgerald investigation proved that Karl Rove told the truth when he told McClellan that he was not involved in the leaking of classified info, and Bush kept his promise and fired Scooter Libby, the only one accused of a crime.

    Saturday, May 31, 2008
     
    Some think that Lucy is related to Flores Man
    The latest Scientific American magazine (see podcast here) claims that most scientists still believe that Flores Man was a separate species of human that lived 20k years ago on a small Pacific island:
    Steve: One of the big problems right now is there are a number of individual skeletons that we have but only one head.

    Wong: That's right. There are lots of, maybe a dozen or so individuals have been discovered, many of them are represented by isolated bones and only one, that original skeleton, actually includes a head; so there is always been a question of, "Well if they find another head, will it be as small as this one?" That question is particularly important because there have been, ever since the discovery was announced, some researchers who have questioned whether or not the Hobbit represents a new species of human or whether it actually is just a modern human with a growth disorder that produced a small brain size.

    Steve: So finding a second small head would be indicative of it really being a separate species and not an individual with pathology.

    Wong: Exactly. It would clinch the deal really in favor of the majority of the researchers who believe that the Flores Hobbit is a new species of human.

    Steve: So, what do you do now? You have to find some more fossils to try to really settle this issue, and one big thing would be to try to figure out how did this relative of Australopithecus, if that's what it is, get from Africa to Indonesia without leaving any fossils anywhere else?

    Australopithecus is the supposed missing link between humans and apes. The main skeleton is called Lucy and is from Africa over 3M years ago. It looked like a chimp, except that some scientists say that it walked slightly more upright that most other chimps, and so they argue that it was just starting to evolve to be a human.

    So what do Lucy and Flores Man have in common? Both were very short, and had small brains. Their brains were only a third the size of humans.

    One problem with this theory is that we have just found one Lucy skeleton, and one Flores skeleton, and they lived three million years apart on opposite sides of the world! If they were really connected by 3M years of evolving cave men, we would see some evidence. It is easier to believe that we have been visited by space aliens.

    Another silly article asks Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

    Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

    The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

    The is wacky stuff. The magazine used to be better than this. The author of the article has a blog.

    Update: The UK BBC has a story on this nonsense.


    Tuesday, May 27, 2008
     

    I happened to hear Dr. Laura Schlessinger plugging her latest book, and taking questions from an audience. A man asked:
    I don't understand -- what are you going to do when it is proved conclusively by science that homosexuality is physiological and not a choice? ...

    Aren't you with the hate the sin love the sinner crowd?

    Dr. Laura denied that she ever said that homosexuality was a choice. I understand that she once said several things that offended gays, and she later apologized.

    But I am wondering what the point to such a silly question is. Nobdy has found a "gay gene", and it is likely that no one will. But what if someone does? How is that going to change Laura's opinions?

    Science has not found genetic explanations for much in the way of human behavior. Probably future research will find genetic correlations with various sorts of behaviors, but I doubt that the research will affect public opinion of those behaviors very much.


    Sunday, May 25, 2008
     
    Sandisk Sansa ipod is better than the Apple iPod
    I like the Sandisk Sansa e280 mp3 music player. It sells a lot worse than the Apple iPod, but it has a lot of advantages.

    It has 8G of flash memory, and is a whole lot cheaper than an iPod. You can sometimes buy one for about the same cost as the flash memory.

    It has an FM radio, microphone, recorder, picture display, movie player, memory card slot, 20-hour battery life, and replaceable battery. It was years ahead of Apple on these features.

    It is completely uncrippled. If you have a v1 unit, you can just plug it into a computer usb port, and all the files are plainly exposed for copying back and forth. You can copy data, and just use it as a usb drive if you wish. You can just use any file utility to copy music, recordings, playlists, or whatever. You can even edit the playlists directly, which are in a simple text format. (But annoyingly encoded in 16-bit unicode, so you have to be a little careful.)

    With the v2 unit, the file structure is almost completely exposed. You cannot edit the playlists directly, but you can create them easily with just Msft Windows Explorer. While the device is connected in MTP mode, just right click on the device files you want on a playlist, and choose "Create playlist". You will then see a 0-byte playlist file on the device. You can rename it as you wish.

    The choice of MSC or MTP mode is minor complication. In MSC mode, the device is just a regular usb drive with Windows assigning a drive letter. In MTP mode, it still looks like a usb drive, but instead of having a drive letter it is set up for communication with Micosoft Media Player and other computer music players. You can sync with libraries on your PC, if you wish.

    The Apple iPod does not support either MSC or MTP mode. Instead it only supports a special Apple iTunes mode, where Apple puts artificial limits on what you can do. The Apple software works okay if you are buying from the iTunes music store, but it is really complicated and confusing to do anything else.

    The Sansa v1 player allows loading the Rockbox alternative open-source firmware for playing music and games. The Sansa v1 firmware also has some quirks. You have to pause the music before turning it off, or else the next boot-up will be slow. The v2 firmware fixes this, and has a snappier user interface. Boot times are only slow if you add a playlist or something like that.

    At first I found it annoying that I could not listen to music and recharge it at the same time. But I have discovered that if I just partially plug in the usb cable then I can do exactly that. Works great.

    I have taken to calling the player my ipod, as if ipod has become a generic term for this type of music player. Terms like "music player" and "mp3 player" are inadequate. If someone asks for something more specific, I'll say it is a non-Apple ipod, or an ipod made by Sandisk. Then they understand.

    Update: I've just discovered that the Sansa v2 player supports M3U playlists nicely. These are just ascii files with mp3 filenames in them. You can just load them on the main player or the memory card, and the player will find them the next time it boots up. There are just a couple of minor tricks needed. I'll post details if I have time.


    Wednesday, May 21, 2008
     
    Silly letters about marriage
    The San Jose newspaper has some wacky letters on same-sex marriage. This Monday letter said:
    Let's suppose an initiative was passed, with an overwhelming majority, to bring back slavery. Would the court be accused of being "activist" when they struck down such a law? Isn't slavery a part of this country's deep-rooted tradition? Isn't it the will of the people?
    This is a particularly bad example, because the courts did *not* strike down slavery. To the extent that they intervened, the courts made things worse. It took a civil war, and some constitutional amendments to end slavery in the USA.

    A letter today said:

    If marriage, at its very core, isn't about the potential for procreation, then why is there a social taboo and laws against closely related heterosexuals getting married? Obviously it is to avoid inter breeding.
    He means "inbreeding".

    Monday, May 19, 2008
     
    NY Times readers say humans are not smart
    For the second week in a row, the NY Times science section published a letter saying animals were smarter than humans. Last week was this:
    I must disagree with the very premise of this article — that humans are “so smart.” Why must scientists and supposedly objective people be so egotistically ignorant? Classifying other animals as “dumb” is, well, dumb. Until we humans drop the attitude that we are so smart and so superior, the chances that we will continue to exist as a species become less and less. So let’s stop the collective pats on the back and start really looking at why other animals are so smart that they have not needed to improve for very long periods of time.
    And this week:
    What I finally determined was that apparently smart humans were messing with the natural predilections of animals, ... Should we blame the flies for adapting? I blame the allegedly smart humans for confounding their cues.
    Evolutionists often have a real hard time saying that humans are better than animals in any way.

    Saturday, May 17, 2008
     
    American DNA
    Michael Medved writes that Americans are evolving distintive DNA:
    Nevertheless, two respected professors of psychiatry have recently come out with challenging books that contend that those who chose to settle this country in every generation possessed crucial common traits that they passed on to their descendents. In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life. The tiny percentage making that choice (perhaps only 2%, even in most periods of mass immigration) represents the very essence of a self-selecting group. Compared to the Irish or Germans or Italians or Chinese or Mexicans who remained behind in the “Old Country,” the newcomers to America would naturally display a propensity for risk-taking, for restlessness, for exuberance and self-confidence –traits readily passed down to subsequent generations. Whybrow explained to the New York Times Magazine that immigrants to the United States and their descendents seemed to possess a distinctive makeup of their “dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.”

    John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School makes a similar case for an American-specific genotype in “The Hypomanic Edge” -— celebrating the frenzied energy of American life that’s impressed every visitor since Tocqueville. The United States also benefited from our tradition of limited government, with only intermittent and ineffective efforts to suppress the competitive, entrepreneurial instincts of the populace. Professor Whybrow says: “Here you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace. That’s what gives us our peculiar edge.” In other words, “anything goes capitalism” reflects and sustains the influence of immigrant genetics.

    I don't know whether it is observable in DNA, but Americans do appear to have some distinctive qualities.

    Thursday, May 15, 2008
     
    Same-sex marriage decision
    The California Supreme Court has just mandated same-sex marriages by a 4-3 vote. Judge Kennard wrote:
    As the opening words of the Chief Justice’s majority opinion indicate, this case is a continuation of Lockyer. There, this court held that local officials had acted unlawfully by issuing gender-neutral marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the officials made a legal determination that depriving same-sex couples of the right to marry was unconstitutional. ... Here, this court holds that under the state Constitution’s equal protection guarantee, same-sex couples have a right to marry, and that state officials should take all necessary and appropriate steps so that local officials may begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

    From such brief descriptions, these two decisions may appear inconsistent. ... What this court determined to be unlawful in Lockyer, and ordered city officials to

    Rather, this court decided only that local officials lacked authority to decide the constitutional validity of the state marriage statutes and instead should have submitted that question to the judiciary for resolution.

    This decision has many controversial aspects, but for now I'll just note the judicial supremacist nature of it. This court of seven judges is saying that it is the only body that is allowed to interpret the state constitution. That is just wrong. All Californians are responsible for upholding the constitution. The court is just making a political decision about its own political ideologies, and it wants all the power for itself.

    Monday, May 12, 2008
     
    There is no best technology, if you ignore cost
    The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about whether the US EPA should mandate the "best technology available", regardless of any cost-effectiveness analysis. This essay explains why cost-effectiveness analysis ought to be essential to environmentalism.

    Doing a cost-benefit analysis is essential to any engineering problem, and its necessity just seems like common sense. I don't even see how there could ever be a "best technology available", regardless of cost. There is always some way to spend more money to get a slightly better result.

    There are apparently environmentalists who argue against a cost-benefit analysis. This is just more evidence that environmentalism is a big fraud. Anyone serious about improving the environment would want to analyze what will do the most good with the resources available.


    Sunday, May 11, 2008
     
    Narrow-minded law profs
    A dozen feminist law profs have issued this public letter:
    Our objection to honoring Ms. Schlafly instead stems from the fact that she has devoted her career to demagoguery and anti-intellectualism in the pursuit of her political agenda. ...

    Finally, as lawyers and law professors, we are deeply disturbed by Ms. Schlafly’s similarly anti-intellectual campaign against an independent judiciary. Instead of engaging in reasoned debate, she regularly uses the label “activist” to decry judges and decisions with which she happens to disagree. ... she actively participated in the attempt to unseat Missouri Supreme Court Judge Rick Teitelman because of the substance of his judicial decisions.

    We call on the University to rescind its offer of an honorary degree to Ms. Schlafly.

    Other gripes have come from People For the American Way and Katha Pollitt in The Nation magazine.

    Wash. U. points out that it has given honorary degrees to much more controversial political figures, such as Jesse Jackson.

    The complaints are absurd and disengenuous. How can it be "anti-intellectual" to disagree with the substance of some judicial decisions?

    Here is a kooky Crooked Timber blog attack on the degree, rebutted here. There is also a protest page.

    Update: Washington University Chancellor Mark Wrighton has now apologized for the "anguish" suffered by those pathetic law profs.

     
    Quantum crypto broken again
    Here is research from Sweden:
    ScienceDaily (May 11, 2008) — Quantum cryptography has been regarded as 100-percent protection against attacks on sensitive data traffic. But now a research team at Linköping University in Sweden has found a hole in this advanced technology. ...

    But a new technology called quantum cryptography is supposed to be absolutely secure. Thus far, however, very few people have made use of it. It requires special hardware, for example with a type of laser that emits polarized light particles (photons) via optic fiber or through the air. Some companies and banks in Austria are testing the system, and trials are underway with satellite-TV transmission.

    The security is guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. ...

    But Jan-Åke Larsson, associate professor of applied mathematics at Linköping University, working with his student Jörgen Cederlöf, has shown that not even quantum cryptography is 100-percent secure.

    Quantum crypto is a big scam. The security is not guaranteed. The technology has no practical utility. This is just the latest of many weaknesses that have been announced.

    Wednesday, May 07, 2008
     
    National “DNA warehouse” bill passes
    The physician group AAPS reports:
    Passing the House of Representatives on a voice vote, S. 1858 has been sent to President Bush for signature. The Newborn Genetic Screening bill was passed by the Senate last December. ...

    The federal government lacks the Constitutional authority as well as the competence to develop a newborn screening program, states Rep. Ron Paul, M.D. (R-TX). ...

    “Drafters of the legislation made no effort to ensure that these newborn screening programs do not violate the privacy rights of parents and children,” Dr. Paul noted.

    I warned below that the GINA Act was paving the way for DNA privacy invasions.

    Monday, May 05, 2008
     
    Ben Stein's assertions
    Jim Manzi writes:
    Expelled makes two key assertions. First, the scientific establishment has prevented adequate consideration of Intelligent Design (ID). Second, the scientific finding of evolution through natural selection logically entails atheism and nihilism.
    These assertions are indeed dubious, but I didn't notice the movie going that far. I would say instead that the movie asserted that (1) the scientific establishment is incredibly hostile to Intelligent Design (ID), and (2) Darwinism leads many people to atheism and a devaluation of human life.

    I think that the scientific establishment would be better off letting the ID folks say whatever they have to say. At worst, it is just nuttiness that is of the sort that is common in academia anyway.

     
    Relativity was invented before Einstein
    Who Invented Relativity?. It concedes that Einstein really just had a reinterpretation of an existing theory, but Einstein gets most the credit anyway:
    In the context of electro-dynamics, Fitzgerald, Larmor, and Lorentz had all, by the 1890s, arrived at the Lorentz transformations, including all the peculiar "time dilation" and "length contraction" effects (with respect to the transformed coordinates) associated with Einstein's special relativity. By 1905, Poincare had clearly articulated the principle of relativity and many of its consequences, had pointed out the lack of empirical basis for absolute simultaneity, had challenged the ontological significance of the ether, and had even demonstrated that the Lorentz transformations constitute a group in the same sense as do Galilean transformations. ...

    Hardly any of the formulas in Einstein's two 1905 papers on relativity were new, but what Einstein provided was a single conceptual framework within which all those formulas flow quite naturally from a simple set of general principles.

    One of the arguments in favor of Einstein is that he demanded and got credit at the time, while Lorentz and Poincare generously credited others. But this just reflects the fact that Einstein was more of a plagiarizing egomaniac:
    Regarding Born’s impression that Poincare was just “recording Lorentz’s work”, it should be noted that Poincare habitually wrote in a self-effacing manner. He named many of his discoveries after other people, and expounded many important and original ideas in writings that were ostensibly just reviewing the works of others, with “minor amplifications and corrections”. So, we shouldn’t be misled by Born’s impression. Poincare always gave the impression that he was just recording someone else’s work – in contrast with Einstein, whose style of writing, as Born said, “gives you the impression of quite a new venture”.
    The article really gets absurd when it argues that Lorentz and Poincare did not fully understand Relativity. They were regarded as two of the smartest men in Europe, and understood Relativity better than Einstein. It is true that Lorentz and Poincare wrote after 1905 of the possibility of the aether existing, but so did Einstein.

    Saturday, May 03, 2008
     
    Evolutionists preoccupied with motives
    On a legal blog discussing the teaching of Evolution and Intelligent Design (ID) in the schools, someone named Oren wrote:
    I think it's been pretty conclusively shown (Kitzmiller) that ID is and always was religion. Most damning IMO was the revision of "Pandas" in which the word "creation" (and its cognates) was systematically removed to make the book more palatable as non-religious.
    I responded:
    The judge said that this was done in order comply with a Supreme Court decision. Why is it damning to comply with a court decision? Shouldn't everyone try to comply with the law?
    Arnold Asrelsky responded to me:
    Judge Jones did not say that the editors of 'Pandas' changed every instance of 'creationism' to 'Intelligent Design' in order to 'comply' with a Supreme Court decision. The changes were made to hide the fact that the 'new' 'Pandas' presented the same old Creationist text in a disguise meant to deceive the courts, the school boards and the general public. I hope you were making your comment tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise your comment is as deceptive as the 'Panda' editors' and your motives become as suspect as theirs were.

    The wedge document of the Discovery Institute clearly states the its goal is to invalidate materialistic secular science. ID is the chosen term of a massive and well-funded PR campaign to subvert scientific inquiry. ...

    The remarkable thing here is how the leftist-athiest-evolutionists make such unscientific arguments. They pretend to be advancing the cause of science, but they usually base their arguments on dubious mindreading instead of actual facts.

    There are several good arguments against teaching ID in the schools. But these evolutionists focus on the alleged motives of others. They want to read the minds of the Pandas authors, the Discovery Institute, the Dover PA school board, and others who don't buy into the leftist-atheist-evolutionist party line. I made one little comment, and now the guy wants to read my mind!

    The US Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that Louisiana's Creationism Act was unconstitutional. Judge Jones found that the Pandas book was subsequently edited to remove references to creationism, and made inferences about the motives of the Pandas authors. I think that it is bizarre to denigrate folks for complying with a court decision.

    Here is what Judge Jones ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005):

    In Edwards v. Arkansas [sic], 482 U.S. 578 (1987), five years after McLean, the Supreme Court held that a requirement that public schools teach “creation science” along with evolution violated the Establishment Clause. The import of Edwards is that the Supreme Court turned the proscription against teaching creation science in the public school system into a national prohibition. ...

    As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards, which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. ...

    The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates, as noted, that the systemic change from “creation” to “intelligent design” occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court’s important Edwards decision.

    (It is curious that Judge Jone would get the name of his main precedential case wrong; the Edwards case was from Louisiana, not Arkansas. The mistake is not in the ACLU brief he plagiarized.)

    You can draw your own conclusions about why the Pandas authors revised their terminology. The simplest explanation is that they were trying to comply with a court decision.

    It is also a little bizarre to say that there is a "massive and well-funded PR campaign to subvert scientific inquiry". Whatever you think of the Discovery Institute, it is a tiny operation that has not spent one cent to subvert scientific inquiry.


    Friday, May 02, 2008
     
    Congress passes Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA)
    Russell Korobkin makes a good point when he says that Amy, Beth, and Cindy may have the exact same cancer risk, and yet GINA forces insurance companies to discriminate between them. This seems unfair and economically inefficient to me. But he loses me here:
    Exceptions should be permitted to allow insurers to surcharge customers who engage in risky activities within their individual control, such as smoking.
    He defends his op-ed here.

    This is the really insidious part of Korobkin's ideology. He wants the govt to decide what behavior you ought to be correcting.

    There is no consensus about what is under your individual control. Recent research has shown that some smokers may have a gene that makes it very difficult for them to quit. Likewise, some obese people seem to be unable to lose weight. Many physical conditions can be ameliorated by actions that people are unable or unwilling to do. Does Korobkin really want the govt or the insurance company to distinguish "unable" from "unwilling"? It just cannot be done, with today's medical knowledge. It is like trying to separate nature and nuture; you can do it for a few things, but you cannot do it for most things.

    It is amazing that there was no opposition to GINA. It is a horrible law that will waste health care dollars, create inequities, and ultimately be unworkable because it requires insurance companies to make distinctions that cannot be made. Ron Paul was the only one to vote against it.

    I also commented on this law below.


    Wednesday, Apr 30, 2008
     
    Ex-priest gets evolution religion
    Cornelia Dean writes in the NY Times:
    Dr. Ayala said he remained surprised at how many Americans believe the theory of evolution is contrary to belief in God, or that the theory is erroneous or even fraudulent. (In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.)
    I pointed out before that Ms. Dean likes to put that last silly sentence in all her evolution articles.

    The point of the story of the story is that Ms. Dean found an ex-priest evolutionist and creationism basher named Francisco J. Ayala who refuses to bash religion. Not until the end of the article does she reveal that this ex-priest refuses to say whether he is a religious believer.

    How is this news? Ayala is obviously an atheist. When an ex-priest still believes in God, he is never embarrassed to admit it. Evolutionism is his new religion.

     
    Evolutionists are lying again
    The Bad Astronomer brags about an NCSE fundraising video in which Eugenie Scott supposedly proves that Ben Stein is a liar in the movie Expelled.

    This video is just the sort of narrow-minded evolutionist propaganda that Stein's movie ridicules. He could have put it in his movie.

    The video's main pitch is that the evil forces of religion, possibly disguised as Intelligent Design (ID), have erupted in several places around the country, and Scott closes by saying that, "NCSE is going to be there until the last fire is out".

    This is similar to what Scott and her allies say in Expelled. The evolutionists want to expel any academic discussion of ID.

    The main piece of evidence in Scott's video was a draft of a pro-ID book that made some editorial changes in order to comply with a US Supreme Court decision. It is a stupid point. There is nothing wrong with trying to comply with a court decision.

    The NCSE video also says:

    The Dover Penn was trying to push an Intelligent Design textbook into the science classrooms. ...

    In Kansas, the school board voted to delete evolution from the curriculum.

    No, these statements are not true. No ID book was put into the classrooms. The school merely put a few copies in the school library, and had an administrator read a statement to some ninth-graders that included:
    Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
    ID was not taught beyond this. No teacher taught it. No student was required to read anything about ID, and no student was examined on it.

    Kansas never voted to delete evolution. Even the leftist-evolutionist NY Times, which as extremely critical of Kansas, said that the most significant shift was an obscure philosophical detail in the definition of Science. Evolution remained in the Kansas curriculum at all times.

    It is really striking how much energy the evolutionists devote to declaring the anti-evolutionists as liars, and trying to expel them from schools. But the evolutionists cannot even tell the truth in their attacks. I am not saying that ID is right or that Evolution is wrong. I just think that scientists should be more accurate and broad-minded. They should not be afraid of ID or Christian religion.

     
    Who is the real BHO?
    Todd Zywicki writes:
    Obama seems like an extremely decent guy.
    Not to me. He appears to have a very long history of anti-American views and associates. Some of the criticisms of Obama seem unfair in isolation, but Obama's defense is alarmingly weak. Who is the real Obama? Is he a kook like Wright who has cleaned up his language in order to play the role of a mainstream politician, as Wright suggested? The voters need to know.

    Tuesday, Apr 29, 2008
     
    Reviewing a movie without seeing it
    John Derbyshire writes:
    So what’s going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? No, I haven’t seen the dang thing. I’ve been reading about it ..., and I can’t believe it would yield up many surprises on an actual viewing. It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism.
    These sorts of reviews pretty much prove the point of the movie. The evolutionists have a hatred and a hostility towards any critics that is irrational. Derbyshire's description of the movie is grossly inaccurate, but he doesn't case. He attacks it as a medieval monk might attack blasphemy. He should have watched the movie before making a fool out of himself.

    Monday, Apr 28, 2008
     
    Funny election comment
    Here is a Dane's view of our presidential election.

    I am getting a little tired of all the Obama supporters who argued that criticism of Rev. Wright is racist. It is Rev. Wright who is racist, but that is not even the worst thing about him. He is anti-American.


    Saturday, Apr 26, 2008
     
    Genetic Discrimination law is not so great

    PBS TV reports
    Senate Votes to Prevent Genetic Discrimination in the Workplace

    As research of preventative genetic testing increases, many fear the impact this information can have on employment and health-insurance practices -- leading the Senate to vote Thursday to ban genetic-based discrimination. An expert on genetics examines the issue. ...

    FRANCIS COLLINS, National Human Genome Research Institute: Well, you could say this is the bill for people with DNA, and that would be all of us, because that's our instruction book. It's also the bill for people with DNA that has glitches in it, and that would also be all of us.

    We all have little places in our instruction book, places at risk for something, some of them fairly dramatic, some of them less so.

    The idea that that information, which none of us get to choose, which you simply inherit from your parents, might be used to deny you coverage, in terms of health care, or to be used in a way that would deny you access to a job or a promotion is really not a comfortable situation for people to contemplate. And that's been pretty clear now for more than a decade.

    And so the real solution here really required this kind of legislation that would say, "That information just ought to be off the table when those decisions are being made."

    I believe that this is profoundly mistaken. He acts like genetic discrimination is all harmful, but it would help as many people as it would hurt.

    If people were really concerned about the potential discrimination that might result from medical tests, then they would also be reluctant to get other diagnostic tests, such cholesterol and blood pressure measurements, colonoscopy, etc. Maybe some are, and pay for these things out-of-pocket so that the results are not reported, I don't know. Those same people could pay for the genetic tests out-of-pocket if they wanted to. No, I think that the public reluctance to get genetic tests is more because of a privacy issue than a discrimination issue.

    The real effect of this law is to allow the govt to compile vast privacy-invading DNA databases. There will be propaganda that they are for your own good, but they will surely be used in the future for criminal profiling and for medical benefits rationing.

    A truly consumer-oriented law would give citizens privacy rights over their genetic info. Then we could decide for ourselves how the info is to be used.  


    Wednesday, Apr 23, 2008
     
    Obsolete Trademarks
    Here is a list of terms that are commonly used by millions of people in a generic way. Each of these was used by a manufacturer to describe its products, but it was not able to convince everyone to restrict usage to the manner defined by the company. I use them in a generic sense.
    • band-aid
    • elevator
    • escalator
    • xerox
    • nylon
    • kleenex
    • velcro
    • coke
    • playboy, playmate
    • windows
    • wired
    • Q-tip
    • monopoly
    • coke, cola
    • yo-yo
    • thermos
    • cellophane
    • aspirin
    • baby oil
    • hoagie
    • trampoline
    • linoleum
    • levi's
    • formica
    • walkman
    • tupperware
    • rollerblade
    • post-it
    • styrofoam
    • unix
    • google
    For example, if I say to google something, I just mean to look it up on your favorite web search engine.

    Tuesday, Apr 22, 2008
     
    Quote mining Darwin
    One of the main complaints against the Expelled movie is that it misquotes Darwin just as William Jennings Bryan did in the 1925 Scopes Trial!

    The quote talks about "degeneration" of the human race, and says, "hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

    In Darwin's Descent of Man, he has a discussion of what he thinks about breeding humans for the better. After the supposedly out-of-context quote, Darwin compares intentionally neglecting the weak and helpless to a surgeon cutting out a tumor, and says that such a present evil should only be done for "contingent benefit". While he does not advocate genocide or anything like that, he does support policies that discourage the "weak in body or mind" from marriage and reproduction.

    I don't think the movie misquoted Darwin. It did not argue that Darwin personally advocated anything like the Nazi Holocaust. The movie does suggest that Darwinism leads to eugenics and a devaluation of human life. For that, the quote seems fair to me.


    Monday, Apr 21, 2008
     
    31 shootings in gun-free city
    Chicago Illinois news:
    In an especially violent weekend, no less than 31 people have been shot in Chicago -- six fatally -- and two people have been stabbed since noon Friday. The shooting victims range in age from 12 to 65.

    On Friday, 15 people were shot -- four fatally -- between noon Friday and midnight Saturday, police said. ...

    The violence continued Saturday, as 13 more people were shot -- two fatally. ...

    On Sunday, police have reported three shootings -- none of which were fatal -- and a stabbing that critically injured two people.

    They now say there were 36 shootings, and 9 dead. Law abiding Chicagoans are forbidden to have handguns to defend themselves.

    Update: John Lott has some dataa on gun-free zones being unsafe.


    Sunday, Apr 20, 2008
     
    New anti-evolutionism movie
    I just watched the new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It was much better than I expected. It was odd to see an obscure documentary in a mainstream movie theater along with mass-market movies.

    The movie was not objective. It was over-the-top propaganda in places. At least that was done in an amusing way, like a Michael Moore movie. Here is the movie web site, Wikipedia page, the Conservapedia page.

    The movie succeeds in explaining how many prominent evolutionists regard Evolutionism, Science, and Atheism as all one big noble cause, and how they have utter comtempt for anyone who attends church, believes in God, or mentions Intelligent Design in a positive way. Evolutionists will adamantly assert that God had absolutely nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth, but when pressed, they have to admit that there is no scientific theory for the origin of life.

    The movie has received extremely negative reviews. Here is a typical negative review:

    Look, I don't know what people don't understand about Evolution. And apparently the makers of this film don't' understand what they are debating. Evolution is one of the most elegant and beautiful theories ever conceived in science. And before you tell me its just a theory, Gravity is just a "theory" too. The truth is, there is NO debate ABSOLUTELY NONE in the scientific community about the origin of life. Get it straight, do you own research before you try to disprove gravity. There is a good reason why idiots who try to question Darwinism gets silenced, its like questioning if gravity exists. Maybe if the proponents of intelligent design came up with some credible proof and observations, they would be accepted.

    This film is a propaganda film to support the views of the ill informed masses. Remember, science is to find out the truth, regardless of the repercussions of such knowledge. And if you don't believe in the highly logical process of science and you believe the quest for truth should be adulterated, this is the movie for you.

    Evolution is a fine theory, but it really says nothing about the origin of life. This guy wants to silence critics in the name of Science, but he is not defending science at all. He is defending notions about the origin of life that have no scientific basis. Real scientists would have no need to silence critics anyway.

    The movie also does a very good job of explaining why many people do not like the theory of evolution. They do not object to the hard science, but they do not like the way evolutionism leads to eugenics, atheism, and various other philosophies such as life having no purpose and humans having no free will. Most of all, the movie ridicules the way evolutionists are so extremely intolerant of any criticism that they think might have a religious motivation. Eg, Richard Dawkins says that Intelligent Design might be okay if the designer is a extraterrestial being who evolved on another planet, but not if the designer is God. The God of the Bible is evil, he explains.

    The movie does not promote Intelligent Design as being valid or correct, but merely argues that scientists should treat it just like any other theory, and not try to get scientists fired for merely mentioning the phrase. (I am not promoting Intelligent Design. But I do think that scientists should let Intelligent Design stand on its own merits, and not try to censor it.)

    The NY Times also gave the movie a scathing review:

    One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry. ...

    Prominent evolutionary biologists, like the author and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins — accurately identified on screen as an “atheist” — are provided solely to construct, in cleverly edited slices, an inevitable connection between Darwinism and godlessness.

    Yes it is cleverly edited, and I can see why Dawkins hates the movie, but Dawkins says the same stuff that he says in his books and lectures. It seemed fair to me.

    The NY Times also attacked the movie in last September and in March.

    If you saw the movie and you still don't believe that evolutionists have a passionate hatred for anyone who deviates from the party line, just look at all these viscious reviews, or at Eugenie Scott's site. They cannot find anything that is actually wrong with the movie, but it sure struck a nerve, and they are angry about it.

    The other new movie I've seen recently was 21. It claimed to be based on a true story, but it was grotesquely distorted and turned into an awful movie. I had high hopes for it early on as it tried to portray MIT, and it even tried to explain a little probability lesson. But then it was all fiction, and not even very entertaining fiction. The true story of the MIT blackjack card counting team would have been a much better movie.


    Saturday, Apr 19, 2008
     
    Gore-Lieberman
    The NY Times writes:
    Imagine for a moment the Supreme Court had gone the other way in Bush v. Gore in 2000. We would now be in year eight of the Gore-Lieberman administration. Well, maybe not the Lieberman part.
    Maybe not the Gore part either. Any other ruling from the Supreme Court in 2000 would have resulted in a Florida recount, and under most of the scenarios identified by the independent reporters, Bush would have won that recount. Even if Gore had won the recount, it probably would not have been in time to stop a Bush slate of electors being sent to Washington, so a narrowly divided Congress would have had to resolve the conflict. Bush might still have won.

    The article also assumes that a Pres. Gore would not have invaded Iraq. But that is not known. As explained here, Gore position on the Iraq War in 2002 was actually very similar to what Bush actually did.

    I just learned that the one of the iceberg scenes in An Inconvenient Truth was lifted from a science fiction movie. It was computer generated.

     
    The Lawyers' Party
    A reader sends this essay by Bruce Walker:
    The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.) Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Benson, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

    The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

    Yes. It is funny how little the Lawyer's Party has to say about the law. I don't hear Obama or Clinton telling us what kind of judges they will appoint, or what is wrong with the decisions from the Republican-appointed judges.

    Friday, Apr 18, 2008
     
    Platypus-ian personality
    Hans Reiser's defense lawyer gave this speech in court:
    Hans’ conduct can be interpreted as being guilty. It can also be interpreted as innocence, and a product of his own platypus-ian personality, as we will see. He is odd in every way. Odd in the way he carries himself. Odd in the way he acts. Odd in the way he speaks. Why did he act the way he acts? He does not understand social cues. He shows almost no emotion is because he has no emotion. He is the duck-billed platypus of criminal defendants, the duck-billed platypus amongst some of his peers, the duck-billed platypus amongst normal people. Yet he must get the same consideration under the law. … My client is an ugly and unlovable platypus who did not kill his wife.
    He needs a better lawyer.

    Thursday, Apr 17, 2008
     
    Blocked again
    A Wikipedia editor under the name of FeloniousMonk has blocked me again. He has a personal grudge against me. He did not even say whether there was anything wrong with my edits, except that he personally does not like me making them.

    Update: Now the guys who were attacking me have admitted that my edits were correct, and have put them back in. But I am still blocked.

    Update: I am blocked again, this time for 72 hours.


    Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008
     
    Physics is more scientific than medicine
    GNXP cites a study showing that a lot of people think that medicine is more scientific than physics. Only the more educated people realize that physics is more scientific. Physicists gain new knowledge by doing scientific experiments. Some medical researchers do this also, but the vast majority of physicians do not. They are more like engineers in that they apply knowledge that was learned by others.

    I wonder how people could think that medicine is more scientific. Perhaps it is because there are often news stories about how some medical study has shown that some belief is wrong or that some drug is harmful. It is a sign of scientific thinking that medicos are willing to revise their opinions based on empirical evidence.

    On the other hand, physicists who promote their subject to the general public are usually talking about string theory or alternate universes or extraterrestial life or something else that is completely disconnected from reality.


    Monday, Apr 14, 2008
     
    Magazine trashes movie
    SciAm magazine
    You wouldn't expect Scientific American to take a particularly positive view of a movie that espouses intelligent design over evolutionary biology. Then again, you wouldn’t expect the producers of said film—in this case, Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—to offer the editors of said magazine a private screening.
    So it has several bad reviews of the movie.

    This reminds me of when the magazine had several reviews trashing an evironmentalist book by Bjorn Lomborg. It would not be worth multiple bad reviews if it were just bad or wrong. It has to contain some dangerous truths to get this sort of treatment.

    I haven't seen the movie, and I expect it to be a one-sided polemic. But it is a little strange for a science magazine to complain that the movie did not mention the Wedge document. That document was an obscure essay that leftist-atheist-evolutionists always cite because they argue that it proves that any resistance to evolutionism is grounded in some sort of evil religious beliefs. It is funny to hear a science magazine recite such a goofy conspiracy theory.


    Sunday, Apr 13, 2008
     
    Not like the Americans that I know
    Sen. Hillary Clinton said, referring to Sen. Barack Obama's stupid comment about bitter Penn. citizens clinging to guns and religion:
    Senator Obama's remarks are elitist and are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know.
    I think that the key to beating Obama will be to portray him as unamerican. He was born in Hawaii. His father was a Kenyan and a commie. His mother was also an extreme leftist. He grew up in Indonesia. He has a Mohammedan name, and 10% of the population thinks that he is a moslem. He sought out and joined an ant-American church. There are widely-circulated pictures of him disrespecting the American flag. He brags about opposing the American decision to fight the Iraq War. His wife made $300k per year and still was not proud to be an American. He distances himself from typical white people.

    Some of these criticisms are unfair, but they add up to an image that will make Obama unelectable. Obama needs to convince the public that he is a patriotic American, but he is failing miserably.


    Saturday, Apr 12, 2008
     
    The Day the Earth Stood Still
    This year brings a big-budget Hollywood remake of the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original movie was about an invading space alien who commanded us to destroy our weapons. The alien race themselves had been enslaved by robots that they had built, and humans were to be also enslaved. This was portrayed as a good thing, because the alien was a Christ-like figure who taught peace. The movie was immensely popular among the sort of people who thought that the United Nations should take over nuclear stockpiles.

    Now we learn that the remake is going to be based on the hazards of global warming. Why would robots from outer space care if Earth's temperature goes up a couple of degrees? Will they really try to portray robot enslavement as a good thing? I have a feeling that this movie will be a disaster. It will be ill-conceived from the start, like the remakes of King Kong and War of the Worlds.


    Friday, Apr 11, 2008
     
    Evolution not used in medicine
    Mike the mad biologist writes:
    I've recently written a couple of posts about how evolution is used in medicine. ... For instance, certain cases of HIV could be traced back to a specific Florida dentist ... Researchers in every area of medicine use phylogenetic methods to analyze genetic data.
    What he is trying to say is that ever time some scientist makes some deduction about some organism using DNA sequences, then he is using evolutionary biology techniques.

    But Darwin knew nothing about DNA and no Darwinian principle is being applied here. Whether or not humans are descended from apes, or natural selection causes new species to arise, or any of that has no relation to any of the research mentioned. I guess these articles are posted to try to get people to believe in evolution, but they do not do that at all.


    Tuesday, Apr 08, 2008
     
    Flaws in cognitive dissonance theory
    NY Times John Tierney has another column. He quotes M. Keith Chen:
    I go through this in detail in my working paper on cognitive dissonance, but the basic intuition behind how these studies ignore what people’s choices teach is pretty easy to see. All of the studies I talk about take as their basic model a famous and incredibly influential experiment by Jack Brehm in 1956; the first study, in fact, which psychologists took to demonstrate cognitive dissonance. In Brehm’s study and its modern variants, subjects are first asked to rate or rank a bunch of goods based on how much they like them. Then, subjects are offered a choice between two of the goods they just rated, and are told they can take the good they choose home with them as payment for the study. They are then asked to re-rate all of the original goods; cognitive dissonance theory suggests that people would have a better opinion of the good they choose after choosing it than before. ...

    What we’ve found so far, is that the problem is real; you can show that these studies, as they have been run, will measure lot of “cognitive dissonance” when there is none.

    I commented before that I think that the problem with the psychological theory cognitive dissonance is faulty mind-reading. Psychologists brag that the theory is their best theory of the last century, but I don't think that their experiments prove much.

    Monday, Apr 07, 2008
     
    Professor calls for tax on 'poison' butter
    A New Zealand paper reports:
    A top public health expert is calling for a health tax on butter, saying it's "pure, natural poison" and as bad as cigarettes.

    New Zealanders eat more butter per head than any other nationality and Auckland University epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson says that's why our cholesterol levels are also among the world's highest.

    "We have a health tax on alcohol and cigarettes and there should be a health tax on butter. It's the most poisonous commonly consumed food in New Zealand. It's about the purest form of saturated fat you can eat and it has no protein and no calcium. Butter has had all the good things taken out and just left the poison."

    Poison? Butter is one of the healthiest foods you can eat.

    Wednesday, Apr 02, 2008
     
    Anonymous Google searches
    Ever want to do a Google search without using your Google cookie? You could delete your cookie or use a meta-search engine. Another alternative is to use a domain that just happens to be parked at Google's IP address. Here are a few. There are many others. As a side benefit, you don't get any Google ads.

    Tuesday, Apr 01, 2008
     
    Professing evolution
    Which Presidential candidate said this?
    I believe in evolution.
    Those exact same words came from McCain, Clinton, and Obama. I guess they all agree!

    More likely, it has just become another meaningless aphorism, like believing in climate change. Some science activists here this stuff, and go away happy.


    Monday, Mar 31, 2008
     
    Rev. Wright and black paranoia
    I just watched this exchange on Fox News:
    Marc Lamont Hill, Prof of urban studies at Temple Univ: Bill what you have to look at is not just whether or not it is true or not -- altho that is important -- but you also have to look at the historical legacy of America doing these very things.

    Bill O'Reilly: They don't do those very things. They've never done those very things.

    Hill: Let me tell you how they have. We may both agree that the govt didn't give black people HIV but we certainly know they gave black men syphilis during the Tuskegee experiment.

    O'Reilly: Doesn't make any difference. Every country has done things in their past that you can justify insane remarks and actions now. That's fallacious thinking. You know that.

    This was the third TV news channel I've seen that showed some black scholar and Obama apologist claim that the govt infected blacks with syphilis, no one disputed it!

    No one was deliberately infected. The Tuskegee study was a completely legitimate study when it began in 1932. There was no effective treatement for syphilis at the time. For more info, see The Truth About Tuskegee. The only complaint is that a few dozen of them might have been helped by penicillin when that became available in the late 1940s.

    A reader argues that a syphilis treatment was described in the 1940 Hollywood movie, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet , reviewed here. It told how Paul Ehrlich (no relation to the population bomb guy) used an arsenic-based drug to treat syphilis, but went on trial when a lot of his patients died of poisoning.

    Yes, there were treatments for syphilis before antibiotics, and the whole point of the Tuskegee experiment was to measure their effectiveness and side effects. I think that there was a group that got the drugs, a group that did not, and a group that did not even have syphilis. This type of scientific study is done on all new drugs today, and it is the main way in which we learn whether drugs really work.

    The study should have been terminated earlier than it was, but otherwise it was a good study.

    John responds:

    The movie does portray Ehrlich's treatment for syphilis as toxic and dangerous. Some of his patients died, and Ehrlich was accused of professional misconduct for exposing them to unreasonable risk of harm. After a trial (or perhaps it was a form of peer review) instigated by his jealous colleagues, my recollection is that Ehrlich was exonerated after demonstrating that the treatment was beneficial despite the risks. I think Ehrlich demonstrated his confidence by subjecting himself to his own experimental treatment and thereby injured himself.

    In any case, the movie portrays Ehrlich as a hero and visionary who made major discoveries in medicine, and whose magic bullet, despite risks, was a major advance in treatment for an otherwise intractable disease. So I would dispute the claim that there was no effective treatment for syphilis in 1932.

     
    The Manufacture of Uncertainty
    Journalist ("war on science") Chris Mooney writes:
    The sabotage of science is now a routine part of American politics. The same corporate strategy of bombarding the courts and regulatory agencies with a barrage of dubious scientific information has been tried on innumerable occasions -- and it has nearly always worked, at least for a time. Tobacco. Asbestos. Lead. Vinyl chloride. Chromium. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Atrazine. Benzene. Beryllium. Mercury. Vioxx. And on and on. ...

    The 1998 Data Access Act (or "Shelby Amendment") and the 2001 Data Quality Act, both originally a glint in Big Tobacco's eye, enable companies to get the data behind publicly funded studies and help them challenge research that might serve as the basis for regulatory action. Meanwhile, the 1993 Supreme Court decision in the little-known Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals case further facilitates the strategy, unwisely empowering trial court judges to determine what is and what isn't good science in civil cases. Under Daubert, judges have repeatedly spiked legitimate expert witnesses who were otherwise set to testify about the dangers demonstrated by epidemiological research. Often juries don't even hear the science any more because the defense can get it thrown out pre-trial.

    It's all about questioning the science to gum up the works.

    Mooney is conducting his own war on science. Real scientists are happy to release the raw data behind their studies, and do not mind at all when other re-examine the data.

    If Mooney likes these science lawsuits so much, then he should love this one:

    The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment.
    This lawsuit sounds wacky, but it is the direct consequence of string theorists and other physicists making outlandish claims, and people like Mooney wanting courts to hear those claims.

    Friday, Mar 28, 2008
     
    Newt Gingrich attacks judicial supremacy
    A Big Win for Judicial Supremacy, a Big Loss for Government Language Lawyers and Another Example of Real Change
    by Newt Gingrich

    Parents "do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children."

    So wrote a California judge in a case that has ominous potential for the estimated one million-plus American families who have opted out of the public education monopoly and choose to educate their children at home.

    Although the ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court, as it now stands, the 166,000 California children who are home schooled are truant, and their parents are criminals. Welcome, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to a "strange new chapter" in the "annals of judicial imperialism."

    Glad to see Gingrich has adopted terminology from The Supremacists.

    Thursday, Mar 27, 2008
     
    Have peacock tails lost their sexual allure?
    NewScientist reports:
    Was Darwin wrong about the sexual allure of the peacock's tail? A controversial study has found no evidence for the traditional view – practically enshrined in evolutionary lore – that peahens choose their partners depending on the quality of the peacocks' tails.

    Mariko Takahashi and Toshikazu Hasegawa at the University of Tokyo in Japan studied peacocks and peahens in Izu Cactus Park, Shizuoka, from 1995 to 2001.

    They judged tail quality in two ways – first by simply measuring tail length, and secondly by taking photos of each male during the tail-fanning display ritual and counting the number of eyespots. Next they examined whether females chose mates with the best-quality tails.

    During the seven years of observation, Takahashi's team observed 268 successful matings. But surprisingly, they found that females mated with poor-quality peacocks as often as with "flashy", high-quality males.

    They conclude that the peacock's train is not the object of female sexual preference – contradicting Darwin's theory of sexual selection.

    This does not disprove Darwin, but it is striking that no one has successfully demonstrated the theory for peacock tails.
     
    Larry Niven suggests spreading rumors
    Here are some science fiction writers, giving advice:
    Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

    “The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

    “Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked.

    “I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.


    Wednesday, Mar 26, 2008
     
    Science and Unobservable Things
    Cosmologist Sean Carroll writes that it is crazy to restrict science to observing things and making predictions:
    If making predictions were all that mattered, we would have stopped doing particle physics some time around the early 1980’s. ...

    There is also a less rosy possibility, which may very well come to pass: that we develop more than one theory that fits all of the experimental data we know how to collect, such that they differ in specific predictions that are beyond our technological reach. That would, indeed, be too bad. But at the moment, we seem to be in little danger of this embarrassment of theoretical riches. We don’t even have one theory that reconciles gravity and quantum mechanics while matching cleanly onto our low-energy world, or a comprehensive model of the early universe that explains our initial conditions. If we actually do develop more than one, science will be faced with an interesting kind of existential dilemma that doesn’t have a lot of precedent in history. (Can anyone think of an example?) But I’m not losing sleep over this possibility; and in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to develop at least one such idea.

    No, he has a crazy view of science. We do have a good theory that reconciles gravity and quantum mechanics at low-energies. All that is missing is predictions about very high energy events that we cannot observe anyway.

    The history of science is filled with examples of multiple theories that fit the experimental data. The geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system. The wave and particle theories of light. The Copenhagen and many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. The asteroid and volcano theories for dinosaur extinction. The big bang and inflation models of the early universe.

    These guys want to believe in a one true theory the way others want to believe in a one true God. Science is all about observations and predictions. Once the scientists get away from that, then they are doing philosophy or mysticism or something else.


    Tuesday, Mar 25, 2008
     
    Informed vaccine skepticism
    Michelle Malkin defends vaccine skepticism:
    As I’ve said before, I am no anti-vaccine hysteric ... But I have refused to be coerced or bullied into anything regarding our kids’ health–and that includes vaccines.

    Does that make parents like me “sociopaths?” Better than being unquestioning, blind sheeple immediately abdicating parental responsibility whenever anyone in hospital scrubs invokes “the public good.”

    An ethical physician would not try to coerce a decision. He just recommends and the patient decides. If a physician tries to coerce you, you should fire him. The same goes for a lawyer, plumber, or any other professional.

    There is a long history of people getting better vaccines because of informed vaccine skepticism among consumers. Eg, see my article, Is Vaccination Dissent Dangerous?. Do not let anyone convince you that you are acting against the public good somehow.

    And it is not true that science has proved the vaccine skeptics wrong. I skipped most of the vaccines for my kids, and most of those vaccines have since been taken off the market because of safety concerns.

     
    Klaatu barada nikto
    Hollywood is giving us some new global warming propaganda:
    With mankind’s first uncertain steps into the atomic age comes a warning from beyond the stars: cease your fighting and your wars or you will be destroyed. “The decision rests with you,” Klaatu says by way of farewell at the end of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a classic of Cold War science-fiction from 1951.

    Fifty years later and Klaatu has a new message for humanity, but one with equally dire consequences should we choose to ignore it, Keanu Reeves, who is playing the alien in Scott Derrickson’s upcoming remake, told MTV News.

    “The first one was borne out of the cold war and nuclear détente. Klaatu came and was saying cease and desist with your violence. If you can’t do it yourselves we’re going to do it. That was the film of that day,” Reeves explained. “The version I was just working on, instead of being man against man, it’s more about man against nature. My Klaatu says that if the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the earth survives. I’m a friend to the earth.”

    Sounds like a bomb. In the original movie, the space alien brags about how they are all slaves to robots. Terminator robots have taken over their world, and the movie portrays that as a good thing!

    Monday, Mar 17, 2008
     
    Good science considers costs and benefits
    The NY Times makes one of its usual claims that the Bush administration is anti-science:
    In the Bush administration, contests between politics and science are usually resolved in favor of politics.

    The big surprise was Mr. Johnson’s proposal to rewrite the Clean Air Act to allow regulators to take costs into account when setting air quality standards. Since this would permanently devalue the role of science ...

    Economic considerations — costs and benefits — can be taken into account in figuring out a reasonable timetable for achieving the standards. But only science can shape the standards themselves.

    Congress wrote the law this way because it believed that air quality standards must be based on rigorous scientific study alone and that science would be the sure loser unless insulated from special interests.

    No, it is crazy to think that air quality standards can be defined by science alone, without considering costs and benefits. And even if it were possible, it would be foolish.

    Air is not perfectly clean, and it never will be. Getting cleaner air is a matter of costs and benefits. It is not anti-science to say that; science should help inform us of those costs and benefits.

     
    DC gun case argued tomorrow
    Dahlia Lithwick writes in Newsweek and Slate:
    The Supreme Court determined in 1939, in United States v. Miller, that an individual right to a gun had no "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia," and thus the Second Amendment did not confer individual rights to gun ownership. The court followed with seven decades of constitutional radio silence on the subject, either reaffirming Miller in a whisper or declining to hear new cases. So much radio silence created an assumption that the debate was over: There was simply no individual right protected by the Second Amendment. This led former Solicitor General Erwin Griswold to insist: "[T]hat the Second Amendment poses no barrier to strong gun laws is perhaps the most well-settled proposition in American Constitutional law." Time and again the lower federal courts of appeals followed the Miller line until it appeared the question was settled there, as well.
    No, that is not what the Court said. Here is the full paragraph:
    In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
    The constitutionality of a law taxing the interstate transfer of short-barrelled shotgun was being challenged. The law was justified based on such guns being gangster guns that Al Capone might use, but which had no legitimate purpose. The court could not find a legitimate military purpose, and remanded the case back to the lower court. (The defendant was not present to argue his case, or he might have pointed out that such guns were indeed used by the Army in World War I.)

    The point here is that it is just not true that the court ruled against the 2A being an individual right. It only ruled that militarily-useless gangster guns could be taxed.

    Update: Here is another criticism of Lithwick's account of this case. Volokh explains that she is just another goofy leftist who rants about conservatives being hypocrites, even when her accusations don't make any sense.


    Friday, Mar 14, 2008
     
    The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford
    Science writer John Horgan writes:
    Noting that World War I left Rutherford deeply suspicious about the morality and competence of political and military leaders, Reeves said he suspects that Rutherford actually recognized the potential of nuclear fission but was trying to discourage governments from pursuing it. Reeves suggested that Einstein and Bohr publicly expressed skepticism about nuclear power for similar reasons. In fact, the three men, who knew each other well, may have privately agreed to take this stance.
    This is crazy. None of those physicists had any idea in the 1930s that nuclear power was possible, except for Leo Szilard.

    Thursday, Mar 13, 2008
     
    Smurfing
    I did not know that structuring federal crime. If you have ever written a check for $9k, you may have committed it.

    Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008
     
    More on California homeschooling
    The recent homeschooling California court decision illustrates the folly of judicial supremacists. It takes one particular homeschooling case, and tries to generalize to ban most homeschooling. In doing so, it makes at least two major errors.

    The opinion relies heavily on an obscure 1953 case, People v Turner:

    In Turner, the court affirmed a judgment of conviction of parents who refused to send their children to public school and instead provided them with instruction that did not come within the exemptions to the compulsory public school education law. The appellant parents were convicted of violating former section 16601, a predecessor to current section 48200. Former sections 16624, and 16625 provided exemptions for children attending private full-time day school and children being educated by a person holding a valid teaching credential, but the parents did not make use of the exemptions.
    So the 1953 case differs from that of today's California homeschoolers, as most of them make use of the statutory exemptions.

    Here is the second serious error:

    The court stated that a simple reading of the statutes governing private schools and home instruction by private tutors shows the Legislature intended to distinguish the two, for if a private school includes a parent or private tutor instructing a child at home, there would be no purpose in writing separate legislation for private instruction at home.
    The flaw is that the tutor exemption does not specify "home instruction by private tutors", but rather instruction "for at least three hours a day for 175 days each calendar year" by a credentialed tutor.

    California homeschoolers use one of three alternatives:

    1. They can register their home as a full-time private school.
    2. They can hire a credentialed tutor for three hours a day.
    3. They can do independent study under the supervision of the local public school.
    Now the court is arguing that the second alternative has no purpose. But it seems to me that it has obvious and useful purposes, such as accommodating child actors in Hollywood. They cannot attend school full-time, but they can get three hours of tutoring a day, and they can afford to pay for a professional. In that situation, it makes sense to require the tutor to be credentialed.

    Thus the choice of a registered full-time home school or three hours a day of credentialed tutoring seems reasonable to me. These judges may not have even known anything about these alternatives. The actual case was a kid under the supervision of a private Christian school, and that is a different matter from most homeschoolers.


    Tuesday, Mar 11, 2008
     
    Identical twins have different DNA
    The US NIH National Human Genome Research Institute says:
    Most of any one person's DNA, some 99.9 percent, is exactly the same as any other person's DNA. (Identical twins are the exception, with 100 percent similarity). Differences in the sequence of DNA among individuals are called genetic variation.
    The NY Times says that this is wrong:
    But according to new research, though identical twins share very similar genes, identical they are not. ...

    The specific changes that Dr. Dumanski and his colleagues identified are known as copy number variations, in which a gene exists in multiple copies, or a set of coding letters in DNA is missing. Not known, however, is whether these changes in identical twins occur at the embryonic level, as the twins age or both.

    That 99.9% figure is not right either; according to Craig Venter, it is only about 98%.

    Today's NY Times also reports on new evidence that Flores Man was really just a human being, and not an exotic Missing Link as many evolutionists have claimed. See also Science Daily.


    Monday, Mar 10, 2008
     
    The end of the Earth
    The NY Times reports:
    If nature is left to its own devices, about 7.59 billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death. That is the forecast according to new calculations by a pair of astronomers, Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Connon Smith of the University of Sussex in England.

    Their report, to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is the latest and gloomiest installment yet in a long-running debate about the ultimate fate of our planet.

    Dr. Smith called the new result “a touch depressing” in a series of e-mail messages.

    This sounds like a joke. The idea that the Earth, and human life on it, will last for 7 billion more years is incredibly optimistic.
     
    The great theorists
    Science writer John Horgan writes:
    But I have an admission to make. Although I give lip service to the importance of experiment, my knowledge of physics history is skewed toward theory, the work of Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bethe, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Weinberg. I didn’t realize how ignorant I was of genuine, nitty-gritty, experimental physics until I read A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford. I was astounded by what Rutherford accomplished with his astonishingly simple, clever tabletop experiments, which confirmed the existence of atomic nuclei as well as illuminating phenomena such as radioactivity, fission, fusion and transmutation. Reeves argues persuasively that Rutherford contributed as much to the advance of physics in the early 20th century as Einstein did.
    Both theory and experiment are important, of course, but there were some more important theorists. I'd mention Gauss, Riemann, Poincare, Hilbert, Weyl, von Neumann, Dirac, and tHooft. Eg, it was tHooft who did the theory that underlies what Weinberg did.

    Meanwhile Woit points out what is wrong with string theory:

    According to Schellekens, the “string vacuum revolution” is on a par with the other string theory revolutions, but most people prefer to overlook it, since it has been a “slow revolution”, taking from 1986-2006. The earliest indications he finds is in Andy Strominger’s 1986 paper “Calabi-Yau manifolds with Torsion”, where he writes:

    All predictive power seems to have been lost.
    and in one of his own papers from 1986 where the existence of 101500 different compactifications is pointed out.

    Schellekens claims that “string theory has never looked better”, but he completely ignores the main question here, the one identified by Strominger in 1986 right at the beginning. If all predictive power is lost, your theory is worthless and no longer science. What anthropic landscape proponents like him need to do is to show that Strominger was wrong; that while string theory seems to have lost all predictive power, this is a mistake and there really is some way to calculate something that will give a solid, testable prediction of the theory. The String Vacuum Project is an attempt to do this, but there is no evidence beyond wishful thinking that it can lead to a real prediction. Schellekens has worked on producing lots of vacua and describing them in a “String Vacuum Markup Language”, and in his slides describes one construction that involves 45761187347637742772 possibilities. These possibilities can be analyzed to see if they contain the SM gauge groups and known particle representations, but this is a small number of discrete constraints and there is no problem to satisfy them. The problem is that one typically gets lots and lots of other stuff, and while one would like to use this to predict beyond-the-SM phenomena, there is no way to do this due to the astronomically large number of possibilities.

    I think that the Landscape is the proof of the failure of string theory, and I didn't know that the Landscape ideas go back to 1986.

    Saturday, Mar 08, 2008
     
    Lawyers refuse to save lives
    If you want an example of how lawyers use contorted arguments to justify what any normal person would consider unethical, see this Volokh post.

    Friday, Mar 07, 2008
     
    California court tries to ban homeschooling
    The homeschoolers are in a panic over this:
    A three-member panel in Los Angeles ruled unanimously last week that parents who home-school their children must have such a credential. Although the ruling probably will be put on hold during an appeal to the state Supreme Court, it could put a damper on the increasingly popular phenomenon of parents keeping their kids out of schools to teach them themselves.
    WorldNetDaily has been covering this story:
    A "breathtaking" ruling from a California appeals court that could subject the parents of 166,000 students in the state to criminal sanctions will be taken to the state Supreme Court.

    The announcement comes today from the Pacific Justice Institute, whose president, Brad Dacus, described the impact of the decision as "stunning."

    "The scope of this decision by the appellate court is breathtaking," he said. "It not only attacks traditional homeschooling, but also calls into question homeschooling through charter schools and teaching children at home via independent study through public and private school."

    This case started as a minor spanking case in the juvenile dependency court, where judges are used to bullying poor parents. The spanking charge was dropped, but some court-appointed lawyer raised the school issue. But this opinion reads as if the judges did not know that homeschooling is legal and respectable in all 50 states.

    Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger responded:

    "Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what's best for their children," the governor said in a statement. "Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children's education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don't protect parents' rights then, as elected officials, we will."
    I hope so.
     
    Defining Evolution
    I've tried to define Evolution before here, and I have cited other definitions here, here, and here. I am not trying to say how I think the term ought to be used, but just to note how prominent evolutionists use it.

    Now the prominent science blogger and leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers gives his definition:

    Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms.
    This is an amazingly vacuous definition. It says nothing about genes, heredity, fitness, etc. It says "well-confirmed" just so he can say that it is a fact, not a theory. It says "natural" just to make sure no God is involved. Beyond that, it says nothing of substance. It is more or less equivalent to:
    Evolution is whatever atheist scientists believe to be an explanation for life.
    Real scientists don't define scientific principles this way.

    Thursday, Mar 06, 2008
     
    Health nondiscimination
    Congress has passed another health insurance nondiscrimination law:
    After more than a decade of struggle, the House on Wednesday passed a bill requiring most group health plans to provide more generous coverage for treatment of mental illnesses, comparable to what they provide for physical illnesses.

    The vote was 268 to 148, with 47 Republicans joining 221 Democrats in support of the measure.

    The Senate has passed a similar bill requiring equivalence, or parity, in coverage of mental and physical ailments. Federal law now allows insurers to discriminate, and most do so, by setting higher co-payments or stricter limits on mental health benefits.

    “Illness of the brain must be treated just like illness anywhere else in the body,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California.

    There are also laws pending against DNA discrimination.

    I think that these nondiscrimination laws are fundamentally misguided. Insurance works by gathering info and using it to spread risk across groups. When you tell an insurance company it cannot use info, then you make insurance less efficient and more expensive.

    It is going to be worse when the govt takes over the health care industry. A socialized medicine system has to impose limits on health care, as it does not have infinite resources. Even if it did, not everyone could get the best physicians and hospitals. So it has to ration the care somehow. If it does not use prices, it will have to use waiting lists, lotteries, bureaucrat gate-keepers, etc to manage the care provided.

    I think that it is very likely that a govt system will discriminate based on DNA. The British do it now, as in this 1999 story:

    LONDON (CWNews.com) - A British hospital has refused to approve a heart transplant for a 9-year-old girl afflicted with Down's syndrome because her quality of life is not good enough, according The Times of London on Sunday.

    Katie Atkinson will die without a transplant, but her parents said Leeds General Infirmary will not approve transplants for children with Down's as a matter of policy, ...

    When you go in for your heart transplant or other major medical procedure, some bureau is going to decide whether it is warranted and justified under the regulations, and that decision is likely to consider your whole medical history, including your DNA.

    Wednesday, Mar 05, 2008
     
    Vatican gets Galileo statue
    Slashdot reports:
    Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the scientist by erecting a statue of him inside Vatican walls. The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated. He was held there while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
    Suprisingly, some of the comments there explain that Galileo's science wasn't really correct, and he wasn't really punished for his science.

    If Vatican suppression of heliocentrism was really so bad, ask yourself this: Why doesn't anyone explain exactly what was wrong with the corrections that the Pope ordered? The famous Copernicus book wasn't banned; it was originally published with Church approval, and years later it was required to have nine sentences corrected to retain that approval. If the Church was really wrong about those nine corrections, then why don't you ever hear scientists explaining the error?

     
    New Harvard Dean is a nut
    String theorist, formerly on the Harvard junior faculty, Lubos Motl writes:
    Evelynn Hammonds, a black postmodern feminist science-hater, was chosen to lead the Harvard College.

    During the anti-Summers witch hunts, this pseudointellectual was the chairwoman of the "Women Task Force" - the Feminazi Inquisition - and one of the main people who forced President Summers to throw USD 50 million out of the feminist window. Whenever I heard her speaking at the FAS faculty meeting, I was really down.

    In her "scholarly" work, she has criticized science as an industrial tool of the evil straight white males to oppress the sexuality of the nice black female lesbian people: see e.g. her masterpieces "Black (w)holes and the geometry of black female sexuality" or "Conflicts and tensions in the feminist study of gender and science".

    He has links to her writings, and yes she is a racist sexist lesbian anti-science wacko.

    She is a professor of the History of Science. Real scientists should be as offended by her as they are of young Earth creationists. Harvard is where Stephen Jay Gould used to be a History of Science professor. I wonder what other kooks they have there.


    Tuesday, Mar 04, 2008
     
    Birds like dirty worms
    I should keep a list of evolutionists who don't really believe in evolution Today's example is from the NY Times
    To the long list of the unintended effects of environmental contaminants, add one — eating polluted worms affects the songs of male starlings.

    What’s more, the females seem to like it. ...

    A male’s song is one trait that helps to attract mates. The researchers found that females chose the males with more complex songs even though the contaminants had made them less fit. “Females are choosing to mate with males who are in poorer physical condition,” Dr. Buchanan said, with potential effects on the number and survivability of offspring.

    No. The birds being chosen by the females are more fit, not less fit, in the Darwinian sense. The slogan "survival of the fittest" means survival of the ones that reproduce successfully, not survival of the ones in the best physical condition.

    Friday, Feb 29, 2008
     
    Family court tries to make a religious choice
    Law prof Volokh writes:
    I just got the trial court opinion in Kik v. Kik, the latest Michigan appellate case that counted a parent's greater religious observance as a factor in favor of the parent's custody claim. ...

    Perhaps the decision wasn't this particular trial judge's fault, given what seems to be the Michigan state legal principles that push in this direction. But it seems to me unconstitutional nonetheless.

    Most of the other family court criteria seem unconstitutional also. As one reader said:
    One parent's (even both parents') preference for religious observance should at best be treated like any other recreational activity. Some parents regard going to to see the Red Sox as sacrosanct, but its ridiculous to suggest that the allocation of season tickets should be determinative in a custody dispute.
    Yes, it is ridiculous, but there are comments from other lawyers who think up contorted justifications for such nonsense. The worst ones are those who think that judges are forced to resolve issues like this. They are not. The judge can and should just refuse to meddle in issues that are the responsilities of the parents.
     
    Global warming propaganda is not working
    Motl reports:
    Paul Kellstedt, Sammy Zahran and Arnold Vedlitz examined results from an original and representative sample of Americans and found that “more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global worming, and also show less concern for global warming.”
    This result seems reasonable to me. The bad effects of global warming are nearly always much less than what people expect. Myself, I was very surprised to learn that the IPCC consensus was that sea level would only rise two feet in the next century. Yes, the more I learn about the subject, the less I am concerned.

    The NY Times blogger John Tierney adds:

    Paul Kellstedt, the lead author and a professor of political science at Texas A&M, told me that previous researchers found that a campaign to increase public understanding of genetically modified foods didn’t lessen public fears, and that more widespread “scientific understanding” of research on embryos actually diminished support for that research. “What those two studies show, and what ours does, too,” he said, “is that more information given to the mass public does not automatically translate into more support for what are (in the public’s mind) controversial areas of scientific research. In fact, more information, in all three cases, seems to have the opposite effect, creating opposition to the research area in question.”
    This makes sense to me. Science public relations proponents are dominated by leftist intellectuals who are always arguing that the stupid public would adopt their leftist goals if only they were more educated. So they oversell their views with dumbed-down science.

    Thursday, Feb 28, 2008
     
    Correcting Misperceptions About Evolution
    Prominent blogger and leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers writes:
    'Evolution is a theory about the origin of life' is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that "abiogenesis is not evolution," but it's a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity.
    This is part of a discussion on how scientists can correct misperceptions about Evolution.

    The trouble with this view is that there is no good scientific theory about how life started here on Earth. Life could have been planted here by space aliens, for all anyone knows. This quote shows that evolutionists like Myers are willing to use the term in a sense in which it is just a scientifically meaningless buzzword.

     
    Why the Clipper chip died
    Cryptologist Matt Blaze argues:
    First, the Clipper Chip itself was abandoned not because of concerns about privacy (although it certainly became a lightning rod for criticism on that front), but rather because it was found to have serious technical vulnerabilities that had escaped the NSA's internal review process and that rendered the system ineffective for its intended purpose. I discovered and published in the open literature the first of these flaws ...
    No, those flaws were minor and insignificant. I really doubt that they were any big surprise to the NSA. As I recall, Blaze's biggest point was that a 16-bit checksum should be a 32-bit checksum. If that were really the problem, the NSA would have just corrected it.

    The Clipper chip was part of a Clinton administration plan to spy on the private lives of American citizens. It was even part of the Hillary Health Care Plan where it was supposed to be used to monitor peoples' health records and make sure that they were not getting anything beyond what has been rationed by the feds.

    The Clipper chip was a hot political issue among civil libertarians on the internet, and it was threatening to become a liability for Al Gore and the Democrats in 2000. The Republicans were against this spying, and had blocked the Clinton administration's proposals in Congress. As Blaze acknowledges, the G.W. Bush administration has been pro-crypto.

    A good history of the Crypto wars can be found in Steven Levy's Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age.


    Tuesday, Feb 26, 2008
     
    Obama's legal views
    Barack Obama's main expertise is in law, as that is the subject of his Harvard degree and he spent ten years teaching it at the Univ.o f Chicago. So you would think that he would be bragging about how he can improve the courts by making better appointments. Instead, all we get is silly stuff like this:
    We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges.
    He voted against Roberts and Alito, so he ought to be able to point out errors in their legal reasonings. He has not been able to do that.
     
    Bob Bennett - world's worst lawyer
    DC lawyer Bob Bennett is plugging his new book, and getting wide praise for being a great lawyer. I don't know why. He bungled his most famous case, Jones v Clinton, worse than anyone thought possible. He could have just defaulted on the case, and Clinton probably would have only had to pay $50K or so. Instead, he mishandled the deposition, got Clinton impeached, and ended up paying a huge settlement.

    Monday, Feb 25, 2008
     
    Academics for gun control
    Chicago eggheads Gary Becker and Richard Posner post their arguments for gun control laws. These guy are supposed to be so smart, and yet they seem baffled as to why any would have guns or why guns might serve a legitimate purpose. They want to get rid of guns the way that a lot of people want to discourage smoking cigarettes -- with very high taxes, regulation, and propaganda campaigns.

    Sunday, Feb 24, 2008
     
    Digital files on discs
    The NY Times reports on movie studios trying to save the DVD:
    Fox DVDs, starting last month, now come with an additional disc holding a digital file of the title. ... “This puts the DVD at the center of the digital revolution and returns the business to a growth trajectory,” ... the packaging of digital files with standard DVDs “has the real potential to steal the thunder from the Internet delivery of movies.” ... Today, digital files on discs; tomorrow, mass downloading straight from the Internet.
    Will someone please tell the NY Times that DVD discs only have digital files on them. The first "D" in "DVD" stands for "digital". Putting digital data on a DVD is not something new; that's all that has ever been on DVDs.
     
    Swedism manhood suffers from UN resolution
    News from Sweden:
    Sweden's chief heraldists remain dissatisfied with a decision by the Nordic Battlegroup to remove a lion's penis depicted on its coat of arms.

    But staff at the National Archives are hopeful that the Nordic Battlegroup will reconsider its position and re-erect the lion's member on its insignia.

    "They stepped over the line when they made alterations to the badge without consulting us. It was a clear breach of copyright," state heraldist Henrik Klackenberg told The Local. ...

    In an interview with Sveriges Radio, the Commander said he decided to give the lion the snip having read UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security.

    This is a followup from last month. Our proud military symbols should not be emasculated by some silly UN resolution.
     
    Fancy schools are a waste money
    The London Times newspaper reports:
    Middle-class parents obsessed with getting their children into the best schools may be wasting their time and money, academics say today. They found that children from privileged backgrounds excelled when they were deliberately sent to inner-city comprehensives by parents opposed to private schooling. Most of the children “performed brilliantly” at GCSE and A level and 15 per cent of those who went on to university took places at Oxford or Cambridge.
    This is more evidence that fancy private schools are overrated.

    Saturday, Feb 23, 2008
     
    Debate over taping confessions
    The NY Times reported last year:
    Eight states, by law or court action, mandate taping of interviews with suspects in at least serious felony cases, turning a tape recorder or video camera into an important tool in convictions, like DNA tests, fingerprints and ballistics. More than 450 law enforcement agencies in major cities and smaller jurisdictions also require the taping of certain interrogations.

    The F.B.I., a division of the Justice Department, has strenuously resisted the practice unless special permission is granted by supervisors, under the theory that it may discourage suspects from talking and expose juries to interrogation methods that the department would rather not highlight.

    But the inability to tape suspects, especially those accused of sexual abuse and domestic violence, can seriously compromise a case, Mr. Charlton and other prosecutors said. ...

    The F.B.I., in documents defending its policy, argued that taping was not always possible, particularly when agents were on the road, and that it was not always appropriate. Psychological tricks like misleading or lying to a suspect in questioning or pretending to show the suspect sympathy might also offend a jury, the agency said.

    “Perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants,” said one of the once-secret internal Justice Department communications made public as part of the investigation into the dismissals of the United States attorneys.

    Wow, I didn't know that the feds were so stubborn on this issue. I knew that interviews of Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby were not recorded, but I didn't know that this was a blanket federal policy.

    If I were on a jury, I don't think that an unrecorded confession, if I knew that the police had deliberately not recorded it out of fear that the jury would be offended by the interrogation techniques.

    The argument that taping is not possible when agents are on the road is bogus. The voice recorders are extremely cheap and convenient.

     
    Solar panels a loser
    The Si Valley paper reports:
    Installing solar panels on homes is an economic "loser" with the costs far outweighing the financial benefit, a respected University of California-Berkeley business professor said Wednesday.

    The technology, using photovoltaic panels to generate electricity, is not economically competitive with fossil fuels and costs more than other renewable fuels, said Severin Borenstein, who also directs the UC Energy Institute.

    "We are throwing away money by installing the current solar PV technology," he said. ...

    Borenstein said he didn't take into account the feel-good benefit or societal value of installing a solar system on your roof. "Certainly people make these decisions for a variety of reasons," he said.

    But installing better insulation would be a better bet economically, he said, although your neighbors won't know you did it.

    The solar power industry is driven by govt subsidies.

    Thursday, Feb 21, 2008
     
    Florida teaches evolution
    USA Today reports:
    Students in Florida must be taught that evolution is a theory and not a settled fact, according to standards that the State Board of Education just approved in Tallahasee. ... The compromise language approved today cites 'the scientific theory of evolution,' making it officially a theory rather than a settled fact.
    The actual standard says:
    Standard 15: Diversity and Evolution of Living Organisms A. The scientific theory of evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology. B. The scientific theory of evolution is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence. C. Organisms are classified based on their evolutionary history. D. Natural selection is a primary mechanism leading to evolutionary change. ...

    Describe the scientific explanations of the origin of life on Earth. ...

    Identify basic trends in hominid evolution from early ancestors six million years ago to modern humans, including brain size, jaw size, language, and manufacture of tools.

    I wonder what will be taught for some of those topics. There really isn't much in the way of scientific explanations for the origin of life on Earth. Human ancestors are thought to have diverged from chimps about 6M years ago, but there is very little agreement about which fossils are really human ancestors.
     
    Only branch has acted unilaterally
    A Slashdot reader writes:
    Each branch has different powers, but none can exercise significant power without the consent of at least one other branch. Yes, there are areas where each has latitude to act unilaterally, but major initiatives generally require the consent of at least two branches. And before you say "Bush went to war on his own," recall that Congress has the power to limit or end funding for the war whenever it wants to. It may not have the will, but it has the power.

    The only branch of the US government that has been able to act unilaterally has been the Judicial branch, and that is a phenomenon largely of the last 50 years. Congress has declined to exercise its powers to limit the Courts' jurisdiction as granted under Article 2 of the Constitution.

    He is exactly correct. Surprising, for a nerd site.

    Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008
     
    Mrs. Obama's chip on her shoulder
    Steve Sailer writes:
    Newsweek has a long article on the wonderfulness of Mrs. Obama, but she sounds like she's got a log-sized chip on her shoulder from lucking into Princeton due to affirmative action. ...

    One reason diversicrats want to bring all the black freshmen to campus before everybody else is so they'll bond to each other, not to random whites and Asians during the regular orientation week.

    I attended Princeton a few years before Mrs. Obama, and it had peculiar racial policies back then. It recruited a lot of black students, but they didn't really socialize with the white very much. A lot of them, like Mrs. Obama, would take classes just for blacks.

    This blog claims to have some excerpts from Mrs. Obama's senior thesis:

    “I wondered whether or not my education at Princeton would affect my identification with the Black community. I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with Whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that Black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”…

    Sunday, Feb 17, 2008
     
    Human Culture Subject To Natural Selection
    Here is some goofy research from some leftist-evolutionist Stanford profs who sound like they don't really believe in evolution:
    But Nina Jablonski, chair of the Anthropology Department at Pennsylvania State University, said she is sold on the research. "This paper is revolutionary in its approach … one of the most significant papers to be written in anthropology in the last 20 years," she said.

    Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. "People studying climate change, population growth, poverty, racism and the threat of plagues all know what the problems are and what we should be doing to solve them," said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford.

    Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb and other books on dilemmas facing contemporary human society, said he does not understand why more effort is not going into urgently needed solutions. "What we don't know, and need to learn, is how cultures change and how we can ethically influence that process," he said.

    Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford, said their findings demonstrate that "some cultural choices work while others clearly do not."

    "Unfortunately, people have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term," she said. "We need to begin aligning our culture with the powerful forces of nature and natural selection instead of against them."

    So what did their research really find? They found that Polynesian canoe technology gradually improved over time. Because the islanders were considered to be too stupid to know what they were doing, the authors assumed that inferior designs were eliminated by natural selection, in analogy to biological evolution.

    It is amazing what sloppy work passes for good research in this field. Because the authors make some wacky and unsupported left-wing conclusions, it gets raves from politically correct academics like Jared Diamond.

    Update: Ehrlich gives an interview on the subject.

     
    Girl has 4 kidneys
    18-year-old Laura Moon has four kidneys. She would like to become a live donor, but she cannot legally choose a worthy recipient, and she cannot legally be compensated. I hope that she keeps all her kidneys, as I don't think that it would be ethical for any physician to remove her kidneys under the current system. Physicians should only be acting to benefit their patients.
     
    Drake's formula
    Here is a funny comic on the Drake equation for extraterrestial intelligence.
     
    Law requires teaching climate change
    The San Jose paper reports:
    A Silicon Valley lawmaker is gaining momentum with a bill that would require "climate change" to be among the science topics that all California public school students are taught.

    The measure, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would mandate that future science textbooks approved for California public schools include climate change.

    "You can't have a science curriculum that is relevant and current if it doesn't deal with the science behind climate change," Simitian said. "This is a phenomenon of global importance and our kids ought to understand the science behind that phenomenon."

    The state Senate approved the bill, SB 908, Jan. 30 by a 26-13 vote.

    The bill adds climate change to a list of 7 other environmental topics, such as "Energy conservation". I certainly hope that schools are teaching the first law of thermodynamics, with or without this law.

    California has already passed SB 777 to require schools to comply with various LGBT objectives. It remains to be seen how the schools will implement this nonsense.


    Saturday, Feb 16, 2008
     
    ID for illegal immigrants
    Bruce Schneier is against a national ID card for several reasons, including:
    And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.
    But Schneier is all in favor of Giving Drivers Licenses to Illegal Immigrants:
    Some states have considered a tiered license system, one that explicitly lists immigration status on the licenses. Of course, this won't work either. Illegal immigrants are far more likely to take their chances being caught than admit their immigration status to the DMV.

    We are all safer if everyone in society trusts and respects law enforcement. A society where illegal immigrants are afraid to talk to police because of fear of deportation is a society where fewer people come forward to report crimes, aid police investigations, and testify as witnesses.

    This is wacky. Where I live, it is usually pretty obvious who the illegal aliens are. They don't speak English. And if it is good to have different kinds of ID, then let's have an ID just for illegal aliens.

    Friday, Feb 15, 2008
     
    Lessig endorses Obama
    Law prof Larry Lessig is thinking about running for Congress, and is endorsing Obama. His main argument is that Obama always opposed the Iraq War, and that Hillary Clinton might swiftboat him:
    Barack Obama took to the streets of Chicago and made a strong call to stop the entry into this war. ... he had the moral courage to stand up for what was right in the face of very strong political opposition. ... A man who opposed the war at the beginning,
    But it is not true, and Obama deserves to be swiftboated for it.

    If Obama really was against the war, he failed to have to courage to say so in his most famous speeches, and in the US Senate. He was apparently afraid that the war would be popular, and only said silly things like "I'm opposed to dumb wars." If the war had turned out to be popular, he would have just said that he was glad that the Iraq War was not a dumb war.

    A big problem with John Kerry's campaign for President was that his big selling point was his Vietnam War experience. But that experience did not hold up to scrutiny.

    I think that it is going to be similar with Barack Obama. He and his supporters will constantly talk about his war opposition, but he will be exposed for the naive coward that he is. Obama is good at speaking meaningless platitudes, but that's about all.

    Lessig claims that Hillary lied about Obama removing the 2002 speech from the web site, but I am not sure Lessig is correct. Look at this backup of Obama's site. It appears to me that the speech was there in 2003 but not 2004 or 2005.


    Thursday, Feb 14, 2008
     
    Guns in space
    Russian citizens are not allowed to own guns, unless they are in space:
    Right now Russian Cosmonauts carry a gun on their Soyuz space capsule, which is attached to the space station.

    Every spacecraft carries survival gear for crash landings, and the Russian Soyuz has a kit that includes the gun.

    NASA expert James Oberg has more.

    Wednesday, Feb 13, 2008
     
    ABA wants to ban guns
    The Amer. Bar Assn. supports gun control in the DC gun case:
    Stare decisis is directly at issue in this case. This Court and other courts have interpreted the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as related to maintenance of a well-regulated militia. See, e.g., United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939); ...

    Accordingly, changing the longstanding interpretation of the Second Amendment would frustrate settled expectations, require courts to perform historically legislative functions, and would compromise important values of certainty and finality.

    The US Supreme Court is just considering saying that the 2A protects an individual right, a position that is consistent with everything the Supreme Court and Congress have said for 200 years, and consistent with numerous state constitutions. The only inconsistency would be with certain lower federal court decisions of the last 40 years.

    If the ABA is so much in favor of stare decisis, then it should be against all the death penalty appeals and a lot of other appeals.


    Tuesday, Feb 12, 2008
     
    Judges trying to decide a child's religion
    The NY Times reports:
    Across the country, child-custody disputes in which religion is the flash point are increasing, part of a broader rise in custody conflicts over the last 30 years, lawyers, judges and mediators say. ...

    Judges do not want to take on custody disputes rooted in religion, said lawyers like Gaetano Ferro, who until recently served as president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Mr. Ferro said, “How will a judge say in any rational fashion that Islam is better than Buddhism, Catholicism better than Judaism, or Methodism better than Pentecostalism?”

    As a result, more and more states have tried to keep custody disputes out of court by mandating mediation. But the effect has been piecemeal, and religious disputes have proven to be among the most difficult to resolve, lawyers said.

    But judges do unnecessarily take on these custody disputes. Mediation cannot solve the problem as long as a dissatisfied party can still get court orders.

    The only solution is to just remove such disputes from the jurisdiction of the court. The court has no business getting involved.


    Sunday, Feb 10, 2008
     
    Judge blamed for not preventing abuse
    A Mercury News Special Report documents some abuses by the California juvenile dependency courts, and says:
    Dependency court judges must promptly make the most critical of decisions. Err one way, and a child may be sent home to a dangerous situation. Err the other way, and children are separated from their families for a life just as chaotic and fearsome. Growing evidence shows disruption can be worse for many children than remaining in their homes with the appropriate support services.

    Worse, sometimes judges do not get the information they need.

    On Dec. 26, 2002, San Mateo County's presiding juvenile judge, Marta Diaz, got a brutal reminder of that. A baby she had authorized to visit his home had been declared brain-dead. His father was accused of violently shaking him on Christmas Day.

    I don't know about that case, but there is considerable scientific doubt about whether there is any such thing as Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). I don't know whether there is or not, but I do think that it is absurd to expect judges to prevent SBS by taking babies out of their homes and putting them in foster care.

    Saturday, Feb 09, 2008
     
    A Choice, Not An Echo
    Mark Silva write for the Chicago Tribune:
    “And the reason is simple,’’ Huckabee said, alluding to the title of a book by Phyllis Schlafly which inspired him as a younger man.

    “Let others join the me-too crowd,’’ Huckabee said. “But I didn’t get where I am today… by simply echoing the voices of others. I did it by staking out a choice, fighting for that choice… It’s better to be right, and even to not win, than it is to be wrong.

    “They say the math doesn’t work out,’’ Huckabee said, pointing to the primary elections remining. “Folks, I didn’t major in math. I majored in miracles, and I still believe.’’

     
    Convicts lose parental rights
    Here is Texas news:
    A Williamson County jury has decided to terminate forty-two-year-old Phil Rian’s parental rights. Rian, who was convicted in August of having an affair with a sixteen-year-old boy, will now have no contact with her two young children. The twelve men and women deliberated for approximately four hours before coming to a unanimous verdict yesterday afternoon. The jury also decided to terminate the children’s biological father’s parental rights. Timothy Nagel is currently incarcerated in California on drug charges.

    The little boy and girl will now go up for adoption. They have been in foster care since Rian was arrested in the fall of 2006.

    At least she got a jury trial. I don't think that any other state bothers with jury trials when they terminate parental rights.
    Several psychologists testified they believe Rian to have bi-polar disorder, a diagnosis Rian rejects. She did not, as the therapists suggested to her, go to a psychiatrist for additional treatment for the chemical imbalance.
    I hope the jury wasn't unduly influenced by this, because there is no proof that any mental disorder is caused by a chemical imbalance. Nor should they be listening to therapists on the subject of drug treatment, when the therapists are not even licensed to prescribe drugs.

    Friday, Feb 08, 2008
     
    Broken families, broken courts: How rushed justice fails our kids
    The Si Valley paper has a special series on the state's juvenile dependency courts, a little-known arm of the justice system deciding the fate of families whose children have been removed by social workers.
    The dysfunction permeating the dependency courts is unknown to most people. Cloaked in confidentiality designed to protect children's privacy, the system allows few outsiders in, holding hearings so secretive that the law provides for criminal charges if clients or lawyers discuss them.

    Yet system insiders, as well as numerous outside legal experts, openly describe the overloaded courts as a threat to the fundamental legal rights of parents and children.

    I am glad to see that system get some exposure. The people who work in that system are the most evil people I have ever met.
     
    Firing people with nutty ideas
    Bad Astronomer writes about Iowa State University firing Guillermo Gonzalez.
    As I said before, that is 100% the correct decision. Tenure is given for many reasons, but one criterion is how well the candidate will represent the University. Supporting Intelligent Design would reflect very poorly on ISU. They know that, so they dumped him.
    His previous post promoted the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Now there is a wacky project that should embarrass a university. Even if the galaxy is populated by intelligent races, there are overwhelming reasons for believing that the project will fail. Those who subscribe to a goofy unscientific belief in SETI are just as embarrassing as the creationists.

    Thursday, Feb 07, 2008
     
    DC gun case
    I have heard gun control advocates argue that we don't have any individual Second Amendment gun rights because the Supreme Court has never said that we do, that only the Supreme Court is entitled to interpret the Constitution, and that not even the NRA has argued in court that we have Second Amendment gun rights.

    No more. The US Supreme Court is hearing a Second Amendment gun case, and here are the DC v Heller case filings.

    The NRA doesn't believe in waiting around for the Supreme Court to tell us that we have rights. We have constitutional rights that you can learn by just reading the Constitution. The Second Amendment was written to protect our individual gun rights, whether the court agrees or not.


    Wednesday, Feb 06, 2008
     
    She calls herself Hillary
    The Bad Astronomer blogger wife writes:
    Has anyone else noticed that newscasters and commentators seem to feel it is perfectly appropriate to refer to Hillary Clinton as "Hillary" while referring to every other presidential candidate by their last name, or first and last name? ...

    The only reason I can come up with for the inappropriately familiar use of "Hillary" alone is that she’s a woman.

    Just look at Hillary Clinton's web site. Her campaign slogan is “Hillary for President”.

    She is embarrassed by her husband. She would run as Hillary Rodham if she could get away with it. Her political success is entirely dependent on Bill, and she refuses to give him credit.

    Mrs. BA says that she refused to take her husband's name, and refuses to open mail addressed that way. Sigh. People should just call her Mrs. Bad Attitude. Hillary's core constituency is feminists like her.


    Friday, Feb 01, 2008
     
    Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor
    Here is some new research:
    ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2008) — New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

    “Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”.

    The title is a little confusing, because the usual evolutionist dogma is that all life on Earth had a single common ancestor. Also, we are all descended from apes, and apes all have brown eyes.

    Just a couple of months ago, Craig Venter claimed that we do not have the technology to look at someone's DNA and determine whether or not he has blue eyes. Somebody is wrong here.

    Unless there is more to the research than the article explains, I don't see how it can prove that the mutation only occurred once. It claims that there is a blue-eyes switch on a particular gene, but it seems to me that if the mutation occurred once, it could have occurred several times. Perhaps the single-mutation theory could be proved if the switch were linked to unrelated DNA data that is shared by blue-eyed people, but the article does not say that.

    The article goes on:

    The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival.
    This is the sort of nonsense that comes from evolutionists who don't really believe that humans are evolving. Blue eyes are common in low-sunlight areas like Norway, and rare in sunny countries. It seems likely that blues eyes have been a survival advantage in Norway, and a disadvantage in Egypt.

    There is just one other primate with blue eyes, the blue-eyed lemurs of northwest Madagascar. No monkeys or apes do.

     
    USA and the Kyoto protocols
    I just heard the NPR morning radio news say:
    The United States is alone among industrialized countries in rejecting Kyoto limits on greenhouse gases.
    I don't see how the USA is any different from the other countries. Pres. Clinton signed the Kyoto plan, and the US Senate rejected it as a treaty. That is more or less the same as what the European countries. The USA has exceeded the Kyoto limits, and so have all the other countries. So what is the substantive difference?

    George writes:

    At least the Europeans didn't repudiate Kyoto. They passed a cap-and-trade scheme to give incentives for reducing emissions.

    Thursday, Jan 31, 2008
     
    American bail bondsman
    The NY Times reports:
    Wayne Spath is a bail bondsman, which means he is an insurance salesman, a social worker, a lightly regulated law enforcement agent, a real estate appraiser — and a for-profit wing of the American justice system.

    What he does, which is posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee, is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. ...

    Here as in many other areas of the law, the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States has charted a distinctive and idiosyncratic legal path.

    Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee.

    America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear.

    Commercial bail bond companies dominate the pretrial release systems of only two nations, the United States and the Philippines.

    The picture shows a young woman, with a baby in her arm, who owes her freedom to a low-life bail bondman. Only at the end of the article do we find out why she was in jail.
    Kate Santana, a 20-year-old waitress, had spent eight days in jail when she found her way to Mr. Spath.

    “Me and my husband got into a fight,” Ms. Santana explained, “and the cops were called and I was arrested because there was a bite mark on his shoulder.”

    Mr. Spath took her $200 and posted her $2,000 bail. “I checked her criminal history out,” he said. “I found out she was a mother and really she shouldn’t be in jail.”

    Isn't America great? The disreputable private bail bondsmen have more common sense than the district attorneys and judges.
     
    Consumer spending dominates the economy
    I just heard the NPR morning radio news say:
    Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of all economic activity.
    A lot of others say the same thing, as if it means something. It is typically used to argue that consumer confidence must be kept high to avoid recession, or something like that.

    The factoid makes people think that consumer spending is more important than business spending. But business spending is not that other third. Consumer spending is two thirds of GDP because GDP is defined to exclude business spending.


    Wednesday, Jan 30, 2008
     
    Deconstructing Gould
    The Si Valley paper reports:
    Famed Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould ...

    But the late science historian has bequeathed to Stanford his priceless collection of books, papers and artifacts - a gift not only to the university but also to the public, which someday will be invited to visit the treasure trove.

    With his gift, one of the 20th century's great thinkers will himself become the subject of a research project that will attempt to answer the question: Where did Gould find inspiration? ...

    "We hope to deconstruct how he got his ideas," said Henry Lowood, curator for the History of Science & Technology Collection at Green Library. "It's reverse engineering." ...

    Although Gould had a triple professorship at Harvard - in biology, geology and the history of science - the school was apparently not interested in the project, Lowood said.

    Harvard has probably already deconstructed him. It's not that complicated. He was a Marxist kook who got academic praise only because he wrote politically correct leftist-atheist-evolutionist essays. He is more noted as a "science historian" than for any actual science he did.

    Tuesday, Jan 29, 2008
     
    The Preservation Predicament
    Cornelia Dean writes:
    Conservation organizations that work to preserve biologically rich landscapes are confronting a painful realization: In an era of climate change, many of their efforts may be insufficient or beside the point.
    It is funny to see these folks get all confused when they discover that two of their politically correct ideologies are in conflict.

    Sunday, Jan 27, 2008
     
    Questioning the health effects of cholesterol
    Gary Taubes writes for the NY Times:
    THE idea that cholesterol plays a key role in heart disease is so tightly woven into modern medical thinking that it is no longer considered open to question. This is the message that emerged all too clearly from the recent news that the drug Vytorin had fared no better in clinical trials than the statin therapy it was meant to supplant. ...

    Because medical authorities have always approached the cholesterol hypothesis as a public health issue, rather than as a scientific one, we’re repeatedly reminded that it shouldn’t be questioned. Heart attacks kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, statin therapy can save lives, and skepticism might be perceived as a reason to delay action. So let’s just trust our assumptions, get people to change their diets and put high-risk people on statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs.

    Science, however, suggests a different approach: test the hypothesis rigorously and see if it survives. If the evidence continues to challenge the role of cholesterol, then rethink it, without preconceptions, and consider what these other pathways in cardiovascular disease are implying about cause and prevention. A different hypothesis may turn out to fit the facts better, and one day help prevent considerably more deaths.

    Conventional wisdom has been that high dietary fat causing high blood cholesterol, which in turn causes heart attacks. But that is too simplistic as human cholesterol is divided between the bad LDL which seems to cause heart disease, and the good HDL which seems to prevent it. So then the story was that heart risks are raised by eating saturated fats that raise LDL, and lowered by taking LDL-lowering drugs. Some some of those drugs seem to help and some don't. The trans-fats that used to be in all the margarines are now seen as worse than the saturated fats in butter. In many people, blood cholesterol seems to have nothing to do with dietary cholesterol.

    I've had people tell me all my life that I have an unhealthy diet high in saturated fats and that I will die young from a heart attack. And yet I have a low LDL and a high HDL. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out that most of the mainstream medical advice about diet has been wrong.

    The best drugs for lowering cholesterol and preventing heart attacks are the statins like Lipitor, but the NY Times reports:

    In studies of middle-aged men with cardiovascular disease, statin users were less likely to die than those who were given a placebo.

    But many statin users don’t have established heart disease; they simply have high cholesterol. For healthy men, for women with or without heart disease and for people over 70, there is little evidence, if any, that taking a statin will make a meaningful difference in how long they live.

    Joe writes:
    The funniest thing about cholesterol is "total cholesterol." I have never understood what that number is for. Is a total of 150 good or bad? It might be unbelievably good or unbelievably bad. Why would you ever add good and bad stuff together to get one number?
    As I understand it, total cholesterol is the easiest thing to measure. They don't measure LDL directly; they measure HDL and deduce LDL from the HDL and the total. And the total cholesterol is not just LDL+HDL. Close, but not exactly. I don't know whether that is because there is some other kind of cholesterol or what.

    Saturday, Jan 26, 2008
     
    Personal music went digital went digital long before iTunes store
    Randall Stross reports for the NY Times:
    The digitization of personal music collections began, however, only after the right combination of software and hardware — iTunes Music Store and the iPod — arrived.
    The iTunes Music Store arrived in 2003. Personal music went digital about 20 years earlier.

    I don't know how reporters could write such nonsense. Hardly anyone under the age of 40 has ever even owned any non-digital music.

    Digital music first got popular when compact discs hit the market in 1982. In a few years, people were using personal computers for digital music. The first portable mp3 players hit the market in 1998. In 1999, Diamond Rio won a big case against the RIAA (recording industry), annd Napster got wildly popular on college campuses. That combination was four years ahead of Apple in allowing people to have portable digital music collections.

     
    Senate Looking at Endowments as Tuition Rises
    If you are considering donating to your alma mater, read this NY Times article about how stingy colleges are with their endowments. They do not spend at the rate required by law for other tax-exempt foundations. They have more money than they know what to do with, and they can get away with charging huge tuitions whether they need them or not.
     
    Using a symbol can be a hate crime
    A Texas newspaper reports:
    ALEXANDRIA, La. — A white man accused of driving past a group of black civil rights activists with two nooses dangling from the back of his pickup has been indicted on federal hate-crime and conspiracy charges, prosecutors said Thursday.

    Jeremiah Munsen, 18, was arrested in September after driving past a crowd of people who had attended a civil rights march in Jena, about 40 miles northeast of Alexandria, police have said. The Jena march drew an estimated 20,000 protesters, and many stayed in surrounding cities, including Alexandria.

    Putting a symbol on your car seems like free speech to me.

    Friday, Jan 25, 2008
     
    Leftist climate change denier
    The kooky leftist Alexander Cockburn writes:
    While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

    The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

    This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. ...

    More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries.

    His extreme leftist ideology clouds his judgment. In fact, there is conclusive proof that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. Atmospheric CO2 has grown steadily and in amounts directly attributable to the buring of fossil fuels. Furthermore, analysis of oxygen isotope has shown that the CO2 really did come from those fossil fuels. It is also a certainty that the extra CO2 has caused some warming, even if we don't know for sure how that warming compares with other warming and cooling factors.

    The consequences of CO2 are subject to debate, of course. For several years the global warming nuts have told us that it causes more and worse hurricances. But a Florida newspaper reports:

    Following in the footsteps of an earlier study, government scientists on Tuesday said warmer oceans should translate to fewer Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States.

    The reason: As sea surface temperatures warm globally, sustained vertical wind shear increases. Wind shear makes it difficult for storms to form and grow.


    Thursday, Jan 24, 2008
     
    CD v digital music
    Wired.com has this AP story:
    LONDON (AP) -- Record companies' revenue from digital music sales rose 40 percent to $2.9 billion over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from collapse of international CD sales, the music industry's global trade body said Thursday. ...

    The industry body said CD sales fell 11 percent between 2005 and 2006 and were likely to drop further in 2007. Digital music revenue has so far failed to make up for the decline - and is also showing signs of slowing, the IFPI said.

    Somebody should tell these reporters that all CD music is digital!

    The NY Times is just as bad:

    LONDON — As consumers lose interest in compact discs and balk at paying for the digital alternatives, ...

    But digital sales have yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs, ...

    Every sale of a compact disc is a digital sale. The compact disc was invented about 25 years ago for the sole purpose of storing digital music.

    Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008
     
    Fighting steroids
    Here is a really bad idea from Steven D. Levitt on his Freakonomics blog:
    Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball:

    1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.

    2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval.

    3) A player’s remaining salary would be voided entirely if a drug test ever came back positive.

    I’m not sure about points 2 and 3, but there is no question that point 1 is essential to any serious attempt to combat the use of illegal performance enhancers. The state-of-the-art in performance enhancement is the best set of techniques that cannot be detected using current technology. So, by definition, the most sophisticated dopers will evade detection, unless they are unlucky or make a mistake.

    The threat of future improvements in testing technology is the most potent weapon available in this fight, because the user can never know for certain that the doping he does today won’t be simple to detect a decade from now. Retrospective testing of samples attributed to Lance Armstrong suggest that he used E.P.O., which was not detectable at the time. The circumstances surrounding this test were sort of murky (the identification of the sample as Armstrong’s was indirect, and it was also unclear why these samples were being tested in the first place), so the Tour de France champion didn’t pay the price he would have if formal testing at later intervals had been a standard policy.

    The Lance Armstrong example just illustrates the foolishness of the idea. Armstrong has rights to due process, and any attempt to punish him for 8-year-old blood samples will deny him those rights.

    Do these same folks want to take away Gaylord Perry's pension if videotapes proves that he was throwing spitballs 30 years ago? The unfairness and maliciousness of these proposals is appalling. I say that sports authorities should try to catch petty cheaters if they can catch them in the act, but to forget about it otherwise.


    Sunday, Jan 20, 2008
     
    Culture Affects How Brains Operate
    Here is some new research:
    It’s no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.

    New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

    Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging.

    I don't see where the research looked at cultural effects at all. Maybe Chinese brains work differently because of genes, or maybe culture. This study doesn't say.
     
    Research claims to prove that evolution is not random
    ScienceDaily reports:
    According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, individuals in a species pass successful traits onto their offspring through a process called “deterministic inheritance.” Over multiple generations, advantageous developmental trends – such as the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck – occur.

    An opposing theory says evolution takes place through randomly inherited and not necessarily advantageous changes. Using the giraffe example, there would not be a common neck-lengthening trend; some would develop long necks, while others would develop short ones.

    Now, the findings of an international team of biologists demonstrate that evolution is not a random process, but rather occurs through the natural selection of successful traits. The collaborative study by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, the U.S, France and Germany is published in the November 2007 issue of Current Biology (vol. 17, pp. 1925-1937).

    This is just nonsense. Darwin didn't say anything about deterministic inheritance. He knew nothing of genes. These arguments about whether evolution is random are just gibberish. Mutation is random. Inheritance of genes in individuals is random. Natural selection is a tautology.

    Evolutionist Richard B. Hoppe tries to make sense out of the story, says that it "is at best confusingly incoherent". I say that this is another example of bad science, and low standard in the field of evolutionism.


    Saturday, Jan 19, 2008
     
    String theorists win prize
    The AAAS Science mag news reports:
    Mathematician, Two Physicists Share Crafoord Prize
    By Daniel Clery
    ScienceNOW Daily News
    17 January 2008

    This year's Crafoord Prize, a sort of alternative Nobel, has been awarded to a mathematician and two physicists whose work ranges from the mathematics of string theory to the details of how black holes suck in matter. The mathematical half is shared by Maxim Kontsevich of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in France and Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for contributions inspired by modern theoretical physics. The astronomical half goes to Rashid Alievich Sunyaev of the Space Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, for his work on black holes and neutron stars and on the structure of the cosmic background radiation.

    No, not 1 mathematician and 2 physicists. The prize went to 2 mathematicians and 1 astronomer.
    Witten is "the greatest theoretical physicist in the world." ...

    Witten says he was "totally startled" to find that his achievements in mathematics had won attention rather than his physics.

    He is trying to say that he really wanted to win a Nobel Prize in Physics for string theory. But that is never going to happen. String theory has totally failed to say anything of significance about the physical world.

    Crafoord prizes are only given to those who cannot win Nobel prizes.

     
    Questioning the candidates on science
    Here is another silly AAAS Science mag editorial:
    Given this new focus on religious disclosure, what does this U.S. election have to do with science? Everything. The candidates should be asked hard questions about science policy, including questions about how those positions reflect belief. What is your view about stem cell research, and does it relate to a view of the time at which human life begins? Have you examined the scientific evidence regarding the age of Earth? Can the process of organic evolution lead to the production of new species, and how? Are you able to look at data on past climates in search of inferences about the future of climate change?
    Why not ask for evidence for black holes, quarks, dark matter, string theory, and extraterrestrial life? How about the efficacy of psychiatric meds, vitamin C, and cholesterol-lowering drugs?

    Maybe one of these questions would illuminate whether a candidate is willing to reconsider his views based on scientific evidence. But why single out the age of the Earth? The obvious explanation is that it is a sneaky way of tricking politicians into repudiating the Bible.

    I think that it would be better if politicians were asked scientific questions that actually had some bearing on what they might do in office.


    Friday, Jan 18, 2008
     
    More on the Pope
    Here is more on the academics protesting the Pope:
    The signatories of the letter said Benedict's presence would be "incongruous". They cited a speech he made at La Sapienza in 1990, while he was still a cardinal, in which he quoted the judgment of an Austrian philosopher of science who wrote that the church's trial of Galileo was "reasonable and fair".

    The letter said: "These words offend and humiliate us." ...

    The newspaper Il Giornale, which republished his 1990 speech, said the Pope had "expressed a different position" from that of the Austrian scholar Paul Feyerabend, "absolutely not adopting it as his own". The Vatican's own daily, L'Osservatore Romano, carried an article by the Jewish mathematician Giorgio Israel, in which he wrote that the Pope's address "could well be considered, by anyone who read it with a minimum of attention, as a defence of Galilean rationality against the scepticism and relativism of postmodern culture".

    That Austrian philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, had some very wacky anti-science views, and yet he was treated as a very distinguished philosopher by major universities throughout his life. For example:
    Feyerabend described science as being essentially anarchistic, obsessed with its own mythology, and as making claims to truth well beyond its actual capacity. He was especially indignant about the condescending attitudes of many scientists towards alternative traditions. For example, he thought that negative opinions about astrology and the effectivity of rain dances were not justified by scientific research, and dismissed the predominantly negative attitudes of scientists towards such phenomena as elitist or racist. ...

    According to Feyerabend, new theories came to be accepted not because of their accord with scientific method, but because their supporters made use of any trick -- rational, rhetorical or ribald -- in order to advance their cause.

    This is more more anti-science that anything the Pope has said. If the academic scientists are really so easily offended and humiliated, then they should complain about other academic profs like Feyerabend.

    Wednesday, Jan 16, 2008
     
    Cholesterol as a Danger Has Skeptics
    The NY Times reports:
    For decades, the theory that lowering cholesterol is always beneficial has been a core principle of cardiology. It has been accepted by doctors and used by drug makers to win quick approval for new medicines to reduce cholesterol.

    But now some prominent cardiologists say the results of two recent clinical trials have raised serious questions about that theory — and the value of two widely used cholesterol-lowering medicines, Zetia and its sister drug, Vytorin. Other new cholesterol-fighting drugs, including one that Merck hopes to begin selling this year, may also require closer scrutiny, they say.

    “The idea that you’re just going to lower LDL and people are going to get better, that’s too simplistic, much too simplistic,” said Dr. Eric J. Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, is the so-called bad cholesterol, in contrast to high-density lipoprotein, or HDL.

    And dietary advice about cholesterol is often wrong also. Here is more on the subject.
     
    Pope cannot speak at university
    Some university scientists are censoring the Pope:
    Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday cancelled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting. ...

    One of the protesting professors, Carlo Cosmelli, told AFP: "Since the conviction of Galileo ... physicists are especially sensitive over interference by the Catholic Church in the scientific domain." ...

    "The Church can no longer use pyres or corporal punishment," Cini said in the communist daily Il Manifesto. "Today it uses the Enlightenment's God of Reason as a Trojan horse to enter the citadel of scientific knowledge."

    These scientists need to lighten up. The Pope is no threat to science, and never has been.

    Motl, the Reference Frame blogger, compares Galileo to string theorists.

    I don't really care whether Galileo's teaching was a new religion, new philosophy, or new science. I think it is much more important that he was right and his wisdom turned out to be essential for the development of our civilization. I happen to care about the fact that Galileo was infallible in the fundamental questions, unlike the religious authority. ...

    Note that Galileo Galilei's description of the crackpots of his time is almost identical to your humble correspondent's favorite words about the contemporary heirs of the Inquisition - I mean the imbeciles who irrationally criticize string theory today and who are trash upon mankind and childish simpletons who haven't grown up. Well, let us admit that great minds think alike.

    Galileo defied the Pope and made fun of him by creating a childish simpleton character named "Simplicio" in his book. The book's main argument was that the tides prove the motion of the Earth. Galileo may have thought that he was infallible and that only a fool would doubt the argument, but he turned out to be wrong.

    I wonder why Motl even calls his blog the Reference Frame. It was the Catholic Church that correctly argued that maybe Earth-centered and Sun-centered coordinates might be valid reference frames for astronomical predictions. Galileo was the stubborn one.


    Tuesday, Jan 15, 2008
     
    Goofy cosmology
    Here is an article about wacky ideas from cosmologists:
    In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe.

    Monday, Jan 14, 2008
     
    The Moral Instinct
    Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker puzzles over this moral dilemma:
    You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.
    This story is sometimes given to prove that people are irrational about morals. But I don't think that it proves that at all. We cannot have a society where people go around committing murder because of some utilitarian theory of greater social good.

    Sunday, Jan 13, 2008
     
    Obama never truly opposed the Iraq War
    People keep crediting Barack Obama with opposing the Iraq War, but here is Obama's 2002 speech:
    I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. ...

    I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

    Pres. Bush would agree with much of this. Everyone is against dumb wars. Obama fails to say that he is actually against the Iraq War, and in 2004, he said that he didn't know how he would have voted on the war. When he got to the US Senate, he voted to continue the war funding. I agree with Bill Clinton that Obama's war opposition is a "fairy tale".

    I think that the Democrats could be making the same mistake that they made in 2004. They think that opposition to Pres. Bush's handling of the Iraq War is an electoral winner, but they don't have a candidate who has any credible story about how the war could have been handled any better.

     
    Fluoridated water
    The current Scientific American has an article on how adding fluoride to water has an assortment of health risks, and little benefit to those who brush their teeth. It essentially says that the John Birch Society was right after all!

    Saturday, Jan 12, 2008
     
    Ron Paul's fringe views
    Some bloggers seem to be just discovering that Congressman Ron Paul has some fringe views. Paul ran for President in 1988 as the nominee of the Libertarian Party. Of course he has fringe views.

    What is really slimy is digging out old quotes to try to portray Paul as racist, anti-semitic, or homophobic. It is just idiotic name-calling. Someone would have to be really afraid of Paul's message to stoop so low.


    Monday, Jan 07, 2008
     
    Silly evolution argument
    The Si Valley paper published this letter:
    Drug-resistant TB sign of evolution

    The Mercury News (Editorial, Jan. 4) points out another strong piece of evidence for evolution in its opinion about the increasing drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. These drug-resistant strains are the direct result of TB evolving - survival of the fittest. Those strains that are most resistant to antibiotics survive and reproduce while other, less fit strains do not. This process is exacerbated by people not completing their prescribed antibiotic treatment. This is a simple and practical example of why it is important that everyone be taught about the process of evolution.

    Bob Downs
    Los Gatos

    This is often given as a practical and easily verifiable proof for evolution. But it really proves nothing. My hunch is that creationists would readily believe that some drugs are more effective on some bacteria than other bacteria. That is all it takes to understand that drug-resistant bacteria could be a problem.

    Here is a new anti-creationism book:

    The National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine have released Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book designed to give the public a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the current scientific understanding of evolution and its importance in the science classroom. NAS and IOM strongly maintain that only scientifically based explanations for life should be included in public school science class.
    The 70-page book argues that evolution is compatible with religion, and has various straw-man attacks on creationists. I wonder why they bother with such a silly book. Their main conclusion:
    Nonscientific approaches do not belong in science classrooms.
    Nobody disagrees with that.

    The paper did publish this response:

    Evolution isn't a proven fact

    Bob Downs' use of the increase of drug-resistant bacteria as evidence for evolution (Letters, Jan. 7) is poor reasoning and poor science. While this example is a valid case of "survival of the fittest," it is not evidence for evolution. No new information was created in the genetic material of the surviving tuberculosis bacteria and none will pass to the next generation. This is nothing more than a new distribution of a small percentage of a population that was already present. No new species, genera or family are present.

    It is a "leap of faith" to assume that survival of the fittest produces new or different species or kinds of organisms, animal, plant or protozoa. While I agree that everyone should learn about evolution as a point of view, it is not a proven fact. It is an assumption based upon a philosophical perspective.

    Ken Van Meter
    Superintendent Milpitas Christian School

    It is possible that bacteria has mutated in drug-resistant strains as a result of anti-biotic use. I don't know. If so, it would be a good example of evolution. But the argument for evolution as stated in the original letter is meaningless. It is just "survival of the fittest", which nobody doubts or disputes.

    Here is another silly letter:

    Time to reactivate flat-Earth theory

    Huzzah for Ken Van Meter (Letters, Jan. 12) for his stunningly logical and factual refutation of biological evolution. Inspired as I am by his intellectual tour de force, I feel the time is now finally right to take down that other pillar of secular science-babble, the round-Earth theory. As the Earth by observation is obviously flat (even from the highest mountain it appears only slightly bent), it is clearly a "leap of faith" to conclude that doctored photographs from faked Apollo missions prove that the Earth is any other shape than what it appears to be from the ground.

    Scott Shellard
    Santa Cruz

    Somehow the evolutionists often come around to talk about the Flat Earth theory. You never hear about the Flat Earth, except from evolutionists.

    Wednesday, Jan 02, 2008
     
    Christianity v Islam
    Half Sigma debates this comment:
    Islam is just at the same point Christianity was a couple of hundred years ago with crusades, martyrs, and converting anyone it can get its hands on to a strict dogmatic set of doctrines. I can see why Christians (and those in Christian nations) are scared. They are seeing a shadow of their former selves, and know that if they let it be, they will be replaced just as the pagans were.
    This is just too stupid for detailed comment. 200 years ago Christians were the most enlightened people on Earth, and the worst Christian country was better than the best Mohammedan country today.
     
    Edge thinkers change their minds
    Harvard philopher Rebecca Goldstein writes:
    Another problem with the falsifiability criterion is that I have seen it become a blunt instrument, unthinkingly applied. Popper tried to use it to discredit not only Marxism and Freudianism as scientific theories but also Darwin’s theory of natural selection -- a position that only a creationist could hold today. I have seen scientists claim that major theories in contemporary cosmology and physics are not “science” because they can’t think of a simple test that would falsify them.
    It is not just that there is no simple test to refute string theory; there is no way to relate string theory to anything that is observable at all. Yes, string theory is not science, and some other popular theories aren't either.

    I am not a creationist, but I agree with Popper's criticism of Darwin. There is no experiment or observation that can tell us whether the Darwin’s theory of natural selection is correct or not.

    I am not denying evolutionary theory. There is much in evolutionary biology that can be tested. Mutation rates can be measured. The function and inheritance of individual genes can be observed. Evidence for common ancestors to different species can be found in fossils and in DNA. But natural selection is just a meaningless tautology.

    Natural selection just means any form of animal or plant reproduction other than artificial selection. Artificial selection refers to human-directed breeding programs as carried out by farmers and dog lovers. Anything else is natural selection. Any observation of life in nature is an example of natural selection, and there is no way it could be anything else.

    You often hear evolutionists rave about how the theory of natural selection was the greatest scientific discovery of all time. But the fact is that no one ever thought that nature worked in any other way.

    In another article, Steven Pinker changed his mind about humans evolving, and so Mark Pagel. It is amazing to see evolutionists suddenly discover that humans are evolving.

    Keith Devlin and Paul Davies have decided to reject Platonism!


    Monday, Dec 31, 2007
     
    Science acknowledges human biodiversity
    The Science mag breakthrough of the year 2007 is Human Genetic Variation.
    The unveiling of the human genome almost 7 years ago cast the first faint light on our complete genetic makeup. Since then, each new genome sequenced and each new individual studied has illuminated our genomic landscape in ever more detail. In 2007, researchers came to appreciate the extent to which our genomes differ from person to person and the implications of this variation for deciphering the genetics of complex diseases and personal traits.
    7 years ago, those politically correct researchers were claiming that human genome research proved that all people are the same, and not much different from chimps. Humans stopped evolving 50k years ago, they said. It turned out to be not true. People have genetic differences after all.

    Of course the magazine does not admit that the only people who were surprised by the news are the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who disingenuously claim that teaching evolution promotes their egalitarian ideals.

    The accompanying editorial finds a way to include a lot of Bush bashing. It says that a strong runner-up was the research that proved that stem cells will continue to available under Pres. Bush's policy of not federally funding embryo destruction:

    James Thompson of the University of Wisconsin, who did the first research with embryonic stem cells, has now taken a major step toward ending the "ethical" controversy over their use. But hold on: That controversy was generated by specific objections from one religion, not some universal ethic. There is every reason to continue research along the old path, with embryo-derived cells: The new methods may carry unknown liabilities, so making the case for changing Bush's 2001 presidential order should continue.
    Then it gets even weirder. It claims that Bush somehow covered up the possibility that global warming with cause mental health problems among environmentalists having anxiety about global warming. I wonder if these leftist scientists ever even talk to someone who is not a lying Bush-hater.

    Sunday, Dec 30, 2007
     
    What I've changed my mind about
    The online magazine Edge is asking some prominent people the question, "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" The answers are supposed to be posted shortly.

    I used to think that general relativity and quantum mechanics have some fundamental incompatibility that must be resolved by some unified field theory like string theory. Most theoretical physicists have believed this for 50 years, but no good has ever come from this thinking. There are no incompatibilities at any observable energy level, and no known way to test whether anybody's ideas are good or bad. It is just one of those goofy philosophical problems, like asking whether information can be lost in a black hole. It is not physics.

    I used to think That Einstein invented relativity theory. I have always believed that Einstein was one of the great scientists of all time, but his most renowned work was actually mostly plagiarized from others. Poincare, Lorentz, Hilbert and others deserve more credit for relativity.

    I used to think That it is feasible and useful to figure out people's motives. Some of the most evil people in the world have somehow gotten a free pass by convincing people that they have good motives. I have discovered that people are very frequently wrong when then make inferences about the motives of others, and that the inferences are often not useful even when they are correct.

    I used to think that creationists represented some sort of threat to the scientific establishment. But the creationists are just people with fringe ideas and no influence. Fringe ideas are no threat to science. The mainstream evolutionists who push unscientific ideas are much worse.

    Maybe I'll get some more ideas when the Edge essays appear.


    Saturday, Dec 29, 2007
     
    Lawyer wants to redistribute wealth
    Theodore H. Frank writes:
    There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney’s and John Edwards’s wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards’s multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

    Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards’s policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

    Excellent point.

    The Democratic presidential nominee will almost certainly be a lawyer who has never had any executive responsibilities, has never played a leadship role, and has never done anything productive for our economy. The Republican nominee will have far more relevant experience, and will have a proven track record of accomplishments.

     
    1980s covert war in Afghanistan
    I just watched the new movie Charlie Wilson's War, and the promotional History Channel documentary. It was about American support for the Afghan resistance to the invading Soviet army in the 1980s.

    The movie has some strange omissions. It showed Congressman Wilson getting drunk the night before a big trip to Afghanistan in which he was going to convince the committee chairman to approve more covert money for the Afghan Mujahideen rebels. But it skipped the story about how he caused a car accident on a bridge on his way home, and should have been charged with hit-and-run driving. Considering that a major theme of the movie was how Wilson improbably succeeded in supporting the Afghans while facing personal scandals, I can't see why they would omit this story.

    Another major omission was Pres. Ronald Reagan's role. The movie explains how the USA initially supported the Afghans covertly by buy Russian AK-47s and other military equipment from Egypt and other countries, and supplying them thru Pakistan so that the Soviets would not have proof of American involvement. Then it explains how the war was later won by American Stinger missiles that shot down a lot of Soviet aircraft. But it gives the impression that the Stingers were part of the covert war and bought from Egypt or elsewhere.

    In fact Reagan had to personally approve the Stingers, and he did it over the objections of all the CIA-types who believed that the aid had to concealed from the Soviets. Only the USA had Stingers, and the Soviets would soon know what we were doing.

    The movie also ends on an odd note. It shows Congressmen debating whether to fund an Afghan school after the war. The point seems to be that if we had only spent a bunch of money re-educating the Afghans after the war, then we might not have had to invade the country in 2001. The argument is wildly speculative and unsupported.

    The movie looks as if someone made a factual movie, but then some Hollywood producer decided to correct the politics by removing the Reagan scene and tacking on an anti-American message at the end. If you want to watch the story, I would suggest just watching the History Channel version, as it has commentary from the real Charlie Wilson.


    Thursday, Dec 27, 2007
     
    Bush deplores cowardly acts
    On 9-11-2001, Pres. Bush said:
    THE PRESIDENT: I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.
    Now he says:
    The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy.
    I don't think that "cowardly act" is the best term here. Brazen act, perhaps.

    Also Pakistan does not have a democracy, and we don't know the motives of the assassin.


    Wednesday, Dec 26, 2007
     
    Repressed memory does not exist
    Harvard Magazine reports on research that there is no such thing as repressed memory, and that fictional use of it is a recent invention:
    In a recent study, professor of psychiatry Harrison Pope, co-director of the Biological Psychiatry Lab at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, put “repressed memory” to the test of time. He reasoned that if dissociative amnesia were an innate capability of the brain—akin to depression, hallucinations, anxiety, and dementia—it would appear in written works throughout history. In collaboration with associate professor of psychiatry James Hudson, Michael Parker, a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Michael Poliakoff, director of education programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and research assistant Matthew Boynes, Pope set out to find the earliest recorded example of a “repressed memory.”

    The survey yielded various nineteenth-century instances: best known were A Tale of Two Cities (1859), by Charles Dickens, in which Dr. Manette forgets that he is a physician after his incarceration in the Bastille, and Captains Courageous (1896), by Rudyard Kipling, in which “Penn,” a former minister, loses his memory after his family perishes in a flood and recalls that trauma only after being involved in a collision at sea. But the survey turned up no examples from pre-modern sources. ...

    In a report of their findings published in Psychological Medicine, Pope and his colleagues concluded that the absence of dissociative amnesia in works prior to 1800 indicates that the phenomenon is not a natural neurological function, but rather a “culture-bound” syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century. They argued that dissociative amnesia falls into the diagnostic category “pseudo-neurological symptom” (or “conversion disorder”)—a condition that “lacks a recognizable medical or neurological basis.”

    So why do people believe in such a nutty and unfounded idea? Because of the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, and because Hollywood uses flashbacks as a useful dramatic device.
     
    Egypt to copyright antiquities
    Here is another example of absurd copyright overreach. The UK BBC reports:
    Egypt's MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids.

    Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries. ...

    The Luxor hotel in the US city of Las Vegas would also not be affected because it was not an exact copy of a pyramid and its interior was completely different, Mr Hawass told AFP news agency.

    But he said claims by the hotel that it was "the only pyramid-shaped building in the world" could no longer be made.

    Meanwhile, college students today do not see anything wrong with many forms of copyright infringement. David Pogue is quoted here as saying:
    I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

    Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, ‘O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.’

    There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

    ‘Who thinks that might be wrong?’

    Two hands out of 500.


    Tuesday, Dec 25, 2007
     
    Diamond's theories not well-accepted
    From a NY Times essay:
    Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” ...

    What the scientists held in common was a suspicion that in writing his two best-selling sagas of civilization — the other is “Guns, Germs and Steel” — Dr. Diamond washed over the details that make cultures unique to assemble a grand unified theory of history.

    “A big-picture man,” one participant called him. For anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae — the specifics and contradictions of human culture — the words are not necessarily a compliment. ...

    The backlash had been brewing since a symposium last year, “Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse and Colonial Encounters,” at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although “Guns, Germs and Steel” has been celebrated as an antidote to racism — Western civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority, but geographical luck — some anthropologists saw it as excusing the excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made them do it, it was their geography.

    “Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said Deborah B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.”

    My problem with Diamond is that he speaks with such certainty about the behavior of illiterate societies that died out 1000s of years ago. His far-fetched theories are conveniently politically correct, and get widespread praise, but his evidence is thin.

    Meanwhile, his analysis of recent events is well off the mark. By recent, I mean 20th century USA. He erroneously attributes the success of QWERTY, DOS/Wintel, and VHS to market failure.

    Sailer comments here.


    Monday, Dec 24, 2007
     
    Calling for a science debate
    John Tierney of the NY Times has joined the evolutionist bloggers in calling for a presidential science debate.
    An impressive array of scientists, academics, politicians and journalists have joined Science Debate 2008, the grass-roots group urging the candidates to have a debate on science and technology.
    One comment explains the main problem with this idea:
    From what I have read and heard, there is no point to a debate on any science topic. The candidates, and I mean all of them, are illiterate in science. Why watch posturing when we have more than enough of that already? These people are incapable of any depth greater than a bumper sticker.
    Most of the evolutionists pushing this idea present it as an opportunity to embarrass candidates with Christian beliefs. But they would all be embarrassed if they had to say something intelligent about science.

    Another comment says:

    Candidates should be asked this most fundamental science question. Are you willing to use science as tool to better inform public policy decisions? If not, why? and what will you use to guide your decision-making process if not well-informed science?
    That is indeed the most fundamental question. Science does not say whether we should send a mission to Mars, fund embryo destruction, impose a carbon tax, or build more nuclear power plants. All science does is to provide better info for those policy decisions.

    For the most part, it is people like Al Gore who are afraid of a science debate. When asked about contrary views, Al Gore says

    There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, ...
    Pres. Harry S Truman is quoted as saying:
    If you can't convince them, confuse them.

    Saturday, Dec 22, 2007
     
    Evolutionism and eugenics
    To see why evolutionists like to deny that humans are still evolving, see this pro-eugenics article. It argues:
    1. Human intelligence is largely hereditary.
    2. Civilization depends totally upon innate intelligence.
    3. The higher the level of civilization, the better off the population.
    4. At the present time, we are evolving to become less intelligent with each new generation.
    5. Unless we halt or reverse this trend, our civilization will invariably decline.
    Eugenics is a bad word. No one wants to deal with this stuff.
     
    Water fluoridation is still an issue in California
    Tap water fluoridation is not a priority of the John Birch Society anymore, according to the LA Times:
    Today, fluoride isn't among the topics on the John Birch Society's website.

    When William F. Jasper first went to work for the group in the mid-1970s, the fluoride fight had taken a back seat to more pressing issues.

    "We did have quite large files on fluoridation," said Jasper, a senior editor for the group's magazine. "I'm sure we still do somewhere."

    Jasper notes that the John Birch Society still opposes fluoridation as an abuse of government power. But he wasn't aware that his hometown of Sacramento began adding fluoride to its water two years ago.

    The Birch Society is concerned scientists in the United Kingdom believe that women may be evolving as humanity's sole representatives.

    Water fluoridation does reduce tooth decay, but there is no proof that drinking fluoride is any better than putting it in your toothpaste. The main benefit is to those who do not brush their teeth. And 10% or so of the population suffers some (minor) adverse health effects from too much fluoride.


    Thursday, Dec 20, 2007
     
    Pope defends hard science
    x
    Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

    The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

    The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

    It is now the environmentalists who are pursuing a dogmatic and unscientific ideology.

    Monday, Dec 17, 2007
     
    Pygmy evolution
    According to new research, pygmies are short because they die young:
    African pygmies usually live in forests, and the conventional explanation for their stature has been that it makes it easier for them to move through dense vegetation. There are also two competing explanations: that small bodies keep cool more readily than large ones (pygmyism tends to be a tropical phenomenon) or that pygmies live in places with unreliable food supplies, and their size means they can make do with smaller meals.

    Dr Migliano and her team reject all these explanations. Some non-African pygmies live outside forests and many live in cool, dry areas. Moreover, some of the world's tallest people, such as the Turkana and Maasai of East Africa, suffer periodic interruptions to their food supply. Instead, the researchers suggest that short stature is not a desirable feature in itself, but is rather a consequence of something else, namely a need to reproduce early.

    By adding pre-existing data for African pygmies to new information they have collected about the Aeta and the Batak of the Philippines, they show that at the beginnings of their lives all these pygmy populations follow the same growth curves as taller people, including Turkana and Americans. This demonstrates that pygmyism is not a result of early malnutrition, as another hypothesis has it. At the age of about 12, however, pygmies stop growing. That is also the age at which they become sexually mature—about three years earlier than taller people.

    The other part of the argument is that all observed pygmy populations have a short life expectancy. Indeed, this, according to Dr Migliano's hypothesis, is the crucial evolutionary pressure. Of the six groups of pygmies for whom data exist, two have a life expectancy of 24 years and the other four about 16 years.


    Sunday, Dec 16, 2007
     
    Huckabee's inspiration to politics
    CBS News reports, about Mike Huckabee:
    At 14, he got a job at the local AM radio station, where the station manager, a passionate, deeply conservative Republican, became his first political mentor. Haskell Jones gave Huckabee a copy of Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 book, "A Choice Not an Echo," written in part to promote Barry Goldwater's presidential bid. Schlafly railed against the moneyed East Coast elites who she argued were diluting the Republican Party's core values. Huckabee found the ideas in the book electrifying.

    Thursday, Dec 13, 2007
     
    Lawyer of the year
    Former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales is 2007 lawyer of the year. The runners-up are also pretty bad. It is amazing how the traits admired by lawyers are despised by everyone else.

    Wednesday, Dec 12, 2007
     
    More on evolution speeding up
    For decades, the leftist-atheist-evolutionists have denied that they were eugenicists. To escape associations with eugenics, they've always claimed that evolution doesn't really apply to humans because humans stopped evolved 50k years ago. They never really had any evidence for that claim, of course. It was as if they didn't really believe in evolution, and only cited evolution when it suited their political purposes.

    From the LA Times story:

    The researchers looked for long stretches of DNA that were identical in many people, suggesting that a gene was widely adopted and that it spread relatively recently, before random mutations among individuals had a chance to occur.

    They found that the more the population grew, the faster human genes evolved. That's because more people created more opportunities for a beneficial mutation to arise, Hawks said.

    In the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, as agriculture was able to support increasingly large societies, the rate of evolutionary change rose to more than 100 times historical levels, the study concluded.

    Among the fastest-evolving genes were those related to brain development, but the researchers aren't sure what made them so desirable, Hawks said.

    There are other mysteries too.

    "Nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes," Hawks said. "Why is it that blue-eyed people had a 5% advantage in reproducing compared to non-blue-eyed people? I have no idea."

    SciAm says:
    "Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes," Hawks notes, because that gene —- OCA2 -— had not yet developed. "We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes."
    Just a few days ago, I heard Craig Venter plugging his new book, and he claimed that we do not have the technology to look at someone's DNA and determine whether or not he has blue eyes. Venter is a leading authority on DNA, so I am not sure who is right. But if this new paper is correct, then much of what you have been taught about human evolution is wrong.

    Tuesday, Dec 11, 2007
     
    Researchers: Human Evolution Speeding Up
    AP Science Writer reports:
    Science fiction writers have suggested a future Earth populated by a blend of all races into a common human form. In real life, the reverse seems to be happening. People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

    "I was raised with the belief that modern humans showed up 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and haven't changed," explained Henry C. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. "The opposite seems to be true."

    "Our species is not static," Harpending added in a telephone interview.

    Also, in Wired:
    "We're more different from people 5,000 years ago than they were from Neanderthals," said study co-author and University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending.
    This is contrary to a lot of evolutionist dogma.

    Saturday, Dec 08, 2007
     
    Recording proves cop lied
    Here is a cop who wishes he told the truth:
    Recording Nets Charges for NY Detective

    NEW YORK (AP) - A teenage suspect who secretly recorded his interrogation on an MP3 player has landed a veteran detective in the middle of perjury charges, authorities said Thursday.

    Unaware of the recording, Detective Christopher Perino testified in April that the suspect "wasn't questioned" about a shooting in the Bronx, a criminal complaint said. But then the defense confronted the detective with a transcript it said proved he had spent more than an hour unsuccessfully trying to persuade Erik Crespo to confess - at times with vulgar tactics.

    Once the transcript was revealed in court, prosecutors asked for a recess, defense attorney Mark DeMarco said. The detective was pulled from the witness stand and advised to get a lawyer.

    Perino, 42, was arraigned Thursday on 12 counts of first-degree perjury and faces as many as seven years on each count, prosecutors said. He was released on $15,000 bail.

    This is a good thing. People who act in an official govt capacity to take away people's rights ought to be monitored. And when they lie about what they are doing, they should be held accountable.

    Freddy Hill writes:

    Instead of the marriage ammendment and a few other stupid constitutional proposals out there, I'd suggest an ammendment to the effect that any citizen has the right to record the words and visual interactions of any representative of the state, at any time, for no reason whatsoever. It rings like a 21st century complement to the 2nd ammendment, doesn't it?

    And I would encourage the auto and electronics industry to develop devices that continuously record our actions along with those of people that interact with us, in our cars and in our persons. Black boxes to protect you against the state, if you will. If a cop believes that (s)he is on candid camera all the time, (s)he will be a lot more respectful of our rights.

    I'd vote for that amendment.
     
    We are not so similar to chimps
    Ever hear evolutionists argue that humans are 99% the same as chimps? I am not sure what that was really supposed to prove, but the argument is made frequently, and it is wrong.

    I just heard J. Craig Venter plugging his new book that human differ from each other by 2% of the DNA, and chimps differ by as much as 5 or 6%.


    Friday, Dec 07, 2007
     
    Human evolution is speeding up
    PhysOrg.com reports:
    Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up - and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought - indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different. "We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago," says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

    Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

    -- "We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. "The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence."

    -- "Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, "and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then."

    "Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern humans [those who widely adopted advanced tools and art] appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes are different in different continental groups."

    The site has now blocked this story, and says that it will be back on Monday.

    Sunday, Dec 02, 2007
     
    Comparing psychoanalysis to astrology
    Randy writes, in response to this:
    If you are really interested in knowing whether psychoanalysis is "an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process" or a "desiccated and dead, historical artifcact" I would suggest consulting the yellow pages of your local phone book, since the public tends to vote with their wallet. Based on your coordinates, that would be the yellow pages of Santa Cruz, CA. I count 135 Psychotherapists in the yellow pages of Santa Cruz, Ca. That does not include psychologists who practise psychotherapy.

    Somehow, that does not strike me as a 'historical artifact', or a field which is experiencing an "existential crisis". We're not talking literature, film or history here, but BUSINESS and $.

    As to courses offered outside of of psychology departments, why would you think that a psychology department has the monopoly on psychoanalysis, truth or reality? Because its graduates spend 5 or 6 years being brain washed to re-inforce an existing paradigm which may be far removed from any basis in fact or reality?

    Needless to say, I don't agree with your unscientific conclusion that the field is 'completely unscientific and bogus'. I question your bias and invite you to examine your need to condemn psychoanalysis.

    P.S.: What is the basis of your determination that astrology is unscientific?

    Have you researched astrology, or do you know that astrology has no merit without having to research it because your credentials as an arrogant graduate of a prestigious school make it unneccessary to think?

    In Santa Cruz, we also have astrologers in the yellow pages.

    Astrology and psychoanalysis are based on principles that are known to be false. There have been many many attempts to scientifically prove that these fields have merit, and they have failed. But that doesn't stop people from spending money. People spend money on all sorts of foolish things.


    Friday, Nov 30, 2007
     
    Best science books
    John Horgan posted his list of the 70 best science books since 1900.

    It is remarkable how few of them are real science books. Many of them are essays on various aspects of consciousness. Some promote bogus ideas, and some debunk those ideas. But there really isn't very much scientific knowledge about consciousness. Aren't there any real science books, that explain real science?

     
    No weaknesses at the high school level
    The Bad Astronomer praises this statement:
    There are no scientific weaknesses with biological evolution as the natural process is understood by scientists. At the level at which it is taught in high school, evolutionary biology has no weaknesses, gaps, or problems.
    Only an evolutionist would say something so idiotic. It suggests that evolutionary biology has problems that need to be concealed from impressionable high school students so that they can be taught that the history of life on Earth has been an entirely natural process. Real scientists are not afraid to explain the limitations of their theories.

    George writes:

    Newtonian mechanics also has no weaknesses at the level at which it is taught in high school physics classes. Are you saying that high school students should be allowed to learn that Newtonian mechanics has weaknesses?
    Yes, of course. High school students ought to be taught some of the limitations of Newtonian mechanics, such as its failure to explain what happens inside an atom.

    Monday, Nov 26, 2007
     
    Science ideas proven wrong
    Lubos Motl, the Czech string theorist, writes
    I want to end up with a slightly more extensive list of seventeen wrong beliefs that were once considered to be essential components of any scientific explanation of the world.

    1. Isaac Newton believed that his impressive physical explanation of the world required everything to be composed of particles. ...

    This idea is not known to be false. The best physics theories we have say that everything is observable as particles. Light, energy, electricity, gravity, and everything else is observable as particles at the lowest levels.
    2. It was believed by Maxwell et al. in the 19th century that every wave requires, much like sound, a material substance to propagate; they believed that the existence of the aether was a crucial and inevitable component of any scientific or "materialistic" explanation of electromagnetic waves.
    Again, this is not known to be wrong. The best explanations we have for electromagnetic waves involves a medium of virtual electron-positron pairs and other oddities that permeate the vacuum. The medium may or may not be the same as the mysterious dark energy that is everywhere. We have no viable theory for electromagnetic waves passing thru empty space, and conventional wisdom is that there is no such thing as empty space. The word "aether" is out of fashion, but the concept remains essential.
    7. In mathematics, it was believed by many people that every assertion can either be proved or disproved. Kurt Gödel has demonstrated that every sufficiently powerful system of axioms allows one to construct a statement that can be neither proved nor disproved.
    Goedel only showed that the statement that can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms; it might be provable by other means.
    10. Thirty years ago, it was believed that causality can never be violated, not even in the presence of black holes and not even infinitesimally. Such an assumption implies that the information is being lost during the evaporation of black holes. As we know today, the information is preserved and the reason why the old argument was incorrect is an exponentially small violation of causality and locality inside black holes, a kind of "tunelling of information".
    This one is just laughable. There is no agreement on what causality and information would even mean in a black hole, and no way to say whether one view is any better or worse than any other. Stephen Hawking claims that he solved this problem, but no one else accepts his supposed solution.

    I would put string theory on the list. The theory was widely accepted by theoretical physicists 20 years ago, but it is a big washout.


    Sunday, Nov 25, 2007
     
    Credit for the Big Bang theory
    According to the Cosmic Variance blog, Father Georges-Henri Lemaitre published Hubble's law in 1927, before Hubble published it in 1931. Lemaitre gave a theoretical derivation, and used data from Hubble and elsewhere to estimate Hubble’s constant in that 1927 paper.

    Hubble's law says that the universe is expanding, and the velocities are proportional to the distances. Hubble had some better data, and published an experimental confirmation of the law, but it appears that most of the credit belongs to Lemaitre. The law was the first convincing evidence for the Big Bang theory.

     
    Latest unified field theory
    The British Economist mag writes:
    The nearest thing they have to this—the Standard Model of particle physics—is messy in places and partial, because it omits gravity. Three decades of effort have been expended on string theory, which includes gravity but at the expense of having the universe inelegantly sprout hidden dimensions. Other potential avenues, such as loop quantum gravity, are also proving untidy. That a theory of everything might emerge from geometry would be neat, but it is a long shot.

    Nevertheless, that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing. The geometry he has been studying is that of a structure known to mathematicians as E8, which was first recognised in 1887 by Sophus Lie, a Norwegian mathematician. E8 is a monster. It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year, when a group of mathematicians managed to construct a map that describes it completely.

    No, string theory does not include gravity. It does not include any other known force or particle either.

    The Lisi theory is just another silly unfied field, and it will fail just like all the others. The string theorists and other unified field theorists are the modern alchemists.

     
    Evolutionists complain about cell video
    Some anti-copyright geeks are upset that someone gave a scholarly lecture and showed some remarkable pictures of cells without properly attributing them to Harvard University.

    What really bugs them is showing a short video clip that "subverts the purpose of the original". The original purpose was presumably evolutionist, and the lecturer was criticizing parts of evolutionism. The leftist-atheist-evolutionists cannot tolerate any criticism.

    Harvard will not be suing for copyright violation. Its own professors use clips like this all the time, and call it fair use.

    Update: The evolutionist lying Bush-hater Pharyngula blogger PZ Myers still argues that Dembski "was caught stealing a science video from Harvard/XVIVO for use in his Intelligent Design creationism lectures." His proof is that Dembski admits getting the video from the web, and Harvard refused to sell it to him. The video is an animation of cell pictures, and is widely available on YouTube and elsewhere.

    No, Myers needs a lesson in copyright law. The use of a video under the above facts is a textbook example of fair use, and it is legal. The fact that Harvard refuses to sell the video makes the fair use argument stronger, not weaker.

     
    Build more nukes
    People on both the Left and the Right are coming around to the view that nuclear power is the cleanest and safest large electricity source. People used to worry about accidents like the one at Chernobyl, but that reactor used 50-year-old technology and was not as bad as most people think anyway. A leading
    A mounting number of studies are coming to some surprising conclusions about the dangers of nuclear radiation. It might not be as deadly as is widely believed. ...

    On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down. Forty-seven clean-up workers died from radiation poisoning. Nine children died from thyroid cancer. Experts estimate that up to 4,000 may subsequently die from the long-term results of radiation.

    Germany had once decided to shut down all their nuclear power plants, but now it is not going to do it. If you are concerned about global warming, you have to be in favor of nuclear power. Alternative energies like solar power are just not competitive (using current technology).

    Saturday, Nov 24, 2007
     
    Bogus Freud teachings continue
    The NY Times reports:
    A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.”

    The study, which is to appear in the June 2008 issue of psychiatry’s flagship journal, The American Journal of Psychiatry, is the latest evidence of the field’s existential crisis. For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor’s theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching. ...

    It found that of the 1,175 courses that referenced psychoanalysis, more than 86 percent were offered outside psychology departments. ...

    The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.

    That is a polite way of saying that the field is completely unscientific and bogus, like astrology.

    Friday, Nov 23, 2007
     
    Bush stem cell policy a success
    It is now more clear than ever that Pres. Bush's stem cell policy is an unqualified success. It has resulted in more good science being done, as he pumped more federal money into research while quelling the ethical concerns of those who don't like killing embryoes. There is not one legitimate science research project that was delayed or limited by his policy, nor is there any likelihood that there will ever be.

    The biggest fear was that the federally-approved stem cell lines would run out before alternative technologies became available. But an alternative technology just became available, so there is no chance of that.

    The Bush-haters who have been telling you that Bush was anti-science or thwarting research were just lying.

    Here is one of them still blaming Bush:

    The latest developments are very significant, ... Here are a few reasons why those who claim the debate is over now are way out of line: ... This is the big one: iPS cells appear to be totipotent. That means they are fully capable of forming embryos themselves (this has been demonstrated in mice). If these cells are no different from human embryonic stem cells in that respect, I'm not really sure what ethical issues are being addressed here.
    IOW, his biggest concern is that the new stem cells will have all of the advantages of the embryonic stem cells, and that it will be possible to achieve all of the scientific goals without deliberately killing human embryoes.

    Wednesday, Nov 21, 2007
     
    Why you shouldn't go to law school
    Ex-lawyer Paul Gowder advises not to attend law school:
    Lawyers are Unhappy ... You'll be Surrounded by Jerks ... The law will make you into the worst kind of person.
    Hardly anyone actually likes the law. They become lawyers for the money, and they hate it.

    Monday, Nov 19, 2007
     
    Court only recently got a building
    Andy writes:
    I learned one remarkable fact at the Federalist Society conference I just attended. Despite being around politics and law most of life, including 3 years at law school, one year of clerkship, many years of practice, etc., I never knew that the Supreme Court lacked its own building in the early 1800s and had to hold its hearings in the basement of the Capitol.

    No big deal? Well, it surprised me, both the fact itself and how the legal profession and teachers cover that up. But then imagine my astonishment when I learned that the Supreme Court continued to hold its oral arguments and hearings and meetings in the Capitol until ... 1935!!!! Can you believe that??? The Supreme Court did not have its own building until 1935!!! It's no coincidence that it became more liberal and activist soon thereafter. We should mention how for over 140 years our leaders did not even view the Supreme Court as entitled to its own building.

     
    Genetic news
    The liberal news media is acknowledging the science of genetic influences like never before. The Wash. Post Slate mag columnist William Saletan summarizes theories for genetic and other influences on IQ.

    SciAm reports on "baby rage":

    Kate Keenan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, views this new genetic analysis as the logical next step in Tremblay's long-term exploration into childhood aggression. She believes Tremblay's work may help uncover genetic profiles distinct to chronically aggressive children that may allow researchers to answer questions like, "Can we differentiate [between these kids] even earlier?" [and] "How early can you intervene?"
    Steve Sailer reports:
    There will be a milestone scientific paper out soon on PNAS summarizing evidence that human evolution has been -- in contrast to the conventional wisdom -- speeding up over the last 50,000 years.
    It is now feasible for consumers to get their own DNA analysis:
    For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers will be able to learn what is known so far about how the billions of bits in their biological code shape who they are. Three companies have already announced plans to market such services, one yesterday.
    This NY Times article doesn't mention that Google is investing in one of the companies; conspiracy theorists are saying that this is yet another evil Google plot to invade your privacy and profile you for targeted advertising.

    The legal use of DNA info is uncertain. I guess some people think that the genetic info is beneficial, and others think that it will be harmful.

    Update: Saletan has been forced to issue regrets for his columns. He now says that he neglected to accuse the scientists of being racist because of some associations with others teaching politically incorrect facts and views.


    Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007
     
    PBS re-enacts ID trial
    I just watched Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, a PBS dramatization of the Dover PA intelligent design trial. As expected, it was leftist-atheist-propaganda.

    Parts of it were well done, and some of the details of the Dover PA school situation were news to me. But some of it was very misleading.

    The show defined evolution this way:

    Dr. Miller, what is evolution?

    Most biologists would describe evolution as the process of change over time that characterizes the natural history of life on this planet.

    That is indeed a common evolutionist definition of evolution. But the show also says that a third to a half of Americans don't believe in evolution. Those evolution skeptics are using a different definition. Everyone agrees that there has been change over time.

    The show said that evolution was not taught much in the USA from 1925 to the 1960s because of the Scopes verdict and the judge ordering a $100 fine. It even said that the reporters at the trial were unable to learn what evolution was all about because of some creationist conspiracy. In fact, Scopes did not teach evolution, and neither Scopes nor anyone else has ever had to pay any fine for teaching evolution. The evolution material in the textbook at issue in the Scopes trial is not taught today because of objections from evolutionists. The textbook taught Piltdown Man as a missing link, eugenics, and the superiority of the caucasian race. Everyone now agrees that this was bad science and should not be taught.

    The show said that evolution explains how dinosaurs evolved into birds. I think that there is some legitimate dispute about that.

    The show claimed that Pres. Bush supported ID, but he really just said that "people ought to be exposed to different ideas".

    The show said that there was no jury trial because there was no money at stake. (The US Constitution 7A guarantees a right to a jury trial if money is at stake.) In fact, the ACLU and its partners sought and received over a million dollars as a result of the trial judgment.

    The show told how the trial hinged on some early drafts of a manuscript that could not have been known to anyone in Dover PA, and to some embarrassing misstatements by the Dover PA school board.

    Perhaps the strangest thing was that the show went on for two hours about the constitutionality of a "four-paragraph statement", but it never actually read the statement. It just gave all sorts of evolutionist opinions about how it was promoting a particular religious view. If they read the statement, then viewers might come to a different conclusion.

    George writes:

    As the show said:
    To this day, teaching creationism in public school science classes anywhere in the United States remains a violation of students' Constitutional rights.
    A court of law has ruled that the four-paragraph statement is unconstitional. PBS is govt-supported. It might be unconstitutional for PBS to broadcast the statement. It would be using the public airwaves to advance an establishment of religion. Viewers might think that the govt had endorsed anti-evolution, and feel pressured to attend church or something. The American Revolution was fought just to combat that sort of thinking. With George Bush in the White House, people like Judge Jones are the only ones keeping us from becoming a theocracy. No one should be allowed to hear that four-paragraph statement on any govt-supported channels.
    With two hours of leftist-atheist-evolutionist propaganda, I would think that even the evolutionists would like to know what the other side is saying.

    Discovery Institute has objected to the show materials:

    A packet for educators issued by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in conjunction with the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" encourages teaching practices that are probably unconstitutional, a conservative organization stated on Tuesday. ...

    In the booklet, teachers are instructed to use such discussion questions as: "Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion?" The answer to that query is provided as: "Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently antireligious is simply false."

    "This statement is simplistic and not neutral among different religions, and in that sense arguably inconsistent with Supreme Court teachings concerning neutrality," said attorney Casey Luskin, program officer for public policy and legal affairs at the institute.

    The PBS Nova teaching guide is strange in that it attempts to briefly summarize the beliefs of five religions that support evolution (Judaism, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist). The ID proponents don't go around trying to get teachers to promote the views of their preferred religious denominations. It is very strange the way these folks think that it is unconstitutional to say that some people are skeptical about certain aspects of evolution, but then also try to get the teachers to teach some pro-evolution religion.

    Update: The evolutionist NewScientist mag reports:

    In a bizarre twist to the evolution wars, ...

    The teaching package states: "Q: Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? A: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply false." According to Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, this answer favours one religious viewpoint, arguably violating the US constitution. "We're afraid that teachers might get sued," he says. “We're afraid that teachers might get sued for bringing religion into the classroom”

    A lawyer for WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts, which produces the show, says the package is covered by the right to free speech. He declined to comment on the claim that teachers risked lawsuits.

    It would be fine if the leftist-atheist-evolutionists just wanted to teach evolution. They want to teach it with their own religious spin, and they want to suppress alternative views.
     
    Stone Age feminism killed the Neanderthals
    The Boston Globe reports:
    The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by "real" humans to prehistoric climate change.

    But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers. ...

    There are other plausible explanations for the Neanderthal extinction.


    Tuesday, Nov 13, 2007
     
    Federal judges maintain racial discrimination
    This article highlights the problem (discussed in The Supremacists) of federal consent decrees that last forever.
    Front-page court battles over integration are mostly a thing of the past. But according to the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, there are at least 253 school districts still under federal court supervision in racial inequality cases and those are just the ones in which Justice intervened.
    Congress should pass a law setting a time limit on all consent decrees.

    Sunday, Nov 11, 2007
     
    Obama contradicts himself on the Iraq War
    Candy Crowley of CNN interviews Barack Obama:
    CROWLEY: I want to talk about your Iraq speech, because have you also said since then that you’re not sure what you would have done had you been in the Senate because you weren’t privy to the intelligence.

    OBAMA: The only time when I said I’m not sure what I would do if I were in the Senate was right before the Democratic convention, when we had two nominees that obviously I did not want to be criticizing right before they got up and received the nomination.

    CROWLEY: But you didn’t mean it?

    OBAMA: So — well, no. What I’m suggesting is, everybody had difficult choices to make. And I — and these were difficult choices.

    Obama said something similar on Meet the Press today.

    I previously attacked Obama's Iraq War reasoning here, and Al Gore's here.

    So remember, when you hear Obama say that he consistently opposed the Iraq War, what he really means is that he opposed the war except when it was to his partisan political advantage to say that he might have voted for the war.

     
    More evidence for genetic theories
    The NY Times reports:
    When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

    But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

    Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases.

    At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.

    I guess race is not a social construct after all.

    Meanwhile, the Wash. Post reports:

    Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. ...

    Suspecting such an error in the Haynie study, Harden and three colleagues, including her adviser, Eric Turkheimer, an expert in behavioral genetics, studied more than 500 pairs of twins in the same national survey analyzed by the Ohio team....

    The team looked at identical twin pairs in which one twin initiated sex younger than the other, then team members tallied subsequent problem behaviors. If sex really adds to the chances of delinquency, then early-sex teens should end up delinquent more often than their later-sex twins.

    "It turns out that there was no positive relationship between age of first sex and delinquency," Harden said.

    In other words, the same genes are causing both behaviors.

    The article goes on to some even more politically incorrect research:

    A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is irrelevant to IQ and that the mother's IQ explains both the decision to breast-feed and her children's IQ.

    Saturday, Nov 10, 2007
     
    Cognitive dissonance
    NY Times columnist John Tierney writes:
    At a gathering of social psychologists earlier this year in Memphis, I was surprised to hear one of them say mournfully, “You know, we haven’t really come up with a solid concept since cognitive dissonance.” What made this surprising was that it’s been a half century since cognitive dissonance was identified.
    He writes here on cognitive dissonance.

    The trouble is that there are alternate theories that explain the data just as well, and no way to tell which theory is better. Tierney describes attempts to observe cognitive dissonance in monkeys, but there are always simpler explanations for the observations that do not involve cognitive dissonance. Eg, here is monkey experiment:

    Monkeys presumably don’t have all that elaborate a concept of themselves, yet in the experiment at Yale, once they chose a red M&M over a blue M&M, they seemed to be afflicted with cognitive dissonance — and reduced it by acting as if they didn’t like the blue one anyway.
    But the monkeys can also be explained by this:
    The data in the monkey study are extremely interesting. They could be interpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance theory, but there are other interpretations as well. For example, monkeys may be wired not to waste time making the same evaluation twice. So once they reject something, they remember that they rejected it and reject it again in the future.
    Or this:
    I am economist by training and inclination. To me, the explanation for the observed behavior is simple. This is Risk Aversion. If you think two choices are equal and sample only ONE of them, which turns out to be satisfactory, plain old risk aversion will cause you to place a higher value on the known, acceptable choice in the future.
    I think that the problem here is faulty mind-reading. Psychologists and other construct elaborate theories for what people are thinking, but they don't test whether they are correct or not.
     
    Election Results
    John writes:
    Two local public officials, who have done more than anyone else in the nation to fight illegal immigration at the local level, faced their respective voters on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007.

    In Hazleton, PA, Mayor Lou Barletta, a Republican cross-endorsed by the Democrats, was reelected to a 3rd term with 89 percent of the vote. His only opponent was a Libertarian candidate who got 11 percent. A Democratic former mayor, who had sought the Democratic nomination, was defeated in the Democratic primary by write-in votes for Barletta!

    In Suffolk County, NY (which has a population of 1.5 million people at the eastern end of Long Island), County Executive Steve Levy, a Democrat cross-endorsed by the Republicans and 3 other parties, was reelected to a 2nd term with 96 percent of the vote. His 2 opponents (including a Libertarian) each got about 2 percent.

    Why can't our national candidates get the message?

     
    Brainwashing kids with pseudoscience propaganda
    Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi writes:
    Gov. Bill Ritter recently dropped a new "ambitious" climate-change plan in our laps.

    The plan envisions a government that dictates what size car you drive, how you run your business, how much electricity you use and what alternative energies are worthy of your consideration.

    And as an added bonus, the plan intends to indoctrinate your children. ...

    Yet, the Climate Action Plan says that "the state will work through the Governor's P-20 Education Council and others to make sustainability curricula become standard fare in K-12 classrooms throughout the state."

    Standard fare? I'm a weird person. I don't want social conservatives teaching my kids about creationism. I don't want Republicans teaching my kids about balanced budgets. And I don't want Democrats teaching my children global-warming hysteria.

    The leftist school authorities are not content to just teach the scientific facts, because they are insufficient to lead to the leftist conclusions that they want. So they teach pseudoscience propaganda.

    Meanwhile, there is also controversy in Africa:

    The centerpiece of the exhibit at the Nairobi National Museum is Turkana Boy, the remains of a boy who died 1.5 million years ago in Kenya. The fossil, the most complete specimen of homo erectus found so far, has been kept in a bomb-proof vault.

    Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who heads the Kenyan evangelical churches, hasn't been mollified by an invitation to tour the Human Origins exhibit before it opens to the public, The Times of London reported.

    "I do not dispute that as humans we have a history but my family most certainly did not descend from the apes," he said.

    Adoyo said that members of his churches will picket the museum if evolution is presented as a fact rather than a theory.

    If the museum just presents facts, then there should be no problem. Homo erectus was once thought to be a missing link, but most evolutionists no longer think that it was a human ancestor.

    Friday, Nov 09, 2007
     
    Sierra Club opposes prosperity
    Ever wonder why so-called environmentalists oppose nuclear power? The Sierra adopted this policy in 1974, and still stands by it on its web page:
    The Sierra Club opposes the licensing, construction and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending:

    1. Development of adequate national and global policies to curb energy over-use and unnecessary economic growth. ...

    Since then, nuclear power has become relatively safer, cleaner, and cheaper, compared to the alternatives. Especially if you are concerned about global warming.
     
    Modern science is atheistic
    Here is data from Nature magazine supporting the claim that most prominent scientists are atheists:
    Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample [1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively [2].

    In 1996, we repeated Leuba's 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature [3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba's 1914 survey to gauge belief among "greater" scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.

    Before 1900, most of the great scientists were Christians. Since then, most of the prominents were raised in a Christian culture but were actually atheists.

    Wednesday, Nov 07, 2007
     
    Buchanan says that we are despised for our toxic culture
    Patrick J. Buchanan writes:
    Millions of Muslims now no longer see America as the beacon of liberty, but as an arrogant superpower with a huge footprint in their world, dictating to their regimes. Instead of bringing our troops home after our Cold War and Gulf War victories, we moved permanently into Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Then we attacked a Muslim nation, Iraq, that had neither attacked us nor threatened us, to impose our system upon it.

    Like the British, French and Russians before us, we are seen as imperialists, and shall be so seen and so hated until we get our troops out of their world. Finally, we are despised for our toxic culture and our uncritical support of the Israelis, who are viewed as the persecutors and robbers of the land and dignity of the Palestinian people.

    Why cannot we see ourselves as others see us?

    This is nonsense. We never moved permanently into Saudia Arabia, and we have no troops there today. Iraq did attack our oil supplies in 1990, and set fire to the oil. Iraq threatened us by refusing to account for previously-documented WMD, and by taking the wrong side in the war on terrorists.

    We have not imposed our system on Iraq. Iraq has adopted a constitution that makes Islam the official religion, and Islamic law the basic principle.

    America is still the beacon of liberty. Mohammedans have more liberties under American rule than they have ever had under Mohammedan rule. The "toxic culture" that Mohammedans despise is Christian culture. They hate infidels and they have a long history of waging jihad against infidels.

    I just don't believe that anyone really views the Israelis as the persecutors and robbers of the land and dignity of the Palestinian people. The Mohammedans have hated the Jews as being like monkeys and pigs for over 1000 years. That is what the Koran says, and that is what every Arab schoolboy is taught. It wouldn't matter how much land and dignity that the Jews gave to the Palestinian Arabs, the Jews would still be hated as monkeys and pigs, and the Mohammedan Arabs would still want to eliminate them.

    As far as I know, the Arabs are treated better in Israel than they are in the Arab countries. If the Iraqis or other really cared about the Palestinian Arabs, then they'd complain about how they are treated in Jordan and Lebanon. They don't.

    We don't have uncritical support of Israel. We have lots of politicians like Jimmy Carter who say nasty things about Israel, and who sympathize with Israel's terrorist enemies.

    We are not imperialists. We have no desire to rule foreign countries. We would bail out of Iraq in a minute, if there were some responsible government that was capable of running Iraq in a civilized manner.


    Tuesday, Nov 06, 2007
     
    Kerry says he’ll be ready next time
    Boston news:
    RANDOLPH -- John Kerry said Monday there might be a next time for his presidential aspirations, and if there is, the 63-year-old U.S. senator from Massachusetts says he’ll be ready for the political torpedoes that helped sink his 2004 White House bid.

    Kerry, whose service as a U.S. Navy Swift boat skipper during the Vietnam War came under attack in his race against President Bush, said he has compiled a dossier on his war record critics that he wishes he had as the Democratic presidential nominee.

    ``We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,'' Kerry said following a morning address to the South Shore Chamber fo Commerce. ``It’s a shame we weren’t able to produce all that at the time.''

    Kerry said he regrets his slowness to counter accusations from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which faulted Kerry’s war record and his subsequent anti-war activism.

    The chief Swift Boat Vet John O'Neill first debated John Kerry in 1971. And Kerry is just now claiming to have a rebuttal ready? It is amazing that a bozo like Kerry was almost elected President.

    Meanwhile, Bill Clinton has accused Barack Obama of swiftboating Hillary Clinton by pointing out inconsistencies in her comments on drivers licenses for illegal aliens. I think that Obama should take it as a compliment. So far he has been a wimpy candidate.

     
    Hillary's college thesis on the net
    Here is Hillary Clinton's Wellesley thesis.
     
    Jerry Coyne attacked
    On the VDare blog, Fulford and Sailer make fun of evolutionist Jerry Coyne for refusing to recognize some genetic science, while attacking others for similarly ignoring evolutionary science.

    I have previously comment on Coyne here here.


    Monday, Nov 05, 2007
     
    Our cousins, the flying lemurs
    I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but the Zooillogix blog reports that new DNA research shows that our closest cousins other than primates are the colugo flying lemurs. They are not really lemurs and they don't really fly. Phillipine eagles eat them.
     
    Court Gives Indiana City Go Ahead to Sue Gun Makers
    Here is another supremacist judges who act like they can make the law:
    (CNSNews.com) - The Indiana Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the city of Gary, Ind., could sue gun manufacturers, though federal law currently prohibits such lawsuits. Gun control advocates are hailing the ruling as a victory, but gun rights groups said the federal law will be upheld.

    The case originated in 1999 with a sting conducted by Gary police of northern Indiana gun dealers. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a liberal gun control organization, the gun dealers supplied more than 60 percent of the crime guns recovered in the city.

    Gary also sued the major gun makers who sold handguns through these dealerships, claiming they knowingly profited from the diversion of guns to criminals.

    Guns are legal and beneficial to society. If the gun makers or dealers are doing something bad, then the legislatures could pass some laws to require them to do business differently. They haven't. The courts should not be hearing a case like this.

    Sunday, Nov 04, 2007
     
    Famous atheist supports intelligent design
    The NY Times reports:
    Unless you are a professional philosopher or a committed atheist, you probably have not heard of Antony Flew. ... His greatest contribution remains his first, a short paper from 1950 called “Theology and Falsification.” ...
    Flew still rejects Christianity, saying only that he now believes in “an intelligence that explains both its own existence and that of the world,” ... Flew’s fame has reached even to small-town Pennsylvania, where in 2005 Judge John E. Jones cited Flew in his landmark decision prohibiting the teaching of intelligent design in the town of Dover. Referring to a publication of the Dover School Board, Jones wrote that “the newsletter all but admits that I.D. is religious by quoting Anthony [sic] Flew, described as a ‘world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design.’ ”
    I never understood the logic of this. If ID is religious, then what religion is it? Not any form of Christianity, apparently. If a famous atheist supports ID, how does that prove that ID is religious?

    Judge Jones plagiarized most of his decision from the ACLU, so maybe it is ACLU logic.

    Here is the full quote from the ACLU brief (available here):

    It all but admits that intelligent design is religious. It quotes Anthony Flew, described as a “world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design,” as follows: “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence where it leads.”
    Here is the version from Judge Jones, where even the misspelled name is copied:
    Finally and notably, the newsletter all but admits that ID is religious by quoting Anthony Flew, described as a “world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design,” as follows: “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence where it leads.”
    I wonder whether Judge Jones understood what he was writing plagiarizing.

    Thursday, Nov 01, 2007
     
    Louisiana promotes better science education
    Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Barbara Forrest writes:
    [Louisiana governor Bobby] Jindal’s remarks, which clearly signal his support for teaching ID, are a study in incoherence. On one hand, this Rhodes scholar wants “the very best science” taught to children. On the other, his assertion that children should be told “what different theories are out there” in order to explain what science cannot is an admission that ID is not science. His inference of a creator from “looking at creation,” while legitimate as a personal religious belief, is at odds with his statement that “our kids” should be taught “the very best science.” Putting the two together in a public school science class violates not only the standards of responsible science teaching but the U.S. Constitution as well.

    Disturbing signs are converging in Louisiana. ... The Religious Right appears to be lining up its ducks down here.

    She accuses him of being part of a Discovery Institute conspiracy because he favors giving children “all the evidence,”

    What Jindal actually said was this:

    There’s no scientific theory that explains how you can create organic life out of inorganic matter. I think we owe it to our children to teach them the best possible modern scientific facts and theories. Teach them what different theories are out there for the things that aren’t answerable by science, that aren’t answered by science. Let them decide for themselves. I don’t think we should be scared to do that.
    No, I don't think that we should be scared to do that either. It is funny how often evolutionists want to censor legitimate science. Real scientists are happy to explain the limits to their theories.
     
    Jim Watson and the facts
    The Gene Expression blog details the facts and science behind what Jim Watson said. It says that Watson was right, and that his apology was misreported.

    I do think that Watson exaggurates what can be explained with genes. Ten years ago he predicted that cancer would be solved in two years. Now he predicts that we will have genetic explanations for all mental illness in ten years. I doubt it.

     
    Leftist law profs publish biased analysis
    Law professors Thomas Miles and Cass Sunstein defend their analysis of possibly-partisan Supreme Court decisions:
    If the distribution of agency decisions were skewed in a liberal direction, as some critics allege, we should have observed few or even no challenges from public interest groups.
    No, that is not correct. Liberal groups are willing to mount court challenges as long as there is a good chance that they will get a favorable court ruling. It is possible, say, that agency bureaucrats are more liberal than the general public, and that federal judges are more liberal than those bureaucrats. (It is also possible that the liberal groups file the lawsuits in order to influence public opinion or help in fundraising.)

    Tuesday, Oct 30, 2007
     
    Manhattan was not a code name
    The NY Times reports:
    In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. ...

    Dr. Norris noted that the Manhattan Project led to “many of our problems today.”

    I didn't know that the Manhattan Project started in Manhattan. But what are those "problems"?

    The MP led to victory in WWII, turning Japan into a peaceful nation, 60 years of relative peace, big power plants without using fossil fuels, the cleanest big energy source we have, and our best hope against global warming. What are the negatives?

     
    Neanderthals were fair-skinned and redheaded
    Here is more evidence that Neanderthals looked like Europeans:
    But by analyzing DNA from some of those old bones, European researchers have helped fill in the picture. Some Neanderthals, they suggest in a study published online by Science, were fair-skinned and redheaded.

    Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona and Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig in Germany and colleagues report the finding. They found a variation in a fragment of a Neanderthal gene that regulates pigmentation of skin and hair through melanin production and discovered that it had effects similar to those from variations in the same gene in humans.

    “The inference is that the Neanderthals had red hair just like modern Europeans,” Dr. Lalueza-Fox said.

    Conventional evolutionary wisdom is that modern Europeans are descended from Africans, not from European Neanderthals. The similarities with Neanderthals is just coincidental, they say.
     
    Bush not suppressing CDC science
    The Bad Astronomer thinks that he finally has the smoking gun to prove that Pres. Bush is suppressing science:
    The Bush Administration has been appallingly heavy-handed about crushing any science that goes against its political and religious leanings.

    Last week, I posted about the White House redacting large portions of a speech given by the head of the Centers of Disease Control when she spoke about how the CDC is preparing to deal with the effects of global warming.

    It’s appalling: the White House removed a solid 1/3 of the speech. Some of it is harmless enough, but other parts make their agenda clear. Here’s one part taken out:

    CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern. ...

    In the United States, climate change is likely to have a significant impact on health, through links with the following outcomes:
    * Direct effects of heat, ...
    * Mental health problems, ...

    I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: global warming is real. Humans are partly if not mostly to blame for it. The evidence is in, real scientists agree, and the effects are being seen now. Sticking your head in the sand will only make things worse down the line.
    He is just another lying Bush-hater. More people die of cold than of heat. If the CDC is giving a report on the health impacts of global warming, then it should include the benefits as well as the drawbacks. The Bush administration was right to discourage those silly and unscientific remarks.

    Even sillier was the proposed testimony about Mental Health Problems:

    Some Americans may suffer anxiety, depression, and similar symptoms in anticipating climate change and/or in coping with its effects. Moreover, the aftermath of severe events may include post-traumatic stress and related problems, as was seen after Hurricane Katrina. These conditions are difficult to quantify but may have significant effects of health and well-being.
    Wow. This is the CDC that is used to giving us scare stories about Bird Flu and other diseases. Now the CDC head wanted to tell Congress that one of the big problems of global warming is all the anxiety from people worrying about it!

    Update: On Wed. Nov. 7, Sen. Barbara Boxer is on MSNBC complaining that is an example of the Bush administration not letting us hear the truth about global warming! Of course, Boxer had the opportunity to ask the CDC chief any question she wanted, but chose to complain to MSNBC instead.


    Sunday, Oct 28, 2007
     
    Hillary Clinton quotes
    It looks like we now have to take Hillary Clinton seriously, so I am going to start collecting quotes. When someone pointed out that her 1994 health care plan could bankrupt small businesses, she said:
    I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America.
    In an 2003 interview with Katie Couric on the Today show:
    Couric: “Why did you decide to stay in your marriage? There were so many women, frankly, feminists out there…”

    Clinton: “Well, I asked myself all those questions. ... And what I’ve tried to do in my own life, ever since I was a little girl, is to listen hard to my own heart and to make the decisions that are right for me.”

    Selfish, cold, and calculating. My guess is that her heart told her to do focus groups on what would best advance her political career. And she discovered that her career is entirely dependent on Bill Clinton, and it always has been.

    Curiously, the latter quote is on Yahoo but not Google. I do a lot of my searches on Yahoo now, because it is just as good as Google.

     
    Savage attack on Justice Thomas
    David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times has a new attack on Justice Clarence Thomas for being unsympathic to the poor. It was published on page 2A of the Si Valley paper. It says:
    WASHINGTON - In his new best-selling memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas tells the story of his personal struggle to overcome poverty and racism. ... His book ends in 1991 when he is confirmed to the Supreme Court and takes the oath to "do equal right to the poor and to the rich."

    But rarely have the hardships of the young Clarence Thomas been evident in the opinions of Justice Thomas. "Justice Thomas' opinions do not reflect any special sympathy for poor people," said David Vladeck, professor of law at Georgetown.

    In other words, Thomas has obeyed his oath of office, even tho he is a black man.

    Savage gives two examples of Thomas's opinions. The first does not involve a poor person, but a homeowner who failed to pay his property taxes. Here is the second:

    Thomas has been particularly dismissive of the rights of prisoners, as evidenced by his rejection of one prisoner's claim that he was sadistically beaten by guards. The Constitution forbids "cruel and unusual punishment," but Thomas said he doubted this provision should "protect inmates from harsh treatment."
    Here is the full paragraph:
    Surely prison was not a more congenial place in the early years of the Republic than it is today; nor were our judges and commentators so naive as to be unaware of the often harsh conditions of prison life. Rather, they simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment. Thus, historically, the lower courts routinely rejected prisoner grievances by explaining that the courts had no role in regulating prison life.
    So the quote is not Thomas's opinion, but merely part of a section that has summarized how similar cases had been treated in the past.

    I am still wondering why this article was presented as news. The newspaper must really hate Clarence Thomas.


    Saturday, Oct 27, 2007
     
    Retracting a 1955 paper
    What would drive a scientist to disavow a 1955 paper he wrote? What would cause that to be news in the NY Times?
    Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want -- from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

    So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

    Wow. This is the first that I have heard of a scientist trying to retract an old paper because he didn't like who cited it. Normally if someone is unhappy about a paper, he just writes a new one. There is no procedure for retracting a paper like that.

    This is really wacky. If the paper had been cited by people wanting to colonize Mars or some goofy thing like that, no one would care. There seems to be some sort of conspiracy to prevent any science being used to support any Christian cause.

    Here is the actual quote that offended Jacobson so much:

    Homer Jacobson, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, comments:
    Directions for the reproduction of plans, for energy and the extraction of parts from the current environment, for the growth sequence, and for the effector mechanism translating instructions into growth-all had to be simultaneously present at that moment [when life began]. This combination of events has seemed an incredibly unlikely happenstance...269 [footnote to 1955 paper]
    The quotation above was written two years after the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. But despite all the developments in science, this problem for evolutionists remains unsolved.
    While Jacobson retracts the paper, he does not deny the accuracy of the quote. He also does not deny the follow-up statement that the problem (of the origin of life) remains unsolved.

    NY Times reporter Cornelia Dean writes:

    It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.
    She likes putting this sort of pro-science editorializing in her stories. I am a hard-core science promoter myself, but these opinions do not belong.

    First, Jacobson is not revising his work because of new evidence challenging it. He just doesn't like being quoted by creationists. By doing this, he sounds more like a censor than a scientist.

    Second, it inaccurately describes the difference between science and faith. The Christian message is one in which Jesus challenged authority and tradition, and urged people to do the same. So a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom is not the difference. Science does not really subject all knowledge to being overturned; facts are still facts even when a new theory comes along.

    George writes:

    Faith is the literal belief in the Bible as the source of all truth. It is incompatible with Science because it does not allow for altering beliefs or considering new evidence.
    Not exactly. The Bible defines faith in Hebrews 11:1 [KJV]:
    Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
    Another translation gives, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see."

    Jonathan objects to me saying that colonizing Mars is goofy:

    With Earth ensconced in what's been termed a "shooting gallery" of an estimated 260,000 near-earth objects boasting a mass roughly larger than a "cubic" football field, and a sizable consensus of scientists believing "It's not if, but when" w.r.t. the next Yucatan Peninsula -type Impact, I don't understand what's goofy about having a space-faring lifeboat at the ready hand, aimed at a Mars replete with some prepositioned supplies, robotic greenhouses, breedable females, etc. near the polar ice caps. We've definitely built some massive bunkers for government officials in case of nuclear attack, but those won't help in the event of a massive asteroid collision. I also note that Congress is (gingerly) funding the SpaceGuard Program, and last I heard some outfit was awarded a $100 million contract to track NEOs. What good is funding SpaceGuard unless we're prepared to act upon the information it yields? Or, in the alternative, can we assume that you think SpaceGuard is a waste of taxpayer dollars?

    "The difference between us and the dinosaurs is that the dinosaurs didn't have a space program." -- unknown NASA official


    Friday, Oct 26, 2007
     
    Lab has long history with eugenics
    Newsday reports:
    Now, with Watson forced into early retirement for questioning Africans' intelligence, officials said it remains unclear whether he will continue his lesser known but immensely important role as the laboratory's fundraiser-in-chief.

    "I don't think that's been discussed," said Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "This is a great institution. I hope that these events don't affect our fund-raising."

    So they're still trying to figure out whether Watson is good or bad for fund-raising. I wouldn't worry about the Lab's reputation too much. It was created largely to do eugenics research, and only dropped it when the Nazis made that sort of thing unpopular.

    Steve Sailer also reports that Sen. Joe Biden discussed underperformance of DC black kids, and said:

    What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with, ... half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom.
    It sounds like he was trying to say that intelligence is half genetic. His campaign denies it, of course.
     
    Court concocts reason to let a sex offender go
    The Georgia Supreme Court just ruled 4-3:
    [W]e conclude that the habeas court properly ruled that [Genarlow] Wilson’s sentence of ten years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fifteen-year-old girl when he was only seventeen years old constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
    No, he was not sentenced for consensual oral sex. The girl had not yet reached the age of consent, and the sex act was not legally consensual.

    Wilson had turned down much more lenient plea bargains, both before and after his conviction.

    In case you think that Wilson is totally innocent, he and his buddies threw a New Years Eve party in a motel room, and got a bunch of underage girls intoxicated on bourbon and marijuana. A video camera recorded the action. It showed Wilson having sex with one semi-conscious girl, and she claimed that she had been raped when she woke up. Wilson was lucky to be acquitted of that charge.

    The court's press release refers to "its cruel and unusual analysis" of the "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Funny. I couldn't have said it better myself.

     
    The 60 million year extinction cycle
    Here is the latest global warming research:
    The researchers examined tropical sea temperatures - the only ones that can be determined from fossil records and go back hundreds of millions of years. They indicate a natural 60 million-year climate cycle that moves from a warmer "greenhouse" to a cooler "icehouse." The Earth is warming from its current colder period.

    Every time the tropical sea temperatures were about 7 degrees warmer than they are now and stayed that way for millions of enough years, there was a die-off. How fast extinctions happen varies in length.

    The study linked mass extinctions with higher temperatures, but did not try to establish a cause-and-effect. For example, the most recent mass extinction, the one 65 million years ago that included the die-off of dinosaurs, probably was caused by an asteroid collision as scientists theorize and Mayhew agrees.

    So maybe we are in a 60M year cycle, and the heat or CO2 is going to kill off a lot of species over the next few million years. That still does not mean that the warming is necessarily bad. Extinctions are crucial to the evolution of new species. Maybe we have too many species today, and maybe we would be better off with fewer and better species.

    Thursday, Oct 25, 2007
     
    Appealing to conservative judges on copyrights
    A new academic article on "The Effect of Judicial Ideology in IP Cases" (link here) says this:
    Lawrence Lessig, the architect of the constitutional challenge to the CTEA, argues that the Eldred case could have been won if he had adopted a different strategy. Lessig’s strategy in Eldred was based on an appeal to the conservative members of the Court. Lessig had believed that the same conservative justices who had increasingly restricted the power of Congress in relation to the powers granted under the Commerce Clause since Lopez could be persuaded to limit the power of Congress under the Copyright Clause as well.
    Lessig argues that, but it is not correct. Lessig is a liberal, and he didn't really make a conservative argument. He lost 2-1 on appeal, getting only the vote of a judge who relied on an Eagle Forum amicus brief for the conservative argument. The majority said that the amicus brief should have been ignored since Lessig didn't make the argument. Then at the US Supreme Court, he strangely disavowed the conservative position in oral argument, and only got the votes of two liberals.

    For more on this, see my blog in 2003 and 2004.


    Wednesday, Oct 24, 2007
     
    Pres. Bush accused of science censorship again
    The Wikipedia article on Joe McCarthy lists 15 people in the US govt who were correctly identified as communists by McCarthy. The Senate censure of McCarthy actually acquitted him of all the substantive charges. The Wash Post reports:
    Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

    Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review. ...

    The deletions directed by the White House included details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC's analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels, according to one official who had seen the original version.

    There are no diseases being spread by the rise of sea level. According to the IPCC report, sea level rose a foot or so in the last century, and the consensus models have it rising another foot or so in the next. If the CDC report had a bunch of scare stories about how this minor sea level change was going to spread disease, then it should have been edited.

    I suspect that original report was also unbalanced in that it gave health threats to warming, but not cooling. It may well be that warming is a net positive on human health, and any govt report should have described advantages and disadvantages of warming. If the report only described health disadvantages, as the Wash Post (AP) story implies, then it was misleading and should have been edited.

     
    Comic book treatment of McCarthyism
    David Bernstein found a comic book in which writers were persecuted by Joe McCarthy's HUAC for wearing the wrong color socks! This is an example of popular gross distortions about the McCarthy era.

    Some leftists were upset that Bernstein would defend McCarthy in this way. Grover Gardner wrote:

    McCarthy was a brutal opportunist who lied about people he didn't know and destroyed lives and reputations for personal and political gain. It doesn't matter if it was ten or a hundred or a thousand. His name has become synonymous with reckless defamation of the undeserving, and became so for very real and regrettable reasons.

    I'm not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era, but I am old enough to be astonished than anyone would so much as lift a hair to defend Joe McCarthy. The fact that there were Communist spies in this country in no way excuses the tactics he employed and the terrible influence he exercised over this country for a brief period in the early 1950's.

    He argues that on subjects like slavery, Nazi Holocaust, and McCarthyism, no one should ever cite any facts that undermine leftist dogma.

    Gardner cannot give one single example of someone that McCarthy recklessly defamed. Not one.

    Eric Muller accuses Bernstein of revisionism for pointing out the absurdity of the comic book. Muller seems to spend most of his time looking for Japanese Americans who were inconvenienced during World War II. His latest example is Harry Iba, who was rejected for military service because of suspicions that he was loyal to Japan. I wonder what Muller is going to say when he discovers that some people actually fought a war! There were probably about a billion people who were inconvenienced more than Harry Iba.

    A visitor comments:

    Professor Muller is acting, thus far, like the fellow travelers of the 50s: attack the anti-Communists for "going too far and smearing innocents," never acknowledge that there were any real Communists with espionage intentions to worry about, and never criticize the Communists, because opposing anti-Communism is more important than criticizing Communism.
    When I asked for an example of someone McCarthy harmed, the only names that anyone could give were a couple of State Dept officials who supported Mao's Communist revolution in China. They lost their jobs. That's all. 50 million people died in China, and the McCarthy-haters think that the real crime was that a couple of obscure diplomats lost their jobs. Amazing.

    Tuesday, Oct 23, 2007
     
    Questions Al Gore won't answer
    Reuters reports:
    Gore shared the Nobel prize with the U.N. climate panel for their work helping galvanize international action against global warming.

    "It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," Gore said.

    "This is a chance to elevate global consciousness about the challenges that we face now."

    "I'm going back to work right now. This is just the beginning," Gore added, before leaving the room without taking questions.

    What changes? The most obvious change that I can think of is to switch to using more nuclear power. That is the only technology that is available today that can make a significant dent in CO2 emissions.

    Someone else suggested that Gore means renewable energy and international law. Renewable energy would mean govt subsidies for ethanol, as opposed to breeder reactors for nuclear fuel. This doesn't make much sense, as ethanol is not really renewable. More energy goes into producing it than comes out.

    International law means treaties like Kyoto, I guess. Kyoto was a big flop. If Gore really supports Kyoto, then he should say so.

    But what did Gore really mean? And why isn't he really willing to explain the changes and the reasons?

    My suspicion is that Gore wants the support of leftist-environmentalists who believe that humans are an evil and destructive force on planet Earth. Economic development is bad, and anything that counters development is good. Because nearly all development involves CO2 emissions, crying about global warming is the most effective way to oppose all development at once, without sounding like someone who is just against progress. So Gore is saying that we should reduce CO2 emissions to thwart global warming, and that we should be cutting development anyway for the sake of leftist-environmentalist ideals.


    Monday, Oct 22, 2007
     
    Ben Stein's ID movie
    Ben Stein is plugging his new movie:
    EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed is a controversial, soon-to-be-released documentary that chronicles my confrontation with the widespread suppression and entrenched discrimination that is spreading in our institutions, laboratories and most importantly, in our classrooms, and that is doing irreparable harm to some of the world’s top scientists, educators, and thinkers. ...

    Now, I am sorry to say, freedom of inquiry in science is being suppressed.

    Under a new anti-religious dogmatism, scientists and educators are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator. Do you realize that some of the leading lights of “anti-intelligent design” would not allow a scientist who merely believed in the possibility of an intelligent designer/creator to work for him… EVEN IF HE NEVER MENTIONED the possibility of intelligent design in the universe? EVEN FOR HIS VERY THOUGHTS… HE WOULD BE BANNED.

    This is funny. Stein is not even a Christian.

    Real scientists would not suppressing alternate points of view. Yet evolutionists are busy censoring any views differing from the party line. They censor religious views as well as those expressed by Jim Watson.

     
    Defending Jim Watson
    James Fulford writes:
    I’d like to see is if any mainstream conservatives have defended James D. Watson’s remarks, based on the fact they are, as far as we know, scientifically accurate, rather than “defend to the death your right to say it” kind of thing.
    I don't know why conservatives are supposed to be defending the scientific accuracy of comments by Jim Watson and Larry Summers. They are not conservatives, and they do not support any conservative causes.

    Furthermore, the scientific accuracy of a statement depends on facts and scientific analysis, not political views. Watson is one of America's most highly respected scientific leader. Who would want to hear some political commentator give opinions on his science?

    I don't really defend Watson's right to say what he did. He made some clumsy and demeaning comments, and claimed that science was on his side. Then he apologizes, and implies that science says the opposite. Either way, I don't see much science. He doesn't explain what he really meant. I don't know what "social policies" he is referring to. Maybe he explains them in his book. If he explained what he meant, and explained the science behind his statements, then I'd defend him. As it is, he just gives the impression that all evolutionists are racists who are afraid to tell the truth about their true beliefs.

    As for whether Watson was scientifically accurate, I don't know. He predicts that genes affecting differences in human intelligence will be found in 15 years. That seems plausible to me, but predictions for finding genes affecting human behavior have nearly always been over-optimistic. Attempts to find genes for alcoholism, schizophrenia, autism, homosexuality, etc. have all failed.

    I am not even sure that they will find genes to show that modern humans are any smarter than Neanderthals. According to SciAm:

    German researchers have discovered Neandertals apparently had the human variant of a gene that is linked to speech and language. A team of scientists, primarily from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the discovery during efforts to reconstruct a full genome of the extinct hominid.

    The findings push back the estimated timing of the FOXP2 gene's selective sweep (rapid spread of a gene mutation due to the survival advantage it conferred) from 200,000 to 350,000 years ago, when the common ancestor of Neandertals and humans roamed the earth.

    "From the point of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neandertals did not have language as we do," says Planck Institute geneticist Johannes Krause, a co-author of the study published in Current Biology.


    Sunday, Oct 21, 2007
     
    Hiding behind a privilege
    A lawyer recommends:
    He cites a key advantage to bringing in lawyers up front: "If you hire a law firm to supervise the process, even if there are technical engineers involved, then the process will be covered by attorney-client privilege," Cunningham said.

    He noted that in a lawsuit following a data theft, plaintiffs usually seek a company's records of "all the [data-security] recommendations that were made [before the breach] and whether or not you followed them. And if you go and hire technical consultants only, all that information gets turned over in discovery. [But] if you have it through a law firm, it's generally not."

    Someone comments:
    This sorcerous-incantation view of attorney-client privilege is common. My last company told people on certain critical projects to Cc: the lawyer on all project communications so as to get the magical privilege pixie-dust on them.
    The attorney-client privilege is abused a lot. Lawyers and clients can get away with the abuse, because no one looks at the confidential communications to see whether the claim of privilege is proper.

    I am a patent agent, so I am licensed to give legal advice on patent matters. I am not an attorney, but the privilege is the same. (Eg, see this reference to a treatise.) Someone can ask me for confidential legal advice about the patentability of an invention, and be assured that the advice will not be used against him in court or the patent office later, unless he waives the privilege.

    The idea is that if someone has an invention that he wishes to market, and he is concerned about protecting his legal rights, then he should be able to get an opinion without creating liabilities for himself. For example, he might be concerned that his invention infringes another patent, but his concerns should not be used as an admission of guilt in an infringement lawsuit. I can give such an opinion, and it will be privileged.

    It appears that the above lawyer is trying to use the privilege to cover up some sloppy business practices. That is not really what the privilege is for.

     
    Requirements for a Presidential candidate
    From a recent speech:
    A good candidate must protect parent's rights in public schools in rulings such as those which say the right of parents to determine the upbringing of their children ends at the school door. They should also oppose "nosy" questionnaires and school mental health evaluations, giving contraception to young children, and "diversity" courses.

    A good president must appoint only judges that rule by the Constitution as it is written, and that reject notions that the Constitution is "evolving" or is guided by "evolving notions."


    Saturday, Oct 20, 2007
     
    Watson's unfortunate remarks
    Here is someone who actually tries to address Watson's "unfortunate" remarks. (Here, "unfortunate" is a code word for "racist".)
    It’s not science. I note that in Watson’s most recent book, he speaks darkly of how we shouldn’t necessarily expect that “the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.” Yeah, well, we shouldn’t expect them NOT to be equal, either. What we should do is WAIT until we have decent science before we talk expectations.
    If we waited for decent science, then we'd have to eliminate a lot of publications on global warming, space alien life, evolutionary psychology, string theory, and a lot of other subjects.

    The author acknowledges that Africa is in bad shape, but blames it on us: "our forebears raped the continent of much of its resources." Huhh? Is Africa really suffering because some of its uranium and diamond mines have been depleted? I don't think so.

    Watson has said other odd things. He has justified stealing Franklin's research here:

    I asked him whether he felt that he gave Franklin a hard time. “No,” he shrugged. “She really was awkward.” He also told the audience that Franklin “was good at maths, and mathematicians are a bit strange”.
    What he did was to cheat her out of credit for discovering the molecular structure of DNA.

    Friday, Oct 19, 2007
     
    Comparing toddler IQ
    The Freakonomics blog writes that black economist Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt have done some research on this topic:
    The striking result we find is that there are no racial differences in mental functioning at age one, although a racial gap begins to emerge over the next few years of life. ...

    I have to say, however, that I imagined a lot of reactions to this paper, none of which were utter indifference on the part of academics and the popular press. But that was the reaction we got.

    Maybe people ignored it because their paper doesn't really prove what it says. The peer-reviewed journal rejected it, and Steve Sailer writes:
    Look, there is no IQ test for 1-year-olds. What Levitt did in this paper is show that a test of infant liveliness (e.g., how often the infant babbles) that has a low but positive correlation with childhood IQ doesn’t show the normal differences between the races at age 8 to 12 months. Indeed, the highest IQ children (Northeast Asians) do the worst on this test of infant vivacity. With a typical Freakonomic leap of faith, Levitt and Fryer suggested that this shows that IQ differences aren’t genetic but are caused by environmental differences, presumably between age 1 and the earliest ages at which IQ tests are semi-reliable.

    Of course, all Levitt actually did was show that this test of infant liveliness is a racially biased predictor of IQ.

     
    Europeans try to maintain their prominence
    Biology guru Jim Watson has now been forced to apologize for his comments. I don't know why any apology or denunciation is necessary; if his remarks are scientifically incorrect, then just report the science that rebuts him. The NY Times reports:
    There is wide agreement among researchers on intelligence that genetic inheritance influences mental acuity, but there is also wide agreement that life experiences, even in the womb, exert a powerful influence on brain structure. Further, there is wide disagreement about what intelligence consists of and how — or even if — it can be measured in the abstract.

    For example, in “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, dismissed “the I.Q. industry” as little more than an effort by men of European descent to maintain their prominence in the world.

    So intelligence is hereditary but maybe it cannot be measured? So how does anyone know that it is hereditary if it cannot be measured?

    Men of European descent have maintained their prominence in the world by using guns and bombs, not IQ studies.

    Joe adds:

    ...and by establishing the most successful governmental system that incorporated and encouraged the most dynamic economic system.

    Thursday, Oct 18, 2007
     
    How extra dimensions may affect science
    Dilbert complains about getting savagely criticized for saying:
    I read about the physicist who thinks we might be able to create a Unified Theory of Everything if we allow for one additional dimension of time and one of space. ...

    I’ve been saying for years that evolution as we perceive it is not a feature of reality so much as an internally consistent perception, like a shadow. Our brains aren’t equipped to understand the nature of reality. What we understand as the gradual change of species over time is no more a feature of reality than your shadow is a real person.

    Because I doubt all stories about potential scientific breakthroughs, I figure it is unlikely we will create a theory of everything by adding one dimension of time and space. But let’s say this idea turns out to be validated by scientists. And let’s say you currently believe the theory of evolution is reality. Would this hypothetical breakthrough in physics be enough to convince you that your understanding of evolution has only a shadow connection to reality?

    The physicist is trying to explain the universe by adding 9 extra spacetime dimensions. Any theory with extra dimensions is radically contrary to established scientific thinking, as Max Tegmark explains. He says that "there would be no point to evolving a brain", if there were any extra dimensions. Universes with extra dimensions are "probably uninhabited".

    Nevertheless, Dilbert's critics confidently assert that evolution would be true regardless of how many dimensions there are.

     
    Wikipedia promotes concept of dominionism
    I just encountered another malicious edit from Wikipedia editor FeloniousMonk. He hates me, and uses his privileged Wikipedia status to badmouth his political enemies whenever he can.

    In his latest, he insists on calling Eagle Forum a "Dominionist organization", whatever that is. He cannot produce any sources that even say that Eagle Forum is dominionist, except for the web site of Joan Bokaer, a self-described "nuclear disarmament activist". All she says is that Eagle Forum has high ratings for some congressmen who are also rated highly by a couple of Christian groups and rated lowly by an environmentalist group. How this is related to dominionism is never explained.

    Separately, he made this edit to call Phyllis Schlafly "hypocritical", accuse her of dispersing unspecified misinformation, and to mischaracterize a quote of hers.

    Wikipedia is the perfect vehicle for leftist name-calling. They can invent obscure terms like "dominionism", give them encyclopedic definitions, and then use them to smear their enemies.


    Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
     
    Vaccine exemptions for religious beliefs
    This AP story says Parents Use Religion to Avoid Vaccines:
    BOSTON (AP) - Sabrina Rahim doesn't practice any particular faith, but she had no problem signing a letter declaring that because of her deeply held religious beliefs, her 4-year-old son should be exempt from the vaccinations required to enter preschool.

    She is among a small but growing number of parents around the country who are claiming religious exemptions to avoid vaccinating their children when the real reason may be skepticism of the shots or concern they can cause other illnesses. Some of these parents say they are being forced to lie because of the way the vaccination laws are written in their states. ...

    "Do I think that religious exemptions have become the default? Absolutely," said Dr. Paul Offit, head of infectious diseases at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and one of the harshest critics of the anti-vaccine movement. He said the resistance to vaccines is "an irrational, fear-based decision." ...

    Twenty-eight states, including Florida, Massachusetts and New York, allow parents to opt out for medical or religious reasons only. Twenty other states, among them California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio, also allow parents to cite personal or philosophical reasons. Mississippi and West Virginia allow exemptions for medical reasons only.

    The article doesn't mention that Offit is a paid lobbyist for the vaccine industry. He supports expanding vaccine mandates at every opportunity.

    Californians do not need religious exemptions, but even if it did, Penal Code 422.56 defines:

    (g) "Religion" includes all aspects of religious belief, observance, and practice and includes agnosticism and atheism.
    So I am not sure that these parents are lying. If parents have an agnostic belief that the vaccine may be harmful, then that could be considered a religious belief in California. I'm not sure about other states.
     
    Geographically separated people evolve differently
    The famous DNA pioneer and leftist-atheist-evolutionist James D. Watson explains some consquences of evolution:
    He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

    When asked how long it might take for the key genes in affecting differences in human intelligence to be found, his “back-of-the-envelope answer” is 15 years. However, he wonders if even 10 years will pass.

    The UK Times has a follow-up here. He is promoting his new book, Avoid Boring People and Other Lessons from a Life in Science. Watson edited a previous book on the collected works of Darwin.

    I'm not sure that he meant to complain about social policy being based on "fact".

    Joe writes:

    So is leftist-atheist-evolutionist Watson most likely right or wrong in his surmise?
    Good question. The UK Times says that Watson is said to have “joined Darwin and Copernicus among the immortals”, and stands alone as “the godfather of DNA”. Who am I to dispute such a demigod? For now, I'll just note that most or all of these leftist-atheist-evolutionists are closet eugenicists. Also, some leftist politically-correct UK do-gooders are already going to investigate Watson, and I'll wait to see if they report any scientific evidence one way or the other:
    The newly formed [UK] Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". ...

    Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.

    "These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels." ...

    Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."

    Perhaps they'll discover that Watson's famous DNA discovery was derived from stolen research of Rosalind Franklin. I previously criticized Watson for saying that anyone who disagrees with him is a irrational fundamentalist, for comparing himself to Freud, and for adopting the wedge strategy.


    Tuesday, Oct 16, 2007
     
    The most powerful theory in all of science
    Richard Dawkins has posted a formula that he says shows that "Darwin discovered what may be the most powerful theory in all of science".

    This is really wacky. Consider Newton's 2nd law, that force equals the rate of change of momentum. Or the law of gravitation. Or the conservation laws. These explain far more, while assuming far less, and therefore more powerful by Dawkins' measure.

    I am not disputing Darwin's theory, just arguing that it doesn't explain very much. It doesn't have much predictive power, or allow much in the way of quantitative testing. Darwin regarded natural selection as the core of his theory, and no one has figured out any way of making predictions from that, or getting any nontrivial explanations from it.


    Monday, Oct 15, 2007
     
    Majority favors death penalty
    Here is a Gallup poll:
    When asked, "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?," 69% of respondents replied "yes" and 27% replied no. That matches up with results from a May Gallup poll on the morality of the death penalty: in that poll, 66% said that that the death penalty was morally acceptable, 27% said that it was morally wrong, and 5% said it depended on the circumstances.
    Because of our supremacist courts, we don't even have a death penalty. The only way you can get executed in the USA is if you commit first-degree murder with "special circumstances". Simple premeditated first-degree murder is not enough.

    Sunday, Oct 14, 2007
     
    The Culture War in the Courts
    This is at Radcliffe College tomorrow:
    In this lecture, Phyllis Schlafly will contend that the role of judges should be similar to the role of baseball umpires: they must call the balls and strikes, but they should not change the rules of the game. Schlafly believes that nonelected, activist judges have presumed to dictate American culture in the areas of elections, free speech, immigration, law enforcement, marriage, private property, religion, schools, taxes, and even families raising children. According to Schlafly, these judges have become a super legislature that invents new rights, changes the Constitution, and makes decisions that should be made by elected representatives. She asserts that we must save self-government from rule by judges.
    Update: The Harvard paper reports:
    Twelve audience members staged a silent walkout ...

    “It’s important to listen to viewpoints, but there’s a line,” said Catherine C. Pyle, a second year Harvard Divinity School student and first-time protester who organized the walkout.

    Just 12 students walked out? That's is news? It says that Pyle was pushed over the edge by the "legitimacy of martial abuse", whatever that means. She could have stayed and asked a question, if she wanted to.

    It appears to have been a successful speech.


    Saturday, Oct 13, 2007
     
    Advertising personal injury lawyers
    Click on any ad here, and you will cost some scumbag lawyer about $25.

    Friday, Oct 12, 2007
     
    Gore wins Peace Prize
    I thought that all the talk about Al Gore winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was a joke. It would have made more sense to give the IPCC the Chemistry prize, and Bjorn Lomborg the Peace prize. Lomborg has brought attention to measures that might actually improve lives. The prize is:
    for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change
    Note that it does not mention global warming, or to vouch for the scientific accuracy of any conclusions, or to endorse any policy measures. It does seem to say that man-made climate changes need to be counteracted.

    The assumption that man-made climate change must be counteracted seems to me to be the most dubious part of the whole global warming movement. Where does anyone give a justification for this?

    Here is a summary of errors in Al Gore's film, according to a British judge.

    Remember also: Arafat got Nobel peace prize, but Ronald Reagan did not.

    Update: This science blogger defends Gore on those 9 points. He concedes that some of Gore's points are misleading, but defends Gore showing a CO2-temperature correlation graph, and concludes:

    But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, ...
    I agree with the judge that the graph does not show that at all.

    Thursday, Oct 11, 2007
     
    Defining Islamofascism
    UCLA law prof Volokh writes:
    The term Islamofascism strikes me as a pretty apt description of the political and religious movement of which al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, and other extremist Muslim groups are members. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Islamofascism" is,
    The advocacy or practice of a form of Islam perceived as authoritarian, intolerant, or extremist; spec. Islamic fundamentalism regarded in this way.
    The link to fascism strikes me as quite sound: It is authoritarian, in the sense of not allowing genuine democracy, suppressing speech and religious dissent, and aiming to control ...
    Several comments complain that this definition, as well as remarks by Guiliani, Romney, and other politicians, lump together Sunnis and Shiites who don't get along with each other.

    I am in favor of lumping them together. Outside the Mohammedan world, no one cares about the obscure differences between Sunnis and Shiites. We mainly care whether they are capable of coexisting with the Western civilized world. Both Sunnis and Shiites are dominated by Mohammedans who promote a jihad against infidels.

    The trouble with the word "fascism" is not the meaning, but that it sounds like name-calling.

     
    Pollution cuts life expectancy in Europe
    AP reports:
    BELGRADE, Serbia - Poor air and water quality, and environmental changes blamed on global warming, have cut Europeans' life expectancy by nearly a year, Europe's environmental agency warned Wednesday.

    More must be done — fast — to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ...

    Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe are dying prematurely because of air pollution, it said. "The estimated annual loss of life is significantly greater than that due to car accidents," the report said.

    At this rate, life expectancy in western and central Europe will be shorter by nearly a year, it said.

    This is typical alarmist environmentalist propaganda. Global warming is not killing people in Europe. So far, it has probably even saved lives, as more people die of cold than heat.
     
    Sometimes bad ideas cascade
    Dilbert ridicules Darwinian evolution again
    There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about something social scientists call a cascade. It’s a process by which one expert’s wrong opinion spreads to other experts until they all believe it must be true because all the experts say so. ...

    As I understand a cascade, bad information originates from one source, spreads until it becomes common knowledge, and any dissenting data is ignored. ...

    Suppose Darwin’s original theory had been that evolution was directed by aliens who had visited Earth in its early days. He’d have plenty of circumstantial evidence for that theory because you can find all sorts of ancient wonders that seem too advanced for the societies of the time.

    Here is a NY Times followup.

    There are examples of scientists saying something just because all the others say something. This is particularly true in the soft sciences.

     
    Thompson voted to acquit Clinton perjury charge
    Conservative columnist Ann Coulter writes:
    In 1999, Sen. Fred Thompson joined legal giants like Sens. Jim Jeffords, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to vote against removing Bill Clinton from office for obstruction of justice.

    Thompson, whom President Nixon once called "dumb as hell," claimed to have carefully studied the Constitution and determined that obstruction of justice by the president of the United States did not constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors."

    But according to Wikipedia and the NY Times, Thompson voted GUILTY on the obstruction of justice charge, and NOT GUILTY on the perjury charge.

    So she got it backwards.

    Update: Coulter has corrected it on her own site. I checked whether other blogs had noticed, but instead I found blogs attacking for answering a question in a TV interview on whether it would be better for Jews to convert to Christianity. The host, Donny Deutsch, was a Jew and accused her of hateful anti-Semitism for saying that Jews need to be perfected. But Deutsch misquoted her. What she actually said was, "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews." She also implied that America would be better if more people were Christians.

    Sashal writes:

    R.Schlafly, do you think it would be OK for a Muslim to state that Muslims are just perfected Christians and that all Christians should convert to Islam?
    Muslims commonly say much worse things than that about Christians and Jews. They say that we are monkeys and pigs who deserve to be killed. Mohammed taught that infidels are to be subjugated by force, and that is what his followers have been trying to do for 1300 years.

    Christian countries allow Mohammedans and Jews to worship in peace. Mohammedan countries persecute Christians and Jews. Coulter is a model of religious tolerance compared to Arab countries.

    Donny Deutsch baited Coulter into saying that Christianity is an improvement on Judaism. Of course, nearly all Christians believe that, and Coulter said the obvious. Then Deutsch misquoted her, and accused her of hateful anti-semiticism. He was essentially saying that anyone who believes in the New Testament is a hateful anti-semite. Deutsch is a lying anti-Christian bigot.

    George writes:

    This is from the same Ann Coulter who famously advocated forced conversions of Moslems to Christianity, something that not even Pres. Bush supports. She has damaged American interests because her words have been quoted by our enemies for propaganda purposes.
    If they quoted her accurately, they'll know that she was referring to Moslems who are waging war against the USA, and she did not say to forcibly convert them. Pres. Bush and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress did agree with the part about invading their countries and killing their leaders.

    The Mohammedans already believe in forced conversions. The propagandists don't need Ann Coulter to prove that not everyone agrees with Pres. Bush on everything.

    I really don't think that anyone should be surprised by a Christian saying that the world would be a better place if more people became Christians. It is not the Christians who go around committing terrorist acts.


    Wednesday, Oct 10, 2007
     
    Supremacist judge supports illegal aliens
    The SF Chronicle reports:
    (10-10) 13:54 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge in San Francisco barred the Bush administration today from threatening to prosecute businesses for knowingly employing illegal immigrants if they fail to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don't match government records.

    U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued a nationwide preliminary injunction barring the government from enforcing the so-called no-match rule, which was scheduled to take effect last month but was blocked by temporary restraining orders from Breyer and another judge. Today's order remains in effect until a suit by labor unions challenging the rule goes to trial sometime next year or until a higher court intervenes.

    Breyer is the little brother of the US Supreme Court justice.

    John writes:

    Here are all the papers filed in this case, including the preliminary injunction signed today by Judge Charles Breyer. It's an outrage that one federal judge thinks he can impose his will on the entire U.S. government, thereby overruling a clearly valid executive decision for a period that may extend until after Bush leaves office.

    President Bush should announce that he alone is responsible for enforcing federal law, and he should instruct DHS and SSA officials to proceed with the no-match program despite the judge's order. In light of the court's inordinate delay, Bush should announce that he is revising the no-match letters in order to require a satisfactory response within 30 days, instead of 90 days as originally planned.

     
    Please do not let the lawyers sort it out
    From the Republican debate: (also here)
    MR. MATTHEWS: ... Governor Romney, that raises the question, if you were president of the United States, would you need to go to Congress to get authorization to take military action against Iran's nuclear facilities?

    MR. ROMNEY: You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do, but obviously, the president of the United States has to do what's in the best interest of the United States to protect us against a potential threat. The president did that as he was planning on moving into Iraq and received the authorization of Congress.

    MR. MATTHEWS: Did he need it?

    MR. ROMNEY: You know, we're going to let the lawyers sort out what he needed to do

    Romney is going to have to stop sounding like a weaseling Democrat lawyer politician if he wants to get elected. No USA president should consult lawyers on whether to consult Congress on whether to attack Iran's nukes. If the President really does "what's in the best interest of the United States", then it doesn't matter who is elected.

    Joe writes:

    I agree that the answer SOUNDS pretty wimpy. But realistically, on something like attacking Iran, you have plenty of time and there are legitimate questions of constitutional authority. The AG and his staff are going to be in the room for many meetings. Sure, there are situations where you have to do something RIGHT NOW, but Iran really isn't one of those. Realistically, nowadays lawyers are in on everything - we live in a hyper-legalized climate ant that isn't going to change. It is going to get worse.
    Well, the other candidates gave better answers. We want a president who can act quickly and decisively when necessary, and to get public approval otherwise. I am inclined to think that the Iran situation is not urgent, but it is possible that at some point we gain intelligence about how a bombing mission could knock out Iran's nukes, and public debate would ruin the opportunity.

    Tuesday, Oct 09, 2007
     
    Let Jones keep the medals
    No one is defending Marion Jones, but this is silly:
    The International Olympic Committee will spend the next two months examining how to adjust the medal standings for more than 40 athletes who competed with and against Marion Jones at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.
    Okay, she didn't deserve the medals in 2000, but this is 2007. As a sports fan, I hate it when officials cannot decide who won a simple foot race. She was declared the winner at the time, and I think that she should be allowed to keep the medals. It diminishes the excitement of watching a live race, if I have to wonder who might be declared the winner 7 years later. Yes, Jones did wrong, but the IOC did much worse.

    The feds are similarly out to get Barry Bonds. But there are some differences. Bonds admitted taking "the clear", while Jones denied it. Also, MLB will not take Bonds' home runs away. All games are final.

     
    Nobel winners did not invent the iPod
    The NY Times reports:
    Two physicists who discovered how to manipulate the magnetic and electrical properties of thin layers of atoms to store vast amounts of data on tiny disks, making iPods and other wonders of modern life possible, were chosen as winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics yesterday. ...

    “The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery,” Börje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy, said, according to The Associated Press. “You would not have an iPod without this effect.”

    No, that is not correct. Most mp3 players use flash memory, and do not use giant magnetoresistance at all. The hard-disc-based iPods and other players would have much smaller capacities without the advance, but mp3 music was already quite popular before the new drives hit the market in 1997.
     
    Hillary and the war on science
    Hillary Clinton's campaign web site says:
    Hillary will: Sign an Executive Order that: ... Ends political interference with science. Hillary will ban political appointees from altering or removing scientific conclusions in government publications without any legitimate basis for doing so, and prohibit unwarranted suppression of public statements by government scientists. ... In another case, the Bush administration added statements to the National Cancer Institute website that suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, when experts agreed that no such link existed. (Abortion and Breast Cancer, New York Times [Jan. 6, 2003].)
    I don't know whether there is a link or not, but the NY Times cite is just an anti-Bush editorial and is rebutted here. Here is the NCI factsheet. The editorial said:
    So in June, the institute removed the fact sheet from its Web site and later replaced it with a statement that some studies have found an increased risk of cancer while others have not. That statement, while technically accurate, is such an egregious distortion of the evidence that one can only hope it is an interim statement, as some staff members suggest, not a final surrender.
    So I guess Hillary would suppress mention of a possible abortion-cancer link, and justify the suppression as being warranted.

    I think that the govt puts out too many over-cautious health warnings. Look at this, from a former govt official:

    Children shouldn't use cellphones. No one should drink diet sodas sweetened with aspartame. And think twice before getting X-rayed with a CAT scan except in a bona fide life-threatening emergency. That's just some of the precautionary advice that epidemiologist Devra Davis, who runs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, delivers in her new book, "The Secret History of the War on Cancer."
     
    Study on university ideologies
    Among social science profs in American universities, 5% are conservatives and 18% are Marxists. David Bernstein adds:
    Among actual scientists, in the physical and biological sciences, the percentage who identify themselves as Marxists is zero.
    No word on how many support Freudianism.
     
    Mindreading baboons
    Nicholas Wade writes about the search for mindreading apes:
    A possible key to the puzzle lies in what animal psychologists call theory of mind, the ability to infer what another animal does or does not know. Baboons seem to have a very feeble theory of mind. ...

    It is far from clear why humans acquired a strong theory of mind faculty and baboons did not. Another difference between the two species is brain size.

    Maybe humans are smarter than baboons. Did anyone think of that?

    Now for some goofy theorizing:

    "Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels," Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. "Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families."
    Baboons aren't really monkeys, but maybe those literary novels apply anyway.

    You would think that mindreading would be an alternative to language. But the theory here is just the opposite -- that humans evolved to communicate with language after first evolving the ability to read minds.

    But people have a very strong ability to recognize the mental states of others, and this could have prompted a desire to communicate that drove the evolution of language. "If I know you don’t know something, I am highly motivated to communicate it," Dr. Seyfarth said.
    Here, a evolutionist truism runs contrary to the evidence:
    The shaper of a baboon's mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring. ...

    Some biologists have suggested that the demands of social living were the evolutionary pressure that enhanced the size of the brain. But the largest brains occur in chimpanzees and humans, who live in smaller groups than baboons.

    The first paragraph seems like a basic consequence of evolution. But if you look at what it means, it is just a theory that tries to explain brain size, but doesn't really match the evidence.

    In other ape mindreading research, UPI reports: (See also Economist magazine.)

    LEIPZIG, Germany, Oct. 8 (UPI) -- German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.

    Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp's choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another.

    If the proposed share is rejected, neither player gets anything.

    Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also reject as unfair offers of significantly less than half of the reward, even though this choice means they get nothing.

    The study, however, showed chimpanzees reliably made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small.

    The researchers concluded chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

    The study appeared in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Science.

    The simple explanation here is that the chimps are not doing mindreading. Whether they are any more or less rational than the humans is debatable.

    Monday, Oct 08, 2007
     
    The Problem with Atheism
    The militant atheist Sam Harris now says:
    We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.
    Go figure. Leftist-atheist-evolutionist PZ Myers disagrees.

    Oxford prof Richard Dawkins is proud to be an atheist:

    According to a study published last year by the University of Minnesota, Americans distrust atheists more than any other minority group, including homosexuals, recent immigrants or Muslims.

    Now the best-selling author of The God Delusion and chair of public understanding of science at Oxford has set up an organisation to help atheists round the world, including the US.

    In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place." ...

    His estimates, which square broadly with official data, show that atheists in the US account for about 10% of the population. "I have had many letters from people saying 'I don't dare give my opinions. I am afraid of my family. I am afraid of my wife, I am afraid of my husband. I am afraid of my work people. I am afraid of being fired'."

    Even Sam Harris, who has written two big-selling pro-atheism books, is afraid to call himself an atheist.
     
    Does going to college pay? Answer isn't simple
    Economist Laurence Kotlikoff at Boston University challenges whether it really pays to attend college. Yes, college grads earn more on average, but the usual comparisons don't take into account paying the interest on college loans, taxes, and other factors.
     
    Excessive jury verdicts
    Two recent jury verdicts in the news seem way out of bounds to me.

    Anucha Browne Sanders was making $260K per year in a basketball marketing job, and a jury gave her $11.6M because someone called her a bitch.

    Jammie Thomas has to pay $222K for downloading 24 songs on a file-sharing network.

    I didn't follow either of these trial, but I don't see how either judgment could be correct. If Sanders was paid a competitive wage, then she could have just gotten comparable job elsewhere, if she is so sensitive to criticism.

    You shouldn't have to risk a big lawsuit just to listen to some music on your digital player. Maybe I will post some tips on how to avoid a lawsuit.


    Sunday, Oct 07, 2007
     
    Does the US Supreme Court have too much power?
    The Boston Globe has an article against judicial supremacy:
    A growing group of scholars from both left and right say the nation's highest court is out of control. Cut back its power, they argue, and the country will be better off.

    But perhaps the court shouldn't be in such a powerful position at all. Adrian Vermeule, a rising-star professor at Harvard Law School with a deep family legacy in Boston intellectual circles, says this entire conception of the Supreme Court - nine wise and isolated elders fighting over when and whether to overrule Congress - is hopelessly flawed. It promises only perpetual rancor and inconsistency, he argues: the bane of good law. The court, he concludes, should stay out of controversial matters of politics and law almost entirely, deferring - except in painfully obvious cases - to the wisdom of elected representatives in Congress.

     
    Court ruled against racist school busing
    The racist columnist Frank Rich writes:
    We are always at a crossroads with race in America, and so here we are again. The rollout of Justice Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," is not happening in a vacuum. It follows a Supreme Court decision (which he abetted) outlawing voluntary school desegregation plans in two American cities. It follows yet another vote by the Senate to deny true Congressional representation to the majority black District of Columbia. It follows the decision by the leading Republican presidential candidates to snub a debate at a historically black college as well as the re-emergence of a low-tech lynching noose in Jena, La.
    No, the Supreme Court did not outlaw a voluntary school desegregation plan. It never outlaws anything voluntary. It merely heard a dispute from students who were involuntarily excluded from some public schools because of their race, and ruled that the racist school rejections were unconstitutional.

    No one was harmed by that Jena noose. It is not just the current Senate that is against DC being a state, it is the majority of Americans going back to George Washington. Rich is just racist bigot, and the NY Times should be embarrassed to publish his nonsense.

     
    Bad science and diet
    Gina Kolata reviews Gary Taubes:
    His thesis, first introduced in a much-debated article [mirrored here] in The New York Times Magazine in 2002 challenging the low-fat diet orthodoxy, is that nutrition and public health research and policy have been driven by poor science and a sort of pigheaded insistence on failed hypotheses. As a result, people are confused and misinformed about the relationship between what they eat and their risk of growing fat. He expands that thesis in the new book, arguing that the same confused reasoning and poor science has led to misconceptions about the relation between diet and heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, dementia, diabetes and, again, obesity. When it comes to determining the ideal diet, he says, we have to "confront the strong possibility that much of what we’ve come to believe is wrong." The best diet, he argues, is one loaded with protein and fat but very low in carbohydrates. ...

    Yet much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening to those who have not closely followed the science, or lack of science, in this area. (Disclosure: At one point he approvingly cites my articles on the lack of evidence that a high-fiber diet protects against colon cancer.) For example, he tells the amazing story of how the idea of a connection between dietary fat, cholesterol and heart disease got going and took on a life of its own, despite the minimal connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol for most people. He does not mince words. "From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day." The story is similar for salt and high blood pressure, and for dietary fiber and cancer.

    In fact, Taubes convincingly shows that much of what is believed about nutrition and health is based on the flimsiest science.

    More comment here. It is amazing how people have goofy and unscientific ideas about diet. Physicians can be the worst sources of info on the subject.

    Joe sends this article citing studies showing benefits for eating fruits and vegetables.

    Anne writes:

    I guess after all these emails from nutrition experts, I should weigh in! Unless you die in an accident, what is going to kill you is probably already in your body. Changing your diet might add an extra 2 weeks to your life. The biggest problem with people's diet is quantity. If you overeat, you will have health problems.

    I have only one rule on deciding what to eat: does it taste delicious. In a land of plenty, all other considerations are irrelevant.

    More comments here.

    Joe sends this science news article:

    Science Daily — Eating fewer refined carbohydrates may slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to a new study from researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.
    It recommends "whole wheat versions of rice", whatever that is. (Does it mean brown rice?)

    Wednesday, Oct 03, 2007
     
    Judicial supremacist lost job in 1962
    Law prof Eric Muller complains that a 1962 law prof lost his job for advocating judicial supremacy. He quickly got a better job at another law school.

    I don't know anything about the guy, but is that the worst thing that has ever happened to a judicial supremacist? Judicial supremacy is an anti-American doctrine that is common in law schools today, but has never been accepted by the American public. It wasn't even accepted by liberal law profs until about 50 years ago.


    Tuesday, Oct 02, 2007
     
    Anita Hill lied
    Justice Clarence Thomas is in the news, and bloggers are debating Anita Hill again. Ilya Somin writes:
    To my mind, the most interesting aspect of this debate is the way in which nearly all conservatives seem to believe Thomas, while nearly all liberals believe Hill. ... Since only Thomas and Hill themselves really know what happened with any certainty, this degree of polarization is striking. ...

    Various commenters point out that the Thomas-Hill polarization can be explained by the possibility that conservatives are, for ideological reasons, generally less inclined to believe accusations of sexual harrassment than liberals are. There is some truth to this. But it fails to account for the fact that, just a few years later, most conservatives tended to believe and most liberals denied Paula Jones' sexual harrassment accusations against Bill Clinton. In such politically charged cases, the ideology of the accuser and accused seems to determine ideologues' reactions far more than their general perceptions of sexual harrassment.

    A comment says:
    I am a conservative who was at first skeptical of Paula Jones and Hill. But the accusations againat Clinton just kept coming and included physical evidence, while with Hill you had the lone accuser with no other evidence. The Lewinsky scandal confirmed with DNA that Clinton was willing to have sex with subordinates and that he was willing to lie about it, even under oath. With Hill there is only her one accusation with nothing to back it up and no proof that Thomas ever lied. On the other hand, I do not think anyone is skeptical anymore that Clinton is a womanizer even if they do not believe particular individual's claims.
    During the Anita Hill controversy, I ran into women who argued:
    I believe Anita Hill. I was sexually harassed once, and I've heard from women who tell stories similar to Hill's. I am woman so I would know.
    I never heard of a conservative who gave such idiotic opinions of Paula Jones. Saying that Hill's stories are commonly heard among women is just evidence that she could have easily lied, not that she told the truth. The impeachment case against Clinton was based on him lying under oath, not or uncorroborated allegations that he occasionally used some crude language in private.

    There were liberals who argued that Thomas lied under oath when he said that he never debated Roe v Wade with his fellow law students. But no one ever found any evidence to the contrary.

    Anita Hill's complaints were remote, trivial, and unverifiable, at best. The overwhelming evidence favors Thomas. The attacks on Thomas easily explainable as the tactics of pro-abortion fanatics.

    I see here that she is still attacking Thomas:

    Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son."... But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me. ...

    In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling "60 Minutes" this weekend, "She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed." Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, ...

    If she really wanted to refute Thomas, she could have stated her religious or conservative convictions. She could say that she attended church, or said daily prayers, or voted for Ronald Reagan. She says none of that. Instead she merely recites a fact from her resume. She accepted the only job that she could get in her home state, and it turned out to be a Christian school. She sooned moved to a non-Christian school. She is not a conservative, as you can see from her home page.

    Hill is the one who has made a career out of being a whiner. It is remarkable how Thomas has been able to ignore the wacky attacks on him.

    The Tygrrrr Express blog defends Thomas and others.


    Sunday, Sep 30, 2007
     
    Indians take over American grad schools
    Slashdot reports:
    I am a new graduate student in Computer Engineering. I would like to get my MS and possibly my Ph.D. I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?
    I've heard similar numbers from a local university. I don't know how typical this is.
     
    NY Times loves the iPhone
    John sends this NY Times article about how Apple has remotely sabotaged customer iPhones that had either been unlocked for use with non-ATT networks, or had installed unapproved non-Apple application programs. He writes:
    What surprised me was the strong editorial point of view in favor of Apple's exclusionary practices. The article tried to show that Apple customers had plenty of warning this was about to happen, and it was only "denial" if they failed to anticipate it.

    The NYT allowed Steve Jobs to give his pretended justification for Apple's policies, but did not quote any rebuttal from anyone.

    Then the NYT went all the way to Alabama to find a law professor who "had little sympathy" for Apple customers, and the NYT gave him an unusually long quote (5 sentences) to make his case in favor of Apple. The NYT quoted no similar authority on the other side.

    I guess the NYT writer is like the monkeys in this cartoon.

    I've often bashed Microsoft and other big obnoxious companies, but Microsoft has never abused its own customers in this way.


    Friday, Sep 28, 2007
     
    The term Junk Food is meaningless
    What is junk food? The dictionary definitions don't even make any sense. One says, "food that is high in calories but low in nutritional content". There is no such food.

    Other definitions describe junk food as being high-fat (like cheeseburgers) or low-fat (like soda). Some say low-fiber, but of course fiber has no nutritional content. Wikipedia points out some problems with the notion.

    The term seems to be used entirely by health food nuts and others with unscientific and superstitious ideas about food. I am inclined to believe that if someone just uses the term "junk food" then he doesn't know anything about diet and nutrition.

    Joe responds:

    Definitions are always tricky, but it isn't too tough to give foods and food groups a useful, rough ranking, For example, fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, lean sources of protein and lightly processed dairy products are better for you than Hostess cupcakes, doughnuts and soda. I think it makes more sense to focus on the idea of a "junk food diet." As a Supreme Court justice noted in another context, you'll know it when you see it. Nobody is going to die from a cheeseburger and a milkshake. But don't do it 24/7.

    Just about any research you hear about says that fruits and vegetables are the keys to good nutrition. I certainly know people who eat a lot of fast food who think it helps keep them overweight. I think your body gets trained to crave the salt and fat. In general, thin is better than fat. I think there is a consensus that in general, fish and poultry are better for you than high doses of red meat. I have no reason to think that a lot of additives are good for you. If I had to choose between a McDonalds' shake or a glass of skim milk every day, I'd take the milk, and I think the overwhelming majority of nutritionists would agree.

    I want to see some actual research that the cheeseburger-milkshake diet is any worse than any other. It seems to include all essential nutrients, and in reasonable proportions. In contrast, most vegetarians have to take supplements in order to get necessary nutrients.

    Thursday, Sep 27, 2007
     
    Amnesty ends abortion neutrality
    I didn't know that Amnesty International is a pro-abortion lobbying group. UK BBC reports:
    Amnesty International has confirmed its controversial decision to back abortion in some circumstances, replacing its previous policy of neutrality.

    The human rights group will campaign for woman to have access to abortion in cases including rape and incest.

    The initial decision was taken in April, but Amnesty delegates meeting in Mexico gave it overwhelming support.

    Christian organisations, including the Roman Catholic Church, have threatened to withdraw support from the group.

    The decision in April by Amnesty's executive committee to support access to abortion for women in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the pregnancy jeopardises a mother's life or health was greeted with an outcry by churches.

    This tracks the language of Roe v Wade, which defines "health" to include the woman's physical, emotional, and psychological health. The upshot is that abortions must be allowed throughout the entire nine months, for any reason. It therefore appears that Amnesty International is politically supporting late-term abortions as a human right.
     
    Suffering from cognitive dissonance
    The Dilbert blog says:
    Bill Maher is a brilliant guy, whether you agree with his views or not. Salman Rushdie is brilliant too. I don’t know about Rob Thomas, but he looks bright enough. Why couldn’t these three people hear anything the economist was saying? It looks to me like a classic case of cognitive dissonance . They literally couldn’t recognize that the economist was on their side because he suggested considering both the positive and negative effects of global warming.

    I know I harp on this topic too much. But I do think that understanding cognitive dissonance, especially when it happens to you, is the only way to understand the world.

    You can see this phenomenon on this blog on a regular basis. If I say Iran has a legitimate economic reason for building nuclear reactors, because experts agree Iran is running out of oil, it will be interpreted as anti-semitic. If I say the evidence for evolution that is available to me personally, as a non-expert, looks sketchy, it is interpreted as an argument for creationism.

    In summary, if you ever plan to use the phrase "on the other hand", be sure to wear your Kevlar underpants.

    Dilbert is on to something here. Many seemingly intelligent people seem unable to grasp the simplest argument that a freshman economics student should be able to understand.

    Girlrobot writes that Cognitive Dissonance is Yet Another Fifty-Dollar Phrase Brought To Us By Psychologists.

    Dilbert has a follow-up here. It is hard to tell whether the leftist attackers are really so stupid that they do not understand what Lomborg and Dilbert are saying, or whether they are deliberately misrepresenting their views for ideological purposes.

     
    NY Times offended by evolution film
    Cornelia Dean has another evolution article in the NY Times, and as usual she says:
    There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”
    She has said this before. See also here. And here. She says it every chance she gets. If she writes articles on global warming, she ought to include:
    There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of climate change as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of weather on earth.
    The article says that some evolutionists are annoyed at being interviewed for a film that includes some criticism of evolution. But they say that they would have agreed to be interviewed for the film anyway.

    I wonder why the NY Times writes such silly articles. There is no substance to any of it. Just a film that didn't turn out the way that some evolutionists might have hoped. There is no showing of anything inaccurate or misleading. Just some evolutionists who are scared that the public might hear some other views.


    Wednesday, Sep 26, 2007
     
    The Legacy of Little Rock
    Stanford research fellow Shelby Steele writes:
    Fifty years ago today, riot-trained troops from the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black students through the doors of Central High School in Little Rock. Just 48 hours earlier, President Eisenhower deployed -- in a single day -- 1,000 troops to restore order and to reassert federal authority in Arkansas's capital city.

    For weeks the entire nation had watched on television as a mob of angry white adults gathered each morning to prevent the nine black students from integrating Central High. It would come to be remembered as one of the ugliest and meanest white mobs of the entire civil rights era. And because of television--then still a very new medium--the horrible images of people galvanized by ferocious racial hatred were seared into the national consciousness. ...

    But the mob lost in Little Rock. Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy.

    I believe that Steele is a half-black man with a white wife.

    No, Eisenhower was not enforcing democratic authority, because no one voted for forced racial busing. He was enforcing judicial supremacy, and a racist view of white liberals that black kids can only learn if they are sitting in a classroom next to white students.

    It was in Cooper v. Aaron the next year that the US Supreme Court refused to allow the Little Rock school board 2.5 years to phase in an integration plan. The court declared itself the supreme law of the land, and said for the first time that all other branches of govt had to take orders from it, and the Little Rock school must integrate immediately. It didn't, and the school was shut down.

    Fifty years later, I fail to see any good that has come from judicial supremacy or from judicially-forced racial busing. The USA schools are as racially segregated as they have ever been. The social science research that was at the foundation of the court's reasoning has been discredited. The Supreme Court itself has backed away from forced racial busing, and now says that the Constitution prohibits such racial discrimination.


    Monday, Sep 24, 2007
     
    Another silly book about the Supreme Court
    Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine seems to be another biased and error-riddled book about the US Supreme Court. Here is NR criticism:
    8. In another seeming contradiction, Toobin maintains that the same Souter who had a “lifestyle that hovered somewhere between modest and ascetic” (p. 243) and who “ate the same thing for lunch every day: an entire apple, including the core and the seeds, with a cup of yogurt” (p. 43) was also one of the five “leading wine aficionados on the Court” (p. 306). Somehow that last assertion just doesn’t ring true.
    I don't know about the wine, but apple cores contain cyanide, a poison. Justice Souter would be ill if he really consumed all that cyanide.

    Update: I just heard (Fri noon) Toobin repeat this apple core in a radio interview. He also said that Souter was the strangest and most isolated member of the Supreme Court. Souter had not even heard of Diet Coke until he moved to DC.

    Snopes says that Souter should be okay as long as he does not chew the seeds.

    Update: Here is Prof. Volokh trashing Toobin's treatment of Clarence Thomas.

    Volokh seems to understate Toobin's nuttiness. Toobin simultaneously accuses Thomas of favoring "states' rights" and a "personal right" in connection with the right to keep and bear arms. It can't be both. If Thomas really thinks that all gun control laws are unconstitutional, then the states have no rights in the matter.

    George writes:

    What about Toobin's claim that J. Scalia called Thomas a nut?
    Here is the AP story about what Scalia said:
    "Our Constitution does not morph," he said Monday, deadpanning, "As I've often said, I am an originalist, I am a textualist, but I am not a nut."
    It is one of Scalia's standard lines, and it has nothing to with Thomas.

    Sunday, Sep 23, 2007
     
    NY Times kooks now have free blogs
    One of pleasures of NYTimes.com was that its most idiotic columnists, like Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, were blocked from non-subscribers. No more. Now Krugman's rants are freely available, and he starts by plugging his new book:
    I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history. ...

    The middle-class society I grew up in didn’t evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it’s a seminal episode in American history. ...

    The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

    Most people assume that this rise in inequality was the result of impersonal forces, like technological change and globalization. But the great reduction of inequality that created middle-class America between 1935 and 1945 was driven by political change; I believe that politics has also played an important role in rising inequality since the 1970s.

    Krugman is attacked by economist Tyler Cowen.

    Krugman's interpretation is bizarre. The period 1937-1945 was an economic disaster for average Americans. Failed New Deal FDR policies caused big increases in unemployment, and the American standard of living was sinking. World War II put people to work on the war effort, but not producing consumable goods. Essentials like food and gasoline were being rationed. In terms of our domestic economy, it was the worst period of the 20th century.

    The only way I can make sense out of Krugman is that he guided by a liberal conscience that upsets him whenever some people are better off than others. He prefer that everybody be miserable, than to have a national prosperity that is not shared by everyone. Or maybe he is just another lying Bush-hater. At any rate, his economic arguments are absurd.


    Thursday, Sep 20, 2007
     
    Democrats trying to impeach VP Cheney
    I just looked at Dennis J. Kucinich's HR 333, which is three articles of impeachment for VP Dick Cheney. It has about 20 Democrat co-sponsors. Article I is that Cheney emphasized the evidence that Iraq had WMD, and allowing the contrary evidence to be presented to Congress in dissenting reports. The article says:
    The Vice President’s actions prevented the necessary reconciliation of facts for the National Intelligence Estimate which resulted in a high number of dissenting opinions from technical experts in two Federal agencies.

    (A) The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissenting view in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate stated "Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute it’s nuclear weapons program INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors or to project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening. As a result INR is unable to predict that Iraq could acquire a nuclear device or weapon.".

    I guess the core of the complaint here is that when Congress got the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), it was long and boring. Many Congressmen could not be bothered to read all 92 pages of it. The NIE gave the evidence for Iraqi WMD at the beginning, and gave the dissenting opinions afterwards. Many Congressmen did not read that far before voting to authorize the Iraq War. Most of them did not read it at all.

    Article II says that Cheney exaggerated the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, even tho Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11/2001 attacks. I'm not sure if any of Cheney's statements on this subject are actually incorrect.

    Article III is even wackier:

    (1) Despite no evidence that Iran has the intention or the capability of attacking the United States 6 and despite the turmoil created by United States invasion of Iraq, the Vice President has openly threatened aggression against Iran as evidenced by the following:

    (A) "For our part, the United States is keeping all options on the table in addressing the irresponsible conduct of the regime. And we join other nations in sending that regime a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." March 7, 2006, Speech of Vice President Cheney to American Israel Pub1lic Affairs Committee 2006 Policy Conference.

    So 30 Democrats want to impeach Cheney for wanting to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons?! Every sensible person wants to stop Iran from getting hukes.

    I do think that a President who lies to get us into war should be impeached. There is a long history of presidents doing that, including Wilson, FDR, and LBJ, and it is disgraceful. But here, the Bush administration was remarkably open and honest about presenting the evidence for and against military action, allowing a lengthy open debate, and getting approval from Congress and the public. The Congress had all the same evidence Cheney had, both pro and con.

    22 Senators say that they voted for the Iraq War after reading the 2002 Iraq NIE report, including Sen. Joseph Biden. Sen. John Kerry says that he didn't read it, but was fully briefed on the contents. Sen. Hillary Clinton admits that she didn't read it, but explained her pro-war vote at the time in terms that were perfectly valid, based on all intelligence info. She was not misled. Those reasons are as valid now as they were then.

    Rep. Nancy Pelosi refuses to have impeachment hearings. She's right. Such hearings would just convince the public that the Democrat Party is dominated by the leftist lunatic fringe.


    Tuesday, Sep 18, 2007
     
    latest evolution research
    Here is some dubious evolution research:
    Science Daily — It turns out that older men chasing younger women contributes to human longevity and the survival of the species, according to new findings by researchers at Stanford and the University of California-Santa Barbara.

    Evolutionary theory says that individuals should die of old age when their reproductive lives are complete, generally by age 55 in humans, according to demographer Cedric Puleston, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at Stanford. But the fatherhood of a small number of older men is enough to postpone the date with death because natural selection fights life-shortening mutations until the species is finished reproducing.

    And more:
    On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together. ...

    The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.

    "Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Haidt writes, "where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex 'doggie style' in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass."

    And more:
    In the study of human origins, paleoanthropology stares in frustration back to a dark age from three million to less than two million years ago. The missing mass in this case is the unfound fossils to document just when and under what circumstances our own genus Homo emerged. ...

    At present, most paleoanthropologists think a solitary upper jaw represents the likeliest candidate for a Homo from that period. ...

    Is habilis really one, two, possibly three species? Some scientists are not sure. Did erectus descend from habilis in a single, unbroken lineage, a process called anagenesis? “This is the only option that is no longer on the table,” Dr. Anton said.


    Monday, Sep 17, 2007
     
    Skeptic misunderstands hard sciences
    Professional skeptic Michael Shermer writes in SciAm:
    Over the past three decades I have noted two disturbing tendencies in both science and society: first, to rank the sciences from “hard” (physical sciences) to “medium” (biological sciences) to “soft” (social sciences); second, to divide science writing into two forms, technical and popular. And, as such rankings and divisions are wont to do, they include an assessment of worth, with the hard sciences and technical writing respected the most, and the soft sciences and popular writing esteemed the least. Both these prejudices are so far off the mark that they are not even wrong.

    I have always thought that if there must be a rank order (which there mustn’t), the current one is precisely reversed. The physical sciences are hard, in the sense that calculating differential equations is difficult, for example. The variables within the causal net of the subject matter, however, are comparatively simple to constrain and test when contrasted with, say, computing the actions of organisms in an ecosystem or predicting the consequences of global climate change. Even the difficulty of constructing comprehensive models in the biological sciences pales in comparison to that of modeling the workings of human brains and societies. By these measures, the social sciences are the hard disciplines, because the subject matter is orders of magnitude more complex and multifaceted. ...

    The view of science as primary research published in the peer-reviewed sections of journals only, with everything else relegated to “mere popularization,” is breathtakingly narrow and naive. Were this restricted view of science true, it would obviate many of the greatest works in the history of science, from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, the evolutionary biologist’s environmental theory about the differential rates of development of civilizations around the world for the past 13,000 years.

    Well-crafted narratives by such researchers as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, the late Stephen Jay Gould and many others are higher-order works of science that synthesize and coalesce primary sources into a unifying whole toward the purpose of testing a general theory or answering a grand question. Integrative science is hard science.

    Somebody should send Shermer a dictionary. The word "hard" can mean "not easy" or "not soft". When someone distinguishes the hard sciences from the soft sciences, the meaning of "hard" is "not soft". For an example of the difference, Mathematician Terence Tao explains the difference between hard and soft analysis.

    The theories by Darwin, Diamond, Dawkins, Pinker, and Gould are soft because they have no definitive predictions, and no specific tests for whether they are right or wrong. Diamond argues that human civilization is best explained by geography, and his book is a collection of anecdotes that supposedly supports his thesis. You may or may not find his stories persuasive, but his book is certainly not a great scientific work. There is not much science in his book at all.

    Gould's most popular book was a polemic against intelligence testing. To the extent that he has made testable statements, they have been proven wrong, for the most part. And yet his book is still a hot seller. That is the nature of the soft sciences -- people can get rich and famous promoting "well-crafted narratives" that are politically correct but scientifically either untestable or wrong.


    Saturday, Sep 15, 2007
     
    Microsoft acts as if it owns your computer
    Here, Microsoft explains why it automatically updates Windows even if you have automatic updates turned off:
    One question we have been asked is why do we update the client code for Windows Update automatically if the customer did not opt into automatically installing updates without further notice? The answer is simple: any user who chooses to use Windows Update either expected updates to be installed or to at least be notified that updates were available. ... users would not have had updates installed automatically ... This has been the case since we introduced the automatic update feature in Windows XP. In fact, WU has auto-updated itself many times in the past.
    This is absurd. The user should only get updates if he says he wants updates. Why does Msft even give the user the choice, since it is going force updates anyway?
     
    Wikipedia on neo-evolution
    Wikipedia has an article on neo-creationism, even tho there is nobody who actually calls himself a neo-creationist. This paragraph was recently removed, and put back in:
    As do postmodernists, neo-creationists reject the traditions arising from the Enlightenment upon which modern scientific epistemology is founded. Neo-creationists seek nothing less than the replacement of empirical and logical evidence with ideology and dogmatic belief. Thus, neo-creationism is considered by Eugenie C. Scott and other critics as the most successful form of irrationalism.
    As far as I can tell, "neo-creationist" is a smear term to refer to people who believe in the major tenets of evolution, but who also believe that God may have played a role. Apparently the Wikipedians believe that you have to be an atheist evolutionist, or you must be irrational and against all modern science.
     
    Another law prof complains about the lack of leftists
    Cass R. Sunstein complains:
    A widely unknown fact: Between 1984 and 2000, the Court overruled more than 40 precedents, specifically rejecting the law as it was understood in 1980. And on many more occasions, the Court significantly reoriented the law without overruling particular decisions.
    I guess Sunstein is too young to remember the Warren Court.

    Sunstein's biggest complaints are that the current court favors free speech in political campaigns; opposes racial discrimination; has not outlawed religious symbols at every opportunity; and permitted some regulation of late-term abortion procedures. And he is especially upset that the public does not seem to mind that the court has shifted away from the extreme leftist positions that it previously held.


    Friday, Sep 14, 2007
     
    College financial aid propaganda
    Don't believe colleges when they brag about all the good that their financial aid is doing. A group of very prestigious colleges have formed an organization called COFHE and published a book about their financial aid successes. I commented on this before. Phyllis Schlafly has written to them, asked them to correct errors about her. COFHE has repeatedly refused, and continues to post the false info. The site still claims that financial aid paid for her college education. In fact, she paid in full, out of her own money.

    The colleges involved include Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale. Apparently these schools think that everone is a charity case, even if the student pays full tuition.


    Thursday, Sep 13, 2007
     
    Law prof Erwin Chemerinsky fired
    Law blogs are complaining that UC Irvine withdrew an appointment to extreme leftist Erwin Chemerinsky for its law school. Eg, see here. Here is a sample Chemerinsky rant:
    I have no doubt that when historians look back at the late 20th and early 21st century, they will say that the most important development was the rise of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists, whether Christian, Islamic, or Jewish, share remarkably similar views on many issues -- and remarkably similar intolerance. I believe that the greatest threat to liberty in the United States is posed by the religious right, largely comprised of Christian fundamentalists. Across a broad spectrum of issues they want to move the law in a radically more conservative direction, ultimately threatening our freedom. ... Monday marked the start of a trial determining the legality of the teaching of intelligent design -- creationism dressed up as psuedoscience -- in a Pennsylvania school district. That threat extends far beyond just one county in Pennsylvania, as moves are afoot in state legislatures and county school boards across the country to call established scientific fact into question ... The threat even extends into personal freedom. I believe the Supreme Court got it exactly right in Roe v. Wade: a fundamental right of each woman is to choose whether to terminate her pregnancy. Taking this right away is a central aspect of the religious right's campaign.
    Apparently what did in Chemerinsky's appointment was that two weeks after it was announced, he wrote an inflammatory op-ed in the local paper that was riddled with errors:
    Does Professor Chemerinsky know that his article is chock full of patently false statements? It is hard to believe he would knowingly risk his reputation that way. Yet is also hard to believe he does not know or at least suspect they are false. Did he pick up some exaggerated claims from the anti-death-penalty propaganda machine, exaggerate them further in his own mind, and then print them as fact without any checking whatever? That would be extremely reckless disregard of the truth, at the very least.
    Of course, many law schools are dominated by left-wing kooks anyway.

    Joe writes:

    I don't know anything about Chemerinsky, but Powerline, which I find pretty reliable, has a pretty strong endorsement.
     
    String Theory inconsistent with inflation theory
    From NewScientist:
    String theory is having trouble producing inflation – the rapid expansion of space thought to have occurred in the early universe – at least in some of the theory's simplest incarnations, according to a new study.

    The work suggests squaring string theory with the well-accepted notion of inflation will be challenging at best – and some even say that one or both theories may have to be abandoned.

    String theory is a leading contender for the "theory of everything", which would unify all the forces of physics in one framework. Though there are many different versions of string theory, all posit that elementary particles are actually tiny vibrating strings, and that the universe contains extra spatial dimensions beyond the three that we can see.

    Now, a new study suggests it may be difficult to reconcile string theory with the widely accepted theory of inflation, which explains several key cosmological observations – such as why the universe appears to have the same properties in whichever direction astronomers look.

    The study was carried out by a team of researchers led by Mark Hertzberg of MIT in Cambridge, US. The team tried to produce inflation in three versions of string theory in which the extra dimensions are shaped like a doughnut – the simplest possibility. But they found that the conditions needed for inflation appear to be impossible to achieve in these simple versions. ...

    Another inflation pioneer, Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California, US, is more critical of the work, however.

    He says the results only apply to a class of string theory versions called type 2a, which are irrelevant to the real universe because they have been shown to be incompatible with dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe's expansion to accelerate.

    The article neglects to mention that string theory has also been impossible to reconcile string theory with any other well-accepted theory or observable physics.

    Inflation theory is not really a well-accepted theory either. If cosmic inflation occurred, no one knows when it started, when it ended, if it ended, what caused it, how strong it was, or how we'd recognize it if we saw it. No Nobel Prize has been given for inflation theory, even tho a closely related prize was given last year.

     
    Freud was a charlatan
    Someone just removed this from the Wikipedia article on Sigmund Freud:
    According to Richard Webster, author of Why Freud Was Wrong (1995): "Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure.[21]"

    H. J. Eysenck claims that Freud 'set psychiatry back one hundred years', consistently mis-diagnosed his patients, fraudulently misrepresented case histories and that "what is true in Freud is not new and what is new in Freud is not true".

    Other critics, like Dr. Frederick C. Crews, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (1995), are even more blunt: "He was a charlatan. ..."

    The criticisms are valid. Freud was a charlatan. His theories were garbage.

    Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007
     
    Silly leftist law prof writes tirade
    Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes:
    The revolution that many commentators predicted when President Bush appointed two ultra-right-wing Supreme Court justices is proceeding with breathtaking impatience, and it is a revolution Jacobin in its disdain for tradition and precedent. Bush's choices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, have joined the two previously most right-wing justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in an unbreakable phalanx bent on remaking constitutional law by overruling, most often by stealth, the central constitutional doctrines that generations of past justices, conservative as well as liberal, had constructed. ...

    It would be a mistake to suppose that this right-wing phalanx is guided in its zeal by some very conservative judicial or political ideology of principle. It seems guided by no judicial or political principle at all, ...

    Twenty-four cases—a third of the Court's decisions—were decided by 5–4 votes last term, nineteen of them on a strict ideological division. Kennedy voted on the winning side in all twenty-four of them. He joined with the right-wing justices in thirteen of the ideological cases; ...

    So the court has a faction that is right-wing, but not guided by political ideology, and they managed to get a majority in 13 of 24 closely-divided cases. Yawn.

    The Jacobins were violent extreme leftists during the French Revolution. I am not sure how they relate to right-wing judges.

    Dworkin goes on:

    The most important decision was the Court's 5–4 ruling striking down school student assignment plans adopted by Seattle and Louisville. The plans of the two cities differed, but the goal in both was to reduce the depressing racial homogeneity of their schools. ...

    The resulting racial isolation of young Americans at the beginnings of their lives is a national disgrace; that isolation perpetuates racial consciousness and antagonism in both blacks and whites. There is formidable evidence -- Breyer cited much of it in a long and brilliantly argued dissent that Stevens called "unanswerable" -- that the racial isolation has very serious educational disadvantages as well: black students do significantly better when they are not in either almost all-black schools or schools with very few blacks. Thomas, in a concurring opinion, cited contradictory studies, but Seattle and Louisville were certainly entitled to rely on the detailed and impressive evidence that Breyer cited.

    Dworkin simultaneously complains about racial homogeneity and isolation; I guess that he thinks that both are bad for blacks. He says nothing about what is good for white students.

    Fortunately, most Americans have rejected Dworkin's racist ideology. They don't want forced racial busing of schoolchildren to achieve racial quotas. Such busing has caused much more harm than good.


    Monday, Sep 10, 2007
     
    Motl attacks me
    String Theory blogger Motl writes:
    Concerning theories in physics, I think that a natural conservative position would be skeptical towards string theory (or QCD, or anything else that is new enough). Some people are clearly more conservative in this respect than I am. It seems sensible to say that a critical attitude with respect to string theory naturally belongs to creationists such as William Dembski and Roger Schlafly while DailyKos fans Peter Woit and Lee Smolin are just anomalous guests in this group of reactionary bigots.
    Usually Motl is content to slander Woit and Smolin. He hates them because they wrote books documenting the failure of string theory.

    I am not a creationist. I do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible. I believe that there is overwhelming evidence that the Earth is billions of years old. I don't think that Dembski is a creationist either. Certainly not a Young Earth Creationist, anyway. He subscribes to some sort of Intelligent Design theory. I don't. I argue for scientific and naturalistic explanations on this blog. I attack String Theory because it does not give a scientific or naturalistic explanation of anything.

    Motl was commenting on a goofy study that claims to distinguish right-wingers from left-wingers by how they tap on keys in response to the letters M and W on a computer screen. I'll comment further if I find the study. Here is the abstract.

    Update: You can find the 2-page study here. The author also sent me a brief supplement with some inessential details.

    They studied 43 right-handed college students who each pushed buttons 500 times. 7 of the 43 students indentified as being moderately conservative, 4 as being in the center, and the rest as being liberal to various degrees. The main result was that error-related negativity electroencephalograph amplitudes were correlated with liberalism. It concludes:

    Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation1–3. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were alsomore likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.
    I guess this means that if a conservative gets mugged by illegal aliens a few times, then he will distrust illegal aliens. Liberals will show more cultural sensitivity. Conservatives might also leap to the conclusion that this study is junk.

    The Dilbert blog says:

    This ground-breaking study shows that the brain is somehow involved in decision-making. At the risk of sounding braggy, I already knew that. ...

    I’m guessing this is how the process went down: The scientists (usually liberals) report their findings to their university bosses (usually liberals) who call their public relations people (usually liberals) to sex up this story and feed it to the media (usually liberals). There wasn’t much to slow it down. ...

    We live in a strange time in human history. Every time a scientist discovers that child molesters or geniuses or musicians have different brain structures, the public gasps at the suggestion that the brain is involved in thinking. What were the other hypotheses? Souls? Elbows?

    Funny. It is progress when scientists actually learn something about how the brain works, however trivial. I'll be waiting to see if this experiment is replicated, as I am skeptical.
     
    Justice Souter wanted to resign
    Here is some Souter gossip:
    According to Jeffrey Toobin’s new book on the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter nearly resigned in the wake of Bush v. Gore, so distraught was he over the decision that effectively ended the Florida recount and installed George W. Bush as president.

    In "The Nine," which goes on sale Sept. 18, Toobin writes that while the other justices tried to put the case behind them, "David Souter alone was shattered," at times weeping when he thought of the case. "For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice," Toobin continues. "That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same."

    If true, this is more evidence that Souter is unfit for the court. Souter went along with the first ruling that stopped the Florida court. I guess that he wanted some backroom count by Florida court clerks to swing the election for Al Gore.

    Sunday, Sep 09, 2007
     
    The Koran teaches hatred towards infidels
    A Mohammedan blogger claims that Gisburne has inaccurately paraphrased the Koran, and says:
    A believer in Islam is anybody who speaks the truth and acts with extremely high, selfless, moral and ethical standards. Naturally this includes all good Muslims. But a believer in Islam could also be an Atheist, a Christian, a Jew, or anybody.
    No, atheists, Christians, and Jews are not believers in Islam. Gisburne paraphrased the Koran as:
    Jews are the greediest of all humankind. They'd like to live 1000 years. But they are going to Hell 2:96 ...

    Have no unbelieving friends. Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. 4:89

    Go ahead and read Mystilleef's context, and see you you believe is describing Islam more accurately. What really matters is the broader context that Mohammedan leaders teach to their followers. Gisburne's videos show those leaders and what they teach.

    Friday, Sep 07, 2007
     
    Defining evolutionism
    Wikipedia says:
    The terms "evolutionism" and "evolutionist" are rarely used in the scientific community as self-descriptive terms. "Evolutionism", is defined by the OED as "[t]he theory of evolution, evolutionary assumptions or principles". Creationists tend to use the term evolutionism in a misleading sense in order to suggest that evolution and creationism are equal in a philosophical debate.
    It goes on to argue that the terms are just creationist smear terms. That is not the case.

    The terms have been in dictionaries and in common use for a century. Googling them shows that the big majority of usage today is not pejorative. The most distinguished academic scientists promoting the theory of evolution readily call themselves evolutionists or Darwinists. For example, the famous of them all, the late Stephen Jay Gould said, "I count myself among the evolutionists".

    Furthermore, the mainstream press using these terms without controversy. Gould's obituary read "Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould dead". Richard Dawkins made the TIME 100 list with his occupation listed as "Evolutionist, author, Oxford University professor". The distinguish Harvard Zoology prof Ernst Mayr wrote a book titled, "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist".

    George writes:

    Yes, your examples are all extremely distinguished evolutionary scientists, but they are also professors who promoted various philosophical, theological, and even political views as being related to evolution. If you take a scientist who sticks to the science, then you'll find that his views are not just philosophical opinions.
    I am just saying that evolutionism and evolutionist are neutral and accurate terms for the promotion of evolution. The terms apply whether referring to strictly scientific views or other views. I am not a creationist and creationists did not invent these terms. The terms are used by evolutionists themselves.

    Wednesday, Sep 05, 2007
     
    Correcting the Copernicus record
    I corrected Wikipedia on Copernicus to:
    In connection with the Galileo affair, Copernicus' book was suspended until corrected by the Index of the Catholic Church in 1616, because the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun "is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture".[5][6] These corrections were indicated in 1620, and nine sentences had to be either omitted or changed. [7] The book stayed on the Index untill 1758.
    The points that are usually omitted are that it was perfectly acceptable to read Copernicus's book with the nine sentences corrected, and that the Church was in fact correct that the doctrine of the immobility of the Sun is indeed false. The Sun is orbiting around a black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

    George writes:

    Are you justifying censorship? Even if the Pope was right, it was for the wrong reasons. He used theological arguments. Galileo used science.
    I am just stating the facts. Galileo's main argument for the motion of the Earth was that the motion caused the tides. He was completely wrong about that. The Church also had scientific arguments against the Copernican model, saying that the model could be viewed as a computational method and that it had not been shown to be any better than Ptolemy's model. The Church was correct.

    Tuesday, Sep 04, 2007
     
    Explaining evolution to Dilbert
    Cornell anthropologist Meredith F. Small writes:
    For anthropology students 30 years ago, learning human evolution was a breeze. It went from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to various Homo sapiens. It was a straight shot that one could learn in a few minutes late at night while cramming for an exam.

    But in the late 1970s, we entered a golden age of human fossil discoveries that has repeatedly punched holes in the naive idea that our evolution would be that clear, clean, and straight.

    Like most animals, humans have a checkered past, and our family album is now full of side branches and dead ends. And it's populated with creatures, such as the little people (Homo floresiensis) of Flores Island in Indonesia, that we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams.

    The straight line has blossomed into a spreading, rather uncontrolled bush and we don’t like it. We want our history to be nice and neat, but the fossils keep messing us up.

    This summer, scientists announced the discovery of two human fossils found in Kenya in 2000. One is a 1.44 million-year-old Homo habilis, the first member of our genus, and the other is a 1.55 million-year-old Homo erectus, a larger brained, much more sophisticated kind of human.

    Although paleoanthropologsts have assumed that habilis evolved into erectus, it looks like these creatures spent time together on the shores of Lake Tanganika.

    The big news, then, is that these very different fossils are being hung on the human family tree on separate branches but at the same height. And once again, we have to reconsider the path of human evolution.

    But should we be all that surprised?

    We want the first bipedal humans to stay out of the trees, but their curved hand bones suggest they spent time swinging in the canopy like apes; we want brain size to increase in lock step with tool use, but tools appear before big brains; we want an orderly diaspora out of Africa and across the globe by culturally armed early humans, but it looks like people kept leaving all the time in fits and starts that don’t correlate with anything; and we want the last 200,000 years of human evolution, the time when modern Homo sapiens appeared, to make some kind of sense, but it doesn't.

    Of course it doesn't.

    The Dilbert blog responds:
    The biggest reaction I ever got from this blog was when I stated my opinion that the evidence for evolution is bulls**t. Thanks to recent news, it's time to make that case again, but this time more clearly. ...

    What I'm saying is that the evidence for evolution that is available to the casual person of interest, including most students, is simplified to the point of being misleading, false, or useless. In other words, the popular argument for evolution is bulls**t, independent of the underlying reality of evolution or the evidence available to experts in the field. ...

    My point is that the average non-scientist has been fed a diet of suspicious evidence for evolution for decades. And much of it turns out to be bulls**t. It smelled like bulls**t and it was. ...

    You don't need to give me links to web sites that "do an excellent job of answering all your questions." I've been there. They don't address my point in this post. All they do is point out that scientists themselves have convincing evidence for evolution that non-scientists don't understand.

    He's right. The high-profile evolutionists and evolution web sites are unconvincing. They may have lots of interesting stuff about fossils or DNA, but when it comes to explaining something like how humans evolved from apes, they sound like con men. They act like they have all the answers, but they can hardly explain anything.
     
    Left-handed crabs lose fights
    The evolutionist NY Science Times reports:
    ... for males of the fiddler crab species Uca vocans vomeris. Male fiddlers have one large claw they use for fighting other males, and in most species this “clawedness” is about equally divided between left and right in the population. But among this species just 1 percent to 4 percent of males are left-clawed.

    Patricia R. Y. Backwell of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues studied the fighting ability of these crabs, expecting to find that lefties would be scrappier because they have more experience fighting opposite-clawed crabs.

    But as they report in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, lefties had no fighting advantage. Indeed, they appeared less likely to fight, and less likely to win if they did. ...

    The researchers say it is puzzling why left-clawedness persists in this species if it offers no fighting advantage. It isn’t likely that it is just an aberration with no evolutionary significance. They suggest that further study may turn up some adaptive benefit of being a lefty.

    I wonder whether these folks really believe in evolution. If lefties had an advantage in a population of righties, then evolution teaches that the population of lefties would increase until it is closer to the population of righties, and neither has an advantage.

    A more sensible test would have been to choose a species of crab with righties equalling lefties, create a population of righties that only have ever seen other righties, and then see if a lefty has an advantage fighting. Also test the reverse. If so, it would indicate that the equal right-left balance was a stable equilibrium.

    Maybe there are so few left-handed fiddler crabs precisely because they do poorly in fighting.

     
    More evidence for lateral gene transfer
    Evolutionists sometimes argue that if two species share some common genes, then they must have a common ancestor. But this is not true, because of lateral gene transfer. NY Times reports:
    Bacteria are a generous sort, sharing their genes with other bacterial species practically at the drop of a hat. Such lateral gene transfer, as it is known, contributes to the spread of bacterial drug resistance, for example.

    But lateral gene transfer between bacteria and multicellular organisms has been assumed to be exceedingly rare, for the reason that most cells in a higher organism are somatic; their genetic material does not get passed on. “So the opportunity for contact and lateral gene transfer would be fairly low,” said John H. Werren of the University of Rochester.

    But now Dr. Werren, Julie C. Dunning Hotopp of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and colleagues report widespread transfer of bacterial genes into the genome of numerous invertebrates. The finding was published in Science.

    This genome-within-a-genome involves Wolbachia pipientis, a bacterial parasite that is one of the most prevalent in the world, infecting close to three-quarters of all invertebrate species, typically in the reproductive cells.

    Because of mechanisms like this, science currently has no way of knowing whether humans and trees have common ancestors.
     
    String Theory hype continues
    Peter Woit writes:
    The problem with string theory is not too much mathematics and a lack of effort towards making connection to real world experiments, but that it is a wrong idea about unification, and thus cannot ever explain the standard model or predict what lies beyond it.
    He's right. He refers to a Physics World magazine article on String Theory that uses the word "revolution" 16 times. Here's a good rule of thumb -- if a science article uses the word "revolution" for anything other than an object revolving in a orbit, it is garbage. Real scientists point to real results, not hokey revolutions that did not accomplish anything.

    The magazine editorial says, "String theory is guided by problems in the real world -- for instance the entropy of black holes". This sounds like a joke. The entropy of black holes is not observable, and sounds like medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

    String theorist David Gross is quoted as implying that the only problem with string theory is that its predictions cannot be confirmed to the 10th decimal place. No, the problem is that it has no predictions that can even be related to any experiments. Nothing agrees to even one decimal place.

    I found this:

    At the time of this writing, a brilliant young theoretical physicist at Harvard, Lubos Motl, has reportedly had his position terminated as a consequence of his outspoken support for Larry Summers and for his criticism of discrepancies between the claims of global-warming alarmists and the fundamental radiative physics involved. With this happening to the brightest at the best institutions, one can hardly expect better elsewhere.
    Not likely. You can see from Motl's blog that he is a lunatic pursuing dead-end theories that have no bearing on any real-world science, like string theory.

    Monday, Sep 03, 2007
     
    Edwards Backs Mandatory Preventive Care
    AP reports:
    TIPTON, Iowa (AP) - Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

    "It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."

    He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat "the first trace of problem."

    Next, there will be mandatory medical orders to lose weight, stop smoking, or go on a low-fat diet.

    I do wonder what the penalty would be those who don't comply with the mandatory preventive measures.

    Edwards in not electable because he is an inexperienced lightweight. He will always be known as the guy with the $400 haircut. But he is useful because he is stupid enough to say what the Democrats want.


    Sunday, Sep 02, 2007
     
    Lawyer rig the legal system to favor themselves
    Adam Liptak, on what's wrong with judges:
    Dennis G. Jacobs, the chief judge of the federal appeals court in New York, is a candid man, and in a speech last year he admitted that he and his colleagues had “a serious and secret bias.” Perhaps unthinkingly but quite consistently, he said, judges can be counted on to rule in favor of anything that protects and empowers lawyers.

    Once you start thinking about it, the examples are everywhere. The lawyer-client privilege is more closely guarded than any other. It is easier to sue for medical malpractice than for legal malpractice. People who try to make a living helping people fill out straightforward forms are punished for the unauthorized practice of law.

    But Judge Jacobs’s main point is a deeper one. Judges favor complexity and legalism over efficient solutions, and they have no appreciation for what economists call transaction costs. They are aided in this by lawyers who bill by the hour and like nothing more than tasks that take a lot of time and cost their clients a lot of money.

    And there is, of course, the pleasure of power, particularly in cases involving the great issues of the day.

    This article addresses similar questions:
    The questions considered include: why are lawyers the only American profession to be truly and completely self-regulated? Why is it that the attorney-client privilege is the oldest and most jealously protected professional privilege? Why is it that the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down bans on commercial speech, except for bans on in-person lawyer solicitations and some types of lawyer advertising? Why is it that the Miranda right to consult with an attorney is more protected than the right to remain silent? Why is legal malpractice so much harder to prove than medical malpractice? The Article finishes with some of the ramifications of the lawyer-judge hypothesis, including brief consideration of whether our judiciary should be staffed by lawyer-judges at all.
    The simple answer is that lawyers rig the legal system to favor themselves. We would all be better off if non-lawyers were sometimes appointed to the courts, including the Supreme Court.

    Friday, Aug 31, 2007
     
    Best crypto methods are patent-free
    Three months ago, BetaNews reported:
    In a move whose repercussions could seriously impact the future development of the AACS content protection system, and even endanger the production plans of high-definition disc console manufacturers worldwide, cryptography software provider Certicom this morning filed suit in Marshall, Texas, against Sony Corporation.

    Its claim is that Sony's use of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in two of its implemented technologies - AACS and Digital Transmission Content Protection - conceptually violate Certicom's patents for that cryptographic method. ...

    As Certicom CEO Bernard Crotty stated in a conference call to analysts this afternoon, the Sony suit is probably the first in a string of patent suits the company may file against AACS and DTCP licensees who refuse to license the underlying cryptography for those schemes directly from Certicom. ...

    Certicom apparently patented the concept of elliptic curve mathematics in cryptography as soon as it could following the first suggestion of its use in 1985, by a fellow Certicom admits worked for IBM at the time. It since filed subsequent patents on variations of its use, including #6,563,928, "Strengthened public key protocol," which describes the use of exponentiation as a technique for placing the very large numbers required for high-bit cryptography into a smaller, more manageable group.

    This is one of two patents Certicom claims Sony willfully infringed upon, and as Certicom points out, the method is used in Sony's AACS supporting products including the PlayStation 3, its Blu-ray Disc players, Vaio computers, and numerous HDTVs; as well as in its DTCP supporting products including its i.LINK wireless video streaming ports.

    For good measure, Certicom also threw in an infringement claim with regard to US patent #6,704,870, "Digital signatures on a smartcard," which Certicom claims is exploited by pretty much the same list of products - including the PS3 and Blu-ray. ...

    Is there a possibility that companies such as Sony, and others who received what they believed to be valid licenses from the AACS Licensing Authority, could implement a workaround that doesn't infringe upon Certicom's IP? Not likely, the company said today, since Certicom patented the concept of ECC, not some specific implementation of it. Did the company investigate Sony's implementations in PS3 or Blu-ray to detect specific infringements?

    "We weren't able to determine how the implementation is being done," admitted Vanstone, "so all we can determine is that they're using concepts that we have coverage on, solid coverage on." ...

    Counterpane CTO and globally recognized security expert Bruce Schneier said he believes Certicom may have a case. "Certicom certainly can claim ownership of ECC," Schneier told us. "The algorithm was developed and patented by the company's founders, and the patents are well written and strong. I don't like it, but they can claim ownership."

    No, Schneier is wrong and Certicom will lose this case. I am a patent agent and I have been doing ECC for years.  I was Secretary of the working group that adopted the IEEE 1363 standard for ECC and other public-key cryptography. Certicom has a lot of patents, but it is quite easy to avoid them. The Certicom techniques are not even the best ones, so you can avoid the patents without compromising security or efficiency. If Sony got some decent patent advice, then it should have no trouble defending the lawsuit. Others who want to use ECC just need to take some simple measures to avoid lawsuits.

    Congress is considering a patent reform bill next week. I do think that the patent system needs to be reformed, but this bill just tilts the power balance far too much in favor of the big companies. It favors the big companies already. Sony doesn't need any more help.

    One argument against the patent reform bill is that the courts have now issued precendent-changing rulings on obviousness and willfulness that address some of the supposed problems that the new bill is addressing. Maybe the bill is unnecessary, even if what the proponents say is correct.

    Here is the Certicom v Sony complaint.


    Thursday, Aug 30, 2007
     
    String Theory research is a waste of time
    The Cosmic Variance blog considers whether String Theory research is a waste of time, and got this exchange:
    [CV] understanding particle physics beyond the Standard Model was never the primary motivation of most string theorists anyway

    [Woit] It really isn't true that what happened in 1984 was all about the sudden appearance of an excellent theory of quantum gravity. Take a look at the highly cited papers from that era, and you'll find little about quantum gravity, but a lot about compactification schemes for getting the Standard model. The people who made string theory a hot subject were mostly particle theorists excited by the the idea of a unified theory, with real predictions seemingly possible by looking at the lowest energy states of a superstring propagating on a compactified 10d space-time.

    [CV] The question of why individual scientists in the 1980's were excited about string theory is certainly a question of sociology. We may argue whether one or another reason is a good one or not, but that is a logically distinct question. If we wanted to drop discussions about what such-and-such a person was thinking when they gave a talk twenty years ago, I'd be all in favor of it.

    Woit got the better of that argument. String Theory has no bearing on reality, and research in it is more like Astrology than Physics.
     
    Courts run California prisons
    The NY Times describes a supremacist federal receiver micromanaging state prisons:
    SAN JOSE, Calif. — Last year, shortly after receiving extraordinary powers to overhaul the medical system in California's prisons, Robert Sillen, armed with a stack of court papers, issued a blunt warning to cabinet officials at the governor’s office in Sacramento.

    "Every one of you is subject to being in contempt of court if you thwart my efforts or impede my progress," said Mr. Sillen, a silver-haired former hospital administrator chosen to carry out the overhaul of the prison medical system as the result of a class-action suit brought by a prison advocacy group.

    Backing up his warning, Mr. Sillen handed out copies of a federal court order that named him the health care receiver for the California prison system.

    In a subsequent warning, Mr. Sillen threatened to "back up the Brink's truck" to the state's treasury, if need be, to finance better medical services for the state’s 173,000 inmates.

    State figures show that court-ordered changes to California’s prison system, including those in Mr. Sillen’s health care domain, have cost more than $1.3 billion, and the meter is still running.

    For decades, California officials have tried to bring order to the state’s prison system, which is the largest in the nation. There have been lawsuits, special legislative committees and a declaration of a state of emergency by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, but never has one person attacked a problem, piece by piece, with such blunt force and disregard for political convention as Mr. Sillen has the prison system.

    Mr. Sillen, whose $500,000 annual salary puts him among California's highest paid public officials, said he had never visited a prison or thought much about the penal system until a recruiter called last year to persuade him to accept what the recruiter called a "mission impossible."

    Now he has the power to hire, fire, raise salaries, build facilities, waive laws, tap the state treasury and have jailed any bureaucrat who tries to thwart him.

    "In my opinion, Robert Sillen is not going to be happy until he’s running the entire prison system," said a state assemblyman, Todd Spitzer, an Orange County Republican and one of Mr. Sillen’s detractors. "He’s a man who has utter disdain for the legislature despite the fact that we’re the appropriate body for budgeting."

    If this is really such a good way to run important govt functions, why don't we just shut down the legislature and appoint petty dictators to run everything else? This makes us sound like a Third World country.

    Tuesday, Aug 28, 2007
     
    Killing patients for their organs
    Jane E. Brody writes:
    Although willingness to donate has risen in recent years, major hurdles remain. Some people, for example, believe incorrectly that patients who might otherwise be saved are sometimes “killed” for their organs. Strict regulations are in place to prevent this. ...

    There are several ways to increase the supply of organs. They include persuading more people to agree to be donors when they die, putting hospital policies and procedures in place to foster organ donation, obtaining more organs donated from the victims of brain death and cardiac death and increasing the number of live donors, especially people unrelated to the recipients.

    This omits the obvious:
    Thousands of people die every year waiting for organ transplants that never come, and some of these deaths come at the end of months or years of debilitation and suffering.

    In some countries, it is legal to purchase organs to be transplanted. Some people spend upwards of $100,000 to go to those countries for a transplant operation when they cannot get a kidney or a liver or other organ here.

    Why is the selling of an organ illegal here? Because so many people are so squeamish about such a transaction.

    I think that the whole organ donation business in unethical, and it would be better if no one ever filled out those organ donor cards.
     
    Science does not resolve political disputes
    Science editor Alun Anderson writes:
    For better or worse, the Arctic is going to see some exciting times. With a bit of luck, and if the US signs up to the Law of the Sea, the claims to different bits of the Arctic may be resolved scientifically, rather than militarily, through surveys of the sea bed to determine whose continental shelf extends where and how far.
    I am all for using science instead of the military, but what he says is just impossible. There is scientific resolution to political claims on the Arctic Ocean.

    Monday, Aug 27, 2007
     
    Vaccines Are Roaring Back
    The NY Times reports:
    By the mid-1990s, however, innovation in vaccines had virtually come to a halt. Only a handful of companies even tried to develop new ones, compared with 25 in 1955.

    But in a stunning reversal, innovators today are chasing dozens of vaccines, stimulated by some recent high-profile successes. “People see vaccines as money makers,” says Paul A. Offit, chief of the infectious diseases section at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia...

    Governments are more interested in funding vaccination programs after years of neglect, and public fears that vaccines cause harmful side effects are subsiding. Those fears are now largely discounted by medical experts.

    The govt started aggressively mandating new vaccines in about 1990, so that kids now have to get a couple of dozen shots. The govt has also been paying for vaccinating poor kids for decades. So I don't know what those "years of neglect" were.

    Saying that the public fears that are now largely discounted by medical experts is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that many of those public fears were proved valid, and the honest medical experts now agree that they were correct. In the last ten years, the following childhood vaccines were taken off the market as a result of the medical experts conceding that the public fears were correct:

    • whole cell pertussis vaccine
    • childhood vaccines with thimerosal (mercury) as a preservative
    • live polio vaccine
    • rotavirus (diarrhea) vaccine
    Without the public pressure, I doubt that any of those vaccines would have been taken off the mandated schedule.

    Sunday, Aug 26, 2007
     
    Another dubious missing link
    AFP reports:
    Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday.

    The handful of teeth from the earliest direct ancestors of modern gorillas ever found -- one canine and eight molars -- also leave virtually no doubt, the study's authors and experts said, that both humans and modern apes did indeed originate from Africa. ...

    But the study, published in the British journal Nature, "conclusively demonstrates that the Last Common Ancestor (of both man and ape) was strictly an African phenomenon," commented paleoanthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio. ...

    "This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the origin of humanity," Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, told AFP.

    The most startling implication of the find, the scientists agree, is that our human progenitors diverged from today's great apes -- including gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees -- several million years earlier than widely accepted research based on molecular genetics had previously asserted.

    So they found nine tooth fossils that vaguely resemble gorilla teeth. There aren't any other gorilla fossils, but they could be the teeth of a ape from 10M years ago. Maybe even a gorilla ancestor. That much seems possible. But from there the paleontologists conclude that humans split from apes in Africa 10-20M years ago.

    This all sounds bogus to me. I wonder whether these folks really believe in evolution. If apes were evolving back then, I would expect many fossils to be from dead-end species that are not ancestors to any species alive today. These teeth say nothing about the human-ape split.

     
    Modern Cosmology is a folktale with negative significance
    Michael J. Disney writes in American Scientist magazine:
    The currently fashionable concordance model of cosmology (also known to the cognoscenti as "Lambda-Cold Dark Matter," or ΛCDM) has 18 parameters, 17 of which are independent. Thirteen of these parameters are well fitted to the observational data; the other four remain floating. This situation is very far from healthy. Any theory with more free parameters than relevant observations has little to recommend it. Cosmology has always had such a negative significance, in the sense that it has always had fewer observations than free parameters (as is illustrated at left), though cosmologists are strangely reluctant to admit it. While it is true that we presently have no alternative to the Big Bang in sight, that is no reason to accept it. Thus it was that witchcraft took hold. ...

    Big Bang cosmology is not a single theory; rather, it is five separate theories constructed on top of one another. The ground floor is a theory, historically but not fundamentally rooted in general relativity, to explain the redshifts—this is Expansion, which happily also accounts for the cosmic background radiation. The second floor is Inflation—needed to solve the horizon and "flatness" problems of the Big Bang. The third floor is the Dark Matter hypothesis required to explain the existence of contemporary visible structures, such as galaxies and clusters, which otherwise would never condense within the expanding fireball. The fourth floor is some kind of description for the "seeds" from which such structure is to grow. And the fifth and topmost floor is the mysterious Dark Energy, needed to allow for the recent acceleration of cosmic expansion indicated by the supernova observations. Thus Dark Energy could crumble, leaving the rest of the building intact. But if the Expansion floor collapsed, the entire edifice above it would come crashing down. Expansion is a moderately well-supported hypothesis, consistent with the cosmic background radiation, with the helium abundance and with the ages inferred for the oldest stars and star clusters in our neighborhood. ...

    In its original form, an expanding Einstein model had an attractive, economic elegance. Alas, it has since run into serious difficulties, which have been cured only by sticking on some ugly bandages: inflation to cover horizon and flatness problems; overwhelming amounts of dark matter to provide internal structure; and dark energy, whatever that might be, to explain the seemingly recent acceleration. A skeptic is entitled to feel that a negative significance, after so much time, effort and trimming, is nothing more than one would expect of a folktale constantly re-edited to fit inconvenient new observations.

    This is a curiously pessimistic view. The cosmologists all brag about how much progress has been made in just the last ten years, and how the big problems have been solved.

    As he says, the expansion is well-supported, but inflation seems dubious to me. The evidence is weak, and no one knows how long the inflation era lasted, if it existed at all. I wouldn't be surprised if the inflation models were completely wrong.

     
    Congress Withdraws Jurisdiction
    John writes:
    Yes, it can be done. The Democratic controlled 110th Congress has just passed a law withdrawing jurisdiction over a certain type of lawsuit.

    Like the law that protects gun manufacturers from civil lawsuits based on criminal or negligent misuse of a gun, which Bush signed in 2005. The new law prohibits a specific type of lawsuit from being heard in either Federal or State court. In both cases Congress relied on its power under the Commerce clause, instead of Article 2.

    The new law is Section 1206 of H.R. 1, which Bush signed on August 3.

    After much negotiation in conference, the final language is about 10 times longer than the bill that was originally introduced.

    But its purpose remains the same. As summarized by the AP, the bill "Provides civil immunity to those who, in good faith, report suspicious activities that threaten the safety and security of passengers on a transportation system or that could be an act of terrorism."

    The law had an immediate effect. On August 1, 3 days after Congress completed final action, the attorney for the 6 "flying imams" filed a motion in U.S. district court in Minneapolis to amend his complaint to remove as defendants the "John Doe" airline passengers who reported suspicious behavior on Nov. 20, 2006.

    The attorney said his motion "absolutely nothing to do" with the new law. Although he removed the passengers as defendants, he kept the airline employees as defendants even though they, too, would seem to have immunity. We'll have to wait and see what the judge does.

    Withdrawal of jurisdiction is the obvious solution to a variety of problems involving overreaching opinions from supremacist federal judges. Judicial supremacists often doubt that it can be done, but in fact there is a long history of it being done effectively.

    Saturday, Aug 25, 2007
     
    The Electoral College cure is worse than the disease
    Jamin Raskin writes in Slate:
    Deformed Reform

    The cure for the Electoral College that is worse than what ails us.

    The "National Popular Vote" plan, which is on the table in 47 states, has been signed into law in Maryland and had actually passed both houses in California in 2006 before it was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It simply calls for an interstate compact among all states to agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. It becomes effective and binding when states representing at least 270 electors enter the compact. ...

    We Maryland Democrats were not acting in a partisan spirit. The National Popular Vote plan will not necessarily help (or hurt) us. In small-d democratic fashion, it simply benefits that party whose presidential candidate best appeals to the majority of Americans in an election -- that could be us or them.

    No, Raskin is using dishonesty and subterfuge to try to manipulate the presidential election. The NPV plan is anti-democracy because it allows and encourages someone to win the presidency with a minority of the votes. The NPV plan does not require the president to win a majority of the votes.
     
    Lack of any substantive war criticism
    Is there even one Democrat leader who is willing or able to say how he could have handled the Iraq War any better than the Bush administration?

    All wars involve huge mistakes, so it seems obvious that the Iraq War could have been handled better with benefit of hindsight. And yet I have not heard anyone with a convincing explanation of how the war could have been handled better. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, John Edwards, and the others all complain about G.W. Bush, but none has offered any credible alternative.

    Everyone in the media assumes that the Democrats will win in 2008, but I think that the traditional big issues -- the economy and world peace -- will both be net positives for the Republicans. The economy has done very well throughout the Bush administration. Against all predictions, there have been no successful terrorist attacks on USA soil since 9/11/2001. The Iraq War is unpopular, but Bush will not be on the ballot, and Democrat who is on the presidential ballot will likely be a war supporter like Hillary Clinton.

    There are those who say that Bush lied, but then they cannot point to an actual lie in quotes. There are those who say that Bush didn't tell the whole story, but then those in the US Senate have to admit that they got the National Intelligence Estimate with all the info, and they didn't even read it. There are those who argue that the Congress should not have authorized the war, but then they have to admit that the major Democrat leaders voted for it. There are those who say we invaded the wrong country, and should have invaded Iran or Pakistan instead, but that approach won't win any votes.

    There are those who point out that the economy was good during the Clinton administration, but they neglect to mention that it crashed at the end of his presidency.

    There is certainly plenty of room for substantive criticism of the Bush presidency. But very little comes from the Democrats.


    Thursday, Aug 16, 2007
     
    Relativity came from critical opalescence
    I just ran across this 2004 book review by Robert M. Wald in Physics Today:
    Galison's main thesis is that, rather than being the product of one man's isolated attempt to resolve deep problems in physics by pure thought, the discovery of special relativity should be viewed as arising naturally from a convergence of ideas in physics, philosophy, and practical engineering that, in the author's words, had produced a "critical opalescence" by the turn of the 20th century. ...

    If the historical record presented by Galison shows that Einstein as isolated thinker is not all that was behind relativity, it seems to me also to show that critical opalescence cannot be the whole story. No one was in a better position to take advantage of the critical opalescence than Poincaré. By 1900, he understood how Hendrik Lorentz's "local time" could be interpreted as the physical time measured by a moving observer. He had by then adopted an operational view of simultaneity, very likely influenced by his work for the Bureau of Longitude. His mathematical abilities certainly exceeded Einstein's. Yet Poincaré not only failed to discover special relativity, he failed to embrace it after Einstein discovered it. Surely Einstein's deep conviction that the principle of relativity must be fundamentally embedded in the laws of physics ...

    (Opalescence is a kind of reflected light.)

    It is funny how the Einstein worshipers refuse to look at actual facts. Poincare did discover special relativity, and published it before Einstein. It was Poincare who even coined the term "principle of relativity" and applied it to all the laws of physics. Einstein just copied it without crediting Poincare.

    Saying that Poincare failed to embrace special relativity is just nonsense. Poincare did suggest experimentally testing the theory, and some Einstein-lovers have argued that this showed that Poincare lacked confidence in the theory, or that he didn't really believe. But it shows the opposite. Poincare was ahead of Einstein on the ether, simultaneity, constancy of the speed of light, mass-energy equivalence, four-dimensional spacetime, and gravity.

    If anything, it was Einstein who failed to fully embrace special relativity. American Scientist magazine says:

    He [Einstein] also initially rejected Hermann Minkowski's wedding of space and time (anticipated again by Poincaré) as "superfluous erudition."
    Here are the original papers. More references may be found here.

    Martin Ouwehand argues that the proof that Poincare didn't understand special relativity is that he made an obscure technical error in his 1908 paper. But see also the rebuttal by Harry below it, explaining that Ouwehand misunderstood one of Poincare's terms.

    Even if Poincare did make a mistake, Einstein also made his share. The canonicalscience blogger says:

    Relativistic theory was mainly an achievement of Lorentz, Poincaré, and others. Now historians agree that all basic ideas of relativity theory, including constancy of c and existence of a maximum velocity for transmission of signals, were previously known in literature.

    That none of famous formulas of Einstein, including E = mc^2 was obtained by Einstein. Even when he did attempts to derive formulas, he failed. For example, Ives showed in 1952 that original Einstein proof of E=mc^2 was completely wrong [Ives, H. E. J. Opt. Soc. Amer. Xlii (1952) p.540]. Other formulas derived by Einstein are also wrong. Some reviews are very recent.

    This isn't news either, as he explains:
    Einstein copied the work of others without cite them, how even Max Born or S. Hawking have recognized.

    [Einstein's] paper 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper' in Annalen der Physik. . . contains not a single reference to previous literature. It gives you the impression of quite a new venture. But that is, of course, as I have tried to explain, not true. ---- Max Born

    Wilhelm Wein proposed that the Nobel Prize of 1912 was awarded jointly to Lorentz and Einstein, saying

    "While Lorentz must be considered as the first to have found the mathematical content of relativity, Einstein succeeded in reducing it to a simple principle. One should therefore assess the merits of both investigators as being comparable."

    Poincare was dead at the time, and hence ineligible. Max Born was one of the creators of quantum mechanics, and is credited with discovering how to get probabilities from wave functions. (Schroedinger and Heisenberg had no way to get probabilities.)

    Wednesday, Aug 15, 2007
     
    Argument against parental rights in family court
    Ella writes:
    Whenever two parents walk into a courtroom to determine who gets the kids, one or both is walking away with their constitutional rights having been limited in some way. The court could not issue an order allowing one parent to fully exercise her fundamental right to raise her child in a manner that does not abridge the other's equally fundamental right to raise his child. For this reason, a parent's rights are almost entirely irrelevant in a child custody case. Everything that might relate to the best interest of the child is fair game, including the parents' religious and political opinions, sexual behavior, dietary habits, health, etc.

    The only limitation on the court's consideration of these factors should be that the court can only use a factor in making a determination if there is a neutral basis to conclude that it has a positive or negative effect on the child's well being. Thus, Mom's recent conversion to paganism might be considered if she and Dad had raised the child in fundamentalist Christianity for the past ten years and the child would be distressed by the change in religious environment if ordered to live with Mom. Dad's inability to refrain from telling his child that Mom was going to hell might also be considered, for similar reasons. I don't see any other workable standard for custody decisions. The truth is that in most cases, the parents are equally fit and the child would probably do equally well (or poorly) with either parent. All the "constitutionally neutral" factors - income, caretaking ability, law abiding character, etc. - are often a wash, leaving more problematic areas related to speech, beliefs, and behavior.

    This argument is wrong from beginning to end. Family court judges do not necessarily take away any rights; they can merely divide the parental rights.

    In the typical case, where both parents are legally fit, there is rarely any neutral basis for saying that one parent is a better parent than the other. Many custody decisions are based on nothing more than the prejudices of the judge.

    Yes, there is a better way.  Judges can simply respect parental rights, and allow parents to maintain the joint custody that they had before divorce, unless one parent is proved unfit. Some courts do this today, and it works a lot better than the judge inquiring into the parents personal, political, and religious beliefs, as was done in the above Minnesota case that promted Ella's comment.

    Update: Ella responds to me by saying:

    If you want to argue that flipping a coin would lead to equally good decisions in most cases, you're probably right, but for some reason our legal system is reluctant to officially implement this scheme.

    I don't think most people are arguing that Muslims or Islamists should always lose their kids, just that in some cases, one parent's embrace of a particular brand of Islam may tip the scales in favor of the other parent.

    Normally I would disregard such views as too kooky to bother with, but I am afraid that they are common in the legal system.

    I do think that the family court decisions are often no better than tossing a coin, but I am not arguing for coin tossing. I am arguing for something better!

    The family court could simply respect parental rights, and not attempt the sort of analysis that would cause judges to take kids away from fit parents based on some subjective and theological argument that is no better than coin tossing.


    Tuesday, Aug 14, 2007
     
    Don Imus settles one suit, faces another
    FoxNews reports:
    A member of the Rutgers women's basketball team sued Don Imus and CBS on Tuesday, claiming the radio personality's sexist and racist comments about the team damaged her reputation.

    Kia Vaughn filed the lawsuit alleging defamation of character in state Supreme Court in the Bronx the same day Imus settled with CBS Radio in a deal that pre-empts his threatened $120 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against CBS.

    The article has a picture of Vaughn.

    Truth is a defense to a defamation suit. Imus's right to express his opinion is also a defense. The gist of his remarks was that the Tennessee Lady Vols were cuter than the Rutgers basketball team, based on his watching the championship game. Check out the pictures yourself. The case will be dismissed.

    George writes:

    Imus didn't just say that the Rutgers girls had tatoos. He said that they were hos. It is libel per se to say that a woman is unchaste.
    No, Imus only said that they looked like "nappy-headed hos" on TV. The new media quoted him out of context, but Imus is not responsible for that. Now that Vaughn has sued, Imus is free to say that she is a greedy publicity-seeking extortionist.

    Sunday, Aug 12, 2007
     
    Today's evolution research
    The theory of evolution explains modern prosperity:
    Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution -- the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 -- occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues. ...

    It is puzzling that the Industrial Revolution did not occur first in the much larger populations of China or Japan. Dr. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile ...

    Most historians have assumed that evolutionary change is too gradual to have affected human populations in the historical period. But geneticists, with information from the human genome now at their disposal, have begun to detect ever more recent instances of human evolutionary change ...

    Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

    The English upper classes had the right genes for wealth production, and spread them to the whole population. The Third World remains poor because they are insufficiently evolved.

    Wow. Rarely do we see such a racist theory in the NY Times.

    Meanwhile, another missing link has been shot down:

    The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution - that one of those species evolved from the other.

    And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.

    The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

    The evolution textbooks say that homo habilis was a human ancestor. Maybe not.

    Friday, Aug 10, 2007
     
    Novell owns Unix copyrights
    I posted this in May 2003:
    The Unix copyright dispute took an odd twist, as Novell denied that it sold Unix to SCO! SCO was sure enough of its ownership that it sued IBM for shipping Linux that infringes Unix. Strange. Something is fishy here. IBM and Microsoft are paying SCO a lot of money for Unix licenses, and I am sure they wouldn't do it unless they had to.
    Four years later, the judge has finally ruled:
    SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10 — In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

    In the 102-page ruling, the judge, Dale A. Kimball, also said Novell could force SCO to abandon its claims against I.B.M., which SCO had sued. Judge Kimball’s decision in favor of Novell could almost entirely undermine SCO’s 2003 lawsuit against I.B.M.

    If you ever want proof that high-priced corporate lawyers are worthless, this is it. Novell and SCO negotiated a Unix deal that was worth 100s of millions of dollars. They paid lawyers 100s of thousands of dollars to draw up contracts that were 100s of pages long. The core of the deal was the sale of the Unix business. The most central issue in the whole deal was who was going to own Unix.

    Somehow that central part of the deal was lost in the legal paperwork. It took four years of litigation to determine who was to own Unix under that contract. If appealed, the litigation could continue.

    Novell and SCO would have been much better off if they did not use lawyers at all, and just had a one-paragraph summary of the deal. That way, at least the parties would know what the deal was.

    Here is a good summary of the contract dispute:

    CO's basic argument is that the transfer of copyright ownership is implied in Schedule 1.1(a) of the APA which conveys to SCO "all rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare, including but not limited to all versions of UNIX and UnixWare and all copies of UNIX and UnixWare."

    Schedule 1.1(b) of the APA, which enumerates assets excluded from from the agreement, specifically states that copyrights and patents are not conveyed as part of the transaction.

    The second leg of SCO's argument relates to Amendment 2 of the APA, which was written a year later and grants SCO "all copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies."

     
    1998 not the hottest year
    NASA has quietly admitted that 1998 was not the hottest year in history after all. Controversial scientist James Hansen had covered up the error. See Malkin or Slashdot for more. 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

    Hansen complains about being censored by the Bush administration, but no one stopped him from releasing the data underlying his published graphs.

     
    Flock of Dodos
    I just watched Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, film by Randy Olson. Olson says that his idol was Stephen Jay Gould, and he makes fun of evolution critics. It is largely an attempt to "teach the controversy" between Darwinism and critics.

    At one point, the film says that Galileo was threatened with being burned at the stake for merely suggesting the possibility that the Earth might revolve around the Sun. That's wrong. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresies like denying the divinity of Jesus Christ. Galileo never would have had any problems for just suggesting a possibility.

    This movie was just like most of the other evolutionist propaganda. It claims to be promoting science to the general public, and yet there is no real science in it. Instead of addressing what people really say, it invokes conspiracy theories and questions motives. And they bring up Galileo, as if his story helps their case.

    One argument the movie made was that the anti-evolution forces spend more money than the pro-evolution forces. As evidence of how powerful and influential the anti-evolution forces are, it says that the Discover Institute once helped get an op-ed article published in the NY Times!

    That is just crazy. Evolution is part of the curriculum in every school district in the USA. There is no school that teaches intelligent design or any other alternative. The NY Times publishes about one pro-evolution article a week. That one NY Times op-ed was by a Catholic Cardinal who accepted that human and other organisms have a common ancestry. The amount of money being spent to promote evolution exceeds the amount of money against by many orders of magnitude, no matter how you measure it.


    Tuesday, Aug 07, 2007
     
    Defending the constitutional rights of parents
    Andy writes:
    Unlike most conservatives, Justice Scalia opposes the principle that parents have a constitutional right to the upbringing and education of their children. Specifically, Justice Scalia has indicated his disagreement with the leading precedent in favor of parental rights to control the education of their children, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. Specifically:

    In Winkelman v. Parma City Sch. Dist., 127 S. Ct. 1994 (2007), Justice Scalia did not join the Court's reliance on Pierce in allowing pro se parents to litigate claims for their children under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)

    In Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 91-92 (2000), Justice Scalia wrote a two paragraph dissent: In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the "unalienable Rights" with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims "all Men ... are endowed by their Creator." And in my view that right is also among the "other [rights] retained by the people" which the Ninth Amendment says the Constitution's enumeration of rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage." The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people. Consequently, while I would think it entirely compatible with the commitment to representative democracy set forth in the founding documents to argue, in legislative chambers or in electoral campaigns, that the state has no power to interfere with parents' authority over the rearing of their children, I do not believe that the power which the Constitution confers upon me as a judge entitles me to deny legal effect to laws that (in my view) infringe upon what is (in my view) that unenumerated right.

    Yes, Scalia said that. But note that at least he says that parents have an inalienable 9A right to direct the upbringing of their kids. A distressing number of conservatives and others apparently believe that there are no such rights at all in family court.

    It only takes one parent to bring a motion in family court. Then the judge has free reign to consider whatever he regards to be in the best interest of the child, an undefined concept. If you agree with that, then you are essentially saying that parents have no individual rights to even make the most basic parenting decisions.

    Here is a recent Iowa appellate decision where the judge raised all sorts of seemingly irrelevant matters. One parent lost custody, in part, because the other parent enrolled the quarter-Korean seven-year-old in a martial arts class.

    I think that it is a little strange for Andy to complain about Scalia's position. Roe will be overturned before Pierce is. It is very rare that Pierce is applied to the benefit of parents anyway. Meanwhile, millions of parents are subject to judges telling them how to rear their kids, and Andy says nothing.

    I say that divorced parents should also enjoy that fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their kids.

    John responds:

    In line with Andy's comments on Scalia, see Justice Thomas's opinion in the recent Bong Hits case, which I just read.

    Thomas's opinion (which no other Justice joined) calls for overruling the Tinker (student armband) case. Thomas praises Hugo Black's dissent in that case (which no other Justice joined) as "prophetic."

    Tinker's majority opinion, written by Fortas, cited both Meyer and Pierce, though it didn't explain why those parent's rights cases were relevant to student free speech.

    Black's dissent not only rejected the majority's reliance on Meyer, but also attacked the Meyer decision itself as being no longer good law. Black said the Meyer decision was an example of the type of reasoning that was no longer valid after the Roosevelt Revolution of 1937.

    Now back to Bong Hits. Thomas's footnote 8, emulating Hugo Black, strongly criticizes Tinker for relying on Meyer and Pierce. In doing so, Thomas basically limits Meyer and Pierce to the precise facts of those cases. Thus, Thomas writes:

    "Meyer involved a challenge by a private school . . . Meyer provides absolutely no support for the proposition that that free-speech rights apply within schools operated by the State. . . . "Pierce has nothing to say on this issue either. Pierce simply upheld the right of parents to send their children to private school."
    Obviously Thomas, like Scalia, rejects the notion that Meyer and Pierce stand for a broad parent's rights doctrine which could be applied in future cases. Indeed, it's hard to see on what basis Scalia and Thomas would disagree with Reinhardt's opinion in Fields v. Palmdale.

    Monday, Aug 06, 2007
     
    E.O. Wilson says Darwin was the greatest
    From last year:
    A few weeks ago James Watson and [Edward O.] Wilson, two of the most eminent living evolutionists, appeared on the Charlie Rose Show to talk about Charles Darwin. Watson said that Darwin was the greatest man in history, because he was the first to "see it." The "it" that he saw was a godless vision of the history of life. Darwin explained how we could have gotten here without supernatural intervention, and to Watson that makes him the greatest man who ever lived.
    Wilson was on C-SPAN2 In Depth yesterday, and a caller asked him about this. He reiterated that he agreed with Watson, altho he refused to compare Darwin to Jesus Christ.

    Evolutionists are always attacking Phillip E. Johnson for writing this:

    The objective (of the wedge strategy) is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic.
    Wikipedia evolutionists are always trashing intelligent design (ID) supporters, and their justification always ends up being that Johnson's Wedge Document proves that all ID supporters are unscientific, disingenuous, and dishonest.

    I don't know about the ID supporters, but it sure appears to me that all the major evolutionists have accepted Johnson's premise that Darwinism is inherently atheistic. Richard Dawkins just wrote a whole book on the subject, and promotes the idea at every opportunity.

    It is kooky the way the evolutionists idolize Darwin. He had a few good ideas, but his scientific contributions are relatively minor compared to other great scientists. The theory of evolution would have developed just as well without him. They seem to want to cite Darwin more for being an inspiration to modern atheists, than for any actual scientific results.

    It appears that Dawkins, Watson, and Wilson have their own wedge strategy, and it is the mirror image of Johnson's.


    Sunday, Aug 05, 2007
     
    Penrose's Road to Reality
    I just got Roger Penrose's excellent The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. He is only of the leading authorities on Mathematical Physics in the world. Penrose has whole chapters on Einsteinian spacetime and Minkowskian geometry, but says:
    We must ask why 'spacetime'? What is wrong with thinking of space and time separately, rather than attempting to unify these two seemingly different notions together into one? Despite what appears to be the common perception on this matter, and despite Einstein's quite superb use of this idea in his framing of the general theory of relativity, Einstein's original idea nor, it appears, was he particularly enthusiastic about it when he first heard of it. Moreover, if we look t to the magnificent older relativistic insights of Galileo find that they, too, could in principle have gained great spacetime perspective. [sec. 17.1, p.383]
    That is correct. I'm not sure who should get most of the credit, but Poincare and Minkowski were way ahead of Einstein on this point.

    It may seem like a trivial point, but the idea of combining 3D space and 1D time into a four-dimensional spacetime is largely when Einstein is considered such a genius today. But it just was not Einstein's idea.

    Penrose also has a discussion of String Theory. He explains how it has failed to explain gravity or particle physics, and why it is unlikely to do so in the future.


    Thursday, Aug 02, 2007
     
    Family court uses religion to deny child custody
    Law prof E. Volokh's blog usually attracts libertarian legal comments, but when he writes on a mom losing child custody partially because of her outspoken religious beliefs, he gets this:
    There is no infringement of this lady's freedom to exercise whatever religion she likes (nor to seek sexual gratification with whomever she likes). It is rightly the court's province to say that the father is the preferable party to take custody of the child.

    Doesn't this all boil down to: It's in the best interests of our children to conform as much as possible? If so, why is that a good thing?

    But when the two parents disagree on how to raise the child and who should have primary physical custody of the child after a divorce, and they are both technically "fit" parents, and the judge HAS to decide which parent's custody is in the "best interest" of the child, I see no reason why the court shouldn't be able to look at the relative normalcy of the two parents' lifestyles.

    First Amendment rights give way in custody cases. ... Best interest trumps Constitutional rights.

    and this:
    The reason I give little weight to Free Exercise issues is that the case inevitably involves two parents, ... Best Interest must control.

    In a custody case, the government has already stepped in. I agree that the government should not step in due to the parent's ideology, but once the government is in, between parents of differing ideologies, shouldn't the court consider those ideologies?

    Lawyers discussing child custody can be truly evil.

    As an example of judicial supremacist thinking, Loki13 argues:

    It only takes one party to bring a motion, and then the court intervenes.

    That, of course, means the parties are not in agreement. If they were, one party would not be filing the motion (unless it is a joint motion for modification).

    Here's the deal-
    a. If the parties don't get divorced, the court doesn't get involved.
    b. If the parties agree to the terms of the divorce, the court doesn't get involved.

    So, you have a dispute between two parties. The court is the netural arbitrator. A decision must be made.

    That's how family court works. Don't like it? Get rid of divorce. I wouldn't run on that platform, though.

    I am not opposing divorce. Even if there were no divorce, parents could disagree about religious upbringings for their kids.

    Loki13 says that one party can bring a motion, and "A decision must be made." But it is just not true that the court must decide on a religious preference for a child. It is wrong, harmful, and unconstitutional for a court to make such as decision, as the law prof blogger Eugene Volokh argues persuasively. The court can refuse to intervene by simply dismissing the motion.

    If it is true that family courts have authority over such personal matters as how we teach religion to our kids just because someone brings a motion, then no one has any individual rights. Anyone can bring a motion to court.

    Sometimes people think that just because a case is in family court, then the parents must have failed to properly raise their kids and need help. But we have unilateral (aka no-fault) divorce in the USA, and the rules of the court are that anyone can bring a motion asking the court to take some action for the best interest of the children. It doesn't even mean necessarily that the parents have any child-rearing disagreements. It only means that one parent may have something to gain by bringing the motion.

     
    Copyright claims exaggerated
    Copyright holders routine exaggerate their claims. For example:
    Any fan of the NFL can almost recite the warning by memory: "This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL's consent is prohibited." The legitimacy of that broad claim may be determined by the Federal Trade Commission after the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a lengthy complaint with the FTC this morning.
    It is a lie. You can certainly describe a football game without the NFL's consent. Here is a story about "Captain Copyright" having to retract exaggerated claims. You still have fair use, no matter what they say.

    Friday, Jul 27, 2007
     
    E-mail Threatening to Destroy Career of Climate Skeptic
    Free Republic reports:
    EPA Chief Vows to Probe E-mail Threatening to "Destroy" Career of Climate Skeptic

    During today's hearing, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, confronted Stephen Johnson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with a threatening e-mail from a group of which EPA is currently a member. The e-mail threatens to "destroy" the career of a climate skeptic. Michael T. Eckhart, president of the environmental group the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), wrote in an email on July 13, 2007 to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):

    "It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on."

    In a July 16, Washington Times article, Eckhart confirmed that he did indeed write the email.

    Here is Eckhart's response. He justifies his threat against Lewis based on suspicions about Lewis's motives. Eckhart says that Lewis's argument against global warming is just a tactic in a larger battle you are waging against big government.

    Without even reading Lewis, I think that I can conclude that Eckhart is a leftist ideological nut-case. Eckhart seems to be arguing against editorials containing false statements. And yet his defense of himself does not list any of these alleged falsehoods. Instead he argues:

    It is time to end CEI's disingenuous undermining of worldwide concern about global warming. ... We must begin a nonpartisan, bi-partisan, and universal move forward to manage carbon in society and implement solutions ...
    The last thing we need is some sort of unchallenged authority that manages the Earth's carbon. I don't know what Lewis's arguments are, but Eckhart is a menace who needs to be rebutted at every opportunity.
     
    Why some logic puzzles are hard
    I was looking at other writings by evolutionary psychologist David P. Barash, and I found this 2003 esssy on how the human mind evolved to be illogical:
    In short, the evolutionary design features of the human brain may well hold the key to our penchant for logic as well as illogic. Following is a particularly revealing example, known as the Wason Test.

    Imagine that you are confronted with four cards. Each has a letter of the alphabet on one side and a number on the other. You are also told this rule: If there is a vowel on one side, there must be an even number on the other. Your job is to determine which (if any) of the cards must be turned over in order to determine whether the rule is being followed. However, you must only turn over those cards that require turning over. Let's say that the four cards are as follows:

         T   6   E   9

    Which ones should you turn over? ...

    Next, consider this puzzle. You are a bartender at a nightclub where the legal drinking age is 21. Your job is to make sure that this rule is followed: People younger than 21 must not be drinking alcohol. Toward that end, you can ask individuals their age, or check what they are drinking, but you are required not to be any more intrusive than is absolutely necessary. You are confronted with four different situations, as shown below. In which case (if any) should you ask a patron his or her age, or find out what beverage is being consumed?

    1. Drinking Water
    2. Over 21
    3. Drinking Beer
    4. Under 21 ...

    Why is the second problem set so easy, and the first so difficult? This question has been intensively studied by the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides. Her answer is that the key isn't logic itself -- after all, the two problems are logically equivalent -- but how they are positioned in a world of social and biological reality. Thus, whereas the first is a matter of pure reason, disconnected from reality, the second plays into issues of truth telling and the detection of social cheaters. The human mind, Cosmides points out, is not adapted to solve rarified problems of logic, but is quite refined and powerful when it comes to dealing with matters of cheating and deception. In short, our rationality is bounded by what our brains were constructed -- that is, evolved -- to do.

    I have a different theory. I believe that the second problem is easier because it is more clearly explained.

    First, the first problem describes the rule as an implication that must be negated to give the conjunction that is the actual test to be used. The second describes the rule in a form that can be more directly applied.

    Second, the first problem uses the ambiguous phrase "whether the rule is being followed", without any explanation of what that means. The second problem explains the purpose of the rule, and makes it much more clear what the bartender is supposed to do. The bartender's job is also familiar, so there is unlikely to be any confusion.

    I tried these problems on my kids. Sure enough, they were confused by the instructions on the first problem. They thought that flipping over the "6" to find a vowel might show that the card was an example of the rule being followed. I was unable to explain what was wrong with this, without adding additional info to the problem that was not actually given.

    Once I explained the first problem in greater detail, the kids had no problem. I had to explain, for example, that the problem only seeks cards that violate the rule, and not card that follow the rule.

    It seems plausible that logic problems are easier if they can be related to personal observation. The evolutionary psychologists go further with this example, and claim that it shows that the human mind has evolved to solve problems only insofar as they relate to policing social interactions, rather than the mind just evolving general intelligence.

    The example proves nothing. Evolutionary psychology must really be in a sorry state that such silly arguments are taken seriously.


    Thursday, Jul 26, 2007
     
    Texas Board gets independent thinker
    The Bad Astronomer is all upset that the Texas State Board of Education is now headed by Don McLeroy, who once said, "It is wrong to teach opinion as fact", and also:
    I don't think I share a common ancestor with a tree. However, most of the books we are considering adopting, claim as a fact that we all share a common ancestor with a tree.
    No, it is not a generally accepted fact that we share a common ancestor with a tree. If it were, then there would be some scientific paper with the proof.

    Humans and tree all use DNA, the genetic code, and even some of the same genes. The obvious explanations are common ancestry, independent evolution, and horizontal gene transfer. All three possibilities are known to occur in nature, and no one knows how we might be related to trees. McLeroy is correct.


    Tuesday, Jul 24, 2007
     
    Evolutionary psychologist gets his science wrong
    David P. Barash is an evolutionary psychologist, who calls himself an evolutionary biologist, writes in the LA Times and the Si Valley paper:
    Truthiness trumps dry logic, dull evidence and mere facts. It disdains or simply bypasses laborious intellectual examination in favor of what feels right. ... But such gut thinking poses another set of dangers to science. All too often, it bumps into scientific truth, and when it does, it tends to win - at least in the short term. Ironically, much of the time, scientific findings don't seem immediately logical; if they were, we probably wouldn't need its laborious "method" of theory building and empirical hypothesis testing for confirmation. We simply would know.
    He is a leftist-atheist-evolutionist Bush-hater with a silly straw man attack on the supposedly scientifically illiterate troglodytes. But you would think that he would draw empirical truths for his examples. He says:
    After all, the sun moves through our sky, but it is the Earth that is going around the sun. ... Nor is the battle over. Indeed, there is a constant tension between science and its truthy alternatives, from "quantum weirdness" to the irrefutable (but readily resisted) reality that a brick wall consists of far more empty space than solid matter.
    A brick wall does not have more empty space than solid matter. Quantum field theory, as it has been generally accepted for over 50 years, teaches that the space is filled with electromagnetic fields, and those fields create and destroy zillions of particles all the time. There is no such thing as empty space. A brick feels solid because particles are not really point particles, but wave functions that bump into each other.

    There is a point of view that says that the particles are more fundamental than the fields, and that when electrons are observed they appear to be point particles, and that electrons don't really take up as much space as their wave functions indicate. I guess that this is Barash's view. It is not really wrong, but it is about 80 years out of date. Barash certainly is wrong when he says that the empty space is an irrefutable reality.

    Likewise, his comments about the relative motions of the Sun and Earth are about 90 years out of date.

    I think that it is funny that these guys who lecture us troglodytes on scientific truth seem to be ignorant of the basics of 20th century Physics. They babble about the scientific method and empirical hypothesis testing, and yet their examples of scientific truths are not things that can be tested at all. And then they have the nerve to attack those who refuse to accept their outdated philosophical precepts.

    Barash hates the late Stephen Jay Gould, but subscribes to this Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian nonsense:

    Sigmund Freud was not a humble man. So it will probably come as no surprise that when he chose to identify three great intellectual earthquakes, each of them body blows to humanity's narcissism, his own contribution figured prominently: Freud listed, first, replacement of the Ptolemaic, earth-centered universe by its Copernican rival; second, Darwin's insights into the natural, biological origin of all living things, Homo sapiens included; and third, Freud's own suggestion that much -- indeed, most -- of our mental activity goes on "underground," in the unconscious.
    This is all supposed to prove:
    The truth, I submit, is more daunting. The natural world evolved as a result of mindless, purposeless, material events, and human beings -- not just as a species but each of us, as individuals -- are equally without intrinsic meaning or purpose.
    This is philosophy, not science. There is no empirical test that can prove him right or wrong, and he doesn't propose any.

    Let me address some science. Elsewhere in the essay, Barash launches an attach on Tycho Brahe:

    Next, consider the strange case of Tycho Brahe, ... In his own right, Brahe achieved remarkable accuracy in measuring the positions of planets as well as stars. But his greatest contribution (at least for my purpose) was one that he would doubtless prefer to leave forgotten because Brahe's Blunder is one of those errors whose very wrongness can teach us quite a lot about ourselves, and about the seduction of specieswide centrality.

    Brahe was also a careful scientist whose observations were undeniable, ... came up with a solution, ... It was ingenious, ... Brahe proposed that whereas the five planets indeed circled the Sun, that same Sun and its planetary retinue obediently revolved around an immobile and central Earth!

    It is just amazing that Barash thinks that there was something wrong or unscientific about Tycho for doing this. Tycho was one of the greatest astronomers of all time. Tycho brilliantly and painstakingly collected much better astronomical data that had ever been done before, and he devised a model of the system to match his data. He was an outstanding example of the scientific method at its finest. He proposed original hypotheses and tested them. Copernicus, by contrast, never did any experiment or observation that showed that his system was any more correct that Ptolemy's.

    If I were rating astronomers, I would rate Tycho as far more important than Copernicus. Tycho's work was critical for Kepler and Newton. Copernicus did improve Aristarchus's heliocentric model and brought attention to it, but he did not prove that was correct.

    I don't know what kind of scientific work Barash does. Much of his writings are on Peace Studies, whatever that is. Evolutionary psychology theories can be fascinating to read, but it rare that researchers actually propose some way of testing their hypotheses. He is not the one to be telling us what is or is not science.


    Monday, Jul 23, 2007
     
    Why we quit aping around, began walking
    MSNBC reports on some evolution research:
    Humans walking on two legs consume only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use while "knuckle-walking" on all fours, according to a new study.

    The finding, detailed in the July 17 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the idea that early humans became bipedal as a way to reduce energy costs associated with moving about.

    "Walking upright on two legs is a defining feature that makes us human,” said study leader Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It distinguishes our entire lineage from all other apes."

    According to this theory, the energy saved by walking upright gave our ancient ancestors an evolutionary advantage over other apes by reducing the costs of foraging for food.

    The idea is just one of many scientists have entertained as reasons for why humans walk on two legs. Recent studies have also suggested that, rather than taking millions of years to evolve from a hunched position as is commonly believed, our early ancestors were already capable of standing and walking upright the moment they descended from the trees.

    These theories don't really explain anything. If walking upright were advantageous, then why didn't other apes walk upright?

    Other apes nearly walk upright, and can do some limited upright walking if they have to. And yet true upright walking distinguishes humans. Why? To answer the question, we need some explanation as to why walking upright would be advantageous for humans, but not for apes.


    Sunday, Jul 22, 2007
     
    Amazon piranha fish not so scary
    Joe writes:
    There are two scientific facts that everyone of my age knows.

    The first is that a lone genius named Albert Einstein single-handedly thought up something called "relativity" while working as a patent clerk. Alas, you have gone a long way toward debunking that cherished belief.

    The second concerns the Amazon River. No, this has nothing to do with rainforests - this one has a lot more bite than that. Apparently, all that we know about the dreaded piranha fish is...... pretty overblown.

    This site claims that our impression of piranha was largely created by Theodore Roosevelt's experience in Brazil around a hundred years ago - when the natives played a trick on him!

    The lonely search for certainty continues.

    I am happy to debunk myths with cold facts.

    Friday, Jul 20, 2007
     
    Comparing Poincare to Einstein
    Olivier Darrigol wrote an excellent 2004 paper on Poincare's and Einstein's contributions to special relativity:
    By 1905 Poincare's and Einstein’s reflections on the electrodynamics of moving bodies led them to postulate the universal validity of the relativity principle, according to which the outcome of any conceivable experiment is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which it is performed. In particular, they both assumed that the velocity of light measured in different inertial frames was the same. They further argued that the space and time measured by observers belonging to different inertial systems were related to each other through the Lorentz transformations. They both recognized that the Maxwell-Lorentz equations of electrodynamics were left invariant by these transformations. They both required that every law of physics should be invariant under these transformations. They both gave the relativistic laws of motion. They both recognized that the relativity principle and the energy principle led to paradoxes when conjointly applied to radiation processes. ...

    To sum up, Einstein's and Poincare's versions of relativity theory differed in their basic concepts and in the accompanying heuristics. These differences should not hide the following facts: the two theories had the same observable consequences in the domain of classical electromagnetism; they both postulated the relativity principle; they both required the Lorentz-group symmetry of the laws of physics; and they both provided a physical interpretation of the Lorentz transformations in terms of measured space and time in moving frames. Despite this strong overlap, many commentators have anointed Einstein the true discoverer of relativity theory and others have bestowed this honor on Poincare´.

    So they published more or less the same theory. In some ways Poincare's exposition was better, and in some ways Einstein's was better, and Darrigol details the differences.

    The paper also explains that Poincare published his works first; that Einstein is known to have read (at least) some of Poincare's works; that Einstein surely got some of the main ideas for relativity from Poincare; and that Einstein stubbornly refused to cite or credit Poincare for anything. The paper then tries to explain Einstein's refusal to credit Poincare:

    One can imagine many reasons for his silence. First, and least plausible, is the possibility that the ambitious Einstein deliberately occulted Poincare's role in order to get full credit for the new theory. This hardly fits what we know of Einstein's personality.
    Actually, it does fit with Einstein's personality. Einstein was a vain egomaniac who repeatedly schemed to get more credit for himself than he deserved, and to avoid crediting others. His famous 1905 special relativity didn't just fail to credit Poincare, it didn't have any references at all! We now know from publication of Einstein's letters that he failed to credit his first wife for help with special relativity, and refused to credit many others. His first wife was a physicist who collaborated with him on relativity.

    For general relativity, Einstein directly collaborated with David Hilbert and Marcel Grossman. He corresponded with Tullio Levi-Civita, Hermann Weyl, Felix Klein, Emmy Noether, and a number of other mathematicians. Einstein wrote a lot of wrong stuff in his general relativity work, and we now know that he got most of his best ideas from these mathematicians. And yet Einstein always claimed that general relativity was entirely his own invention.

    Darrigol stops short of trying to explain Einstein's motives. Maybe he independently rediscovered part of special relativity, and honestly thought that Poincare did not deserve credit. Whether he did or not, we can be sure that Poincare invented and published the theory of special relativity first, and should be credited for it.

    Joe writes that maybe Einstein got mellower with age:

    As it turned out, Einstein can hardly have been dissatisfied with the amount of popular credit he received for the theories of relativity, both special and general. Nevertheless, one senses a bit of annoyance when Max Born mentioned to Einstein in 1953 (two years before Einstein's death) that the second volume of Edmund Whittaker's book “A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity” had just appeared, in which special relativity is attributed to Lorentz and Poincare, with barely a mention of Einstein except to say that "in the autumn of [1905] Einstein published a paper which set forth the relativity theory of Poincare and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention". ... On the other hand, in the same year (1953), Einstein wrote to the organizers of a celebration honoring the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of his paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, saying:
    I hope that one will also take care on that occasion to suitably honor the merits of Lorentz and Poincare.
    Maybe Einstein mellowed a bit, but he still wouldn't directly credit Lorentz and Poincare for what they did.

    My interest in this issue is not in analyzing Einstein's character defects. I am just giving credit where credit is due. Einstein is credited with being the greatest genius of all time, but his accomplishments are much less than those of Poincare, Hilbert, Weyl, and others.

    It does appear that everyone who has looked into this matter acknowledges that Poincare published the essence of special relativity before Einstein. Then they end up concluding either that Einstein was the incorrigible plagiarist of the century, or they give wacky reasons for crediting Einstein anyway. The reasons include:

  • Poincare didn't fully understand what he was saying.
  • Einstein didn't credit Poincare, so Poincare doesn't deserve credit.
  • Poincare generously credited Lorentz, and Lorentz generously credited Einstein.
  • Poincare suggested ways of experimentally testing the theory, indicating that he didn't believe it as strongly as Einstein.
  • Poincare used the aether as a mathematical construct and merely said that it was superfluous, while Einstein more vigorously rejected it. (In fact, Einstein wrote papers saying that general relativity requires reinstating the aether.)
  • Lorentz and Poincare were pure mathematicians, not physicists. (Lorentz got a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1902.)
  • Einstein would have been exposed long ago, and would not have gotten the Nobel Prize. (A lot of Einstein's contemporaries did say that he didn't deserve a Nobel Prize for relativity, and his prize citation did not mention relativity.)

    These arguments are just nutty. All of the evidence is published, so there should be no argument about who did what first.

    You often hear people wonder: Why wasn't Einstein recognized as a great genius at an early age? How is it that he did such brilliant work on relativity, but never accomplished much else afterwards? How could he be so smart and humble at the same time? How could his first wife be smart enough to be a coauthor to the special relativity (as indicated by pre-publication drafts), and yet not be recognized also as a great genius? The answer is real simple -- Einstein's contributions to relativity theory are vastly overrated, and secondary to those of others.


  • Monday, Jul 16, 2007
     
    Atheists come out of the closet
    The Si Valley paper reports on local atheists:
    Broadly stated, atheists believe in natural laws instead of supernatural forces like a divine creator. The number of people open to such beliefs is growing and has created sub-groups, each with its own distinctive twist: humanists, secularists, freethinkers, atheists, rationalists, skeptics, agnostics, non-theists and -- a new addition to the lexicon preferred by many atheists -- "brights." Atheists say this sprouting visibility is partly a response to the Advertisement country's growing religiosity -- especially under President Bush. ...
    Under Bush? Lots of other presidents have talked about God more, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Bush is as openly tolerant of atheists as any president in a long time.
    At an Atheists of Silicon Valley meeting, Godfrey (Ben) Baumgartner, sporting a "Born Again Skeptic" shirt, recounted how he questioned his niece's Christianity so much during her last visit, her husband half-jokingly said he wasn't sure she should stay over again. He wasn't trying to convert her, Baumgartner said, just set her free.

    "I don't care what she believes," he said, "as long as what she believes is true."

    Funny. They want to do their own proselytizing!

    They also have their own idol worship:

    An image makeover is also a priority for Chuck Cannon, a member of San Francisco Atheists who organized a scholarship at City College of San Francisco for the student who writes the best essay on Darwin.
    Now it is really wacky to try to promote Atheism by getting students to write essays on Darwin. It would be one thing to promote science by encouraging students to go on a field trip and write an essay on their observations, or to write about DNA research or something like that. But no, they want to idolize Darwin as the man who proved that there is no God.

    This is just another example how there are leftist-atheist-evolutionists who want to turn Evolutionism into its own belief system similar to religion.

     
    German teens scared ostrich
    Germany also has wacky lawsuits:
    BAUTZEN, Germany, June 5 (UPI) -- Three German teenagers are off the hook for allegedly scaring an ostrich so badly its owner said his big bird became temporarily impotent.

    A judge in Bautzen recently ruled against the ostrich's owner, who sued the boys for about $6,700, claiming the firecrackers they set off left the bird unable to perform its breeding duties, Deutsche Welle reported Tuesday.

    German ostrich breeder Rico Gabel went to court in March, contending the loud noises left his stud ostrich, Gustav, depressed, apathetic and impotent for about six months. He said he was owed damages for 14 ostrich chickens he says Gustav otherwise would have sired.

    But the court sided with the youths after a bird expert testified there was no reason to tie the loud noises with Gustav's lethargy. The teens were, however, ordered to pay about $200 in veterinary fees.

    And, the German newspaper reported, Gustav is back to his frisky self.


    Friday, Jul 13, 2007
     
    The Libby commutation was consistent with Bush policy
    On the Volokh blog, I explain why Pres. Bush's Libby commutation was consistent with previous Bush policy.

    It is amusing to see attempted mindreading by Bush-haters. Someone calling himself "Justin" had to be censored for making ad hominem attacks against my family. He argued:

    Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have a general policy of at least requiring applicants for clemency to at least go through the required procedures?
    No, there is no required procedure. Richard Nixon did not apply for clemency from Pres. Ford, and no application is required.

    There was no need to get the DoJ opinion on clemency for Libby -- the DoJ was already committed to advocating a stiff sentence for him. Bush presumably had all the facts he needed for his action.


    Monday, Jul 09, 2007
     
    Obama's reason for opposing the war
    Barack Obama's fans say that he is the only serious candidate who opposed Here is an Oct 2002 Oct speech at a Chicago anti-war rally:
    Now let me be clear -- I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

    But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

    I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

    I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

    Okay, that is a reasonable statement. But two years later, he changed his story:
    Six months before the war was launched, I questioned the evidence that would lead to us being there. Now, us having gone in there, we have a deep national security interest in making certain that Iraq is stable.
    No, he didn't question the evidence that led us to the Iraq War. He accepted the evidence, and said that it was a dumb war anyway.

    I think that Obama is really running for VP, and is just saying whatever he thinks that people want to hear. He is like John Edwards in 2004 -- far too inexperienced to be taken seriously as a serious presidential candidate, but maybe a good speaker and campaign that might enhance the Democrat ticket.

    Here is Glenn Sacks attacking Obama for introducing a Senate bill that blames fathers for not seeing their kids, even when they are blocked by the custodial parents.


    Sunday, Jul 08, 2007
     
    Our centrist Supreme Court
    Leftists are repeating their usual complaints about a right-wing shift on the Supreme Court. Linda Greenhouse writes:
    Two years ago, Professor Tribe suspended work on the third edition of his monumental treatise on constitutional law, declaring that the moment had passed for propounding a "Grand Unified Theory." His current ambition, he says now, is to "teach to the future," in ways that will challenge the current climate and "make a difference 20, 30 or 40 years from now."
    Good. We don't need that theory anyway. Barack Obama once helped Tribe write a paper titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space". It was pretty nutty.

    The Philly paper says:

    With Bush's two appointees playing pivotal roles, the court for the first time banned an abortion practice (the late-term method), with no exceptions to protect a woman's health; chipped away at the wall between church and state, by making it tougher for taxpayers to challenge Bush's money grants to religious groups; curbed the ability of school districts to use race as a factor to promote integration; made it tougher for women to sue their employers for wage and pay discrimination . . . the list goes on.
    Then it complains that these issues will not excite the voters enough to vote for a Democrat in 2008.

    I say that only radical leftists are offended by these decisions. The abortion decision did not ban late-term abortions; they are still legal under all circumstances. It only upheld a ban on a particular method, based on reasoning that another method was available and safer.

    Only Justices Scalia and Thomas voted to make it tougher for taxpayer lawsuits challenge church-state issues. The four liberals voted to extend court jurisdiction to cases that had never been permitted before. The Bush appointees took a middle ground.

    The conservatives did rule against public schools using racial discrimination to choose students. I think that most people are fed up with forced racial busing, and are happy with this decision.

    The lawsuit for back wages was based on a statute of limitations set by Congress. The Democrats control Congress, and can change the limit any time they want.

    There were also some liberal decisions this year. The court ruled that the EPA had to do something about global warming, and it continued to make death penalties more difficult. On balance, there has been a slight shift to the right, but not one that will offend any swing voters.


    Saturday, Jul 07, 2007
     
    Supremacist Update
    John sends these updates on judicial supremacy. Here, here, and here.
    Now back to Professor Epstein. Not a word about the separation of powers from him. Epstein argues that Flast should be converted from an exception into a universal principle of taxpayer standing, which would anoint us all as private attorneys general to make a federal case out of any complaint we might cook up that this or that act of Congress or action of the executive branch was unconstitutional. "The proper rule should allow all taxpayers free rein to challenge either Congress or the executive branch for overstepping their constitutional authority." Frothingham, therefore, was the real innovation, and a mistaken one, in Epstein's view.

    This is a breathtaking argument for judicial supremacy. (And Epstein has the nerve to accuse Justice Scalia of "judicial activism"!) For Epstein, it is evidently hard to think of any way to uphold the Constitution that doesn't involve lawyers and judges ...

    A lot of law profs are judicial supremacists, but the US Constitution treats the three federal branches as equally responsible to uphold the Constitution.
     
    The greatest imaginable tragedy
    NY Science Times reports:
    "Nothing," the report concluded, "would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life and fail to recognize it."
    The report is referring to some sort of primordial pre-life that wouldn't even be recognized on Earth.

    Friday, Jul 06, 2007
     
    Lawyer price-fixing
    Someone just told me that price-fixing is the reason people want to avoid probate. There is a law that says that a lawyer gets to pocket a percentage of the value of a dead man's estate, regardless of how little work is involved. That is one reason people put money into trusts -- just to avoid greedy lawyers stealing their money when they are dead.

    Thursday, Jul 05, 2007
     
    Catastrophic global warming is a hoax
    The Bad Astronomer writes:
    Global warming is a very contentious issue. A lot of this is because some people with partisan views have purposely tried to confuse the issue. It's a fact of life that corporations put a lot of money in some politicians' pockets, and it's another fact that a lot of politicians -- I'm looking at you, Senator Inhofe (R-19th Century) -- have made baldly incorrect statements and have obstructed real debate about the issue.

    It's also a fact that this issue was at first denied by such politicians; they said global warming didn't exist (Inhofe called it a "hoax").

    No, it is not a fact.

    Sen. Inhofe's famous 2003 Senate speech actually said:

    It is my fervent hope that Congress will reject prophets of doom who peddle propaganda masquerading as science in the name of saving the planet from catastrophic disaster. I urge my colleagues to put stock in scientists who rely on the best, most objective scientific data and reject fear as a motivating basis for making public policy decisions.

    Let me be very clear: alarmists are attempting to enact an agenda of energy suppression that is inconsistent with American values of freedom, prosperity, and environmental progress.

    Over the past 2 hours, I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists.

    He didn't call global warming a hoax; he offered scientific evidence that catastrophic global warming was a hoax.

    It is really pathetic when the leftist science bloggers have to misquote politicians in order to criticize them. Just quote them correctly, and give the contrary evidence!


    Tuesday, Jul 03, 2007
     
    Dawkins attacks Behe
    R. Dawkins reviews Behe's book, and repeats some silly points from Coyne's review:
    And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site ... Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.
    Why is it so important to say that a Behe hypothesis was rebutted by a "believing Christian"? Dawkins is a hard-core atheist, and the validity of a scientific paper should not depend on the author's religious beliefs.

    But what really upsets Dawkins is that Behe says that random mutation is more important than natural selection:

    Behe correctly dissects the Darwinian theory into three parts: descent with modification, natural selection and mutation. Descent with modification gives him no problems, nor does natural selection. They are "trivial" and "modest" notions, respectively. ...

    The crucial passage in "The Edge of Evolution" is this: "By far the most critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept."

    Most of the other evolutionists describe evolution in terms of random mutations, but any emphasis on randomness drives Dawkins nuts. He says:
    generations of mathematical geneticists ... have repeatedly shown that evolutionary rates are not limited by mutation.
    This is nutty. Of course evolution is limited by mutation. You can breed new dogs by taking advantage of existing genetic diversity in dogs, but you cannot make a new species that way, as far as anyone knows. Major biological changes can take millions of years of mutations and selection, according to the theory.

    The statement "the rate A is not limited by the rate B", means that the rate A can be arbitrarily large even as the rate B tends to zero. But in fact evolution teaches that the evolution rate tends to zero as the mutation rate tends to zero. Mutation is what introduces change into nature. Without mutation, there is no change, and no evolution. Selection cannot produce change unless mutation put it there.

    The NY Times had another silly essay last week about whether mutation or selection is more important. Behe seems to be saying that mutation is more important, and Dawkins says selection is more important:

    Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it -- alone as far as we know -- explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a "modest" idea, nor is descent with modification.
    This is kooky. Natural selection is the most trivial part of evolutionism, and was never disputed by anyone either before or after Darwin. Karl Popper once claimed that "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program". (It is quoted in this recent video blog.) He later conceded that biologists can sometimes predict what features might increase the survivability of an organism, but there are no observable consequences of natural selection itself that anyone has ever tested against an alternate theory. They've successfully tested descent with modification, mutation rates, existence of common ancestors, and other aspects of evolutionism, but when it comes to natural selection theory, there is nothing to test.

    Dawkins' parting shot is that Behe did not publish his ideas in a peer-reviewed evolution journal, and instead writes for the general public that "is not qualified to rumble him". But Dawkins does not publish his rebuttal in one either.

    Maybe Behe's hypotheses have been proved wrong, I don't know. His notion of irreducible complexity certainly does not disprove evolution. But the animosity against him from Coyne, Dawkins, and his own Lehigh U. dept. is bizarre. They treat him like a heretic who should be burned at the stake. They babble unscientific nonsense. Behe appears to have really touched a nerve with the evolutionists.

    Here is Behe's rebuttal to negative book reviews.


    Monday, Jul 02, 2007
     
    Joe and Valerie Wilson are still lying
    They had their lawyer issue this statement:
    First, President Bush said any person who leaked would no longer work in his administration. Nonetheless, Scooter Libby didn't leave office until he was indicted and Karl Rove works in the White House even today. ... Clearly, this is an administration that believes leaking classified information for political ends is justified and that the law is what applies to other people."
    No, Bush did not make that promise, as explained here. At most, Bush implied that he would fire someone if a US Attorney made a finding that he violated the law. And Libby was indeed fired as soon as he was accused of violating a law.

    It is too this administration's credit that it has declassified info so that the American public can know the pros and cons of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Wilson and Plame come from a CIA mindset that wants to keep its incompetence classified.

    I know really agree with any of the other Republican and Democrat comments at the above link. Sen. Barack Obama said:

    This decision to commute the sentence of a man who compromised our national security cements the legacy of an Administration characterized by a politics of cynicism and division, ...
    Libby was not even accused of compromising our national security. Obama's idiotic comment can only be interpreted as cynical and divisive.

    Bush's statement says that Libby deserves to get punished. The obvious explanation is that Bush wanted to make Libby a scapegoat because Libby bungled the White House response to Joe Wilson, and Libby absorbs blame that might have been directed at others.


    Sunday, Jul 01, 2007
     
    What was Darwin's contribution?
    I am looking for a clear statement of just what Darwin's main scientific contributions were. It appears that many others had previous asserted that species had evolved over time, and that different species may have had common ancestorys.

    In the Preface to the 6th edition of his Origin of Species, Darwin credits an assortment of others for earlier publication of similar ideas. Eg, on page xvii Darwin says:

    In 1846 the veteran geologist M. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy published in an excellent though short paper ('Bulletins de l'Acad. Roy. Bruxelles', tom. xiii. p. 581) his opinion that it is more probable that new species have been produced by descent with modification than that they have been separately created: the author first promulgated this opinion in 1831.
    Darwin also says that he was spurred to publication by Alfred Russel Wallace presenting a manuscript with theories essentially the same as his own.

    Darwin considered his theory of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, to be his main contribution. The word "natural" means plants and animal living, mating, and dying from natural causes, as opposed to farmers breeding domesticated animals, or something like that.

    Darwin knew nothing about discrete genes, or genetic mutation, or the age of the Earth, or anything like that. Darwin does have an assortment of examples from his personal observations on Galapagos and elsewhere, and he has some interesting theorizing about how evolution could have taken place. Darwin's book may well have been the most persuasive argument at the time for the idea that different species might be related, but I wonder how much was really scientifically novel.

     
    Do flu vaccines really protect the elderly?
    NewScientist magazine reports:
    Do flu vaccines really protect the elderly? It's been a point of bitter dispute among flu experts. ...

    Veteran flu researcher Tom Reichert of Entropy Limited thinks he knows why. "What I didn't realise till I looked again at the raw data is that deaths from flu have been dropping like a stone in industrialised countries for the past thirty years."

    In a new analysis he found that excess winter deaths have been declining steeply in the US, Canada, France and Australia since the last, mild flu pandemic of 1968, regardless of the predominant flu strain and whether vaccination programmes were in place. "People under 75 just don't die of flu any more," he told New Scientist. That means the virus is becoming less virulent, or we are doing something to make ourselves less susceptible to it.

    People over 80 still die of flu, probably because they respond least well to vaccination.

    Flu vaccines are based on researchers predicting (months in advance) what flu strain will be dominant that winter. Sometimes they predict well and sometimes they don't. I would have expected some clear-cut evidence of fewer flu deaths in the years that the researchers made good predictions. Apparently there is no such solid evidence of benefit.

    Friday, Jun 29, 2007
     
    Citing Marbury v Madison for judicial supremacy
    Ilya Somin writes on the Volokh legal blog:
    The most fundamental duty of the federal courts is to overrule and remedy governmental violations of the Constitution. ...

    I would think that it's rather obvious, but I guess it isn't, so I will spell it out. The duty of the courts is to enforce the law and provide remedies for violations of it. The Constitution is the highest law in the land, taking precedence over other law. Therefore, enforcing the Constitution and remedying violations of it is the most important duty of federal Courts.

    If authority is needed to support this rather simple logic, I cite Marbury v. Madison.

    A reader rebuts it:
    Although I'm sympathetic to the concept of a judicially-created remedy, nothing in Marbury obligates or even promotes it. Marbury was decided by the court NOT exercising a power that conflicted with the Constitution, not enforcing any power of its own.
    Somin also cited Marbury v Madison to argue:
    Yet the majority still denies Robbins his request for a damage remedy. This violates one of the most basic principles of constitutional law: the idea that for every constitutional right there must be an adequate remedy.
    Another reader rebutted this:
    It's pretty rich to quote Marbury for the proposition that every violation must have a remedy. The practical import of the Marbury Court's ruling that it didn't have the authority to issue a writ of mandamus was actually that Marbury didn't have a remedy for the violation of his legal right to his judgeship. As that example shows, the lack of legal remedy for a violation of legal rights has a long pedigree; Wilkie is hardly treading new ground.
    Marbury v Madison is just an obscure 1803 court case that law profs and judicial supremacists cites whenever they argue for judges seizing power non-legislatively. I wonder whether they even read the case, because it actually stands for judicial restraint.

    Wednesday, Jun 27, 2007
     
    Supremacists have four votes on court
    John writes:
    Today's decision shows we're still a long way from attaining the goals of The Supremacists. Only Scalia and Thomas were willing to overturn Flast v. Cohen, which is one of the worst examples of judicial activism by the Warren Court. Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy, rather unconvincingly, gave a narrower interpretation but shrank from plunging the dagger in a bad precedent. Incredibly, the Supreme Court still has four justices who wanted to uphold a decision declaring that the Faith-Based Initiative violates the Establishment Clause. If O'Connor was still on the Court, she probably would have joined them to make a majority.
    A tax-exempt anti-religion organization, FFRF.org, sued to complain about an assortment of supposedly pro-religion policies of the Bush administration. FFRF even challenged the content of presidential speeches. FFRF could not point to any faulty statute or harm to itself, but just argued that any taxpayer should be able to use the federal courts to challenge government policy. In Hein v FFRF, four justices said FFRF should have standing for such nonsense. If a Democrat is elected in 2008, then the liberal judicial suprematicts may get five votes.

    Tuesday, Jun 26, 2007
     
    Evolutionism needs a paradigm shift
    Evolutionist Douglas H. Erwin writes in the NY Times:
    Is Darwin due for an upgrade? There are growing calls among some evolutionary biologists for just such a revision, although they differ about what form this might take. But those calls could also be exaggerated. There is nothing scientists enjoy more than the prospect of a good paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are the stuff of scientific revolutions.

    In the past few years every element of this paradigm has been attacked. Concerns about the sources of evolutionary innovation and discoveries about how DNA evolves have led some to propose that mutations, not selection, drive much of evolution, or at least the main episodes of innovation, like the origin of major animal groups, including vertebrates.

    What he is trying to say here is that everybody knows that evolution is the byproduct of mutation and natural selection, but nobody really knows how much is attributable to mutation and how much to natural selection. Evolutionism needs some radical new ideas in order to figure out how it works.

    Of course he has the obligatory denunciation of creationism or else his career would be in trouble.

    The point here is that evolutionists agree that evolution is natural, meaning that the selection of surviving life is not by God or Man, but beyond that there is not much agreement on how is works.

    The same paper has a bunch of other evolution articles, including this:

    That is the nub of the issue, according to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul. Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, she writes in her book "Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?" (Cambridge, 2006). Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their "strategic location" in creation.
    I think that it is bizarre that some philosophers and others think that Copernicus somehow made people less human. Copernicus did nothing of the kind.

    It has the usual claim that:

    There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth.
    This is not as impressive as it sounds. It only means that change in the history of life on Earth is attributable to mutation and selection (some mutations surviving more than others). If you want to know how much is mutation and how much is selection, no one can tell you.

    Update: Cornelia Dean must like that sentence. She says again:

    In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth.
    She seems to put this sentence in all her NY Times articles on the subject. Sometimes she says "diversity and complexity" instead of "complexity and diversity", but otherwise it is the same.

    The statement is almost completely vacuous. It is about like saying:

    In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of climate change as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of weather on earth.
    Yes, that's right, but there is no practical content to the statement. It is just a silly consequence of the definitions.

    Saturday, Jun 23, 2007
     
    Attacking Conservapedia
    I just discovered a web site and a blog that exist solely to criticize Conservapedia.

    The blog attacks me here:

    Did you know ...

    ... that pointing out errors in a discussion opponent's reasoning is the same as making an ad hominem attack? It's true! Witness this recent discussion on Conservapedia's Talk:Scientific Theory page:

    I guess your confusion, RSchlafly, lies in the fact that you conflate the profession of a biologist ...

    Your ad hominem attacks are not relevant to the article. RSchlafly 10:41, 10 June 2007 (EDT)

    This is easy to explain. The ad hominem attack was to accuse me of being confused. This was on a Talk page that was reserved for discussing improvements to a Conservapedia article. It is not relevant whether I am confused or not.

    It is funny how Conservapedia is so upsetting to these folks. It is just a conservative version of Wikipedia. The critics are free to join and correct any errors, if they wish.

    Most of the complaints on Conservapedia don't point to any actual errors, but instead gripe about a lack of leftist spin.


    Friday, Jun 22, 2007
     
    Older boys are smarter
    The NY Times reports on IQ research:
    The eldest children in families tend to develop higher I.Q.'s than their siblings, researchers are reporting today, in a large study that could settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between I.Q. and birth order.

    Family Influence The average difference in I.Q. was slight -- three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling -- but significant, the researchers said. And they said the results made it clear that it was due to family dynamics, not to biological factors like prenatal environment.

    No, the study only showed that 18-19 year old boys in Norway have a higher IQ. This doesn't really settle anything, as you can see from the contradictory results and explanations:
    Social scientists have proposed several theories to explain how birth order might affect intelligence scores. Firstborns have their parents' undivided attention as infants, and even if that attention is later divided evenly with a sibling or more, it means that over time they will have more cumulative adult attention, in theory enriching their vocabulary and reasoning abilities.

    But this argument does not explain a consistent finding in children under 12: among these youngsters, later-born siblings actually tend to outscore the eldest on I.Q. tests. Researchers theorize that this precociousness may reflect how new children alter the family's overall intellectual resource pool.

    But that doesn't stop them from making unwarranted generalizations:
    Because sex has little effect on I.Q. scores, the results almost certainly apply to females as well, said Dr. Petter Kristensen, an epidemiologist at the University of Oslo and the lead author of the Science study.
    If that is not silly enough, the article gets really wacky at the end:
    Charles Darwin, author of the revolutionary "Origin of Species," was the fifth of six children. Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish-born astronomer who determined that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the planetary system, grew up the youngest of four. The mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, the youngest of three, was a key figure in the scientific revolution of the 16th century.

    Firstborns have won more Nobel Prizes in science than younger siblings, but often by advancing current understanding, rather than overturning it.

    "It's the difference between every-year or every-decade creativity and every-century creativity," Dr. Sulloway said, "between innovation and radical innovation."

    This is nonsense. It doesn't mention first-borns Kepler, Newton, and Einstein because they don't fit the pattern.

    Update: Here is a criticism of the birth-order hypothesis from John Horgan.


    Wednesday, Jun 20, 2007
     
    Indians didn't get paid for blood
    Some South American Indians are complaining that they once donated blood and never got paid for it. Somebody should tell them that USA citizens don't get paid either.
     
    1970s ecologist speaks up
    The NY Times reports:
    Barry Commoner has for decades been agitating to restore ecological balance to the biosphere, whether by outlawing nuclear testing or spreading the practice of recycling.
    So it interviews him:
    Q. So you don’t think global warming is detracting from other concerns?

    A. No, it’s the other way around. If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.

    That is exactly why leftist environmentalists love the attention given to global warming. It allows them to broadly attack human activity and economic production.

    Commoner goes on:

    You could argue that maybe this is a high point in a heating/cooling cycle. Well, we’re adding to the high point. There’s no question about it. So it seems to me the argument that there are natural ways in which the temperature fluctuates is a spurious one. If we accept that we’re in a cycle, it’s idiocy to increase the high point.
    Here, he starts to get wacky. If we are at a high point, then adding to the high point is the best thing that we could do because it would postpone another ice age.

    Commoner goes on to make nutty comments about nuclear power, malaria, clothes, and Ronald Reagan.


    Tuesday, Jun 19, 2007
     
    NASA Head Regrets Global Warming Remarks
    ABC News reports:
    NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that "unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it." ...

    Griffin made headlines last week when he told a National Public Radio interviewer he wasn't sure global warming was a problem.

    "I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists," Griffin said on NPR. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we [at NASA] must wrestle with."

    The radio interview angered some climate scientists, who called his remarks ignorant. ...

    Griffin reiterated that NASA's job was to provide scientific data on global warming and leave it up to policy makers to decide what to do with it.

    I already commented on this below. What Griffin did was to correctly distinguish science and policy. For that, he is called "ignorant". It has become politically risky to question the global warming agenda.

    Monday, Jun 18, 2007
     
    Coyne trashes Behe
    Jerry Coyne trashes Michael J. Behe's new book:
    More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III. ... Jones's 139-page verdict for the plaintiffs was eloquent, strong, and unequivocal, especially coming from a churchgoing Republican. He ruled that "intelligent design" is not only unscientific, but a doctrine based firmly on religion.
    So the strongest argument against Behe's work is that a church-going Republican judge declared that it is unscientific?!
    In Darwin's Black Box, Behe made exactly the same argument to show that a similar structure, the flagellum (a larger cilium that propels microorganisms), could not have evolved by natural selection. But in this case Behe's claim that no intermediate stages could have existed was refuted. Ken Miller, a biologist at Brown University (and an observant Catholic), showed how flagella and cilia could have had their precursors in mechanisms that the cell uses to transport proteins, mechanisms that are co-opted to construct flagella.
    So Behe's latest idea must be wrong because an observant Catholic biologist refuted an earlier and related idea?
    Is Behe's theory testable? Well, not really, since it consists not of positive assertions, but of criticisms of evolutionary theory and solemn declarations that it is powerless to explain complexity.
    Coyne seems to alternate between saying that Behe's ideas are untestable, and saying that they have been refuted.
    Evolution has been tested, and confirmed, many times over. Every time we find an early human fossil dating back several million years, it confirms evolution.
    I agree that a great many aspects of Evolution have been tested and confirmed, but Coyne sure offers wacky evidence. No one has ever found an early human fossil dating back several million years.

    Coyne notes that Lehigh U. has this disclaimer:

    While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.
    Coyne says that this statement is unique. Other universities do not similarly disavow their professors who advocate Marxism, Feminism, or String Theory. It is common for a Physics dept. to have a professor who denies that the theory of gravity can explain galaxy formation, and that prof is not ostracized.

    The hysterical reaction of evolutionists to Behe is a little strange. Real scientists would just offer rebuttals to the testable aspects of Behe's ideas, and leave it at that. Behe accepts most of conventional Evolution dogma, and merely questions some evolutionary mechanisms. It is likely that he will be proven wrong, if he hasn't been already. But he seems like just another academic writing a provocative book. Lehigh U. looks particularly ridiculous in branding Behe unscientific just because it says that his ideas are outside the mainstream and have not been tested experimentally.

    According to a recently revealed document, the great Isaac Newton once gave a Biblical analysis that predicted the end of the world in 2060. Some Case Western profs don't believe in black holes, and the critics just calmly explain why the profs are wrong.

    George writes:

    Behe is not like other scientists who question the details of an established theory. If Behe is right, then religious nuts will infer that God had a role in the history of life on Earth. Science cannot tolerate that. It opens the door to unscientific arguments and irrational thinking. Science must always be premised on God having no role in anything. Otherwise we'll be heading back to the Dark Ages. Scientists must actively disavow Behe and everything that he represents.
    I wondering why it is that only evolutionists make such silly arguments. Other sciences have controversies that have religious implications. Physicists and cosmologists do not go around waging an ideological war against those who support theories that some theists happen to like.

    Sunday, Jun 17, 2007
     
    NY Times trashes Clarence Thomas again
    Harvard prof Orlando Patterson just wrote a NY Times book review trashing Justice Clarence Thomas:
    He frequently preaches the virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings -- not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.
    Yes, there is doubt. No one can point to just what the alleged lies were. This is just another unsubstantiated defamatory cheap shot. What is worse here is that Patterson appears to know nothing about Thomas's actual court opinions. Patterson is a black Jamaican sociologist, and not a lawyer or legal scholar, but he is reviewing a biography of Thomas. Patterson writes:
    notoriously, he [Thomas] has held that beating a prisoner is not unconstitutional punishment because it would not have appeared cruel and unusual to the framers
    The case was Hudson v McMillian, 503 US 1 (1992). It appears that Patterson did not read the opinion, as it has little resemblance to the above sentence. Thomas's argument was more about what previous courts considered to be punishment, than what framers would have considered cruel and unusual.

    This is yet another example of people visciously attacking Thomas without showing that they even know the first things about what he has done on the court. The article attacks "his suspect qualifications for the job". That is just a code phrase. Thomas has been on the Supreme Court for 15 years, and he should now be judged on the opinions that he has issued on the job.


    Wednesday, Jun 06, 2007
     
    Libby gets stiff sentence
    John writes:
    Does Libby's sentence violate the Blakely decision?

    The Blakely principle is that only facts found by a jury can support criminal punishment.

    Libby's severe sentence was based on the conclusion that Libby's perjury was extremely serious. It was extremely serious because the perjury substantially impeded a federal investigation into whether Valerie Plame's identity was improperly disclosed, which was an extremely serious matter.

    In fact, as we know (but the jury didn't), the lie did not in fact mislead the prosecutor because he knew from the very beginning exactly how Valerie's identity was disclosed. So the jury could not find that the federal investigation was in fact impeded or obstructed.

    And secondly, the jury was never given any evidence, and therefore could not find, that there was anything unlawful (or harmful to the U.S. Government) about the disclosure of Valerie's identity by Libby, Rove or Armitage.

    So I conclude that, while Libby was unquestionably guilty of perjury, the judge was obliged to sentence him on the assumption that lie Libby told was trivial and immaterial, since the jury did not find otherwise.

    I wonder if Libby is even going to make the argument. The NY Times reported:
    The judge said there was no issue that Mr. Libby’s lawyers could appeal that seemed to present a reasonable chance of succeeding. But he relented somewhat and said they could file briefs next week detailing their arguments that there were two reasonable grounds for appeal: that Mr. Fitzgerald’s appointment as a special counsel was improper and that Judge Walton had erred in prohibiting the defense team from presenting experts on the fallibility of human memory.
    Yes, I think that the judge violated Blakely, but Libby's got the problem that his lawyer, Ted Wells, made hopelessly weak arguments in court and the jury convicted Libby of obstruction of justice. I don't see how any justice was obstructed, but Libby should have explained that to the jury himself.

    The NY Times reports in Thursday's paper:

    A decision not to pardon Mr. Libby would further alienate members of Mr. Bush’s traditional base of support in the conservative movement, a group already angry about his proposed immigration policy, his administration’s spending and his approach to Iran.
    This is crazy. Conservatives are upset with Pres. Bush over his immigration policy, but nobody cares about a Libby pardon. No one outside the DC pundits, that is.

    Tuesday, Jun 05, 2007
     
    Why humans are not furry
    SciAm experts address this evolutionary question:
    What is the latest theory of why humans lost their body hair? Why are we the only hairless primate? ...

    Scientists have suggested three main explanations for why humans lack fur. ...

    1. The aquatic-ape hypothesis suggests that six million to eight million years ago apelike ancestors of modern humans had a semiaquatic lifestyle based on foraging for food in shallow waters. ...
    2. The second theory is that we lost our fur in order to control our body temperature when we adapted to life on the hot savannah. ...
    3. Ancestors to modern humans became naked as a means to reduce the prevalence of external parasites that routinely infest fur. ...
    He rejects (1) because paleontological evidence is elusive, and rejects (2) because we would have lost more heat at night. He prefers theory (3) because human lice prefer hairy areas, and because naked mole rats have no hair!

    It seems clear that the evolutionary experts have no good answer. Theories (2) and (3) don't even answer the question, because they fail to explain why other primates are still furry. The aquatic ape theory lacks paleontological evidence, but so does every other theory.

    Evolutionists make fun of creationists and others who ask why some apes evolved into humans, and all the other apes didn't. Why didn't the chimps evolve, they ask. Evolutionists say that the question shows a misunderstanding of evolution. But there is a legitimate open question about how humans have evolved to be so different from other primates, and the above discussion shows that there is no good answer.


    Monday, Jun 04, 2007
     
    Use free wi-fi, goto jail
    Michigan prosecutors say that it is a felony to access a free coffeeshop wifi connection unless you get explicit permission from the coffeeshop.
    When you buy a Wi-Fi equipped device, it's your responsibility to find out what you can and can't legally do with that device, just as it would be if you were buying a radar detector or any other piece of electronics.
    Only DC and VA actually try to restrict the use of radar detectors.

    My guess is that the Michigan wifi user could have contested the charge, and been acquitted. The coffeeshop manager would not have had the guts to testify against his own potential customer.

     
    Defining the paradigm shift
    NY Times says:
    a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn, whose seminal 1962 book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution", neatly mapped the anti-establishment landscape of innovation. Kuhn's central insight, which fast became a cliché, was to identify "paradigm shifts" as the key to advances in science and technology. Scientific world views were belief systems first and proved empirically only later. Facts had meaning only in relation to a "world view". When world views were overthrown by rebels, new paradigms could be constructed, opening the way for new theories, new facts, new technologies.

    As the London-based writer Ziauddin Sardar has noted, in the popular mind, Kuhn reduced science to "nothing more than long periods of boring conformist activity punctuated by outbreaks of irrational deviance."

    I mention this because there is some confusion about the meaning of the term "paradigm shift". The term is commonly used to promote an irrational and deviant world view as a scientific breakthru, even tho it lacks empirical evidence. The term is very popular among philosophers, leftists, evolutionists, and crackpots.
     
    Racist attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas
    NY Times editorial writer Adam Cohen slams Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, suggesting that he is ignorant, ideologically driven, contemptuous of legal processes, regularly ruling against the weak, indifferent to suffering, marginal, far right, grew up angry and hurt, with friends like Rush Limbaugh, rules reflexively and on dubious grounds, against moving humane directions, and promoting other harsh jurisprudence.

    If I can find Cohen's email address, I intend to send him this:

    Your article quotes C. Thomas:
    Justice Thomas claims he is simply faithful to the "original intent" of the founders.
    What is your source for this quote? Where did Thomas ever say that he was simply faithful to the "original intent" of the founders, using the phrase "original intent"?
    The NY Times is free to publish Cohen's extreme opinions, of course, but it is really dishonestly misrepresenting and misquoting Clarence Thomas. Thomas often gives arguments based on the original text or the original meaning of the US Constitution, but not the original intent. Eg, in Rosenberger v Rector, Thomas says that the "right path" is to consult the "original meaning" of the Constitution.

    The remarkable thing about the attacks on Clarence Thomas is that they are from people who appear to have never even read any of his opinions. His attackers are unable to cite any specifics from Thomas; and when they do, they get it wrong.

    Cohen's background is that he worked as a lawyer for the virulently racist SPLC. He attacks Thomas in a way that he would only use to attack a black man.

    Update: I sent the email to Adam Cohen at editorial@nytimes.com, and got no response. It appears that Cohen and the NY Times are misquoting Thomas, and refusing to run a correction.

     
    Unscientific attacks on NASA boss
    Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, President of the [UK] Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)
    I was disturbed to read the comments by the Head of NASA, Michael Griffin, on global warming and climate change. While accepting that a trend of global warming exists, he questions whether this 'is a problem we must wrestle with'.

    This is counter to the strong advice of the world's climate scientists, expressed through the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have urged the world's leaders to act swiftly to limit the rise in warming to no more than 2 degrees Centigrade. It is also counter to the Stern Report, which demonstrated that limiting global warming is both do-able and affordable.

    Europe's space scientists, astronomers and Solar System scientists, will be dismayed by Michael Griffin’s position and it will undermine their confidence in his leadership of NASA, an organisation with which the UK has a strong shared purpose.

    I call on Michael Griffin to withdraw these comments.

    Note that he doesn't say that Griffin is wrong; only that he expresses a view that differs from the advice of others.

    It is unusual to see one scientist ask another to retract a statement. If the issue is scientific, one would normally just give a reference to the scientific paper that settles the matter. If the issue is political, then one would normally just express his own opinion. Catastrophic global warming theory is really an ideology masquerading as science.


    Saturday, Jun 02, 2007
     
    Apes may have been walking upright for 24M years
    AAAS Science magazine reports:
    To walk upright is to be human. At least that's what paleoanthropologists have thought for decades. But now, researchers have observed orangutans walking in a way that resembles human locomotion--albeit along the branches of trees. This suggests that the earliest stages of upright walking evolved in apes living in the trees rather than in hominids walking on the ground, according to primatologist Robin Crompton of the University of Liverpool, U.K., co-author of the report in tomorrow's issue of Science.
    Yes, the standard evolutionist party line for decades has been that the essence of being human is to walk upright. The famous 3M year old fossil Lucy is considered to a human ancestor solely because of some evidence that she may have walked upright. Otherwise she appears to have been just another chimp. Now these researchers claim that orangutans today are walking upright on tree branches in the Indonesian rain forest. Furthermore, according to Reuters, apes have always been walking upright:
    But observations of wild orangutans navigating tree branches on two legs led these researchers to propose that bipedalism arose much earlier -- perhaps shortly after apes split evolutionarily from monkeys roughly 24 million years ago, assuming a specialized niche of tree-dwelling fruit eaters.
    So apes have been walking upright ever since they evolved from monkeys 24M years ago, but we are supposed to believe that some 3M year old chimp-like fossil is a human ancestor just because it may have walked upright?

    I am not doubting conventional wisdom that humans evolved from apes, that human ancestors split from apes about 5M years ago, and that apes split from monkeys abot 24M years ago. What I am challenging here is the way evolutionists latch on to wacky missing link theories, and then try to use them to tell us what it means to be human. I have previously expressed doubt (for various reasons) on this blog that Lucy is a human ancestor.

    The Science magazine news article also says:

    The authors suggest that early human ancestors in Africa may have abandoned the high canopy when climate change thinned the forest--and retained this familiar, upright mode of walking when they moved down to the forest floor. Still, many changes were needed for habitual use of two legs. For example, their lower limbs and pelvises were remodeled to better balance the weight--and these changes still are found only in hominids that walked upright most of the time, not apes.
    What surprises me about this last sentence is that AAAS Science magazine is willing to make a distinction between hominids and apes. I have previously noted that many modern evolutionist deny that there is any difference.
     
    Examples of scientific illiteracy
    Steven Pinker writes:
    These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy -- inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil-lead; is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation's math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation's endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.
    He is right that the average educated person is really a scientific illiterate who could not pass a high school science exam. And they are proud of their ignorance.

    Friday, Jun 01, 2007
     
    Libby may be sentenced as if he had committed a real crime
    Byron York writes:
    During the perjury and obstruction trial of Lewis Libby, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged, and never presented evidence, that Libby illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA agent. But now, Fitzgerald wants Libby to be sentenced as if he had been guilty of that crime.
    I argued here that Libby's statements were easily defensible, but he didn't take my advice, and did not even testify to explain himself at his trial. I conclude that really bad legal advice led him to testify for 8 hours to the grand jury, but not for one minute at his trial.

    Now Libby should only be sentenced for his actual conviction. The only found him guilty of 4 counts of lying to the feds, and not of anything worse.


    Thursday, May 31, 2007
     
    TB Patient ID'd As Atlanta Lawyer
    Forbes reports:
    The honeymooner quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was identified Thursday as a 31-year-old Atlanta personal injury lawyer whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB.

    Bob Cooksey would not comment on whether he reported his son-in-law, 31-year-old Andrew Speaker, to federal health authorities. ...

    He was quarantined May 25, after his return from his honeymoon, in the first such action taken by the federal government since 1963. ...

    His wife, Sarah, is a third-law law student at Atlanta's Emory University.

    That figures. Only a personal injury lawyer with a law-student wife would think that he has a right to ignore official CDC advice and spread TB on airplanes.

    Tuesday, May 29, 2007
     
    Moths taste like shrimp
    Nicholas Wade writes:
    The gaudy swirls of color on a butterfly’s wing, the rococo curlicues on its riotously dressed caterpillars, may seem to be delightful examples of nature’s artistry. But that is to miss nature’s point. ...

    Many butterflies have gashes of iridescent color splashed across their wings. Why risk such a conspicuous display? The flashes of color accentuate the speed of flight. Their message to birds, Dr. Janzen suggests, is, "Don’t even try to catch me." ...

    Why do birds and monkeys go to such lengths to consume these insects, stimulating such a rich array of evolutionary strategies to evade capture? The answer is simple. Moths taste "like raw shrimp, if one should care to try," Dr. Janzen assures the reader.

    Accentuate the speed of flight? Taste like raw shrimp? Is there any actual experimental science to back this up?

    Thursday, May 24, 2007
     
    Microsoft claims patents on Linux
    Slashdot reports:
    Microsoft's Patent Attorney Jim Markwith told the Open Source Business Conference that the reason they hadn't named the [235] supposedly infringing patents was that it would be 'administratively impossible to keep up' with the list.'
    If Microsoft really wanted its legitimate monopoly patent rights to those 235 inventions, then it would reveal the patent claims and infringing features so users wanting to respect Msft IP could remove those features.

    The only way to interpret those Msft comments is to figure that Msft wants those infringing features to stay in Linux so that Msft can extract royalties from companies like Novell and deter others from making OS products that compete with Msft.

    For now, I'd say that Linux users have official permission to use the Msft patents. If Msft cannot even be bothered to list its 235 patents that allegedly cover Linux, then no one else can be expected to either.

     
    Quantum gravity is not a scientific problem
    String theorist Joseph Polchinski is continuing his lame defense of ST. He concentrates on minor nitpicks about Smolin's book, and fails to cite any substantial success of ST. An anonymous reader of that blog writes:
    "I'd like to step back and ask: what non-string alternative ideas are there that are being seriously considered to explain what the Standard Model doesn't explain (which, I assume, is primarily having gravity finally get along with everybody else)?"

    I have two comments in response to your question:

    -First: At any energy that we have direct experimental or observational information about [up to the energy scale of inflation], gravity gets along with everybody else just fine. In fact, at laboratory energies quantum gravity is the most precisely calculable piece of the standard model. This is because it can be treated by Wilson's methods of effective field theory; for a general review of the ideas of effective field theory see the first half of the review:

    - Effective field theory and the Fermi surface. Joseph Polchinski (Santa Barbara, KITP & Texas U.) . NSF-ITP-92-132, UTTG-20-92, Jun 1992. 40pp. Lectures presented at TASI 92, Boulder, CO, Jun 3-28, 1992. Published in Boulder TASI 92:0235-276 (QCD161:T45:1992) e-Print: hep-th/9210046

    For the explicit discussion of the effective field theory treatment of quantum gravity see the reviews:

    - Introduction to the effective field theory description of gravity. John F. Donoghue (Massachusetts U., Amherst) . UMHEP-424, Jun 1995. 26pp. Talk given at Advanced School on Effective Theories, Almunecar, Spain, 25 Jun - 1 Jul 1995. e-Print: gr-qc/9512024

    - Quantum gravity in everyday life: General relativity as an effective field theory. C.P. Burgess (McGill U.) . Nov 2003. 57pp. Published in Living Rev.Rel.7:5,2004. e-Print: gr-qc/0311082

    What string theory does is to provide a consistent quantum description of gravity at arbitrarily large energies [the Planck scale and beyond], where the effective field theory methods would no longer be applicable. It should be noted that there are also aspects of the particle physics of the standard model which break down at very large energy [Landau poles in scalar self- interactions, fermion mass Yukawas, and the U(1) gauge couplings], ...

    Second: Within the standard model of particle physics there is a lot that is not understood. We have no understanding of why the quarks and leptons get the precise masses that they do; we have no prediction for the mass of the Higgs particle; we have no prediction of the values of the gauge coupling constants; we have no idea why the vacuum energy is so ridiculously small [cosmological constant problem]; we have no idea why the electroweak scale is so much smaller than the Planck scale [hierarchy problem]; we have no idea why there is no observable CP violation in the strong interactions; we have no idea why neutrinos have the masses they do; we have no idea why the mixing matrices in weak decays are what they are, both in the lepton sector and in the quark sector; we have no idea what composes the cosmological dark matter; we have no idea how the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, which we see in the universe today, was generated after inflation;... There is a lot that we don't understand; ...
    This debunks the popular notion that we have solid theories for gravity and quantum fields, that they are incompatible, and that the big problem in physics today to reconcile them with a unified field theory.

    The above papers show that there is no incompatibility between quantum theory and gravity (relativity) at any energy level that we could observe in the foreseeable future. The need for quantum gravity is just a mathematical or philosophical problem, and not a scientific problem.

    Where I disagree with the above is where it says that ST provides a "consistent quantum description of gravity at arbitrarily large energies". ST has not been shown to be consistent, and it has not been shown to describe gravity at any energy levels. You'll note that there is no citation for this ST claim.


    Tuesday, May 22, 2007
     
    Hanson on global warming
    NASA scientist Jim Hansen attacks the Bush administration, but I didn't know that Kerry paid him to do it:
    A prominent scientist in the pay of the federal government attacks the President in a crucial state (Iowa) one week before the election. Not just any prominent scientist, either, but James Hansen, recipient of $250,000 in pocket change from the Heinz Foundation, run by Mrs. John Kerry. Don't worry, though, he said he was speaking as a private citizen because he paid his own way. With Mrs. Kerry's money, we might add, in his family nest egg.
    Hansen also attacks oil companies:
    Dr. James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, addressed the state of climate science and the disruptive role industry-backed skeptics have played in clouding the near-unanimous findings of global warming scientists.
    But Hansen himself is now clouding the near-unanimous findings of the IPCC:
    Rises in sea levels from global warming could be much greater than the recent forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a noted climate change scientist claims. Dr James Hansen, a senior NASA climatologist who last year claimed his research findings were being suppressed by the Bush Administration, says the most recent evidence on climatic impacts on sea levels shows they could rise five metres this century. ... The first volume of the IPCC's fourth assessment report released last month lowered its forecasts for sea level rises, stating a range of 28 to 58 cm. This is a reduction of the range issued in the 2001 report which predicted a rise of 9 to 88cm.
    I think that funding scientific research that may give contrary results is a good thing. The research can stand or fall on its own. But don't take Hansen too seriously.

    Saturday, May 19, 2007
     
    Evolutionists attack school board officer
    The NY Times reports:
    The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.

    The candidate is Kenneth R. Willard, a Kansas Republican who voted with the conservative majority in 2005 when the school board changed the state's science standards to allow inclusion of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism.

    What those 2005 Kansas standards actually said were:
    Regarding the scientific theory of biological evolution, the curriculum standards call for students to learn about the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory. ... We also emphasize that the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design, ...
    So how is Willard against the teaching of evolution? Where did he include intelligent design (ID)? The NY Times goes on:
    There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. Courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism and intelligent design are religious doctrines, not scientific theories.
    Willard voted for students learning about "scientific criticisms" of evolution. If ID is not scientific, then it would not qualify as a scientific criticism.

    The NY Times is trying to paint Willard as a kook for supporting some position that the scientific authorities say is not credible. But just what is that position?

    The statement that the theory of evolution explains the complexity and diversity of life on earth has no scientific content. That is just a fancy way of saying that change occurs in gene populations. It is obvious, and non-falsifiable. If the NY Times evolutionists want to portray Willard as someone who rejects this obvious statement, then it should provide some quote to substantiate it.

    The statement that evolution explains the "diversity of life" is not even a good description of the dispute between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists. If all life on Earth has a common ancestor, as in the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) hypothesis of evolution, then evolution explains the lack of diversity in life on Earth. Living beings being share a common genetic code and similar DNA because of that common ancestor. If there were not a common ancestor, then we would expect greater diversity.

    The whole NY Times article is just evolutionist propaganda. If someone has an anti-science position, then it should be possible to find where he has made some statement that is contrary to some scientific observation or experiment. I assume that they would do that about Willard if they could. Apparently they cannot, and just have some political or philosophical differences, not scientific differences.


    Friday, May 18, 2007
     
    Feds ban contingency fees
    David Kopel writes on a legal blog:
    Yesterday President Bush issued an Executive Order banning contingent fee arrangements for private attorneys who are hired to represent the government. The order is long overdue.
    Contingency fees can make sense for poor people who cannot afford or manage lawyers. The US govt can afford lawyers. I do not want private lawyers deciding to pocket taxpayers' money based on their own private deals. Good decision.

    A defender of contingency fees replies:

    How many think the huge settlements from big tobacco would have ever occurred without contingent fee lawyers?
    Now that convinces me. The tobacco settlements were completely corrupt, and primarily benefited crooked lawyers. The states could have chosen to tax the tobacco companies as much as they wanted, if they had wanted to. But it was wrong to use to courts to create a tobacco tax, and to enrich crooked lawyers with money that rightfully belongs to the taxpayers.

    Thursday, May 17, 2007
     
    Romney believes in God and evolution
    Evolutionist blogger PZ Myers is upset that Mitt Romney endorsed theistic evolution and opposed the teaching of intelligent design. He finds it confusing to have a right-winger express opinions that have been supported by leftist evolutionists. I get the impression that he thinks that all leftist evolutionists should stick to being hard-core atheists. He is worried that it will be hard to prove that Romney's views are unscientific if Romney doesn't actually contradict any scientific knowledge. Weird. Read it yourself.

    Tuesday, May 15, 2007
     
    The evils of school testing
    I just listened to David Berliner plugging on CSPAN2 his new book, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools. He gave a long diatribe against the evils of NCLB and standardized testing in the schools. He told anecdotes of people driven to suicide, and other outrageous scare stories.

    His type of argument proves too much, of course, and never addresses why most people want school testing. Finally a man asked the obvious:

    But who benefitting from that?

    Those who would like to privatize American education are certainly a culprit here. If you can embarrass the public schools and show that they are failing, you will get vouchers and charter schools in great proportion.

    Aha! He is essentially saying that the public schools have have deep structural problems, and he does not want them exposed or else they might be fixed.

    Friday, May 11, 2007
     
    Global warming is beneficial
    The big German magazine Spiegel says:
    Svante Arrhenius, the father of the greenhouse effect, would be called a heretic today. Far from issuing the sort of dire predictions about climate change which are common nowadays, the Swedish physicist dared to predict a paradise on earth for humans when he announced, in April 1896, that temperatures were rising -- and that it would be a blessing for all.

    Arrhenius, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, calculated that the release of carbon dioxide -- or carbonic acid as it was then known -- through burning coal, oil and natural gas would lead to a significant rise in temperatures worldwide. But, he argued, "by the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates," potentially making poor harvests and famine a thing of the past.

    Arrhenius was merely expressing a view that was firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness of the day: warm times are good times; cold times are bad.

    The article goes on to explain that current research indicates that global warming might make life on Earth better, not just for humans, but all species. The fear that it will cause super-storms appears to be unfounded.

    Frits writes from Holland:

    I don’t think you understand at all what you write about. How can you just pick a text from the internet and say it is true? I guess you are religious as you oppose the evolutionary theory. So if life was created, then are you going to allow man made global warming to eradicate one third of it? Because that is what real scientists expect will happen. In the US 43% of them are creationist. Please write about something you understand.
    His guesses are wrong. I follow hard science here.

    He sent me another message with a number of responses to the Spiegel article, such as "Moderate warming of 2 degrees is said to mean extinction of one third of the worlds spiecies. So what is moderate about it?"

    He is just reciting scare stories. There are no real scientists who say that two degree warming will wipe out so many species. It may even be beneficial to the vast majority of species. I suppose that there are a few people in Holland who will have to build their dykes a foot higher sometime in the next hundred years, but global warming should even be a net benefit to Holland.


    Thursday, May 10, 2007
     
    Research questions worth of vaccine
    The LA Times reports:
    New data on the controversial HPV vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer has raised serious questions about its efficacy, researchers are to report today, undercutting the efforts in many states, including California, to make vaccination mandatory.

    Although the Merck vaccine, called Gardasil, blocked nearly 100 percent of infections by the two HPV strains it targets, it reduced the incidence of cancer precursors by only 17 percent overall.

    Part of the reason was that many of the teenage girls and young women in the three-year study had already been exposed to the virus, according to the report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    But the data also hinted that blocking the targeted strains may have opened an ecological niche that allows the flourishing of HPV strains previously considered to be minor players, partially offsetting the vaccine's protection.

    In an editorial in the same issue of the journal, Dr. George F. Sawaya and Dr. Karen Smith-Carter of the University of California-San Francisco, called the benefits of the vaccine "modest" and said young women and their parents should take "a cautious approach" to vaccination because of the many unanswered questions about its efficacy.

    "The effect is fairly small," Sawaya said in a telephone interview.

    There was a huge PR campaign to make this vaccine mandatory, and all the official experts touted its efficacy. Apparently it is not so great. Texas is now repealing the governor's attempt to mandate the vaccine, and the governor is not going to veto it.

    The obvious lesson is to just let the market decide. Let people buy the vaccine if they want it, and avoid it if they don't.


    Tuesday, May 08, 2007
     
    Leftist arguments against medical progress
    Harvard prof Michael J. Sandel is plugging a new book called The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. It is an expansion of this Atlantic Monthly Magazine essay on what’s wrong with designer children, bionic athletes, and genetic engineering.

    The gist of his argument is that using modern medicine is unethical unless it is used to promote leftist egalitarian ideals. Eg, he objects to using cosmetic surgery to make rich people more beautiful, but thinks that cosmetic surgery for poor people is just fine.

    He is a good example of what is wrong with professional bioethicists. He attacks genetic engineering as the new eugenics:

    Thirty-five years ago Robert L. Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist at the California Institute of Technology, glimpsed the shape of things to come. In an article titled "The Prospect of Designed Genetic Change" he argued that freedom of choice would vindicate the new genetics, and set it apart from the discredited eugenics of old. ...

    Copernicus and Darwin had "demoted man from his bright glory at the focal point of the universe," but the new biology would restore his central role. In the mirror of our genetic knowledge we would see ourselves as more than a link in the chain of evolution: "We can be the agent of transition to a whole new pitch of evolution. This is a cosmic event." ...

    It is more plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate _expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.


    Monday, May 07, 2007
     
    Explaining String Theory
    Discover Magazine has 6 videos that each claim to explain String Theory in two minutes.

    One video says that ST makes no testable predictions, but that the Swiss CERN LHC may find evidence for it anyway. A couple of videos say that ST combines gravity with other forces. Several say how beautiful ST is, but none say what is supposed to be so beautiful. All sound like just BS. There is no real content in any of them.


    Sunday, May 06, 2007
     
    Faith in space aliens undeterred
    NY Times blogger John Tierney writes:
    Gliese 581c, the Goldilocks planet (not too hot, not too cold) [is] the best prospect yet for extraterrestrial life. ...

    I consulted Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. He told me the institute has twice aimed large antennas in the direction of Gliese 581 — first in 1995 with a telescope in Australia, and then two years later from West Virginia. Neither search turned up anything. But Dr. Shostak isn’t losing hope. "The extraterrestrials might have been off the air when we were listening", he says. "Maybe their transmitter power was insufficient for our receivers, or perhaps we were tuned to the wrong part of the dial. There are many ways not to find an alien broadcast."

    This isn't Science, this is a religious faith. The SETI folks want to believe that space aliens are talking to us, no amount of evidence will deter them. Even if space aliens were talking to us, they would be far more likely to be using laser pulses than radio signals.
     
    Making the case for gun rights
    The NY Times reports:
    A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary

    In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

    There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

    Weird. The article doesn't even mention the NRA. There was an anti-2A consensus among liberal law profs and lower federal courts. That consensus was upset the NRA relentlessly hammering the facts for 50 years. Once you look at the text of the 2A, the history of the 2A, the intent of the 2A, the long-understood meaning of the 2A, the history and law of the militia, the history and usefulness of guns in our society, the court decisions before about 1960, etc, the only tenable interpretation of the 2A is the individual rights one.

    Monday, Apr 30, 2007
     
    No Nobel Prize for Relativity
    Former TIME magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson (who helped make Albert Einstein Person of the Century) is out plugging his Einstein biography, and attempts to answer Why did it take so long for Einstein to get a Nobel Prize?

    He correctly explains that by the time Einstein got the prize, he was more famous than the prize, and the prize committee would have been embarrassed to not give him a prize. What he doesn't explain is that there was a lot of legitimate opposition to giving Einstein a prize for special relativity. Einstein's contributions were a lot less significant that those of H. Lorentz and H. Poincare. It was the deflection of starlight that actually made Einstein famous, but the measurements at the time were actually inconclusive.

    The Nobel committee also had a bias towards experimental science, as opposed to theory. That bias continues to this day.

    Isaacson admits that Poincare discovered special relativity before Einstein, but tries to explain it away by claiming that Poincare did not truly understand what he was doing, and that he did not totally renounce the aether. As evidence for the latter, he quotes Poincare as speculating on whether or not the aether was observable. But in fact Einstein uses the same sort of terminology as Poincare (calling the aether "superfluous"), and may have even copied it Poincare. Furthermore, it was Einstein who eventually repudiated his position and wrote some paper in about 1920 saying that the aether exists after all.

    The idea that Poincare didn't understand what he was doing is just nutty. Poincare was a brilliant mathematician, and worked on a much higher mathematical level than Einstein.

    There seems to be no end to public fascination for Einstein, but Isaacson is going around attributing a lot of ideas to Einstein that were actually published before Einstein. When Isaacson gives an explanation of Relativity, almost every single word of it is not due to Einstein at all, but due to others. Einstein just gave a popular exposition of the ideas of others.


    Sunday, Apr 29, 2007
     
    Quantum cryptography is hacked
    Nature reports
    A team of researchers has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption.

    Quantum cryptography uses the laws of quantum mechanics to encode data securely. Most researchers consider such quantum networks to be nearly 100% uncrackable.

    Usually they claim that it is provably 100% uncrackable according to the laws of physics. I have doubted the security here.

    Thursday, Apr 26, 2007
     
    Physicists hoping for failure
    Science mag says:
    Many particle physicists say their greatest fear is that their grand new machine—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland— will spot the Higgs boson and nothing else. If so, particle physics could grind to halt, they say. [SCIENCE VOL 315 23 MARCH 2007]
    This shows how particle physicists are obsessed with unrealistic goals. The Higgs boson is unlike any particle ever seen before, and will be a spectacular confirmation of theory when (and if) it is found.

    Particle physics will grind to a halt because theorists who proposed fanciful models might have to admit their lack of success. This must be the only field of science that has an extremely successful theory that correctly predicts experiments, but all the insiders hope that new experiments will prove that it doesn't work.

    A physicist today who expresses the belief or wish that the Standard Model is wrong is about like a chemist a century ago saying that the Periodic Table is wrong. It is nutty.


    Monday, Apr 23, 2007
     
    Fen-phen scandal
    Remember fen-phen? The drug company paid $200M in a class action settlement, and the lawyers could take $67M legally. But that wasn't enough, and they took about twice as much. Even the judge was in on the take. More here. They ought to be all in jail.
     
    New Clarence Thomas biography
    Yale law prof Kenji Yoshino writes in the Wash Post:
    Justice Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court's most reclusive member, which is saying something.
    He goes on to even goofier theorizing about Thomas. David Stras responds:
    I am obviously quite biased, having clerked for Justice Thomas several Terms ago. But Prof. Yoshino, with all due respect, lost me in the first sentence of his Washington Post review when he said that Thomas is the most reclusive Justice. I know that Thomas has not visited Yale, but he does visit law schools more frequently than virtually any other Justice, and makes frequent public appearances, including one as the grand marshal of the Daytona 500 several years back. In stating that Justice Thomas is the most reclusive Justice, especially as compared to Justice Souter who never makes public appearances, Prof. Yoshino is just plain wrong.
    Thomas is widely hated among law profs who don't appear to have bothered to read his opinions or find out the first things about him.

    Tuesday, Apr 17, 2007
     
    Arguing that a good defense attorney matters
    Law prof Randy E. Barnett writes in the WSJ:
    The crucial importance of defense lawyers was illustrated in reverse by the Duke rape prosecution, mercifully ended last week by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper's highly unusual affirmation of the defendants' complete innocence. ... The next time you hear a lawyer joke, maybe you'll think of the lawyers who represented these three boys and it won't seem so funny. ... Without their lawyering skills, we would not today be speaking so confidently of their clients' innocence. These lawyers held the prosecutor's feet to the fire.
    I don't buy it. I am not sure the defense lawyers ever gained anything by making legal arguments in court. They failed to stop the indictment, and they failed to get the case dismissed.

    The Duke boys would have surely been acquitted with just about any lawyers. It didn't take clever lawyering to expose Nifong; he had exposed himself in his foolish public statements and there was plenty of public criticism of him. Perhaps the defense lawyers helped instigate the NC state Bar investigation of Nifong. If so, then they should get credit for doing that.

    It is striking how badly big-shot million-dollar-fee defense lawyers have done in famous cases. Eg, the lawyers for Bill Clinton and Scooter Libby did terrible jobs. Clinton would have been better off if he had just defaulted on the case. Libby would have been better off if he had dropped the legalities and just told his own story directly.


    Wednesday, Apr 11, 2007
     
    Duke lacrosse players exonerated
    I am glad to see the Duke lacrosse players exonerated, but what took so long? It was almost one year ago that I said on this blog that they were innocent, and posted the name of the accuser.

    The boys were saved by modern technology -- DNA tests, time-stamping digital cameras, cell-phones, ATM machines, and video surveillance cameras. And the resolve of some innocent boys, and a few others who were willing to tell their story.

    George writes:

    You didn't mention the fact that two of the boys had millionaire fathers, and they could afford high-priced lawyers.
    I am just not sure those lawyers made much difference. They lost all of their court motions, as far as I know. They will probably claim to have generated million-dollar bills, but that is just funny money to justify a wrongful prosecution lawsuit against the state of North Carolina.

    NC attorney general Roy Cooper is getting a lot of credit for dropping the case, but remember that he sat on the case for a year and did nothing. For the last three months, he alone was responsible for continuing the charges when even the major newspapers said that no conviction was possible. He deserves to be a defendant in that civil suit against the state.

    Yesterday, the Wash. Post managed to write a whole article on the charges being dropped without using the word "innocent". Amazing. I thought that was the main story in Cooper's press conference.

    Update: I just listened to Saturday morning's NPR news broadcast, and it had a segment explaining that it was still refusing to name the Duke accuser, even tho some major newspapers are publishing her name (Crystal Gail Mangum). NPR said that it has a policy of not naming victims of sexual assault. It acknowledged that there is now a consensus that she was not a victim, but suggested that naming her might deter other women from coming forward with false charges in the future. Amazing.

     
    The Mooney war on Science
    Matthew C. Nisbet1 and Chris Mooney wrote an editorial in the leftist AAAS Science magazine urging scientists to use propaganda tactics to promote political ideas:
    Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, ... scientists must learn to actively "frame" information to make it relevant to different audiences. ...

    Frames organize central ideas, defining a controversy to resonate with core values and assumptions. Frames pare down complex issues by giving some aspects greater emphasis. They allow citizens to rapidly identify why an issue matters, who might be responsible, and what should be done. ...

    Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring to safely stick to the facts. Yet scientists must realize that facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.

    (Science magazine restricts access to members only; you can find a link to the full text here.)

    Their point is not to better convey scientific facts or knowledge, but to persuade the public to certain political conclusions.

    Their main point is that education is not sufficient to bring the public around to their leftist political views. They say:

    Consider global climate change. With its successive assessment reports summarizing the scientific literature, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has steadily increased its confidence that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. So if science alone drove public responses, we would expect increasing public confidence in the validity of the science, and decreasing political gridlock.

    Despite recent media attention, however, many surveys show major partisan differences on the issue. A Pew survey conducted in January found that 23% of college-educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats. Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans rank global warming as less important than over a dozen other issues.

    The curious result is that the Democrat-Republican difference is greater for college graduates than for others. This implies that education alone is not sufficient to cause Republicans to panic over global warming. Hence the suggestion for non-factual persuasion tactics.

    What the UN IPCC really said was that there is 90% likelihood that more than 50% of the observed Earth warming since 1950 was caused by increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, and that the sea level could be expected to rise about a foot over the next century.

    So the Democrat-Republican differences are not really as great as they appear. Scientists don't really know exactly how much of the recent warming is caused by CO2 and related gases.

    In a sense, Nisbet1 and Mooney are correct that educating the public about scientific estimates that sea level may go up a foot in the next 100 years is not going to convince that global warming is any more importtant that more immediate political issues like terrorism, education, economy, immigration, Social Security, health care, military strength, crime, morality, Medicare, tax cuts, poverty, energy, health insurance, budget deficit, environment, jobs, and trade.

    In the mean time, you can expect to get Leftist propaganda from Science magazine, because the folks there think that college-educated non-scientists are too stupid to draw the correct policy conclusions from scientific facts.


    Tuesday, Apr 10, 2007
     
    Failure to find gravity waves
    Physics news:
    The fourth science run of the LIGO and GEO 600 gravitational-wave detectors, carried out in early 2005, collected data with significantly lower noise than previous science runs. ... No gravitational-wave signals are detected in 15.5 days of live observation time ...
    The paper has a couple of hundred coauthors. IOW, they spent billions of dollars and found nothing. I am guessing that if they actually found a gravity wave, then somebody would be trying to hog the credit.

    Monday, Apr 09, 2007
     
    Democrats favoring the Iraq War
    Here are Democrat quotes on the Iraq War, as confirmed here and here.
    "We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them." Sen. Carl Levin (d, MI), Sept. 19, 2002.

    "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.

    "It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

    "We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003.

    Clinton and Kerry voted for the Iraq War, and Levin against. Gore was out of govt at the time, and claims that he was always against the war.

    It is easy to be a critic, and make general statements that the war could have been handled better. But none of the Democrats has a coherent story as to how he (or she) would have done a better job.


    Sunday, Apr 08, 2007
     
    Defining the term evolutionist
    Occasionally someone questions my usage of the word evolutionist, even tho it has been in dictionaries and common usage for a century without controversy. It simply means an evolutionary biologist, or someone who believes in the theory of evolution. (See also this definition of evolution.)

    Many evolutionists are happy to call themselves evolutionists, but a few don't like the term because they say it implies a belief in evolutionism, and they dislike that term even more. Evolutionism has also been in common usage for a century without controversy. The problem is that the suffix "-ism" connotes a philosophical belief, like Marxism or pacifism, and it suggests that evolutionism is more than just a narrow scientific theory about how allele frequencies change from one generation to the next.

    Most evolutionists do indeed embrace an evolution worldview that extends far beyond what is scientifically verifiable. For example, leading evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould spent much of their time promoting philosophical views which they claimed to be tightly coupled to the theory of evolution. When the term "evolutionist" is used for these folks, there can be no confusion because the it is accurate in each sense of the word.


    Thursday, Mar 29, 2007
     
    Definition of Theory
    I posted this definition of Theory on Conservapedia.

    For some reason, the anti-evolutionist make a big deal out of saying that evolution is a theory, not a fact. The evolutionist, in turn, make a big deal out of saying that a scientific theory is the highest and most perfect from of knowledge that we have. Both sides are a little nutty. Scientific use of the term "theory" is just the same as the common usage, except during evolutionism proselytization.

    Joe writes:

    I am finishing Smolin's book. Some of it is over my head, but he makes a convincing case. Did you read it? He gets really flaky in the last chapter on women in physics and affirmative action. He says that basically he has never seen an affirmative action candidate for some hotshot physics position who wasn't arguably the best candidate. I don't think that many big law firms would share that opinion.
    Yeah, Smolin gets a little kooky at the end. I was surprised at how he was influenced by Paul Feyerabend. There's a guy who really has some nutty ideas about how science really works.

    Smolin cites this MIT report as evidence of blatant prejudice. I just skimmed it quickly, but it appears to me that the report failed to find any significant bias against women. The women said that gender bias is not hindering their careers, and their biggest complaint was that the department could be doing more to make them feel more included.

    The argument for affirmative action would be that cronyism and subjective measures work against women. If that were true, then I would expect that women would have a much harder time in the soft sciences than in the hard sciences. In fact, it is just the opposite.

    I did like the way Smolin exposes the failure of String Theory as a viable theory of quantum gravity. The string theorists act as if they have already solved gravity and they are moving on to particle physics. Ed Witten is fond of saying, "‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity." In fact, they've added nothing to our understanding of gravity, and ST is not able to reproduce relativity theory.

    Physicist Laurence Krauss says, in a current interview:

    The debate is twofold. A: Does string theory have anything to do with the real world. And B: Is it, as I like to put it, ready for prime time? Is it worth all the hype and has it made any progress? I think the answer is no. It's been incredibly unsuccessful. It's a theory in crisis — it hasn't really achieved any of its major goals as espoused 20 years ago. I'm not saying a physicist shouldn't be looking at this stuff. I just think it's not worthy of a lot of attention. Now, there are no really good alternatives, but I can guarantee when there is, everyone is going to drop string theory like a hot potato and go onto something else.
    Here is a recent debate over string theory:
    Brian Greene (left) and Lawrence Krauss (right), participated in a String Theory Debate last night at the Natural History Museum (Smithsonian Associates Program), with Michael Turner acting as moderator.
    See also this Science magazine summary.

    Krauss got the better of the argument, but I thought that he was too easy on Greene. Greene argued that ST had succeessfully combined gravity with quantum theory in a consistent manner, and wasn't even challenged on the point. Greene is not telling the truth. ST does not include gravity, and does not give a consistent way to give a quantum calculation of anything.

    Greene gushed with enthusiasm for ST, saying things like this:

    When this points to it, and this points to it, and this points to it, all the spokes on the bicycle wheel point to one direction, you begin to have confidence that you are going in the right direction.
    This is so nutty that I cannot even figure out what he meant. The spokes in a bicycle do not point in the direction that the bicycles is going. I guess you could say that the spokes on a wheel all point to the axis at the center, but that tells you nothing about whether the bicycle is going in the right direction.

    Actually, now that I think about it, maybe this is a good quote for characterizing the thinking behind ST. Some physicists think that they are going in the right direction because they found a few mathematical consistencies, but those consistencies say nothing about any real-world physical problems.


    Monday, Mar 26, 2007
     
    The failure of String Theory
    Clifford V. Johnson, writes, on the Physics blog Asymtotia:
    Peter, Please just answer the physics questions asked of you, and stop referring us to your book. ... I asked you whether or not you are now claiming that your declaration (with no proof) that string theory has failed or is wrong (or any of the many ways you are publicly on record for saying this) is still your central claim. ...

    All I’m asking for is a good physicist’s proof, not a mathematician’s proof. ...

    You are making a very strong claim. Claims such as these are not scientifically backed up by writings in popular books. That is why many are not bothering to read your book.

    Clifford refuses to read the book, but he'd get part of the answer by just reading the title, Not Even Wrong. It is not that String Theory makes demonstrably wrong predictions, but that it fails to make any testable predictions at all. String theory has yet to yield a particular definitive test, or to produce any models that resemble any known particles or forces.

    Physicists use relativity to explain gravity, and U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) gauge theory (aka the Standard Model) to explain the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces. These theories are extremely successful, altho there are some unexplained anomalies like dark energy. String Theory exists as part of a misguided philosophical program to unify these theories and more tightly couple the forces.

    String Theory is said to be consistent with relativity because relativity predicts that empty space will be Ricci-flat, and that ST also uses Ricci-flat spaces. Also, hypothetical quantizations of relativity always predict a spin-2 graviton (that has never been observed), and ST also predicts a spin-2 particle.

    ST is hoped to be a viable quantum field theory because some of the infinities that would ruin the theory are known to cancel. Existing gauge theories are able to make very accurate predictions by computational procedures that cancel all the infinities. Nobody knows how to calculate anything measurable in ST. The known particles are quarks, leptons, and bosons, but no one has figured out how any of these would have a place in ST.

    Where ST has made predictions, they are contrary to observation. ST predicts at least six extra dimensions, stringy electrons, dozens of superparticles, and a gigantic vaccuum energy. There is some possibility that superparticles will be observed, as some theorists predicted these long before ST and there are independent reasons for thinking that they may exist. The other predictions are hopeless.

    Asymptotia wants proof that ST has failed. Failure is an understatement. Most of our smartest theoretical physicists have worked on ST for the last 30 years. While it has produced some impressive Mathematics, it has produced nothing of significance to Physics. There is not one formula, particle, principle, force, computation, or other result that the ST proponents can claim to have some tangible connection to actual physics.

    The ST proponents argue that despite the shortcomings, ST remains the "only game in town" and is the best hope for replacing current (extremely successful) theories with a more tightly-coupled theory. They are delusional. They are following some peculiar mystical vision of how they think that the universe ought to be, instead of following physics.

    Harvard string theorist Motl attacks critics by reciting silly myths about Galileo and Einstein, and calling the string theory skeptics stupid and other names. Today his blog has this gem:

    Chicken Little Society has been around for centuries ... a certain kind of human stupidity simply can't be eradicated: Columbus was criticized for his plans to try the Western route to India because this reasoning based on the round shape of Earth was pure theory but it would surely be a waste of sailors in practice
    Those who criticized Columbus were actually quite correct. They correctly calculated that Columbus would never make it to India.

    Friday, Mar 23, 2007
     
    Bush on who is winning in Iraq
    Someone sent this proof that Pres. Bush is a liar, from the Wash. Post in December:
    As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. "We're not winning, we're not losing," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, "Absolutely, we're winning."
    But here is the context for the original quote:
    Q Are we winning?

    THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely, we're winning. Al Qaeda is on the run. As a matter of fact, the mastermind, or the people who they think is the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks is in our custody. We've now got a procedure for this person to go on trial, to be held for his account. Most of al Qaeda that planned the attacks on September the 11th have been brought to justice.

    Extremists have now played their hand; the world can clearly see their ambitions. You know, when a Palestinian state began to show progress, extremists attacked Israel to stop the advance of a Palestinian state. They can't stand democracies. Extremists and radicals want to undermine fragile democracy because it's a defeat for their way of life, their ideology.

    People now understand the stakes. We're winning, and we will win, unless we leave before the job is done. And the crucial battle right now is Iraq. And as I said in my statement, I understand how tough it is, really tough. It's tough for a reason; because people understand the stakes of success in Iraq. And my point to the American people is, is that we're constantly adjusting our tactics to achieve victory.

    It is clear that Bush was saying that we are winning the global war on terrorists. The Iraq War is just a battle in that war, he says. The people have the full story on what is happening in Iraq. I don't see any lies.

    Update: When Bush said, "We're not winning, we're not losing", he was just quoting General Pace. It wasn't Bush's phrase.


    Saturday, Mar 17, 2007
     
    Geocentric theory
    Conservapedia defines:
    The geocentric theory is a system for describing the universe with Earth-centered coordinates. It was extremely popular from ancient times until about 1600, as it had better agreement with observation than any alternative. Ptolemy's model was particularly effective at cosmological predictions.

    By the 1800s, the spectacular successes of Newtonian theory and Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism had convinced everyone that the Sun is a preferred frame of reference, and that the laws of physics must be applied in that frame. The geocentric theory was considered to be profoundly mistaken, and the heliocentric theory correct.

    Since the advent of relativity theory in the early 1900s, the laws of physics have been written in covariant equations, meaning that they are equally valid in any frame. Heliocentric and geocentric theories are both used today, depending on which allows more convenient calculations.

    A lot of people like to make fun of the geocentric theory, or to use it as an example of ignorant and erroneous thinking, like the Flat Earth Theory. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that they are relying on physics that is 100 years out of date.

    Tuesday, Mar 13, 2007
     
    A Call to Cool the Hype
    The NY Times reports some inconvenient truths:
    Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth", which won an Academy Award for best documentary. ... ...

    But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism. ...

    Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

    It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent. ...

    So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

    If present trends continue, the best estimate is that Earth's sea level will rise about a foot over the next 100 years. A drastic cut in CO2 emissions might cut the increase to 10 inches. This might be accomplished by either a shift to nuclear power or a reduction in our standard of living. Nothing else would have much effect. A shift to nuclear power would have other environmental benefits as well.

    There are also cosmological and other factors beyond human control. These will probably start a global Ice Age in the next 5k years or so. It is possible that the CO2 global warming is just what we needed to stave off the coming Ice Age. It might also be true that we'll be better off with a higher sea level.


    Wednesday, Mar 07, 2007
     
    Bush will not pardon Libby
    Not now, anyway. I am baffled by those who are pushing for Pres. Bush to pardon Scooter Libby. I have defended Libby here on this blog, but a pardon is not appropriate.

    Prosecuting Libby is exactly what Bush wanted. If Bush did not agree with the prosecution, he could have stopped it with a single phone call. The obvious inference is that Bush wanted to make Libby a scapegoat for the Plame controversy. The conviction insures that the legal process will continue, and White House officials have their usual excuse for not commenting until everyone has forgotten about it.

    If Libby had told his story, and explained how he was telling the truth, or was mistaken, or was forgetful, or was overlooking a trivial detail, or whatever, then I might feel differently. But he chose to keep his mouth shut, and he will have to live with the consequences.

    It is a little strange to hear Libby jurors say that the wrong man was being prosecuted, or that Libby should not goto jail. So why did they convict him?


    Tuesday, Mar 06, 2007
     
    Scooter Libby convicted
    Okay, I was wrong. I thought that Libby would be acquitted. We may soon know more, as the jurors talk.

    My first reaction is that the defense was weak. It mainly argued that Libby could have been mistaken, or he could have been a scapegoat. Libby needed to take the stand, and give his story. He could have stuck by his contradiction of Russert, or explain how he was misinterpreted, or explain how he was mistaken, or explain how he was trying to comply with the feds, or something. But he had to have some story.

    My guess is that lawyer Ted Wells talked Libby out of testifying because it is too risky. The risk was that Wells would lose control of the case if Libby's cross-examination strayed into unexpected territory. Defense lawyers hate to put the defendant on the stand. But the real risk is going to prison, and Libby should have known better.


    Thursday, Mar 01, 2007
     
    Hansen opposes IPCC report
    John Horgan joins the leftists who argue that the Bush administration has been anti-science, and says:
    Some of the Bush administration's actions have been almost comically incompetent. Last January, for example, George Deutsch, a public-affairs officer at NASA, tried to prevent the space agency's James Hansen from speaking to the press about the dangers of global warming. Andrew Revkin of The New York Times quickly exposed the attempt to censor Hansen, ...
    But here is what Revkin wrote:
    The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

    The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

    Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

    Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

    He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

    Note that there was no attempt to discourage him from speaking on science; only a feeble attempt to limit policy statements.

    What Hansen says now is that the IPCC is understating the expected sea level rise from global warming. Maybe he's right and the rest of the world is wrong, but he doesn't speak for Bush administration policy.

    Meanwhile, Al Gore complains that mass media bias is keeping a lid on the global warming story:

    He noted that recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth unanimous report calling on world leaders to take action on global warming.

    "I believe that is one of the principal reasons why political leaders around the world have not yet taken action," Gore said. "There are many reasons, but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias." ...

    Gore would not answer any questions from the media after the event.

    Gore sure seems to be getting plenty of publicity for his cause. And he is getting it without having to answer tough questions.
     
    Cartoon compares Science and Faith
    This cartoon has flowcharts comparing Science to Faith. For Faith, it is just Get an idea, Ignore contradicting evidence, and Keep idea forever.

    Based on this, I am classifying String Theory (ST) under Faith. Among the ignored evidence is:

    • Spacetime is 4-dimensional. ST predicts 10 dimensions, but only 4 are observed.
    • No supersymmetric particles. ST says that every existing particle has a supersymmetric (SUSY) partner. None has ever been observed.
    • Dark energy. There is an ST calculation for the cosmological constant, but it is wrong by 60 orders of magnitude (1060).
    • Gravity with masses present. ST is only designed to handle the gravitational aspects of empty space.
    • Known particles do not match anything out of ST. ST cannot say anything about electrons, photons, or any other familiar particles or fields.
    • ST is not renormalizable. The successful quantum field theories are renormalizable, but no one knows how to remove the infinities from ST.
    I am all in favor of distinguishing Science and Faith. Let's start by identifying scientists pushing unscientific ideas.

    Here is a typical claim from ST guru Ed Witten:

    String theory avoids the ultraviolet infinities that arise in trying to quantize gravity. It is also more predictive than conventional quantum field theory, one aspect of this being the way that it contributed to the emergence of the concept of ``supersymmetry'' of particle interactions. There are hints from the successes of supersymmetric unified theories of particle interactions that supersymmetry is relevant to elementary particles at energies close to current accelerator energies; if this is so, it will be confirmed experimentally and supersymmetry is then also likely to be important in cosmology, in connection with dark matter, baryogenesis, and/or inflation. Magnetic monopoles play an important role in the structure of string theory, and thus should certainly exist, if string theory is correct, though they may have been diluted by inflation to an unobservable level.
    No, ST does not avoid the infinities, and it is not predictive. Conventional quantum field theory successfully explains all of the atom smasher experiments, and ST explains none of them.

    Brian Greene says:

    Although it is by no means obvious, this simple replacement of point-particle material constituents with strings resolves the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity (which, as currently formulated, cannot both be right). String theory thereby unravels the central Gordian knot of contemporary theoretical physics. This is a tremendous achievement, but it is only part of the reason string theory has generated such excitement.
    This is more nonsense. ST does not resolve any incompatibility. It has not achieved any physics at all. ST advocates like to say that it must be true because it is beautiful and consistent, but these aren't true either.

    Wednesday, Feb 28, 2007
     
    Why liberals hate the 10C
    Michael Medved writes:
    The left’s fiery obsession with removing Ten Commandments monuments from public property throughout the United States may seem odd and irrational but actually reflects the deepest values of contemporary liberalism.

    A bedouin sells blankets on the summit of Mount Moses in the Sinai Peninsula at sunrise, October 3, 2006. According to the Old Testament this is where Moses received the ten commandments from God. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic (EGYPT) In the last five years alone, the tireless fanatics at the ACLU have invested tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of legal time in lawsuits to yank the Commandments from long-standing displays in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Montana, Georgia, Iowa, Washington State, Nebraska, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. In one of the most recent battles, they delayed their litigation in Dixie County, Florida, because they couldn’t find a single local resident to lend a name as plaintiff in a drive to dislocate the tablets from the local court house.

    There is a simple explanation that Medved overlooks. These lawsuits are actually big moneymakers for the ACLU. There is an obscure federal law, 42 USC 1988(b), that lets the ACLU collect 100s of 1000s of dollars in attorney fees every time it wins a lawsuit to remove the Ten Commandments from some public place. It costs the ACLU practically nothing to litigate these cases, because it has already written all the legal briefs many times, and the payoffs are huge.

    Congress should amend this law, and stop this ACLU subsidy. Lawsuits should be based on an actual injured party, and be limited to the injury. And that is none, in the case of the 10C.


    Tuesday, Feb 27, 2007
     
    Using the word Evolution for Antibiotic Resistance
    Evolutionists are on a campaign to use the word "evolution" to describe antibiotic resistance. The idea is that people understand the practical significance of the fact that some drugs are more effective for some bacterial infections than others, so they will become more respectful of evolution if they think that the theory of evolution is curing infections.

    If you are wondering what antibiotic resistance has to do with evolution, it is because evolution has been redefined:

    In biology, evolution is the change in a population's inherited characteristics, or traits, from generation to generation.
    So if a drug is effective at killing a part of bacteria population, while letting the rest reproduce, then it exemplifies evolution in this definition.

    Now a PLoS Biology paper has collected data on whether the research literature has adopted this silly terminology. As expected, it found that the evolutionary biology are fond of using the word "evolution", and biomedical papers tend to use less doctrinaire terms.

    The results of our survey showed a huge disparity in word use between the evolutionary biology and biomedical research literature (Figure 1). In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word “evolution” was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes (range 10%–94%, mode 50%–60%, from a total of 632 phrases referring to evolution). However, in research reports in the biomedical literature, the word “evolution” was used only 2.7% of the time (range 0%–75%, mode 0%–10%, from a total of 292 phrases referring to evolution), a highly significant difference (chi-square, p < 0.001). Indeed, whereas all the articles in the evolutionary genetics journals used the word “evolution,” ten out of 15 of the articles in the biomedical literature failed to do so completely.
    That is because the theory of evolution is irrelevant to most biomedical research. So why does this matter? Because, the authors argue, the evolutionists are missing out on a propaganda opportunity:
    we examined whether the use of the term “evolution” in the scientific literature affects the use of this word in the popular press, i.e., whether there is evidence for “cultural inheritance” of word use. We searched articles on antimicrobial resistance in national media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and the BBC (Text S1). Our results showed that the proportion of times the word “evolution” was used in a popular article was highly correlated with how often it was used in the original scientific paper to which the popular article referred (Figure 2). This clearly shows that the public is more likely to be exposed to the idea of evolution and its real-world consequences if the word “evolution” is also being used in the technical literature. ...

    This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate.

    The authors collected data to show that there is no downside in participating in this propaganda campaign, because just mentioning the word "evolution" in a grant proposal seems to make funding more likely:
    We wondered whether these patterns were changing, so we carried out a survey of the use of the word “evolution” from 1991 to 2005 in the titles and abstracts of papers published in 14 scientific journals, as well as in the titles of proposals funded by both the US National Science Foundation (Division of Environmental Biology) and the US National Institutes of Health (National Institute of General Medical Sciences). The results showed that the use of the word “evolution” was actually increasing in all fields of biology, with the greatest relative increases in the areas of general science and medicine (Figure 3).
    This is ridiculous. People will not think that they evolved from apes just because they read about a penicillin-resistant infection.

    George writes:

    You missed the point of the PLoS article. Yes, it urges more use of the word "evolution", but only to counter anti-evolution biases of the Bush administration. It says that one grant proposal was retitled from "the evolution of sex" to "the advantage of bi-parental genomic recombination" just to avoid controversy. Scientists should not be censored.
    The article doesn't say who suggested that title change; it may have just been a colleague who thought that the latter title was more descriptive. The former title suggests a study in the origin or change in sex, but the research probably didn't cover that at all.

    Monday, Feb 26, 2007
     
    The origin of Relativity
    I am going to make a list of great ideas that are falsely attributed to Albert Einstein.

    The principle of relativity. Lorentz and Poincare explicitly published the principle that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames, and they even called it the "principle of relativity" long before Einstein.

    Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations. Larmor discovered that Maxwell's equations were invariant certain transformations in 1897, and Lorentz and Poincare published relativity theories based on these Lorentz transformations.

    The speed of light is constant for all observers. This was the consensus view among physicists after the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment. Poincare published this in 1902.

    Time is the fourth dimension. Minkowski explicitly unified space and time into a four-dimensional spacetime in 1908, and Einstein didn't really agree with it at first. Einstein's 1905 papers did not use four-dimensional vectors, and did not unify space and time any more that Poincare did previously. Poincare was apparently the first to use four-dimensional vectors in 1906.

    The non-invariance of simultaneity. Lorentz and Poincare published detailed examples showing that what is simultaneous for one inertial observer may not be for another, and hence there is no absolute time. Einstein's 1905 discussion came later.

    The nonexistence of the aether. Einstein said that the aether was "superfluous" in 1905. Poincare said the same thing years earlier, and doubted whether it could be detected.

    The equation E=mc2. Einstein derived this formula in a 1905 paper. His main point was that a body that radiates an energy E should also lose a mass equal to E/c2. Poincare published almost the exact same argument in 1900, 1902, and 1904. It wasn't until years later that Planck and others suggested that part of the mass of an atomic nucleus could be converted to energy, and it wasn't until the discovery of antimatter did anyone suggest that a particle mass could be converted entirely to matter.

    The atomic bomb. Szilard invented the atomic bomb. Einstein didn't really believe it was possible, until Szilard convinced him.

    The idea of using tensors to describe relativistic gravity. This was apparently due to Grossman in about 1908.

    Covariant field equations for gravity. Einstein published some papers saying that it was impossible to find covariant field equations for general relativity, until Hilbert showed him how in private communication. Hilbert published the field equations on the about the same date as Einstein.

    Black holes, expansion of universe, big bang These ideas were due to others, and Einstein didn't even believe them at first.

    For a detailed discussion of Poincare's contributions to Relativity that predate Einstein's, see Henri Poincare and Relativity Theory, by A. A. Logunov. Here are other papers on the history of special relativity. Wikipedia summarizes the Relativity priority dispute. Einstein has been called Plagiarist of the Century.

    I have blogged on this on Nov. 30 and Dec. 3.

    There doesn't seem to be any serious dispute about any of this, as the papers are published and in libraries, and everyone who has looked at the matter has come to the conclusion that all of the essential concepts of relativity were published before Einstein.

    Some people refuse to believe that Einstein was a plagiarist, and take him at his word when he claimed that he never saw Poincare's works. But Einstein's famous 1905 paper on special relativity used Poincare's terminology for a "Lorentz transformation" and did not include any references. Einstein got it from somewhere.

    Other people assume that because Einstein was such a genius, he surely understood relativity better or deeper than anyone else. That is probably true about Larmor, FitzGerald, and Bartocci who published some early relativity work. But Lorentz, Poincare, Minkowski, and Hilbert were truly geniuses and deep thinkers.

    This still doesn't explain why people idolize Einstein so much. Here's what I came up with:

    • Simple hero worship. History is simpler when it focuses on a few heroes who get all the credit. Stephen Hawking gets far more credit than he deserves, just because he has an appealing personal story, other physicists are happy to build him up, and the public doesn't understand his work anyway.
    • Eddington made Einstein world-famous in 1919 by declaring that an eclipse observation proved Einstein's relativity theory correct. In fact, Eddington's data was doctored and his results didn't really prove anything.
    • Poincare, Minkowski, and Hilbert are primarily known as mathematicians, and physicists don't like to give credit to mathematicians. Similarly, the mathematicians Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann are largely responsible for our understanding of quantum mechanics, but they don't get much credit from physicists.
    • Some of Einstein's popularity might be attributable to some sort of wacky Jewish conspiracy. Most of Einstein's big promoters, like Eddington, were not Jewish, so I doubt that this is a big factor. Maybe there is something wrong with the French and Dutch physicists for not promoting their countrymen.
    Quoting Einstein is a sure sign of kookiness. Whether Einstein believed in the big bang, quantum mechanics, gravity waves, or anything else should carry no more weight than the views of dozens of his contemporaries. Those who continue to idolize Einstein are perpetuating a big hoax.

    This 2006 American Scientist article makes a strong case that Poincare published the special theory of relativity before Einstein, and that Einstein stole it. The Mystery of the Einstein–Poincaré Connection gives a detailed comparison between Poincare's and Einstein's theory, and it makes Poincare look much better than Einstein. Here is description of Poincare's theory. The main differences between Poincare's Relativity and Einstein's is that Poincare is more mathematically sophisticated. Poincare understands the Lorentz group, uses time as the fourth dimension, and even suggests gravity waves. Einstein did not get to this point until many years later. The only point where Einstein supposedly had the edge is in having a more enlightened view of the ether (luminiferous aether).

    Poincare said in 1905: (translated from his 1902 French book)

    Whether the ether exists or not matters little -- let us leave that to the metaphysicians; what is essential for us is, that everything happens as if it existed, and that this hypothesis is found to be suitable for the explanation of phenomena. After all, have we any other reason for believing in the existence of material objects? That, too, is only a convenient hypothesis; only, it will never cease to be so, while some day, no doubt, the ether will be thrown aside as useless.
    In contrast, Einstein's famous 1905 paper said:
    The introduction of a "luminiferous ether" will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an "absolutely stationary space" provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.
    It seems to me that they are practically saying the same thing. If there are any differences, there were no observable consequences under either view. Conventional wisdom today is that there is no ether, but according to this, Einstein and other prominent physicists have found the concept of the either useful long after relativity was accepted.

    Sunday, Feb 25, 2007
     
    Rejecting students for out-of-school beliefs
    Science bloggers are attacking Marcus Ross, the young-Earth creationist who got a geoscience PhD, including Knop and PZ Myers.
    If I'd been on his committee, I would have directly asked him to defend his public statements about the age of the material he was studying—not his statements to his committee alone, but to the public at large. I would have insisted that he defend those comments scientifically. And when he failed to do so, I would have voted to deny him his degree.

    Although, more realistically, if I'd been in that department, the rejection would have occurred at the admission step, or in the preliminary exam. Apparently, the university knew he was a young earth creationist at the time he admitted him, which is simply appalling.

    I commented on this before.

    I am appalled that academic scientists would be so narrow-minded. Young-Earth creationism is pretty wacky, but I never heard of profs applying such litmus tests on students' personal beliefs. Universities are filled with people who belief all sorts of wacky things. If they were really to start denying degrees based on personal beliefs, then what is next? Requiring agreement with the so-called global warming consensus?


    Friday, Feb 23, 2007
     
    Greenpeace hysteria
    Here is a creepy Greenpeace video ad:
    The Earth is getting warmer ... Rain forests and clean air will be a thing of the past ... You adults have known about this for years ... We will not be patronized ...
    Patronized? He'll be treated like a phony scaremongering idiot.

    Tuesday, Feb 20, 2007
     
    Copernicus's birthday
    Wired celebrates the birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus by giving a summary of his theory from Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article is misleading, but is currently locked because of a dispute over whether he was Polish or Prussian!

    I would summarize the theory presented in his famous book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, as having these major parts:

    Heavenly motions are uniform, eternal, and circular or compounded of several circles (epicycles).

    The center of the universe is near the stationary Sun.

    The orbs around the Sun, in order, are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars.

    The Earth has three motions: daily rotation, annual revolution, and annual tilting of its axis.

    Retrograde motion of the planets is explained by the Earth's motion.

    A lot of people get this stuff wrong. They'll say that Copernicus eliminated epicycles, when in fact he used more epicycles than Ptolemy.

    One of the main points of the Copernican model was to get rid of Ptolemy's equants. The equant allowed planets to go more slowly on distant portions on their orbits. After Copernicus, Kepler reinstated a related idea by making the planets move non-uniformly in elliptical orbits.


    Monday, Feb 19, 2007
     
    Wash Post publishes facts about Plame affair
    Victoria Toensing writes in a Wash Post op-ed a long list of facts implying that Pat Fitzgerald is blaming the wrong person at the Scooter Libby trial:
    If we accept Fitzgerald's low threshold for bringing a criminal case, then why stop at Libby? This investigation has enough questionable motives and shadowy half-truths and flawed recollections to fill a court docket for months. So here are my own personal bills of indictment:

    THIS GRAND JURY CHARGES PATRICK J. FITZERALD with ignoring the fact that there was no basis for a criminal investigation from the day he was appointed, with handling some witnesses with kid gloves and banging on others with a mallet, with engaging in past contretemps with certain individuals that might have influenced his pursuit of their liberty, and with misleading the public in a news conference because . . . well, just because. To wit:

    · On Dec. 30, 2003, the day Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, he should have known (all he had to do was ask the CIA) that Plame was not covert, knowledge that should have stopped the investigation right there. The law prohibiting disclosure of a covert agent's identity requires that the person have a foreign assignment at the time or have had one within five years of the disclosure, that the government be taking affirmative steps to conceal the government relationship, and for the discloser to have actual knowledge of the covert status.

    From FBI interviews conducted after Oct. 1, 2003, Fitzgerald also knew that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had identified Plame as a CIA officer to columnist Robert D. Novak, who first published Plame's name on July 14, 2003.

    · In January 2001, Libby was the lawyer for millionaire financier Marc Rich, whom President Bill Clinton pardoned shortly before leaving office. Fitzgerald, who was then an assistant U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York, and U.S. Attorney James Comey spearheaded the criminal investigation of that pardon.

    · Fitzgerald jailed former New York Times reporter Judith Miller for almost 90 days for not providing evidence in a matter that involved no crime. Yet the two were engaged in another dispute: Fitzgerald wanted Miller's phone records, contending that by contacting an Islamic charity, she had alerted it to a government search the day before it happened.

    · Fitzgerald granted immunity to former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer without ever asking what he would testify to; he permitted NBC News bureau chief Tim Russert to be interviewed in a law firm office with his lawyer present, while Novak was forced to testify before the grand jury without counsel present.

    · Armitage, like Bush adviser Karl Rove, forgot one conversation with a reporter. Fitzgerald threatened Rove with prosecution; Armitage bragged that he didn't even need a lawyer.

    · In violating prosecutorial ethics by discussing facts outside the indictment during his Oct. 28, 2005, news conference, Fitzgerald made one factual assertion that turned out to be flat wrong: Libby was not "the first official" to reveal Plame's identity.

    There is much more. The FireDogLake blog is cheering for a Libby conviction, and hopes the jury won't hear these arguments. (That blog is an excellent source of info about the trial.)

    Sunday, Feb 18, 2007
     
    String Theory is a lost cause
    R. F. Streater has an essay on Lost Causes in Theoretical Physics. He maintains the list in order to discourage Physics grad students from working on ideas that once seemed attractives, but which proved to be dead-ends for various reasons.

    He should add String Theory (ST) to the list. I've just been reading:

    The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Lee Smolin. xxiv + 392 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. $26.

    Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. Peter Woit. xi + 291 pp. Basic Books, 2006. $26.96.

    Smolin describes how ST has no prospects for explaining gravity, and Woit describes how ST has similarly failed to explain particle physics. ST is supposed to be the only consistent way of explaining gravity and particle physics, but it is not a consistent way of explaining anything. ST has no connection to the physical world, and those who say that it does are perpetrating a giant hoax.

    ST physicist Jim Cline trashes these books:

    Many of us think that string theory has an extremely good chance of being right. It successfully combines Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics; it unifies the four fundamental forces of nature in a beautiful and elegant way; it appears to contain the Standard Model as a low-energy approximation; it has an amazing richness, depth and mathematical consistency; it has helped us to unravel deep puzzles concerning the nature of black holes; it is well-defined and allows researchers to reach clear and unambiguous answers to questions they pose; it incorporates "supersymmetry," which many workers even outside of string theory believe will be a feature of the new physics. ...

    But the historically proven and right way for the underdog to succeed (think of Einstein inventing relativity in the patent office) is by convincing others that he or she has the better idea, not by slandering the competition.

    These claims about ST are total lies -- ST does not include any known physics as any sort of an approximation, and certainly not general relativity or the Standard Model, and it has not solved any puzzles or questions. Only the stuff he says about supersymmetry is true, but supersymmetry has proved to be another theoretical dead-end.

    Cline's last comment is bizarre. Relativity was invented by Lorentz and Poincare, two of the most respected researchers in Europe. It was proven right by agreement with experiment, not by being an unscientific fad. Apparently these books struck a nerve with Cline.

    I'll be watching for the winner of this contest to explain ST in a 2 minute video. It will be judged by Brian Greene, the leading ST popularizer.


    Saturday, Feb 17, 2007
     
    Evolutionist teachers promote atheism
    Eugenie C. Scott wrote in 1998:
    In 1995 the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) issued a "Statement on the Teaching of Evolution" which was reprinted in Reports of NCSE (17(1):31-32). In a list of "tenets of science, evolution and biology education," the first item read:
    The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.
    After the statement was published, anti-evolutionists criticized the use of the terms "unsupervised" and "impersonal." UC Berkeley lawyer Phillip Johnson (author of Darwin on Trial) and other anti-evolutionists have claimed that the NABT statement is "proof" that evolution is inherently an ideological system, rather than simply a well-supported scientific explanation.
    Scott explains that the NABT refused to budge for a couple of years, and then was persuaded in 1997 that it could delete the terms "unsupervised" and "impersonal" and still meet its goals of promoting science and evolution.

    Even without those terms, the statement still lacks scientific content. There is no experiment or empirical test that can prove the statement true or false. It does not promote science; it ridicules science. It serves no purpose except to promote an atheist-materialist philosophy.


    Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007
     
    Kansas changes definition of science again
    After a heated electoral fight, Kansas has revised its science standards for the public school curriculum. The hottest issue was the definition of science, replacing this:
    [2004] Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. Science does so while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses.
    with this:
    [2007] Science is a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us. Throughout history people from many cultures have used the methods of science to contribute to scientific knowledge and technological innovations, making science a worldwide enterprise. Scientists test explanations against the natural world, logically integrating observations and tested hypotheses with accepted explanations to gradually build more reliable and accurate understandings of nature. Scientific explanations must be testable and repeatable, and findings must be confirmed through additional observation and experimentation. As it is practiced in the late 20th and early 21st century, science is restricted to explaining only the natural world, using only natural cause. This is because science currently has no tools to test explanations using non-natural (such as supernatural) causes.
    The shift is from testable hypotheses about the natural world to natural explanations for the observable world.

    The AAAS and other leftist-evolutionist organizations strongly endorsed the latter definition, while denouncing the former as some sort of fundamentalist-creationist plot to undermine the cause of Science.

    It is a little hard to see how voters could get so excited about such a subtle philosophical distinction. As best as I can figure out, the evolutionists don't want to be restricted to testable hypotheses. They want to be able to give explanations that are not necessarily testable. The restriction they do want is to naturalistic explanation.

    For example, they want to say that life on Earth began as a random primordial ooze, even tho no one has any idea how to test that hypothesis. Nevertheless, they want to be able to rule out life being created, because that would not be a natural explanation.

    George writes:

    Are you justifying the teaching of religious or superstitious ideas in a science classroom?
    No. I am saying that an untestable naturalistic hypothesis is no better than an untestable supernatural hypothesis. Neither is really Science, and neither should be taught as scientific truth in school. If a science teacher happens to mention an unscientific speculation, then he should also mention alternative speculations that are widely held, even if they are also unscientific.

    I like the 2004 Kansas definition of Science better. It closely matches the general understanding of the term. It emphasizes empirical tests, which are really at the core of Science. The 2007 definition seems to be trying to make an ideological statement about multiculturalism and supernaturalism. It gives the impression that something becomes scientific just because humans around the world say so, or because it conforms to an accepted explanation.

    The 2004 definition is restricted to "natural phenomena", while the the 2007 definition leaves the door open to studying supernatural causes, if sufficient tools are developed. It makes it sound as if this restriction is just an artificial consequence of current technology being limited and Science being a "human activity". I get the impression that they are more interested in getting String Theory classified as science than in blocking Intelligent Design.


    Tuesday, Feb 13, 2007
     
    Libby trial contradictions
    Ari Fleischer testified that he told John Dickerson and David Gregory about Plame, but not Walter Pincus. The reporters say exactly the opposite. More Libby trial contradictions here.

    I think that Libby is gutless to refuse to testify, but I don't think that he needs to either. There are no demonstrable facts that contradict anything Libby said. His reported recollections of conversations differ from how others testified, but no more so than the discrepancies in Fitz's star witnesses for the prosecution.

    The most implausible thing Libby said was that he "forgot" that Cheney told him about Plame when he first talked to reporters about her. I don't see how the jury can determine whether Libby forgot or not. Even if it is false that Libby "forgot", it is an easy mistake for him to make. People with classified or inside info often have to pretend to forget things in order to avoid leaks. Maybe Libby had to tell himself that he forgot about Plame in order to talk to reporters, and was later confused about whether he just pretended to forget about Plame or he really forgot about Plame.

    Even if Libby did say something false, it is hard to see how it could have impeded any investigation or obstructed justice. None of these disputed points has any direct bearing on whether anyone illegally leaked classified info or any other crime that Fitzgerald was investigating.

    The only way I can see that a jury would convict Libby is that if it adopted a theory that Libby deliberately lied about Russert telling him about Plame in order to have an excuse for telling other reporters about Plame. The jury would have to think that Libby didn't actually discuss Plame with Russert at all, and that Libby believed that Russert would lie about it or refuse to testify. The jury would also have to think that Libby truly believed that getting hearsay from Russert would be an acceptable excuse for leaking info that maybe should not have been leaked.

    None of that seems plausible to me. Other motives for Libby lying seem even less likely to me. And without some sort of criminal intent, I don't see how Libby can be convicted for turned out to be some rather minor and trivial details in the 100s of hours of testimony that Fitzgerald collected.


    Monday, Feb 12, 2007
     
    Global warming deniers
    Ellen Goodman writes:
    By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.

    I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

    No, 90% is not the maximum. Scientists usually cannot even get published unless they claim at least 95% certainty about something.

    Holocaust denial is illegal in Europe, but fortunately it is still legal to deny the future. If Goodman is right, then I would expect Europe to soon be passing laws against saying things that are hurtful to socialist environmentalists.

     
    Christian gets PhD, atheists upset
    The NY Times reports on Bible-believers getting science PhDs:
    May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

    Those are "darned near imponderable issues," said John W. Geissman, who has considered them as a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico.

    No, these issues are not difficult at all. Universities do not need to be conducting their own religious inquisitions.

    Meanwhile, H. Allen Orr trashes Richard Dawkins' atheist-evolutionist book:

    Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary, and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity." We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.
    Another one is that Dawkins viciously attacks biological intelligent design, while conceding that similar non-biological intelligent design arguments have merit.

    Thursday, Feb 08, 2007
     
    More Wikipedia bias
    A Wikipedia editor using the pseudonym Raul654 has blocked me for 24 hours, giving two reasons.

    First, he objected to my removal of a poorly-source statement attacking Jonathan Wells. The article said:

    Wells's assertions and conclusion in this book, as well as in his other writings, are rejected by the scientific community.
    Since the article did not actually cite any such assertions or rejections, the sentence appeared to be just a malicious and unsupported comment. Wikipedia policy is that controversial material of any kind about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately.

    Instead of removing it immediately, I marked it with the standard Wikipedia tag that says "citation needed". Soon enough, one of the Wikipedia evolutionists added a bunch of references to scientific organization that had denounced the teaching of intelligent design as science in the public schools.

    The trouble with these citations was that Wells's book, "Icons of Evolution", is not even about intelligent design. For the most part, the book criticizes the scientific evidence that is often presented in evolutionary biology books, and argues that biology should be taught in a more scientific manner.

    Nevertheless, Raul654 put the above attack on Wells back in, along with the irrelevant citations.

    The other issue raised by Raul654 concerns a comment that I made on the Wikipedia discussion page for Wells. The main article on Wells falsely asserts that the Unification Church paid for Wells getting his PhD in Biology at U. Calif. Berkeley. The only cite was an unsourced comment on the left-wing political blog DailyKos. I posted this comment:

    I don't know why Guerttarda and the others are so focused on ad hominem attacks on Wells. How Wells funded his education doesn't say anything about the merits of his books and ideas. If you want to expend a lot of energy trying to trace Wells's finances, then go ahead, but please don't insert your silly speculations into the article until you have some verifiable facts.
    I am telling this story as an example of systemic bias in Wikipedia. A Wikipedia editor with the power to block me has chosen to make a public statement that Wikipedia biographies are to be used in the above way.

    George writes:

    You should not defend Wells. The anti-evolutionists and Christian fundamentalists cite Wells's "Icons of Evolution" as if a few errors in popular biology textbooks disprove evolution. Evolution is true and the Bible isn't, and those textbook paradigms are useful for students to learn evolution, even if they are not technically accurate. I don't think that Wells even believes what he writes when he implies that his examples are valid arguments against evolution. If Wikipedia discredit Wells as a Moonie puppet, then it is for the good of science, because then evolutionary scientists don't have to bother with him.

    There are scientific bloggers who have rebutted what Wells says about peppered moths and Haeckel diagrams, but those rebuttals are too complex for the average Wikipedia reader. Citing those arguments would only reinforce the view that Wells has raised legitimate objections to how the textbooks teach evolution. That would play right into the hands of the intelligent design advocates who want to "teach the controversy". Teaching the controversy is just a sneaky way of avoiding the fact that the Bible is not scientific.

    Teaching Science is about teaching consensus, not controversy. Wells is like the scientists who write dissents from the IPCC report on global warming. They leave the public confused, and thinking that if scientists cannot persuade each other then they cannot persuade laymen. Such thinking is an obstacle to science-based social change. Science is not just about collecting facts and doing experiments to test theories. It is about bringing a new world-view to people who cling to old-fashioned superstitions. The scientific community must exercise its authority and make sure that people like Wells are not seen as legitimate spokesmen for Science.

    I was just trying to correct Wikipedia. If Wikipedia is going to say that Wells's assertions in his book are rejected by the scientific community, then it should at least cite some reliable source in the scientific community that actually rejects some specific assertions in the book. That is what the Wikipedia editors refuse to do.

    Wednesday, Feb 07, 2007
     
    Leftist attacks on science
    NPR reports:
    The U.S. government's top wildlife biologist says a Bush administration proposal to protect bald eagles won't do the job.

    NPR has obtained an internal government memo signed by Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall. In it, he calls on his bosses to abandon a key part of their proposal for managing bald eagles once they're removed from the endangered species list.

    The bald eagle has made such a remarkable comeback from the brink of extinction that the national bird might come off the endangered species list later this month.

    Biologists and environmentalists say the government's plans for protecting more than 14,000 bald eagles after they leave the list are inadequate. ...

    John Kostyak from National Wildlife Federation says the current fight is just another example of Bush administration officials ignoring the best government science.

    The job for govt scientists is to determine whether bald eagles are endangered. The eagles are not endangered. Leftists like NPR want the scientists to twist their reports in order to favor bald eagles.

    Congress has already made the policy decisions on how much protection bald eagles should get. Scientists should stick to science, and the anti-science leftists should quit trying to manipulate the science.


    Tuesday, Feb 06, 2007
     
    Wikipedia propagates errors
    Andy sends this story about how an unfounded rumor about Rutgers Univ. kept bouncing in and out of a Wikipedia article, and then ended up in The New York Daily News! The reporter admitted in an email that he got it from Wikipedia, altho he would never say so in the newspaper.

    I recently encountered something similar. The Wikipedia biography of Jonathan Wells is filled with half-truths from his enemies. When people point out on the discussion page that a sentence is contradicted by primary sources and not even implied by secondary sources, evolutionists will respond that Wikipedia policy prefers secondary sources and that the possibly-false statement should remain as long as it is not contradicted by the supposedly-reliable secondary sources.

    Consider this paragraph on Wells:

    He also rejects the prevailing view of the scientific community that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The main proponent of the idea that the human immunodeficiency virus HIV is not the causative agent of AIDS has been Peter Duesberg. Wells's publisher, Regnery Press, also published Duesberg's book, which argued that the HIV explanation for AIDS was the product of a government and industrial conspiracy. Both intelligent design and AIDS reappraisal are considered pseudoscience by the scientific community.
    The first reference is to Wells's only known statement on AIDS, where he merely signed a petition asking for a "reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against". The second supporting reference is to a web site that just cites Wikipedia!

    It should be obvious to anyone that Wells is not responsible for another book from the same publisher.

    In case you think that this is an isolated incident, a Wikipedia editor calling himself Raul654 threatened to block me from Wikipedia for pointing this out, and declared that the above "edits conform to our polices and accurately reflect the reliable sources [FeloniousMonk] has provided."

    Currently, FeloniousMonk is telling another user that this editing "has to stop" because he pointed out that the Wells article falsely states that the Unification Church paid for Wells's biology graduate school. The source was an offhand comment on a leftist political blog!


    Sunday, Feb 04, 2007
     
    Wikipedia editor threatens me
    A prominent Wikipedia editor who uses the alias FeloniousMonk posted this on Wikipedia directed at me:
    Personal attacks made off Wikipedia, such as at your blog ... can be used as evidence ...

    Clearly a change in your methods and behavior with a shift to contributing positively is called for. The only question that remains is will you make that change of your own accord, or will you continue as you have and force the community to take action?

    I guess that he is threatening to ban me from Wikipedia, as he has done to others that he dislikes.

    His current beef with me is concerns calling Jonathan Wells an AIDS denier. Wells is a biologist best known for writing a book criticizing the way evolution is presented in popular biology textbooks. FeloniousMonk wrote:

    secondary sources are preferred over primary sources. We have 3 secondary sources that support the existing content, and 1 primary (and very partisan) source. "He also rejects the prevailing view of the scientific community that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the sole cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)." accurately summarizes the three secondary sources, while your version, "He also proposed a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS." merely repeats the rhetoric of the partisan primary source, in effect giving that fringe viewpoint undue weight, in turn running afoul of WP:NPOV. Have I made this clear enough for you?
    As far as anyone on Wikipedia knows, the only thing that Wells has ever said about AIDS was to sign this petition:
    It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group diseases called AIDS. Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.
    That's all. Apparently FeloniousMonk believes that it is pseudoscience to reappraise the evidence.

    What FeloniousMonk calls the primary source is the actual petition that Wells signed. The secondary sources are an opinion rant that only said, "Moonie Jonathan Wells [has] joined the AIDS denialist camp", and 2 other such sources.

    I cite this as example of evolutionist thinking. FeloniousMonk cannot tolerate anyone who criticizes leftist-atheist-evolutionist conventional wisdom, and will not even let an encyclopedia article about Wells accurately report what Wells actually said.

    FeloniousMonk can delete my comments on Wikipedia, but not on my blog.

    Update: A Wikipedia editor calling himself Guy responds with another threat:

    ... attacking a Wikipedia editor in a venue outside Wikipedia. For this, we usually ban people. Attacking others makes it impossible to get on with the job of building an encyclopaedia, ... It is a provable fact that the dominant western holds creationists to be wrong and evolutionists right. Wikipedia reflects what goes on in the real world.
    This is weird. I previously convinced the editors to stop calling Wells a "creationist" because he believes in an old Earth and doesn't match the common definition of a creationist. I haven't made any argument on Wikipedia about whether creationists are right or wrong. I just didn't want to call Wells a creationist unless he really is a creationist.

    Now FeloniousMonk adds this to Wells's biography:

    The main proponent of the idea that the human immunodeficiency virus HIV is not the causative agent of AIDS has been Peter Duesberg. Wells's publisher, Regnery Press, also published Duesberg's book, which argued that the HIV explanation for AIDS was the product of a government and industrial conspiracy.
    This is part of FeloniousMonk's character assassination on J. Wells.

    Duesberg is a distinguished scientist who seems to be wrong on this issue, but it is really absurd for Wikipedia editors to blame Wells for publishing a book with the same publisher as Duesberg. Regnery is a reputable published that has published a lot of excellent books.

    Update: Raul654 writes:

    In the last few hours, multiple people have emailed me asking me, as an uninvolved administrator familiar with the topics you edit, to look into your editing. I have noticed several things. ...

    Lastly, and most seriously, is the use of your blog to make personal attacks on the people with whom you are having a disagreement with on-wiki. This is not patently unacceptable. It is a violation of our No-personal-attacks policy. Other people have been blocked for doing it. If you wish to continue to participate on Wikipedia, you must immediately cease.

    I thought that Wikipedia was supposed to be an open process.

    Saturday, Feb 03, 2007
     
    Soliciting diverse scientific opinions
    A think tank sent this letter to some climate scientists:
    The American Enterprise Institute is launching a major project to produce a review and policy critique of the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due for release in the spring of 2007. We are looking to commission a series of review essays from a broad panel of experts to be published concurrent with the release of the FAR, and we want to invite you to be one of the authors.

    The purpose of this project is to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC process, especially as it bears on potential policy responses to climate change. ...

    The TNR magazine blog responds:
    Of course, if there were any scientists out there who had legitimate complaints about the report, they could have worked with the IPCC and registered their objections during the drafting process.
    It is amazing how Leftists always want to suppress dissent. Governments are considering making trillion-dollar policy decisions based on the IPCC report, and I want to know everything good and bad about the report. If someone is willing to pay a few scientists $10k to do some analysis and publish it, so much the better.

    Update: US Senators Kerry, Feinstein, and others have written:

    We hope that you will respond to this letter by telling us that the news reports that you offered to pay scientists up to $10,000 are incorrect. If not, we trust that AEI will publicly apologize for this conduct and demonstrate its sincerity by properly disciplining those responsible.
    Count them as anti-science Democrats.
     
    String Theory and other untestable ideas
    A review in a Physics magazine says:
    If we accept string theory as valid while it evades observational tests, how can we legitimately rebut arguments about the "intelligent design" of the universe? The honest answer is that we cannot. For these arguments, too, are not falsifiable; they do not allow testing by measurements. To me, string theory and intelligent design belong in the same speculative, unproveable category, and Smolin apparently agrees. "The scenario of many unobserved universes plays the same logical role as the scenario of an intelligent designer," he argues. "Each provides an untestable hypothesis that, if true, makes something improbable seem quite probable."
    I agree with this. Next time you hear someone give some haughty argument that Intelligent Design does not satisfy the definition of Science, ask him about String Theory.
     
    No catastrophic global warming
    The global warming scaremongers are hyping the latest IPCC report is out. It is not so scary after all.

    Check out Table SPM-2 on page 11. It says that the projected sea-level rise over the next 100 years will be about one foot, according to six models. Even under the worst-case scenario of the most pessimistic of the six models, sea-level will only rise 23 inches.

    Those who live near the ocean deal with much larger storm surges anyway. I think that the report will do some good. It strengthens the case for nuclear power is the most environmentally-friendly way to generate power. Germany had let its Green Party pass a law phasing out all of the country's nuclear power plants, but now the Germans want more nuclear power.


    Friday, Feb 02, 2007
     
    Libby admitted learning about Plame from Cheney
    Each day the press tells of some smoking gun in the Scooter Libby trial. NY Times reported
    WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — The former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer today contradicted the account of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on when Mr. Libby first learned the identity of a C.I.A. agent.

    Mr. Fleischer, testifying in Mr. Libby’s trial under a grant of immunity, said Mr. Libby told him over lunch on July 7, 2003, that the wife of a critic of President Bush’s Iraq policy worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is three days before he told a grand jury that he first learned her name.

    "This is hush-hush," Mr. Fleischer recalled Mr. Libby as saying in effect. "This is on the Q.T. Not many people know about this."

    Since then, Bloomberg reports:
    WASHINGTON -- I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby told the FBI he learned from Vice President Dick Cheney that an Iraq war critic's wife was a CIA official, then forgot about it until he talked to a journalist a month later, according to testimony Thursday in his perjury trial. ...

    FBI agent Deborah Bond testified Thursday that, although Libby said Cheney told him about Plame around June 12, he claimed it slipped his mind until his conversation with [NBC journalist Tim] Russert [on July 10, 2003].

    And AP reports:
    Former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby acknowledged he may have discussed with Vice President Dick Cheney whether to tell reporters that a prominent war critic's wife worked at the CIA, an FBI agent testified Thursday.
    I thought that Fitz's whole case was going to based on Libby telling the FBI that he first learned about Plame from Russert, and then proving that he knew about Plame earlier. Now it turns out that Libby told the FBI he first learned about Plame a month earlier, and said that he could not remember whether his boss had authorized him to tell the reporters.

    So when Libby talked to Russert on the phone, Libby already knew about Plame from Cheney, and Russert already knew about her from Armitage. The subject of Plame came up in the conversation in a brief and incidental way. Maybe Libby was surprised that Russert knew, and maybe Russert was surprised that Libby knew, we don't know. Libby and Russert tell slightly differing accounts of that 30-second conversation fragment. There is a similar discrepancy involving another reporter. That is the gist of the case against Libby. Libby is going to walk free.

     
    Andy Schlafly’s New Project
    ArchPundit writes:
    Those who used to spend some time on Talk.origins will never forget the duo of Andy and Roger Schlafly and some of the most bizarre claims to surface even in a newsgroup designed to attract the bizarred and weird from useful groups.

    Andy has a new project: Conservapedia

    Yes, that’s right. Wikipedia is liberally biased.

    Yes, I wasted a lot of time posting messages on talk.origins. People think that it is an unmoderated group, but actually it is controlled by an evolutionist cabal that uses the usenet moderation system to censor certain types of messages. They claim that they have to because someone once cross-posted an insensitive message about how evolution encourages rape. They got it moderated under a promise that it was temporary, but then they refused to obey their own charter.

    I found that if I criticized on of the evolutionist idols, like Stephen Jay Gould, then I would immediately be called a creationist or a fundie or something like that. I would protest that I am not, but the name-calling would continue anyway.


    Thursday, Feb 01, 2007
     
    Is binge eating a disorder?
    AP reports:
    Frequent binge eating is America's most common eating disorder, far outpacing the better-known diet problems of anorexia and bulimia, according to a national survey.

    Psychiatric researchers at Harvard University Medical School and its affiliate, McLean Psychiatric Hospital, have billed the study as the first national census of eating disorders. The results were published last Thursday in the medical journal Biological Psychiatry.

    The survey found that 3.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men suffer from binge eating, defined as bouts of uncontrolled eating, well past the point of being full, that occur at least twice a week. ...

    "Everyone has a sense, whether from a casual inspection of people on Broadway or an empirical study, that there are a lot of problems with binge eating and overeating," he said. "The question is, is it a cause or a symptom?"

    Seeing a lot of fat people tells you that overeating is a problem, but why is binge eating a problem or an eating disorder?

    We presumably evolved from hominids who feasted on the occasional big kill. There are large snakes that just eat once a month or less. Maybe occasional binge eating is healthier that eating frequent small meals.

    This paper appears to be an attempt to get binge eating classified as a DSM-IV psychological disorder, so shrinks will have new excuses to treat people.


    Wednesday, Jan 31, 2007
     
    NY Times accuses Pres. Bush of felony
    Mike writes that Bamford blasts Bush:
    Last August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen -- someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion -- the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn.
    Had Pres. Bush been an ordinary citizen, he would have been innocent until proven guilty. By the time that a judge said he broke the law, he would have already had a jury trial.

    Bamford is just another lying Bush-hater. Of course no judge found that Bush committed a felony. The American justice system doesn't even work that way.

    If Congress disapproved of the NSA wiretap program, then it could de-fund or ban it. But Congress approves of the program. Even the current Democrat Congress.


    Tuesday, Jan 30, 2007
     
    Nader wants impeachment
    Ralph Nader argues:
    About two years ago, a poll showed 52 percent of Americans would favor impeachment if they learned the President was lying about the reasons for invading Iraq. That number is probably larger today, ...
    Count me in with the majority. Lying to get the country into war is one of the worst crimes a president can commit.

    And yet Pres. Bush was re-elected in 2004 and only the lunatic fringe discusses impeachment today. There is a simple explanation -- Bush didn't lie.

    The next time you hear someone say that Bush lied, demand to see the exact quote of the lie. To make it easy for you, here is Bush's 2003 SOTU speech. This is the speech that laid out the case for the Iraq War, and was widely criticized mainly for saying:

    The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
    This is maybe the most scrutinized sentence in political history. The whole Scooter Libby trial stems from arguments about the validity of this sentence. It now appears that the White House is trying to make Libby the scapegoat for any related controversies.

    Nader was on MSNBC plugging his new book on what a good job his parents did rearing him, of all things. He credited his parents with the important task of picking out his childhood friends.

    George writes:

    Why are you defending the Iraq War? It has not achieved any of its goals. Even Bush admits that we are losing the war.
    No, Bush does not admit that we are losing the war. The main war goals have been achieved: We defeated Iraq; we brought Iraq into compliance of UN WMD resolutions; we removed Saddam Hussein from power; we have eliminated the threat of Iraqi state-sponsored terrorism; we held free elections in Iraq; we freed the Kurds; and we have set an example for other nations who do not side with us in the war against terrorism.

    Supposedly some neocons hoped that the war would result in 1000 years of peace and harmony in the Middle East. That has not happened. I am not sure if anyone actually believed that would happen or not.


    Monday, Jan 29, 2007
     
    Hillary Clinton and the height of irresponsibility
    AP reports:
    Davenport, Iowa - Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that President Bush has made a mess of Iraq and it is his responsibility to ``extricate'' the United States from the situation before he leaves office.

    It would be ``the height of irresponsibility'' to pass the war along to the next commander in chief, she said.

    ``This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy,'' the Democratic senator from New York said her in initial presidential campaign swing through Iowa.

    ``We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office'' in January 2009, the former first lady said. ...

    ``I am going to level with you. The president has said this is going to be left to his successor,'' Clinton said. ``I think it is the height of irresponsibility and I really resent it.''

    It is the "height of irresponsibility" for H. Clinton to blame the Iraq War decision entirely on Pres. G.W. Bush. We had a very open and public debate before going to war. There was an international consensus that Iraq had to be punished. H. Clinton voted for the war.

    Mohammedan terrorism against the civilized world is not going to end in 2009 no matter what Bush does.

    I guess Hillary thinks that she will be the next president, and doesn't want any foreign policy messes. I don't think that she is up for the job.


    Saturday, Jan 27, 2007
     
    Praising Barack Obama
    The Wash. Post reports this over-the-top praise (from this AP story):
    In 1990, [Barack] Obama became the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, a position that usually falls to the student with the sharpest elbows. ...

    "... he was certainly the most all-around impressive student I had seen in decades," said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard for whom Obama served as a research assistant.

    Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a Law Review article that Tribe wrote titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space."

    My brother Andy worked with Obama on the Harvard Law Review, but I do not have any inside info.

    Harvard law prof Laurence H. Tribe thanks Barack Obama for assistance on this paper:

    The Curvature of Constitutional Space

    Twentieth-century physics revolutionized our understanding of the physical world. Relativity theory replaced a view of the universe as made up of isolated objects acting upon one another at a distance with a model in which space itself was curved and changed by the presence and movement of objects. Quantum physics undermined the confidence of scientists in their ability to observe and understand a phenomenon without fundamentally altering it in the process. Professor Tribe uses these paradigm shifts in physics to illustrate the need for a revised constitutional jurisprudence.

    This is wacky stuff. No one has integrated relativity with the uncertainty principle. Curved space is not an alternative to gravity. The idea that objects are affected by local fields was well entrenched before relativity. While quantum physics does include an uncertainty principle, it greatly boosted the confidence of scientists to understand the natural world. The full article is not freely online, but I'll try to get it to see if it is as stupid as it sounds.

    Update: I found the article here. It is worse than I suspected.

     
    Libby on trial
    Against conventional wisdom, I am still predicting that Scooter Libby will be acquitted.

    Martha Stewart was sent to prison for lying to cover up what may have been an insider-trading crime. That underlying crime was never proved or prosecuted. I didn't agree with that, but the case against her seemed much stronger than the case against Libby. In Libby's trial, there is pretty conclusive proof that there was no underlying crime, that Libby did not cover anything up, and that Libby's testimony is consistent with the demonstrable facts. Libby's recollections appear to differ from those of a couple of reporters about telephone conversations in 2003, but some or all of these folks may simply be mistaken.

    Perhaps prosecutor Fitzgerald has some ace up his sleeve that has not been revealed yet. So far, I have yet to see some literal quote from Libby that is contradicted by some demonstrable fact.

    Fitzgerald does have evidence that Libby knew about Joe Wilson's wife working for the CIA before discussing it with reporters, and that it was part of Libby's job to rebut Joe Wilson's accusations against the White House.

    Supposedly Libby told FBI agents and the Fitzgerald grand jury that he learned about Wilson's wife from reporters. Since we now know that the reporters really did know about Wilson's wife independently, it is possible that Libby learned about Wilson's wife from both Cheney and the reporters. So whether Libby actually misled the grand jury is going to depend on whether Fitzgerald explicitly asked Libby whether he had separately learned about Wilson's wife from White House sources.

    My hunch is that Fitzgerald knew all along that Libby first learned about Wilson's wife from the White House, and that the reporters first learned about Wilson's wife from Armitage. Fitzgerald was just trying to set a perjury trap by quizzing Karl Rove and Libby before the grand jury. Fitzgerald decided that he could make Libby look bad based on some ambiguous statements, and deliberately did not ask a clarifying question. If so, then Libby is innocent and should be acquitted.

    I previously attacked Libby's indictment for failing to quote Libby telling a lie. Also here. In case you don't think that it was fair for the White House to rebut Joe Wilson, be sure to read Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies And Misstatements.

    Now Fitz's latest theory for Libby's motivations is that Libby was worried that he would be falsely accused of violating a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). At the same time, Fitz offered Ari Fleischer immunity against similar accusations if he would testify that Libby knew about Wilson's wife. I don't think that a jury is going to find this very persuasive.


    Friday, Jan 26, 2007
     
    Smoking Gun for climate change
    USA Today reports:
    WASHINGTON [AP] -- Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week. "The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling." ...

    The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is being released in Paris next week. ... The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.

    If this is so important, why aren't all 1600 pages being released? According to IPCC's own documents, the delay is because the science is still being manipulated to conform to policy recommendations and conclusions:
    Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.
    Yes, this is a smoking gun all right. Real scientists just publish their data and leave the policy decisions to the policymakers.
     
    Jimmy Carter pushes goals of terrorists
    The Wash. Post reports that Jimmy Carter has finally apologized for this:
    In particular, some students challenged Carter on a sentence that has brought him much grief. On Page 213 of his book, Carter wrote: "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."

    "The sentence was worded in an absolutely improper and stupid way," Carter said. "I apologize to you and to everyone here . . . it was a mistake on my part." ... But Carter insisted that one botched line in his book should not drain his larger argument of its power.

    Jimmy Carter's larger argument is that Mohammedans should be able to gain Israeli land by committing terrorist acts. While Carter apologizes for his wording, he refuses to repudiate his implicit endorsement of terrorism.

    On Carter, the Jewish Holocaust whiner Deborah Lipstadt writes:

    It is hard to criticize an icon. Jimmy Carter's humanitarian work has saved countless lives. Yet his life has also been shaped by the Bible, where the Hebrew prophets taught us to speak truth to power. So I write.

    Carter's book ``Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,'' while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.

    I previously blogged about the phrase "speak truth to power".

    Wednesday, Jan 24, 2007
     
    Another claim that Bush is anti-science turns out to be a hoax
    Michael Shermer writes:
    In last week’s eSkeptic , we published highlights from a press release issued by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), a Washington D.C.-based environmental watchdog group. That press release, dated December 28, 2006, was headlined:

    HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
    Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

    The first sentence of the release reads:

    Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

    Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to check it. ...

    Understandably, many of our readers were outraged by both the duplicity of the claim and our failure to fact check it. One park ranger wrote us:

    You’re a day late and a dollar short on this one. As a national park ranger, I found most of PEER’s findings to be bogus. So have others: http://parkrangerx.blogspot.com

    PEER is an anti-Bush, anti-religion liberal activist watchdog group in search of demons to exorcise and dragons to slay. ...

    I believe we were duped by an activist group who at the very least exaggerated a claim and published it in order to gain notoriety for itself, or worse, simply made it up.

    To that end I apologize to all of our readers for not fact checking this story before publishing it on eSkeptic and www.skeptic.com.

    I attacked this hoax here 3 weeks ago.

    I have checked out about ten of these mainstream stories that the Pres. G.W. Bush administration is anti-science. All have been hoaxes so far.

    Update: Jonathan Adler relates this to left-wing anti-science biases.


    Sunday, Jan 21, 2007
     
    Kitzmiller, One Year On
    John Derbyshire wrote:
    It was just a year ago this month, on December 20, 2005, that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III delivered his opinion in the case Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, a crushing blow to the Intelligent Design [ID] movement. ...

    All the depositions and court transcripts in the case are now on the Internet, and very devastating they are to the ID cause. And as devastating as what is there is what is not there — the court testimony of leading ID-er William Dembski, for example. ...

    I don’t see how anyone can read these transcripts, or Ms. Forrest’s account, without concluding that the whole ID business is riddled with dishonesty. Two of the [pro-ID] defendants in the case were actually discovered to have lied under oath when making their depositions, and were scolded by the judge for it. Lesser degrees of shiftiness, like Dembski’s as noted above, are all over the place. I daresay there are some honest and sincere people pushing the ID agenda; but taken as a whole, it is all a bit shabby and ignoble. Read those transcripts, or just Barbara Forrest’s article, and tell me I’m wrong.

    Derbyshire is wrong. Dembski is allied with the Discovery Institute, the leading proponent of ID. But they did not agree with the lawsuit, and did not participate in it. It is wrong to call Dembski dishonest for failing to participate in a lawsuit in which he apparently disagreed.

    More importantly, the alleged lying under oath did not involve the merits of ID. And no one was charged with perjury, so there was no judicial resolution of whether anyone lied.

    Much of the trial was devoted to determining whether the school officials had any religious motivations for their decisions. I don't do mindreading, so I don't have opinion about their motivations. The school officials were interrogated about their religious beliefs, and allegedly a couple of them attempted to cover-up evidence that might be used to link their religious and scientific beliefs. I didn't follow the details, as I didn't think that they should have been on trial for their religious beliefs anyway.

    Derbyshire is smart enough to form his own opinion about ID. He is wrong to reject ID based on some judge's opinion of the motives of some minor Dover PA school officials who were not even following the advice of the leading ID advocates.

    George writes:

    The Kitzmiller judge was correct to examine the motives of the school officials. The Supreme Court Lemon Test has held that ID is unconstitutional if the school officials had a religious purpose in reading a couple of paragraphs about ID to the students.
    That is basically correct, but see also Scalia 2000 dissent.

    Friday, Jan 19, 2007
     
    Weinberg on Dawkins
    The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has a new review of Richard Dawkins' God Delusion.
    In the early days of Christianity, the Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria rejected the knowledge, common since the time of Plato, that the Earth is a sphere. They insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, and from Genesis to Revelation verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat. ...

    The more radical idea that the Earth moves around the Sun was harder to accept. After all, the Bible puts mankind at the centre of a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation, so how could our Earth not be at the centre of the universe? Until the nineteenth century, Copernican astronomy could not be taught at Salamanca or other Spanish universities, but by Darwin’s time it troubled hardly anyone. Even as early as the time of Galileo, ...

    Here Weinberg is perpetuating some false myths about Biblical literalism, as you can read here.

    This stuff is strange coming from Weinberg. He wrote in the Preface to Gravitation and Cosmology

    There was another, more personal reason for my writing this book. In learning general relativity, and then in teaching it to classes at Berkeley and MIT, I became dissatisfied with what seemed to be the usual approach to the subject. I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student who asked why the gravitational field is represented by a metric tensor, or why freely falling particles move on geodesics, or why the field equations are generally covariant would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that spacetime is a Riemannian manifold.

    Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created. However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and the theory of elementary particles. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and that too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics.

    Other physicists have begged him to retract his statements that the geometrical interpretation of gravitation is just an analogy.

    As with most physicists, he gives too much credit to Einstein. It was Marcel Grossman who persuaded Einstein that the gravitational field is represented by a metric tensor, and David Hilbert who persuaded Einstein that the field equations should be generally covariant. I believe that Einstein had previously published papers that were contrary to these ideas. I am not sure who had the idea that spacetime is one four-dimensional entity, but it is often credited to Minkowski and Poincare. I do not believe that it was Einstein.

    More importantly, Weinberg is doubting a fundamental principle of Relativity (Gravitation) as most physicists understand the theory. If the Pope said something similar, he would be attacked by the scientific community as failing to understand the lessons of the Galileo trial.

    The Catholic Church never opposed the teaching of the Copernican model; it merely objected to certain interpretations of it until those interpretations could be supported by evidence. Weinberg's objection to the standard geometrical interpretation of gravity is even goofier. He thinks that it will be an obstacle to some quantum theory of gravity, but he has no empirical evidence for his thinking. There just isn't any way to understand gravity without geometrical arguments.

    His denial that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms is really strange. The Standard Model theories for these are all gauge theories that derive from geometrical ideas of Hermann Weyl. The field strength for all of these are quantified by curvature tensors. They caught on big in particle physics when tHooft and Veltman proved that they were renormalizable. Weinberg got his Nobel Prize for having the good fortune of publishing a paper on an electroweak gauge theory model before it was known to be renormalizable.

    In his book review, Weinberg goes on to attack Dawkins for failing to distinguish between Christians and Mohammedans. Weinberg concludes:

    Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins's even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.
    He's right that it is folly to equate Mohammedans with Christians. Christians are making the world a better place, and Mohammedans are making it a worse place. Anyone who cannot see that has his head in the sand.

    I seriously doubt that Dawkins's even-handedness is well-intentioned. I am not a mindreader, so I cannot say for sure. Dawkins is on the warpath against all religion, and he cherrypicks examples of the misguided beliefs of a few in order to condemn all believers. It is appears to me that his even-handedness is a dishonest ploy to blame good people of the offenses of a few.

    The problem with the Islamic world is not religious certitude. Plenty of devout Christians and members of other religions have just as much certitude, but they don't promote suicide bombers. The problem with Mohammedans is that they teach Evil.

     
    Trying to punish global warming skeptics
    A US Senate blog reports:
    The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to "Holocaust Deniers" and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

    The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.


    Tuesday, Jan 16, 2007
     
    Colleges conspire for price discrimination
    Some high-status colleges have formed a new group:
    The Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) is an institutionally supported organization of 31 private colleges and universities. COFHE schools are united in their commitment to [conspiring to share secret financial data in order to cooperate in price discrimination policies].
    No, it doesn't exactly state its mission this way, but it says the same thing in other words. Its main propaganda booklet brags about some of their prominent graduates:
    The individuals profiled in this collection span a broad range of ages, backgrounds and accomplishments; but they have three things in common. They attended some of the nation's oldest, most prominent and best endowed colleges and universities. They came from lower- and middle-income families and paid for college through a combination of work and financial aid, most of which came from the institution they attended. And in their lives and careers, they have demonstrated a lifetime commitment to the service of others.
    But the alumni profiles do not necessarily match this description. The Phyllis Schlafly profile says:
    Phyllis began college early, transferring from a Catholic college to Washington University in 1942, where costs at the time were kept artificially low for St. Louis residents. She supported her education by working as an ammunition tester on the night shift at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant, firing rifles and machine guns, and as a laboratory technician, investigating misfires.
    She did work to support her college education, but she never received any work or financial aid from Washington University. It is not true that the fees were artificially low for St. Louis residents, and she paid the same fees that any other student paid who was not getting aid.

    The booklet appears to be false about some others as well. It says Syreeta McFadden's college choice was "made possible by federal financial aid." So she got tax money, not college generosity.

    The COFHE booklet is also dishonest because it suggests that the profiled alumni are endorsing the college price discrimination policies. They did not. They probably don't even know the purpose of COFHE.

    I am surprised that the colleges don't get more criticism for their price discrimination policies. Those policies are not justified by listing 50 prominent alumni who may have had difficulties paying for their college tuitions.


    Friday, Jan 12, 2007
     
    Catastrophic global warming is a hoax
    This is from the editorial by Donald Kennedy wrote this editorial in the 5 Jan 07 Science Magazine.
    The Senate's Environment Committee gets Barbara Boxer of California, a huge contrast to incumbent James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Boxer finds the scientific evidence on climate change convincing, along with most of the rest of the country. Inhofe, on the other hand, is a conspiracy theorist who calls global warming a grand hoax.

    Here is what US Senator Inhofe said in floor speech:

    Over the past 2 hours, I have offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax.
    Science Magazine is a respectable scientific journal, but it has not published a correction.

    I would welcome Science Magazine publishing a rebuttal to Inhofe. I'd also like to see evidence that Boxer understands any scientific issue at all. Instead, Science Magazine is just another propaganda source that distorts and misstates what its ideological enemies are saying.

    Where I live, not too far from Barbara Boxer's home town, the past couple of days have been the coldest in eight years.

    Update: More recently, Inhofe comments on the politics of polar bears.


    Monday, Jan 08, 2007
     
    Evolutionist censorship in Wikipedia
    The Wikipedians are threatening to ban me again. Not for any actual edits to Wikipedia, but for comments on the Talk:Intelligent_design_movement page.

    At issue is the neutrality of the Intelligent Design Movement entry, which starts:

    The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist campaign that calls for broad social, academic and political changes derived from the concept of "intelligent design." Chief amongst its activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it.[1][2] The movement arose out of the previous Christian fundamentalist and evangelistic creation science movement in the United States[3]

    The overall goal of the intelligent design movement is to "overthrow materialism" and atheism.

    Someone using the alias FeloniousMonk, and his evolutionist cohorts, use the page to badmouth Intelligent Design (ID), citing ID critics like Barbara Forrest. They say that the ID advocates like the Discovery Institute have no credibility, and an encyclopedia should not trust them about what their own opinions are. Instead, Wikipedia should rely on people like Forrest. Forrest is credible because she was an expert witness at the Kitzmiller v Dover trial, and the Discovery Institute lost that case, they say.

    I pointed out that the Discovery Institute was not even a party to that lawsuit. It did not agree with the legal and political stances taken by the ID advocates in the case, and did not support them.

    FeloniousMonk wrote:

    "Barbara Forrest's opinion is just her opinion." Yes, that is the Discovery Institute's spin on it since they lost in court, but in actuality Barbara Forrest's opinion is testimony that the judge accepted and affirmed in his ruling. And reading the Discovery Insitute's spin, you're left with the impression that the judge agreed with their objection to Forrest's testifying as an expert. But in fact, Judge Jones denied this motion. These and many number other equally damning examples is why accepting source material from the Discovery Institute at face value is problematic. They have no credibility outside of their own movement. ... The fact remains the Dover trial is the first and only analysis of the claims of ID's proponents in a US court. ...

    Yes, technically it was the Thomas More Law Center that lost the case ...

    There is no shortage of examples showing why accepting source material from the Discovery Institute at face value is problematic. Again, they have no credibility outside of their own movement, as noted in the Dover trial ruling.

    Someone using the alias KillerChihuahua added:
    Roger, we know you have a blog. Keep this kind of thing on your blog. Don't attempt to re-argue a court case on this talk page, and stop attacking editors. You are wearing out my patience, and I am sure the patience of others here. I am inches away from blocking you for constant low-level trolling and disruption combined with personal attacks, and have no issues with doing so if you continue. You are throwing constant road blocks into any attempt at coherent discussion on this page.

    In case it is not clear, you are directly insulting FM and indirectly insulting everyone who is here to work on an article, and not here to listen to your personal interpretation of Kitzmuller. ... This thread being hijacked by you for your usual brew of unsubstantiated rumour, ...

    All I said about Kitzmiller v Dover was that the Discover Institute was not a party to the case. I did not try to re-argue the case. I also acknowledged that Forrest and the judge criticized ID in the case, and that Forrest may have had some influence on the judge. That's all. These are indisputable facts.

    I post this as an example of narrow-minded evolutionists who have enough influence to control Wikipedia. They cannot stand to even have objective facts posts to a discussion page about an evolution-related article. And they will not allows the views of the ID advocates be accurately described on a Wikipedia page on the ID Movement.

    George writes:

    But the Discovery Institute has not gained the respect of the scientific establishment, so their scientific views do not have to be taken seriously. Some of their members are known to have religious views that may cloud their scientific judgment. Wikipedia doesn't have to give a soapbox to every crackpot.
    Whether the ID advocates are crackpots is beside the point. Encyclopedias have articles on goofy religions, superstitutions, failed ideologies, and other nonsense. If the ID Movement is important enough to merit an article, then that article should describe what the movement actually teaches. Where there are sharp divisions within the movement (as there apparently are between the Discovery Institute, Thomas More Law Center, Young Earth Creationists, and others, the article should properly distinguish those views.

    The Wikipedia article has a section title "Criticism". Criticism should go in the Criticism section.

     
    Judge is surprised by lawyer study
    Morris B. Hoffman, a Colorado state trial judge, writes this an NY Times op-ed:
    Sixteen years as a state trial judge have left me with a deep respect for the professionalism and competence of the public defenders who handle felony cases for indigent criminal defendants in my courtroom. ...

    So when two economists from Emory University, Paul Rubin and Joanna Shepherd, agreed last year to collaborate with me on an econometric study of how effective public defenders really are, I had to guard against confirmation bias. ...

    If it is true that public defenders achieve substantially worse results for their clients than private lawyers, that fact should be troubling to us all, quite apart from whether the difference is the product of underfinancing, government inefficiencies or both.

    But our results suggest a more benign explanation, and a less drastic solution than spending more on public defenders or privatizing the system. ...

    It is amazing how stupid judges can be. Judges are impressed with public defenders because they help the justice system run smoothly. The public defenders have as much incentive to please the judge as to get their clients free. Without public defenders, we'd have a lot more cases of defendants without lawyers, and judges hate that.

    Next, this judge argues that it should be "troubling to us all" if lawyer money actually buys something of value. Of course money buys something of value. That's the way it always is, and that is the only way the economy could work. Higher priced services have to offer something of greater value, or no one will pay the higher prices.

    Yes, I have sometimes wondered how some particularly high-priced lawyer could be worth his fees. I have wondered the same about high-priced chiropractors and other service professionals. But they must somehow persuade their customers that they are worth the big bucks. And their customers are either foolish or they are deliberately paying a premium for those services because of some perceived value.

    This judge is like someone who is used to delicious home-cooked meals from his wife, and suddenly discovers that other people pay for meals at restaurants. He thinks that people could just stay home and eat better meals. Then he finds that some people like the meals at the high-priced restaurants better, and he thinks that everyone should be troubled by this revelation. He is an idiot.


    Sunday, Jan 07, 2007
     
    Climate is a mental construct
    The NY Times quotes Michael MacCracken, trying to explain why Europeans are more agitated about global warming than Americans:
    Climate is a mental construct.
    His web site warns about effects to California:
    In addition to water resources, the projected changes in climate would be very likely to have detrimental effects on California’s agriculture. For example, the higher temperatures under both emission scenarios will shorten the ripening period for grapes, significantly degrading the quality of the resulting wine. Rising temperatures are also projected to lead to reduction in milk production by as much as 7-10%.
    Okay, so maybe global warming will help other states and countries to compete with California wines.
     
    Anthropogenic earthquakes
    Wired reports:
    The most powerful earthquake in Australian history—December 28, 1989, magnitude 5.6, epicenter Newcastle, New South Wales, killed 13 people, $3.5 billion damage—was caused by human beings! Too much coal mining (coal..Newcastle...heh) which apparently uncorked a local fault line.
     
    The vegan diet is unhealthy
    Dilbert argues vegetarians are healthier, as long as they eat soy protein and take B12 and omega-3 supplements. Most of India is vegetarian, and this is sometimes used to argue that meat is not needed in the human diet.

    But east Indians aren't that healthy. They have a billion people, and they've only won 14 Olympic medals. That is less than Ireland. Even Jamaica has 43.

    Furthermore, Indians get their vitamin B12 from animal feces:

    It is true that Hindu vegans living in certain parts of India do not suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency. This has led some to conclude that plant foods do provide this vitamin. This conclusion, however, is erroneous as many small insects, their feces, eggs, larvae and/or residue, are left on the plant foods these people consume, due to non-use of pesticides and inefficient cleaning methods. This is how these people obtain their vitamin B12. This contention is borne out by the fact that when vegan Indian Hindus later migrated to England, they came down with megaloblastic anaemia within a few years. In England, the food supply is cleaner, and insect residues are completely removed from plant foods (16).

    Saturday, Jan 06, 2007
     
    Immigrant Innovators
    WSJ reports:
    Start-up engineering and technology companies that had at least one immigrant founder produced $52 billion sales in 2005 and employed about 450,000 workers, according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University.

    The study surveyed 28,776 engineering and technology firms that were started between 1995 and 2005, and found that one-quarter had either a chief executive or a chief technology officer who is an immigrant. Of those, one-quarter had Indian-born founders. The biggest share of the start-ups is in California, where almost 40% of new engineering and technology companies have immigrant founders. ...

    But the effort to allow in more skilled legal workers was overwhelmed by questions about illegal immigration, and that’s not likely to change when the new Congress takes up immigration. Some business supporters would like to see a separate skilled-immigrant bill pass quickly before the current shortage of employment-based visas puts a crimp in the economy. But most immigration groups oppose that approach, fearing that support for a bill to also help unskilled legal immigrants and the estimated 11.5 million illegal immigrants would fade if skilled workers are taken care of first.

    The WSJ wants more H-1B visas for foreign workers, but this is really a phony argument. The H-1B visas don't allow the foreign workers to start companies.

    There are foreign entrepreneurs that come to the USA because they are frustrated by difficulties in their home countries. Maybe we should have an entrepreneur visa for those people. But H-1B visas are not for entrepreneurs. The H-1B visas are mainly used by big companies to cut their labor costs, and get employees who will not leave to join start-up companies.

     
    Dawkins allows one reason for believing in God
    Cosmic Variance quotes Richard Dawkins:
    Susskind (2006) gives a slendid advocacy of the anthropic principle in the megaverse. He says the idea is hated by most physicists. I can’t understand why. I think it is beautiful - perhaps because my consciousness has been raised by Darwin.
    This is part of an argument for atheism. Because Dawkins had his consciousness raised by Darwin, he believes that there is no respectable argument for God from the biological sciences. But at the same time, he argues that certain remarkable coincidences in nuclear physics and cosmology go give legitimate reasons for believing in God.

    There are 100s of scientific facts that seem necessary for human life on Earth. Some are biological; some are not. Some have natural explanations; some do not. Dawkins seems particularly narrow-minded about the biological ones, and particularly gullible about the non-biological ones.

    This is an example of an expert arguing outside his expertise. Dawkins is an expert in evolutionary biology, and is mainly known as a popularizer of Darwin. He doesn't know so much about theology, cosmology, politics, or physics.

     
    Changing the rules of science
    In an IEEE interview, physicist Lee Smolin said:
    String theory is not a theory in the sense that Newtonian mechanics or quantum mechanics is. It’s not defined by the statement of two or three principles that are expressed in the basic equations of the theory -- which are then solved to yield examples and predictions. Instead, there are several approximation procedures and approximate arguments that describe an infinite number of cases, which are all conjectured to be solutions of a fundamental theory that has never been written down. ...

    Once it became undeniable that string theory comes in an infinite number of different versions, which all give different predictions, some people, like Leonard Susskind and Steven Weinberg, unfortunately began to argue that, on the basis of other reasons -- the mathematical beauty of the theory, et cetera -- the theory was so compelling that we should consider this a situation where the rules of science should be modified. ...

    Brian Greene [author of The Elegant Universe, the best-selling 2003 book on string theory] believes the majority of string theorists agree with me that a scientific theory must make falsifiable predictions and that if string theory ultimately fails to do so, it will fail to be a scientific theory.

    Evolution theory has related problems. It hardly makes any predictions, and just about any scenario can be held up as an instance of evolution is action. Prominent evolutionists complain bitterly about being held to a falsifiability standard that all other scientists are held to.

    Wednesday, Jan 03, 2007
     
    Grand Canyon science and Bush
    Here is another complaint that the Bush administration is anti-science.
    Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
    In fact, this controversy was resolved in 2004. The American Geological Institute wrote:
    According to an October 15th [2004] article in the Washington Post, the controversial book Grand Canyon: A Different View, Tom Vail's biblical explanation for the formation of the Grand Canyon, has been moved from the natural science section to the inspirational section in the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore. This complies with a letter signed by the presidents of AGI and six of its member societies ...
    The official Grand Canyon bookstore website offers books on American Indian mysticism and the canyon, but not Vail's book.

    The science books all say that the canyon is millions of years old. The PEER Bush-haters are not satisfied with this, and want to censor Vail's overtly Christian book.

    Update: The NY Times now reports that the Park Service promised a "review" but never did a "formal review" of the book, and has no written reports on it.

    That seems appropriate to me. It is the Park Service, not the Censorship Service. Someone needed to verify that the book was of legitimate interest to people visiting the Grand Canyon, but that's all. They certainly don't need to do a formal comparison between particular Christian and American Indian beliefs for a book in the Inspiration section of the bookstore.


    Tuesday, Jan 02, 2007
     
    String Theory is like the Anthropic Principle
    Theoretical physicist Lubos Motl writes:
    There are very smart people who believe ... I personally encourage them to think about their networks of ideas. On the other hand, most of us are making it clear that almost no one wants theoretical physics to write quasi-religious papers with some mathematics that has nothing to do with the actual arguments or measurable quantities and whose goal is to encourage some philosophical viewpoints by permanent repetition.

    ... But it is unlikely that someone will convince the physics community that this hypothesis is correct unless he will offer some non-trivial results that provide us with a strong consistency check or that are even directly related to observable quantities. ...

    When a crackpot proposes that the value of theories in physics should be judged by their agreement with some philosophical dogmas from the 17th century - that were a part of bad physics already in the 17th century but they are now proposed to control the 21st century (!) physics - and the only argument is that these misconceptions sound "nice" to the crackpot, no serious physicist takes such a crackpot seriously. Physics hasn't worked like that at least for 300 years. Philosophical prejudices no longer dictate what is true and what is not true about natural sciences.

    Can you figure out what he is saying? He is arguing that one untestable theory (String Theory) is better than another (Anthropic Principle). It is not better because of any physical experiment -- that would be relying on 300-year-old philosophy.

    Sunday, Dec 31, 2006
     
    Copernican Principle is wrong
    The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the Copernican Principle:
    The Copernican Principle is a basic statement in physics that there should be no ``special'' observers. For example, the Aristotelian model of the solar system in the Middle Ages placed the Earth at the center of the solar system, a unique place since it ``appears'' that everything revolved around the Earth. Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated that this view was incorrect and that the Sun was at the center of the solar system with the Earth in orbit around the Sun.

    The implications of Copernicus' work can not be exaggerated. His views challenged the literal interpretation of Scripture, the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of moral theory, and even common sense itself. The result was a massive opposition to his reported ideas. It was the slow, sure acceptance of the heliocentric theory by natural philosophers that ultimately quieted the general clamor, however the name of Copernicus is still a battle cry against the establishment in religion, philosophy and science. In later years with Freud, man lost his Godlike mind; with Darwin his exalted place among the creatures of the Earth; with Copernicus man had lost his privileged position in the Universe.

    The lesson learned by future scientists is that if a theory requires a special origin or viewpoint, then it is not plausible

    This is nonsense from beginning to end. The geocentric model is called the Ptolemaic model, not the Aristotelian model, and it originated at least 1000 years before the Middle Ages. Copernicus never demonstrated that the geocentric view was incorrect. His model put the Sun near the center of the solar system, but not at the center.

    Copernicus did not challenge the "foundations of moral theory" or anything like that. There was no massive opposition to his idea that the solar system could be modeled with the Sun near the center. His famous book had the explicit imprimatur of the Roman Catholic Church, altho its approval was later conditioned on nine minor corrections being made.

    Today, the name of Copernicus is the battle cry of crackpots. The article endorses a view of Freud, who really was a crackpot.

    The Big Bang theory requires a special point of origin for the universe. If all such theories are necessarily implausible, then I guess that we should reject the Big Bang theory. But the Big Bang theory is the most plausible theory we have for the expansion of the universe. Without it, scientists cannot explain why it gets dark at night. (Olber's Paradox)

     
    Senile slug research
    Sci. American reports:
    The ancestors of humans and sea slugs diverged more than a half billion years ago, but scientists have now unexpectedly found genes that are remarkably similar in the brains of both. These findings could help shed light on the evolution of the brain in the animal kingdom and the mechanisms of human disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

    The sea slug Aplysia californica, a red, green or brown hermaphrodite that can grow up to 16 inches long, has the biggest brain cells, or neurons, in the animal kingdom, at up to a millimeter long. These marine snails also have just 20,000 or so neurons, compared with the 100 billion in people.

    I'll be updating this if anyone ever learns anything about Alzheimers, from humans having common ancestry with sea slugs.

    Wednesday, Dec 27, 2006
     
    Cause of global warming is irrelevant
    I am suspicious of the global warming activists for these reasons:

    1. The so-called science matches the leftist ideology too conveniently. If someone wanted to shut down global development and economic growth, there is no surer way than to impose an international carbon tax or otherwise reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It reminds me of those who want to stop some power plant or logging operation because of some supposed endangered species that no one had heard of. For the most part, they are just leftist ideologues masquerading as environmentalists.

    2. They rarely mention nuclear power. If the greenhouses gases are really a harmful form of pollution, then nuclear power is by far the cleanest and cheapest form of energy available. Anyone who is really concerned about greenhouse gases should be promoting nuclear power plants.

    3. They emphasize human causes. The climate scientists have made a convincing case that industrialization has caused big CO2 increases in the atmosphere, that greenhouse gases can cause global warming, and that some parts of the world have already seen a noticeable warming. But they are hung up trying to demonstrate that Man caused the warming.

    Why do they even care? When Yellowstone Park burned in 1988, the authorities let it burn because the fire had been started by lightning rather than Man. There are even those who think that the ethics of cloning Neanderthals should depend on whether humans wiped them out 35kyrs ago.

    So it appears to me that these folks think that we should try to do something about global warming if Man is the cause, and not otherwise. That is why they believe that it is so crucial to show that Man is the cause.

    This is crazy. It sounds like some sort of pagan nature-worship, not science. If fire in Yellowstone is really a good thing, then we should deliberately set that fire, and not wait for the lightning. If global warming is really a bad thing and we really have the technology to economically reverse it, then we should do that regardless of whether Man originally caused the warming.

    I think that scientists should work on telling us the cost-benefit ratios of feasible climate interventions, and forget about whether Man is the cause of global warming.

     
    The risks of being Homo Urbanus
    Jeremy Rifkin writes that human civilization is unsustainable:
    Large populations living in mega- cities consume massive amounts of Earth's energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity. The Sears Tower alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly 40 percent of the net primary production on Earth -- the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis -- even though we make up only one-half of 1 percent of the animal biomass of the planet. ...

    In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures.

    When he expresses concern for "our fellow creatures", is he talking about humans or animals? Normally I'd assume humans, but when he complains about extinctions and about our species using more than our fair share of sunlight, I'm not so sure.

    Ronald Bailey attacks Rifkin for other reasons.


    Tuesday, Dec 26, 2006
     
    Evolution of dishonest frogs
    NY Science Times reports:
    If you happen across a pond full of croaking green frogs, listen carefully. Some of them may be lying.

    A croak is how male green frogs tell other frogs how big they are. The bigger the male, the deeper the croak. The sound of a big male is enough to scare off other males from challenging him for his territory.

    While most croaks are honest, some are not. Some small males lower their voices to make themselves sound bigger. Their big-bodied croaks intimidate frogs that would beat them in a fair fight.

    Green frogs are only one deceptive species among many. Dishonesty has been documented in creatures ranging from birds to crustaceans to primates, including, of course, Homo sapiens.

    The NY Times treats this as some big breakthru in evolutionary theory. It supposedly explains how dishonesty evolved in humans. Here is the theory, as I understand it.

    Any time one animal has some behavioral response to another, we could regard this as a communication signal. A growl, a sharp claw, or a peacock's tail might be considered a signal.

    The next step is to regard the signal as being correct or false. You have to use your imagination to say whether a peacock is telling the truth or not when it shows its tail, but assume that.

    Furthermore, assume that there are advantages and disadvantages of animals telling the truth with these signals, and of lying.

    The new research shows that if the advantages can be quantified in a computer model, then the optimal behavior for the animal will be to sometimes tell the truth, and sometimes lie.

    The NY Times explains:

    Tales of animal deception reach back at least as far as Aesop’s fables. In the late 19th century, the naturalist George Romanes made a semi-scientific study of deceptive animals. In his 1883 book, "Mental Evolution in Animals," Romanes wrote about how one of his correspondents had sent him "several examples of the display of hypocrisy of a King Charles spaniel." ...

    A signaler may have different relationships with different listeners. In some cases, honest signals are best. But eavesdroppers may be able to use honest signals for their own advantage.

    To capture this extra layer of complexity, Dr. Rowell built a mathematical model with two receivers instead of one. The signaling animal could choose to be honest or dishonest. The receivers could respond to the signal as an honest one or a dishonest one.

    Working with Dr. Ellner and Dr. Reeve, Dr. Rowell discovered that honesty and deception could reach a stable coexistence in the model. The signalers could sometimes be dishonest, and yet the receivers continued to believe the signals despite the deception.

    Dr. Rowell and his colleagues published the details of their model in the December issue of The American Naturalist. ...

    Dr. Reeve cautioned that the model was only the first step in understanding how networks of listeners can drive the evolution of deception. "Right now it needs to be tested in detail, experimentally," he said.

    I am wondering what it new or scientific about this. Why is that 1883 book only "semi-scientific", while some untested model is considered a hot new evolutionary result. Who would be surprised that there might be an equilibrium between honesty and deception under the above assumptions?

    Every kindergarten teacher understands that if she rewards honesty, she'll get more honesty, and if there are rewards for deception, there will be more deception. Depends on the rewards, there will be a balance. The whole thing seems trivial.

     
    Judge denounces femifascists
    St. Louis judge Robert H. Dierker Jr. has written a book titled, The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault. It says:
    Just as we saw with the femifascists, illiberal liberals don't want equality; they want to make some people more equal than others. And they've made it happen through their dominance of the courts over the past seventy-five years. Liberals have converted the courts from the 'least dangerous' branch of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers to the most dangerous. ...

    This is liberal law in a nutshell. History and tradition count for nothing; the language of the Constitution itself counts for little; the only criterion is whether a ruling will advance the liberal agenda.

    A female lawyer complains here. I think that she is concerned that he might be prejudiced against femifascist lawyers in his court.

    Sunday, Dec 24, 2006
     
    Imported workers depress wages
    BatesLine denies that foreign workers with H-1B workers are depressing American wages:
    H-1B visa holders must, by law, be paid comparably to or better than American workers. Companies have to post notices listing the salary, job title, and experience of H-1B employees to allow other employees to verify that the visa holders aren't driving out American workers by accepting a low wage. The companies I have worked for have complied with this requirement.
    I think that he needs some lessons in supply and demand. Increasing the supply of workers always lowers wages. That is the way economics works. It is the whole purpose of the H-1B program.

    Maybe some 1% of the H-1B workers have some unique skill that some employers especially needs. But the vast majority of them are computer programmers, engineers, nurses, and others coming into a job market where there are millions of American workers already available. They have no special skill, and they are just being hired because they will work more hours for less money.

    BatesLine goes on:

    Most H-1B visa holders I've known are using it as a first step to qualify for permanent residency and eventual citizenship. ... They are not tethered to the first employer that hires them.
    This is misleading. They are not "tethered" in the sense that they can leave the USA at any time. But they need that employer sponsorship if they want to get on the waiting list for permanent residency. If an H-1B worker changes jobs, then he must get another H-1B sponsor and forfeit his application for permanent residency. As a result, the employer gets an indentured servant, and won't have to give him pay raises to keep him from jumping to another employer.
    This statement of Schlafly's just floored me:
    Much of the Compete America discussion involved blaming the U.S. educational system and the fact that fewer U.S. students are going into math and computer sciences. Yes, U.S. students have figured out that our engineers have a bleak employment future because of insourcing foreigners and outsourcing manufacturing.
    Isn't this the same Phyllis Schlafly who has been telling us what a bad job our schools are doing of educating our children in the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic?
    Yes, she does complain about our schools, but she wants to improve our schools, not import foreign guest workers to make our schools irrelevant.

    Thursday, Dec 21, 2006
     
    No more evolution stickers
    The LA Times reports:
    ATLANTA — A suburban school board has abandoned its four-year legal fight to place stickers in high school biology textbooks that say "evolution is a theory, not a fact."

    In a settlement announced Tuesday in federal court, the Cobb County Board of Education agreed never to use any similar "stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions or other warnings," or to undermine the teaching of evolution in science classes.

    In turn, the parents who sued over the stickers — charging that they promoted religion in science classrooms and violated the separation of church and state — agreed to end all legal action.

    The Cobb school board says:
    "Appealing the lower court ruling was the right decision by the school board because that ruling was incorrect," said Dr. Plenge. "The Board maintains that the stickers were constitutional, but, at the same time, the Board clearly sees the need to put this divisive issue behind us. There will be no stickers in textbooks, and, as always, we will continue to provide Cobb County students a curriculum that follows national and state standards in teaching science and the theory of evolution."
    The lower court had said that the stickers were unconstitutional, and the appellate court vacated (reversed) that ruling. Apparently the school will continue to take the position that evolution is a theory.

    Sunday, Dec 17, 2006
     
    Weinberg on ST
    The eminent physicist Steven Weinberg said:
    The critics are right. We have no single prediction of string theory that is verified by observation. Even worse, we don’t know how to use string theory to make predictions. Even worse than that, we don’t really know what string theory is.
    And he is someone who likes String Theory! He says that it is the only game in town:
    I don't see any alternative to string theory. I don't see any other way of bringing gravity into the same general theoretical framework as all the other forces of nature. Yes, it could be entirely wrong. I don't think it's likely at all. I think it's best to assume it's not and take it very seriously and work on it.
    The string theorists idolize Weinberg, but they do wish that he'd retract this statement:
    The geometric interpretation of gravitation has dwindled to a mere analogy, which lingers in our language in terms like "metric", "affine connection", and "curvature", but is not otherwise very useful.
    The string theorist love their geometrical interpretations because that's all they have.

    Friday, Dec 15, 2006
     
    Why Truth Matters
    A new book on Why Truth Matters gives this as its prime example:
    In the David Irving libel trial held two years ago, in which I served as an expert witness for the High Court in London , Irving was suing Penguin Books and their author Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. ...

    Just as important as this was the fact that it was possible to demonstrate that Irving 's historical works deliberately falsified the documentary evidence in order to lend plausibility to his preconceived arguments, ...

    If it is Truth that really matters, then why aren't they satisfied with just proving Irving wrong? Why is it so important to argue that Irving had bad motives, and to ruin him?

    Irving apparently has some sort of theory that the Jews at Auschwitz were killed by means other than gas chambers. He cites publicly documents and evidence. Other historians say that he is wrong. Irving has been bankrupted and jailed by Europeans and Jews who are offended by what he says.

    Praising the punishment of Irving is not a good example for the search for Truth. It is a sad day when Iran is the only country that can have a conference dedicated to telling the truth about the German Holocaust.

    George writes:

    What is going on in Iran is not the Truth, but just hate speech. They are just doing that to generate support for anti-Israel terrorism.
    I am not a mindreader, so I don't know about anyone's motives. Certainly most of the Mohammedan world is anti-Israel. I think that the only way that we'll get at the truth is to allow historians to have free speech to present their theories. I don't see how anything Irving could say would be worse than what the Mohammedans say all the time about Jews and Israel.
     
    ST patents
    Lumo Motl's latest evidence for String Theory is the nine US patents involving string theory, and the lack of patents on other quantum gravity theories.

    Maybe he is making a joke, because some of the patents aren't really String Theory. Those that are just give more evidence that ST is just another wacky physics fad with no relation to reality.


    Wednesday, Dec 13, 2006
     
    Rushing math to publication
    A respected mathematician Joan Birman wrotes that the Math community has too much tolerance for bad behavior:
    I focus on one small part of the complex array of matters discussed in the Nasar-Gruber article, namely the manner in which the normal peer review process, essential to the integrity of the profession, was tossed out the window when the paper of Cao and Zhu was accepted for publication in the Asian Journal of Mathematics (AJM). The submitted paper appears to be mainly an exposition of Perelman’s work on the Geometrization Conjecture, however it asserted that there were gaps in Perelman’s proof, which the authors filled. That was a serious assertion. The decision to publish the Cao-Zhu paper was made by the two editors-in-chief of the AJM, without consultation with the journal’s twenty-six member editorial board, even though it was known that the authors had deep personal attachments to the editors-in-chief. The members of the editorial board of the AJM were notified of the pending publication a few days before the journal issue appeared, but were not shown the paper, an abstract, or reports by independent referees.
    There must not be very much bad behavior in the Mathematics community for Birman to complain about this. Here is what happened.

    Perelman published what he claimed was a proof of the Poincare and Geometrization Conjectures in some papers around 2003. The papers appeared to have some gaps, and most mathematicians were still unsure in 2006 as to whether Perelman had a complete proof or not. If correct, it would be the biggest result in ten years. The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) meets every four years, and the August 2006 meeting would surely want to make an announcement as to whether the proof is correct.

    Several groups of mathematicians worked thru Perelman's details, and wrote up more complete proofs. The new papers convinced everyone that Perelman's theorem was correct. According to the New Yorker article, S.-T. Yau rushed one of them into print in time for the ICM to award a Fields Medal to Perelman for the proof.

    I am still baffled as to how anyone could find fault with this. Three years is a long time to wait for a resolution of this issue. If Yau sped up the process by a couple of months, so much the better. The Math community needed to know whether the theorem was correct or not.

    Perhaps someone might think that the new papers complicate the process of assigning credit for the proof the conjectures. How much credit should goto Richard Hamilton and other who did the work leading up to Perelman's papers, how much to Perelman, and how much to the later mathematicians who filled in the details?

    These credit issues are secondary, at best. The really important thing was to determine correctness of the theorems, and to make a readable proof available. That has now happened, and Yau contributed to it.

    People can debate the credit if they want, but there are no facts in dispute. Perelman published his papers promptly on a public web server. If anyone wants to form an opinion about the completeness of his arguments, then he can just download the papers and read them for himself. Nothing Yau or anyone else can do will change that.

    Other academic fields have endless squabbling about who deserves credit for what. In many cases, big-shot scientists take credit for what a grad student did, and no one outside the lab knows for sure. In spite of attempts by Sylvia Nasar and the New Yorker magazine to artificially create controversy, the Math community has very few such disputes.

     
    Maxwell pioneered relativity
    PhysicsWorld magazine says:
    James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. ...

    Or consider relativity: mention it and everyone thinks of Einstein. Yet it was Maxwell in 1877 who introduced the term into physics, and had noticed well before then how the interpretation of electromagnetic induction was different depending on whether one considers a magnet approaching a wire loop or a loop approaching a magnet. It was from these "asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena" that Einstein began his work on special relativity.

    Had he not died so young, Maxwell would almost certainly have developed special relativity a decade or more before Einstein. Moreover, it was through reading Maxwell's article "Ether" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Albert Michelson came to invent the interferometer – a new kind of instrument that he and Edward Morley used in 1887 to discover that the speed of light is the same in all directions.

    Lorentz and Poincare did discover special relativity before Einstein.

    Tuesday, Dec 12, 2006
     
    Pinochet died
    The great Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet has died. He was hated for proving that free-market economic policies work much better than Marxist ones. Leftists complain that about 2k Chileans died under his rule, but AFAIK they are all commie revolutionaries who were out to destroy Chile.

    People commonly claim that the USA had something to do with the 1973 Chile coup. No connection was ever proved. Wash Post editorial says:

    It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.

    Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. ...

    The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

    Thanks to Alex Forshaw.

    Monday, Dec 11, 2006
     
    Anti-Zionists speak up
    USA Today reports:
    TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran on Monday hosted a conference gathering prominent Holocaust deniers that it said would examine whether the World War II genocide of Jews took place, drawing condemnation from Israel and Germany.

    The conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an apparent attempt to burnish his status at home and abroad as a tough opponent of Israel. The hard-liner president has described the Holocaust as a "myth" and called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

    Organizers touted the conference as a scholarly gathering aimed at discussing the Holocaust away from Western taboos, but the 67 participants from 30 countries were predominantly Holocaust deniers. They included David Duke — the former Louisiana state representative and Ku Klux Klan leader — and France's Robert Faurisson and Australian Frederick Toben, who was jailed in Germany in 1999 for questioning the Holocaust.

    The conference opened with a declaration that "Anti-Semitism has never existed in the Muslim territories".

    This doesn't bother me. They are not literally anti-semites because they are not opposed to Semites. They oppose the Jewish religion. Germany is in no position to complain as it has no free speech on the subject. If it wants an open examination of the truth, it should host its own conference and allow people to express their opinions.

    No, what offends me today is Jimmy Carter complaining about how public discussion of his latest Mideast peace plan is being suppressed:

    Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that ``he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel.''
    Carter has new book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid that blames Israel and is sympathetic to Palestinian Arab terrorists. He thinks that if he were President, he could talk Israel into trading land for peace.

    Israel has being trying to trade land for peace for decades. The Palestinian arabs have been offered an independent state many times, and every single time they've turned it down and repeated a vow to destroy Israel.

    Jimmy Carter is an embarrassment to the USA. Pelosi was just stating the obvious -- Carter's kooky views are out of the mainstream and he does not speak for anyone.

     
    Recent Instance of Human Evolution
    another article claiming that humans are still evolving:
    A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found. ... Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

    Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant.

    Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.

    It is funny how all scientists say they believe in evolution, and yet it is always surprising when someone finds some actual evidence of humans evolving.
     
    Science casts doubt on arson convictions
    Apparently a lot of innocent people have gone to prison as arsonists, based on bogus expert testimony. AP reports:
    Up until the 1990s, this is what fire investigators were taught:
  • Fires always burn up, not down.
  • Fires that burn very fast are fueled by accelerants; "normal" fires burn slowly.
  • Arsons fueled by accelerants burn hotter than "normal" fires.
  • The clues to arson are clear. Burn holes on the floor indicate multiple points of origin. Finely cracked glass (called "crazed glass") proves a hotter-than-normal fire. So does the collapse of the springs in bedding or furniture, and the appearance of large blisters on charred wood, known as "alligatoring."

    Firefighters and investigators arrived at these conclusions through decades of observation. But those beliefs had never been given close scientific scrutiny, until an effort that began in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s.

    "There were a lot of rules of thumb, but very little scientific understanding," said Jonathan Barnett, a professor of fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a leader in the investigation of the World Trade Center collapse.

    Once researchers began to apply the scientific method to beliefs about fire, they fell apart.

    A major revelation came from greater understanding of a phenomenon known as "flashover." When a fire burns inside a structure, it sends heat and gases to the ceiling until it reaches a certain temperature — and then in a critical transition, everything combustible in that space will catch fire. Instead of a fire in a room, now there is a room on fire.

    When that happens, it can leave any number of signs that investigators earlier thought meant arson — like the burn holes on the floor that used to prove multiple starting points. And it can cause a fire to burn down from the ceiling — not up as investigators had been taught.

    Significantly, flashover can create very hot and very fast-moving fires. And it can occur within just a few minutes, dashing the concept that only arson fires fueled by accelerants can quickly rage out of control.

    And the crazed glass? It comes from water being sprayed on hot glass, not a hot fire. The collapse of bed springs and the "alligatoring" — they can't say anything definitive about a fire's cause.

    The studies began to chip away at the old beliefs — critics call them myths — but it took years. Through the 1980s, texts at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md., still taught the traditional techniques.

    It wasn't until 1992, when a guide to fire investigations by the National Fire Protection Association — "NFPA921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations" — clearly laid out, in a document relied upon by authorities nationwide, that the earlier beliefs were wrong.

  • More discussion on Slashdot. Judges and lawyers usually know nothing about science, and have a long history of allowing junk science in court.

    Saturday, Dec 09, 2006
     
    Reconsidering Brown v Board of Education
    Adam Liptak writes:
    IF there is a sacred text in the American legal canon, it is the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It is the court’s one undisputed triumph, and no Supreme Court nominee who expressed doubt about the decision would ever be confirmed. Who can argue, after all, with the wisdom of putting an end to state-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools?

    But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.

    During the argument, two sets of justices managed, with equal vehemence, to invoke Brown -- while understanding it to require precisely opposite things.

    Brown v Board was actually a terrible decision. It was an attempt to make social policy based on some dubious assumptions and incoherent arguments. The proof that it is overrated is here -- everyone agrees that it was a great decision, but no one can agree on what it means.

    Friday, Dec 08, 2006
     
    String Theory reviews
    (Duplicate post deleted.)
     
    String Theory reviews
    String theorist Joe Polchinski reviews a couple of books critical of String Theory, with footnotes here.
    But what about the lack of predictions? This is the key question, for Woit, for Smolin and for string theory. Why have the last 20 years been a time of unusually little contact between theory and experiment? The problem is partly on the experimental side: The Standard Model works too well. It takes great time, ingenuity and resources to try to look beyond it, and often what is found is still the Standard Model.
    Polchinski admits that ST cannot make any predictions, and furthermore says no one can even predict how long it will take ST to make any predictions.
    A major point for Woit is that no one knows exactly what string theory is, because it is specified only through an infinite mathematical series whose sum is ill-defined. This assertion is partly true: With new physical theories there is often a long period between the first insight and the final mathematical form. For quantum field theory, the state of affairs that Woit describes lasted for half a century [5].

    [5] I am counting from the mid-20’s, when the commutation relations for the electromagnetic field were first written down, to the mid-70’s when lattice gauge theory gave the first reasonably complete definition of a QFT, and when nonperturbative effects began to be understood systematically.

    This is nonsense. Throughout those 50 years, QFT had enough theory to make numerical predictions that could be tested experimentally.

    His defense of ST is quite weak. You would think that he would be able to point to some hypothesis or prediction or argument to persuade that ST is on to something worthwhile.

    It is also odd the way the ST crowd castigate the Standard Model. They all have some sort of ideological belief that the SM theory is incorrect, and express bewilderment every time it is confirmed by experiment.


    Wednesday, Dec 06, 2006
     
    Speaking truth to power
    Jonathan writes about this phrase:
    The phrase has been on my own mind recently, but I disagree with what Joe has to say. I don't think the phrase "speaking truth to power" is in any way a special province of leftists, liberals, feminists, etc. And I don't think that "Allahu Akhbar" is in any way commensurate with it.

    "Speaking truth to power" is a situation that obtains in a classic David and Goliath scenario, the underdog against the powerful established seat of power (As in, "What did David, representing Truth, say to Goliath, representing Power, just before Truth clobbered Power?" I think of it in terms of the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, and the way he broke down "fixation of belief" (based on our innate urge to remove doubt) into three methods: (a) Tenacity, (b) Authority, and (c) Science. Fixating belief by tenacity is demonstrated by the case of the ostrich hiding its head in the sand: if only I believe the problem will go away, it will go away. Obviously, that is not a good way to fixate belief. History can be seen, in part, as a struggle between Authoritarian belief-fixaters and Science belief-fixaters. The classic "speak truth to power" play comes in when (let's call him) "the little guy", armed only with (what he perceives as) the "truth", confronts Mr. Power and says: "You've got it all wrong." In the case of bureaucracies, it's been said the the first and foremost cardinal rule of the tribe is to ensure survival of the bureacratic entity, expand its power base and budget, etc. Sometimes, it's said, an "inconvenient truth" (sorry to quote as dismal a person as Al Gore) will come to the attention of such bureacracy, and, rather than turning to science to verify (or dispel) the alleged truth, or even turning to sympathetic, status-quo leaning authority for that matter, the bureacracy will try to ignore the alleged truth in the hopes that the threat to its interests will just go away (fixating belief by tenacity -- some would say that President Bush's repeated mantra of "Stay The Course" reveals an effort to fixate belief by tenacity). If tenacity starts to fail, a bureaucratic administrator may seek a ruling from a higher-level bureaucrat (e.g. an administrative law judge), say, in an effort to dispel the threat to the cherished bureacracy. A quickie example of "speaking truth to power" is the time I got my eyes checked out for flight lessons, the FAA eye doc said "You're good to go", and then a week later I get a bureaucratic computer-generated letter from FAA saying I couldn't continue my lessons due to bad eyesight -- I had to call the FAA, tell them I'd passed the test, check your records, etc., and finally they said "Okay, we were wrong, you're right, go ahead and fly, etc." (Although I had the truth on my side, I was dealing with a big )i.e. powerful) government bureaucracy, so I thought "If their computers say I have bad eyesight, they might, as government officials, just throw up their hands and say "Sorry, we can only do what the computer tells us to.")

    That's a personal example on a very small scale -- but, something else I disagree with, is that I certainly don't think the phenomenon is limited to liberals or leftists or feminists. Those groups may have tried to co-opt "speaking truth to power" as a code-phrase, but that is only because they are perceiving themselves as the underdog valiantly fighting powerful, established authorities whose interests, they perceive, run counter to their own. Recently, I ran across the phrase a few times, once was the other night when I heard Charles Krauthammer use it in a roundtable discussion of fellow journalists. Also, several months ago, conservative blogger Pam Geller (Atlas Shrugs) used the phrase to describe the tactics of Italian author Oriana Fallaci, who was on trial in Italy for writing her book which is highly critical of the Muslim religion as practiced in Europe. In fact, Italy ("Power") passed a law stating it is illegal to criticize Islam, to do so is now considered a hate crime -- Islam has expressed power in the form of Italian legislation (and in fact, such power takes the form of suppression of truth-seeking via criticism). Fallaci chose to speak truth to that power (truth being "criticism of Islam"), and, as a result of speaking truth to power, she was placed on trial (before she died). Finally, I also think of this phrase in terms of "biting the hand that feeds you". Generally speaking, you're not supposed to do that, but OTOH if Mr. Power starts to get out of control, in that situation sometimes the lower folks on the totem pole need to step up to the plate, blow whistles, risk alienating authority, etc. As Colin Powell puts it, "Being responsible means sometimes pissing people off." I believe he may have stated that in the context of a speech on leadership, where he was talking about the fact that, as a supervisor of others, you aren't in a popularity contest and that sometimes your decisions will piss off some subordinates. I believe it also cuts the other way, and, as is the case with me suing a racist ex-employer, sometimes the subordinates must stand up and tell Power it's doing something wrong, and thus risk pissing off The Folks Who Are Currently In Charge.

    So, "speaking truth to power" should be no big mystery. It often rears its head when The Old Guard doesn't want to hand over power to The New Sheriff In Town, instead they want to go out kicking and screaming, and you have to stand up to them, armed only with the truth, and say:" Hey. Mellow Out. Act Your Age. It's High Time To Step Down In Favor Of A Younger Man (or Woman)" In a very real sense, the American Revolution was an object lesson in Speaking The Truth to the British Redcoats In Power.

    Joe responds:
    Lordy!!! Look, "speaking truth to power" came from people like Toni, Maya and Jesse, and was probably rooted in left wing lit crit twenty years ago. It's one of those code phrases like "viewing such and such through the LENS of such and such." It's just standard-issue street cred lingo that has gone mainstream. It's just a PC way of stating the concept that shows your left-wing bona fides. That Krauthammer is using it just shows that it has gone mainstream. You know, like rap. Ugh.
    Jonathan responds:
    "Speaking Truth To Power" is NOT leftist in origin. Apparently this phrase was born in the efforts of German Quakers to resist Nazi tyrrany. A simple Google search gave some intersting results. If this source is accurate, as it would appear to be, it shows that your friend Joe is all wet and may require a large "beach" towel to get dry. From: Living The Truth, Speaking To Power:
    The phrase "speaking truth to power" goes back to 1955, when the American Friends Service Committee published Speak Truth to Power, a pamphlet ii at [sic] proposed a new approach to the Cold War. Its title, which came to Friend Milton Mayer toward the end of the week in summer 1954 when the composing committee finished work on the document, has become almost a cliche; it has become common far beyond Quaker circles, often used by people who have no idea of its origins. (One current example: Anita Hill entitled her memoir of her sensational charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Speaking Truth to Power.)

    To speak truth to power sounds so much like an integral part of Quakerism that some modem Friends have simply assumed the phrase goes back to the seventeenth century rather than arriving late in the middle of ours. It reflects what many contemporary Friends would like to believe is the characteristic Quaker stance toward political authority, hallowed in practice if not the exact words. Yet in its origins it was a political statement, entitling an explicitly political document.

    Our confusion about this phrase and what we think it represents is what makes Hans A. Schmitt’s book, Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness such relevant reading for Friends. A Frankfurt-born historian, who retired at the beginning of this decade from a productive career at the University of Virginia, Schmitt has told a compelling story about how the tiny German Yearly Meeting responded to monstrous evil. ...

    The Quaker band of believers in Germany was "lucky" in this sense, even though some fell victim to the regime they had to endure, as Schmitt’s non-Quaker father did. They happened to live in an extraordinary period, times demanding more than simply surviving in a specific time and a specific place; most felt compelled to do what their religious faith required. They did not so much speak truth as they did live the truth, allowing their scattered and mostly uncoordinated examples of faithfulness to speak to power.

    Enough of them defied convention sufficiently to merit our admiration and attention. By their very existence and their growth during the dozen dark years of the Third Reich, these Quakers demonstrated that ordinary middle-class people could remain faithful to their testimonies and accept the drastic consequences of radical faith. In now having their history told, they continue to inspire by their example.

    Ergo, the origin of the phrase is not leftist. Its original meaning was to describe the actions of the sort of person who was the exact opposite of the proverbial "Good Germans" who did whatever the goose-steppers ("Power") told them to.
     
    Trying to disprove Intelligent Design
    Evolutionist Jack Woodall writes:
    What can we make of the further complications that led the Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) to extinction in Britain? It entrusts a critical stage in its life cycle to the tender care of a single species of red ant that is particularly finicky about where it nests. ...

    So here you have an insect that depends for its very existence on a fragile chain of circumstances that is easily broken by bad weather, changes in exposure to grazing due to human intervention and disease, loss of its unique food plant, and loss of its protector ant species. If I were to design such a silly system I'd at least choose the most abundant, hardy species of ant to host my caterpillars, and ensure that they could feed on other plants beside thyme, and at other stages than the bud. To me, the case of the Large Blue is conclusive disproof of the theory of intelligent design.

    Evolutionists are split between those who say that Intelligent Design (ID) is a non-scientific hypothesis (because it is untestable), and those who say that it is a testable hypothesis that has been disproven. Woodall is in the latter camp. And his best argument is the extinction of the Large Blue butterfly?!

    This is weird. If the blue butterfly had not gone extinct, would that have disproved survival of the fittest? Certainly not.


    Tuesday, Dec 05, 2006
     
    Is Richard Dawkins endorsing eugenics?
    Evolutionist Richard Dawkins causes more controversy:
    Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, but is best known as one of the world's most outspoken current opponents of religious belief, giving lectures and interviews and writing articles in which "fundamentalist" Christianity is among his favourite targets.

    "I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them," Dawkins wrote Sunday.


    Sunday, Dec 03, 2006
     
    Speak Truth To Power
    On NBC Meet The Press, I just heard the new US Senate Armed Service chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) say:
    We’ve got to have a change in Iraq policy. We have to have someone who will speak truth to power and not just tell the president what he wants to hear.
    He was defending his support for Robert Gates as the new Secy of Defense. I was puzzled by what he meant by "speak truth to power".

    Some brief research indicates that "speak truth to power" is a Quaker code-phrase for a pacifist agenda. According to the Quakers, it dates back to the 18th century. It is the title of this 1955 Quaker essay against the use of military power.

    The title "Speaking Truth To Power" was used by Anita Hill in her 1997 memoir about her attempt to sabotage the career of her mentor, Clarence Thomas. She promoted her book by saying things like, "My reality did not comport with his reality".

    I don't know what to make of this, except that it is very strange for Carl Levin to be using this jargon in this context.

    Joe writes:

    "Speak truth to power" is a phrase very commonly used by feminists and leftists in general. It's like muslims yelling "Allahu Akbar". It's basically a left-wing cliche.
    The phrase must mean something, and there must be some reason those people use it.

    The phrase Allahu Akbar is arabic for Allah is Greater. Literally, it boasts of the superiority of the Mohammedan god. Sometimes it is just a routine prayer beginning. It is supposed to be recited whenever animals are slaughtered. It is also commonly said by Mohammedans when they want to cheer the terrorist murder of infidels.


    Saturday, Dec 02, 2006
     
    New immigration exam
    The Si Valley paper reports:
    Some immigrants who want to become Americans will be given a new, more detailed test next year, one designed to gauge not just their memorization skills, but also a broader sense of their knowledge of government and history. ...

    The Mercury News asked five experts in immigration, law and government to take a swipe at a few of the new questions ...

    Just about everyone knew the U.S. Constitution was the supreme law of the land, although Davis and Peerally quibbled that the U.S. Supreme Court could be the correct answer, because it has the final say on what the Constitution means.

    No, U.S. Supreme Court does not have the final say on what the Constitution means. The newly-elected Congressmen will be taking an oath to the Constitution, not to the the Supreme Court's interpretation.

    The article makes it sound as tho the new test is a difficult test. In fact, a new citizen just has to answer 6 out of 10 questions correctly, and the 10 questions are selected from a list of just 144 question. All 144 questions with answers are posted on www.uscis.gov. Many of the questions are quite easy, like "Who is the President now?" and "What country is on the southern border of the United States?".

    The newspaper had to print a correction the next day over whether Mississippi or Missouri river was the longest in the USA.

    Here are the old INS questions

     
    Atheist scientists
    NY Times reports on a science and religion conference:
    Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief" ... ...

    "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." [also Weinberg]


    Thursday, Nov 30, 2006
     
    Blair on creationists
    UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said this in a recent interview:
    One subject that is of great concern to scientists is creationism. There has been a suggestion that creationism is being taught in some British schools. What are your views on this?

    This can be hugely exaggerated. I've visited one of the schools in question and as far as I'm aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way. If I notice creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country then that's the time to start worrying. As I've said, it's really important for science to fight the battles it needs to fight. When something like MMR [measles vaccine] arises, or stem cells, that's the time to have a real debate.

    He's right, the issue is hugely exaggerated by anti-religion scientists and others. Creationism is not taught to any significant degree anywhere in the USA or UK. Occasionally some teacher will make an off-hand comment that some people believe in creation, and that's about all. It is not in the curriculum anywhere.

    The preoccupation of the leftist-atheist-evolutionists with this issue is kooky.


    Tuesday, Nov 28, 2006
     
    Distinguishing equality, equity, and law
    The Wash Post reports:
    The Democratic takeover of Congress should revive interest in an issue many Americans think is settled -- adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment ..

    Supporters say that despite advancements for women's rights since the ERA's official death in 1982 -- primarily prohibitions against sex discrimination -- the constitutional amendment is needed because women lag in career advancement and pay equity.

    The word "equity" has a technical legal meaning here. Medieval England had a very important distinction between "law" and "equity". Law courts decided cased based on written statutes. Equity courts were delegated by the king to issue orders based on the judge's opinions and prejudices, regardless of the statutes.

    American courts have almost entirely abandoned the concept of separate law and equity courts, but the distinction is still important. It sometimes happens that a lawsuit proves damages, and the judge is persuaded to order an "equitable" remedy because the statute only allows a monetary remedy and that is considered to be inadequate.

    So why are ERA advocates demanding a law that will give them "pay equity" instead of pay equality? That is because we already has a law that guarantees women pay equality. They want to be able to bring lawsuits asking supremacist judges to order pay increases based on some goofy non-statutory notion of what is reasonable.


    Monday, Nov 27, 2006
     
    Promoting red wine as healthy
    The NY Times reports on evidence that supposedly says that red wine is good for your health, and says:
    As an industry that is closely regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Mr. Mondavi said, "it is blatantly against the law for any alcoholic beverage producers to make any health claim regardless of the facts or the accuracy." ...

    "We actually resigned from the Wine Institute because we wanted to come out and say wine is healthy and good for you," Mr. Mondavi said.

    "We put on a back label, that wine is healthy and recommended in the Bible," he added. "The B.A.T.F. sent us a cease and desist letter and made us change the label even though we went back to Washington and showed them the scientific evidence and read them the Bible passages."

    I am with the ATF, because such labels would be fraudulent. The recent rat study used dosages that were inapplicable to humans. Other studies that have claimed benefits to light alcohol drinking have all been flawed.

    The Bible only recommends wine over dirty water that is contaminated with cholera and other diseases. Americans have clean water. A truthful label would tell the whole story.


    Sunday, Nov 26, 2006
     
    Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years
    New Scientist magazine asked prominent intellectuals to forecast the future.

    The brilliant theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft says:

    A spectacular breakthrough that could take place in my field is the construction of a theory that not only unites quantum mechanics and gravity but also predicts every single detail of the evolution of the universe.

    The theory, or model, would have to be "deterministic". It should describe certainties, not probabilities. I put deterministic between quotation marks because it would not enable intelligent creatures in that universe to predict the future, since nothing inside that universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself.

    In such a model, all that is needed are the local laws, the boundary conditions and the initial state. The rest is mathematics. Most of my colleagues have good reasons to suspect that such a model cannot exist. That's why its discovery would be a breakthrough. I for one think it might be possible, but at present we do not understand how to do the maths.

    This is heresy. Conventional physics wisdom is that deterministic theories have been proved to be impossible. Anyone who disputes that is considered a nut.

    Except that no one will call 'tHooft a nut. He just got one of the very few Nobel prizes in theoretical physics, and is credited with figuring out how to renormalize the quantum field theory of strong and weak forces.

    Physicists are so sure that the world is non-deterministic that they have quantum cryptography systems, such as BB84 published in 1984, that use the non-determinacy in order to assure that info was transmitted securely. It is commonly claimed that BB84 has been proven secure that the laws of physics prevent any possible eavesdropping.

    Conventional cryptosystems typically use special passwords or keys for their security. If some adversary had unlimited computer resources, he could test all possible keys, and eventually be able to crack the system. Cryptography is the science of making sure that any such key search is infeasible, so that info is available only to those who have been granted the proper keys.

    The appeal of quantum cryptography is that no assumptions have to be made about the computational resources of adversaries. The laws of physics will make it provably impossible for anyone to spy on you.

    But quantum cryptography has not replaced ordinary cryptography because it cannot do most of the things that ordinary cryptography can. Those in the field now call it quantum key distribution (QKD) because all it does is to transmit some probable bits down a dedicated line, allowing keys to be computed from those bits. If you want to use encryption, authentication, repeaters, or anything else, you need to use ordinary cryptography.

    A lot of people thought that BB84 was proved secure, under standard quantum mechanical assumptions, back in 1984. But it was not. The so-called proofs had various holes allowing possible attacks. I am just talking about mathematical holes here. You can find recent papers which find holes and claim to fix them here, here, and here. Briefly, the physicists failed to consider the possibility that an adversary would gain probabilistic info about several bits without indentifying individual bits, and they failed to consider that someone might store captured info in a quantum computer and save it for an attack later.

    Any physical implementation of QKD is likely to have physical attacks as well. No real system can perfectly match the idealized models of the QKD papers. Info could be leaked in subtle ways. For example, QKD systems typically assume that two photons can be sent down an optical fiber such that the only difference is that their polarizations differ by 90 degrees. That can be done approximately, but not perfectly.

    If 't Hooft is right and the laws of physics are deterministic, the basic quantum mechanical assumptions underlying QKD are wrong. Those who promote QKD should admit that the security depends on physical assumptions that may or may not be correct.


    Saturday, Nov 25, 2006
     
    Genes affect attitudes
    A 1998 twin study has conclusions that are described this way:
    Your differing attitudes on abortion, birth control, immigrants, gender roles, and race are mostly due to your genes, while your attitudes toward education, capitalism and punishment are due to your life experiences.
    There are also other studies like this. I am not sure these particular conclusions are correct, but it does seem likely that certain attitudes are correlated with certain genes. If so, then this should have a bearing on what people should regard as a "choice" in others, and what is not.

    Many people say that we shouldn't say anything bad about another race because race is an inborn trait that no one has any choice about. But what if certain attitudes are inborn, and not a matter of choice? Should we not criticize them either? That is one theory for not criticizing the religions of others.

    I think that if people are really going to censor themselves and others based on some theory about what is inborn, then they should be prepared to accept the science about what really is or is not inborn.


    Wednesday, Nov 22, 2006
     
    Horganism trashes science books
    Science writer John Horgan trashes a pro-Prozac book:
    If you read the peer-reviewed clinical trials rather than the puffery of Kramer you would know that Prozac and other SSRIs are no more effective than earlier antidepressants, such as tricyclics, and antidepressants as a whole are no more effective than psychoanalysis and other talking cures. When I made this claim in The Undiscovered Mind in 1999, it was treated as highly controversial, but now it's been overwhelmingly confirmed.
    Then he follows that up with this:
    Re The Bell Curve, depictions of Murray and Herrnstein as champions of truth defying political correctness make my blood boil. Many studies have shown that if you repeatedly tell a group of people—girls or members of an ethnic group or whomever—that they are inferior and there is nothing they can do about it, they will perform at a lower level. In other words, Murray and Herrnstein made a serious social problem worse with their diagnosis and prescription.
    He's got a point with the Prozac, but then the argument against The Bell Curve is odd. If The Bell Curve is psychological hurtful to people, then I would expect that telling people that Prozac is ineffective would be similarly hurtful.

    Horgan responds:

    Here's the big difference: You don't have to take Prozac or pray to the Virgin Mary. You can take a homeopathic pill or consult a witch doctor instead. You have a choice. When it comes to your race or gender, you have no choice. That puts racism and sexism in a different moral category than attacks on religion or quasi-religions like psychopharmacology.
    I am not sure why "choice" should make such a big difference. If it turns out that depression is caused by genetic factors (so that people with depression have no choice), then I don't see why that should have a bearing on the availability of scientific books on how to treat depression.

    Joe writes:

    Well, Horgan has really clarified the IQ debate for me. Whites do more poorly than Asians and Jews because they have been told they are inferior, right?
    Horgan is one of the better science writers around. On this issue, his objections seem to be based more on politics than science.

    I wonder what someone like Horgan would think of this NY Times story:

    When President Bush signed his sweeping education law a year into his presidency, it set 2014 as the deadline by which schools were to close the test-score gaps between minority and white students that have persisted since standardized testing began. ...

    Despite concerted efforts by educators, the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school.

    "The gaps between African-Americans and whites are showing very few signs of closing," Michael T. Nettles, a senior vice president at the Educational Testing Service, said in a paper he presented recently at Columbia University. One ethnic minority, Asians, generally fares as well as or better than whites.

    The reports and their authors, in interviews, portrayed an educational landscape in which test-score gaps between black or Hispanic students and whites appear in kindergarten and worsen through 12 years of public education.

    Some researchers based their conclusions on federal test results, while others have cited state exams, the SATs and other widely administered standardized assessments. Still, the studies have all concurred: The achievement gaps remain, perplexing and persistent.

    If these results are discouraging to blacks, then is the NY Times wrong to publish this story? What if stories like this cause Asians to do better?

    If the achievement gaps are really "perplexing and persistent", and some social scientist has figured out an explanation, then should he refuse to publish out of fear that it would be upsetting to those with some egalitarian political philosophy?

    There are billions of dollars riding on these educational policies. If someone has research that answers the perplexing gaps, then I certainly hope that he will publish it so that we can adopt some policies that will work.

    Horganism continues:

    Re some readers’ defense of The Bell Curve, the worst of the worst science books, see ...

    The Flynn effect cannot be explained by genetic evolution. As Flynn once explained, "Over one or two generations, only a fanatical eugenics program could have made a significant contribution to IQ gains, and if anything mating trends have been dysgenic." The question is, what could the non-genetic cause be? Every hypothesis put forward so far has flaws.

    I don't get the argument here. The Bell Curve popularized the Flynn effect. I guess the book expressed an opinion about it, I don't remember. Horgan maintains that the Flynn effect is real and unexplained. How this makes The Bell Curve a terrible book, I don't know.

    Here is another NY Times article on the achievement gap.


    Tuesday, Nov 21, 2006
     
    The Best Science Show on Television
    NY Science Times reports:
    Mr. Hyneman and his colleague, Adam Savage, are the hosts of "Mythbusters" on the Discovery Channel. It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What “Mythbusters” is best known for, to paraphrase Mr. Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science’s sake. ...

    The show, which has been on the air since October 2003, may be wacky, but Mr. Hyneman and Mr. Savage employ thinking and processes that are grounded in scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis and test it methodically. After research and experimentation, they might determine that they have “busted” a myth or confirmed it, or they might simply deem it “plausible” but not proved.

    It is the kind of logical system of evidence-based conclusions that scientists understand but that others can sometimes find difficult to grasp. And so “Mythbusters” fans say the show has hit on a great way of teaching the process of scientific discovery.

    I agree. No other TV science show is as good at forming a hypothesis and then empirically testing that hypothesis. That is the essence of science.

    Too many TV shows and popular books dwell on biographical details of the life of Einstein or some other scientist, or give some other personalized narrative without explaining the real science.


    Monday, Nov 20, 2006
     
    25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time
    The latest Discover magazine has a list of 25+8 greatest science books. I would not have included any of these, as they are mostly examples of bad science:
    • Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
    • The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)
    • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)
    • Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
    • The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)
    • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
    • Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)
    • The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene (1999)

    I would think that the greatest science books would use the scientific method. That is, they would form hypotheses and then carry out experiments to test them.

    Most of the better books on the list have a lot of interesting theorizing, but provide no real way to determine whether the theory is correct or not. These aren't the best examples of science. I'd like to see a list of science books that describe some real science. The books by Newton, Einstein, and Feynman derive formulas that are empirically testable.


    Sunday, Nov 19, 2006
     
    Global warming causes good weather
    The Chicago Tribune reports:
    Most tropical storm experts had predicted that this year's Atlantic hurricane season would be deadly. Instead, with just a few days remaining in the June-November hurricane prime time, 2006 has turned out to be a dud. ...

    In fact, this year there have been just nine named storms, only five of which became hurricanes and only two of which were intense - and none of them hit the U.S. mainland as hurricanes. And there's nothing more on the horizon between now and Nov. 30, when the 2006 hurricane season will formally close.

    Last year, there were 27 named storms, and the leftist ideologues blamed them on global warming.

    Saturday, Nov 18, 2006
     
    Becoming a Quack
    Ever wonder how a respected Harvard professor could go off the deep end and devote his life to interview people who reported space alien abductions, and then writing a book about them as if they were real? I just learned this about Prof. John Mack:
    Following encouragement from longtime friend Thomas Kuhn (who predicted that the subject might be controversial, but urged Mack to simply collect data and temporarily ignore prevailing materialist, dualist and "either/or" analysis), Mack began concerted study and interviews.
    Kuhn was a famous philosopher who convinced everyone that Science periodically jumps irrationally from one fad to another. I didn't know that he went around giving practical suggestions on how to make those irrational leaps.

    Friday, Nov 17, 2006
     
    Evolution and medicine
    Psychiatry prof David V. Forrest writes:
    From antibiotic resistance of microbes to ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in embryology, from the presence of vestigial parts to organization of the neuraxis, evolution is always in the forefront of modern medical understanding. Even the psychoanalytic institute at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons had a course in the evolutionary biology of behaviors such as maternal attachment as early as the late '60s.
    I wonder what other voodoo science he learned in those psychiatry classes. He probably learned "ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny" from faked Haeckel diagrams, and that autism was some sort of evolutionary punishment for mothers who don't form proper attachments to their babies.

    Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006
     
    You are what your grandmother ate
    New Scientist reports:
    A mother’s diet can change the behaviour of a specific gene for at least two subsequent generations, a new study demonstrates for the first time.

    Feeding mice an enriched diet during pregnancy silenced a gene for light fur in their pups. And even though these pups ate a standard, un-enriched diet, the gene remained less active in their subsequent offspring.

    The findings could help explain the curious results from recent studies of human populations – including one showing that the grandchildren of well-fed Swedes had a greater risk of diabetes.

    The new mouse experiment lends support to the idea that we inherit not only our genes from our parents, but also a set of instructions that tell the genes when to become active. These instructions appear to be passed on through “epigenetic” changes to DNA – genes can be activated or silenced according to the chemical groups that are added onto them.

    This is completely contrary to conventional genetic theory. If confirmed, some textbooks will have to be revised.

    Update: Here is another article on behavioral (non-genetic) influences on evolution. Evolutionists have been saying for 100 years that such theories are wrong, but more evidence for them is piling up.

     
    Quoting President Bush
    Joe sends this 2003 Wash Post article:
    For Bush, a Methodist who calls himself a born-again Christian, spiritual vocabulary is a frequent feature of his public speaking.
    And yet MSNBC said this in 2004:
    George Bush has not said directly that he was ever born again.
    I don't know why it is so difficult for reporters to understand what Bush says. His public comments are on the record and easily accessible. If he said that he was "born again", then it would be easy to find the quote.

    People variously claim that Bush admitted to being an alcoholic or a cocaine user; said Iraq had WMD and was an imminent threat; claimed that God told him to wage war against Iraq; and many other things. When you hear someone claim that Bush lied -- ask for the quote.

     
    Dawkins believes in multiple universes to explain atheism
    Horganism writes:
    David Van Biema, the TIME interviewer (who deserves a pat for good questions), asks both men to comment on the observation that "if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible."

    Dawkins responds that "maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning." ...

    I hate to say this, but Collins is right. The multiverse theory is just as preposterous and lacking in evidence as divine creation.

    Since S.J. Gould died, Dawkins has become the leading spokesman for evolutionism, atheism, and the use of Science to attack religion. Too bad he also promotes goofy unscientific ideas like the multiverse as an alternative to religion.

    Saturday, Nov 11, 2006
     
    Stumbling on Happiness
    Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, writes in a LA Times op-ed:
    Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features — features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

    First, global warming lacks a mustache. ...

    That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, ...

    No, he is wrong about this. Millions of people are sufficiently worried about flu that they get flu vaccines. No one gets an anthrax vaccine.
    Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a shame. ...

    The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil ...

    Not only that, but global warming seems to do us more good than harm.
    Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. ... Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.
    This is kooky stuff. The human brain is fully capable of understanding global warming. Under some of the more likely scenarios, sea level will rise a foot or so over the next hundred years. If we were willing to give up part of our standard of living for the sake of fighting global warming, then maybe the increase could be slowed to 10 inches or so. The rational response to global warming scare stories is to ask: What can we do? What would the costs be under likely scenarios? What will the net benefit be for the measures that we might take?

    Until these issues are addressed, the global warming lobby is not even appealing to rational thinkers.

    Gilbert has another op-ed trashed here.


    Friday, Nov 10, 2006
     
    Science pundits deny truth
    Horganism writes:
    As you’ll see if you read her remarks, Dolling is a very well-informed, sophisticated thinker. So are Jim McClellan and all the other scholars, scientists and journalists I know who hold this skeptical view of scientific “truth” (these folks view all truth claims as deserving of quotation marks). This is the position that I denigrate—for lack of a better term--as postmodernism.

    As I’ve tried to explain ad nauseam, postmodernism is a perfectly appropriate response to string theory, multiverse theory, Gaia and psychoanalysis. Theories like these are clearly constructed, invented, not discovered; that’s why I call them ironic. But we have discovered—not invented—evolution by natural selection, the germ theory of infectious disease, the DNA-based model of heredity, the atomic theory of matter, the big bang.

    My inability to convince smart, well-educated people -- including professional science pundits!!! -- that science can achieve truth leaves me frustrated to the point of despair. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I talk to intelligent people who nonetheless believe in a loving, just, omnipotent God.

    He's right. At least those scientists who believe in God will readily admit that their belief is a matter of faith. Those who deny truth are frustrating to deal with.

    Thursday, Nov 09, 2006
     
    Neanderthal brains
    Evolution news:
    According to CNN, human beings may have acquired a gene for developing bigger brains from Neanderthal man. Apparently, 70% of the world's population has a variant of a gene regulating brain size, with this variant being most common in people of European descent (where Neanderthal man lived alongside ancient humans), and least common in people of African descent (where Neanderthal man was non-existent). While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our lineage ancient humans and Neanderthals decided to make love and not war on the ancient plains of Eurasia.
    Here is the NY Times version.

    The standard evolutionist bias is to take fossils that look human, like Neanderthals, and declare them to belong to a separate species. Old fossils that look like chimps, like Lucy, are declared to be human ancestors. Thus, conventional wisdom is that Neanderthals did not interbreed with humans.

    What is unexplained is that Neanderthals lived in Europe 50k years ago, and they look more like Europeans than humans found elsewhere in the world.

    Now this study suggests that Europeans may have gotten the genes for big brains from Neanderthals. This idea may upset some people.

    We actually have enough Neanderthal DNA fragments that it may soon be possible to sequence most of it and answer some of these questions.

    Meanwhile, if Europeans are embarrassed about mating with Neanderthals, Africans might be embarrassed by this:

    One more reason not to eat our close living relatives. Of the three strains of HIV known to infect humans, we know that two - the one causing the global AIDS epidemic and another that has infected a small number of people in Cameroon - came from a chimpanzee virus called SIV. The source of the third strain, which infects people in western central Africa, was a mystery. Now we know it came from gorillas.
    Yes, don't eat them. And certainly don't have sex with them. You might get a disease, and they might get your big brain genes, and evolve into another species that might wipe you out.

    Sunday, Nov 05, 2006
     
    String Theory and the Crackpot Index
    Kuro5hin comments:
    Recently two books, by Peter Woit and by Lee Smolin, have been published questioning whether the enormous theoretical effort applied to the problems of string theory has been fruitful. Both books have been reviewed in several popular publications, and generated substantial discussion both inside and outside of the physics community.

    One response was published several days ago by Briane Greene on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times (also here). A famously grouchy observer called the editorial a long, wistful plea for patience. But what struck me most as I read it was its similarity to the crackpot index maintained by John Baez. So, for fun, I scored it. ...

    Certainly, Dr. Greene has been been working for a long time (10) on a paradigm shift (10), towards which Einstein struggled on his deathbed (30). For his effort, his theory has no equations (10) and no tests (50). With the starting credit, that much makes 105 points.

    Is Dr. Greene a crackpot? No. But is this how physics should be presented to the public?

    Funny. That's right, Greene is not a crackpot, but he sure sounds like one. If he had any real science to talk about, he would be doing that instead of babbling about Einstein's vision. His short op-ed on String Theory mentions Einstein eleven times, even tho Einstein died about 25 years before String Theory got started. It really doesn't have much to do with Einstein.
     
    Fat people cause global warming
    Research shows that fat people cause global warming, but they keep eating anyway:
    Fat people are more reviled than ever, researchers find, even as more people become fat. When smokers and heavy drinkers turned pariah, rates of smoking and drinking went down. Won’t fat people, in time, follow suit? ...

    He cites a famous study in the 1960’s in which children were shown drawings of children with and without disabilities, as well as a drawing of a fat child. Who, they were asked, would you want for your friend? The fat child was picked last.

    Now, three researchers have repeated the study, this time with college students. Once again, almost no one, not even fat people, liked the fat person. ...

    One problem with blaming people for being fat, obesity researchers say, is that getting thin is not like quitting smoking. People struggle to stop smoking, but many, in the end, succeed. Obesity is different. It’s not that the obese don’t care. Instead, as science has shown over and over, they have limited personal control over their weight. Genes play a significant role, the science says.

    Genes play a role in smoking and other addictions also.
     
    Galileo's condemnation: The real and complex story
    An evolutionist Wikipedia editor just removed this paragraph from the article on Galileo Galilei:
    Pietro Redondi has put forward another reading of this history ("Galileo eretico", pub. Italy, 1983; "Galileo: Heretic" (transl: Raymond Rosenthal) Princeton University Press 1987; Penguin 1988). Redondi makes a very detailed and powerful case for the thesis that Galileo's eventual condemnation in 1633 was not to do particularly with his Copernicanism but was everything to do with the fundamental attack on Aristotle that his previous book "The Assayer" (1623) represented. The Jesuits deeply resented this book, which was a spirited attack on Orazio Grassi's (correct) interpretation on the 1618 comets that was widely believed to have been a baleful harbinger of the [[Thirty Years' War]]. By May 1632 the Pope needed the help of the Spanish to stop the Protestant [[Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden]] from crossing the Alps and descending on Rome. And the price of the Spanish was a greater attention to the protection of orthodoxy. They would dearly have liked to arraign Galileo for heresy in his atomistic views presented with such verve and force in "The Assayer", which struck at the heart of the [[Council of Trent|Tridentine]] doctrine of the [[Eucharist]] but they could hardly press this capital charge considering that the Pope himself would also be implicated (since he had welcomed "The Assayer", which was dedicated to him shortly after he was elected). Therefore they chose a lesser charge predating the current Pope, that nevertheless will still silence Galileo. Redondi's thesis was heavily criticised at the time, but subsequently Emerson Thomas McMullen has supported it with a detailed article "Galileo's condemnation: The real and complex story" (Georgia Journal of Science, vol.61(2) 2003).
    This story is news to me.

    For some reason, evolutionists stubbornly cling to certain myths about Galileo. They believe that Galileo was the Prometheus of the Middle Ages, and gave Reason to Man much to the dismay of the Church authorities. When they find out that Galileo was wrong about the comets and the tides, and that he was even wrong about whether the Copernican system had been proved, the evolutionists are annoyed to no end. If the above paragraph is correct, then Galileo's troubles were as much a result of his theology and Biblical interpretation as anything else. It ruins their whole myth.

     
    Liking blue-eyed women
    Here is another goofy evolution theory:
    The researchers, whose study was published online earlier this month in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, theorized that for a blue-eyed man, finding a blue-eyed mate might have a Darwinian payoff: as a father, he could be more certain that a blue-eyed child was his own.

    To test this idea, the researchers showed a group of 88 college students head shots of male and female models, their eye colors digitally manipulated to appear either blue or brown. The students were asked to rank the photos by attractiveness on a scale of one to five.

    Blue-eyed men — or at least the male Norwegian students — preferred blue-eyed women, rating them an average 3.29, compared with 2.79 for the brown-eyed women.

    Female students and brown-eyed men registered no preference by eye color. ...

    Since most Norwegians — 55 percent — have blue eyes, it is possible that the results would differ in other populations, the researchers acknowledged.

    "A cultural explanation is not impossible," Dr. Laeng said, "but it requires a lot of assumptions."

    The evolution explanation also requires a lot of assumptions. How many people even know how recessive genes work? Why didn't they try the experiment with other recessive traits?

    Thursday, Nov 02, 2006
     
    Lost Moon tapes
    GeekNewsCentral reports:
    The site that has reported this story says the Lost Nasa Tapes have been found,, but an a thread on Digg is saying tese are only data tapes and not the original video feed tapes. Now I am going to sit this one out and hope that these are indeed are the lost tapes.

    Some of you may say well so what! Well we have all seen the blurry pictures that the TV companies have archived correct. Well did you realize that they did not have sophisticated transfer equipment then and the raw feed which came in crystal clear at Nasa was the rebroadcast by a Camera recording a Monitor. The original tapes contain the pristine video feed without the blurry lines.

    Those who say that the Moon landing was a hoax will jump on this. They'll say that it is not plausible that the tapes could be lost, and that only low quality tapes were released because analysis would show that they were faked.

    Wednesday, Nov 01, 2006
     
    An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong
    Nicholas Wade reports for the NY Science Times:
    Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has ... [proposed] that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind. ...

    Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up. ...

    His proposal of a moral grammar emerges from a collaboration with Dr. Chomsky, who had taken an interest in Dr. Hauser’s ideas about animal communication. In 2002 they wrote, with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch, an unusual article arguing that the faculty of language must have developed as an adaptation of some neural system possessed by animals, perhaps one used in navigation. From this interaction Dr. Hauser developed the idea that moral behavior, like language behavior, is acquired with the help of an innate set of rules that unfolds early in a child’s development.

    My impression is that Chomsky's ideas are not too popular among evolutionists, because they suggest that humans are qualitatively different from other animals. This new book would similarly suggest that humans are different from animals by being the only ones with a conscience.

    I'll be interested to see how the leftist-atheist-evolutionists will react to this. They might see this as a further opportunity to encroach on religion, and argue that religious morality is fully explained by the theory of evolution, just as evolution explains everything else. Or they might dismiss the whole idea as some sort of heresy against the doctrine that evolution is supposed to prove that humans are just animals.

     
    Scotus blog discussion degenerates
    The discussion about Phyllis Schlafly on the Scotus blog has degenerated into an argument about World War II policies!

    Phyllis Schlafly made a minor comment about the US Supreme Court and majority opinion:

    No one in our country is forced to recite the Pledge, get married, or learn the Ten Commandments. But we are not going allow a few people to censor the will of our overwhelming majority.
    This got a couple of people agitated. One said that it is dangerous to listen to the overwhelming majority. As examples, they cite the WWII internment of Japanese aliens and Nazi Germany!

    He might have a point if the WWII Japanese alien relocation were proposed by the overwhelming majority of the American public, and then stopped by the Supreme Court. But in fact it was the opposite. The policy was supported by FDR, Earl Warren, and the Supreme Court, and there was never any public vote on it.

    I had expected some informed criticism of Phyllis Schlafly's attack on judicial supremacy on the Scotus blog. Instead, the commenters there seem to be living in some sort of fantasy world about how the Supreme Court might have behaved.


    Tuesday, Oct 31, 2006
     
    A Country Ruled by Faith
    Garry Wills has a tirade against Pres. Bush and his religion in the NY Review of Books. (He has written previous books condemning the Roman Catholic Church for various things.) He starts with some silly anti-Bush stuff:
    Bush's conversion at a comparatively young stage in his life was a wrenching away from mainly wasted years. He joined a Bible study culture in Texas that was unlike anything Eisenhower bought into.

    Bush was a saved alcoholic—and here, too, he had no predecessor in the White House. Ulysses Grant conquered the bottle, but not with the help of Jesus.

    Bush was not an alcoholic, and he did not waste his youth. Other USA presidents have been known to study the Bible even more, such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

    Later Wills says:

    An executive at the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, chimed in: "President Bush is to be commended for defending free speech on evolution."[22] By that logic, teaching flat-earthism, or the Ptolemaic system alongside the Copernican system, is a defense of "free speech."
    I wonder what Wills will say when he finds out that NASA engineers frequently use an Earth-centered frame of reference.

    Monday, Oct 30, 2006
     
    String Theory revolutions
    There are two kinds of people who like to use the word "revolution" a lot: Marxists and Kuhnians. The latter are science philosophers who deny that Science is making progress and view it as a sequence of revolutionary shifts that are not rationally based on evidence.

    String Theorists, such as guru John H Schwarz, are always talking about "revolutions". A Science Magazine article about String Theory said:

    ASPEN, COLORADO—Twenty years ago, this chic playground for skiers and celebrities gave birth to a scientific revolution.
    Similar statements here. Brian Greene in NY Times said:
    String theory continues to offer profound breadth and enormous potential. It has the capacity to complete the Einsteinian revolution and could very well be the concluding chapter in our species' age-old quest to understand the deepest workings of the cosmos.
    I wonder if string theorists are overusing the word "revolution" deliberately. That is, they realize that they cannot persuade anyone that their theory is better than anything else, but think that scientists adopt theories like fads or fashions, and if they use the word "revolution" enough times, String Theory will become the dominant paradigm.
     
    Wikipedia bias
    As another example of Wikipedia bias, here is a recent addition to the Neo-creationism page:
    As do postmodernists, neo-creationists reject the traditions arising from the Enlightenment upon which modern scientific epistemology is founded. Neo-creationists seek nothing less than the replacement of empirical and logical evidence with ideology and dogmatic belief. Thus, neo-creationism is considered by Eugenie C. Scott and other critics as the most successful form of irrationalism.
    You cannot find anyone who calls himself a "neo-creationist", or who describes his views in a way resembling the above.

    Even if you think that creationism is a religion, then an encyclopedia should describe it as neutrally as it describes other religions.


    Saturday, Oct 28, 2006
     
    Ohio school election
    NY Times says:
    In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education. ...

    Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was “laughable.”

    Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. ...

    Her opponent, Mr. Sawyer, was urged to run for the Seventh District Board of Education seat by a new organization, Help Ohio Public Education, founded by Dr. Krauss and his colleague Patricia Princehouse, a biologist and historian of science, and Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University.

    I commented before on how Krauss like to mix science and politics. The letter is not on Krauss's web site.

    When scientists say that evolution is "an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth", it is important to understand exactly what they mean. They do not mean that evolution explains the origin of life on Earth, or that all life has a single common ancestor. They mean that the history of life has involved change over time, and that gene populations vary from one generation to the next. It is a bit like saying taxonomy describes the diversity of life on Earth; it doesn't say much.

    The Encyclopædia Britannica defines:

    evolution -- theory in biology postulating that the various types of plants, animals, and other living things on Earth have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations. The theory of evolution is one of the fundamental keystones of modern biological theory.
    If Fink disagrees with teaching this, then she ought to be voted out. My guess is that the NY Times is being misleading. I cannot find where she opposed the teaching of evolution. All I see is that she supported Framework for Teaching Controversial Issues, that doesn't even mention evolution.

    Friday, Oct 27, 2006
     
    Narrow-minded Wikipedia evolutionists
    A Wikipedia editor with the pseudonym FeloniousMonk has been inserting bogus statements into the Phyllis Schlafly biography. He even removed the tag indicating that the neutrality of the article is disputed. He refused to justify his changes for a week, until he finally posted this comment on the Talk page:
    ::I think "doyenne of the shrill right wing harpies" is more accurate than either "propagandist" or "spokesperson," but I'll leave it up to you. [[User:FeloniousMonk|FeloniousMonk]] 20:30, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
    His comment was then removed by MattCrypto with the comment, "I don't think that's an enormously helpful comment". Then he made the change anyway.

    FeloniousMonk is the one who has taken charge of the Wikipedia pages on evolution controversies. He and his buddies have agreed to help each other out when blocking anyone from putting neutral information on those pages. I expect this from narrow-minded evolutionists, but I am really surprised at the extent to which he attempts to use Wikipedia to personally retaliate on me.

     
    Teach the controversy
    String theorist Lubos Motl says:
    Aaron Pierce who is now at faculty of University of Michigan wrote a nice and wise essay for Science:
    Teach the controversy (subscription required)

    The title includes a witty analogy - I am apparently not the only one who thinks that this "controversy" about string theory and hypothetical alternatives is similar to the "controversy" about evolution and creationism. Both of these "controversies" are invented, promoted, and sometimes "taught" with a certain goal in mind and they don't reflect actual scientific results. See the Wikipedia page about the Teach the Controversy strategy to see that the two situations are essentially isomorphic.

    Real scientists are not afraid of controversy. They enjoy getting the opportunity to show how the empirical evidence supports their theories.

    It turns out that the article doesn't say anything about evolution.

    I do think that String Theorists like Motl have something in common with Evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott -- they just hate it when someone says that Science requires some empirical evidence for validation, and that predictions are not scientific unless there is some way to demonstrate whether they are true or false.


    Thursday, Oct 26, 2006
     
    Health news for the elderly
    A new study says that old people who eat vegetables do not go senile as fast. There are news stories here, here, and here.

    I am very skeptical about studies like this. First, it is just a correlation. Are vegetables making them smarter, or do the smarter ones eat more vegetables for some other reason? A study like this cannot tell.

    Second, there is no theory as to what in the vegetables is so beneficial. Is it vitamins? anti-oxidants? oils? what? If the study were really convincing, then it would answer this.

    Third, maybe the vegetables are just displacing something else. Presumably, those who eat more vegetables are eating less of something else. Eg, maybe a lot of those who don't eat vegetables are alcoholics, and either the alcoholism is making them stupid or their senility is driving them to alcohol.

    I'll wait for more studies. There are a lot of diet studies, and hardly any of them really show that any one diet is better than any other diet.

    Meanwhile, a new vaccine for shingles is recommended for people over the age of 60. Apparently the shingles rate has gone way up, and half of all those who reach age 85 have suffered from shingles.

    What they are not telling you is that the increase in shingles is a direct result of the chicken pox (varicella) vaccine for toddlers. It used to be that most of the kids would get chicken pox, and old people would occasionally get a boost to their shingles immunity by mild exposure to a kid with chicken pox. That does not happen anymore.

    People often assume that a vaccine or other medicine that prevents disease is automatically a good thing. The chickenpox vaccine is a good example of a vaccine that causes harm by preventing disease in kids. It is debatable whether the vaccine does more harm than good.


    Wednesday, Oct 25, 2006
     
    The Supremacists on Scotus blog
    Phyllis Schlafly is answering questions about the courts assaulting our Constitution on the Scotus blog.

    Monday, Oct 23, 2006
     
    Censored by Wikipedia editors again
    The narrow-minded evolutionist Wikipedia editors have blocked me again. This time, an editor operating under the pseudonym "FeloniousMonk" inserted text into the Phyllis Schlafly biography saying that she attended a school that "stressed Christian anti-Communism", that she is a "one-woman propagandist for the far-right", and that she made it "more difficult for any women to forge a career in the paid labor force".

    In case anyone seriously believes these absurdities, I initiated a discussion on the "Talk" page that Wikipedia provides to discuss edits. No one could defend these statements, except to cite some polemical book. Instead, they blocked me from Wikipedia on the grounds that I am biased! They even blocked me from posted responses to their attacks on me in the discussion page.

    In fact, Wikipedia policy recommends that even the subject of a biographical article should correct errors.

    I actually post on Wikipedia under my real name. When making changes, I want it to do it transparently. I have my particular interests and biases, just like everyone else. Except that FeloniousMonk and the others only use pseudonyms.

    FeloniousMonk obviously hates creationists and other anti-evolutionists. He carefully monitors pages on subjects like Intelligent Design, and immediately removes factual information that presents the views of the advocates. As a result, those pages are biased and unreliable.

    I am not an advocate of Intelligent Design (ID). I think that an encyclopedia article on ID should include a section of criticism, but it should primarily describe ID as the advocates would describe it. Likewise, an article on Astrology or UFOs or Scientology or any other disreputable subject should include the views of the advocates. Evolutionists like FeloniousMonk just cannot tolerate that. He even managed to convince his fellow editors to put a guy named "Ed Poor" on Wikipedia "probation", just because he wanted to add some balance to the evolution-related pages.

    What is really strange is that FeloniousMonk would follow me around and insert edits like those above. I hope he gives some explanation for himself.

    I am posting my comments here because I cannot post them on the Wikipedia discussion pages.

    George writes:

    What is wrong with those Wikipedia pages on evolution? FeloniousMonk even got an award from his fellow editors:
    We award a Barnstar and the Barnstar of diligence to FeloniousMonk for his great work on Intelligent design related articles. We recognise his seemingly inexhaustive efforts in keeping the articles free from vandalism and applaud his efforts to provide detailed sources. As anything worth doing can be difficult, FeloniousMonk if you need further help you can count on us to assist you.
    RoyBoy, KillerChihuahua, Parallel or Together?, Ec5618, dave souza, Dunc, Bill Jefferys, Guettarda, Jim62sch, WAS 4.250, Plumbago, Samsara

    (KillerChihuahua was the one who helped FeloniousMonk by imposing the Block on me.)

    Those articles are biased and distorted from beginning to end. For example, just look at the first paragraph of the first article on Intelligent design. It says:

    Its leading proponents are all affiliated with the Discovery Institute. They say that intelligent design is a scientific theory that stands on equal footing with, or is superior to, current scientific theories regarding the evolution and origin of life.
    The latter sentence cites this 2002 article by Stephen C. Meyer:
    This essay will examine the in principal case against the scientific status of intelligent design. It will examine several of the methodological criteria that have been advanced as means of distinguishing the scientific status of naturalistic evolutionary theories from nonnaturalistic theories such as intelligent design, special creation, progressive creation and theistic evolution. I will argue that attempts to make distinctions of scientific status a priori on methodological grounds inevitably fail, and instead that a general equivalence of method exists between these two broadly competing approaches to origins. In so doing, I will attempt to shed light on the specific question of whether a scientific theory of intelligent design could be formulated, or whether methodological objections, forever and in principle, render this possibility "self contradictory nonsense" as Ruse, Stent, Gould and others have claimed (of, at least, scientific creationism). ...

    Can there be a scientific theory of intelligent design? At the very least it seems we can conclude that we have not yet encountered any good in principle reason to exclude design from science.

    Elsewhere, Meyer has written that ID should not be required to be taught along side Darwinian evolution.

    Now you may agree or disagree with Meyer; that is not the point. The point is that the Wikipedia article does not accurately represent Meyer's views. These articles are supposed to be written with a "neutral point of view". They are not.

    I don't even think that FeloniousMonk and the other Wikipedia editors are advancing their evolutionist cause. The ID advocates do say some silly things that ought to be properly rebutted. But when an encyclopedia misrepresents what the ID advocates say, then people mistakenly rebut the wrong things.


    Sunday, Oct 22, 2006
     
    More organizations trying to define science
    Some socioligists have jumped into the evolution debate:
    The American Sociological Association (ASA) supports the teaching of science methods and content in U.S. public school curricula, and affirms the integrity of science education to include the teaching of evolution, a central organizing principle of the biological sciences that is based upon overwhelming empirical evidence from various scientific disciplines. ASA opposes proposals that promote, support, or advocate religious doctrines or ideologies in science education curricula. ...

    The United States Constitution articulates the principle of separation of church and state as a means to prevent the government (including public schools) from advocating or imposing specific religious beliefs on our citizens.

    No, Constitution does not articulate that principle. The phrase "separation of church and state" is sometimes used to describe the US Supreme Court's interpretation, but the Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

    I think that it is a little odd for sociologists to be talking about the "integrity of science" and promoting evolution.

    Meanwhile, the AAAS has its own wacky ideas about science:

    The American Association for the Advancement of Science has 262 "affiliates," groups whose aims are “directed toward, or consistent with, the aims” of the AAAS. One affiliate is the Parapsychological Association, a self-described "organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of ‘psi’ (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition."
    Wow. This is the same AAAS that led the campaign to change the definition of science in Kansas. At the Kansas evolution hearings, the evolutionists grilled the witnesses about their religious beliefs. The AAAS talked evolutionist witnesses into refusing to testify.

    Now we know why the AAAS evolutionists didn't want to testify. They didn't want to admit that they include parapsychology in Science!

     
    Censure of Sen. Joe McCarthy
    Someone tried to tell me that Sen. Joe McCarthy must have been a bad guy because he was censured by the US Senate.

    Here is the actual text of the 1954 Censure Resolution:

    Resolved, That the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee [that was investigating him, and] repeatedly abused the subcommittee ... contrary to senatorial traditions.

    Sec 2. The Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy [called the] Select Committee to Study Censure Charges a "lynch-party" ... and stating further: "I expected he would be afraid to answer the questions, but didn't think he'd be stupid enough to make a public statement"; ... and such conduct is hereby condemned.

    In other words, McCarthy's principal sin was that he badmouthed his enemies who were investigating him. The investigation itself turned up nothing of substance. It was a bit like if Bill Clinton called the Whitewater investigation a witch-hunt.

    Friday, Oct 20, 2006
     
    Greene defends String Theory
    Brian Greene gives this defense of string theory:
    To be sure, no one successful experiment would establish that string theory is right, but neither would the failure of all such experiments prove the theory wrong. If the accelerator experiments fail to turn up anything, it could be that we need more powerful machines; if the astronomical observations fail to turn up anything, it could mean the effects are too small to be seen. The bottom line is that it's hard to test a theory that not only taxes the capacity of today's technology, but is also still very much under development.

    Some critics have taken this lack of definitive predictions to mean that string theory is a protean concept whose advocates seek to step outside the established scientific method. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    Some String Theory advocates do indeed want to step outside the scientific method. Eg, Lee Smolin writes
    String theory comes in a countably infinite number of versions, most of which have many free parameters. String theorists speak no longer of a single theory, but of a vast "landscape1" of possible theories. Moreover, some cosmologists argue for an infinity of universes, each of which is governed by a different theory. A tiny fraction of these theories may be roughly compatible with present observation, but this is still a vast number, estimated to be greater than 10400 theories. (Nevertheless, so far not a single version consistent with all experiments has been written down.) No matter what future experiments see, the results will be compatible with vast numbers of theories, making it unlikely that any experiment could either confirm or falsify string theory.

    This realization has brought the present crisis to a head. Steven Weinberg and Leonard Susskind have argued for a new definition of science in which a theory may be believed without being subject to a definitive experiment whose result could kill it. Some theorists even tell us we are faced with a choice of giving up string theory—which is widely believed by theorists—or giving up our insistence that scientific theories must be testable.

    The fact is that no one has figured out a way to relate String Theory to gravitation, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, existing particles, or anything else in present-day physics.

    So what has String Theory accomplished? Greene pretends that you are too stupid to understand:

    While accessibility demands that I describe these developments using familiar words, beneath them lies a bedrock of rigorous analysis. We now have more than 20 years of painstaking research, filling tens of thousands of published pages of calculations, which attest to string theory's deep mathematical coherence. These calculations have given the theory countless opportunities to suffer the fate of previous proposals, but the fact is that every calculation that has ever been completed within string theory is free from mathematical contradictions.
    IOW, the theory does not predict or explain anything, but no one has proved that it will never predict or explain anything. He goes on:
    Moreover, these works have also shown that many of the prized breakthroughs in fundamental physics, discovered over the past two centuries through arduous research using a wide range of approaches, can be found within string theory. It's as if one composer, working in isolation, produced the greatest hits of Beethoven, Count Basie and the Beatles. When you also consider that string theory has opened new areas of mathematical research, you can easily understand why it's captured the attention of so many leading scientists and mathematicians.
    It has opened up new areas of math research, and that helps explain its popularity among mathematical physicists. But it has not reproduced any "prized breakthroughs" or he would name one. Greene is a charlatan for saying this.

    Here are some useful links for getting up to speed on The String Wars.


    Wednesday, Oct 18, 2006
     
    Falsely accused
    Here is a list of people who are being falsely prosecuted, in my opinion.
    • Scooter Libby. He will be acquitted. The phony indictment against him was just to save face for Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor.
    • Barry Bonds. The only chance to convict him is to hold his buddy Greg Anderson in jail until he says what the feds want him to say.
    • John Mark Karr. He is a weirdo, but there is no evidence that he committed any crimes.
    • Mark Foley. He is a homosexual, not a pedophile. His privacy has been invaded to reveal embarrassing messages, but all he did was to talk dirty with a 17-year-old boy.
    • Duke lacrosse players. The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, is obviously lying. Duke University and the press should be really embarrassed for letting this become a racist lynching of the players.
    • HP boss Patricia Dunn. Even if she knew about the pretexting, it was an accepted practice.
    • Saddam Hussein. He deserves punishment, but his trial is a sham. It has already been going on for a year, with no end in sight.
    I have a much longer list of people who have been unfairly prosecuted in the past.

    As for Dunn, the law says that the phone companies own your phone records, and can do whatever they want with them. The phone companies have chosen to make them easily available for their own business reasons. Dunn's private investigator merely took advantage of phone company policy. The law is heavily tilted against the consumer, but Dunn is the wrong one to blame.

    Jonathan asks about Tom Sell, the St. Louis dentist. Yes, I believe that he was unfairly prosecuted and held for about 5 years without trial. He eventually made a plea bargain for the time he had already served. I was only listing current cases.

    He also wonders how Saddam Hussein is going to get the punishment he deserves, if not by trial. The evidence against Hussein's regime in Iraq has already been presented to Congress and the UN, and both decided that Iraq was in violation. That is enough. I don't see that a multi-year criminal trial serves any useful purpose.

    He also suggests that the phone companies have some responsibility over and above their regulatory requirements. Yes, I agree, and I hope that they get shamed into protecting customer records better.


    Tuesday, Oct 17, 2006
     
    The future of human evolution
    It is good to see an evlutionist actually make a testable prediction:
    ACCORDING TO A NEW STUDY by evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry, boffin-in-residence at the London School of Economics, in 10,000 years or so the human race could well be split into two different classes, a 6-7ft tall elite and an imp-like underclass.

    The theorist claims that the genetic elite will be healthy, smart, good looking and creative, whereas the underclass will be short little ugly idiots. Something that is sure to anger the average Sun reader is that the future of humankind will most likely sport coffee-coloured skin.

    Women, reports the Sun, are likely to be prettier and will have perkier breasts. Men, on the other hand, will have larger penises.

    Also claimed in the study is that a further reliance on technology in our lives is likely to leave us with weak immune systems, and more prone to cancers.

    More details on BBC News and The Sun. I hope that someone puts all this stuff in a time capsule, so that our descendants can laugh at us.

    Update: Evolutionist PZ Myers says it is utter nonsense:

    Ignoring the fact that you cannot predict long-term evolutionary trends without knowing long-term environmental trends (and not even then), I would like to see the evidence for any of this.
    He also supports changes to the definition of science so that evolutionism can be considered science with falsifiability.
     
    Evolution judge still has the big head
    A Lutheran magazine reports:
    When Judge John E. Jones III was invested as a U.S. District Court judge in August 2002, he “could never have imagined,” he said recently, that within four years he would appear on the cover of Time and rub shoulders at a black-tie dinner this year with others “judged” as the 100 most influential people of his time.

    The case? That would be Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, ...

    Jones said he knew instantly when he arrived in Harrisburg, Pa., for the trial’s first day that the case would make history. “Usually judges like me labor in relative obscurity,” he recently told an audience at the Lutheran Seminary at Philadelphia. “When I arrived, I saw the courthouse ringed by satellite trucks. Security was on overload. Charles Darwin’s great-great grandchild was in attendance.”

    The crowded atmosphere, replete with sketch artists and media, “took my breath away. I had to calm down,” he said.

    Many saw the case as a new version of the famed Scopes Monkey Trial (July 1925) that led to the 1960 feature film Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy as a fictionalized Clarence Darrow. Jones said he understands two books are in the works about the recent trial, along with a docudrama for the PBS “Nova” series.

    “The attention is understandable,” he said. “The trial involved the kind of cultural clash that makes for a good story.”

    A "good story"? He sounds like he wants it to be fictionalized like Inherit the Wind, which was actually intended to be a pro-Communist parable. I think the publicity went to his head.

    Jones justifies the case by saying:

    “I didn’t think a school district somewhere else should be exposed to the costs and fees that the Dover School District ended up paying (more than $1 million) as a result of my ducking that issue.”
    So he forced his local school district to pay a million dollars in order to set an example for other school districts?

    The case involved a school administrator reading a statement to ninth-grade students that said:

    Darwin's Theory is a theory, ... not a fact. ... Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view.
    Judge Jones didn't find that these statements were wrong; only that they were religiously motivated when the Dover PA school board said them. So all his decision really does is warn others that they better be able to prove that they have no religious motivations if they say something similar, or they risk a million-dollar lawsuit.

    Monday, Oct 16, 2006
     
    Call of the West: Rein In the Judges
    LA Times reports:
    DENVER — Judges across several Western states could soon face new limits on their authority and threats to their independence, as conservatives campaign for ballot measures that aim to rein in what they describe as "runaway courts." ...

    South Dakota's Amendment E would have the most sweeping effect; it has drawn opposition from conservatives and liberals — including, in a rare show of unanimity, every member of the state Legislature.

    Under the amendment judges in the state could lose their jobs or assets if citizens disliked how they sentenced a criminal, resolved a business dispute or settled a divorce. "We want to give power back to the people," said Jake Hanes, a spokesman for the measure.

    A special grand jury would evaluate citizen complaints against judges — and judges would not be presumed innocent. Amendment E explicitly instructs jurors to "liberally" tilt in favor of any citizen with a grievance, and "not to be swayed by artful presentation by the judge."

    Update: NPR's Nina Totenberg just had a segment with hysterical opposition to this amendment. I think that it is American judges who have promoted the idea that anyone can sue anyone for anything, and maybe it would be instructive if S. Dakota judges were subject to being sued just like everyone else.

    Friday, Oct 13, 2006
     
    Scientific revolution
    Wikipedia now has an article on the Scientific revolution that starts:
    The event which most historians of science call the scientific revolution can be dated roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body).
    Copernicus's book title used the word "revolution" in the sense of planets revolving around the Sun, not in the sense of an intellectual revolt. For 100s of years, the term "Copernican revolution" referred just to planetary motion. Then Thomas (Mr. Paradigm Shift) Kuhn adopted it for a 1957 book, and persuaded everyone that it was really an intellectual revolt. Then it became his best example of a paradigm shift, because it was a new point of view without any objective evidence of any scientific truth or advantage. It was crucial to his theory that there is no scientific progress, and scientists just irrationally leap from one fad to another.

    Immanuel Kant once analogized one of his ideas to the Copernican Revolution at about 1800 or so. He was writing about how perceptions of objects can depend on your point of view. His analogy was that just as planets appear to revolve around the Earth but really revolve about the Sun, other objects might have some reality that differs from our perception. Depending on whom you read, this was either one of the great original philosophical breakthrus of all time, or just some incoherent ramblings of which no one has been able to make any sense.

    The Wikipedia article says:

    In 1543 Copernicus' work on the heliocentric model of the solar system was published, in which he tried to prove that the sun was the center of the universe. Ironically, this was at the behest of the Catholic Church as part of the Catholic Reformation efforts for a means of creating a more accurate calendar for its activities.
    Why is this ironic? The Catholic Church has a long history of supporting Astronomy.

    Wednesday, Oct 11, 2006
     
    Skipping vaccines linked to illnesses
    AP reports:
    CHICAGO - State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests.

    All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for medical reasons -- because they might have a bad reaction, for example, or have weak immune systems -- and 48 states, including California, allow exemptions for personal or religious beliefs.

    To get non-medical exemptions, some states require documentation, notarized paperwork and even visits to a local health department. In other states, parents merely have to sign an exemption letter.

    Compared with stricter states, those with easy exemption policies had about 50 percent more whooping cough cases, according to the study. Also, about 50 percent more people got whooping cough in states that allowed personal-belief exemptions, compared with those allowing only religious exemptions, the study found.

    States increasingly are being pressured to relax their exemption requirements, often by parents with fears about the risks of childhood vaccines, said University of Florida researcher Daniel Salmon, a co-author of the study. But loosening these policies would be a public-health threat, he said.

    The study appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association. It was partly funded by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Researchers from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health contributed to the study, including two who reported financial ties to vaccine makers. Salmon said he has no financial connection to vaccine makers.

    It is amazing how these articles can only get written if they are funded by vaccine promoters.

    The study says:

    The mean exemption rate increased an average of 6% per year, from 0.99% in 1991 to 2.54% in 2004, among states that offered personal belief exemptions.
    Actually, that is only an increase of only 0.12% per year. More importantly, it means that 97.5% of the population in those states are getting all the 20 or so recommended vaccines.

    What is really amazing is that the vaccination rates are so high, in face of all the scandals, hassles, and contra-indications. In those 13 years, the number of vaccine shots roughly tripled. (I'll need to check the exact numbers.) A diarrhea vaccine, mandated for all babies, was withdrawn from the market because it was unsafe. The HBV vaccine, mandated at birth for all newborns, was suspended because of safety concerns. Several vaccines had to be pulled because they had thimerosal (mercury) that violated federal EPA limits. Some evidence indicated that measles vaccine may be related to autism. The FDA and CDC federal advisory committees on immunization were shown to be dominated by drug company stooges in violation of conflict-of-interest laws. The conflicts continue, but the feds just grant waivers to the laws. The committees still do not allow outsiders to participate.

    In some states, like California, parents can opt out of the mandated vaccines by just signing a statement. No questions asked. The public schools have to accept it. And yet, after 13 years of widely publicized sound and unsound reasons for opting out of the official vaccines, the vaccination rates only dropped from 99% to 97.5% in those states. It is higher in other states.

    I don't know if this JAMA paper has any merit or not. Only the abstract is freely available online. I doubt that the underlying data is available. It was funded and written for the purpose of promoting CDC policy. The conclusion "States should examine their exemption policies to ensure control ..." is not a scientific statement. It is merely a statement about how the CDC desires stronger enforcement of its mandates, and the CDC does not want to have to convince individuals that it has good policies. The CDC just isn't satisfied that a couple of states have only 97.5% compliance rates.


    Monday, Oct 09, 2006
     
    Courts don't give rights
    David Parker writes in the Si Valley paper:
    Court usual place to pursue rights

    A state court of appeal voted 2-1 on Thursday that a marriage ban, approved in 2000 by California voters, is constitutional. The justices also ruled that any changes to marriage laws should come from the Legislature or the voters. This ruling is completely misguided. Equal rights have always been fought in the courts.

    No, it isn't. American blacks (negroes) got their equal rights from the Civil War, the 13A, 14A, and 15A amendments to the Constitution, and from various civil rights acts passed by the Congress.

    Sunday, Oct 08, 2006
     
    Reforming Islam
    Occasionally I hear someone say:
    Christianity had its Protestant Reformation in the Middle Ages; the trouble with Islam is that it hasn't had its reformation.
    I cannot figure out what these people mean. The Protestant Reformation had various purposes, such as abolishing the sale of indulgences, promoting a more literal reading of the Bible, and undermining allegiance to the Pope. The effect was to split Christendom, allow open warfare between various Christian factions, and promote fundamentalism.

    Islam has already had its split into Sunnis and Shiites. They don't sell indulgences, they read the Koran, and they have no Pope. It would be more accurate to say that the problem with Islam is that it has had its Reformation, not that it needs one.


    Saturday, Oct 07, 2006
     
    Attacks on the courts
    John sends this WSJ op-ed by Judge William H. Pryor Jr.:
    Recently some leaders of the bench and bar -- including, on this page last week, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- have decried what they describe as unprecedented threats to the independence of the judiciary. I respectfully disagree. Although the fringes of American politics offer a few disturbing examples of ignorance of the judicial function, I agree with Justice Clarence Thomas, who observed in 1999, "What is truly surprising about today's judiciary is how strong it really is."

    Contemporary criticisms of the judiciary are relatively mild. ... As Justice Stephen Breyer stated several years ago, "We run no risk of returning to the days when a president (responding to [the Supreme] Court's efforts to protect the Cherokee Indians) might have said, 'John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!'"

    I don't know why people keep repeating this myth. Yes, Breyer said that in Bush v Gore, but Pres. Andrew Jackson never said the quote about defying the court. As I've written here and here, the story doesn't even make any sense. The Supreme Court ruled against the Cherokees, and it was Pres. Van Buren who moved them to Oklahoma. Even Wikipedia says, "the popular story that Jackson defied the Supreme Court in carrying out Indian Removal is untrue."
     
    Neo-creationist propaganda
    I tried adding this to Wikipedia:
    Neo-creationism is a [[neologism]] used by [[Eugenie C. Scott]] and a few other evolutionists to describe those who oppose her political campaign to promote the [[theory of evolution]] in the schools and to extinguish the criticism that they claim to be religiously motivated. They attempt to relate the [[Intelligent design movement]] and other non-mainstream views of evolution to earlier movements that lost American court battles under the name of [[creationism]]. What follows is a description of neo-creationism from the point of view of those who think that it is the work of the devil.
    Sure enough, the evolutionists deleted it within minutes. I thought that they might be willing to at least discuss why they objected to my paragraph. Is "neo-creationism" a neologism or not?

    FeloniousMonk's complaint was that the article is no more biased than my blog. Just to be clear, my blog is my point of view. It is not an encyclopedia.

    An article on neo-creationism should, at the very least, include material from the neo-creationist point of view, if there is such a thing. As of now, the article does not even acknowledge that the term was invented by a couple of non-neo-creatioinist to put down the the folks with whom they disagree. There are no neo-creationists who call themselves neo-creationists.

    I only mention this as an example of evolutionist narrow-mindedness. If I were a scientist who wanted to expose Astrology as bogus, I would want the encyclopedia to describe Astrology as the astrologers themselves promote the subject. It would then be easy to demonstrate where they go wrong.

    Likewise, creationists are easily rebutted based on what they say. But somehow, the ideological evolutionists like E. Scott and the Wikipedia evolutionist editors cannot stand for anyone to see an alternate point of view.

     
    Nobel Prizes
    All five Nobel prizewinners in science this year are Americans. I guess the supposedly inferior US science education hasn't hurt them too much.

    The Chemistry winner is the son of another prizewinner. The NY Times once editorialized that IQ could not be hereditary, or else we'd see children of Nobel prizewinners winning prizes. Now there are seven examples of Nobel prizewinners who had at least one parent who was another Nobel prizewinner.


    Wednesday, Oct 04, 2006
     
    Redefining hominids
    I just discovered that evolutionists have redefined "hominid". It used to be a term for humans, cave-men, Neanderthals, and other close relatives from the past who walked upright.

    Now it is anyone in the classification that includes humans and apes. The word hominin has been invented for those hominids who are humans or chimps, but not gorillas.

    All my dictionaries give the older definition. I haven't quite figured out the reason for the change yet. The only thing that I can figure is that evolutionists do not approve of distinguishing between humans and apes.


    Monday, Oct 02, 2006
     
    Why I post about Lucy
    I get the strangest complaints from evolutionists about my postings here. They don't challenge the factual accuracy of what I say, or even directly challenge my opinions, except perhaps to say that they sometimes go against the mainstream. Instead they question my motives for not accepting the evolutionist party line unquestionably. They say that I am only encouraging followers of the Discovery Institute, and then tell me some weird conspiracy theory about how anti-evolutionists want to turn the USA into a theocracy, or something like that.

    Take, for example, the 3M year old fossil Lucy, the most widely promoted Missing Link today. Johanson, the discoverer, claimed that it was the last common ancestor to humans and chimps. My daughter's fifth grade social studies textbook features Lucy prominently, and says that "most anthropologists agree" that it was a human ancestor. I guess it is a true statement about most anthropologists. No one would be interested in Lucy otherwise.

    Furthermore, evolutionists commonly argue that Lucy defines what it means to be human. They say that Lucy was a small-brained primate that resembled an ape in most respects, except that it walked upright. Therefore, they say that it was walking upright that induced all the other evolutionary changes that we now recognize as human.

    This theory seems farfetched to me. There are apes today that have been trained to walk upright, and so have some dogs and cats. Walking upright seems unlikely to me to explain the huge differences between humans and apes.

    Looking at the Lucy fossil, I don't see how they even have enough evidence to say whether Lucy walked upright or not. They have less than half the bones. Johanson thinks that Lucy was a tree-dweller, and no one has explained why a tree-dweller would be walking upright or why other apes did not. Sometimes experts can identify a species by a single tooth, but figuring out animal's usual locomotion is a lot more difficult.

    I am not a fossil or evolution expert, so shouldn't I just accept what the experts say? Maybe if they had a track record of being correct. But there is a long history of false and exaggerated claims about missing links, from Piltdown Man to Flores Man. I want to see the evidence, before I accept that some 3M year old fossil defines what it means to be human.

    Paul A. Hanle writes, in the Wash Post:

    I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: "How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don't even accept evolution?"

    I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of "intelligent design" in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education.

    This is hysterical nonsense. Every American school teaches evolution. There is no public school that teaches intelligent design. The NCSE is counting states like Georgia, where there is current litigation over whether students can be told that evolution is a theory.

    This so-called war on science is just a big smokescreen. It is an excuse to bash religious folks and distract from other education issues.

    The idea that schoolchildren will suffer somehow if they learn both the arguments for and against Lucy being a human ancestor is just ludicrous. If there is a war on science, it is being conducted by the evolutionists who insist on accepting their doctrinaire views without dissent.

    For those who want an alternate view, here is a summary of arguments that Lucy walked upright:

    As in a modern human's skeleton, Lucy's bones are rife with evidence clearly pointing to bipedality. Her distal femur shows several traits unique to bipedality. The shaft is angled relative to the condyles (knee joint surfaces) which allows bipeds to balance on one leg at a time during locomotion. There is a prominent patellar lip to keep the patella (knee cap) from dislocating due to this angle. Her condyles are large, and are thus adapted to handling the added weight which results from shifting from four limbs to two. The pelvis exhibits a number of adaptations to bipedality. The entire structure has been remodeled to accommodate an upright stance and the need to balance the trunk on only one limb with each stride. The talus, in her ankle, shows evidence for a convergent big toe, sacrificing manipulative abilities for efficiency in bipedal locomotion. The vertebrae show evidence of the spinal curvatures necessitated by a permanent upright stance.
    Here is an ID article that is skeptical about Lucy, and here is an evolutionist rebuttal.

    Sunday, Oct 01, 2006
     
    Chomsky attacks evolutionary psychology
    Horgan writes:
    When I interviewed Chomsky for The Undiscovered Mind, he disparaged evolutionary psychology as “a philosophy of mind with a little bit of science thrown in.” He suggested that the field is not really scientific, because it can account for every possible fact. “You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.”
    Chomsky has a point, but I am not sure evolutionary psychology is so much different from the rest of evolutionary biology. Some is based on hard science, and is testable; other parts are wildly speculative and sound contorted to fit the facts.

    Friday, Sep 29, 2006
     
    Professional Skeptic on creation and evolution
    Michael Shermer writes:
    In my opinion, the single best argument my debate opponents have is the apparently fine-tuned characteristics of nature. Indeed, they quote no less a personage than Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, who argues in his 2000 book, "Just Six Numbers," that "our emergence from a simple Big Bang was sensitive to six ‘cosmic numbers.' Had these numbers not been ‘well tuned,' the gradual unfolding of layer upon layer of complexity would have been quenched." These six numbers are:

    Ω = 1, the amount of matter in the universe, such that if Ω were greater than one, it would have collapsed long ago, and if Ω were less than one, no galaxies would have formed.

    e = .007, how firmly atomic nuclei bind together, such that if epsilon were .006 or .008, matter could not exist as it does.

    D = 3, the number of dimensions in which we live, such that if D were 2 or 4, life could not exist.

    N = 1036 , the ratio of the strength of gravity to that of electromagnetism, such that if it had just a few less zeros, the universe would be too young and too small for life to evolve.

    Q,= 1/100,000, the fabric of the universe, such that if Q were smaller, the universe would be featureless, and if Q were larger, the universe would be dominated by giant black holes.

    λ = 0.7, the cosmological constant, or "antigravity" force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate, such that if λ were larger, it would have prevented stars and galaxies from forming.

    He goes on the explain that String Theory doesn't explain any of the major outstanding problems in Physics, and there is not much hope that it is going to, either.

    Elsewhere, Shermer argues:

    According to a 2005 Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of evangelical Christians believe that living beings have always existed in their present form, compared with 32 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics. ... What these figures confirm for us is that there are religious and political reasons for rejecting evolution. Can one be a conservative Christian and a Darwinian? Yes. Here's how.
    1. Evolution fits well with good theology.
    2. Creationism is bad theology.
    3. Evolution explains original sin and the Christian model of human nature.
    4. Evolution explains family values.
    5. Evolution accounts for specific Christian moral precepts.
    6. Evolution explains conservative free-market economics.
    Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced. The senseless conflict between science and religion must end now, or else, as the Book of Proverbs (11:29) warned: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind."
    He is selective with his arguments. He doesn't mention this New Scientist news:
    The queens of bees, ants and wasps that indulge in the most promiscuous and lengthy sex marathons produce the healthiest colonies, a new study reveals.

    Honeybee queens that mated with multiple drones were shown to foster bee hives with wider genetic variation. This variation meant they were much better able to fend off a debilitating disease, researchers found.

    I am surprised that Shermer goes down this path. Evolution can be used to justify war, rape, euthanasia, eugenics, and all sorts of other things that people find objectionable.

    Thursday, Sep 28, 2006
     
    Missing links in social studies class
    My daughter's fifth grade class just learned about Lucy and Selam, the supposed missing links, in her social studies class. She was taught that these were human ancestors, and marked the beginning of human history. I showed her this picture of the Lucy fossil, so she could see how meager it is.

    It has been claimed that Lucy was the last common ancestor to humans and chimps, 3M years ago. But the DNA mutation extrapolators say that the last common ancestor would have lived 6M or so years ago. There are also other fossils, such as Kenyanthropus, that seem as likely as Lucy to have been a human ancestor.


    Tuesday, Sep 26, 2006
     
    Scientific Regress
    Science writer John Horgan writes:
    A few years ago, I bet the string advocate Michio Kaku (whom I’m debating at Stevens on October 18) $1,000 that no one will win a Nobel Prize for string theory or any other quantum-gravity theory by the year 2020. I have absolutely no doubt that I’ll win this bet.
    Yes, Horgan will win the bet. Nearly all of the theoretical physicists at the top universities are string theorists, so I am predicting that they will be shut out of the Nobel prizes.

    Horgan lists these examples of scientific regress: End of infectious disease, Origin of life, Space colonization, Supersonic commercial transport (SST), Commercial fusion power, Curing cancer, Unified theory of physics, Unified theory of mind. Yes, these are all good examples of where the confident predictions of leading scientific researchers have fizzled out.


    Monday, Sep 25, 2006
     
    Another false claim that conservatives are activists
    David G. Savage writes in an LA Times op-ed quoted here:
    One year ago, John G. Roberts Jr., at the time President Bush's nominee to be the chief justice of the United States, told senators that he aspired to be like an umpire, enforcing the rules of the game, not making them. "My job is to call the balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat," he said. "It is a limited role…. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire." ...
    It was The Supremacists that has just popularized the baseball umpire analogy. We would indeed be disappointed if Roberts abandoned that role. Savage goes on:
    But in several cases, he behaved differently, ...

    When Bush made Ashcroft his attorney general in 2001, Ashcroft issued an order saying that doctors in Oregon could lose their licenses to prescribe medication if they gave dying patients lethal drugs. ...

    Roberts joined Scalia's dissent, as did Justice Clarence Thomas. The three said the use of legal drugs for ending a life was not a "legitimate medical purpose" and could be banned by the attorney general.

    Note how Savage alternates between using the term "medication" and "lethal drugs". He is obscuring the fact that they are the same thing. An Oregon physician who got caught using federal narcotics to kill patients would only risk losing his license to prescribe those same federal narcotics. He could still keep his Oregon medical license and prescribe everything else.

    The feds license Oregon physicians to prescribe certain narcotic drugs for legitimate medical purposes. Recreational use of cocaine is not a legitimate medical purpose, but Congress did not explicitly say whether overdosing a patient with morphine was a legitimate medical purpose. So it was up to the US Supreme Court to interpret that phrase.

    All Roberts did was to vote to uphold the statute, and limit the federal licensing of narcotics to medical purposes that do not include killing patients.

    What is really strange here is that other liberal academics have called the conservative justices "activist" because of supposedly objective measures of their willingness to overturn federal law. Here, Roberts was voting to uphold federal law, and he gets called activist anyway.


    Saturday, Sep 23, 2006
     
    Survival of the non-obsessed prairie dogs
    New Scientist reports:
    Young, old and sick animals are usually the ones that end up as lunch - though not, it seems, if you're a prairie dog in Utah. Last year it was the turn of healthy, adult males.

    "This has really made me rethink everything," says John Hoogland of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge.

    Now his theory is when foxes are more accostomed to the presence of people, they eat more sex-obsessed male prairie dogs. This is not exactly Survival of the fittest.

    Thursday, Sep 21, 2006
     
    More on the new Lucy
    The Chicago Tribune reports:
    A 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a young child curled into a ball no bigger than a cantaloupe--a unique fossil described as "a bright beam of light" on human evolution--was unveiled Wednesday by paleontologists working in the sun-baked badlands of Ethiopia.

    The tiny bundle of bones may be the best fossil found of the primitive human ancestor Australopithecus afarensis. That is the same species as the superstar fossil dubbed Lucy, an adult female found nearby in 1974.

    Note that it is reported with certainty that this species is a human ancestor.

    Not only that, but it is supposed to be a true Missing Link -- a primate that was in the midst of evolving from ape to human:

    "Clearly, we have a species in transition," said Lucy's discoverer, Donald Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. The species "sits at a critical point of human evolution."
    Some parts of the skeleton are missing--the pelvis, the lowest part of the back and parts of the limbs--but what is preserved is remarkably complete. ... To him, what he has found suggests A. afarensis mainly moved around on two feet but also climbed trees when necessary, especially when young. The fossil's shoulder blades resemble a young gorilla's, suggesting the child could and did climb trees, but the angle of the femur from knee to hip is close to that of a modern human, implying she also walked efficiently on two legs.
    How can they know the angle of the femur, if they don't even have the pelvis? They just have a tiny ball of fossil fragments.

    The reason why they cling to the belief that this animal (nicknamed "Selam" in this article) walked on two feet is because that it their only basis for saying that it was a human ancestor. All of the other characteristics are apelike.

    However, even Johanson now admits that Lucy was a tree-dweller:

    Johanson said that in the years since he found Lucy he has come to agree that the species spent time in trees. "The females were only 3 1/2 feet and weighed about 60 to 65 pounds," he said.
    Isn't it strange that every single fossil like this is declared to be a human ancestor, and never an ape ancestor? I don't doubt that humans had ape-like ancestors 3M years ago, but apes also had ancestors. Some day they'll have to admit that Lucy and Selam were big frauds, and the evolutionists will be discredited again.

    Wednesday, Sep 20, 2006
     
    String theory is like Freudian psychoanalysis
    John Horgan writes:
    Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence that psychoanalysis works, but neither can proponents of more modern treatments… The anti-Freudians argue, in effect, that psychoanalysis has no more scientific standing than phlogiston, the ethereal substance that 18th-century scientists thought gave rise to heat and fire. But the reason physicists do not still debate the phlogiston hypothesis is that advances in chemistry and thermodynamics have rendered it utterly obsolete. A century’s worth of research in psychology, neuroscience, pharmacology and other mind-related fields has not yielded a paradigm powerful enough to obviate Freud once and for all.

    That is why string theory refuses to die, too. If string theory is phlogiston, so are all the other unified theories of physics.

    He may be right about Freud, but the so-called Standard Model (SU3xSU2xU1 gauge theory over a spacetime manifold) works great. It agrees with experiment to many decimal places.
     
    Pathologies within contemporary Islam
    A reader recommends this essay:
    The violent response to Pope Benedict's remarks is indicative of the pathologies within contemporary Islam. ...

    But it seems the media would rather condemn the pope and thus place criticism of Islam off limits rather than focus on the pathologies in contemporary Islam. This Western response serves to undermine Muslim moderates and strengthen radicals. It undermines moderates because one of the strongest big-picture arguments the moderates have is that Muslims need to act like adults, that they can't go off burning churches and killing people at the slightest provocation. Yet the signal we're sending is that we're willing to look the other way and create a ridiculous double-standard: that we're unwilling to hold Muslims accountable for unacceptable behavior and unacceptable actions.

    That's right. We must congratulate the Pope for reasoned dialog, and denounce the Mohammedans who promote a murderous jihad against infidels. Those who criticize the Pope are just helping the terrorists. The Pope properly issued just a non-apology apology.
     
    New Missing Link
    New Scientist reports:
    The stunningly complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago has been uncovered in Ethiopia. The child belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis like the famous "Lucy", who was discovered in 1974. The young age of the so-called Dikika child promises new insights into the growth of early humans. ...

    The stunningly complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago has been uncovered in Ethiopia. The child belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis like the famous "Lucy", who was discovered in 1974. The young age of the so-called Dikika child promises new insights into the growth of early humans. ...

    The Dikika hyoid resembles an ape's, suggesting speech had not begun to evolve in A. afarensis.

    Alemseged believes much information can be gained once the skeleton is freed from its stone casing. "A clear picture will emerge of how baby human ancestors were built, and how they grew up," he says.

    IOW, this is a Missing Link. The evolutionists will say that it proves that man evolved traits in this order: walking erect, larger brain, speaking.

    I say that Dikika is just another ape, and not a human ancestor.


    Monday, Sep 18, 2006
     
    Cutting legal fees
    Baptist news:
    WASHINGTON (ABP) -- Some members of Congress want to make it harder for citizens to sue the government over religious-liberty abuses.

    If a House panel has its way, groups that win federal cases against the government for violating church-state separation won't be able to reclaim the legal expenses they've incurred.

    On a 12-5 vote Sept. 7, the House Judiciary Committee passed the "Public Expression of Religion Act of 2006." In cases involving the First Amendment's establishment clause, the bill would not allow federal courts to require government entities to reimburse the legal costs of the individual or group that filed the lawsuit. ...

    The American Civil Liberties Union frequently sues government entities for violating the establishment clause. They issued a press release denouncing the House vote.

    "[T]he ability to recover attorneys' fees in civil-rights and constitutional cases, including establishment-clause cases, is necessary to help protect the religious freedom of all Americans and to keep religion government-free," the statement said, noting the fees in such suits often total "tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars."

    No, the law would not make it harder to sue. It would still be possible for an atheist to sue the govt because he claims that a public cross offends. The only limit would be that vultures like the ACLU would no longer be able to collect millions of dollars in attorney fees from the taxpayers.
     
    Eugenie Scott on evolutionism
    I just listened to a lecture evolutionist Eugenie C. Scott gave at U. Mich last winter on evolution in the classroom. She bragged about court wins for her cause, and spent most of her time denouncing Intelligent Design (ID).

    She denied that evolution is random and said, "Don't ever let any ever tell you that natural selection is a chance process. It isn't. It is adaptive differential reproduction." (There are other evolutionists who argue just as vehemently that evolution is a random process.) Possibly she meant that mutation is random while natural selection was not. I'm not sure.

    She attacked the ID folks for assuming that either evolution or ID must be true. They fallaciously try to prove ID by disproving evolution, she says. However it seemed like she made the same assumption, as she spent her whole lecture trying to disprove ID in order to validate evolution.

    She really bragged about how subpoenas in the Dover PA lawsuit were used to get drafts of pro-ID manuscripts, and show how terminology had changed. They used the terms "creation", "intelligent design", and "sudden emergence" for the concept of life beginning abruptly, with distinctive features. Furthermore, they dropped the term "creation" around the same time that the US Supreme Court declared that creationism was unconstitional.

    I'm not sure what this argument proves. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould described a similar concept, and called it "punctuated equilibrium". It does seem a little silly to have to change terminology to comply with a superficial Supreme Court decision, but she can hardly blame people for trying to comply with the law. If the Supreme Court declares that the phrase "under God" is unconstitional in the Pledge of Allegiance, then is she going to blame people who say the Pledge without that phrase?

    She objected to the word "Darwinism" because it suggests an ideology, and ideologies are bad.

    She spent about half of the lecture trying to associate ID with religion. She said that ID promoted by the Discovery Institute, and it has used terminology and imagery that suggests that it is not solely concerned with science. It has argued for "cultural renewal" and other nonscientific objectives.

    Ok, fair enough, but then she wound up her talk by saying that the fight against ID is not just a scientific issue. Her cause needs a coalition of scientists, clergy, civil libertarians, teachers, and others. It surprised me to hear her admit this. If it is not just a scientific issue, then she is just another advocate pushing an ideology.

    It seems clear to me that it is not just a scientific issue to her. Real scientists would not devote so much energy to suppressing alternative views and to investigating the motives of others.

     
    Understanding gun rights
    Joshua Kurlantzick writes:
    In Brazil, the N.R.A. tried a new approach. Brazil has the most gun deaths annually of any country, and last October it held a referendum on a nationwide gun ban. In the run-up to the vote, polls suggested that more than 70 percent of Brazilians supported the ban. Then the Brazilian gun lobby, which previously had emphasized the desirability of gun ownership, began running advertisements that instead suggested that if the government could take away the right to own a weapon (though Brazilians have no constitutional right to bear arms), it could steal other civil liberties. This argument took gun-control advocates by surprise, and on voting day, 64 percent of Brazilians voted against the gun ban. “We gun-control groups failed to anticipate this idea of focusing on rights,” admits Denis Mizne of Sou da Paz, a Brazilian public-policy institute. As a report in Foreign Policy revealed, the National Rifle Association lobbyist Charles Cunningham had traveled to Brazil as early as 2003 to impart strategy to local gun advocates, teaching them to emphasize rights instead of weapons.

    Around the world, the N.R.A. is finding that a rights-based approach translates into many languages. As the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, says: “They made the rights argument [in Brazil.] They made the argument that this was being taken away from the people.” He pauses. “It caught Iansa” — the International Action Network on Small Arms — “by surprise. They already had the Champagne on ice.”

    Who would have thought that even non-Americans could understand the concept of individual rights?

    Sunday, Sep 17, 2006
     
    North American Union
    John writes:
    Well, whaddaya know? Wikipedia has restored the North American Union article which it had previously deleted (and blocked to prevent re-creation).
    Weird. It looks like some sort of New World Order conspiracy is trying to use Mexicans to take over the USA, and even Wikipedia, which has articles about all sorts of wacky theories, was temporarily persuaded to participate in the cover-up.

    Saturday, Sep 16, 2006
     
    David Stove
    Joe writes:
    I think you don't like Kuhn or Darwinism, but do like Popper. Do you have an opinion on David Stove?
    No opinion. He is dead now. It looks like he had some interesting things to say.

    I am not opposed to Darwinism. Darwinism is the best scientific explanation of the history of life on Earth.


    Wednesday, Sep 13, 2006
     
    Uncertainty is a reason for inaction
    Law profs Wendy Wagner and Rena Steinzor claim the Bush administration is anti-Science, and argue:
    Fixing the problem requires, first and foremost, a new commitment from all players to quit treating uncertainties in scientific research as justification for inaction ...

    Specific reforms are in order, too. They include the insulation of research from inappropriate pressure from interested parties, ...

    But none of their examples involve any inappropriate pressure on scientific research. They mainly involve limiting the ability of scientists to make administration policy.

    The authors are not scientists at all, and do not even have the doctoral degrees that most college profs have. They are just lawyers pushing their own political agenda.

    If they were scientists, then they would not say anything so silly as to ask for a commitment to create policies based on ignorance. Yes, uncertainty is a reason for inaction. Scientists do research and experiments to reduce uncertainty, and to make informed and reasonable actions possible. Under this law prof argument, we wouldn't need scientists at all, except to make leftist policy recommendations.

    Jonathan writes:

    The way I read your post, and Wagner and Steinzor's article, is that they are making a broad-brushed claim that somehow, folks in the Bush Administration are (for any of the example issues) doing what is called "studying the problem to death". This can be a valid criticism, of course; I was once told by a teacher that my daughter, while still in grade school, was suddenly refusing to turn in her writing composition assignments; when they asked her why, she told them: "Because I can't make it 'perfect'."

    But in the case of large-scale laws and public policies involving science, here's my two cents (couched in a way that maybe the law profs can understand). When a person is on trial for a crime, the court does not convict them (or set them free) while "the jury is still out". For certain issues of the day, our science just hasn't provided the requisite answers to a degree sufficient to support an informed policy decision. So, it sounds like these law profs are wont to be the type to "bite their nails while the jury's still out", and, when it looks like it's taking too long, they carp at the judge to prod the jury to make a hasty decision. In this analogy, of course, the jury is the scientists. In the "real world", the Bush Administration is the analogue of the judge, and folks like Wagner and Steinzor are one of the litigants -- so you're right, they seems like folks with political agendas who are trying to pressure the "judge" to in turn put pressure on the "jury". What Wagner and Steinzor seem to be claim, following the analogy, is that the judge needs to put pressure on the jury if it's taking too long. In general, I don't think it's a good idea to put political pressure on scientists (unless we're talking e.g. a Manhattan Project scenario, or some similar sui generis case, and even there such pressure or prodding could be extremely risky.).

    It's hard to argue against deliberation; in a sense, that's much of the essence of science, i.e.peer review. It's also hard to argue against the notion that some folks do have a rather nasty habit of studying problems to death, and never putting knowledge into action. There may be cases (issues) where some provisional results are enough to support a fledgling policy, but it seems like, the larger the scope of the issue (impact factor), the less desirable it is to render policy while the jury's still out. So I agree with you here. I'm not convinced by Wagner and Steinzor's article, as far as the specific examples they cite, even though I would agree that the general type of problem they point out can exist. As one of my philosphy profs put it,"the case for philosophical conservatism demands that if it ain't broke, don't fix it." A medical analogy would be: Even if you're convinced there's a problem (there's some symptoms), it does you no good as the patient, or other layman, to try to somehow rush the exploratory surgery.

    You make some good points. I am annoyed at those who confuse science with policy. The highest-profile science issue in politics today is global warming. There is now a majority scientific view that global warming is real, and that human activities have contributed to it. I don't think that there is a consensus yet, and that may take 5 or 10 years. There is no good science to show that there is any net harm to global warming, or that it is practical to do anything about it.

    If we were to do something about global warming, then the most effective known method is to build more nuclear power plants. There is a scientific consensus that nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and cheapest way to generate power, and that all the alternatives emit greenhouse gases. So if we listened to scientists, we'd build more nuclear power plants. If that is what the law profs want, then they should say so.


    Tuesday, Sep 12, 2006
     
    Measuring judicial activism
    NY Times op-ed:
    Lori Ringhand, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, examined the voting records of the Supreme Court justices from 1994 to 2005. ... The conservative justices were far more willing than the liberals to strike down federal laws ... When state laws were at issue, the liberals were more activist. Add up the two categories, and the conservatives and liberals turned out to be roughly equal. ...

    By the third measure, overturning the court’s own precedents (for which data were available only up to 2000), the conservatives were far more activist.

    This is an improvement over an earlier study that just looked at overturning federal laws. But I question whether overturning the court's own precedents can be objectively measured. Most Supreme Court cases result from disagreement between lower appellate courts over how to apply precedent. No matter how it rules, there are likely to be other judges who will say that precedent was overturned.

    Next, it is not clear why activism means deferring to legislatures. Under this definition, deferring to the Executive branch may be activist while deferring to Congress is not.

    The Kelo decision deferred to the legislature on the subject of eminent domain, but in the process it created a new interpretation of the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, after 200 years, "public use" became "public purpose". Ringhand would say that Kelo was not activist.


    Monday, Sep 11, 2006
     
    Wanting to save Pluto
    String theorist Lubos Motl writes:
    When the meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, I was feeling certain that it was a huge victory for astronomy on many fronts. ...

    83 percent of the people who participated in a Discovery Channel poll wanted to save their Pluto. ...

    Many scientists often complain that only 50% of Americans or so understand that evolutionary biology is more correct than creationism. But in this case we get numbers like 83% in the context of a question that is arguably much simpler than the validity of evolution. I thought this was the 21st century. ...

    In the case of planets, you may face 83% of opposition. Many of these people are hysterical imbeciles and people who confuse cartoon heroes with rocks. When someone obtains a scientific result such as the fact that one can't consistently define planets to have 9 of them including Pluto, he or she is guaranteed to face more serious threats today than Copernicus had to face when he figured out that the Earth was orbitting around the Sun, not the other way around.

    As usual, he blames it all on mathematician Peter Woit for pointing out how his string theory work is unscientific. Motl also displays chronological snobbery and ignorance. Copernicus never faced any serious threats for his ideas. His treatise was even endorsed by the Catholic Church.

    Sunday, Sep 10, 2006
     
    Plame not a covert agent
    David Corn is a leftist anti-Bush conspiracy theorist, and been complaining about the Valerie Plame incident for years. Now he has written a book about it and claims to explain what Plame did at the CIA. He says:
    Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA's frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA. ...

    When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator, ...

    So she was really not an overseas covert agent at all. She did some work overseas, but not covertly. She is sometimes portrayed as some sort of WMD expert, but she really just did low-level personnel work with other Americans in the USA. Even special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has issued conflicting statements about whether she was a covert agent. This Wikipedia article gives both sides of the argument.

    The LA Times reports:

    But Fitzgerald, reading FBI reports just after taking charge, learned that federal investigators already knew Novak's primary source — a gossipy State Department official who seemed to have strained relations with the White House.

    So if the mystery was already solved, why did Fitzgerald's investigation continue for almost 36 more months? Why does I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, still face criminal charges in connection with the Plame leak?

    The article goes on to answer the question -- once Fitzgerald determined that no crime had been committed, he got permission to spend two years setting up perjury traps for White House officials instead:
    In early February 2004, barely a month into his tenure, Fitzgerald sought and received a letter from his Justice Department boss stating that — in addition to probing the leaks — he was authorized to pursue possible obstruction of justice and related crimes.
    The leaker now confesses:
    This week, breaking a silence he said Fitzgerald imposed, Armitage told "CBS Evening News," "I feel terrible, every day. I think I let down the president, I let down the secretary of State, I let down my department, my family, and I also let down Mr. and Mrs. Wilson."
    His big mistake was that he let down the country by complying with Fitzgerald's sting operation. Armitage should have told the public that he was leaker back in 2003 when he told the FBI, and deny Fitzgerald the chance to sabotage Bush's reelection in 2004. If anyone here is a criminal, it is Fitzgerald, because he has abused his job, misled the public, brought phony charges, and attempted to manipulate a presidential election.

    The leftist Bush-hating LA Times is so embarrassed by this that it that it editorialized that it wished that Armitage had not been unmasked as the leaker:

    Still, the latest twists and turns in the Plame-Wilson affair make us wish that we had been right when we observed, almost exactly three years ago, that "no one should count on catching the leaker, at least in a legally airtight manner."
    As long as Armitage's role could be kept secret, the leftist moonbats could continue to blame the White House with their goofy conspiracy theories. It is amazing to see the LA Times editorial writers admit that they prefer propagating false conspiracy theories to revealing the facts. They didn't want the public to find out that Armitage was the leaker, because they wanted the public to (falsely) suspect that it was an evil Karl Rove conspiracy.
     
    Non-scientific philosophical interpretations
    The evolutionist star witness on the conflict between evolution and alternative views has been Ken Miller because he wrote a book trying to reconcile his evolutionist and Catholic beliefs. He just gave a speech in Kansas:
    Miller said creationists mistakenly take aim at Darwin's theory because they believe science to be anti-religious. Evolution isn't anti-religious, said Miller. Rather, it's the non-scientific philosophical interpretations some humanists, such as Richard Dawkins, draw from the evidence that challenges the role of religion.
    Okay, that clears it up. Science is not a threat to religion; the problem is just the nonscientific evolutionists who argue that the evidence disproves religion.

    I actually agree with Miller. He is a Roman Catholic, and that Church has a proud record of accepting Science for 1000 years. If the evolutionists would stop making unscientific claims, then there would be no problem.


    Saturday, Sep 09, 2006
     
    Oliver, the Humanzee
    Evolutionists continue to maintain that a 3 million year old partial ape fossil named Lucy was a human ancestor. I think that it is just another in a long chain of fraudulent missing links. Here is another one that I recently learned about, called Oliver, the Humanzee. It was a chimp that got a lot of publicity in the 1970s for walking upright and other human-like characteristics. Some people claimed that it was half-human and half-chimp. DNA tests eventually proved that it was a chimp, but no one ever explained its human-like behavior. It seems to me that it was as human-like as Lucy. I think that Lucy will eventually be proved to be just another ancient ape.

    Friday, Sep 08, 2006
     
    Improbability of life
    David Berlinski has a essay On The Origins Of Life. The math is criticized by the goodmath blog and John Allen Paulos.

    I don't find these calculations about the improbability of life to be persuasive but Berlinski is not a creationist, he states his assumptions, and he gives sources for his figures. I doubt that he is making math errors.

    Similar arguments for the improbability of life are given by cosmologists and string theorists. They use arguments like this:

    The synthesis of carbon -- the vital core of all organic molecules -- on a significant scale involves what scientists view as an astonishing coincidence in the ratio of the strong force to electromagnetism. This ratio makes it possible for carbon-12 to reach an excited state of exactly 7.65 MeV at the temperature typical of the centre of stars, which creates a resonance involving helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-12 -- allowing the necessary binding to take place during a tiny window of opportunity 10-17 seconds long.
    The significance of these arguments is a philosophical question. Maybe greater scientific knowledge will show some of these concidences to be not so outrageous. But there are a lot of very smart physicists who take these arguments very seriously.

    Thursday, Sep 07, 2006
     
    A plea for empiricism
    Jerry A. Coyne reviews Frederick Crews on Freud:
    Laid out in the first four essays, Crews’s brief against Freud is hard to refute. Through Freud’s letters and documents, Crews reveals him to be not the compassionate healer of legend, but a cold and calculating megalomaniac, determined to go down in history as the Darwin of the psyche. Not only did he not care about patients (he sometimes napped or wrote letters while they were free-associating): there is no historical evidence that he effectively cured any of them. And the propositions of psychoanalysis have proven to be either untestable or falsified. How can we disprove the idea, for example, that we have a death drive? Or that dreams always represent wish fulfilments? When faced with counter-examples, Freudianism always proves malleable enough to incorporate them as evidence for the theory. Other key elements of Freudian theory have never been corroborated. There are no scientifically convincing experiments, for example, demonstrating the repression of traumatic memories. As Crews points out, work with survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic episodes has shown not a single case in which such memories are quashed and then recovered. In four further essays, Crews documents the continuing pernicious influence of Freud in the “recovered memory” movement. The idea that childhood sexual abuse can be repressed and then recalled originated with Freud, and has been used by therapists to evoke false memories which have traumatized patients and shattered families.

    Realizing the scientific weaknesses of Freud, many diehards have taken the fall-back position that he was nevertheless a thinker of the first rank. Didn’t Freud give us the idea of the unconscious, they argue? Well, not really, for there was a whole history of pre-Freudian thought about people’s buried motives, including the writings of Shakespeare and Nietzsche. The “unconscious” was a commonplace of Romantic psychology and philosophy. And those who champion Freud as a philosopher must realize that his package also includes less savoury items like penis envy, the amorality of women, and our Lamarckian inheritance of “racial memory”.

    That's right. Freud was a scientific fraud and a kook.

    He also addresses evolutionism:

    In his essay, “Darwin goes to Sunday School”, Crews reviews several of these works, pointing out with brio the intellectual contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science. Assessing work by the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael Ruse, the theologian John Haught and others, Crews concludes, “When coldly examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have adulterated scientific doctrine or to have emptied religious dogma of its commonly accepted meaning”. Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save adopting a form of “religion” that makes no untenable empirical claims), Crews points out the dangers to the survival of our planet arising from a rejection of Darwinism. Such rejection promotes apathy towards overpopulation, pollution, deforestation and other environmental crimes: “So long as we regard ourselves as creatures apart who need only repent of our personal sins to retain heaven’s blessing, we won’t take the full measure of our species-wise responsibility for these calamities”.
    He's right that many of the evolutionists who claim to harmonize religion and science are guilty of intellectual contortions and dishonesties. (Or were guilty, as Gould is dead now.) I don't know about the theologians.

    I am not sure that religious rejection of Darwinism is a cause of pollution. The USA supposedly leads the world in religious rejection of Darwinism, and yet we also lead in protecting the environment. Communist countries that have rejected religion are much more polluted than the USA.

    Michael Crichton said, in a 2003 speech:

    Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

    There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

    He's right. Modern environmentalism is a religion. It is the perfect religion for leftist-atheist-evolutionists who have rejected more traditional religion. That's okay with me if they want to maintain their religious beliefs, but I object when they want to pass them off as science, as they often do.

    (Note: Occasionally an evolutionist questions my use of the word "evolutionist". Here, the term is being used by Jerry Coyne, who is himself a well-respected evolutionist at the Univ. of Chicago. We are using the term just as dictionaries have defined the term for 100 years. Coyne uses the term "evolutionist" in a positive way, such as when he compares proponents of the theory of evolution to creationists and others.)

     
    Quattrone exonerated
    Alykhan Velshi writes:
    The last three years have not been kind to Conrad Black: his media empire and his reputation are in a shambles, his various properties are being auctioned off by court-order, and his assets and family jewelry are being confiscated – all this, and Black has yet to be convicted of a single crime. ...

    U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (yes, that Patrick Fitzgerald) has also filed more than a dozen criminal charges against Black, including racketeering, mail fraud, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and tax evasion. ...

    The trial by attrition of Conrad Black has exposed the dark underbelly of the legal system, where the government can ruin a man, take his property, his means of livelihood, and make him a social pariah – all without the hassle of securing a conviction. There is an insidious little worm that has crept into the legal system, an iconoclastic mentality that is distorting the rule of law. Focused less on securing justice than on bringing down the high and mighty, all the while pandering to the politics of envy, it affects the entire system of corporate governance.

    Fitzgerald is the special prosecutor who is going after former White House advisor Scooter Libby. Everyone says that he has an impeccable record, is extremely competent, and goes by the book. I think that his prosecution of Libby shows that he is an incompetent idiot who has abused his powers. Now I find out that he may have unfairly tried to ruin others as well.

    I'm glad to see that Si Valley banker and dealmaker Frank Quattrone is getting his name cleared. The feds were out to get him for about 5 years. When they couldn't get him for financial irregularities, they prosecuted him for the cover-up. He had a couple of trials, and courageously testified in his own defense. Now, he has finally won on all counts, and should even get $120M in back pay that was conditioned on his acquittal.

     
    Judge attacks supremacists
    Federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III writes in a Wash Post op-ed:
    The chief casualty in the struggle over same-sex marriage has been the American constitutional tradition. ... Judges began the rush to constitutionalize. The Massachusetts Supreme Court concocted a state constitutional right to marry persons of the same sex. The court went on to say that opposing views lacked so much as a rational basis. In other words, centuries of common-law tradition, legislative sanction and human experience with marriage as a bond between one man and one woman were deemed by that court unworthy to the point of irrationality.

    It would be altogether understandable for Congress and state legislatures to counter this constitutional excess with constitutional responses of their own. ...

    Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes?

    Yes, and the best way to leave it to the democratic process is for Congress to pass a law making it clear that the federal courts do not have jurisdiction on the subject, and for state judges to respect the popular votes of the people.

    He defends the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as a way of keeping supremacist state judges from trying spread same-sex marriage to other states, but Congress may need to prevent supremacist federal judges from interfering with DOMA.

    Update: Medis wrote:

    Judge Wilkinson wants to leave the issue to "NORMAL democratic processes" (emphasis added), by which he means ordinary legislation. And as he points out, constitutionalizing the issue actually increases the role and power of the courts. ...

    [Passing constitutional provisions is] simply changing the nature of the source material the courts are using ...

    Yes. That is the normal democratic process. The people pass laws, and the courts use the given source material to resolve disputes.
    it seems odd to say, "We don't want the courts using our constitution to set marital policy in this state, so what we are going to do is put something about marriage in our constitution!"
    No, it is really saying, "We don't like the courts changing marital policy in this state, so we are going to use the normal democratic process to amend and clarify whatever law the courts are trying to use to change policy."

    Tuesday, Sep 05, 2006
     
    Falsifying the anthropic principle
    Stanford string theorist Leonard Susskind claims that the anthropic principle is falsifiable with this argument:
    Suppose an incredibly accurate measurement of the average temperature of the earth gave the answer (in centigrade) T=50.0000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000 degrees. In other words the temperature was found to be exactly midway between freezing and boiling, to an accuracy of one hundred decimal places. I think we would be justified in thinking that there is something beyond the anthropic principle at work. There is no reason, based on the existence of life, for the temperature to be so symmetrically located between boiling and freezing. So discovering such a temperature would pretty convincingly mean that the existence of life is not the real reason why the temperature is between 0 and 100 degrees.
    This is goofy. He has taken a measurement that doesn't even make much sense beyond about 2 significant figures, and hypothesized measuring it to 100 figures. Nothing will ever be measurable to 100 figures. Furthermore, he doesn't really explain how this falsifies the anthropic principle. He seems to be saying that an observation that unusual would be so unexpected and remarkable that science would never explain it and it would be evidence for God. He doesn't say it that way, of course.

    He goes on:

    Throughout my long experience as a scientist I have heard un-falsifiability hurled at so many important ideas that I am inclined to think that no idea can have great merit unless it has drawn this criticism. I'll give some examples:

    From psychology: You would think that everybody would agree that humans have a hidden emotional life. B.F. Skinner didn't. He was the guru of a scientific movement called behaviorism that dismissed anything that couldn't be directly observed as unscientific. The only valid subject for psychology according to the behaviorist is external behavior. Statements about the emotions or the state of mind of a patient were dismissed as un-falsifiable. Most of us, today, would say that this is a foolish extreme.

    Oh boy. At the time, psychology was completely overrun with unscientific Freudians and mindreaders. It is very strange for him to pick on the behavorists.

    He seems to be saying that the truly great ideas are those that appear to be scientific but cannot be tested. I am going to call this the Susskind principle. It can be compared to the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle:

    The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
    For a couple of hundred years, Physics has been the Science that all other sciences emulated. I don't think that they'll be emulating the Susskind Principle.
     
    Esoteric branch of algebraic geometry
    Princeton solid state physicist Philip Anderson writes, in a review of Not Even Wrong:
    What is Woit's argument? He is not accusing the string theorists of egregious mathematical error - of course they are superb mathematicians. Rather, he accuses them simply of doing pure mathematics in physics departments, of redefining "science". One could not possibly object to the existence of an active mathematical community pursuing such an exciting, original line of work. The objection is to the claim that this work is physics, that it possibly, or even probably, will tell us how the real world constructs itself. One may particularly cavil at the high level of hype around string theory, to the point of monopolising popular attention, and that the gigadollars of a number of philanthropists, as well as numerous physics department employment slots, are being farmed out to what is really an esoteric branch of algebraic geometry.
    That is correct. String Theory is Mathematics, not Science. As long as mainstream physicists accept the hype about String Theory, as most of them do, the evolutionists are unconvincing with their goofy definitions of "science" and "theory". Their definitions do not match the usage of today's leading theoretical physicists at all.

    Monday, Sep 04, 2006
     
    Sock puppet caught
    Here is a blogging scandal:
    A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

    Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog.

    Who cares? I can see where TNR might be a little embarrassed, but most online commenters are anonymous.
     
    For religious intolerance
    Sam Harris has written 2 books arguing for religious intolerance, and a current Newsweek article describes him as a major atheist spokesman, along with British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. Harris claims:
    Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years.
    I thought that I would be more sympathetic to his argument. It is fine with me if he scrutinizes and challenges the religious beliefs of others. But hardly any Americans really believe that the world is about to end. Maybe some Jehovah's Witnesses and a few others, but not mainstream Christians.

    Harris's real targets are religious moderates and those who tolerate religious faiths. He attacks them for deviating from the Bible. Maybe his books are intended to be parodies.


    Friday, Sep 01, 2006
     
    CIA Leak Story Solved
    NY Times now reveals:
    Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years ...

    Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, first told the authorities in October 2003 that he had been the primary source for the July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak that identified Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. operative and set off the leak investigation. ...

    Mr. Armitage cooperated voluntarily in the case, never hired a lawyer and testified several times to the grand jury, according to people who are familiar with his role and actions in the case. He turned over his calendars, datebooks and even his wife’s computer in the course of the inquiry, those associates said. But Mr. Armitage kept his actions secret, not even telling President Bush because the prosecutor asked him not to divulge it, the people said.

    So Fitzgerald knew from day one that nothing illegal or improper happened. The story might have been slightly embarrassing for the White House if it could be proved that the leaker was in the White House and had bad motives for the leak. But the leaker wasn't even in the White House, he cooperated fully, and no bad motives have been found.

    Fitzgerald conducted a two-year investigation not to find an unlawful leaker, but to entrap White House officials into some sort of slip-up that would allow them to be accused of a cover-up. He was counting on Watergate-mentality reporters who say that the cover-up is worse than the crime.

    I was predicting all along that no one would get convicted in this so-called scandal. But Fitzgerald is even more irresponsible than I thought. He wasn't even investigating anything criminal. He only got one indictment, against Scooter Libby, and the only way he got that was to trick Libby into admitting that he lied to a reporter in order to protect possibly classified info, and then trick the grand jury into thinking that Libby reciting his lie to a reporter was really a lie to federal agents. Once the facts get sorted out, Libby will be acquitted.


    Thursday, Aug 31, 2006
     
    Galileo and extraterrestial life
    I just watched the PBS special Exploring Space -- The Quest for Life. It has some interesting scientific info, but it included this anti-Catholic propaganda:
    Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's [four] orbiting moons led the astronomer to believe in the Copernican [mispronounced] theory that everything in the universe does not revolve around the Earth. For his efforts, the Roman Catholic Church branded Galileo a heretic, relegating him to a life lived under house arrest. But Galileo fueled the idea that if Earth was not the center of the Universe, perhaps other planets harbored life as well.
    This is nonsense. The Church never had any objection to the idea that moons orbit Jupiter. Copernicus might have, as his theory did not account for any moons orbiting Jupiter. Galileo was punished for violating a court order. The only thing that the Church branded a heresy was the idea that the Sun is immovable. We now know, of course, that the Sun does indeed move, as it orbits a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and the Milky Way is accelerating away from most other galaxies.

    You might wonder how a PBS science show could get such basic facts wrong. The facts are well-documented in many places. My explanation is that PBS suffers from a leftist-atheist-evolutionist mindset. It thinks that extraterrestial life will disprove Christianity, just as Galileo's discoveries did.

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists think that the Earth going around the Sun is evidence for life on other planets, that Science consists of finding ways to knock Man off the pedestal, and that some document from 400 years ago shows that Christianity must be wrong about everything. Whenever they stake out some goofy pseudoscientific opinion, they mention geocentrism or the trial of Galileo as that somehow proves them right. And they nearly always lie about Galileo.


    Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006
     
    Radio show in activist judges
    Here is a Connecticut public radio WNPR program:
    Court judges deliver opinions on issues that affect us both intimately as individuals and broadly as citizens.

    If you agree with a judges decision, you might have something to say about the wisdom of our judicial branch and our system of laws - but if you disagree with a judicial decision, you might cozy up to the idea that our courts are swamped by opinionated activist judges who are interpreting our laws to suit their own political agendas.

    Our guests are lawyer Phyllis Schlafly, conservative commentator and defeater of the ERA Amendment, and Yale Law School professors Reva Siegel and Robert Post.

    You can download the MP3 file. I guess they needed two law profs to rebut Phyllis's criticisms of the courts.
     
    Scientifically irresponsible judge
    Some law prof bloggers rant:
    I labeled Justice Scalia's gratuitous dissent from the Supreme Court's denial of certiorari "the most scientifically irresponsible passage" in the Court's history and an act of "shameless pandering [and] judicial aid and comfort of the highest order to the creationist lobby." By comparison, Jonathan much more temperately concluded: "I see no defense of [Scalia's] reference to the Scopes trial. At best, it was an ill-considered rhetorical flourish. At worst, it reflected a shocking level of scientific illiteracy for such an esteemed and intelligent jurist."
    The legal issue was whether the following disclaimer is unconstitutional:
    It is hereby recognized by the Tangipahoa Parish Board of Education, that the lesson to be presented, regarding the origin of life and matter, is known as the Scientific Theory of Evolution and should be presented to inform students of the scientific concept and not intended to influence or dissuade the Biblical version of Creation or any other concept.
    Here is the offensive Scalia passage:
    today we permit a Court of Appeals to push the much beloved secular legend of the Monkey Trial one step further. We stand by in silence while a deeply divided Fifth Circuit bars a school district from even suggesting to students that other theories besides evolution -- including, but not limited to, the Biblical theory of creation -- are worthy of their consideration.
    It is not clear which Monkey Trial legend Scalia is referring to, as most people have learned a version that is distorted in several different ways. Previously, Scalia referred to it in Edwards v. Aguillard:
    The people of Louisiana, including those who are Christian fundamentalists, are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever scientific evidence there was for it.
    These law profs are being ridiculous, and they fail to answer the comments on their own blogs. There are lots of Supreme Court decisions endorsing wacky racial theories, from the time of slavery to forced busing.

    Here is where Chief Justice Rehnquist tries to define admissable scientific evidence:

    The Court then states that a "key question" to be answered in deciding whether something is "scientific knowledge" "will be whether it can be (and has been) tested." Following this sentence are three quotations from treatises, which speak not only of empirical testing, but one of which states that "the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability,".

    I defer to no one in my confidence in federal judges; but I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is saidthat the scientific status of a theory depends on its "falsifiability," and I suspect some of them will be, too.

    I don't expect judges to know much about science, but I would think that an expert in legal evidence should have some idea about how scientists regard evidence.

    The law profs cannot even explain what is wrong with Scalia quotes, except to say that he gives some encouragement to creationists. I can see where someone might think that it would have been better if he said the "Biblical story of creation", instead of "theory", but that doesn't seem to have bothered the law profs. I think that they are just upset with the term "Monkey Trial".

    A lot of people think that the Scopes Monkey Trial was a great triumph of Science and Reason over Religion and Ignorance. In fact it was a big evolutionist publicity stunt. Scopes never even taught the theory of evolution. The school biology book had a section on evolution that was filled with unscientific and offensive claims, like Piltdown Man and the superiority of the Caucasian race. William Jennings Bryan was not a creationist, but objected to the way evolution was being used to justify eugenics and what was about to happen in Nazi Germany. Clarence Darrow ended up pleading guilty rather than defend evolution. He had wanted evolutionists to testify without being cross-examined, but the judge would not let him. The appeal overturned the $100 fine against Scopes on a technicality, not the merits of the theory of evolution. The movie Inherit the Wind (1960) was a fictionalized dramatization that was intended to make a pro-Communist statement.


    Tuesday, Aug 29, 2006
     
    Main reason for war
    A reader sends this 2004 interview:
    Ahmed Chalabi is the man whose information provided the justification for the American invasion of Iraq. But it now seems that he is at best a very shady character and at worst, a double agent, working for the government of Iran ...
    He says that I was wrong when I gave my list of justifications for the Iraq War because I understate the WMD argument. As proof that WMD was the main reason for the war, he points to Pres. Bush's press conference last week:
    Q Quick follow-up. A lot of the consequences you mentioned for pulling out seem like maybe they never would have been there if we hadn't gone in. How do you square all of that?

    THE PRESIDENT: I square it because, imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.

    Now, look, part of the reason we went into Iraq was -- the main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't, but he had the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction. But I also talked about the human suffering in Iraq, and I also talked the need to advance a freedom agenda. And so my question -- my answer to your question is, is that, imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment and so much hatred that people came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

    The usual Leftist theory is that Bush didn't really believe that Iraq had WMD, but that Bush lied to us in order to get us into war. His true motivations are explained in terms of helping his Arab oil buddies or his Jewish Israeli buddies, they say. Well they don't usually give both of those motivations at the same time. Another theory is that Bush was fooled by Chalabi and other anti-Americans that Iraq had WMD.

    I don't do mindreading. Bush certainly isn't going to admit that the war was a mistake, or that he didn't believe that Iraq had WMD. Maybe Bush was being less than fully truthful about his motivations in 2003, and maybe he is not fully truthful today. I don't know.

    I do know the stated justifications by Pres. Bush, and by Tony Blair and Congressional leaders. They said that Iraq was not complying with UN WMD inspections, and recited various suspicions that Iraq was developing WMDs. They presented circumstantial evidence of WMD development that was lacking in specificity. As an example of the lack of specificity, we didn't even know whether the WMD was nuclear, chemical, or biological. Some people were convinced that Iraq had ready-to-go WMD, and some people didn't. I was skeptical, but I thought that either outcome would not have been surprising.

    Bush does come closer than ever before to admitting that the reasons for the Iraq War were faulty. If you read the rest of his comments, you'll find that Bush still maintains that valid justifications for war were given, and most of those justifications are still valid. Historians may someday decide whether the war was worth the cost. I am not smart enough to say.

    I think that all this carping about the reasons for war is tiresome. The Afghan and Iraq wars had more public support than any wars in my lifetime. The arguments and evidence for the war were fully and openly debated. Prominent Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton, Kerry, Biden, and Edwards voted for the war after reviewing the evidence. Some of those Democrats now say that they made a mistake, and want a debate on what to do now. Fine, let's debate the future of Iraq.

    If someone can prove to me that the President deliberately lied to the American public or to Congress to get us into war, then that is a serious charge and the President should be impeached. But if you are just going to tell me that Republicans and Democrats made some faulty inferences about the intentions and progress of an American enemy, it is not that interesting.

    It might have been reasonable for some Congressman to give a speech in early 2003 saying:

    Pres. Bush has formally justified this war on the grounds that Iraq refuses to comply with UN weapons inspections, and because the war on terror requires that we act before Iraq becomes an imminent threat. I believe that those are insufficient grounds because I believe that we should wait until Iraq's WMD become an imminent threat. However, I am voting for the war because various White House officials have made statements implying that they are convinced that Iraq has dangerous WMD today. The evidence that has been shown to me is unconvincing, but I believe those White House officials and I trust their judgment. If it turns out that Iraq does not have WMD today, then I will say that the war will have been a mistake.
    No one said that. So I think that it is completely disingenuous for people to make nitpicky arguments about WMD and the Iraq War. Chalabi's info was not the justification for the war. The explicitly stated justifications for the war are as valid as they ever were.

    George writes:

    It is not true that the Iraq War had so much public support. The wars in Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo had the support of the international community.
    The Kuwait (Gulf) War did not have the support of the Democrats in Congress, and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo did not have the support of either the UN or the US Congress. The invasions of Panama and Haiti did not either. Giving an ultimatum to Iraq that it had to allow weapons inspections or face military invasion was supported by the President, the Congress, the American public, the UN, and most of the world.

    Monday, Aug 28, 2006
     
    Mooney's War on Science
    Chris Mooney has updated his book, The Republican War on Science. The hardback edition had a lot of insubstantial criticisms of the Bush administration. Eg, Mooney hates it when Bush distinguishes between science and policy.

    Mooney's update says:

    More recently, Republicans in the House of Representatives elected Congressman John Boehner of Ohio as their new majority leader. In 2002, before winning this role, Boehner coauthored a letter to the Ohio State Board of Education instructing it that students should learn about "differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution."
    Okay, I guess Mooney also prefers to brainwash kids with a particular point of view.

    Mooney also complains that Republican judge John E. Jones III tried to evaluate scientific disputes in a courtroom, and then admitted that his trial was an "utter waste of monetary and personal resources." Mooney complains that Kansas redefined science in a way that "horrifies scientists". Here is how the NY Times described that change:

    The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." [NY Times]
    Are you horrified yet? Mooney is just an example of the Leftist war on science.
     
    Papal plot to rubbish Darwin
    Italian news:
    Rimini, August 24 - Pope Benedict XVI is to brainstorm on evolution with a top theologian accused of championing controversial theories that rubbish Darwin. ...

    The closed-door think-in at the pope's summer residence of Castelgandolfo is expected to nail down a firmer position on evolution, which has been keenly debated since Pope John Paul II's famous pronouncement that Darwinism was "not just a theory".

    No, Schoenborn is not out to rubbish Darwin. Here is another Italian report: (copied from here)
    RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 25, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is proposing an ideology-free debate on the theory of evolution, and wants to clarify the Church’s position on the topic.

    The archbishop of Vienna presented his proposal Thursday to a packed auditorium at the Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples, organized by the Communion and Liberation Movement in Rimini, Italy.

    At a press conference Wednesday, the cardinal, explained that the Church does not hold the position of "creationist" theories on the origin of life and man, which draw scientific consequences from biblical texts.

    In fact, he added, there is "no conflict between science and religion," but, rather, a debate "between a materialist interpretation of the results of science and a metaphysical philosophical interpretation."

    Cardinal Schoenborn, who sparked a worldwide debate in 2005 with an article in the New York Times on the subject, called for clarification of the difference between the "theory of evolution" and "evolutionism," the latter understood as an ideology, based on scientific theory.

    By way of example, the cardinal mentioned Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who saw in the publication of Charles Darwin’s "The Origin of Species," "the scientific foundation for their Marxist materialist theory. This is evolutionism, not theory of evolution."

    The archbishop of Vienna warned against the application of this evolutionist ideology in fields such as economic neo-liberalism, or bioethical issues, where there is the risk of creating new eugenic theories.

    Yes, there is a difference between evolutionist science and evolutionist politics and philosophy. It is unfortunate that the leading proponents of evolution such as Steven Jay Gould (now deceased), Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, AAAS, etc. do not make this distinction.

    The Catholic Church has no objection to evolutionist science, and neither do I.

    As an example of evolutionists using science to promote philosophy, here is a Nobel laureate statement that was issued to influence Kansas politics:

    Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.
    Cardinal Schoenborn would accept the confirmable evidence, but not the conclusion that life on Earth is unguided, unplanned, and random.
     
    Only a monkey would question cosmological inflation
    An Australian paper reports:
    In the 1970s, Guth was one of those who realised that the Big Bang theory failed to explain how a hot chaotic fireball could become the cool universe with stable clusters of galaxies we see today.

    Rather than challenge the idea that time and space began with the Big Bang, he suggested the new universe had suddenly expanded trillions of times in a millionth of a second. That idea, called inflation, did such a good mathematical job of explaining the shape of the universe that it was adopted far and wide.

    Guth himself has built his career on it. Recently, however, it has become clear that the theory has major flaws. There is, for example, no widely accepted way for physics to explain how such "inflation" could have happened.

    It also fails to deal with the 1990s discovery of "dark energy", the energy field that fills all space and which is now thought to be the cause of the universe's expansion.

    So when someone presented an alternative to cosmological inflation, Guth compared him to a monkey. String theorist Motl cheers.

    You would think that physicists would respond by explaining what caused inflation, when it started, when it ended, what the empirical evidence, and why we have confidence in those figures. Maybe whoever figures those things out will get the Nobel Prize instead of Guth. In the meantime, inflation appears to be another sacred cow.


    Sunday, Aug 27, 2006
     
    Redefining science
    Now string theorist Lubos Motl defends fellow string theorist Lenny Susskind's statement:
    It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science.
    Creationists would be mocked if they said anything so silly and self-serving.

    It does seem like some string theorists want to be lumped in with leftist evolutionists and creationist who redefine science to include ideas that cannot be empirically tested.

    Motl writes:

    The evidence to support QCD was less direct than the most naive fans of science could have expected - or could have demanded. This trend - the fact that the required steps to find evidence or proof are increasingly more complex, subtle, and abstract - has been a characteristic feature of science in general and theoretical physics in particular at least for 300 years. There is no way how this trend could be suddenly reverted. Theoretical physics is bound to demand increasingly deep and ever more complex mathematical and abstract reasoning, especially if it continues to be increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain new experimental data.
    I like complex mathematical and abstract reasoning. The more the better. That isn't the complaint. The complaint is that it is not science if there is no way to test the theory.

    Motl tries to hide behind mathematics, and pretend that any complaint about string theory is a complaint about its use of mathematics. It isn't.

    The requirement that a scientific theory be empirically testable has not changed a bit in the last 300 years. The more use of math in a physical theory makes it more testable, not less.

    QCD is a theory for quark interactions inside a proton. It makes very few predictions, and no one can isolate a quark. That makes it one of our less successful theories for the fundamental forces. But that doesn't mean that it needs to be replaced with some theory that makes not predictions at all.

     
    Aztecs Tortured, Ate Spaniards, Bones Show
    LA Times reports (from Reuters):
    CALPULALPAN, Mexico — Skeletons found at an archeological site show that Aztecs captured, sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

    The condition of skulls and bones from the Tecuaque site east of Mexico City offers evidence that about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say.

    The findings support accounts of Aztecs capturing and killing a caravan led by Spanish conquistadors in revenge for the murder of Cacamatzin, king of the Aztec city of Texcoco. Experts said the discovery proved that some Aztecs did resist the conquistadors led by Hernan Cortes before they attacked the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

    History books say many indigenous Mexicans initially welcomed the white-skinned horsemen, thinking they were returning gods, but turned against them once they tried to take over the Aztec seat of power in a conflict that ended in 1521.

    "This is the first place that has so much evidence there was resistance to the conquest," said archeologist Enrique Martinez, director of the dig here. "It shows it wasn't all submission."

    The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods, Martinez said.

    "It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected," Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.

    The priests and town elders sometimes ate their victims' hearts or cooked flesh from their arms and legs, Martinez said. Knife cuts and even teeth marks on the bones show which ones had meat stripped off to be eaten, he said.

    Revise those history books. The Aztecs were a bunch of cruel and bloodthirsty cannibals.

    Saturday, Aug 26, 2006
     
    Science insiders and outsiders
    String theorist Lubos Motl estimates estimates that only 1000 Americans are competent to recognize the uniqueness of string theory, and only 100 can evaluate the physics evidence for the anthropic principle. 20M can rationally see the necessity for Darwinian evolution.

    The idea, of course, is that he wants to express his opinions on evolution, global warming, and IQ without any special expertise, but he doesn't want anyone else criticizing string theory.

    The anthropic principle is more philosophy than science. When you hear string theorists talk about the anthropic principle, it is because they have failed to make any physical predictions that might be testable. It is about as scientific as creationists saying, "we're here, so someone must have created us".

    There are some esoteric reasons for thinking that String Theory should be promising research, but you don't have to be an expert to ask what physical phenomena it has explained. Nothing so far, unfortunately.

     
    Taller people are smarter: study
    NEW YORK (Reuters) - While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it's not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality -- tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds.

    "As early as age three -- before schooling has had a chance to play a role -- and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests," wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    The findings were based primarily on two British studies that followed children born in 1958 and 1970, respectively, through adulthood and a U.S. study on height and occupational choice.

    Other studies have pointed to low self-esteem, better health that accompanies greater height, and social discrimination as culprits for lower pay for shorter people.

    But researchers Case and Paxson believe the height advantage in the job world is more than just a question of image.

    It is common for Americans to just assume that discrimination explains differences like these. But it could be that taller people have larger brains, or are healthier, or there are other factors.
     
    Global warming boost to glaciers
    BBC news:
    Global warming could be causing some glaciers to grow, a new study claims. Researchers at Newcastle University looked at temperature trends in the western Himalaya over the past century.

    They found warmer winters and cooler summers, combined with more snow and rainfall, could be causing some mountain glaciers to increase in size.

    Global warming may be a net benefit to most areas.

    Saturday, Aug 19, 2006
     
    Evolutionist mind-reading
    Someone wrote, on a Wikipedia discussion page:
    Seriously, what's an evolutionist? The guy used the term "evolutionist mind-reading"; I think we deserve a clarification of what he means by the term "evolutionist", or more specifically, "evolutionist mind-reading". ... Kenosis
    There is a particular form of mindreading that seems to be peculiar to evolutionists. They will pretend to be defending some straightforward scientific proposition or philosophical issue, and they'll waste most of their time theorizing about the thought processes of those who disagree. Often their theories are directly contrary to what their opponents say, but they persist relentlessly.

    The above discussion was over whether an encyclopedia wanting a neutral point of view should say:

    The bulk of the material produced by the intelligent design movement, however, is not intended to be scientific but rather to promote its social and political aims.
    You would think that for the evolutionists to attack the ID movement, it would be enough to show that the pro-ID papers are not scientific. But instead, they devote a lot of energy trying to make the claim that they are not intended to be scientific.

    It is hard to even have a discussion with these evolutionists, because as soon as I make a point, they immediately leap into an argument about what I am thinking!


    Friday, Aug 18, 2006
     
    Dissing Pluto and the Other Plutons
    Having disposed of the redefinition of science, the NY Times has moved on to the redefinition of planets:
    A panel appointed by the International Astronomical Union thinks it has come up with a dandy compromise to the years-long struggle over whether we should continue to count Pluto as a planet. The trouble is, the new definition of a planet will include an awful mélange of icy rocks found on the outer fringes of the solar system. It would be far better to expel Pluto from the planetary ranks altogether, leaving us to bask in the comfortable presence of the eight classical planets that were discovered before 1900 and have excited wonder ever since.
    If some Christians in Kansas had refused to accept new planets, the NY Times and the evolutionists would lecturing us on how we must accept what the scientists say, and they would be retelling the Galileo story.

    Wednesday, Aug 16, 2006
     
    Ignoring Bush v Gore
    Adam Cohen writes in the NY Times that liberals hate to talk about the 2000 Bush v Gore US Supreme Court decision because they agree with the logic of the decision but didn't like the way that it affirmed an election win for GW Bush.
    The heart of Bush v. Gore’s analysis was its holding that the recount was unacceptable because the standards for vote counting varied from county to county.
    More precisely, it held that a non-statutory court-ordered recount of a federal election must meet some very minimal standards for fairness. The proposed Florida recount was unlikely to be any more accurate than the previous recount.

    State legislatures are still free to devise non-uniform election procedures that they think are fair. Court meddling nearly always makes elections less fair, because judges act undemocratically.

    One of the biggest non-uniform election procedures is to use non-English ballot options in some areas, and not others. Some areas have Tagalog ballots if they have sufficiently many Tagalog speaker. No area has a French or Greek ballot regardless of those languages being spoken. If Cohen and other liberals really think that non-uniformity is unconstitional, then they should start by supporting the repeal of the Voting Rights Act.


    Tuesday, Aug 15, 2006
     
    How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate
    Physicist Lawrence M. Krauss writes:
    But perhaps more worrisome than a political movement against science is plain old ignorance. The people determining the curriculum of our children in many states remain scientifically illiterate. And Kansas is a good case in point.

    The chairman of the school board, Dr. Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, is not merely a strict creationist. He has openly stated that he believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago, although he was quoted in The New York Times this month as saying that his personal faith “doesn’t have anything to do with science.”

    “I can separate them,” he continued, adding, “My personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”

    A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams’s religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board.

    Krauss has his own goofy definition of science. He says egalitarianism is one of the five or so basic principles of scientific ethos. He says that science requires opposition to Pres. Bush on global warming, stem cell research, and missile defense. He subscribes to the String Theory Landscape, which has no hope of being tested empirically.

    Remember that the big issue in the Kansas school curriculum was the definition of science, according to the NY Times. The leftists hate definitions that require empirical testability.


    Monday, Aug 14, 2006
     
    Changing the definition of science
    It is not just the evolutionists who want to change the definition of science, it is also the string theorists:
    Now, it seems, at least some superstring advocates are ready to abandon the essential definition of science itself on the basis that string theory is too important to be hampered by old-fashioned notions of experimental proof.
    At least the string theorists do not try to redefine the word "theory", as the evolutionists do.

    The evolutionists are always calling their enemies liars. String theorist Motl reacts to the criticism by calling it "two pages full of lies about physics".

     
    Right v Left
    The American Conservative magazine asks:
    1. Are the designations “liberal” and “conservative” still useful? Why or why not?

    2. Does a binary Left/Right political spectrum describe the full range of ideological options? Is it still applicable?

    Phyllis Schlafly answers:
    Complaining about the one-dimensionality of Right and Left positions is a bit like complaining that we can’t compare apples and oranges. No scale of variables can accurately describe the full range of qualities a fruit can have. Yet when you go the supermarket, apples and oranges are measured by a single number, the price, and consumers do indeed compare prices when they shop. Whatever varied preferences they have about fruits are judged by dollars and cents at the checkout counter.

    Likewise, when voters enter the voting booth, they must convert their complex ideologies into a simple (often binary) choice. They can vote for only one candidate for each public office. American political history has produced the two-party system. The Constitution requires that the president be elected by a majority of presidential electors, not just a plurality. Third parties do not get any electors if they cannot win any states.

    There are also about 25 other answers.
     
    Wikipedia evolutionists
    FeloniousMonk is one of those who furiously maintains evolitionist bias in Wikipedia articles. Now he argues that that it is unfair for an article on the Kansas evolution hearings to describe what actually happened at the hearings because only one side participated. (I think he means that only one side presented witnesses; both sides participated in the cross examination.) He says that, "policy prevents this article being turned into a vehicle for one side of the debate to restate its position, a position that has ultimately been rejected in state after state." His only authority is the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy.

    Instead of having quotes from the people who were actually involved, he insists on having quotes from some undergraduate student assistant to an ID advocate who wasn't even there. The only justification is that he claims that the quotes support some goofy conspiracy theory that he has.

    These evolutionists are amazingly narrow-minded. You would think that if they really thought that they had superior facts, reason, and science on their side, then they would happily rebut the contrary arguments. Instead they always want to censor the contrary arguments. Real scientists and pro-science advocates do not have to censor anyone.

    Meanwhile, the Wikipedia page on North American Union. Some administrator has deleted it and blocked any re-creation of it, without any explanation. Weird. It looks like more censorship.


    Sunday, Aug 13, 2006
     
    Teach evolution but allow students to question it
    Science magazine brags about its evolutionist election win in Kansas, and reports:
    John Bacon, one of the two pro-ID incumbents who won last week's primaries, promises that the issue won't go away. "It's unfortunate that we'll now be forced to again teach evolution as the only possible explanation for the origin of life," he says. [Science 11 August 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5788, p. 743]
    Evolution explains the development of life, but not the origin. Not very well, anyway. No one should preclude other possibilities.

    One of the supposedly evolutionist winners in Kansas is a former elementary school teacher from Liberal, Kansas named Sally Cauble. That's right, a town in Kansas named Liberal. She says schools should teach evolution but allow students to question it.

    Hmmmm, that's what the current standards say. I wonder if she even knows what she is talking about. Maybe she just promised change in order to get campaign donations from evolutionists.


    Saturday, Aug 12, 2006
     
    Kansas evolutionists
    The evolutionists at Wikipedia think that they have found a smoking gun. The page on the Kansas evolution hearings now quotes an assistant to one of the witnesses as saying that he hopes that intelligent design (ID) will be taught in Kansas. This supposedly contradicts the text of the new standards, which says that ID will not be required.

    What is curious is that the evolutionists don't seem to care very much about the facts or the science. What really drives them is their supposed ability to explain the thoughts and motives of others. Kansas had public hearings on their science standards, and the evolutionists organized a boycott rather than present their witnesses to confront the issues. Even the Wikipedia article on the hearings refuses to describe the actual testimony of the actual witnesses, but instead uses secondary evidence and conspiracy theories to argue that the witnesses were secretly trying to promote Christianity or ID or criticism of some evolutionist sacred cow.

    Some of the Kansas witnesses did give some goofy opinions in their testimony. If I wanted to ridicule them, then I'd quote what they say and rebut it. But the evolutionist Wikipedia contributors will have none of that. It is they are afraid of facing the actual issues. They just want to use name-calling, cite authorities on their side, and to give mind-reading conspiracy theories.

    George writes:

    It is unfair to call them "evolutionists". The name suggests that they are just giving opinions or that they are driven by ideology, rather than objective scientists reciting cold hard facts.
    I didn't choose the term. It is what evolutionists have been calling themselves for over 100 years. It is in new and old dictionaries. I could understand making that objection to the word "Darwinist" because it suggests worshipping Darwin. I try to save that term for people like Dawkins who call themselves Darwinists. But "evolutionist" is the most neutral and descriptive term available, and it has no history of pejorative use. It is just as good a term as biologist or geologist.

    Furthermore, the evolutionists in the Kansas debates do not present any scientific facts. They urged scientists to boycott the hearings. They refuse to discuss any scientific issues, and spend most of their time on ad hominem attacks. If the word "evolutionist" comes to mean someone who holds certain nonscientific opinions or philosophies, it will be because the leading evolutionary scientists wanted it that way.

     
    Voting for war
    I occasionally hear people complain that Pres. Bush failed to get public support for the Iraq War, as previous presidents have gotten for other wars. In fact, Here was the vote on the Persian Gulf (Kuwait) War:
    On January 12, 1991, the Congress gave the president authority to go to war against Iraq. In the Hose, the vote was 250-183. In the Senate, it was 52-47
    And here is the Iraq War vote:
    The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public law 107-243, 116 Stat. 1497-1502) was a law passed by the United States Congress authorizing what was soon to become the Iraq War. The authorization was sought by President George W. Bush. Introduced as H.J.Res. 114, it passed the House on October 10 by a vote of 296-133, and by the Senate on October 11 by a vote of 77-23.
    Many prominent Democrat leaders, including Sen. Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Biden, voted for the Iraq War.

    On the other hand, the president never got approval either Congress or the UN for the wars in Kosovo, Bosnia, Panama, Haiti, etc. It appears to me that the Iraq and Afghan wars have had more official public support than any wars in a long time.

     
    The case for term limits for judges
    A new Colorado campaign to limit judges:
    But this year, reformers have gathered petitions with about 108,000 signatures, and recently set up a November 2006 vote on "10 years and out" for justices of the Colorado Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals. The ballot initiative will almost certainly be certified in the coming days.

    The petition drive was fueled by outrage at a blatantly political June 12 ruling of the state Supreme Court--relying on a technicality, the Court threw off the ballot a popular immigration-reform proposal. Other hot buttons include the justices' leniency to murderers in last year's Harlan and Auman cases; a judge in a custody dispute who restricted where Cheryl Clark could take her daughter to church, lest the child be exposed to "homophobia"; a 2003 decision favoring the teacher unions, snaring poor kids in bad schools; and the Taylor Ranch case, trampling property rights.

    Ten years is more than enough for arrogant supremacist judges.

    Thursday, Aug 10, 2006
     
    Rumsfeld never painted a rosy picture
    Everyone is accusing Rumsfeld of lying, after Hillary Clinton confronted him. The Seattle paper says:
    On Thursday, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words. And you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic."

    Here's what the public record shows:

    On Nov. 14, 2002, Rumsfeld, in an interview with Infinity Radio, said:

    "The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."
    Yes, and the ground war to defeat the regime in Iraq only took a few weeks. It is the nation-building in Iraq that has proved time-consuming and costly. We won the war in Iraq, but we may not succeed in installing a Western-style republican govt in Iraq.

    Before the Iraq War, nearly everyone agreed that nation-building in Iraq would be very difficult. I didn't hear Rumsfeld or anyone else paint a rosy picture of. Eg, Steve Sailor wrote:

    Many prominent neoconservatives are calling on America not only to conquer Iraq (and perhaps more Muslim nations after that), but also to rebuild Iraqi society in order to jumpstart the democratization of the Middle East. ... ...

    In Iraq, as in much of the region, nearly half of all married couples are first or second cousins to each other. ...

    By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes the development of civil society more difficult.


    Wednesday, Aug 09, 2006
     
    Is Our Universe Natural
    Sean Carroll wrote an essay in Nature entitled "Is Our Universe Natural?", and now he is upset that a creationist took him seriously. I think that it is funny that an astrophysicist can publish wacky, vague, philosophical, speculative, and untestable ideas in a top-rated science journal, but no theological considerations are allowed.

    He also says that Nature has an editorial policy forbidding the use of the words "scenario" and "paradigm". Weird.


    Tuesday, Aug 08, 2006
     
    Leftist intolerance
    Former Bill Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis writes in the WSJ:
    I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. ... I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

    Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong.

    In my experience, the Left is far more hateful and intolerant than the Right.

    Monday, Aug 07, 2006
     
    Dark formative periods
    John Noble Wilford answers questions in NY Science Times:
    Q. In the Alchemist article it said: "Yet on the whole, historians say, the widespread practice of alchemy impeded the rise of modern chemistry. While physics and astronomy marched slowly but inexorably from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the Scientific Revolution, chemistry slumbered under alchemy‚s influence through what historians call its 'postponed scientific revolution.' " ...

    A: It's my impression that all the primary branches of science have passed through what we today would call "dark" formative periods. Recall that astronomy was under the spell of Ptolemy and a geocentric universe for more than a thousand years. But why did chemistry have its "postponed scientific revolution?" It's a question the historians of science are grappling with. ...

    It is amazing how many science writers recite such nonsense. Ptolemaic astronomy was good science. There was nothing fundamentally wrong about Fourier analyzing the solar system in a non-inertial reference frame.

    For that matter, alchemists also get a bum rap. They never succeeded in turning lead into gold, but they turned out to be correct about lead and gold being made of the same particles. Their work might be compared to those searching for a grand unified field theory (GUT) today, in spite of the empirical failure of all of their attempts.


    Sunday, Aug 06, 2006
     
    Junk DNA confirms evolution
    Geneticist Todd A. Gray and other have published a reseach paper claiming to show that some particular sequence of junk DNA does not cause polycystic kidney disease or a bone disease known as osteogenesis imperfecta. Coauthor Robert D. Nicholls says:
    Discussion over evolution and Intelligent Design really has centered on whether pseudogenes, sometimes called ‘junk DNA,’ have a function or not. The suggestion is that an Intelligent Designer would not make junk DNA, so if a pseudogene does have a function, this is claimed to support the idea of an Intelligent Designer. But there is no evidence that any of the 20,000 pseudogenes are functional. Our research proves this Makorin pseudogene does not have a function. It has continued to mutate over its short life of a few million years, a fact that supports evolution, and eventually will be discarded from the mouse genome.
    Actually, there is some evidence that junk DNA is functional. When and if someone proves that junk DNA is functional, I guarantee that the evolutionists will say that the research confirms evolution.

    Thursday, Aug 03, 2006
     
    Leftist definition of science
    When Kansas changed its science curriculum last year, the NY Times explained it in terms of a right-left political conflict. The right-wingers defend the traditional notion that science is objective, while the leftists deny it:
    In the early 1990's, writers like the Czech playwright and former president Vaclav Havel and the French philosopher Bruno Latour proclaimed "the end of objectivity." The laws of science were constructed rather than discovered, some academics said; science was just another way of looking at the world, a servant of corporate and military interests. Everybody had a claim on truth.
    The article described the biggest of the Kansas State Board of Education changes as in the definition of science:
    The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." [NY Times Nov. 15, 2005]
    The old definition is the left-wing one; the latter definition is the right-wing one. On May 5, 2005, the NY Times called this change the most significant shift in the Kansas standards. A November 10, 2005 editorial again said that the Kansas change in the definition of science was the "most significant".

    The old Kansas definition was not really that old. It was put in a couple of years earlier by leftists who wanted to purge the curriculum of the word "falsifiable". Those who believe that science describes objective reality have used the notion of falsifiability for decades to distinguish science from pseudoscience. As the NY Times explained:

    When pressed for a definition of what they do, many scientists eventually fall back on the notion of falsifiability propounded by the philosopher Karl Popper. A scientific statement, he said, is one that can be proved wrong, like "the sun always rises in the east" or "light in a vacuum travels 186,000 miles a second." By Popper's rules, a law of science can never be proved; it can only be used to make a prediction that can be tested, with the possibility of being proved wrong.
    But now that the leftists are taking over in Kansas again, the NY Times is changing its tune. It celebrated with a couple of front page stories, and now brags:
    Defenders of evolution pointed to the results in Kansas as a third major defeat for the intelligent design movement across the country recently and a sign, perhaps, that the public was beginning to pay attention to the movement’s details and, they said, its failings.

    “I think more citizens are learning what intelligent design really is and realizing that they don’t really want that taught in their public schools,” said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education.

    The NY Times got it right last year, not this week. The issue in Kansas was the definition of science, not intelligent design. The Kansas standards do not require that intelligent design be taught or even mentioned in class. Here is what it says:
    According to many scientists a core claim of evolutionary theory is that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.5 Other scientists disagree. These standards neither mandate nor prohibit teaching about this scientific disagreement. However, to promote good science, good pedagogy and a curriculum that is secular, neutral and non-ideological, school districts are urged to follow the advice provided by the House and Senate Conferees in enacting the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001:
    The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.
    The Kansas science debate is a dispute between right-wingers who believe that science is about objective reality, and left-wingers who deny that there is any such thing. The leftists don't believe in religion either, so they have latched onto an evolutionist philosophy as their substitute.
     
    Arguing for IQ ignorance
    John Horgan cites this NY Times article for some research on how both nature and nuture influence intelligence, and then quotes Noam Chomsky
    Surely people differ in their biologically determined qualities. The world would be too horrible to contemplate if they did not. But discovery of a correlation between some of these qualities is of no scientific interest and of no social significance, except to racists, sexists and the like. Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexists and the like.”
    Now there is an argument for ignorance. The above NY Times article argues that the research justifies universal preschool. Since we spend about a trillion dollars a year on schooling, I certainly think that we should pay attention to the relevant research. It is not racist to want to know what works and what does not.
     
    Evolutionist name-calling
    I had an argument with the Wikipedia evolutionists who wanted to call all of the 19 Kansas witnesses on this page creationists. They adamantly claimed to have proof that they were all creationists, and considered it so obvious that no citation was necessary. Eventually, one of them relented, and agreed to post his documentation on each witness. As it now stands, none are labeled creationists.

    The testimony of the witnesses is online here, so there shouldn't be any dispute about what they say. If their testimony was really so anti-science, as the evolutionists, then it should be easy enough to quote whatever the evolutionists think is so bad.

    There is something very strange about evolutionists who cannot stand having an alternate point of view expressed. No other scientists try to censor other views.

    Here is the Discovery Inst. FAQ on the Kansas standards.


    Wednesday, Aug 02, 2006
     
    What is Math Physics
    Jonathan writes:
    On string theory, I'm still wading at laborious pace through Penrose's masterpiece, and although I certainly don't understand a lot of the higher math involved, I took him at his word and am marching through the book anyway, picking up as much as I can en route (he writes early on that it should be read for enjoyment, even if much of the math escapes). I've jumped ahead at several points, to see what he writes about String Theory, supersymmetry, etc. As you're undoubtedly aware, Penrose is no fan of String Theory. But as all good math and science folks should, the reader might ask: If not Strings, what? Penrose draws upon his earlier work with twistor theory, and also the work of many others in spinor theory. But I know about as much about thart stuff as I do about the current string theories -- in physics, most of us are laymen.

    I was just wondering if, on a more positive note, you are planning to say anything about what you currently consider to be the basis of better, more robust GUTs. (or whether you're simply gonna carp, carp, carp about strings and hyperdimensional tubules and such). What theory(ies), if any, would you feel most comfortable defending?

    "Mathematical Physics is a branch of Mathematics." Seems like a slippery slope. Maybe it's better (for some) as: "Physical Mathematics" is a branch of Mathematics. "Mathematical Physics" is redundant terminology.

    Yes, the term "Mathematical Physics" sounds like it is a branch of Physics. But the typical Mathematical Physics article makes some grossly simplifying assumptions about the physical world, and then proves some mathematical consequences. Those consequences may or may not say anything about the physical world. Usually they just say something about our ability to make mathematical models. So I regard it as more Mathematics than Physics. It is okay if the Math is right and the Physics is wrong, but it is not okay if the Physics is right and the Math is wrong.

    As far as unified field theories go, the so-called Standard Model works great. This means quantum field theory with a SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) gauge group (so every spacetime point has a hidden symmetry in that group) and a scalar Higgs field to break all but the U(1) symmetry. This theory is consistent with all the particle accelerator experiments.

    Gravity theory is in worse shape, as dark energy contradicts General Relativity. I don't think anyone knows how to explain that.

    Supersymmetry is an interesting conjecture. Finding a supersymmetric particle would be very exciting. It would not necessarily give any evidence for or against String Theory, but it could explain some other mysteries.


    Tuesday, Aug 01, 2006
     
    Intolerant left wins in Kansas
    The conservatives had a 6-4 majority favoring testable science standards, and appear to have lost 2 seats. Connie Morris was involved in a minor spending scandal, and appears to have lost for that reason. Another board member did not run, and was replaced by a leftist-evolutionist.

    If the leftist-evolutionists take over, their first order of business will be defining science to include untestable theories, and to remove dissent. Vote totals here.

    Andy writes:

    This disappointing news confirms two longstanding views of mine:

    (1) Give up on public schools. They will decay until they go bankrupt. It is impossible to improve them. Develop a system (as I have been doing) outside of public schools. Public schools may have 89% of students, but it only takes a handful to make a difference and that handful will not come from public school.

    (2) Evolution is the linchpin of liberal indoctrination. All other liberal beliefs flow from it. Liberals will never, ever give up on teaching evolution in public school.

    Besides evolutionists, there are no other scientists who so tenaciously try to censor other points of view. I am all for teaching evolution in school, but not for adopting a phony definition of science so that certain evolutionist dogmas will go unchallenged, as they will soon do in Kansas. As some point students are going to realize that if textbook evolution ideas were really scientifically substantiated, then the evolutionists would not be using legal means to suppress criticism.
     
    Ted Kennedy misled us
    Ted Kennedy attacked Roberts and Alito in the Wash. Post, claiming that they misled the public in their confirmation hearings. But NRO's Franck points out that Kennedy was actually misquoting a Supreme Court opinion. The Wash. Post had to print a correction. Kennedy complained that the justices wanted to "accept" the Executive's military judgment, but the actual court opinion was to "respect" it.

    Ted Kennedy was not misled. He voted against Roberts and Alito. I expect Kennedy to try to mislead us about the court, but he is a fool to misquote a court decision that is so easily checked.

     
    String theory is not even wrong
    The debate between Motl's reference frame and Woit's Not Even Wrong rages unabated. Woit wrote a book about how String Theory has failed to make any testable prediction, and has not been corroborated in any way. He is like the child who says that the emperor has no clothes, and the string theorists hate him for it. Motl now details his efforts to stop Woit's book from being published.

    As I see it, String Theory is a branch of Mathematical Physics, and Mathematical Physics is a branch of Mathematics. Mathematics is validated by proof, not experiment. String Theory has produced some interesting mathematics. Being a mathematician myself, I believe that is a good thing. But it has not produced any good physical theories. The string theorists who pretend that string theory explains something about our universe are charlatans. It has not scientifically explained anything.

     
    Bench-Clearing Brawl
    Bert Brandenburg on Slate describes state initiatives to rein in runaway judges:
    In Colorado, there's a push for retroactive term limits for appellate judges. The measure would write pink slips for 12 judges in the near future and clear off most of the Supreme Court in just a couple of years. In Montana, where every judge already runs for office, Constitutional Initiative 98 would create a new layer of recall elections to oust judges over specific decisions. An Oregon measure seeks to throw out justices from Portland by creating geographical districts for the Supreme Court. And in South Dakota, a "J.A.I.L. 4 Judges" initiative would amend the state constitution to create a fourth branch of government: a special grand jury to sue judges and others for their decisions.
    He wants to educate people more about the courts. I agree with that. The more they know, the more they want to hold judges accountable.
     
    Kansas election today
    The NY Times is all excited that some evolutionists may oust some Kansas school board members in an election. But they really have a hard time explaining what is wrong with with the Kansas curriculum. It says:
    The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek "more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." ...

    The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really moderates. "They’re liberals," said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.

    He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary "is an absolute falsehood."

    "We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific evidence," Dr. Abrams said, "what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and unfalsifiable."

    In science, he said, "everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of evolution is dogma."

    For this, the evolutionists has mobilized the scientific establishment for an election as never before. Those scientists are scared to death about science being defined in terms of what is observable.

    The issue in Kansas is not creationism, intelligent design, or any particular religious view. The issue is whether evolution must be taught as a dogma that is not subject to notions of observability, testibility, and falsifiability that apply to all other areas of science.

    Andy suggests that the NY Times got the above Abrams quote wrong. Kansas wants to teach science that is falsifiable. Scientific theories are supposed to be falsifiable, meaning that there should be some way to do an experiment that might potentially falsify the theory. If there is no way to falsify a theory, then it really isn't scientific.

    For example, if I propose a theory of climate change that merely says that the Earth's climate is subject to change, then there is no way to prove me wrong. I might be correct, but I am not saying anything that is scientifically testable or useful.

    Maybe a NY Times copy-editor thought that it sounded wrong to say that science is falsifiable, so he changed it to unfalsifiable.

    Update: A reader informs me that the NY Times did publish a correction on this point, admitting that Abrams said (correctly) "falsifiable". I don't know where the correction is, as the above article shows no correction.


    Monday, Jul 31, 2006
     
    Tar baby
    Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney got into trouble:
    The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can," he told a crowd of about 100 supporters in Ames, Iowa.

    Black leaders were outraged at his use of the term, which dates to the 19th century Uncle Remus stories, referring to a doll made of tar that traps Br'er Rabbit. It has come to be known as a way of describing a sticky mess, and has been used as a derogatory term for a black person.

    I didn't know that the term offended anyone. I have never heard it used in an offensive way.
     
    Public versus private schools
    A Mass. paper reports:
    A new report from the U.S. Department of Education casts doubts on the long-held belief that private schools provide a better education than public schools.

    The report compares 2003 national standardized test scores in reading and mathematics from more than 6,900 public schools and 550 private schools nationwide.

    Private-school students outperform their public-school peers when officials compare their raw mean scores, but they found that if they compare students with similar racial and economic backgrounds attending schools in similar settings, their test results are equal and sometimes even a little worse than public schools.

    I cannot find the study online, and I don't know what they mean by "similar settings", so I don't know whether this is meaningful. But assuming that the study has some validity, it is more evidence that increasing school spending may not improve test scores. After all, parents who send their kids to private schools are spending a lot of money on them, and they may not be getting any better test scores.
     
    Vaccines getting complicated
    AP news:
    ATLANTA (AP) - The growing list of childhood vaccinations reads like an alphabet soup: Hib, HepA, HepB, IPV, PCV, MCV4, DTaP, Tdap, varicella and influenza.

    Parents dragging their kids to the doctor's office for those required school shots can expect to hear about more vaccines and, if they're uninsured, new expenses.

    Twenty years ago, it cost $75 to $100 to immunize a child with the four available vaccines. Today, 12 are generally recommended for kids and adolescents, at a private-sector cost of about $1,250.

    And the government is expected to recommend a 13th vaccine for girls - a shot that protects against cervical cancer. It costs about $360 for the three-dose series, potentially raising the per-child vaccination bill to more than $1,600.

    These vaccines are recommended without any cost-benefit analysis.
     
    Humans evolving, but not in the genes
    NY Times reports:
    New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

    The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

    I always thought that evolution involved changes in the genes.
     
    John Dean, no conscience
    I just watched John Dean plug his book, Conservatives Without Conscience for an hour. Here were his main points:
    • Dean is still mad at conservatives who favorably reviewed the book "Silent Coup" about the Watergate break-in. (The book includes many facts that the Woodward-Bernstein account omits, and portrays Dean as a criminal.)
    • Dean cites some psychobabble about how he thinks that Cheney, DeLay, and other Republicans would score high on psychological tests for authoritarianism. Leftists do not score so highly.
    • Bill Frist once did medical research on cats, and he used unclaimed stray cats when he couldn't find cats elsewhere. Dean says that he could have been prosecuted as a serial cat killer.
    I think that John Dean was really the worst of the Watergate criminals, but that story is told elsewhere. The psychobabble was really strange. Dean acted as if the authoritarism measurements reported something scientific.

    Here is a typical test. Dean implied that he has a similar one in the book. Dean's test asks how strongly you believe in equality; if not, then you are an authoritarian.

    This is just pseudoscientific namecalling. It would be just as easy to devise a test where all the left-wingers score highly, and label the high-scores as commies or authoritarians.

    Dean says that the Republicans are authoritarian because they started a war. But so did Clinton, and just about all of Dean's complaints make Clinton look even more authoritarian.


    Sunday, Jul 30, 2006
     
    Kansas evolution election
    An evolutionist blog writes:
    Evolution continues to be a burning issue as the August 1, 2006, primary election in Kansas approaches. In November 2005, the state board of education voted 6-4 to adopt a set of state science standards in which the scientific standing of evolution is systematically impugned. The standards were denounced by a host of critics, including the National Science Teachers Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Biological Sciences, the committee that wrote the original standards, and the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science.

    Now three of the six antievolution members of the board are facing challengers in the primary election, while a fourth is not seeking re-election. Thus the primary election (as well as the general election in November) affords a chance for supporters of evolution education to change the balance of power on the board, just as they did in 2000.

    I looked at some of those denunciations. A Sci. American blog writes:
    Somewhere right now in Kansas, there is a little child who may grow up to be a brilliant scientist. She may make fantastic contributions to science, and future generations may remember her as one of the brightest intellectual lights of her time. But if so, it will be despite the public education that she received in Kansas, because today six dimwits on the state's Board of Education voted to lower the standards for how science is taught.
    AAAS says:
    AAAS is deeply concerned about the changes that have been made in the Kansas Science Education Standards in order to discredit the theory of evolution. The most troubling aspect of these changes is the redefinition of science. The "Nature of Science" section in the most recently proposed version of the standards says that science is a process that produces "explanations of natural phenomena." This implies that science is just one of many explanations of natural phenomena ...
    The National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association complain:
    the new Kansas standards are improved, but as currently written, they overemphasize controversy in the theory of evolution and distort the definition of science.
    AIBS Position Statements:
    Members of the mainstream scientific research community maintain that there is no controversy about evolution, a unifying principle of biology.
    The group of 38 Nobel laureates wrote:
    Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.
    If there is really no controversy, then what are they so excited about?

    The Kansas standards are much more sensible and scientific that these evolutionist critics. Of course science is a process that produces explanations for natural phenomena. Whether the history of life on Earth is entirely unguided, unplanned, and random is not something that science can answer.

    There might be no consensus in the next 1000 years.

    Those Kansas standards do not mention creationism or intelligent design. The issue is whether the establishment evolutionists will allow any deviation from the leftist-atheist party line. They are trying to use copyrights and public pressure to use a goofy definition of science. They don't want anyone to learn what it means for a theory to be falsifiable. I hope the Kansas voters vote to keep the science in their curriculum standards.


    Thursday, Jul 27, 2006
     
    Wikipedia evolutionist zealots
    Wikipedia has a bunch of evolutionist articles that are really just long tedious inaccurate evolutionist rants. I complained about one that starts off misstating a Discovery Institute position, and got this response:
    "it suggests that DI is not sincere in its positions" They aren't sincere at all; that's the point. They've been demonstrably talking out both sides of their mouths since they started their campaign. And that they are isn't just the opinion of their critics, but is supported by their own statements. Anyone who's read the wedge document objectively knows this. That we haven't just come out and say as much in the article is because we do not want to spoon-feed the readers. But we could, very easily as there's no shortage of sources to support such content. FeloniousMonk 16:23, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
    Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone, but the articles related to evolutionism are monitored day and night by evolutionist zealots. If you make a correction or a change towards more objective or balanced text, someone will change it back within minutes.

    The above FeloniousMonk argument is absurd. There are Wikipedia entries already on the Discovery Institute and the Wedge Document. If some DI position has shifted, then perhaps that could be documented somewhere.

    You would not expect an encyclopedia to say, "Hillary Clinton supports the Iraq War for tactical political reasons, fearing that the war will be popular with voters". It might be true, but she would deny it. An encyclopedia should stick to the facts. FeloniousMonk might respond with something like, "Anyone who reads H. Clinton objectively knows that she is not sincere".

    It is funny that evolutionists, who are supposedly so pro-science, frequently claim to have mind-reading capabilities. They claim to know what other people are thinking, and why they think what they do. It doesn't matter how much objective evidence you give them, they will cling to their prejudices no matter what.

    Others said this on Wikipedia:

    And your suggestion that "this page is maintained by evolutionists who want to attack creationists" is also quite odd, as this page is frequented by people of any creed. (Also note that 'evolutionists' is not a word, and it effectively shows your bias.) ...

    Here at Wikipedia the 'consensus' (as we might call it) is to refer to "supporters of evolution" (not "evolutionists"). Supporters of Creationism on the other hand may be called "Creationists". ...

    "Evolutionist" is used as an epithet by opponents of evolution. Hence the problem. AFAIK, "creationist" is not considered an epithet. Am I mistaken?

    This is hilarious. The word "evolutionist" is listed in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries. There is even a Wikipedia entry, altho it also says:
    The term is rarely used in the scientific community, as evolution is overwhelmingly accepted there.
    I really doubt that "evolutionist" is used as an epithet any more than "creationist". I know that evolutionists have derisively called me a creationist many times, even tho I am not.

    Usage of the word "evolutionist" by evolutionists is commonplace. Eg, here is a 2005 NY Times essay:

    One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too.
    Another evolutionist, Daniel C. Dennett, was quoted by the NY Times earlier this year as saying:
    [Stephen Jay Gould] was the evolutionist laureate of the U.S., and everybody got their Darwin from Steve. The trouble was he gave a rather biased view of evolution. He called me a Darwinian fundamentalist.
    There is no better word from an evolution proponent, and common usage is overwhelmingly neutral. It shows the bias of the Wikipedia editors that they shy away from the word evolutionist, and yet they call ID proponents creationists.
     
    Iraq War a success for Republicans
    Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson says:
    The problem for Pelosi is that, despite all the claims of Republican wrong-headedness, there is not enough evidence to suggest firmly any Democratic advantage on the war, and centrist and liberal Democrats disagree on how much to make the war an issue. While 59 percent of Americans told an Associated Press poll this month that they disapproved of President Bush's handling of Iraq, 64 percent disapproved of the Democrats' handling of it. While 62 percent of Americans told a Washington Post/ABC News poll last month that they disapproved of Bush's handling of the war, an even higher percentage of respondents, 71 percent, said the Democrats do not offer clear alternatives.
    It is hard to find anyone in the MSM who defends the Iraq War, but it really has been a big success. The Democrats, even with the benefit of hindsight, cannot explain how they would have handled it any better. Yes, there are people like John Kerry who claims that his presidency would have solved all the Mideast problems, but he cannot say how.

    Wednesday, Jul 26, 2006
     
    Presidential signing statements
    A reader sends this NRO critique of the ABA report on presidential signing statements.
     
    Emergency guns
    Congress news:
    WASHINGTON -- The House voted Tuesday to prevent law enforcement officers from confiscating legally owned guns during a national disaster or emergency.

    Republican Rep. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana lawmaker who sponsored the bill, said firearms seizures after Hurricane Katrina left residents unable to defend themselves.

    One of the main reasons for citizens to have guns is for self-defense in an emergency.

    Tuesday, Jul 25, 2006
     
    Idiot Bush-haters
    Australia news:
    NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren. ...

    "I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.

    "Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.

    She shared the 1976 prize for some sort of Irish political activities.

    Monday, Jul 24, 2006
     
    Liberal bias from NPR and LA Times
    I just listened to NPR's Terry Gross interview the authors of One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century.

    The interview was just silly left-wing propaganda on the part of NPR and the authors from beginning to end.

    They kept hinting at various dark right-wing conspiracies, but they had a hard time giving any specific way in which Republicans are governing differently from Democrats. They said that some Republican campaigners have discovered that they can win an election with 51% of the vote, so they can concentrate on Republicans and a few others. They said that the Bush administration has approved more oil and gas drilling permits than the Clinton administration, but I don't know why such policy differences would be surprising to anyone.

    The authors told a silly story about Grover Norquist convincing Phyllis Schlafly to oppose CAFE fuel emission quotas because of some argument about "forced family planning". The story is false. She did oppose the CAFE laws, but her reason was that they favored SUVs and small cars over stationwagons.

    The authors ended by denying that the LA Times and NY Times have a liberal bias.


    Sunday, Jul 23, 2006
     
    Court stripping
    Baltimore Sun reports:
    When House Republicans tried last week to block federal courts from hearing challenges to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, U.S. Rep. Todd Akin didn't sugarcoat the latest effort to limit the judiciary: We do this, the Missouri Republican said, "because we don't trust them."

    In the simmering feud between Congress and the courts, such "jurisdiction stripping" measures have emerged as a weapon of choice for Republicans.

    For the most part, the proposals - including the move to allow only state courts to hear Pledge of Allegiance challenges - stand little chance of becoming law, legal scholars and analysts say. But they lay bare ugly tensions between the legislative and judicial branches and could prove to be a potent issue in this year's midterm elections.

    Angry about court rulings on issues ranging from private property seizures to same-sex marriage, lawmakers over the past two years have introduced at least a dozen measures aimed at stripping the federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, of the authority to rule on any cases involving issues such as public displays of the Ten Commandments, prayer at government meetings or state laws restricting pornography.

    Maybe these proposals are unlikely to become law, but they are a whole lot more likely than trying to amend the US Constitution.

    The proposed federal marriage amendment against same-sex marriage is ill-considered and unwise. It won't do what the proponents say that it will do. It is impractical. It fails to address the heart of the problems with marriage law. It would make much more sense to pass a statute forbidding federal court jurisdiction over the Defense of Marriage Act.

     
    The leakers are lawyers
    Former NY Times editor Howell Raines says:
    Almost all leakers are lawyers. That's the bottom line.
    What does that mean? That lawyers are criminals? That it is okay to conspire on a criminal act if a lawyer is in on the deal?
     
    Law prof for judicial activism
    Law prof Eric Muller is writing a book to defend judicial activism. He says:
    The methodology is this. First, ask whether the Court is deferring to the other government actor whose action it's reviewing--Congress, or the President, or some state body. Second, ask what reasons can be put forth for or against deference. These reasons would be things like a greater or lesser ability to get the right answer to a particular relevant question (e.g., does this activity in the aggregate substantially affect interstate commerce), or a reason to doubt that the government actor will decide the question objectively or in good faith, or a history of behavior that demonstrates trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.

    These are questions that are pretty easy to answer, and they can be answered with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Then, to decide whether the decision is legitimate or not, you just ask whether there are reasons that support the deferential or nondeferential stance the Court has taken. The upshot of this is that most decisions are legitimate.

    This methodology leads him to justify court decisions in favor of late-term abortions, forced school busing, sodomy, and Japanese-American internment. Yes, he is referring to the WWII relocation of Japanese away from the Pacific coast. He has some sort of weird fascination with the legal issues.

    The gist of his argument is that judicial activism is okay as long as the court gives a justification as to why it is wiser than anyone else. On subjects like sodomy, he thinks that it is self-evident that the court knows best (when it rules in favor of sodomy).

    What is missing from Muller's argument is any acknowledgement that the courts are supposed to be constrained the constitutions, statutes, and cases before him. He is just a leftist who wants to advance his ideology any way he can; his claims of objectivity are absurd.

     
    World War III
    The NY Daily News says:
    World War III has begun.

    The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.

    Terror is just the means. It is a Mohammedan jihad against the civilized world. The USA, UK, and Israel on on the front lines.

    The Iraq and Afghan wars will ultimately be judged on how well they fought organization-sponsored terrorism. So far, these wars have been very successful.

     
    Lithwick worked for Mack's divorce
    Dahlia Lithwick was Darren Mack's divorce lawyer. Mack is the one who killed his ex-wife and the Reno judge. Lithwick is a kooky leftist legal columnist for Slate magazine. This explains a lot.
     
    Cloning Neanderthals
    In case you have confidence in academic ethicists making sensible judgments about cloning, here is what they say about cloning Neanderthal men:
    If Dr. Paabo and 454 Life Sciences should succeed in reconstructing the entire Neanderthal genome, it might in theory be possible to bring the species back from extinction by inserting the Neanderthal genome into a human egg and having volunteers bear Neanderthal infants. This might be the best possible way of finding out what each Neanderthal gene does, but there would be daunting ethical problems in bringing a Neanderthal child into the world again.

    Dr. Paabo said that he could not even imagine how such a project could be accomplished and that in any case ethical concerns “would totally preclude such an experiment.”

    Dr. Lahn described the idea as “certainly possible but futuristic.”

    The most serious technical problem would be creating functional chromosomes from Neanderthal DNA. But ethical questions may be less surmountable. “My first consideration would be for a child born alone in the world with no relatives,” said Ronald M. Green, an ethicist at Dartmouth College. The risk would be greater if, following the plot line of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a mate were created as a companion for the lonely Neanderthal. “This was a species we competed with,” Dr. Green said. “We would not want to recreate a situation of two competing advanced hominid species.”

    But Dr. Green said there could be arguments in the future for resurrecting the Neanderthals. “If we learn this is a species that was wrongly pushed off the stage of history, there is something of a moral argument for bringing it back,” he said. “But the status quo is not without merit. Curiosity alone could not justify what could be a disaster for both species.”

    Beware of moral arguments from leftist-atheist-evolutionists. Green thinks that the morals of cloning Neanderthal men depends on whether they wrongfully went extinct 50 kyrs ago.

    Thursday, Jul 20, 2006
     
    Law prof for judicial activism
    Law prof Eric Muller is writing a book to defend judicial activism. He says:
    The methodology is this. First, ask whether the Court is deferring to the other government actor whose action it's reviewing--Congress, or the President, or some state body. Second, ask what reasons can be put forth for or against deference. These reasons would be things like a greater or lesser ability to get the right answer to a particular relevant question (e.g., does this activity in the aggregate substantially affect interstate commerce), or a reason to doubt that the government actor will decide the question objectively or in good faith, or a history of behavior that demonstrates trustworthiness or untrustworthiness.

    These are questions that are pretty easy to answer, and they can be answered with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Then, to decide whether the decision is legitimate or not, you just ask whether there are reasons that support the deferential or nondeferential stance the Court has taken. The upshot of this is that most decisions are legitimate.

    This methodology leads him to justify court decisions in favor of late-term abortions, forced school busing, sodomy, and Japanese-American internment. Yes, he is referring to the WWII relocation of Japanese away from the Pacific coast. He has some sort of weird fascination with the legal issues.

    The gist of his argument is that judicial activism is okay as long as the court gives a justification as to why it is wiser than anyone else. On subjects like sodomy, he thinks that it is self-evident that the court knows best (when it rules in favor of sodomy).

    What is missing from Muller's argument is any acknowledgement that the courts are supposed to be constrained the constitutions, statutes, and cases before him. He is just a leftist who wants to advance his ideology any way he can; his claims of objectivity are absurd.

     
    Nat. Academy evolutionists attack Kansas
    I just stumbled across this Sept. 2005 NAS critique of the Kansas science standards. The National Acad. of Sciences is a high-status science organization, and its opinion should be taken seriously.

    First it complains about some copyright issues. The Kansas Board quoted some scientific sources even tho some of those sources have some political disagreement with what Kansas is doing. The NAS suggests that this is a copyright violation, even tho the very same critique quotes the Kansas Board in an adversarial manner.

    Next, it attacks Kansas for failing to say that, "All scientific theories are subject to criticism by the scientific community." A couple of paragraphs later, it quotes the Kansas Board as saying:

    All scientific theories should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered ...
    This time it complains that it was "taken directly from the Santorum Amendment."

    It continues with more idiotic complaints. Where the Kansas Board says that something is not known, the NAS is upset that some poor Kansas student might get the impression that there can be no natural explanation for what is observed.

    I think that the Kansas Board is doing the right thing to tell students that some things are not known. Real scientists have no problem admitting that some things are not known. The NAS evolutionists are an embarrassment to Science.

    That NAS also said:

    The fact that the fossil record is incomplete, especially for single-celled and soft-bodied organisms, does not mean that it is inconsistent with what is predicted by evolutionary theory. Indeed, the fossil record is becoming more complete almost daily. Also, not all of modern evolutionary theory suggests that there is a “gradual, unbroken sequence.” For example, S.J. Gould’s ideas about punctuated equilibrium are also inconsistent with Darwin’s original notions. However, Gould embraced evolution.
    Translation: S.J. Gould was leftist-atheist-evolutionist, so it would be okay to teach his goofy and unscientific ideas.

    Tuesday, Jul 18, 2006
     
    More on hearsay rules
    Jonathan writes:
    "Sure, people often sound excited and breathless on 911 tapes. But so what?"

    So, you can't be serious in claiming that a 911 call is "nothing like" an excited utterance. In both cases, aspects such as breathlessness and excitement often abound.

    Do you want a rule that says if people sound excited and breathless when giving a statement, then they don't have to be cross-examined?

    I'm comfortable with a rule that, if the circumstances of the interrogation objectively indicate that its primary purpose is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency, then they don't have to be cross-examined about it. The crucial testimony would be that of the contacted officers. If they testified that, in their opinion, experience, etc., the primary purpose was to notify them of an ongoing emergency, that's what it was, then no need for cross-examination. If, OTOH, the police testified that after responding to the scene, it appeared that the putative victim was faking it, then the person could be cross-examined, in which case they may not only lose their case against the alleged attacker, they could also face criminal charges for abusing the 911 service (like the woman who recently used 911 to attempt to identify a police officer she thought was cute and wanted to date). As word gets out that people get punished for abusing 911, less people will abuse 911 for the kind of fake complaints you mention (sans prevalence stats). And with the decline in fake complaints, the complaints coming in will be true ones, and also excited utterances. There is no "either or" here, the (true) 911 complaints are both "excited utterances" and "complaints" and I find them more like the former than the latter. A "police complaint" generally conjures up images of paperwork, formality, etc. although as you point out, a 911 call is a type of complaint. Why do you believe it is more like a ("formal") police complaint than like an excited utterance? Where is your explanation, other than no-stats assertions that false complaints exist? I can agree with you that false complaints exist, but some would say you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or claiming that some indeterminate quantity of bad apples spoils the entire bunch. The court must have felt that 911 calls are more like excited utterances than formal complaints.

    "I realize that there is a hearsay exception for excited utterances. That is so that someone can testify that he heard someone shriek in pain while being mugged, [...] "

    For example, a 911 operator can testify as to the excited utterance of a caller.who was being mugged by her boyfriend or some other assailant.

    I'm trying to come up with a better articulation for a rule, but so far no luck. Seems there can be a problem with a case where someone makes a fake complaint, as you suggest, or even a case where a frame-up occurs, i.e. a perpetrator dresses up to look like a woman's boyfriend, then she calls 911 to complain about the attacking "boyfriend", sure, the defendant boyfriend would want to cross-examine her as to the basis for the identification: "So you say I was wearing my red pants that day?" -- perhaps he could establish via other witnesses that he was in fact clad in blue dungarees all day, he was painting the church that day and his minister testified that he was in there all day in his blue dungarees. My question is, are there really so many such frame-ups or fake complaints going on in society, or is it not more likely that witness intimidation goes on? In my own experience, I've definitely seen some witness intimidation going on in domestic violence situations. You claim that it's overblown, but again, where are your numbers to back it up? I've seen evidence of the intimidation firsthand, but am aware of no frame-up caes (though I'll assume they exist), and you have no numbers for either, so where do you get off writing that witness intimidation is not a problem, but fake complaints and frame-ups are? Both are problems for the system, but I don't buy the assertion that the fake complaints and frame-ups are more endemic problems than witness intimidation.

    To me, this issue is real simple. I don't think that anyone should goto jail because of some police officer's opinion about whether some witness is faking. The witness should have to give the testimony before a jury, and be cross-examined, and the jury should decide for itself.

    No, I don't have any data on witness intimidation, but it seems unlikely that witnesses are any more intimidated in domestic violence cases than any other cases. There are lots of crimes where witnesses are too intimidated to call 911 at all. If the witness is willing to identify herself to a 911 operator and make a formal complaint against another person, then obviously she is not too intimidated.

    I have seen a case where a woman falsely claimed that she was intimidated because she didn't want to be cross-examined for other reasons. I have also seen a case where the prosecutor claimed that a woman was intimidated, even tho she adamantly maintained that she was not. I don't know whether any domestic violence victims are too intimidated to testify but not too intimidated to call 911 and make a statement. I certainly don't think that the possibility justifies reducing our constitutional rights to confront witness against us.


    Friday, Jul 14, 2006
     
    Derbyshire on Gilder
    John Derbyshire trashes George Gilder about creationism. But Gilder's article doesn't even mention creationism.

    Derbyshire points out that no creationists have won Nobel prizes for their work. Okay, that's right, but I don't think that any evolutionists have either.

     
    The Source of Europe's Mild Climate
    Columbia U. prof Richard Seager writes:
    The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth

    Our conclusion was that the large difference in winter temperature between western Europe and eastern North America was caused about equally by the contrast between the maritime climate on one side and the continental climate on the other, and by the large-scale waviness set up by air flow over the Rocky Mountains.

    If he right, then some of the Global Warming theorists are talking nonsense.
     
    Joe Wilson sues
    Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have sued some White House officials. The lawsuit is absurd. Wilson published lies about why we went to war against Iraq, and claimed to have inside knowledge based on Cheney sending him to Africa to investigate a plot to buy uranium. In fact, Cheney had nothing to do with Wilson, and it was Wilson's wife that recommended that the CIA send him to Africa. It was the duty of White House officials to refute Wilson's lies to the press. They cannot be sued for doing their lawful duty.

    Monday, Jul 10, 2006
     
    911 tapes
    Jonathan writes:
    Not sure I agree with you on this one. Have you ever heard any 911 calls broadcast on the news? Some of those folks sound a bit excited. How can you claim the calls are "not at all" like an excited utterance -- seems some of them are classic cases of same..

    And, depending on the facts, I imagine that asking a breathless person for their middle initial, something they easily know and can produce immediately, might just help them calm down a little so that they can better answer further questions from the 911 operator. Maybe it helps their nervousness about having to deal with authorities. Just a surmise.

    Sure, people often sound excited and breathless on 911 tapes. But so what?

    Do you want a rule that says if people sound excited and breathless when giving a statement, then they don't have to be cross-examined?

    I realize that there is a hearsay exception for excited utterances. That is so that someone can testify that he heard someone shriek in pain while being mugged, or something like that. But it is far too easy for someone to incriminate someone by calling 911 and making an accusation. There is a reason that we have a constitutional right to confront our accusers.

     
    Empty space has dark energy
    The respected physicist Lawrence Krauss writes:
    There appears to be energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. ...

    I wrote a piece where I argued that is a disservice to evolutionary theory to call string theory a theory, for example. Because it's clearly not a theory in the same sense that evolutionary theory is, or that quantum electrodynamics is, because those are robust theories that make rigorous predictions that can be falsified. And string theory is just a formalism now that one day might be a theory. And when I'm lecturing, talking about science, people say to me, evolution is just a theory, I say, in science theory means a different thing, and they say, what do you mean? Look at string theory, how can you falsify that? It's no worse than intelligent design.

    This is not intelligent design; it's the opposite of intelligent design. It's a kind of cosmic natural selection. The qualities we have exist because we can survive in this environment. That's natural selection, right? ...

    I do think there are huge differences between string theory and intelligent design. People who are doing string theory are earnest scientists who are trying to come up with ideas that are viable. People who are doing intelligent design aren't doing any of that. But the question is, is it falsifiable? And do we do a disservice to real theories by calling hypotheses or formalisms theories? Is a multiverse — in one form or another — science?

    In my sarcastic moments I've argued that the reason that some string theorists have latched onto the landscape idea so much is that since string theory doesn't make any predictions, it's good to have a universe where you can't make any predictions.

    It is funny how he endorses some really speculative and untestable theories, any yet he carefully tries to avoid offending the evolutionists.

    Sunday, Jul 09, 2006
     
    Coulter on evolution
    An anonymous reader asks if I care to comment on this complete demolition of Ann Coulters anti-evolutionary screed.

    I haven't had a chance to read any of Coulter's new book yet. Much of it is on evolution, and she is not an expert on that subject, so I wouldn't be surprised if it has some shortcomings.

    This attack on Coulter consists largely of objecting to her quote mining of evolutionists, and saying that she is not up-to-date on criticisms of Behe.

    Quoting Colin Patterson seems like fair game to me. He was a respected evolutionist (I think that he is dead now), he meant what he said, and his quotes are defended by other evolutionists.

    I do not think that Behe's work disproves evolution. At best, it challenges evolutionists to provide plausible mechanisms for how certain biological mechanisms have evolved. Apparently there is some controversy over whether anyone has done for the human eye. I don't know what Coulter's main point here is, but I suspect that it is more political and cultural than scientific.

    George writes:

    The above-linked evolutionist page shows that Patterson has been misquoted. It even has a letter from Patterson complaining about it.
    No, it doesn't. The letter from Patterson confirms the quotes. It also says that of two interpretations presented in another letter, one was more accurate than the other. But that other letter is not shown, so it is not clear that

    Tuesday, Jun 27, 2006
     
    The meddling court
    Leftist Seth Rosenthal writes for Slate:
    As the Supreme Court's term nears its conclusion, columnist George Will has asserted that the John Roberts and Samuel Alito confirmation debates were all about preventing "the nation's courts [from being pulled] even more deeply than they already are into supervising American life." ...

    But contrary to what Will suggests, that's just not the end of the story. Though you'll rarely hear them admit it, today's movement conservatives do embrace muscular courts that "supervise American life," often in the very same cases in which liberals want courts to take a hands-off approach. The most fervent Roberts and Alito supporters would use the power of judicial review to wipe out or weaken land-use regulations, campaign-finance reform, affirmative action, and gun control. ...

    Among other things, these rulings provide that when deciding cases in which state government officials stand accused of violating a federal antidiscrimination law (such as the Americans with Disabilities Act), courts must strike the law down unless they determine that it is a "congruent and proportional" response to a demonstrable history of state-sponsored discrimination. Another landmark conservative favorite brushed aside a "mountain of data" -- four years of fact-finding, studies from task forces in 21 states, and eight different congressional reports -- to condemn as unconstitutional the "method of reasoning" Congress employed to enact legislation that would have protected women against violence. Talk about supervising American life.

    These are very weak examples. Congress did not pass any laws to protect women against violence. It passed VAWA to appease feminists and subsidize feminist programs. Most of VAWA is intact, and only a minor part was struck down.

    Rosenthal seems to think that whenever the Supreme Court is called upon to resolve a jurisdictional dispute between the states and the feds, it should side with the feds.

    The ADA and VAWA were indeed leftist attempts by the feds to supervise American life, and they exceeded federal constitutional authority. The courts were right to point out that there are some limits to federal power.

     
    Georgia judicial supremacists
    Gay news:
    (Atlanta, Georgia) The Georgia Supreme Court today hears an appeal by the state to a lower court ruling that overturned a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

    The amendment was passed in 2004 by 76 percent of voters. Lambda Legal filed suit alleging the question put to the electorate was itself unconstitutional.

    The suit said that the Georgia Constitution requires ballot initiatives pose a single subject at a time to voters, rather than covering multiple issues.

    Lambda argued that the question had multiple issues, including the definition of marriage, the prohibition of the recognition of other types of unions between same-sex couples, an attempt to limit the jurisdiction of Georgia courts, and an attempt to limit the full faith and credit given to judgments and other proceedings from other states.

    In May, Superior Court Judge Constance Russell, of Fulton County, agreed and tossed out the amendment.

    The mulitiple issue argument is ridiculous, as explained here:
    “We trust the Georgia Supreme Court will understand, just as Louisiana’s high court did, that the sole objective of these amendments is to protect marriage and that the language of the amendment is crucial in achieving that single goal,” said Johnson. “This judge may try to assert that civil unions are a different subject than same-sex ‘marriage,’ but the people of Georgia know better. They understand that protecting marriage means protecting it from all imitations.”
    76% of the voters should be able to affirm the definition of marriage. They don't want same-sex marriage, and they don't want something that is the same as same-sex marriage but is called something else. What could be simpler?

    Monday, Jun 26, 2006
     
    Genes, Peoples, and Languages
    Someone sent this 2000 book review:
    The New York Times has hailed "Genes, Peoples, and Languages", the new book by Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the dean of population geneticists, for "dismantling the idea of race." In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond salutes Cavalli-Sforza for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races".

    Cavalli-Sforza himself has written, "The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise"; and that "The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose."

    Don't believe any of this. This is merely a politically correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out that keeps his life's work -- identifying the myriad races of mankind and compiling their genealogies -- from being defunded by the commissars of acceptable thinking at Stanford.

    It is by Steve Sailer, who also reviews Nicholas Wade's book that proves that scientific racial classification is alive and well. See also this John Derbyshire review.
     
    Evolutionary psychiatry
    Discovery News (TV) reports:
    June 23, 2006 —The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever.

    Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth.

    As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry.

    Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny. ...

    David Brooks, a social commentator and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of “the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture,” which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny.

    Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.

    And what about the wisdom to recognize crackpot ideas?

    Saturday, Jun 24, 2006
     
    Chris Matthews and the other lying Bush-haters
    I watched Chris Matthews in his TV show last Sunday, and he spent 10 minutes complaining about how Pres. G.W. Bush reneged on his promise to fire Karl Rove for leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press. His four guests were also lying Bush-haters, and they agreed with him.

    No, we don't know that Rove did anything improper. And Bush certainly didn't promise to fire any leaker. Matthews showed an out-of-context news clip to imply that Bush did, but he certainly did not. I previously explained it here.

    They also complained about Scott McClellan lying in this 2003 press briefing:

    Q Scott, earlier this week you told us that neither Karl Rove, Elliot Abrams nor Lewis Libby disclosed any classified information with regard to the leak. I wondered if you could tell us more specifically whether any of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

    MR. McCLELLAN: Those individuals -- I talked -- I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that's where it stands.

    Q So none of them told any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA?

    MR. McCLELLAN: They assured me that they were not involved in this.

    Q Can I follow up on that?

    Q They were not involved in what?

    MR. McCLELLAN: The leaking of classified information.

    Q Did you undertake that on your own volition, or were you instructed to go to these --

    MR. McCLELLAN: I spoke to those individuals myself.

    So where exactly is the lie? He said that Rove, Abrams, and Libby were not involved in the leaking of classified info. After a 3-year investigation, no one has been able to show that they were involved in leaking classified info. Valerie Plame's identity was first leaked by someone outside the White House, according to most press accounts, and it is not known that her name or relationship to Wilson was even classified.

    It is possible the Bush authorized his staff to rebut false claims by Joe Wilson, including his claim that Cheney sent him to Africa to investigate a uranium story. Wilson's CIA wife had recommended him for the trip. The public had a right to know whether or not Wilson was telling the truth. It is absurd to suggest it was illegal or improper for the White House to confirm privately to the press that Wilson was lying, or to publicly defend its actions.

    I cannot be sure whether Bush and his staff have always told the truth, but it is clear that his enemies in the press are just lying Bush-haters.

     
    Using 911 tapes
    Andy wrote:
    As I have seen before, Justice Scalia can surprisingly disappoint just when you need him most. In the admissibility of 911 calls, Justice Scalia held today that they are admissible despite an inability to cross-examine. This decision was just handed down in Davis v. Washington. Justice Thomas went even further, and said that even out-of-court statements to the police are admissible despite an inability to cross-examine, but he was outvoted 8-1.

    In both cases, the Confrontational Clause would apparently require the right to cross-examine to test the credibility. No matter, as Justice Scalia appeared to be sensitive to the media/feminist position here in the wording of his decision. The liberal AP cheered:

    "In court filings, women's groups argued that judges need to be flexible in dealing with testimony in domestic violence cases because victims or key witnesses are not willing or not available to testify. Scalia said he tended to agree. "This particular type of crime is notoriously susceptible to intimidation or coercion of the victim to ensure that she does not testify at trial," he wrote. "When this occurs, (it) gives the criminal a windfall."
    It is a myth that witness intimidation is a significant factor in domestic violence cases. Scalia was apparently fooled by unanswered arguments in amicus briefs, as it is unlikely that there was any such evidence on the record.

    Witness intimidation is a far greater factor in cases involving drug dealers, gangsters, and many other crimes. We don't suspend the 6A for those cases, and there is far less reason to suspend the 6A for a minor domestic quarrel.

    If a woman makes a police complaint, then she understands that she may be called to testify. A 911 call is just a type of police complaint. If she were really intimidated, then she would not make the police complaint.

    Most domestic violence complaints are just tools for manipulating the family court. Women often don't want to make followup testimony because they know that they were lying, or they had a reconciliation, or they don't want the full story told, or she has a more sober reassessment of the situation, or some other reason. Witness intimidation is rarely a factor.

    Scalia's rule is:

    Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency.
    There is more explanation here. But in the Davis case, there wasn't even any objective evidence that there was an ongoing emergency. There was just McCottry's telephone allegations that she didn't back up in court.

    The 911 operator was asking questions to collect police evidence. Why else would anyone want the full name of someone who is fleeing the scene?

    People do make 911 calls for punitive and malicious purposes. Even the Duke rape case had a deceptive 911 call. Even when the caller is trying to be honest, the tape can give a very false impression that only a cross-examination will clarify.

    A 911 call is nothing like an excited utterance. The call in the Davis case is more like a formal police complaint.

    What was the 911 operator's primary purpose in asking for Davis's middle initial, if not to collect police evidence? If you say that it was to help in an ongoing emergency, how did it help? 911 operators get police training to collect evidence to use in court.

    I say that Scalia's rule and reasoning does not even make sense in the case where he tries to apply it, and there is no telling how judges will apply it to other phone tip and hotline cases.


    Wednesday, Jun 21, 2006
     
    Judge Jones rant
    Judge John E. Jones III, the Penn. evolution judge, gave this speech:
    I was asked by "Court TV" to allow the trial to be nationally televised and I declined that request. And I did sort of labor over that. But in my mind's eye, I kept seeing Judge Ito and I thought this is something that I didn't want to do.
    Ok, I guess he didn't want to look like an idiot on TV. He goes on:
    I found it notable that among those who disagreed with my decision was one Phyllis Schlafly.

    However, under the banner "Judge's unintelligent rant against design," Ms. Schlafly authored a January 2006 column and within her column she noted that, and I'm quoting here, that I "owed my position as a Federal Judge entirely to the evangelical Christians who pulled the lever for George W. Bush in 2002" and that I, I'm still quoting here, "stuck the knife in those who brought me to the dance in Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District." ...

    Ms. Schlafly's column makes it clear that she views me as an activist judge of the very worst kind. Yet in her column and within other criticisms directed at my opinion, time and again writers would omit to note the role legal precedents play as they relates how judges decide cases that come before them.

    No, she wrote a whole book attacking some of those precedents.
    To be blunt, I think that many people need a civics lesson about the judicial system, because we are beginning to cross the line between fair comment and criticism of judges' work into something which is much darker and debilitating.
    Yes, they need a civics lesson. For starters, it is not the job of judges to decide the merits of evolution and intelligent design.

    Wednesday, Jun 14, 2006
     
    Coulter on evolution
    John reports that Ann Coulter's new book is really about evolution!
    What Ann Coulter intended to say in her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, has so far been drowned out by hysterical denunciations because of a lone passage where she wrote savagely about four 9/11 widows. Many people by now think the book is all about 9/11 widows. ...

    The biggest chunk of the book goes where few conservatives so far have dared to tread. Of her eleven chapters, four comprise a sustained assault on liberalism’s holy of holies, Darwinism. She’s clear, well informed, and unmoved by any fear that someone may call her a “fundamentalist” for criticizing “Darwiniacs”:

    ... That’s ‘proof’ when it comes to the state religion [i.e. secularism]: For not disproving evolution, the vertebrate jawbone is said to prove evolution. ...

    In the end, evolutionists’ only argument is contempt. The cultists know that if people were allowed to hear the arguments against evolution for just sixty seconds, all would be lost.

    No, there are a lot of good arguments for evolutions, and they cannot be rebutted in 60 hours. But it is funny how the evolutionists cannot tolerate even 60 seconds of dissent in the schools.

    Tuesday, Jun 13, 2006
     
    Warren Christopher talking tough
    If you catch Warren Christopher's advice for tough dealing with Iranians, then don't forget this story:
    Col. Charles Beckwith, founder of the Delta Force, tells a story about White House planning in April 1980 for the mission to rescue our 53 hostages in Tehran. Beckwith had visited the White House Situation Room to brief President Carter.

    In the meeting, according to one writer, "Charlie mentioned that his Delta shooters would 'take out' the hostage guards.

    "Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher looked over at Charlie, eyebrows raised. 'Take them out,' Colonel?"

    Beckwith replied: "Yes, Mister Deputy Secretary. We're going to double-tap 'em. Shoot 'em each in the head -- twice."

    Christopher protested: "Couldn't you just shoot them in the shoulder or something?"

    Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State ended up resigning to protest the idea that an American rescue mission might use violent means.
     
    Libby will be acquitted
    NY Times reports:
    The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove. ...

    As the case stands now, Mr. Fitzgerald has brought only one indictment against Mr. Libby. The prosecutor accused Mr. Libby of telling the grand jury that he learned of Ms. Wilson from reporters, when in reality, the prosecutor said he was told about her by Mr. Cheney and others in the government. Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty in the case, which is scheduled to begin trial early next year.

    I predict that Libby will be acquitted, as Fitzgerald's indictment is very weak. (I posted similar criticisms here last year.) Yes, Libby learned about Mrs. Wilson from the White House, but he did not tell the grand jury that he first learned about her from reporters.

    Here is what Libby actually told the grand jury, according to the US DoJ indictment:

    . . . . And then he [Tim Russert] said, you know, did you know that this – excuse me, did you know that Ambassador Wilson's wife works at the CIA? And I was a little taken aback by that. I remember being taken aback by it. And I said – he may have said a little more but that was – he said that. And I said, no, I don't know that. And I said, no, I don't know that intentionally because I didn't want him to take anything I was saying as in any way confirming what he said, because at that point in time I did not recall that I had ever known, and I thought this is something that he was telling me that I was first learning. And so I said, no, I don't know that because I want to be very careful not to confirm it for him, so that he didn't take my statement as confirmation for him.
    I think that it is clear that Libby was telling the grand jury that he deliberately lied to Russert wife because he did not want to confirm the status of Wilson's wife to Russert.

    The purpose of Fitzgerald's investigation, as far as Libby knew, was to determine who told the reporters about Wilson's wife. So Libby focused on what he told the reporters, not what he knew at the time.

    The indictment suggests that Fitzgerald was secretly investigating what Libby knew when he talked to the reporters, and was trying to entrap Libby in a misstatement. Libby's grand jury testimony appears to be a rehash of a previous interrogation, so that there would be a record of any Libby lies. But if Fitzgerald really wanted to know what Libby knew during the conversations with reporters, then all he had to do was to ask.

    If anyone was obstructing justice in this case, it was Patrick Fitzgerald. He has abused his position.

    George writes:

    You are overlooking Libby's lies. Libby is a lawyer, and he chooses his words carefully. He is also a snake. Libby testified, "I did not recall that I had ever known ... I was first learning". Libby is concealing his knowledge of Wilson's wife.
    Here is an analogy. Suppose that a police report had a victim saying, "I told the mugger that I had no money because I didn't want to get robbed of the $300 in my wallet and because I spent all my cash on a fancy dinner."

    What would you infer from that? If the two "because" clauses are explanations to the policeman for lying to the mugger, then they are contradictory. It is possible that the contradiction indicates that the victim is lying to the cop, but it is more likely that the victim was admitting to lying to the mugger, and confusing two explanations -- his explanation to the mugger and his explanation to the cop.

    It doesn't make much sense for Libby to be worried about confirming something that he didn't know anyway. It does make sense for Libby to lie to Russert, to tacitly admit to the grand jury that he lied to Russert, and to continue with an explanation that he might have given to Russert.

    Fitzgerald spent two years and millions of dollars setting up this trap, and all he's got is a run-on sentence that appears contradictory when it is parsed in a particular way.

     
    Cutting aid to illegal aliens
    The Colorado court just removed this initiative from the ballot:
    Except as mandated by federal law, the provision of non-emergency services by the state of Colorado, or any county, city, or other political subdivision thereof, is restricted to citizens of and aliens lawfully present in the United States of America.
    The court reasoned:
    We conclude that these two purposes –decreasing taxpayer expenditures and denying access to certain administrative services –are incongruous. The theme of restricting non-emergency government services is too broad and general to make these purposes part of the same subject.
    This is nothing but leftist-supremacist judges wanting to overrule the will of the people.

    Monday, Jun 12, 2006
     
    Flores Man
    In late 2004, Nature magazine said:
    It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.

    Researchers have unearthed remains from individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

    It sounds too incredible because it is too incredible. It is a hoax. But that doesn't stop the leftist-atheist-evolutionists from claiming that this disproves religion. You can find even find pictures of Flores Man. BBC News reported:
    Anthropologist Desmond Morris suggested the discovery of a human Hobbit on Flores would force many religions to examine their basic beliefs. The suggestion provoked quite a reaction.

    "The existence of 'Mini-Man' should destroy religion," claims Desmond Morris.

    I can't help thinking we've been here before. Indeed, Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, still cannot understand why religion survived Darwin.

    Yes, we've been here before with Piltdown Man, Lucy, and the other missing link hoaxes. ABC News reported last month:
    Scientists who argue the "hobbit" is really just a modern human with a small brain have published evidence for the first time in a major scientific journal.

    Today's issue of the journal Science carries a paper led by primate evolution expert, Dr Bob Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago.

    It says Homo floresiensis is likely to have been a modern human, who suffered from microcephaly - a condition that causes a small brain.

    The conclusions about a new hominid species were based on one lousy skull, and a few bones. It is amazing how gullible the evolutionists are, and how gullible they think that we are. This is Piltdown Man all over again.

    Sunday, Jun 11, 2006
     
    More Duke lacrosse evidence
    Newspaper story:
    DURHAM -- The exotic dancer [Crystal Gail Mangum] who has accused three Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping her was drinking while taking medication that night, and had sex with at least four men and a sexual device in the days immediately leading up to the off-campus party, according to court papers filed Thursday.

    And despite what Durham police have contended, a medical examination showed no signs of the sort of sexual or physical attack of which the dancer complained, according to the motion filed by defense attorneys for Reade Seligmann.

    Among other previously undisclosed details, the motion says the woman at one point accused her female dance partner of helping the lacrosse players rape her and of stealing her money.

    And she told one medical staffer she drank at least 44 ounces of beer, and told another she took a powerful muscle relaxant and drank beer before going to the party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on March 13.

    Another newspaper story:
    The second dancer in the Duke lacrosse case told police early on that allegations of rape were a "crock" and that she was with the accuser [Crystal Gail Mangum] the entire evening except for a period of less than five minutes.

    The second dancer, Kim Roberts, made that statement when she was first contacted by Durham police one week after the party where the first escort service dancer said she was gang raped by three men.

    The Durham DA has done everything he could to slander the lacrosse team in the press, and continues to prosecute three boys who are almost certainly innocent.
     
    Evolution myths
    Here is an evolutionist's Top Ten Myths About Evolution. The first is that humans evolved from monkeys. He says:
    Nowhere, except in the most illiterate anti-evolution literature, will you find a claim that humans evolved from monkeys.
    His quibble is that it is more precise to say that humans and monkeys had common ancestors. But later, he says that birds evolved from reptiles. Surely, it is similarly more precise to say that birds and reptiles have common ancestors.

    He says that there is nothing "theoretical" about quantum theory, because it helps us build computers and lasers. This opinion is bizarre. Of course quantum theory is theoretical.

    It gets weirder when he says that it is a myth that "Evolution Means Humans are Just Animals". The explanation:

    Are you a vegetable or mineral? Humans have hair and nurse their young just like all other mammals. Traits like nurturing, cooperation and monogamy are often favored by evolution because they enhance survival of the species.
    This sounds like an argument that humans are just animals.

    Another gripe:

    Critics of evolution are fond of citing Piltdown Man or Nebraska Man (actually the tooth of a fossil pig erroneously claimed to be human). These both happened about 100 years ago. They can't cite any cases of false claims of ancient human fossils since then.
    Now he is failing to distinguish between humans and other human ancestors. Yes, there are still a lot of false claims about human ancestors, such as with with the Lucy fossil. Evolutionists claim that Lucy was a human ancestor, but the evidence is against it.

    Friday, Jun 09, 2006
     
    Net neutrality
    Larry Lessig has a new cause:
    Congress is about to cast a historic vote on the future of the Internet. It will decide whether the Internet remains a free and open technology fostering innovation, economic growth and democratic communication, or instead becomes the property of cable and phone companies that can put toll booths at every on-ramp and exit on the information superhighway.

    At the center of the debate is the most important public policy you've probably never heard of: "network neutrality." Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet's wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

    Net neutrality sounds good, but I am not sure why we would need govt regulation of the internet that we have never needed before. I am more worried that spammers will clog up my network connection, and some silly net neutrality law makes it illegal for Cisco and the telcos to do anything about it.

    Thursday, Jun 08, 2006
     
    Judge's Loss Stuns Experts
    LA election news:
    The rare defeat of a highly regarded sitting judge ousted from the bench Tuesday by a bagel store owner who'd barely practiced law in the last decade sent a jolt through Los Angeles County legal circles, leading some to question whether the system to select judges needs overhauling.

    When the ballots were counted it wasn't even close: Judge Dzintra Janavs, a 20-year veteran of the bench, lost by almost 8 percentage points to Lynn Diane Olson, a Hermosa Beach resident and business owner who only late last year reactivated her state bar membership.

    Rare in judicial contests, the race had drawn preelection attention because of speculation by political consultants and court observers that Janavs could be particularly vulnerable — and even may have been targeted — because of her unusual name.

    Voting judges out of office ought to be more common. We have a lot of bad judges, and even the good ones could use a little more public accountability.
     
    New FDA rule for involuntary tests
    John asks, What is FDA's authority for this rule?
    WASHINGTON (AP) - In a public health emergency, suspected victims would no longer have to give permission before experimental tests could be run to determine why they're sick, under a federal rule published Wednesday. Privacy experts called the exception unnecessary, ripe for abuse and an override of state informed-consent laws.

    Health care workers will be free to run experimental tests on blood and other samples taken from people who have fallen sick as a result of a bioterrorist attack, bird flu outbreak, detonation of a dirty bomb or any other life-threatening public health emergency, according to the rule issued by the Food and Drug Administration.

    In all other cases, the use of an experimental test still requires the informed consent of a patient, as well as the review and approval of an outside panel.

    It seems silly to me to try to force people to run medical tests in an emergency. The vast majority of the victims will agree to whatever tests are requested.

    Sunday, Jun 04, 2006
     
    Definition of insanity
    I just heard Newt Gingrich say on C-SPAN, while interviewing futurist Alvin Toffler:
    I've been using a quote from Einstein that I'm sure you're familiar with, that: "Insanity is when you think that by doing more of what you are already doing, you will get a different result."
    A simple net search shows the more common version: "The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results."

    It is a good quote, but Einstein did not say it.

     
    Apes closest to humans
    NY Science Times reports:
    Q. If gorillas more closely resemble humans than chimpanzees do, at least in some features like teeth, why do scientists think humans are closer to chimps?

    A. "Doing this comparison between humans and modern apes is not particularly helpful ...

    "We know a lot about the direction our own hominid line took because there is a good sequence of fossils that nearly connects us to that last common ancestor," Dr. White said. Lacking fossils for chimps and gorillas, scientists look at the earliest fossils from the human line.

    "Everything we know from those earliest hominid fossils indicates that the last common ancestors were neither chimpanzees nor gorillas," Dr. White emphasized. "All three of us are the living products of subsequent evolution."

    It is funny how the evolutionists have declared all those missing link fossils to be hominids, but they cannot find any that they are willing to call apes.

    My hunch is that the supposed hominid fossil Lucy was really an ape, and that theories of human-ape divorgence are wildly inaccurate. Maybe we are more closely related to gorillas than chimps.


    Saturday, May 27, 2006
     
    Bush's mistakes
    Pres. Bush's enemies are now bragging that he has admitted mistakes:
    I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. "Wanted, dead or alive"; that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted.
    Where was "Wanted, dead or alive" misinterpreted? What part of that doesn't translate into some other language? I do not think that Bush was misinterpreted.

    Friday, May 26, 2006
     
    Evolution sticker in court
    Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:
    In January 2005, Cooper ordered the removal of evolution disclaimers affixed to almost 35,000 science textbooks in Cobb after finding they conveyed an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. The county complied, but also appealed that ruling, which was thrown out Thursday by the 11th Circuit.

    The 11th Circuit noted that all parties in the case agree that some evidence presented to Cooper during a four-day trial is now missing. "The problems presented by a record containing significant evidentiary gaps are compounded because at least some key findings of the district court are not supported by the evidence that is contained in the record," Judge Ed Carnes wrote.

    The 43-page decision said whether the 11th Circuit upholds or rejects Cooper's ruling depends on what evidence was before Cooper, but the appeals court cannot tell what all of the evidence was.

    This is ridiculous. Does the court really want more fact-finding on the theory of evolution? The sticker is just an innocuous disclaimer. If it takes that much judicial effort to check the facts, then it should just let the schools use the sticker.
     
    NAACP wants innocent people gagged
    Lacrosse news:
    DURHAM -- A lawyer with the state NAACP said the civil rights organization intends to seek a gag order in the Duke lacrosse case, and a journalist who participated in a forum with him on Wednesday said media coverage of the alleged rape may deprive the alleged victim of her legal rights to a fair trial.
    What he doesn't want the public to hear is that the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, is a prostitute who had sex with three other men before going to work as a drunk stripper at the lacrosse boys' party. Her main evidence is that she had injuries consistent with rape, but DNA tests say that the semen did not come from anyone on the Duke lacrosse team.

    Mangum has no right to a fair trial. She is not the one on trial. It was the Durham DA who decided to try this case in the press. The accused have a right to defend themselves publicly. The jury may not find out whether Mangum really is a prostitute because of rape shield laws, but I think that the Duke players are entitled to release info that rebuts what the DA has told the press.


    Wednesday, May 24, 2006
     
    Toddlers watching TV
    NY Times reports:
    Parents Making Use of TV Despite Risks

    A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation ... found that despite increasing debate over the potentially harmful effects of television on young children, many parents believe that the benefits of a little tube time — whether for their children's development or their own sanity — outweigh the risk of raising a generation of crib potatoes.

    On a typical day 61 percent of babies one year or younger watch TV or videos, with average viewing of more than an hour, the study found. A third of children under 6 have a TV in their bedroom. And more than half of parents surveyed said their main reason for putting a TV in their child's room was so that they or other family members could watch their own shows.

    The pediatricians say that children under 2 should not watch any TV. But they have no real research to back them up. Some TV may well be beneficial.

    George writes:

    Are you saying that you subscribe to Baby Einstein and Mozart products? There is no evidence that those products work.
    No, they probably don't work. But I let my toddlers watch some TV, and some of it appeared to be beneficial.

    Tuesday, May 23, 2006
     
    Google censorship
    Newsbuster writes:
    Something frighteningly ominous has been happening on the Internet lately: Google, without any prior explanation or notice, has been terminating its News relationship with conservative e-zines and web journals.
     
    Humans v Evolution
    NY Times reports:
    Humans can threaten species with extinction in many ways, including overfishing, pollution and deforestation. Now a pair of studies points to a new danger to the world's biodiversity: humans may be blocking new species from evolving.
    We should send these folks to talk to the climate change folks. Evolutionists usually say that dramatic climate changes promote evolution.
     
    Failure of psychiatry
    NY Times reports:
    In a career that has spanned four decades, Dr. [Thomas H.] McGlashan, now 64 and a professor of psychiatry at Yale, has with grim delight extinguished some of psychiatry's grandest notions, none more ruthlessly than his own. He strived for years to master psychoanalysis, only to reject it outright after demonstrating, in a landmark 1984 study, that the treatment did not help much at all in people, like Keith, with schizophrenia. Once placed on antipsychotic medication, Keith became less paranoid and more expressive. Without it, he quickly deteriorated.

    Dr. McGlashan turned to medication and biology for answers and in the 1990's embarked on a highly controversial study of antipsychotic medication to prevent psychosis in high-risk adolescents. But doctors' hopes for that experiment, too, withered under the cold eye of its lead author.

    Early this month, Dr. McGlashan reported that the drugs were more likely to induce weight gain than to produce a significant, measurable benefit.

    That is right. The scientific evidence that psychiatric drugs do any good is extremely weak.

    Saturday, May 20, 2006
     
    Fake portrait
    There is a famous painting of a black sailor, wearing an officer's uniform, who fought with George Washington during the American revolutionary war. Supposedly he saved Washington's life in the 1783 Battle of Brooklyn. It’s in just about every book on AfricanAmerican history. Unfortunately, it is a fake.
     
    Evolution by small jerks
    Here is Niles Eldredge with Confessions of a Darwinist:
    In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian ministers during the 1980 presidential campaign, that evolution “is a theory, a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed.” The creationist who managed to get to Reagan’s handlers later bragged to me that those scientists in question were none other than Gould and me. ...

    I take being called anti-Darwinian very personally. ... But I never thought the fact that Darwin—from where I stand as a paleontologist—got some of his story wrong somehow made me an anti-Darwinian.

    He wants scientific credit for proving Darwin wrong, but he doesn't want creationists to notice.

    Friday, May 19, 2006
     
    9-11 warnings
    Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted to life in prison for failing to warn the FBI before 9-11 with what he knew about a possible Al Qaeda attack. According to Judith Miller, the NY Times had a story before 9-11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack. Her editor rejected it, and still has regrets about it.

    I am not necessarily blaming anyone. I just think that it is unlikely that Moussaoui would have been taken very seriously anyway.


    Thursday, May 18, 2006
     
    Human ape hybrids
    Evolutionists in Nature are claiming that human ancestors spent a million years interbreeding with chimps, and that we are descended from hybrids. Nicholas Wade writes:
    "If the earliest hominids are bipedal, it's hard to think of them interbreeding with the knuckle-walking chimps — it's not what we had in mind," said Daniel E. Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard. ...

    "We'd like to have a more Victorian view of our genome," he said, "and this reminds us that we are really animals and gives us a glimpse of our past and of a story that we might like to have told in a different way."

    This is nonsense. It is doubtful that the earliest hominids were bipedal, and there are not enough fossils to give any evidence on interbreeding. All they really found out was that chromosome differences between humans and apes are slightly greater for Y than X.

    I expect evolutionists to go ape over this. They are often big fans of the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle that the essence of science is knocking Man off his pedestal. What could be better than claiming that Man is a ape half-breed that spent a million years mating with knuckle-draggers?


    Wednesday, May 17, 2006
     
    Consensus letter
    Some economists are circulating a consensus letter in favor of immigration. I may submit my own:
    Open letter on global warming

    Overall, sunshine has been a net gain for American crops. It may have given some people sunburn, but the gains outweigh the losses.

    America is a warm and friendly country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

    The economist letter is just as silly. It tells us nothing about whether immigration levels should be increased or decreased, or how criminal behavior might be dealt with.
     
    Human ancestors breeding with apes
    Evolution news:
    The earliest known ancestors of modern humans might have reproduced with early chimpanzees to create a hybrid species, a new genetic analysis suggests.

    Based on the study of human and chimp genomes, the scientists believe the split between the human and chimpanzee lines occurred much more recently than previously thought—no more than 6.3 million years ago and perhaps as recently as 5.4 million years ago.

    Human and chimpanzee ancestors began branching apart on the primate evolutionary tree some 9 million years ago, but there are significant gaps in the fossil record. The new analysis suggests that a full split, which scientists call speciation, wasn't achieved for nearly 4 million years and might have occurred twice.

    I just don't believe that this can be deduced by extrapolating present-day gene sequences.

    Tuesday, May 16, 2006
     
    Employer penalties
    Andy writes, about proposed immigration reform:
    After watching people pretend that the penalties in the House version (HR 4473) were fair and sensible, and suspecting otherwise, I looked it up myself. In addition to hefty fines for employers not "verifying" employee status, get a load of this:
    SEC. 706. PENALTIES. ... `(1) CRIMINAL PENALTY- Any person or entity which engages in a pattern or practice of violations of subsection (a)(1) or (2) shall be fined not more than $50,000 for each unauthorized alien with respect to which such a violation occurs, imprisoned for not less than one year, or both, notwithstanding the provisions of any other Federal law relating to fine levels.'; and ...
    What an outrage that is! A small businessman is imprisoned for NOT LESS THAN ONE YEAR!!!!!! A floor on the penalty, not a ceiling!!!

    No thanks. I'll pass on that bill. This is Big Brother terrorizing small business once again. I suspect most conservatives would oppose this also, once they learn the truth about it.

    John replies:
    The quoted provision applies only if an employer "engages in a pattern or practice of violations" of specified sections of the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli law. Those 20-year-old provisions make it unlawful for an employer to employ an illegal alien, "knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien."

    So there are two giant escape hatches for any employer. First, the employer has to have actual knowledge that the employee is an illegal alien. Second, the employer must have engaged in a "pattern or practice" of such intentional violations.

    No honest small employer has any risk of being caught by these laws. Using the instant check system would provide a complete defense. These provision are really quite soft compared with many other, stricter federal laws that we all observe every day.

    The real problem is, Andy apparently agrees with Bush that those who knowingly employ illegal aliens should not be punished. However, the nation decided otherwise in the last "comprehensive" law, which Reagan signed in 1986. In exchange for giving amnesty to 1 million people (which then seemed like a huge number), Congress enacted a law requiring employers to check employment eligibility for all new employees.

    As we all know, the illegal alien lobby got what it wanted, and then some: 3 million eventually got amnesty, instead of the 1 million Congress intended. But the American people, whose votes and citizenship were diluted, got the short end of the stick. The promised employer verification was never enforced, so 20 years later, we now have 12-20 million more illegals.

    I actually agree with Andy that we don't want to rely on the federal government to enforce the law -- not because it would be "Big Brother terrorizing small business once again," but because the federal government would do nothing once again.

    The solution is to make the law self-enforcing. That's the beauty of the H.R. 4437: it sets up a system that any small business can use easily, quickly, and cheaply. Anyone who uses that system never has to worry about criminal violations.

    I think that the feds should be enforcing immigration law, not private employers.
     
    Winning in Iraq
    Three years ago, Pres. Bush announced on the USS Abraham Lincoln under a "Mission Accomplished" banner:
    In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. ... Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
    I am surprised to still see people attacking this claim. It was the correct thing to say.

    We won the Battle of Baghdad. We destroyed Saddam Hussein's govt. We defeated and dispersed the Iraqi army. It was a very impressive military victory.

    Occupying Iraq has proved difficult, of course. A lot of people thought that it would be impossible a Western-style govt there. The Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds might still be fighting each other 100 years from now. Maybe the nation-building experiment will fail in Iraq. But there is no doubt that we decisively and brilliantly won the battle of Iraq as Bush said, and it was correct to claim military victory. It would have been irresponsible for Bush to say anything else.

     
    NY Times says NSA makes math errors
    Jonathan David Farley writes in the NY Times:
    Math is just a tool. Used wisely, math can indeed help in warfare: consider the Battle of Britain, won in part by breaking the German codes. But use it unwisely -- as seems to be the case here -- and your approval ratings might just hit a new all-time low.
    His argument is that Pres. Bush's ratings are down because he fallaciously thinks that the NSA will be able to use phone network data to gain intelligence on potential terrorists.

    The guy is a nut. Bush's rating are not down because of bad mathematicians at the NSA. If the guy is correct that the phone data is useless, then no one should object to the NSA collecting it. Not many people object to it anyway.


    Sunday, May 14, 2006
     
    State babysitting
    Calif Prop 82 is on the June ballot, and it would amend the constitution to impose a surtax on the rich to fund a state babysitting (aka preschool) program for 4-year-olds. The plan is to spend about $8k for 540 hours of day care for each participating 4-year-old.

    That is about $15 per hour. I can hire individual private tutors for less money than that. They would do a lot better job also, and I wouldn't have the problem of taking the kid to and from some silly preschool in the middle of the day. Even the left-wing San Jose paper is against it.

    I don't even think that the ballot initiative should have been permitted under the single issue rule. Prop 82 does 2 things: tax the rich and start a preschool program. If the rich are undertaxed, then maybe we should have an initiative just for that. If preschool is really such a big win, then we should fund it out of general revenues. But taxing the rich has nothing to do with preschool.

     
    Driving while black
    UK news:
    BRITAIN’S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black.

    Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force’s traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

    The technology allows car registration plates to be scanned and automatically run through databases to determine whether a vehicle is stolen, uninsured or has not had its road tax paid.

    American blacks sometimes complain about being stopped by police just because they are black, but these arrests are generated automatically by robots without regard to race.

    Saturday, May 13, 2006
     
    Meddling Judges
    Robert P. Rew of San Jose writes:
    Judges meddling with people's job

    We have Judge Jeremy Fogel, who wants to change or eliminate the death penalty, and now we have Judge Robert Freedman, who wants to run high school graduation (Page 1A, May 10). It's time for the judicial system to remember that we have a ``government of the people, by the people, for the people.'' We the people make the rules for high school graduation. Judges have no role in it. Send Freedman back to school until he learns that. And when the framers of our Constitution wrote that part about ``no cruel or unusual punishment,'' the death penalty was hanging or firing squad.

     
    Limiting judges
    Missouri news:
    The Missouri House approved by voice vote on Wednesday a resolution that calls on Congress to rein in the nation’s judges by approving the Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 (CRA).

    The resolution was sponsored by state Rep. Mark Wright, R-Springfield. It says that the Restoration Act would “resolve the improper judicial intervention in matters relating to the acknowledgement of God.”

    Missouri is at least the third state to pass such a resolution, following Idaho and Louisiana.


    Friday, May 12, 2006
     
    Evolution and bacteria
    Holden Thorp writes in the NY Times:
    Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution.
    Thorp is a chemist, so perhaps that is why he has to guess about the history of biology. In fact, there are hardly any innovations that are attributable to the theory of evolution.

    His favorite example is resistant bacteria. The idea is that if an antibiotic kills some bacteria and not others, then the surviving bacteria will reproduce and not be killed. Sound profound? No, it is as trivial as it sounds. No theory is needed.

    Biology certainly has made tremendous progress in the last 50 years, and the field has been dominated by evolutionists. That suggests that the theory is useful, and worth teaching. But Kansas has not stopped teaching evolution, and neither has anyone else. Thorp is on the warpath against Kansas not for the science that it is teaching, but for its definition of science.


    Wednesday, May 10, 2006
     
    Reading the 4A
    John sends this NRO article on how to read the 4A.
    This week, following Hayden’s nomination, Editor & Publisher republished the Hayden-Landay exchange under the headline, “Hayden, Likely Choice for CIA Chief, Displayed Shaky Grip on 4th Amendment at Press Club.” And just yesterday, Fred Kaplan wrote an article for Slate in which he relates part of the exchange. He then comments, "This is startling. Elsewhere in the speech, Hayden said, 'If there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth.' And he doesn't know that it requires ‘probable cause’ as the criterion for ‘reasonable’ search? ... Hayden may have dug his own hole with this one.”
    The 4A requires that searches and seizures be reasonable, and that warrants be based on a showing of probable cause.

    Tuesday, May 09, 2006
     
    Nonlawyer defends son
    The NY Times reports:
    Several years ago, Brian Woods sued the school board in Akron, Ohio, on behalf of his autistic son Daniel. Mr. Woods wanted to make sure that Daniel received an appropriate education, and he won several concessions and about $160,000.

    Sandee and Jacob Winkelman at home in Parma, Ohio. She said lawyers wanted thousands of dollars to help Jacob, who is autistic. "We had no money, and we had nowhere to send Jacob to school," she said.

    "I soundly defeated a team of lawyers," Mr. Woods, an adjunct professor at Cuyahoga Community College, said yesterday.

    When the Cleveland Bar Association got wind of Mr. Woods's victory recently, it also went to court — to sue Mr. Woods.

    The bar association said he had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. It sought a $10,000 fine, lawyers' fees and a promise that he would not continue to assist other parents seeking to represent their own children in court.

    The Ohio Supreme Court was not impressed.

    I am not impressed either. He won his case, and that should be proof that he competently represented his son's interests. The lawyers just want to monopolize the business.

    The article suggests that the US Supreme Court might hear a similar case. It sure seems to me that a father should be able to stand up for his son in court.


    Monday, May 08, 2006
     
    Physicists make political statement
    Leonard Susskind and a bunch of other mathematical physicists have written a letter to the NY Times:
    Scientists Speak Out About Guantánamo (1 Letter)
    Published: April 30, 2006

    To the Editor:

    We are deeply concerned that without serious debate, the United States has crossed the limits of acceptable practices in the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other sites. The secrecy and the disdain for international law and opinion are contrary to the very ideals that our country has long stood and fought for.

    Huhh? I always thought that that our country stood for disdain for international opinion. International law is certainly not an American ideal. Americans think that the rest of the world is screwed up, and we stand for doing things better.
    We are told that our country is being protected by locking up dangerous terrorists in isolated facilities in order to make us accept a breakdown of our own laws.
    This is really wacky. Do they really think that Pres. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfield adopted some course of action for the purpose of making American accept a breakdown of our own laws? It sounds to me as if it is the physicists who want us to accept international law instead of our own laws.
    But we do not know - indeed, we have not been allowed any way of finding out - if the individual prisoners are enemy combatants, Al Qaeda suspects or innocents unlucky enough to have been caught in a blind sweep.
    Do they really care whether they are enemy combatants or Al Qaeda suspects? I don't.
    It is one of the most fundamental principles of a democracy that all accused should be tried without unreasonable delays and freed if innocent.
    Democracy means majority rule, not how to try terrorist suspects. It does not mean freeing wartime prisoners, even if they are innocent. Soldiers who fought for Germany and Japan in WWII were innocent in the sense of not having broken any law, but we still did not free them until the war was over.
    In no case do our moral principles permit humiliating and degrading treatment.
    Did they become moral philosophers?
    The administration has cynically used fear to justify behavior that the civilized world has long considered criminal.
    Criminal? These physicists probably disagree with the Iraq War and have some policy disagreements, but the the civilized world has never considered it criminal to detain and interrogate enemy combatants.
    Although this is not a scientific issue in the usual sense, we feel that to ignore it would be to abdicate our responsibility to the truth. Therefore, we have felt compelled to speak out against human rights violations, including those committed by Americans. We are asking all people of good will to join us in demanding a quick return to our country's great traditions.
    These guys should stick to math and physics.

    I do think that citizens who are accused of crimes should get protections in the Bill Of Rights, and prisoners of war should get protections as in the Geneva Conventions. But those who conspire with Al Qaeda against the USA are in the another category. They have no rights that the civilized world recognizes, and they should be treated much worse than criminals and prisoners of war.

    George writes:

    You might be misinterpreting the sentence about making "us accept a breakdown of our own laws". It sounds like the Bush administration has one reason for Guantánamo, but is telling us another reason in order to trick us into accepting a breakdown of our own laws so that Bush can declare marshal law or something like that. Or maybe left-wing propagandists are trying to trick us about Guantánamo. Or maybe Bush is detaining those prisoners as a trick to make us accept other violations of the law. The physicists are probably just unhappy about Guantánamo, and wanted to qualify their statement with "we are told" because they don't really know what is going on.
    The signers of the letter are 19 of the smartest people in the world. I am sure that they scrutinized every word, and they mean exactly what they said.

    Bush argues persuasively that Guantánamo is legal. I don't see how anything related to Guantánamo could be leading to the public accepting a breakdown of our own laws. It might be leading to an expansion of executive authority or to the irritation of the Mohammedan world, but not to a breakdown of our own laws.


    Sunday, May 07, 2006
     
    No shortage of skilled workers
    Christopher R. Moylan cites a bunch of article about the supposed shortage of scientists and engineers, and writes:
    Whether the cry is for more H-1B visas or more female engineers, the goal is the same: a dramatic increase in the supply of high-tech workers. The problem with these proposed remedies is that they address an employee shortage that does not, in fact, exist.

    Thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers still roam Silicon Valley looking for work after having been cut adrift by the same types of people who now claim that they can't find anyone to hire. And thousands more are now working in different fields at substantially lower salaries, having given up searching for an equivalent to their previous positions. ``No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage,'' said demographer Michael Teitelbaum in the Wall Street Journal's Nov. 16 front-page story, ``Behind `Shortage' of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy.'' In a column titled ``A Phony Science Gap?'' (Feb. 22), the Washington Post's Robert J. Samuelson explained in detail why ``it's emphatically not true, as much of the alarmist commentary on America's `competitiveness' implies, that the United States now faces crippling shortages in its technological elites.''

    ... When the best students, being rational, start to desert science and engineering, businesses will have nobody to blame but themselves. The solution will be the same one that existed before the Reagan administration, as Harvard economist Richard Freeman told Samuelson: ``If we want more (scientists and engineers), we have to pay them better and give them better careers.''

    He's right. For as long as I can remember, businesses and others have been complaining about a shortage of scientists and engineers at the same time that they were cutting their wages and laying them off.
     
    Freud was a kook
    The Si Valley paper is celebrating Sigmund Freud's 150th birthday, and lists his major inventions:
    UNCONSCIOUS

    Sigmund Freud maintained that people are not entirely aware of what they think and act in ways that have little or nothing to do with their conscious thoughts. He proposed that awareness existed in layers and that important and influential thoughts occurred ``below the surface.'' He wrote extensively about how people repress painful ideas, thoughts or feelings.

    This was Freud's proudest accomplishment. He said that his symbolic interpretation of dreams was the royal road to the unconscious.

    Of course people are unconscious when they are asleep; that has been known for 1000s of years. But Freud's theory of dreams is contrary to everything that we now know about dreams.

    PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

    Freud argued that starting at birth, people go through stages of development -- including the oral, anal and phallic stages -- and become fixated on different objects. He also believed that children at one point see their mothers as sexual objects, a theory that became known as the Oedipus complex; the phenomenon of little girls fixating on their fathers was dubbed the Electra complex.

    This is kooky, and has no merit.
    ID, EGO AND SUPEREGO

    To explain the driving forces behind human behavior, Freud theorized that the psyche is divided into three parts: the id, which contains primitive desires such as hunger, rage and sex; the superego, which internally deals with morals, taboos and societal norms; and the ego, which shifts between the two and plays a key role in a person's sense of self.

    This was just new terminology for old ideas.
    DEFENSE MECHANISMS

    Freud believed the ego uses defense mechanisms to resolve conflicts between the id and the superego. These include denial, displacement, repression or suppression, projection, compensation, intellectualization and rationalization. Freud was convinced those were all ways people try to spare themselves emotional pain when confronted with stress, unpleasant truths or undesirable thoughts.

    There is no scientific evidence for what Freud called repression.
    PSYCHOANALYSIS

    Freud pioneered the modern concept of "talk therapy" to help patients explore what subconscious fears and desires might be surfacing in their conscious thinking or behavior. The technique initially involved using hypnosis to get a patient to recall and relive forgotten or repressed memories. Freud later rejected hypnosis and developed ``free association,'' in which patients are encouraged to express seemingly irrelevant thoughts as they occur to bring repressed traumatic events into the open.

    All scientific studies have failed to show any benefit to Freudian psychoanalysis.

    Freud was a pervert, drug addict, and a scientific fraud. His ideas have been proven false, to the extent that they are testable.


    Friday, May 05, 2006
     
    President's duty to the Constitution
    John credits Michael Kinsley for being an honest liberal for writing this:
    Last Sunday's Boston Globe carried an alarming 4,000-word front-page article about President Bush and the Constitution. It seems that Bush has asserted the right to ignore "vast swaths of the law" simply because he thinks that these laws are unconstitutional.

    The article is specifically about "signing statements," in which the president offers his interpretation of an act of Congress as he signs it into law. This was an innovation of the Reagan administration, intended to give courts something other than a law's legislative history -- that is, Congress's side of the story -- in any future dispute. Bush often signs a law and at the same time says that parts of it are unconstitutional. Sneaky!

    The Globe does not report what it thinks a president ought to do when called upon to enforce or obey a law he or she believes to be unconstitutional.

    The President is sworn to uphold the Constitution, as part of his Oath of office. It would really be alarming if the President declared that he could enforce some unconstitional law. Not even Richard Nixon said that.

    G.W.Bush did raise some eyebrows when he signed the the McCain-Feingold (campaign finance) Bill while expressing reservations about parts of it being unconstitional. Perhaps he thought that those parts would not be enforced.


    Thursday, May 04, 2006
     
    Why Bush appointed Miers
    A Cato Institute article says:
    "Trust the president." That was the Bush administration's main defense of the president's bizarre choice of corporate lawyer Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court. But the administration also had a backup rationale: as D.C.'s Hill newspaper reported, in an October 3, 2005, conference call with conservative leaders, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman stressed "the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration's management of the war on terrorism."
    A reader says, "This rings absolutely true to me."
     
    Princeton Prof defends marriage law
    A reader writes:
    What a laugh that Princeton would criticize Robbie George because he "stepped out of the ivory tower," one week after Princeton history prof Sean Wilentz published his ridiculous cover story in Rolling Stone!

    I do think George deserves severe criticism -- not for becoming an activist, but because neither he nor his colleagues have ever published a law review-style article explaining his position, advancing his argument, or defending the text of the constitutional amendment they drafted. Although there have been 3 versions of the amendment since 2003, neither George nor his colleagues explained why, or whether the changes in wording were meant to have legal significance.

    On the basic question of what effect, if any, the amendment would have on same-sex domestic partners, George has disagreed with his own fellow drafters, as well as with the House and Senate sponsors of the amendment. So what is the public supposed to think?

    Yes, I think that the marriage amendment is hopelessly ambiguous and confusing, and not likely to do what the proponents say it will do. The public will not get behind it.

    Tuesday, May 02, 2006
     
    A really scary idea
    John sends this AP news story:
    WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Tuesday that a Republican proposal in Congress to set up a watchdog over the federal courts is a "really scary idea."

    Ginsburg told a gathering of the American Bar Association that lawyers should stick up for judges when they are criticized by congressional leaders.

    "My sense now is that the judiciary is under assault in a way that I haven't seen before," she said.

    As an example, she mentioned proposals by senior Republicans who want an inspector general to police judges' acceptance of free trips or their possible financial interests with groups that could appear before them.

    "It sounds to me very much like the Soviet Union was .... That's a really scary idea," said Ginsburg, who was put on the court by President Clinton and is one of its liberal members.

    Yeah, just like the USSR. The Soviet Union was famous for monitoring judges for conflicts of interest. Ginsburg gets paid about $200k per year and she cannot be fired, and she is really scared that someone might notice her taking bribes.

    Sunday, Apr 30, 2006
     
    National Popular Vote
    There is a new movement for a National Popular Vote (NPV) for president of the USA. Some of the more populous states would form a compact to throw their electoral vote to whatever candidate they believe to receive a plurality of votes, nationally.

    One of the virtues of the Electoral College is that it requires a majority to elect anyone. Germany just elected its leader last Sept. with 35% of its vote, and Canada with 35% in Jan..

    Under the USA Electoral College system, third parties are discouraged because they have to carry a state to get even a single electoral vote. Usually they have no hope of that, and few people waste their votes that way.

    The main problem with third parties is that they can prevent a majority, and make it difficult to elect a President that everyone will recognize as the rightful winner. Suppose there are 3 candidates, receiving 46, 45, and 9 percent. The one with 46% could be declared the winner, but what if the other 2 candidates were ideologically similar? Then we'd have a president that 54% of the people voted against.

    The NPV proponents will probably spend most of them time arguing that it is wrong that someone can win a majority of the popular vote but not get elected. I wouldn't mind so much if their proposal just favored those with a majority of the votes. Instead, the primary effect is to help those candidates who cannot get majority support.

    In 1948, 1960, 1968, 1992, 1996, and 2000, no one won the popular vote. In 2000, Gore won a plurality of the votes. There is no consensus on who got a plurality of the popular votes in 1960. Perhaps Nixon would have been elected in 1960 if NPV had been in effect.

    Andy writes:

    I don't attach as much significance to the plurality v. majority issue. People who favor democracy don't care about that. People who favor the Electoral College don't care much about that either. It seems like a red herring.
    John writes:
    I agree with Roger (not Andy) about the significance of "majority vote" vs. "the most votes." An essential feature of our present Constitution is that nobody can be elected president without obtaining an absolute majority of something -- either the Electoral College, or state delegations in the House of Representatives.

    Thursday, Apr 27, 2006
     
    Naming the Lacrosse accuser
    Crystal Gail Mangum is the 27-year-old stripper who launched a hysterical attack on the Duke lacrosse team. I got the name from The Johnsville News, which has a lot more detail. Another blog spells her name as Crystal Gail Mangum and has some other info. See also tdaxp.

    I really disapprove of the way that the legal system and the MSM branded the boys as racist rapists on very flimsy charges, and protected the accuser from being held accountable for what she has done.

    I just listened to a radio talk show host go into a big rant against the prosecution and defense lawyers for attempting to try the case in the press. I agree with him about the prosecution, but I think that it is the duty of the defense lawyers to defend the lacrosse boys both in the press and in the courts. They have alibis and other reasons for saying that the accusations are false. Nobody is giving the boys their presumption of innocence, so they'll have to publicly prove their innocence or their lives will be ruined.

    George writes:

    Why are you naming a rape victim? Won't that discourage other rape victims from coming forward?
    I don't think that she is a rape victim. Naming her is like naming Katelyn Faber, Kobe Bryant's accuser.

    Monday, Apr 24, 2006
     
    Anger control classes considered harmful
    British news:
    Anger management courses for convicted armed robbers, wife beaters and stalkers are being axed by the prison and probation services following an official inquiry into the murder of the city financier John Monckton.

    Home Office instructions sent to the probation service say that anger management courses are counterproductive and actually help violent offenders who make premeditated attacks to manipulate the situation to their advantage.

    Too many people assume that such psychobabble classes are beneficial. They may be harmful.

    Sunday, Apr 23, 2006
     
    Judges Interfere With Elections
    John writes:
    Remember the nutty decision of a 9th Circuit panel that stopped the California recall (later reversed en banc)? Now the same logic has been picked up by the 6th Circuit, which throws out Ohio's entire voting system just 2 weeks before the primary at which Ken Blackwell (defendant in this case) is running for governor.

    Thanks to the 5-year Senate filibuster that blocked Bush's 4 nominees to the 6th Circuit, the case drew an all-Democrat panel. The majority opinion was written by a Jimmy Carter judge.

    Some people are going to say that if the US Supreme Court can interfere in an election like the 2000 presidential election, then so can other judges. But Bush v Gore did not change any votes or election procedures. It merely said that the courts had insufficient cause to interfere. OTOH, these judges justify taking radical action by quoting Earl Warren's memoirs!

    Friday, Apr 21, 2006
     
    Unholy alliance opposes ID tags
    This story describes industry gripes about difficulties forcing Americans to carry ID tags that can be passively read:
    [Marc-Anthony] Signorino said the political climate in New Hampshire has made it especially difficult for the industry to make a case for itself. The Granite State has been particularly active on the ID front. House lawmakers there last month passed a bill to reject a 2005 federal mandate for standard driver's licenses.

    "We're scared to go to New Hampshire," he said. "They have gun racks on their motorcycles. They don't want anyone telling them what to do." ...

    The movement against RFID and federal driver's licensing standards has garnered support from all areas of the political spectrum, according to [RFID industry lobbyist Robert] Atkinson.

    He said an "unholy alliance" of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Eagle Forum, which is led by conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, has choked the ability of the technology industry to gather political support. "This isn't a group of fringe players," he said.

    Funny. I guess that the industry thinks that there is an unholy alliance of people who don't want to be treated like cattle.

    Thursday, Apr 20, 2006
     
    Free speech for certain views only
    Volokh writes:
    Tyler Harper wore an anti-homosexuality T-shirt to school, apparently responding to a pro-gay-rights event put on at the school by the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school. On the front, the T-shirt said, "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned," and on the back, it said "Homosexuality is Shameful." The principal insisted that Harper take off the T-shirt. Harper sued, claiming this violated his First Amendment rights.

    Harper's speech is constitutionally unprotected, the Ninth Circuit just ruled today, in an opinion written by Judge Reinhardt and joined by Judge Thomas; Judge Kozinski dissented. According to the majority, "derogatory and injurious remarks directed at students' minority status such as race, religion, and sexual orientation" -- which essentially means expressions of viewpoints that are hostile to certain races, religions, and sexual orientations -- are simply unprotected by the First Amendment in K-12 schools. Such speech, Judge Reinhardt said, violates "the rights of other students" by constituting a "verbal assault[] that may destroy the self-esteem of our most vulnerable teenagers and interfere with their educational development."

    I wouldn't mind if the school banned all homosexuality-related T-shirts, but it is promotes one particular political view, then it should allow alternate views.

    Judge Reinhardt is famous for being a pro-ACLU leftist activist judge who is frequently overruled by the Supreme Court.

    Update: UCLA law prof Volokh points out that in 2002 Judge Reinhardt decided that "First Amendment judicial scrutiny should now be at its height" for people like Taliban sympathizers. But not for anyone who thinks that sodomy is shameful, I guess.


    Wednesday, Apr 19, 2006
     
    Humans are still evolving
    A reader recommends this NPR interview of Nicholas Wade plugging his new book Before The Dawn. (The NPR link is flaky and I could not hear the interview.)

    I blogged earlier about a NY Times article in which Wade said:

    It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago.
    So I guess that Wade has gotten religion on this subject, and is now trying to convince all the other evolutionists who deny that humans are still evolving. Wade says that Iceland was only settled by humans 1000 years ago, and the people there have evolved already.

    There are people who find the concept of human evolution very unsettling. If humans are still evolving, then some people might be more evolved than others. I think that their concerns are a little silly.

     
    No sign of supersymmetry
    NY Times reports:
    Physicists are a bit frustrated that their results keep agreeing with the Standard Model and so far show no hint of supersymmetry.
    It is funny how so many physicists can believe in supersymmetry when there is no hard evidence for it.

    Friday, Apr 14, 2006
     
    Another missing link
    Science news from Nature:
    NAIROBI (AFP) - Four-million-year-old remains in Ethiopia have provided the first hard proof of a link between two key stages of human evolution by bridging the gap between pre-human species, paleontologists said.

    "For the first time, we found fossils that allow us to connect the first phase of human evolution and the second phase," Dr Berhane Asfaw, anthropologist and co-research director of the project that found the remains, told a news conference Wednesday in Addis Ababa.

    "The fossils represent unambiguous evidence for human evolution," he said. ...

    "All (three species) were able to be found in one place, proving that evolution is a fact," Asfaw said. "Successive records that we see here prove that the Afar region is the origin of human kind."

    It is pretty crazy to call these fossils hard proof of anything. They are small-brained with no known connection to humans. Some people speculate that they might be human ancestors because they might have been able to stand up a little better than the typical chimp, but the evidence is extremely weak.

    Thursday, Apr 13, 2006
     
    How the Government Creates Child Abuse
    Stephen Baskerville writes:
    Just in time for "Child Abuse Prevention Month," the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) publishes its annual contribution to obfuscating the causes of child abuse.

    Operatives of the child abuse industry often wax righteous about the "scandal" of child abuse. "We cannot tolerate the abuse of even one child," says an HHS press release. But the real scandal is the armies of officials who have been allowed to acquire -- using taxpayers' dollars -- a vested interest in abused children.

    Devising child abuse programs makes us all feel good, but there is no evidence they make the slightest difference. In fact, they probably make the problem worse. Child abuse is largely a product of the feminist-dominated family law and social work industries. It is a textbook example of the government creating a problem for itself to solve.

    He's right. Govt programs to prevent child abuse are actually causing more abuse than they prevent.

    Monday, Apr 10, 2006
     
    Harmful programs
    Human Events rates The 10 Most Harmful Government Programs:
  • 1. Social Security
  • 2. Medicare
  • 3. Income Tax Withholding
  • 4. McCain-Feingold
  • 5 (Tie). Contraceptive Funding
  • 5 (Tie). Farm Subsidies
  • 7. Medicaid
  • 8. Affirmative Action
  • 9 (Tie). Earmarking
  • 9 (Tie). Davis-Bacon Act
  •  
    Cosmic Landscape v Evolution
    The blog Not Even Wrong cites this:
    Of course, the anthropic principle is in some sense a tautology: we must live where we can live.

    Natural selection is a tautology in much the same sense: survivors survive. But in combination with a mechanism of populating a spectrum of universes or genotypes, these ‘tautologies’ acquire great power.

    Thus we should seriously consider the possibility that there is no other selection mechanism significantly constraining the cosmological constant. Equally we should not stop searching for such a further principle, but I think one must admit that the strongest reason for expecting to find it is not a scientific argument but a psychological one (footnote): we wish fundamental theory to be as we have long assumed it would be.

    Again, the Darwinian analogy is notable.

    This is from evolutionists, not creationists.

    Sunday, Apr 09, 2006
     
    Kerry exaggerates his vote count
    I just watched John Kerry on Meet The Press. He is certainly the master at forcefully saying nothing. He said that he takes full responsibility for mistakes made by his 2004 campaign, but refused to say what they were.

    Tim Russert started the show saying that Kerry won 48.3% of the popular vote in 2004, and Kerry said that he thought that he won 49.2%.

    The 2004 election tally is a strange thing to dispute. If we cannot agree on that, then I don't know how we could agree on Iraq WMD. I checked CNN, WikiPedia, and National Archives. They give slightly differently figures, but they all imply that Russert is right and Kerry is wrong. It is hard to understand how Kerry could make a mistake like this. Perhaps he was thinking about Bill Clinton getting 49.2% of the vote in 1996.

    In other J. Kerry news, he continues to show that he is not afraid to mention religion:

    Not in one phrase uttered and reported by the Lord Jesus Christ, can you find anything that suggests that there is a virtue in cutting children from Medicare.
    Meanwhile, Kevin Phillips says:
    Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

    We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

    He says Bush is only concerned about money, oil, security, and God.

    I don't know why this should be so upsetting to Phillips. We are not a theocracy just because our President is concerned with money, oil, security, and God. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton talked about God more than Bush does.

    Joe writes:

    I think there is only one reason Kevin Phillips is quoted by anybody. It's that he wrote a book about the emerging Republican majority about 30 years ago, so now, 20 years after he has become a total flack for the left, he can be quoted by the MSM as a conservative - and of course he just has nasty things to say about conservatives.
    Joe is correct.

    Friday, Apr 07, 2006
     
    Libby followed instructions
    LA Times reports:
    WASHINGTON -- President Bush personally authorized leaking long-classified information to a reporter in the summer of 2003 to buttress administration claims, now discredited, that Saddam Hussein was attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction for Iraq, according to a court filing by prosecutors in the case against former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. ...

    The court filing by Fitzgerald makes no allegation that Bush encouraged or authorized the disclosure of the identity of Plame to anyone. Bush has previously said that he would fire anyone in his administration who was involved in the outing of Plame.

    No, Bush never said that. He said:
    Listen," Bush said in response to a reporter's question in Chicago on Sept. 30, 2003, "I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action.

    "There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington," Bush said then. "And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of."

    Bush has always punished leakers, Bush's statement was just a restatement of what everyone would expect. But Bush and Cheney have the authority to declassify information, so an authorized disclosure would not have been a leak of classified info.

    I continue to think that no crime was committed here.

    We don't want the President to goto war based on secret reasons. We want the White to declassify and release the necessary evidence. Once the NY Times and Valerie Plame's husband Wilson published an article claiming to have inside info that one of Bush's reasons for war was mistaken, then it was entirely appropriate that the White House release the info and the surrounding circumstances because Wilson was lying.


    Thursday, Apr 06, 2006
     
    Lawrence Krauss: Science under attack
    Lawrence Krauss is a respected physicist and science popularizer, but he cannot resist taking leftist evolutionist political positions, and accusing anyone who disagrees as being anti-science. This blog agrees 85% with him, but says:
    After he explained that science should never advocate things that cannot be defended scientifically, because it is not right and moreover it diminishes the power of science, he listed approximately five principles of the scientific ethos (or even the scientific method), and one of them was "egalitarianism".
    Krauss went on to say Bush was anti-science on the subjects of global warming, stem cell research, and missile defense.

    Wednesday, Apr 05, 2006
     
    Missing link fish
    NY Times reports:
    Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375 million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought "missing link" in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

    In addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils are widely seen by scientists as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life.

    ... They said this should undercut the creationists' argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind.

    One creationist Web site (emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/evid1.htm) declares that "there are no transitional forms," adding: "For example, not a single fossil with part fins part feet has been found. And this is true between every major plant and animal kind."

    Let's assume that these evolutionists are correct, and that this fossil is the first fossil found with part fins part feet. Then why is it that creationist web sites were the only places to have this info that was completely correct? The evolution textbooks should have been willing to admit that this gap existed.

    George writes:

    The creationists will never be happy with a fossil that fills a gap. They'll just say that now there are two gaps: one before and one after this new fossil.

    Monday, Apr 03, 2006
     
    Forcing Ritalin
    Quebec news:
    Gabriel Lavigueur was suspended from his South Shore school on March 20. His mother, Danielle, says his Ritalin was causing insomnia, loss of appetite and aggression. Published: Sunday, April 02, 2006 The case of a 12-year-old Longueuil boy suspended from school when his mother refused to give him Ritalin has sparked concerns over who is in charge of the medicine cabinet.
    There have also been reports that American schools have pressured kids to go on ritalin.
     
    Study rejects benefits of light drinking
    The LA Times reports:
    If you think a glass of wine is good for your heart, think again.

    The belief that moderate drinking reduces risk of a heart attack is based on flawed data and is most likely wrong, according to a study released today.

    A couple of glasses of wine aren't going to hurt, the study found, but they aren't going to help, either.

    ``Our results suggest that light drinking is a sign of good health, and not necessarily its cause,'' said epidemiologist Kaye Fillmore of the University of California-San Francisco School of Nursing.

    The findings were released online in the journal Addiction Research and Theory.

    Fillmore's team identified 54 papers that examined the health effects of drinking. They found that the vast majority of the papers included significant numbers of people who had recently quit drinking with the group who abstained from alcohol. Many of those people did so because of advancing age or serious illness, and might have faced a greater likelihood of disease and death.

    Seven of the studies had only long-term abstainers.

    All seven of those studies showed no benefit from moderate drinking.

    This should rebut some of the pro-alcohol propaganda.

    Sunday, Apr 02, 2006
     
    Chasing the Babe
    The San Jose paper says:
    Just ask Aaron, the only man so far with the audacity to pass Ruth. He was greeted with a barrage of racist hate mail. In 1974, the year he became the home run king, Aaron was asked about someone breaking his own record.

    ``Believe me, I'll be pulling for him,'' Aaron replied, ``and I hope they give him as much hell as they have me.''

    Wish granted.

    Yes, wish granted. The attacks on Barry Bonds are far worse than the attacks on Aaron ever worse.

    George writes:

    I don't know why you want to make excuses for Bonds. Bonds used steroids. He has admitted his amoral disregard for the integrity of baseball by saying, "I don't know what cheating is."
    No, Bonds was saying that the MLB rules on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) were ambiguous, and it is debatable whether his alleged use of the "cream" and the "clear" was cheating. Some people probably think that Lasik surgery is cheating. No one knows whether MLB and the public will eventually consider Bonds a cheater. Bonds cannot know either.

    Paul Campos defends Bonds against various arguments that he cheated, and that the strongest argument against Bonds is that PEDs are dangerous. But there are no studies on the adverse health effects of the "clear" (THG), so I don't know how Bonds or anyone else could be so certain of its danger. Maybe it is no worse than taking a vitamin supplement.

     
    Teaching evolution
    The LA Times reports:
    LIBERTY, Mo. — Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.

    As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.

    The challenges begin at once.

    "Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore Chris Willett demands. " 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't." ...

    Such challenges have become so disruptive that some teachers dread the annual unit on evolution — or skip it altogether.

    In response, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science is distributing a 24-page guide to teaching the scientific principles behind evolution, starting in kindergarten. The group also has issued talking points for teachers flustered by demands to present "both sides." ...

    Frisby hopes the exercise will make an impression on students like Chris Willett, who offered this rebuttal to evolution: "I think it's kind of strange that they can find all these dinosaur fossils from what you say is millions of years ago, but they can't find any transitional human fossils."

    Frisby promised to show the class several fossils that document the halting and gradual evolution from apes to humans. Then he reminded them not to expect equal numbers of human and dinosaur remains, because hominids emerged only recently, while dinosaurs ruled the planet for nearly 200 million years.

    At that, sophomore Derik Montgomery snapped to attention. "I heard that dinosaurs are only thousands of years old, like 6,000. Not millions," he said.

    "That's wrong," Frisby responded briskly. "What can I tell you? You can't believe everything you read."

    Sprawled out across his chair, Derik muttered: "You can't believe everything you hear in here, either."

    Frisby put up his next transparency.

    Most science teachers just love it when students ask questions. If someone doubts that dinosaur fossils are millions of years old, then they get an opportunity to explain the scientific evidence.

    Thursday, Mar 30, 2006
     
    A Feminine Mystique All Her Own
    NY Times article:
    A political organizer and syndicated columnist who campaigned against the equal rights amendment, Phyllis Schlafly is still at war with the feminist agenda. ...

    Recently, a biography of Phyllis Schlafly, the Missourian who traveled the country battling the equal rights amendment with a hairdo like a treble clef, arrived to make a case for its subject as one of the most influential figures in modern American political history. Among critics who found this thesis convincing, some faulted the book, saying it failed to reconcile the discrepancies between the antifeminist positions Mrs. Schlafly maintained and the accomplished professional life she has pursued. The book, "Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade" (Princeton University Press), is a flattering portrayal but also an impersonal one, largely because the author, Donald T. Critchlow, a historian from Mrs. Schlafly's hometown, St. Louis, conducted his research in archives. The two never sat down for a talk, ...

    "In the scale of liberal sins, hypocrisy is the greatest, and they have always considered me a hypocrite," Mrs. Schlafly said. She has never told women, she said, that they shouldn't or couldn't work.

    No, the biography is impersonal because it is about her political life and influence.

    Accusations of hypocrisy in conservatives in almost always rooted in a misunderstanding of someone's position.


    Saturday, Mar 25, 2006
     
    Powers of Courts Curbed Over School Funding
    The NY Sun reports:
    ALBANY - In the latest twist in the legally tangled New York City schools funding case, the order handed down yesterday by a state appeals court means that it is ultimately the governor of New York and legislators, not the judicial branch, that will determine how much money is needed to ensure that the city's students are offered a proper education.

    The 3-2 ruling makes it more likely that the next governor, and not Governor Pataki, will be the final arbiter in a case that spans more than a decade, involves billions of dollars in taxpayer money, and does not appear to be over. ...

    While the court did not specify an exact sum, it recommended that the city public schools receive a range of additional annual operational aid of between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion and $9 billion in capital money for construction projects and repairs.

    Yes, the legislature and governor should be the ones to tax and spend school money. The courts have been infiltrated by judicial supremacists who want to run the schools.

    Thursday, Mar 23, 2006
     
    New Dino Fossil
    Scientific American reports on a 151 myr old dinosaur fossil:
    In a paper describing the fossil, published today in Nature, Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and Ursula Gohlich of the University of Munich classify Juravenator as an early member of the coelurosauria family that eventually evolved into birds, but one that lived later than some of the early feathered representatives. In fact, the discovery of feathers in a wide variety of coelurosaurs had led experts to posit that the entire clade had the downy covering. But Juravenator's skin impressions--seen in the middle of its tail and on its hind legs--show only scales.

    This could mean that feathers evolved, were lost and then regained in the lineage or that the creature shed its coat during different seasons, the researchers write. Or it could be that Juravenator is more primitive than they suggest, argues Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in an accompanying commentary. "Whatever the explanation, our knowledge of early feather evolution has been enriched by the discovery," Xu writes. "Juravenator may complicate the picture, but it makes it more complete and realistic."

    Funny how feather evolution theory can be completed by a find that doesn't make any sense.

    Wednesday, Mar 22, 2006
     
    Rejecting earthquake insurance
    John sends this Seattle story:
    Californians have built vast metropolises atop seismic faults, but 86 percent of the state's homeowners have no quake insurance, a proportion that has crept upward as memories of past quakes fade. The number of uninsured was about 65 percent in 1996.

    "It's a game of Russian roulette," said Norman Williams, an assistant deputy commissioner at the state Department of Insurance.

    Earthquake insurance is a lousy deal. If you have 15% equity in your home, and your policy has a 15% deductible, then you are really just insuring your mortgage company.

    Tuesday, Mar 21, 2006
     
    Patenting ideas
    Tony Mauro of Legal Times writes about the Supreme Court patent case:
    But Jonathan Franklin, lawyer for LabCorp, which challenged the patent, said that if Metabolite’s patent is upheld, then “Einstein could have patented E equals mc squared.” By patenting the correlation that makes the vitamin-deficiency test work, Franklin said, Metabolite has “pre-emptive sweep” over all other tests, past and future, that draw conclusions from blood tests. Physicians who draw similar correlations in their work would also be infringers, Franklin suggested.

    Franklin is a partner at Hogan & Hartson, the former employer of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. Because of that connection, apparently, Roberts recused himself in the case and left the courtroom as the argument began.

    John says that Roberts recused himself from (potentially) the most important patent case in 25 years.

    I think that lawyer needs some better arguments. It is not so obviously bad if Einstein had been able to patent E=mc2.

    Suppose it were really true that anyone who thinks of a new formula for generating energy could get a US patent on it, and collect royalties on the energy generated for the next 17 to 20 years. Then Einstein would have had the exclusive rights to nuclear bombs and power plants from 1905 to 1922. Nuclear power didn't even start to become feasible until 1945. What exactly would have been the harm?

    Einstein did not foresee the practical utility of his formula, so he would not have been eligible for a patent even if the Metabolite patent is approved. The first one to figure out that the formula could be used in a fission chain reaction to generate energy was Leo Szilard and he did patent it. If the patent system provided him with an incentive to figure out a new energy source, then why is that a bad thing?

    I am not saying that I agree with the Metabolite patent claim. I think that it ought to be rejected. But the Einstein analogy is a stupid legal argument.

     
    Banker conviction overturned
    Court news:
    A federal appeals court yesterday overturned the obstruction-of-justice conviction of Frank P. Quattrone, the investment banker who rose to prominence in the 1990's technology boom, and granted him a new trial.

    An appeals court ruled that a judge gave flawed instructions to the jury during the obstruction-of-justice trial of Frank P. Quattrone, pictured in 2004.

    A Case in Point: Andersen Ruling Could Aid Appeal of Former Banker (June 1, 2005) The ruling, a rare reversal of a jury verdict, is considered a big setback for the Justice Department, which had sought to portray Mr. Quattrone as a symbol of Wall Street excesses during the boom years. ...

    Like the case against Martha Stewart, who was convicted, the charges were not about questionable financial activities themselves, but about impeding an investigation into those activities.

    Gary Kennedy, a computer software CEO, just proved his innocense after a long battle with federal prosecutors.

    Quattrone seems to be another victim of the "coverup is worse than the crime" mentality. The feds couldn't find anything he did wrong, except that he once sent a short email suggesting that others follow standard document destruction policies. The documents hadn't been subpoenaed, but the feds said that he had reason to believe that the feds would want them preserved.

    The biggest problems for Quattrone in his first 2 trials were that he made a fortune during the dot-com boom, and when he testified in his own defense, he appeared to know less about criminal prosecutor prosecutors than the average juror who watches the TV show Law And Order.

    There are legitimate business reasons for deleting documents, and Quattrone may well have not known how criminal grand juries work. I am impressed by the determination of Kennedy and Quattrone to prove their innocense.


    Sunday, Mar 19, 2006
     
    Right to confront witnesses
    Tomorrow SCOTUS will hear argument in two separate cases in which a man was convicted of domestic violence on the basis of out-of-court statements of a woman who never appeared in court to be cross examined.

    Read about the cases at Umich.edu, Northwestern.edu, SCOTUS, SCOTUS, and law.com.

    Both men had public defenders in at trial and their convictions were upheld by the supreme courts of Washington and Indiana respectively. In both cases, amicus briefs supporting conviction were filed by the U.S. Solicitor General and several VAWA-funded domestic violence agencies. The SG requested and received permission to participate in oral argument. These cases will provide a good test of whether or not Roberts and Alito are justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas.

    I agree. These cases will be crucial tests of how faithful Roberts and Alito will be to the Constitution.

    The issue seems clear-cut to me. Suppose someone calls 911, accuses you of a crime, and fails to testify at trial. Should the state be able to convict you based on the 911 tape?

    This seems clearly contrary to your 6A right to confront witnesses against you. I don't even see any other argument.

     
    Bill Gates lobbies for cheap labor
    David Broder writes:
    [Msft CEO Bill Gates] decided to add his personal voice to his Washington office's lobbying effort to expand the number of foreign-born computer scientists allowed to work in this country under a special program known as H-1B visas.

    In an interview sandwiched between his meetings on Capitol Hill, Gates told me the "high-skills immigration issue is by far the number one thing" on the Washington agenda for Microsoft and for the electronics industry generally. "This is gigantic for us." ...

    So great is the demand for such skills in the burgeoning high-tech world that in August 2005 the last of the visas available for fiscal 2006 were issued. That means a 14-month shutdown of the program, until October of this year. "It's kind of ironic," Gates told me, "to have somebody graduate from Stanford Computer Science Department and there's not enough H-1B visas, so they have to go back to India. . . . And I have people who have been hired who are just sitting on the border waiting." ...

    Opposition to the H-1B program grew during the dot-com bust, when groups representing domestic electrical engineers and computer technicians argued that foreigners were taking away their jobs. ... Gates said, "If you're graduating from a reasonable university in this country, with a degree in computer science, you have many job offers."

    John writes:
    Congress should force Microsoft to publish a list of every H-1B visa they have ever used, with job description, salary history, where the employee came from and what happened when the visa expired.
    Gates's comments are revealing. The American construction, agriculture, and other industries also have Mexicans sitting on the border wanting jobs, but that does not justify unlimited immigration.

    Gates really wants to hire smart college graduates who have taken several courses in computer science. He is not looking for the sort of people who have special experience and skills that have always been used to justify the H-1B program.

    The supply of college graduates in a given field rises and falls corresponding to demand. There is never a shortage, as students are keenly aware of their job prospects. Msft prefers foreigners because they can be hired more cheaply, and because they are less likely to jump to another company if their visas requires Msft employment.


    Saturday, Mar 18, 2006
     
    FCC censorship
    Someone insisted that I watch the PBS News Hour to get the facts on FCC censorship. I did, but it didn't actually show the teenage orgy scene that drew the recent FCC fines. To get the real story, I had to watch Fox News.

    I get 150 satellite channels. 5 of them are subject to the FCC rules forbidding sex scenes and the 7 dirty words. The big majority of the other 145 channels won't say the 7 dirty words either, for other reasons. If you want to hear the 7 dirty words, buy some rap music. If you want to see sex scenes, porno videos are easily available. You can also get cable and satellite channel with pornography.

    I think that complaints about FCC censorship are pretty silly. The teenage orgy scene was clearly inappropriate and against the rules. No one has any trouble getting porn if he want it.

    The PBS show kept referring incorrectly to FCC regulation of over-the-air broadcasts of radio and TV programs. But the satellite radio and TV is broadcast over-the-air, and is not regulated for indecent content.


    Thursday, Mar 16, 2006
     
    Testing IQ in babies
    The Freakonomics economist looked at IQ testing data on babies less than one year old, and found no evidence of average racial differences. Other studies found differences in kids as young as three.

    I don't know how significant this is. It would be more interesting if someone actually found a way of reliably measuring intelligence in a baby. The above study would rate a baby as smart if it babbled a lot, but babbling may not be the best measure. A lot of smart kids were not babbling babies.


    Sunday, Mar 12, 2006
     
    Abolish the Lemon test
    A reader writes:
    Somewhere this week, I think in Michigan, I ran into a guy who worked at Discovery Institute. He knew absolutely everything about the Dover case. I said, WHY did you guys oppose what the board did, since the statement they ordered to be read to the students was completely innocuous.

    He said, "That's right; it was innocuous. We opposed it because, even before the board voted to adopt the statement, members were on record as stating their religious motive, and we knew it could not pass the Lemon test."

    The Lemon test ought to be abolished. Under current court precedents, religious folks holding public office have to conceal their beliefs or their actions become unconstitutional.
     
    More people believing in evolution
    Nicholas Wade writes:
    Some geneticists believe the variations they are seeing in the human genome are so recent that they may help explain historical processes. "Since it looks like there has been significant evolutionary change over historical time, we're going to have to rewrite every history book ever written," said Gregory Cochran, a population geneticist at the University of Utah. "The distribution of genes influencing relevant psychological traits must have been different in Rome than it is today," he added. "The past is not just another country but an entirely different kind of people."
    Perhaps evolutionists are coming around to admitting that humans are still evolving.
     
    Quantum critical phase transitions
    George Chapline theorizes that dark matter and dark energy might be explained by stars having shells undergoing a quantum critical phase transitions that make them look like black holes. I don't know whether his theory can explain dark buzz.

    Saturday, Mar 11, 2006
     
    When deleting a file is a federal crime
    Computer crime news:
    What: International Airport Centers sues former employee, claiming use of a secure file deletion utility violated federal hacking laws.

    When: Decided March 8 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

    Outcome: Federal hacking law applies, the court said in a 3-0 opinion written by Judge Richard Posner.

    What happened, according to the court: Jacob Citrin was once employed by International Airport Centers and given a laptop to use in his company's real estate related business. The work consisted of identifying "potential acquisition targets."

    At some point, Citrin quit IAC and decided to continue in the same business for himself, a choice that IAC claims violated his employment contract.

    Normally that would have been a routine business dispute. But the twist came when Citrin dutifully returned his work laptop--and IAC tried to undelete files on it to prove he did something wrong.

    IAC couldn't. It turned out that (again according to IAC) Citrin had used a "secure delete" program to make sure that the files were not just deleted, but overwritten and unrecoverable.

    Weird. Posner is supposed to be a smart judge, so he should understand that using a secure deletion program is a normal and preferred practice whenever returning a laptop computer. Posner just invented a new federal crime based solely on the notion that an employee ought to go out of his way to let his employer spy on him.

    Thursday, Mar 09, 2006
     
    Few believe scientific theory
    New poll:
    WASHINGTON: A Gallup Poll released Wednesday suggests about 53 percent of Americans reject the theory of evolution as the explanation for the origin of humans.

    Instead, they believe God created humans at one time "as is," the survey showed.

    About 31 percent of respondents said they believe humans evolved, but God guided the process. Only 1.2 percent said they believe the scientific theory of evolution and "God had no part."

    There's the problem with teaching evolution. The evolutionists want to teach something that only 1% of the public believes.

    Meanwhile, evolutionists have been puzzling over this for many years:

    Humans and chimpanzees have in common more than 98 percent of DNA and 99 percent of genes. Yet, in looks and behavior we are very different from them.
    These statistics are frequently used by evolutionists to argue that humans are just animals who are not much different from chimps. Now it turns out that some of those genes are expressed differently, and have different effects in humans. No word yet on whether God has a part in it.

    Wednesday, Mar 08, 2006
     
    Lawyers promote homosexual agenda
    Christopher Arriola writes, as the local Bar Assn president:
    The Santa Clara County Bar Association is dismayed at the Los Altos City Council's exclusionary actions against gay students at Los Altos High School. ...

    The city recently denied the Los Altos High School Gay/Straight Alliance's request for a declaration of a Gay Pride Day in the city. ...

    The Los Altos City Council is not only misguided but also may have violated federal law. In Romer vs. Evans, The U.S. Supreme Court held that a Colorado law that denied gay people any protections was an unconstitutional violation of their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection. ...

    Much like Colorado, the Los Altos City Council has no legitimate purpose to its actions, other than it does not want to hear the concerns of a certain group of people. In this case, it is all the more egregious because the wound was not simply in violation of their own stated mission or even directed at a "class of persons" but at their own children.

    No, the Los Altos mission is not to promote homosexuality. It is absurd for the Bar Assn to claim that the US Constitution requires "Gay Pride" days.
     
    Paris Hilton restrained
    Celebrity news:
    LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A court commissioner has signed off on an unusual restraining order against celebutante Paris Hilton, ordering her to stay at least 100 yards away from an event producer who claimed she threatened him -- unless they're at a party together.

    Brian Quintana was granted the three-year restraining order against Hilton last month after he testified that the celebutante harassed and threatened him after their friendship soured.

    Usually men are the targets of these silly orders. Judges hand these out without paying much attention to the rights of the parties.

    The girlrobot blog thinks that I am infatuated with Paris Hilton. No, that's backwards. I am just preparing to get a restraining order in case Paris insists on visiting me too often. <g>


    Tuesday, Mar 07, 2006
     
    California Supreme Court rules on oral sex
    California news:
    Sacramento (AP) - California's justices overturned state law requiring adults 21 years or older who are convicted of having oral sex with 16- and 17-year-olds to automatically register as a sex offender for life.

    The California Supreme Court, ruling 6-1, said the law, first adopted in 1947, was unconstitutional.

    The majority said that the law was too harsh or unfair because adults 21 or older who are convicted of having sex with minors ages 16 and 17 are not automatically required to register as sex offenders.

    The case is People v Hofsheier 3/6/06 SC, and was from Santa Cruz. The court was unable to see a rational basis for distinguishing between voluntary oral copulation with a minor and voluntary sexual intercourse with a minor.

    The case is strange. Of course there are rational distinctions. The California legislature deliberately made a distinction. The court should have followed the statute.

    George writes:

    Are you endorsing lifetime registration for such a petty offense? Maybe the judges were looking to avoid such a drastic penalty in this case.
    No. This particular defendant will probably still get lifetime registration, as the trial judge can still order it. He is a sexual predator of underage girls, so he may deserve it as much as others who have to register. My complaint is with the court overriding the legislature based on its own opinion about oral sex.
     
    Ashley Cole
    If you Google Ashley Cole, the British soccer player, you get a special section for links where he denies that he is gay.

    I don't know what Google is trying to do here, but it looks like it is just trying to promote false rumors.

    As usual, Google argues that the alternative search terms were generated automatically. Google is not being completely honest. It employs 100s of people who monitor user searches and manually enter data that guides searches like this one. Somebody decided that pages with gay rumors justify a separate section.

     
    More humans evolving
    NY Times reports:
    Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

    The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

    Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago. ...

    The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.

    "There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study.

    Politically correct evolutionists have been refusing to acknowledge that humans have been evolving, especially when people mention skin color and brain function.

    Meanwhile, London scientists have discovered an unevolved Turkish family called The Family That Walks On All Fours.


    Monday, Mar 06, 2006
     
    Parental notification laws
    This pro-abortion NY Times article says:
    For all the passions they generate, laws that require minors to notify their parents or get permission to have an abortion do not appear to have produced the sharp drop in teenage abortion rates that some advocates hoped for, an analysis by The New York Times shows.

    The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends. ...

    Since the United States Supreme Court recognized states' rights to restrict abortion in 1992, parental involvement legislation has been a cornerstone in the effort to reduce abortions. Such laws have been a focus of divisive election campaigns, long court battles and grass-roots activism, and are now in place in 34 states. Most Americans say they favor them.

    The Court did not recognize any states' rights to restrict abortion. It requires a constitutional right to abortion throughout the entire 9 months, just as it ruled in 1973.

    The purpose of those laws is not to reduce abortion, but to allow parents to exercise their traditional role in directing the upbringing of their children. The opposition has come from radical pro-abortionists who tell wacky stories of how these laws are going to have all sorts of dire consequences. The NYT analysis shows that there have been no such dire consequences.


    Sunday, Mar 05, 2006
     
    Evolving blonds
    Most evolutionists are in denial about whether humans are evolving. When they do comment on human evolution, they say wacky things. For example, The London Times reports:
    The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in Northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

    Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding, and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St. Andrews. ... However, the future of the blond is uncertain.

    A study by the World Health Organization found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the W.H.O. study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

    It seems to me that blonds are still popular for breeding.

    Update: Snopes says that I was fooled by an urban legend, and that WHO never predicted blond extinction.


    Monday, Feb 27, 2006
     
    The opinion speaks for itself
    Here is a Philadelphia interview of Judge Jones, the Dover PA evolutionist judge:
    Inquirer:Reading through the opinion, it was hard to evade the impression that you were surprised at the weakness of one side of the case. You used very strong language to characterize the case as a whole and the presentation.

    Jones: I'll answer that question indirectly... . The opinion speaks for itself. There was something I said in the opinion that was grossly misunderstood... . I said that on the issue of whether intelligent design was science, that there wasn't a judge in the United States in a better position to decide that than I was. [Commentator Phyllis] Schlafly interpreted that as my saying that I am so brilliant and erudite that I could decide that better than anyone else could. What I meant was that no one else had sat through an intensive six weeks of largely scientific testimony, and in addition to the task at hand, which was to decide the case, I wanted the opinion to stand as a primer for people across the country...

    To my mind... it would be a dreadful waste of judicial resources, legal resources, taxpayer money... to replicate this trial someplace else.

    Yes, the opinion speaks for itself. He thinks that because he listened to 6 weeks of idealogical blowhards philosophize on the differences between science and religion, he can decide the issues for everyone else.
     
    New Copernicus book
    Dava Sobel reviews Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by William T. Vollmann.

    It is funny how these Copernicus-lovers will lavish great praise on how his book revolutionized science, and roundly denounce anyone who did not accept it as a true description of the solar system. But when it comes down to discussing the actual model of the solar system that Copernicus published, they proudly admit that they do not understand any of it. Sobel says:

    Yet, as Vollmann makes clear, non-mathematicians have good reason to avoid reading the actual text of the great man's admirable legacy.
    Sobel is not a mathematician, and her latest book on The Planets borders on astrology.

    Another Vollman reviewer says:

    It's interesting that so many of the defining moments in history involved Uncentering something from something else. For instance, Thomas Willis realized that the seat of reason and intelligence was neither the heart nor the soul, but a lump of jelly in the skull. Darwin first figured out that the homo sapiens is just one twig in the tree of life. ... in 16th century Europe people with unpopular ideas were burned along with their books. ...

    In the end Copernicus was successful in uncentering the Earth. This was a real breakthrough, and not just because he was right about heliocentrism. The Uncentered viewpoint is just the idea that things in the universe can be studied objectively and empirically, without recourse to mysticism. Today we just call it science.

    This is absurd. Copernicus was no more scientific than Ptolemy or other astronomers. This is just evolutionist propaganda.

    Sunday, Feb 26, 2006
     
    Bogus patents
    The patent system is a mess. Blackberry lost a jury trial for patent infringement in 2002, but nobody knows whether the service will be shut down or not. This Rob Pegoraro (WashPost) columns says:
    Sound crazy? The RIM-NTP fiasco isn't nearly as loony as many other escapades in patent law. Other companies have asserted ownership of such things as the image format used in digital cameras, hyperlinks on the Web and different types of online auctions. ...

    There are too many bogus patents getting handed out.

    One solution would be to make more things unpatentable. Just as you can't -- or shouldn't -- be able to patent a mathematical equation, in this scenario you wouldn't be able to claim ownership of things like the general workings of software (any individual program is already protected by copyright) or business methods. The U.S. has been a pioneer in turning those things into new types of intellectual property; perhaps it's time to declare this experiment a failure.

    Another, somewhat overlapping solution would make it harder to get any patent. The patent office would apply a higher standard of "non-obviousness" -- the idea that a patent shouldn't reward "inventions" any competent individual could have thought up. And any outside party could submit evidence against a patent before it became final.

    The scope of patentable subject matter keeps expanding. The courts expanded it from software to business methods in State Street case a few years ago. Now Ex Parte Lundgren has the Patent Office dropping the "technological arts" requirement.

    Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v Metabolite Laboratories Inc says that a patent can cover the mental decision-making of a physician making a diagnosis.

    The US Supreme Court is hearing several patent cases.

    Here are some troublesome patents.


    Saturday, Feb 25, 2006
     
    Phyllis Schlafly's 50-year crusade
    Bill Berkowitz writes (on a left-wing site):
    She is not celebrated during women's history month and she's never been elected to public office, but for the past 50 years Phyllis Schlafly has been a major force within the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and she has left her mark on the political landscape.

    Friday, Feb 24, 2006
     
    Dover pays $2M
    A reader sent this agreement between the Dover PA school board and the ACLU:
    STIPULATION

    The parties, by their undersigned attorneys, stipulate and agree as follows:

    1. By virtue of the Court’s order entered December 20, 2005, plaintiffs are entitled to nominal damages and an award of attorneys’ fees and expenses pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1988.

    2. This stipulation satisfies the requirements of Fed. R.Civ.P. 54(b)(2)(B).

    3. The "fair estimate," see id., of plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees and expenses is $2,067,226.00.

    4. Defendants’ undersigned attorney has reviewed time and expense records upon which this "fair estimate" is based.

    5. Judgment shall be entered awarding each plaintiff One ($1.00) Dollar in nominal damages and awarding plaintiffs Two Million Sixty-Seven Thousand Two Hundred Twenty-Six ($2,067,226.00) Dollars for attorneys’ fees and expenses.

    6. In consideration of plaintiffs’ agreement respecting payment of this judgment, defendants will not appeal this judgment.

    So the Dover evolutionists agreed to pay the ACLU $2M and promised to leave intact a permanent injunction against the school ever criticizing evolution!

    $2M is a lot of money to this small school district. The evolutionists, ACLU, and judge have conspired to set an example so that no other American public school will dare criticize evolution.

    George writes:

    Why are you blaming this on the evolutionists? It was the Dover creationists who tried to sneak religion into the classroom.
    It was the prior Dover Board that taught that Darwin's theory is a theory and not a fact. But the Dover Board has since been taken over by evolutionists, and it is the evolutionists who are agreeing to pay $2M and not appeal the injunction.

    This is outrageous. Evolutionists should not be using tax money to pay the ACLU to silence criticism of evolutionism. Real scientists are not afraid of criticism. The Dover court opinion is one of the most narrow-minded and bigoted court opinions that I have ever seen, and it should be appealed.

    Andy agrees that there can be no justification for promising not to appeal, and writes:

    A taxpayer should intervene and force an appeal. I don't think Judge Jones' opinion would survive an appeal due to his media communications during the trial and his comments about religious views of defendants in the opinion.
    I think that there are better grounds for appeal. Judge Jones wrote:
    Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
    Judge Jones thought that he was resolving a grand conflict between science and religion, and deciding in favor of the scientific experts who say that the religious folks are mistaken about their own beliefs.

    Evolutionists teach that life is random and meaningless, and that people are just animals. Yes, this is a conflict for some religious folks.


    Saturday, Feb 18, 2006
     
    Google is a menace
    I am a big fan of Google, but it is doing serious damage to its "Don't be evil" motto. This week it is in the news for two things: Rolling over to outrageous Chinese govt demands that it block anti-communist sites from its search engine, and refusing to comply with a USA govt subpoena for some sample anonymous search results. The paper says:
    Google described the lengths it goes to to protect its search algorithms from competitors, including not disclosing the number of computers it uses to run the search engine, the number of queries processed in a day, the type of browsers those queries are entered on and the nature of the search strings people type in.

    ``The very fact that the Government is so uninformed about the value of search and URL information and so dismissive of Google's interest in protecting it speaks volumes about why the Court should protect Google from this compelled disclosure,'' the company wrote.

    Google's argument is idiotic. Its brief says:

    Google called the Bush administration's request for data on Web searches ``so uninformed as to be nonsensical'' in papers filed in San Jose federal court Friday, arguing that turning over the information would expose its trade secrets and violate the privacy of its users. ...

    In addition, the Government will not be able to ascertain the content of a Web page from its descriptive URL name. A Web site's name that suggests potential harmful material may be benign. Conversely, a URL that seems innocent may actually return pornographic material. ... Here, the adage "you can't judge a book by its cover" applies. ... Web page content also changes, or can be changed, every day or more frequently.

    Yes, the govt experts have to visit the web sites to see if they are pornographic. That is why it wants the URLs. Google is stubbornly refusing a very reasonable request that might help to measure the prevalence of porn on the web. What it is really doing is covering up its secret practices of spying on Americans and censoring pro-freedom web sites at the request of Red China.
     
    College propaganda
    The evolutionist Science magazine (subscription reqd) says:
    Professors at many U.S. universities say their students are learning about evolution without abandoning their belief in some form of creationism

    During a visit to Stanford University in 1994, Cornell University biologist Will Provine bet geneticist Marcus Feldman that there were "a bunch of creationists" among undergraduates at the prestigious California school. He says Feldman scoffed. But when Provine asked Feldman's biology students "how many of you believe humans came to be in the last 10,000 years?" a sizable number raised their hands. ...

    For decades, polls have indicated that close to half of the U.S. adult population is skeptical of the basic tenets of Darwinian evolution. Although more educated people are more likely to endorse evolution, a college degree is no guarantee that the graduate agrees with Darwin.

    It sounds like these evolutionist profs think that the purpose of college is to indoctrinate students to have leftist-atheist-evolutionist opinions. They should be judging their programs based on what the students learned and how well they reason, not whether they agree with Darwin.

    Evolutionists believe that apes evolved into humans about 200k years ago. Most of them also have a leftist-atheist-egalitarian ideology that requires them to believe that humans stopped evolving about 50k years ago. Students without such ideologies could well believe that people only became fully human since the dawn of civilization about 5k years ago.


    Friday, Feb 17, 2006
     
    Why math is not reported
    You rarely read about math research in the NY Times or any other popular periodical. A Math Society article says:
    Gina Kolata, a widely-read science writer for the New York Times, wrote me
    Newspapers are not there to educate or to teach people about the mathematics that underlies search engines unless there is something you can say about that mathematics that makes it new and compelling. The fact that the mathematics is there is not enough. With most things we use -- a car, an iPod, a DVD, most of us don’t really care how it works.
    ... Sara Robinson ... also reported a statement made by Rob Finer, a former editor of the New York Times, that
    Mathematics has no emotional impact. What physicists do challenges peoples’ notion of origins and creations. Mathematics doesn’t change any fundamental beliefs or what it means to be human.
    Sigh. This is evolutionist thinking at work. Evolutionists are often big fans of the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle that the essence of science is knocking Man off his pedestal. I knew that the news media don't like to report anything about mathematics, but I didn't realize that it is an evolutionist plot.

    George writes:

    This is a stretch. Mathematicians are not creationists. Most of them don't goto church. Why would evolutionists want to censor mathematics?
    Mathematicians seek absolute truth. That is very unsettling to evolutionists. They are ideologically opposed to the concept.

    Joe writes:

    You really lost me with this last post re math and evolution. I think Rob Finer is exactly right. Most people are just not interested in math breakthroughs, unless they involve something tangible like the four-color problem. I don't see what evolution has to do with this obvious lack of interest on the part of the public. Now, we could certainly use better math writing. But I don't see that dragging in Freud/Gould is explaining anything here. Are you seeing evolution everywhere? It's starting to sound like the new GUT.
    Yes, of course most people are not interested in math research. Looking at today's (Feb. 18) NY Times front page, the lead stories are on NATO in Sudan, jurisdiction of the FISA court, oil money in Chad, tribal strife in Iran, and gestational diabetes. Most people are not interested in any of that stuff.

    The NY Times strives to be the newspaper of record, publishing what is important. My complaint is that it is deciding what math and science to print based on Freudian-Gouldian criteria. Finer only wants to publish research that changes fundamental beliefs or what it means to be human. Is that really what you want? I want the truth, whether it knocks Man off the pedestal or not.

    Joe replies:

    Well, don't mathematicians seek a level of truth that most science can't quite reach (2+2 = 4, but scientific theories are more approximate than that).

    In fact, the topics you cite from the NYT (e.g. tribal strife in Iran, FISA court jurisdiction) are far more interesting to most people than the latest breakthrough in topology. Rush Limbaugh is talking about the FISA court issues to 12 million people every day.

    You are taking Finer too literally. He means that math is not going to get people's attention unless it affects their view of the world i.e. fundamental beliefs. And it seems to me that the sort of math breakthroughs that you get now, way out on the edge of what math is known, are just not applicable to the real world in a readily understandable way. For example, cutting edge math in the 1600's dealt with probability and gambling - that sort of thing could grab people's attention.

    Finer says that he is specifically looking for news that changes "what it means to be human". Looking at the current Science Times, Gina Kolata has a big article on some new research on how diet affects health. It is titled, Maybe You're Not What You Eat. Okay, I guess the NY Times is trying to spin this story as news that changes what it means to be human. Another article looks at evolutionist explanations for religious beliefs. But most of the articles have nothing to do with what it means to be human.

    Joe seems to be saying that math is not interesting because it is not applicable to daily life. That is a different argument. Apparently someone tried to get Kolata and Finer interested in doing a story on how math is applicable to daily life in search engines. Kolata and Finer said that they don't care whether the math is applicable or not; they reject it anyway.

    Joe replies:

    I'm just saying that Finer means that the math story has to have an angle that people can understand - something that will "change a fundamental belief." What recent math breakthrough has done that?, Wiles/Fermat was a human interest story, and a pretty understandable problem. Finer wants something like a game theory theorem that proves that it's better to approach the slowest - moving line in the grocery store - something counterintuitive and exciting - something that changes widely held "commonsense" views. I don't see that happening often in math. It happened with string theory a few years back - people at least got the idea that everything was strings, not atoms. Now maybe they have no idea what that really means, but in their minds, it was changing their picture of how the universe is put together, and that was interesting. And it didn't have anything to do with evolution.
    I think that you are just substituting your own opinion for Finer's. Finer says:
    Mathematics has no emotional impact. What physicists do challenges peoples’ notion of origins and creations. Mathematics doesn't change any fundamental beliefs or what it means to be human.
    Finer is not saying anything about whether a math news article can be understandable. He is expressing an ideological objection to a math news story.

    Furthermore, I claim that only an evolutionist was say the above quote. No physicist would say that physics is worthwhile or newsworthy because it "challenges peoples’ notion of origins and creations". Who judges the worthiness of science news by its emotional impact?

    Only evolutionists are so preoccupied with dehumanizing Man.

    Andy writes:

    I think Roger has really hit the nail on its head here. The sine qua non of the NY Times, and newspapers like it, is to dumb down our view of (human) life. Math doesn't do that, so we don't hear about its advances through those media.
    Charlie says David Lazarus of the Frisco paper is proud of public ignorance of how computers and other gadgets work.

    Thursday, Feb 16, 2006
     
    The quail coverup
    Those raised on Watergate have been brainwashed to say that the coverup is worse than the original crime. Even when there is no crime, they want to criminalize the coverup.

    This week, they are blaming VP Cheney for not publicizing his quail hunting accident more quickly. They have lost perspective. Cheney is probably guilty of breaking some hunting safety rules, but incident was private and notifying the local authorities was sufficient.


    Wednesday, Feb 15, 2006
     
    Ohio cannot criticize evolution
    Ohio news:
    COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 14 — The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan, ...

    "This lesson is bad news, the 'critically analyze' wording is bad news," Martha W. Wise, the board member who offered the emergency motion, told her colleagues during 90 minutes of contentious debate here Tuesday afternoon. "It is deeply unfair to the children of this state to mislead them about the nature of science."

    There are at least two groups in the news who cannot stand criticism: the evolutionists and the Mohammedans.

    For the latter, here is a complaint box.


    Monday, Feb 13, 2006
     
    Healthy diets
    Gina Kolata writes:
    "It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University. ...

    That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.

    It is almost impossible to reason with people about diet and nutrition. They cling to silly ideas in the face of contrary scientific evidence.

    The physicians are no help. They seem to know no more about diet and nutrition than anyone else, and yet they pretend to be authorities.


    Sunday, Feb 12, 2006
     
    Lincoln and Darwin
    The Si Valley paper editoralizes:
    Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born Feb. 12, 1809, 197 years ago today. ... Lincoln, of course, freed slaves. Darwin liberated science from the dogma of a 6,000-year-old universe created in six days. He provided the framework that let people see, through data and observation, the beauty and complexity of nature and the biological ties that bind all creatures. Advances in stem-cell research and DNA sequencing confirm that Darwin essentially got it right. ... Bigotry persists even though geneticists tell us that the differences that distinguish race and ethnicity -- gifts of evolution -- amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of a person's makeup.
    Science was discovering ways of measuring the age of the Earth that had nothing to do with Darwin. The paper seems to be using code words to say that Darwin liberated us from religion and racism. This editorial is ridiculous.
     
    Betty Friedan
    Mike sends this NY Times obituary of Betty Friedan (mirrored here), and justifies omitting her alleged commie affiliations.

    David Horowitz wrote in 1999:

    In a new book, "Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique", Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) establishes beyond doubt that the woman who has always presented herself as a typical suburban housewife until she began work on her groundbreaking book was in fact nothing of the kind. In fact, under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for a quarter of a century before the publication of "The Feminist Mystique" launched the modern women's movement.
    Disclosure: I went to grad school with Betty Friedan's son Dan. He was a good guy. My mom Phyllis had some sharp political disagreements with Betty Friedan. Other than that, I don't know anything about her past.

    Mike cites this article, saying Betty Friedan spent nine years writing propaganda articles for various commie fronts. The obituaries just say that she was a labor reporter.

    Mike argues that this is rather weak, and that mentioning it would be guilt by association in the same vein as this stuff linking the Bush family and Nazism.

    If Friedan was writing propaganda for the Communist Party, then it is not just "guilt by association". It means that she was a commie. When she famously wrote about her unfulfilled life, maybe it was because she was working for the wrong team.

    Besides, guilt by association is stock in trade for the NY Times. A week before, Judith Warner wrote this about my mom in the NY Times:

    [Critchlow] is particularly indulgent of Schlafly and her Christian conservative allies when they engage in quite un-Christian behavior. When, for example, Schlafly and other "moral conservatives" revolted at the 1960 Republican convention ... Critchlow points out that Schlafly "never identified Jews as part of any conspiracy," but then she didn't have to: phrases that invoke godless, countryless "well-financed" minorities are a well-recognized code among those who fear world domination by Wall Street and the Trilateral Commission.
    This is just baseless crap. The same Judith Warner just wrote this article praising Friedan, and she sure doesn't say anything about Friedan's associations or code words.

    Mike also sends this Chicago Tribune book review:

    Yet for Schlafly, as for her archrival, Betty Friedan, the personal was political. Indeed, as Critchlow suggests, Friedan and Schlafly have some surprising commonalities: Both were highly ambitious, educated women with extensive political experience who decided that the most congenial face for their respective movements was that of loyal housewife and mother.
    In Phyllis Schlafly's case, at least, the story is true, in spite of the NY Times innuendo.
     
    Phyllis Schlafly Was Right
    National Review says:
    Most of America's girls typically don't get to celebrate Phyllis Schlafly during "Women's History Month," but they should. Mrs. Schlafly not only had the right idea when she fought the Equal Rights Amendment during the 70s, but predictions she made back then are still accurate today.
    It is another review of Critchlow's book.

    Saturday, Feb 11, 2006
     
    Forced to testify
    Jonathan Burdick complains about me saying that good citizens should be willing to testify in court, and gives scenarios in which testimony might seem burdensome.

    His examples about a witness losing some intellectual property right by testifying seem rather farfetched to me. I have never heard of such a case. Inventions get disclosed eventually anyway, if they are patented.

    There are circumstances under which I'd commit civil disobedience, but that's another matter. Those who disobey the law can expect to pay some penalties.

    Reporters often complain about testifying, but I have never heard of an example of a reporter being unfairly asked to testify.

    There are some people who are burdened by testifying. For example, there are witnesses to serious gangster crimes. They risk being murdered. There are also people who get dragged into embarrassing roles in high-profile cases, such as Monica Lewinsky, Amber Frey, and Kato Kaelin. The complaints of witnesses like Judith Miller seem rather trivial in comparison.

    Jonathan writes:

    The Constitution says that artists and inventors must be protected. To add more facts to the hypothetical, the government (via truth serum) steals the invention without adequate compensation (as in Hebern's case), and, by practicing it, they avert a catastrophe. But five years later, a completely new menace approaches, and our brilliant inventor is now unfortunately unable to bring his brains to bear on the new problem. Instead, he's locked up in jail for contempt, and highly medicated, kind of like that dentist guy Tom Sell you've written about. And others who might be able to solve the new problem have inadequate incentive now, because they've all heard about our hypothetical inventor's case, and they don't want to engage in a lot of hard work just to end up in C Block. ...
    I think Jonathan is working on a movie script.

    Thursday, Feb 09, 2006
     
    Benefits of vaccination
    A reader writes:
    I am a parent who chose not to vaccinate our children. I agree that when there is a lack of solid evidence that it will not harm my child, the safer choice is to do nothing. When seeing a doctor recently, who knew I did not vaccinate, he made the statement: "The reason you can get away with this is because parents like us vaccinate our children - otherwise you wouldn't have this luxury of not vaccinating." Another doctor had simply stated that when they are presented with a parent like me who has chosen not to vaccinate that they are required to tell us their opinion, being that they believe we are "dead wrong!" We have run into this over the years and have stuck to our decision because they have made those statements with no solid reason to back it up. We do not give them the pleasure of an argument because we know they won't listen, however their attitude is hurtful and condesending. Do you have any advice on how to handle a doctor's comments?
    We have a lot of luxuries that are derived from the fine work of others. We are free because soldiers have fought and died for their country, we have safe streets because of cops and others, we medical care because of physicians and hospitals, we have good because of farmers, and we have high technology because of inventors and entrepreneurs. I do not enlist in the Iraq War just because I am a beneficiary of past wars.

    When my pediatrician recommended vaccines, he never mentioned that I was supposed to take his advice for the good of society.

    I suggest saying: "It was my misunderstanding. I thought that the vaccination was for the good of my child. If someone had only explained to me that I was supposed to sacrifice my child for the good of society, then I would have complied."

     
    Gonzales testifies
    John writes:
    Having trashed Al Gonzales and successfully blocked him as a potential candidate for the Supreme Court, it's only fair to acknowledge that he has done a superb job defending and arguing the case for Bush's surveillance of international phone calls to and from Al Qaeda.

    I was surprised that he ever agreed to go up alone and be grilled all day before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I was even more surprised that he was extremely well prepared, his opening statement was completely persuasive, and no Senator laid a glove on him as far as challenging the legality of the surveillance program.

    As during the Alito hearings, the sputtering Democrats looked and sounded ridiculous.

    I am wondering why the Democrats think that we have spy agencies, if they are not going to do any wartime spying.

    Howard Dean says, "All we ask is that we not turn into a country like Iran where the President can do anything he wants."


    Wednesday, Feb 08, 2006
     
    Justice Breyer
    Breyer defends himself:
    CHICAGO - Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer says he frequently makes decisions about a law's constitutionality by considering its purposes and consequences, which puts him at odds with fellow justices who try to adhere strictly to the language of the Constitution. ...

    He said, however, that he hadn't detected any split on the high court along Republican and Democratic ideological lines.

    "I haven't seen that kind of politics in the Supreme Court. Zero. It doesn't exist," he said. ...

    "I tend to emphasize purpose and consequences," said Breyer, who was nominated for the high court by President Clinton. "Others emphasize language, a more literal reading of the text, history and tradition — believing that those help you reach a more objective answer." ... He decided a display of the commandments in front of two Kentucky courthouses was unconstitutional because he concluded their display would cause religious conflict.

    Breyer is not smart enough to detect political differences, and yet he is so smart that he can predict what will cause religious conflict?!

    And if so, does that mean that he would have found the Danish cartoons unconstitional? Breyer is an embarrassment.

     
    More evolutionist definitions
    A reader sends Aug. 2005 article for its definition of evolution. It defines "theory", and then defines Neo-Darwinian theory as 3 propositions: 1. evolution. 2. speciation. 3. "most (though not all) of evolutionary change is probably driven by natural selection".

    Evolution is defined as meaning 2 below, with the addition that the change has been gradual:

    The first proposition is that populations of organisms have evolved. (Darwin, who used the word "evolved" only once in On the Origin of Species, called this principle "descent with modification.") That is, the species on earth today are the descendants of other species that lived earlier, and the change in these lineages has been gradual, taking thousands to millions of years. Humans, for example, evolved from distinctly different organisms that had smaller brains and probably lived in trees.
    Speciation is the idea that a species can split into multiple lineages. Proposition 3 also goes under the slogan "survival of the fittest", although some evolutionists admit that the slogan is fairly meaningless.

    Monday, Feb 06, 2006
     
    Mormons and evolution
    Others say that Mormonism, with its emphasis that all beings can progress toward higher planes of existence, before and after death, has an almost built-in receptivity toward evolutionary thought that other religions might lack.
    It is funny to hear nonbelievers try to figure out whether religious folks should believe in evolution.

    Saturday, Feb 04, 2006
     
    Google invades privacy
    Privacy expert Declan McCullagh reports:
    Google's recent legal spat with the U.S. Department of Justice highlights not only what information search engines record about us but also the shortcomings in a federal law that's supposed to protect online privacy.

    It's only a matter of time before other attorneys realize that a person's entire search history is available for the asking, and the subpoenas begin to fly. This could happen in civil lawsuits or criminal prosecutions. ...

    Q: Does Google collect and record people's search terms whether they're logged in or not? Yes. Google confirmed this week that it keeps and collates these results, which means the company can be forced to divulge them under court order. Whether Google does anything else with them is another issue.

    Given the Department of Justice's recent subpoena to Google, it's likely the police or even lawyers in civil cases--divorce attorneys, employers in severance disputes--eventually will demand that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and other search engines cough up users' search histories.

    As I noted below, Google has really opened a can of worms by drawing attention to its privacy-invading policies. Under American law, if a company keeps records on users, then those records can be subpoenaed for a court dispute. When Google decides to retain the privacy-invading records, it is also deciding to make them available to courts on request.

    The obvious solution is for Google to just destroy any user-identifiable search data after a month or so. Google has very little use for such data, and the risk to some users could be high. AOL already deletes such data after 30 days.

    Jonathan Burdick writes that conservatives should be defending Google's freedom and intellectual property, but I don't see that as an issue. Sure, Google can collect any data it wants. What it cannot do is to decide to use that data to sell ads but not allow the data to help resolve court disputes. Our courts depend on compelled testimony, and that's the way they have worked for 100s of years.

    It's like this: If you witness a car accident, and take a photograph of it, then you can be forced to testify in court and surrender the photograph. No forced you to see the accident or to take the picture, but once you have evidence, the court can demand it. It is that simple.

    Jonathan responds:

    I'm not so sure. I say the court can TRY to force you to testify. You are free to deposit the film in a Swiss vault, or maybe the Cayman Islands is more secure, and let the judge sentence you to six months for contempt. My understanding (haven't looked it up lately) is that you can then emerge from solitary, calmly dust off your jumpsuit, appear in court, laugh at the judge, and then do another six months for contempt, then another, and another, and so forth (if I recall, there's some sort of vague notion about there supposedly being a theoretical limit to this, i.e. at some point repeated contempt sanctions start to appear to be masquerading as a euphemism for cruel and unusual punishment.) How do you deal with the issue of a reporter refusing to divulge a source, and going to jail for contempt? If the reporter dies in jail, your argument is shown to be wrong. The court did not "force" the reporter to testify; rather, it tried to, but the reporter rejected the force. "I refuse to play with bullies." Maybe the judge ended up being roundly criticized for repeated contempt sanctions which were held in retrospect (by Volokh-echelon legal commentators, for example) to cost our society more (in terms of causing fear of judicial trampling on freedom of the press) than it would have gained us by virtue of having had the specific evidence at issue in a single case. I'm sure you'd agree that a free press is invaluable, as it's sometimes called "the fourth branch of government", can expose corruption, etc.

    I guess you can always claim that the court still "forced" the reporter (or photographer) to testify, but the result was simply that the application of force just plain failed. I may be quibbling about semantics, but "forced to testify" to me is generally a phrase used to imply that testimony actually occurred by reason of the force applied.

    I know there was a big case in 2000 or 2001 on the issue of reporters safeguarding their confidential sources. Can't recall the name offhand, I believe the name of one of the parties may have started with a "B" or an "S". This, : by a lawyer, writing in 2002, doesn't mention that case, it deals with another one (Branzburg), but at the end of the note it claims that there is not a clear national standard for the so-called "reporter's privilege." I'm going to dig around and find that case that came out in 2000 or thereabouts, maybe it backs your position, maybe not; maybe it was correctly decided, maybe not. But apart from the case, I'd like to know what your theoretical position is. I believe it's possible for a court to abuse its authority to [try to] compel testimony, and that some sort of suitably strong showing might need to be made by the prosecution (depending on the facts) beyond a bare assertion that such testimony is required. And even then, the reporter is free to go to jail for contempt. Maybe the case I'm thinking of stands for the proposition that in some cases, it is NOT appropriate for a court to order a photojournalist to divulge the photograph, or for a reporter to divulge the confidential source (unless, for example, it's a case involving national security).

    How's a photog supposed to make a living if his photo suddenly becomes a matter of public record, then it's all over the news, his work has suddenly been "newsified", he can't derive any profits from it, and, far from helping out his cause, what he took a photograph of was a racist beating and now he has to go into hiding like Salman Rushdie? Tell me that the authority of a court to compel someone to cough up intellectual property is not absolute and unfettered.

    Yes, a witness might be able to avoid his legal obligations to testify if he is willing to sit in jail on contempt charges instead. We don't torture witnesses, we just detain them. I don't believe that it is an abuse to force testimony. Part of being a good citizen is being willing to testify.

    As for photographers making a living, they are already the beneficiaries of some very favorable copyright laws. They can still be witnesses, and retain photograph copyrights for their lifetime plus another 70 years.


    Wednesday, Feb 01, 2006
     
    Romney and the supremacists
    John writes:
    Few politicians in history were served up such a test of leadership as Mitt Romney. If he had risen to that challenge, Romney would be a leading candidate for president, but his complete failure to deal it proves that he lacks the qualities that Americans expect in a president.

    I refer, of course, to the gay marriage ruling of the state supreme court. Romney's opportunity and challenge was to deal with that ruling the way his predecessor Calvin Coolidge dealt with the 1919 Boston police strike.

    Coolidge's no-nonsense, no-compromise response to that strike earned him the vice presidential nomination, from which he succeeded to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding. Coolidge's statement, ?There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time? echoed across the nation.

    Romney should have responded to the court ruling as if they were striking policemen -- judges who, though sworn to uphold the law, violated their oath to become a lawless mob. He should have used all the powers of his office to deny and defeat their pretended ruling, and remove them from office.

    Since Mitt Romney could not deal with a small crisis in his own small state, we can't trust him in the White House.

    Liza writes:
    I think Romney has done everything that could be reasonably expected of him with regard to gay marriage in Massachusetts. We can't have officials openly flouting constitutional decisions that don't suit them. If you were a marriage-license clerk in Massachusetts, would you obey or disobey a court order to issue licenses to gays? If you say disobey, the court could throw the clerk in jail for contempt, and the governor probably could not stop it.
    John writes:
    Would Liza have told Governor Calvin Coolidge, "We can't have officials openly flouting the armed police"? If not, why not?

    Liza seems to think that in any conflict between the judiciary and the other co-equal branches of government, the judiciary always wins. That's the heresy that The Supremacists was written to refute.

    The Massachusetts court decision was not 100% self-executing. There never was a "court order to issue licenses to gays." There never was a court order personally commanding any named person to do anything.

    During the 6 month period (Nov. 2003 - May 2004) before the court decision was to become effective, local clerks asked the state for assistance to prepare for gay marriages. Romney's state officials complied by redesigning the state mandated form, changing the words Husband and Wife to Party A and Party B.

    At a minimum, Romney could have refused to take any such actions to accommodate the court decision. If local clerks made their own forms and issued same sex licenses anyway, Romney could have refused to file them in the state office where, by law, all marriages must be filed - thus denying them official recognition as far as state government was concerned.

    That's the bare minimum Romney could have done. Instead, in the immortal words of Webb Hubbell's wiretapped prison phone call, he chose to "roll over one more time." Not a good thing for someone who aspires to succeed George W. Bush.

    Romney did write this WSJ op-ed, where he suggested standing up to the judicial supremacists.

    Liza writes:

    I think John is being naïve. The analogy to Calvin Coolidge limps. Coolidge clearly had the law on his side in an illegal strike by the police.

    Rest assured that the Massachusetts supreme court would have enforced its decision, using the contempt power if necessary. What county license clerk is going to go to jail for disobeying a court order?

    I never heard of central filing of marriage licenses with the state. I doubt that it is necessary for a valid marriage, which takes place at the county level every place I have ever heard of.

    If two branches of government strongly believe the courts are out of line, there is a better chance of resisting an outrageous decision. But Romney didn't have the legislature on his side. Likewise, when the Kansas supreme court demanded more school funding last year and threatened not to allow any public schools in the state to open in the fall, the legislature didn't have the governor on its side, and couldn't afford the political risk of a total school shutdown.


    Tuesday, Jan 31, 2006
     
    Ptolemaic theory is not wrong
    The famous astrophysicist Fred Hoyle wrote:
    The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view ... . Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is “right” and the Ptolemaic theory “wrong” in any meaningful physical sense.
    Hoyle is correct. In the 19th century, physicists were convinced by an argument involving Maxwell's equations that the universe had a preferred frame reference, and that the Ptolemaic theory was wrong. We now know that the 19th century argument was wrong.

    For some reason, evolutionists always point to the Ptolemaic theory as being wrong. They argue that evolution is correct in the same way that the Copernican theory is correct. They are stuck in 19th century science. Here is a typical example, on Doug Linder's website:

    3. To call evolution a "theory" says nothing about its ability to accurately explain facts observed in the world. The sun-centered solar system of Copernicus and Galileo is a theory. ...

    8. It took over 200 years, but eventually the Catholic Church accepted the scientific evidence that the earth revolved around the sun. Eventually, most Fundamentalists will come to accept the theory of evolution as well--whether in 20 years or in 200 is hard to say. But it will happen. Facts are stubborn things.

    His site is an excellent resource on famous trials, but he has some funny ideas about science. He could have just as well said that the Earth-centered theory of Ptolemy had an ability to accurately explain observed facts. The Catholic Church never rejected any scientific evidence.

    George writes:

    You are wrong. The Catholic Church did reject the heliocentric theory. It put Copernicus on the Index of Forbidden Books.
    Copernicus published his famous book in 1543, with the endorsement of the Catholic Church. The Church put it on the Index in 1616, and 4 years later it said that nine sentences needed minor correction. No evidence was ever rejected; only certain conclusions. At the time, the Copernican model was no more accurate than other models, and the Church reasonably decided that some of his conclusions were unjustified. Many editors of scientific journals today similarly require changes to manuscripts before they can be published.

    Monday, Jan 30, 2006
     
    The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds
    John sends this:
    The fabricated evidence on human stem cells published by Hwang Woo-suk and colleagues had a life shorter than two years as scientific fact. In contrast, the infamous hominid remains of Piltdown Man announced in 1912 stood as real for nearly 40 years. ...

    But clever forgery is partly why the Piltdown Man eluded detection for some 40 years, until technology and hypothesis-testing by scientists unequivocally disputed it.

    As I showed here, the fraud of Piltman Man was apparently known to British evolutionists long before it was publicly exposed.

    Sunday, Jan 29, 2006
     
    More on defining evolution
    A reader objects to my definitions of evolution below, saying that they don't adequately charactarize what most scientists mean by the term. They believe that evolution explains how one species can split into two, and that complex organisms did not spontaneously appear. Another possible meaning for the term might be somewhere in between meanings 2 and 3.

    If I were defining evolution, I might define it as a gradual process of species splitting, but I deliberately stuck to definitions that are in common use by leading evolutionists. When evolutionists say that evolution is true or that evolution must be taught in school or that evolution is well-substantiated, then we need to know exactly what they are talking about.

    I contend that evolutionary science has been co-opted by leftist-atheist-propagandists who trivialize evolution in order to promote their non-scientific agenda. They define evolution as just change, and then they claim it explains the diversity of life on Earth. They sound like proselytizers for the one true religion. I call it the evolutionist sleight-of-hand. They present some trivial principle that no one could deny, and then they claim that it explains everything. It even makes religion unnecessary, according to them.

    George writes:

    Your criticism of scientists is unfair. Biologists and other science advocates have had to dumb down the theory of evolution because of the attacks from the creationists. If we defined evolution as a potentially falsifiable theory, then creationists would say that it is only a theory, and propose testing the theory.

    The fact is that life is here on Earth. Life evolved. That is the only scientific way to look at life. If it turned out that it didn't happen by mutation or natural selection or other Darwinist mechanisms, we would still say that life evolved. Anything else would violate the scientific method.

    The fundamentalist creationist bigots are taking advantage of stupid people thinking that there are two sides to any controversy. They want evolutionists to make testable assertions, and then to debate the evidence. We can't fall for that trick because it undermines Science. Science brought us the Enlightment and freedom from superstitious religions. We can't go back to the days when people read the Bible in school. Scientists must hold firm on the idea that evolution is the only way to understand biology, even if it means giving silly definitions in textbooks.

    Sometimes I think that evolutionists are more interested in propaganda than science.

    Saturday, Jan 28, 2006
     
    Schlafly book reviewed
    NY Times Books reviewed Donald T. Critchlow's political biography of Phyllis Schlafly.
    When it was approved by the House and Senate and sent to the states for ratification in March 1972, its success seemed assured. Thirty state legislatures ratified the amendment within a year. Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter all lent their support. Yet in 1982 the E.R.A. died, just a few states short of ratification. By then, it had become linked in the public mind with military conscription for 18-year-old girls, coed bathrooms and homosexual rights. That public relations coup was largely the work of one clever, charming, ambitious, energetic and forever ladylike woman: Phyllis Schlafly.

    Schlafly has, for the better part of the past 50 years, been a one-woman right-wing communications empire.

    Judith Warner's review gets a little weird after that. She suggests that Phyllis was un-Christian for supporting Barry Goldwater, and that she used anti-Jewish code words like "godless". Phyllis might have mentioned the godless commies, but not the Jews, because Jews believe in God. If anything, Warner is using anti-Jewish code words. Saying that it was un-Christian to support Goldwater sounds like a reference to the fact that Goldwater's father was Jewish.

    Here is the Chicago Tribune review. It says:

    But he seems strangely uninterested in some of the more obvious questions of Schlafly's life: How was it that a woman of relentless ambition, a woman who dedicated enormous energy to politics and public life, could carve out her identity opposing women's equality and celebrating the traditional housewife? And who, precisely, took care of her six children and cleaned her house while she was off doing it?

    This last question, in particular, is not a voyeuristic aside but a matter of real political importance.

    The answer is simple. Those six kids were raised by their parents, and a maid cleaned the house. I fail to see the "real political importance".

    Meanwhile, the NY Times lists the top two bestselling "paperback nonfiction" books this week as NIGHT, by Elie Wiesel, and A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, by James Frey. These books should be more accurately described as (fictional) novels based partially on real-world experiences of the authors.


    Friday, Jan 27, 2006
     
    Evolutionists mad at NY Times
    Evolutionist bloggers at Sci. American and elsewhere are very upset at a recent NY Times book review. (I praised it below.) They are particularly upset that an evolutionist newspaper would print pro-evolution opinion that is critical of leading evolutionists.

    John Rennie says:

    Far more insightful, in her opinion, is The Evolution-Creation Struggle, in which Michael Ruse argues that scientists have repeatedly committed the sin of "evolutionism," which is a belief system equivalent to religion. ...

    Furthermore, it seems a bit disingenuous that in this review about the struggle between evolution and creationism and science's clumsy tromping on sincere religious sensibilities, there isn't a word about the actual motives of the creationists. We know, for example, from the Discovery Institute's "Wedge document" that at least some creationists use the pretext of fighting "evolutionism" as a way of covertly reinserting religion into public schools.

    Judith Shulevitz should be praised, not attacked, for refraining from trying to read the minds of the creationists. The Wedge document does not use the term "evolutionism", but it does favor research on alternatives because evolutionism has had destructive moral, cultural, and political consequences. It says nothing about covertly reinserting religion into public schools.

    Michael Ruse responds:

    I am a good friend of Ed Wilson, I have co-authored papers with him, but like it or not he is explicit that for him evolution is more than a theory - he says openly that it is a myth to replace traditional Christianity. In a way I kind of agree with him - I have no more ontological commitment than Richard Dawkins -- but I think it is silly and wrong to deny or ignore what he says.
    I don't think that it is necessary or useful to try to examine motives. The evolutionists are indeed promoting something that is more than a scientific theory, and others are justified in disagreeing.
     
    Spanking therapy
    Checking my server logs, I've discovered that I get a lot of readers looking for spanking therapy. There ought to be much better sources on this subject.

    I just mentioned some research by Sergei Speransky on "Pain affliction as a method of treatment for addictive behavior". MosNews says:

    The recommended treatment course is 30 sessions of 60 cane strokes, delivered on the buttocks by a person of average build. The method has been tested on volunteers and the results are said to be positive.

    The scientists claim the effect of the treatment is even greater if a patient is caned by a doctor of the opposite sex.

    The same guy wrote a book on experiments that tried to measure bonds between mice, and ended up measuring experiment bias in some subtle way. He claimed that the mice were sensitive to the experimenter’s subconscious expectation.

    If you just want to know about spanking kids, I suggest the Wikipedia spanking article. A lot of people are against it for ideological reasons, but others find it effective and beneficial.


    Thursday, Jan 26, 2006
     
    Britons unconvinced on evolution
    BBC reports:
    More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.

    Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons. ...

    "We are, however, fortunate compared to the US in that no major segment of UK religious or cultural life opposes the inclusion of evolution in the school science curriculum."

    Evolutionist propaganda cannot persuade everyone, I guess.

    Wednesday, Jan 25, 2006
     
    Chinese Columbus map is fake
    National Geographic says:
    A recently unveiled map purporting to show that a Chinese explorer discovered America in 1418 has been met with skepticism from cartographers and historians alike. The map depicts all of the continents, including Australia, North America, and Antarctica, in rough outline. ...

    But experts have dismissed the map as a fake. They say the map resembles a French 17th-century world map with its depiction of California as an island.

    Some people just don't want to accept the fact that Columbus discovered America.

    Tuesday, Jan 24, 2006
     
    Evolution defined
    What is meant by evolution? As I see it, there are four meanings in common use.

    1. Change in the history of the universe. This includes biological change, and non-biological change, such as galaxy formation. When evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", he meant that "Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe: the cosmic, biological, and human or cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous."

    2. Descent with modification. E.O. Wilson defines, "evolution is any change in gene frequency in a population." This is narrower than the first definition because it just includes biological change, and only those changes which are inherited.

    3. Universal common ancestor. This is the idea that there is some last universal common ancestor, from which all plants, animals, fungi, and other life on Earth are directly descended.

    4. A leftist-atheist philosophy. This says that man is no better than an animal; that Earth is insignificant; that progress does not exist; that the history of life is unguided, unplanned, and random; and that materialist explanations have replaced all spiritual ones. Various other ideas may also be included, depending on the evolutionist.

    Stephen C. Meyer and Michael Newton Keas have their own description of the meanings of evolution. The Nat. Acad. of Sciences published a book on Science and Creationism, gives meaning 1 on p.3, and then meaning 2 on p.9 for "biological evolution". They also published a book titled Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science, and it gives meaning 2 in the glossary on p.13. (Both of these books are free downloads.) PBS TV gives meaning 2, as does Wikipedia. UC Berkeley's Evolution 101 gives meaning 2 as the definition, and then meaning 3 as the explanation.

    Meanings 1 and 2 are just silly definition with no scientific content. It would be impossible to prove evolution wrong according to these definitions. (Perhaps meaning 2 could be disproved if someone showed that there was no such thing as inheritance.)

    Meaning 3 is a very useful hypothesis that could be true, but we may never know for sure. Some people argue that it has already been proved by the existence of common genes, but we don't know how hard it would have been for those genes to have independently evolved, and we don't know whether they could have propagated by horizontal gene transfer.

    Meaning 4 is a philosophy, and science cannot tell us whether it is true or false. Some people believe it like a religion. I don't. I don't agree with teaching this philosophy as if it is scientific truth, and I don't agree with their refusal to permit alternate points of view.

    I am not a creationist, and I have no religious beliefs that are offended by evolutionary science. I am offended at the way that so-called scientists try to force their bogus philosophy on us, and to claim that it is good science. That is why I criticize evolutionists on this blog.

    Judith Shulevitz cites this Michael Ruse argument:

    We must be careful about how we use the word "evolution," because it actually conveys two meanings, the science of evolution and something he calls "evolutionism." Evolutionism is the part of evolutionary thought that reaches beyond testable science. Evolutionism addresses questions of origins, the meaning of life, morality, the future and our role in it. In other words, it does all the work of a religion, but from a secular perspective. What gets billed as a war between hard science and mushy theology should rather be understood, says Ruse, as "a clash between two rival metaphysical world pictures."
    She concludes:
    I'd suggest something else: Teach evolution in biology class and evolutionism in religion class, along with creationism, deism and all the other cosmologies that float unexamined through our lives. Religion class is just the place for a fight about religion.
    I agree with this. I can understand why the evolutionists find the creationists annoying, but I find the evolutionists much more annoying because they are corrupting science much more than the creationists could hope to.

    Monday, Jan 23, 2006
     
    Howard Stern will be censored
    NewsMax reports:
    The morning drive-time radio host said he left terrestrial radio because he was fed up with censorship by individual stations and FCC fines for indecency. Now, in what must be a painful irony for Stern, Sirius executives are developing an internal document that will set boundaries for his show.

    Stern’s new show is also being broadcast with a time-delay that facilitates censoring, the New York Post reports.

    I think that it is great that Stern has moved to the satellite. Now he is more directly subject to market pressure on what is acceptable to broadcast.
     
    More Oregon misinformation
    A NY Times letter says:
    Some immoderate conservatives never tire of accusing liberals of seeking relief in the courts that they can't achieve democratically in the legislature. Isn't that what John Ashcroft tried to do with regard to state death with dignity laws?
    No, Ashcroft was the defendant, not the plaintiff. It was the pro-death liberals who sought court action.

    See also this cartoon, which gets the position of Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts exactly backwards.


    Sunday, Jan 22, 2006
     
    Why Lawyers Are Liars
    Michael Kinsley writes in the Wash Post, about the man who is now the Chief Justice:
    Roberts told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "the positions a lawyer presents on behalf of a client should not be ascribed to that lawyer." While true, this is a point that does not bear excessive emphasis. If the average potential juror knew that lawyers actually take pride in not believing what they say it could wreck the whole system.

    ... even Supreme Court justices are bound to some extent by the doctrine of stare decisis, which is the judicial equivalent of papal infallibility. Rulings lose the mystical authority they depend on when people start to get the idea they can be reversed at will.

    When lawyers argue in court, they are not sworn to tell the truth. That is because everyone understands that lawyers are expected to occasionally lie on their client's behalf.

    When judges are sworn in to the Supreme Court, they take an oath to the US Constitution. They do not take an oath to stare decisis, and they have no legal or ethical obligation to it.


    Friday, Jan 20, 2006
     
    Google subpoena
    The Si Valley paper is praising Google for fighting a govt subpoena. I think that the praise is misplaced. Google collects a lot of potentially privacy invading data. It uses very long term IDs and cookies, and supposedly it logs all queries. It does this in order to more effectively place ads and sell products. If it is okay to track user data just to sell ads, then it ought to be okay to use that data to help resolve a court dispute. Besides, the subpoena is just for search results, and not for any personally identifying data.

    Google stock dropped 8% on Friday. Perhaps investors are worried that Google's privacy-invading practices will be greater scrutinized. I suspect that Google refused this subpoena because they thought that it would be a political popular example of its "don't be evil" motto. But if it ends up publicizing the logs that Google keeps, it could be bad for Google. The issue could also expose how much Google is in the pornography business. Google doesn't sell porn directly, but it makes a lot of money selling ads targeted at people looking for porn.

    The paper also praises the harsh sentences to the Wendy's finger-in-the-chili scammers. Sure, they deserve some jail time, but I put most of the blame on the newspapers and TV stations that made such a big news story out of what they should have recognized as a bogus claim. Big food companies face scammers all the time, and the news media sure got suckered on this one. I think that they are praising the harsh sentence as a way of hiding their own fault.

    Update: Jonathan Burdick seems to think that I endorsed forcing Google to divulge private personal data. The subpoena is just for search terms and resultant URLs, and not for the privacy-invading data that Google maintains.


    Wednesday, Jan 18, 2006
     
    Progressivism's Alamo
    John Hinderaker writes in the Weekly Standard:
    Over the last 25 years, however, the ground has shifted. History stopped moving inexorably to the left and began to reverse course. The conservative movement achieved electoral success under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. It took a while longer for the conservative trend to reach the judiciary, but it's no coincidence that a number of conservative federal judges, including John Roberts and Sam Alito, got their start in Reagan's White House or Justice Department. Now, 20 later, they are eligible for elevation to the Supreme Court.

    So the left's natural preference for a "living Constitution" has turned into a two-edged sword. Liberals can no longer assume that constitutional change will move in only one direction. Hence their newfound reverence for precedent.

    He points to the contradictions in liberal senators expect both stasis and change. I do not think that the court has moved to the right at all, but perhaps it is possible if Bush gets a couple of more Supreme Court appointments.
     
    Science's Crusade Against Religion
    I just heard an interview of Pamela R. Winnick, who was plugging her new book, A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion.

    She points out that the leading leftist-atheist-evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, went on UK TV saying that religion is the root of all evil, and that teaching religion is child abuse. She also discusses stem-cell research and other topics. She is not religious herself, but she is offended by the ideology of the scientific establishment.


    Tuesday, Jan 17, 2006
     
    Belgium has school vouchers
    I just watched John Stossel's 20/20. I didn't know that Belgium has a school voucher system where public schools have to compete with private schools, and students can take their school money wherever they wish. School voucher advocates usually have to argue from theory, admitting that the system has never been tried. But according to John Stossel, it has been tried in Belgium, and students learn a lot more on less money.
     
    Humorless leftist puppet Ted Kennedy
    Sen. Ted Kennedy blamed judge Alito for once belonging to an organization that once published this article, but Kennedy didn't realize that the article was satire.

    I don't know why anyone would try to prove that Alito was a member of an organization that opposed coeducation at Princeton University. There is no doubt that Alito took the much more radical step of enrolling himself at Princeton at a time when it was all-male. (Of course Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and others have attended single-sex college. Kennedy attended Harvard before being expelled for cheating.)

     
    Oregon assisted suicide
    A majority of six on the US Supreme Court have declared that physicians killing patients is a legitimate medical purpose for using federally controlled drugs. The same court ruled against medical marijuana last year. See Gonzales v Oregon.

    The case was not about the legality of assisted suicide, but merely whether and how the feds can regulate the drugs. No one was challenging the legality of Oregon's physician assisted suicide law. The case being misreported in the press, such as in this AP story:

    The Supreme Court upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law Tuesday, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

    Justices, on a 6-3 vote, said that federal authority to regulate doctors does not override the 1997 Oregon law used to end the lives of more than 200 seriously ill people. New Chief Justice John Roberts backed the Bush administration, dissenting for the first time.

    The administration improperly tried to use a drug law to prosecute Oregon doctors who prescribe overdoses, the court majority said.

    This is incorrect. The validity of Oregon's law was not an issue in the case, and the administration did not try to prosecute any Oregon doctors.

    Nancy Pelosi said, "I don't see it as a defeat for the Bush administration, but I do see it as a victory for states rights and for a compassionate approach to the end of life."

    Update: A reader complains that it was widely reported that Ashcroft threatened to prosecute physicians. Yes, there were such reports, but I am not sure that they are correct. Ashcroft's Interpretive Rule said:

    assisting suicide is not a 'legitimate medical purpose' within the meaning of 21 CFR 1306.04 (2001), and that prescribing, dispensing, or administering federally controlled substances to assist suicide violates the Controlled Substances Act. Such conduct by a physician registered to dispense controlled substances may 'render his registration . . . inconsistent with the public interest' and therefore subject to possible suspension or revocation under 21 U. S. C. 824(a)(4).
    The Wash Post said (at the time in 2001), "The order does not call for criminal prosecution of doctors."

    So I infer that Ashcroft was just threatening to terminate the DEA license of a physician who uses federally controlled substances to assist suicide. He did not arrest, indict, or criminally prosecute any physicians. I suppose that a physician could be criminally prosecuted for violating the CSA under some circumstances, but I fail to see that any such circumstances were involved in this case.

    If the press had been honest, it would have reported the case like this: The Supreme Court ruled that the attorney general could not suspend the federal DEA license of Oregon physicians who prescribe overdoses of federally controlled narcotics in order to assist suicide. The attorney general had argued that DEA licenses were limited to obtaining narcotics for legitimate medical purposes, and that suicide assistance is not a legitimate medical purpose.


    Thursday, Jan 12, 2006
     
    Wikipedia flame wars
    Wikipedia has gotten to be a great resource, but it has its own biases and limitations.

    I tried editing the page on the Kansas evolution hearings. The article was surprisingly long, but it lacked a description of exactly what the Kansas Board did, and why. I tried inserting the info several times, but there were several evolutionists monitoring the page who immediately killed my changes. Even when I inserted quotes from the NY Times, they removed them without any explanation.

    Instead, the article is filled with conspiratorial charges about how the Kansas Board has been manipulated by religious conservatives following a creationist wedge strategy. That may be true, I guess, but it is hard to understand what the hearings were about unless you read what was proposed. I am sure that the Kansas Board believes that they are scientific justifications for what they did, and that view should be described.

    You can click on "discussion" at the top of the Wikipedia page to see my comments along with the others. I commented under my real name; the other didn't.

    On many Wikipedia subjects, these debates eventually simmer down until there is an article with multiple views represented. When that happens, the system works great.

    This story is another example of the narrow-minded thinking of the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who pretend to represent scientists. Real scientists are not afraid to let opposing views be described. They enjoy using empirical evidence to show just why some contrary view is wrong. But the evolutionists are afraid to even allow a quote from the head of the Kansas Board, or to describe exactly what changes Kansas made.


    Wednesday, Jan 11, 2006
     
    Alito will be confirmed
    The Democrat attacks on Alito look a little silly. Perhaps the biggest gripe against him is that he once joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP) to protest the university kicking ROTC off campus, and CAP once published an essay in an alumni magazine titled "In Defense of Elitism".

    Yes, Princeton is an elitist university. Most of our other Supreme Court justices have similarly attended elitist universities. These arguments are going nowhere. Alito will be confirmed, with about the same No votes that Roberts got.

    Here is Steve Dujack complaining that we won't be testifying about CAP.

     
    Gravity is only a theory
    A reader sends this Ellery Schempp article which says that gravity is only a theory, and suggests that text describe some of the limitations of the theory.

    The article is written in a silly way, but I agree with the concept, and the textbooks do indeed explain some of the limitations of the theory. For example:

  • Gravity is counteracted by a mysterious Dark Energy, and no one knows anything about that, except for its approximate strength at very large scales.
  • At extremely high energies, gravity is thought to become quantized and comparable to electromagnetic and other forces, but no one knows how to relate them.
  • Gravitational forces are thought to be transmitted by gravity waves and gravitinos, but no one has ever observed them.

    All the other theories have limitations as well. Evolution is the only scientific theory that is unconstitutional to disparage.

  •  
    Schlafly news
    John sends:
    Preemie goes to Harvard
    http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060108/NEWS01/601080342/1005
    
    Patenting a Prime: Indian engineers are fascinated by Roger's stunt
    http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=113886
    
    Bruce reprimands AAPS for publishing a poorly sourced article which
    "should not have been accepted for publication."
    http://www.jpands.org/vol10no4/correspondence.pdf
    
    Andy has 2 cert petitions awaiting action by the Supreme Court
    http://www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/05-638.htm
    http://www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/05-657.htm
    
    Tenuous links to Jack Abramoff
    http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayArticle.cfm?ID=11421
    
    Critchlow "approaches his subject with a healthy mix of sympathy and
    objectivity."
    http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/60009.htm
    
    "And the winner of the 2005 Award for Political Incorrectness is...(pan
    of vast audience with expectant expressions)..."
    http://careyroberts.redstate.com/story/2005/12/27/183159/68
    
    This guy must be from the unrelated Ohio Schlaflys, who also produced
    the professional baseball player
    http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/0/F6025B20F56380FB852570F100142929?opendocument
    

    Sunday, Jan 08, 2006
     
    Kansas science definition
    As discussed before, Kansas changed its definition of science:
    The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." [NY Times]
    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists complain that the new definition allows the supernatural to be considered science.

    The big problem with the old definition is that it defines science as a "human activity" instead of testable hypotheses and observable truths.

    This distinction parallels other debates about relativism:

    In philosophy of science, there is ongoing tension between the Kuhnians (science is about "paradigms," the fashions of the current discipline) and the realists (science is about finding the truth).
    The Kuhnian-evolutionist-relativists deny that science is about finding the truth, and argue that science is just another human activity.

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists insist on "seeking natural explanations", because they want to exclude any theological explanation as unscientific. But they are being overly restrictive. Scientists commonly use mathematical explanations involving abstractions not found in nature. An example is the PCT Theorem, which explains certain natural symmetries using some very sophisticated mathematics. Other examples range from ordinary quantum mechanics to string theory and multiple unverses.

    I think that the new Kansas definition is correct in that science is about explaining natural phenomena. Scientists don't really care what kind of explanation it is, as long as it is testable. Physicists even publish untestable explanations, such as string theory. I would not call string theory a natural explanation of anything. I would not call it supernatural either, so I think that it is incorrect that allowing supernatural explanations is the main difference between the new and old definitions of science.

    George writes:

    You are missing the point. The Kansas definition change was made by Christians. They are known to attend church on Sunday. They are not scientists or philosophers. They haven't done the philosophical heavy lifting. They probably corresponded with people at the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute wrote the Wedge Document. They want to allow for the possibility that God created the world. Scientists need to take a hard line on the creationists, or else Christianity might gain some credibility.
    I am not good at reading minds. Maybe the Kansas officials were tired of scientists putting down their beliefs, I don't know. I just look at the actual textual changes, and I think that the new definition is much more accurate, and much closer to what science ought to be.

    Saturday, Jan 07, 2006
     
    Attacks on Alito
    The witnesses against Judge Alito include Stephen R. Dujack, whom I previously mentioned on this blog. Drudge says:
    Senate Democrats intend to zero in on Alito’s alleged enthusiastic membership to an organization, they will charge, that was sexist and racist!

    Democrats hope to tie Alito to Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP).

    Alito will testify that he joined CAP as a protest over Princeton policy that would not allow the ROTC on campus.

    THE DRUDGE REPORT has obtained a Summer 1982 article from CAP’s PROSPECT magazine titled “Smearing The Class Of 1957” that key Senate Democrats believe could thwart his nomination!

    In the article written by then PROSPECT editor Frederick Foote, Foote writes: “The facts show that, for whatever reasons, whites today are more intelligent than blacks.”

    Senate Democrats expect excerpts like this written by other Princeton graduates will be enough to torpedo the Alito nomination.

    One Democrat Hill staffer involved in their strategy declared, “Put a fork in Scalito. It doesn’t matter that Alito didn’t write it, it doesn’t matter that Alito wasn’t that active in the group, Foote wrote it in CAP’s magazine and we are going to make Alito own it.” ...

    In the April 21, 2003 LOS ANGELES TIMES, Dujack wrote: “Like the victims of the Holocaust, animals are rounded up, trucked hundreds of miles to the kill floor and slaughtered.” Dujack went on, “To those who defend the modern-day Holocaust on animals by saying that animals are slaughtered for food and give us sustenance, I ask: if the victims of the Holocaust had been eaten, would that have justified the abuse and murder?”

    This may get ugly.

    Update: Dujack has been dropped already.

     
    Philosopher attacks ID
    A philosopby prof defends the Dover PA decision:
    Even if you favor some form of ID, as I do, you should recognize that the ID proponents vastly overplayed their weak hand in this Dover case and deserved to lose. Nowhere did or do ID proponents perform any of the philosophical heavy lifting needed to show where and how the demarcation should be made between science and non-science, nor did or do they produce any credible attempt - credible to the larger non-ID scientific community - to show how ID could be incorporated into the corpus of received scientific methodology.
    Who expects a school board to do "philosophical heavy lifting" to justify everything they do? It only claimed that ID was an explanation, not that it was mainstream scientific theory.

    Lloyd Eby goes on with some silly comparisons to Galileo.

     
    Supremacist judges rule against vouchers
    Florida courts outlawed school vouchers:
    In its ruling, the Florida Supreme Court cited an article in the state's constitution that says, "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools."

    The Opportunity Scholarships Program "violates this language," the Florida court said.

    Simple economics theory implies that vouchers would improve the schools in all those ways. See Milton Friedman here or here.

    Friday, Jan 06, 2006
     
    Happy to have evolved
    Evolutionist Olivia Judson is happy she evolved, and inspired this NY Times letter:
    To the Editor:

    Olivia Judson's observations lose some of their luster when compared with the evidence that living organisms regularly survive by consuming one another; or that scientific pursuits have provided the potential to destroy the species that so widely regards itself as ultimately superior; or most notably, that a deity might exist whose benevolent purposes are not fully comprehensible.

    David E. Kucharsky
    White Plains, Jan. 2, 2006

    Yes, animals eat food to survive. The subject of evolution drives folks to say silly things.

    Thursday, Jan 05, 2006
     
    The Landscape
    Distinguished Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind says:
    I have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous idea.

    According to some people, the "Landscape" idea will eventually ensure that the forces of intelligent design (and other unscientific religious ideas) will triumph over true science. From one of my most distinguished colleagues:

    From a political, cultural point of view, it's not that these arguments are religious but that they denude us from our historical strength in opposing religion.
    ... the idea in question is the Anthropic Principle: a principle that seeks to explain the laws of physics, and the constants of nature, by saying, "If they (the laws of physics) were different, intelligent life would not exist to ask why laws of nature are what they are."
    He is an evolutionist, and he did some very good pioneering work in string theory, but a federal judge would say that his idea is unconstitional in Dover PA.

    I take the side of science here, as always. Scientists should not be censoring perfectly good ideas just because they might weaken an anti-religious campaign that is being waged by the leftist-atheist-evolutionists.


    Wednesday, Jan 04, 2006
     
    Philosopher attacks ID
    A philosopby prof defends the Dover PA decision:
    Even if you favor some form of ID, as I do, you should recognize that the ID proponents vastly overplayed their weak hand in this Dover case and deserved to lose. Nowhere did or do ID proponents perform any of the philosophical heavy lifting needed to show where and how the demarcation should be made between science and non-science, nor did or do they produce any credible attempt - credible to the larger non-ID scientific community - to show how ID could be incorporated into the corpus of received scientific methodology.
    Who expects a school board to do "philosophical heavy lifting" to justify everything they do? It only claimed that ID was an explanation, not that it was mainstream scientific theory.

    Lloyd Eby goes on with some silly comparisons to Galileo. He predicts that ID will win in the long run.

     
    Cuteness explained
    This NT Times article tries to explain why cuteness evolved.
    As with the penguin's tuxedo, the panda's two-toned coat very likely serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it helps a feeding bear blend peacefully into the dappled backdrop of bamboo. On the other, the sharp contrast between light and dark may serve as a social signal, helping the solitary bears locate each other when the time has come to find the perfect, too-cute mate.
    If this were really scientific, then there would be some way to tell whether this panda explanation were right or wrong.

    Tuesday, Jan 03, 2006
     
    Evolutionist denies natural selection
    The NY (Science) Times reports:
    Why, Michael Lynch wants to know, don't we look like bacteria? ...

    Dr. Lynch argues that natural selection had little to do with the origin of the eukaryote genome.

    "Everybody thinks evolution is natural selection, and that's it," Dr. Lynch said. "But it's just one of several fundamental forces."

    In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, Dr. Lynch argues that eukaryotes' complexity may have gotten started by chance.

    Everybody thinks that because Darwin thought so, and and because it is politically incorrect to suggest anything else. It is even considered unconstitutional for schools in Dover PA to mention Lynch's ideas. Evolutionists like Richard Dawkins downplay the role of chance in evolution.
    Prokaryotes never got the chance to evolve this complexity because their populations were so large that natural selection blocked the early stages of its evolution. "There was one lucky lineage that became us eukaryotes," Dr. Lynch said.

    Dr. Lynch dismisses claims by creationists that complexity in nature could not be produced by evolution, only by a designer.

    "In fact, a good chunk of what evolutionary biologists study is why things are so poorly designed," he said. "If we needed a bigger genome, there would be a brighter way to build it."

    Note the obligatory put-down of creationists. What Lynch is saying is that Darwinism cannot explain the early the early development of multi-celled life.

    If he is correct that biologists study poorly designed life, then I guess that the design hypothesis is lot more scientific than other evolutionists are willing to admit.

     
    Federal courts interfering with schools
    I am still trying to figure out how people can support the Reinhardt Palmdale decision:
    It cannot now be doubted that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment pro- tects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions con- cerning the care, custody, and control of their children. This right is commonly referred to as the Meyer-Pierce right ... we affirm that the Meyer-Pierce right does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door.
    and the Judge Jones Dover PA decision:
    To preserve the separation of church and state ... we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants ... from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution ...
    I could understand someone thinking that the federal courts should never interfere with the schools.

    Here are 13 things that do not make sense, from New Scientist magazine.


    Monday, Jan 02, 2006
     
    All scientific theories have gaps
    A reader asks why the theory of evolution should be denigrated, when no other scientific theory gets denigrated.

    All the Dover PA board said to denigrate evolution was that evolution theory had gaps. Other theories do also. For example, the theory of gravity has two huge gaps. There is the quantum gap and the dark energy gap.

    Physicists are convinced that on a small scale, gravity is quantized into spin-2 massless particles called gravitinos. But no one has any clue as to how these particles might interact with other particles at high energies.

    We also have astronomical evidence that gravity is coupled to some sort of dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. No one has any clue as to what that is all about.

    It is still legal to discuss these gaps in the theory of gravity. But Dover PA federal judge Jones has issued a permanent ban on letting students learn that the theory of evolution has gaps.


    Sunday, Jan 01, 2006
     
    Evolutionists deny free choice
    I read some more of the evolutionist-supremacist Judge Jones anti-science opinion in Dover PA. On p.47, He blames the school for letting students (and parents) opt out of the statement if they wanted to. He claims that the "opt out" feature is just more evidence that the statement was endorsing a religion. After all, if the statement were promoting a secular humanist objective, why would the school let anyone opt out!

    Later, he argues:

    Finally and notably, the newsletter all but admits that ID is religious by quoting Anthony Flew, described as a "world famous atheist who now believes in intelligent design," as follows: "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence where it leads."
    This is crazy. Following evidence is not endorsing a religion. Schools should be letting students opt out of controversial programs. Giving students free choice is the opposite of establishing a religion.

    It is not enough for the leftist-atheist-evolutionists to get their ideology taught in school. They want it to be mandatory, with alternate views not allowed. They resent the whole idea of students opting out of anything.


    Friday, Dec 30, 2005
     
    Wartime spying
    People argue that US govt spying is limited by wiretap laws, even in time of war, because the wiretap statutes already have provisions for what to do in wartime.

    50 USC 1811

    § 1811. Authorization during time of war

    Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed fifteen calendar days following a declaration of war by the Congress.

    I don't know how Congress passed such a silly law. The USA formally declares war, and that only justifies a measly 15 days of spying?! Did they realize that a war might last more than 15 days, or that there might be some larger issues at stake than the privacy of some terrorists?

    Thursday, Dec 29, 2005
     
    ID debunker
    Florida news:
    HAMMOND -- When a federal judge in Pennsylvania banned public schoolteachers from offering intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution last week, he relied heavily on the work of a Southeastern Louisiana University professor and Hammond native.

    A proponent and product of Hammond public schools, philosophy Professor Barbara Forrest says her work to debunk intelligent design stems from her desire to protect the integrity of public education.

    "It's because of the good education I got in the public schools here that I am able to do what I do," she said. ...

    Forrest co-wrote "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" with biologist Paul R. Gross.

    She argues intelligent design is repackaged creationism, the belief that the Earth was created as detailed in the Book of Genesis.

    No one offered intelligent design (ID) as an alternative theory to evolution. None of the ID folks subscribe to the Genesis account, as far as I know.
     
    Moment of silence
    I have a new idea. Now that the courts have ruled that it is unconstitutional to disparage evolution or to mention ID, we should start a movement to declare a moment of silence in biology class. During that minute, students would be free to think thoughts that might be unconstitutional to express aloud.

    Monday, Dec 26, 2005
     
    Evolutionist J.Q. Wilson
    James Q. Wilson writes in the WSJ:
    When a federal judge in Pennsylvania struck down the efforts of a local school board to teach "intelligent design," he rightly criticized the wholly unscientific nature of that enterprise. Some people will disagree with his view, arguing that evolution is a "theory" and intelligent design is a "theory," so students should look at both theories.

    But this view confuses the meaning of the word "theory."

    Wilson is the one who is confused. The Dover PA school board pointedly avoided saying that intelligent design (ID) is a theory. It said that Darwin's theory of evolution is a well-tested theory, but it only called ID "an explanation of the origin of life".

    I don't know why it even matters whether ID is scientific or not. The Dover PA statement had 2 sentences on ID that were read by administrators to students, and ID was not taught by science teachers in science class. No students had any ID assignments or exams.

    What schools should do is teach evolution emphasizing both its successes and its still unexplained limitations. Evolution, like almost every scientific theory, has some problems. But they are not the kinds of problems that can be solved by assuming that an intelligent designer (whom ID advocates will tell you privately is God) created life. There is not a shred of evidence to support this theory, one that has been around since the critics of Darwin began writing in the 19th century.
    The idea that God created life has been around for a lot longer than that. And evolution doesn't really teach anything about the origin of life. ID may lack evidence, but it does try to explain something (the origin of life) that evolution does not explain.

    By referring to evolution's "still unexplained limitations", Wilson had made himself constitutionally unfit to teach in the Dover PA schools. Judge Judge has issued an injunction against "requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution". Wilson's statement is quite similar to the Board's unconstitutional statement that evolution has gaps.

    Some people worry that if evolution is a useful (and, so far, correct) theory, we should still see it at work all around us. We don't. ... Besides, the modern world has created an environment by means of public health measures, the reduction in crime rates, and improved levels of diet that have sharply reduced the environmental variation that is necessary to reward some genetic mutations and penalize others.
    Here Wilson sounds like one of those evolutionists who doesn't really believe in evolution. They say that all animals evolve, and that man is an animal, but man does not evolve. It makes no sense to me, unless you assume that Wilson has some ideological purpose for saying this nonsense.

    Andy writes:

    Mr. Wilson implicitly denies parents their right to ensure that their children hear, in the public schools they pay for, a brief reference to intelligent design. Mr. Wilson's position is an astounding act of censorship. Shouldn't the persons paying the bills (the parents) and raising the children (the parents) have the power over this issue, rather than an unelected federal judge?

    Sunday, Dec 25, 2005
     
    Merry Christmas

    Saturday, Dec 24, 2005
     
    ID in science class or not
    A lot of evolutionists are making a big deal about of intelligent design (ID) being mentioned in a Dover PA science class. The trouble is that I am not sure that it was ever intended to be in a science class.

    The court opinion said, "teachers would be required to read the following statement to students in the ninth grade biology class". It can be parsed in either of these 2 ways:

    A. teachers would be required to (read the following statement) to (students in the ninth grade biology class)

    B. teachers would be required to (read the following statement to students) in (the ninth grade biology class)

    Under A, the statement could be read to the students outside class.

    The significance is that even the Bible can be taught in a comparative religion class, so I don't know why ID could not be taught outside science class.

    This may be a debatable point. It was not read by teachers as if it were part of the biology curriculum. Judge Jones said:

    Administrators were thus compelled to read the statement to ninth graders at Dover High School in January 2005 because of the refusal by the teachers to do so. (25:56-57 (Nilsen); 35:38 (Baksa)). The administrators read the statement again in June 2005.
    So it was something that took place outside normal biology instruction.

    Friday, Dec 23, 2005
     
    Is physics a science?
    Evolutionists like to spend a lot of time on the definition of science, as a way to dismiss their critics. Evolution itself is not very scientific, so they look to physics as the most scientific of the sciences.

    But physics doesn't necessarily meet their definitions either. Currently, there are some top theoretical physicists who are mired in a debate over String Theory Versus Intelligent Design. See this Leonard Susskind interview in New Scientist and in Edge, also the Not Even Wrong blog.

    The evolutionists say that a theory must be well-tested, but the string theorists have no way to test their theory. The Anthropic Principle is even more removed from scientific reality.


    Thursday, Dec 22, 2005
     
    What was really decided in Dover PA
    The Dover PA case was not about whether the theory of evolution or ID is correct, or whether ID should be taught, or whether ID is science.

    The Dover school board had not proposed to teach ID, to say ID was scientific or valid, or even to mention ID in the midst of any science classes.

    This case was about 2 things. Whether the US Constitution allows students to be told that evolution is a well-tested theory that has some gaps, and that "Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

    Judge Jones ruled that both teachings were possibly true, but unconstitutional anyway. He permanently enjoined the school board "from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution". They cannot say that the theory has gaps. They also cannot refer to an "alternative theory known as ID" in science class or any other class.

    If a Dover PA student asks about the origin of life on Earth, then I don't know what the teacher can say under these rules. The theory of evolution has very little to say about the origin of life, but he can't say that there are any gaps and he cannot acknowledge other beliefs.

    Perhaps the teacher can say, "I work for the school board, and it has been enjoined from telling me how I can answer that question."

    I think that this decision will ultimately hurt the evolutionist cause. It shows the leftist-atheist-evolutionists as people who cannot defend their beliefs on the merits. They can only survive by censoring alternate views.

     
    Tax deduction for scientologists only
    NY Sun news:
    A federal tax court yesterday refused an Orthodox Jewish couple's request to deduct religious education fees for their children on the grounds that the Internal Revenue Service allows a similar deduction for members of the Church of Scientology.

    Judge John Colvin said the couple, Michael and Marla Sklar of Los Angeles, would only have been entitled to a deduction if they intended their tuition payments as gifts and didn't expect to get a substantial benefit in return. He said the Internal Revenue Service's 1993 agreement to allow deductions for "auditing and training" by Scientologists was irrelevant to the Sklars' case.

    An attorney for the taxpayers, Jeffrey Zuckerman, said an appeal is planned. He faulted the judge for blocking the couple's efforts to inquire about the Scientology arrangement, which remains secret, and for disallowing a deduction for Mishna classes, which are entirely religious.

    I didn't know that scientologists get tax deductions for using lie detectors to find the ghosts of 75-million-year-old space aliens.

    Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005
     
    Lying in Dover Pa.
    Evolutionists are gloating about their win in the Dover Pa. trial, and they are especially happy that the judge accused the ID proponents of lying to cover up their religious motives. The judge also says this:
    Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
    These evolutionists were lying. The leading evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, once said, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." America's most famous scientist and evolutionist (until he died a couple of years ago), Stephen Jay Gould, wrote a whole book saying similar things. Similar ideas are also expressed in a brand new book by the eminent physicist and string theorist Leonard Susskind, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the illusion of intelligent design.

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists would not have made such a big case out of 4 innocuous paragraphs unless they had an ideological cause. Their cause is atheism and attacking religion. They spent most of the trial attacking religion, not discussing science. Evolution is their tool for denying the existence of God. Here is a National Review article on evolutionist hostility to religion.


    Tuesday, Dec 20, 2005
     
    Intelligent Design is unconstitutional
    Dover PA censors intelligence:
    HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) -- "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial. ...

    But, [Judge Jones] wrote, "our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom." ...

    Said the judge: "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

    No, it is not ironic. They are being persecuted for their religious beliefs, and truth is not a defense.

    Andy writes:

    The longtime head of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, now Judge Judge John E. Jones III, held today that "teaching about supposed gaps and problems in evolutionary theory are creationist religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism."

    He then went further. He permanently enjoined defendants "from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution." He also smeared defendants by saying they lied about their motives, as though motive should even be relevant.

    Another Bush/Santorum pick has delivered big time for the liberals. Perhaps a 2-inch headline on the front page of the NYT will greet us tomorrow? What a scientific and educational genius this former liquor chief is!

     
    John Dean on libel
    John W. Dean, the famous Watergate felon, writes:
    Defamation Law Is In Need of a Major Revision, as Justice Scalia Suggested

    The constitutional law of defamation is a disaster. It is nearly incomprehensible. It is unfair. It is unjust. And it is long overdue for a correction. Sadly, I could randomly select dozens upon dozens of cases to make the same point the Lohrenz case makes.

    Scalia is correct: Everybody should be able to protect their reputations. But not until New York Times v. Sullivan -- which literally changed the law of the land overnight -- is reversed, will that ideal be a reality.

    So why does he care? Dean doesn't explain it in his article, but he filed and lost some libel lawsuits himself. He was one of the chief villains of the Watergate scandal, and he just hates it when people describe what he did. He deserved a long prison sentence more than any of the others.

    So instead of describing his own problems, he picks on Elaine Donnelly instead. Donnelly exposed some bad affirmative action policies in the Navy, and was subjected to a SLAPP lawsuit. She was vindicated in the U.S. DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Navy reassigned the female pilot who got the dubious promotion.

    Dean says:

    To read Donnelly's website, however, it is difficult to envision any woman who, in Donnelly's view, could be a competent combat pilot. In a press release, Donnelly charged the Navy with recklessly racing the Air Force to hire women pilots, in a contest "instigated by aggressive female officers, feminist advocates, and Navy public affairs officers."
    Donnelly doesn't say that, but so what if she did? If she doesn't think that women make good combat pilots, then she is entitled to her opinions. The First Amendment guarantees her the right to criticize US Govt policy.

    After Dean's Watergate crimes and subsequent selfish backstabbing, it is difficult to envision anyone listening to his legal opinions. He has already been disbarred once.


    Monday, Dec 19, 2005
     
    Legality of the Bush wiretaps
    Some Democrats and lawyers are arguing that the recently-revealed Bush wiretaps are illegal. This one argues:
    Who says Bush's end run around surveillance laws are illegal?

    The Supreme Court.

    Back in 1972, the Supreme Court took on a case (where President Nixon ordered wiretaps on individuals suspected of plotting to bomb a CIA building) and ruled ...

    Supreme Court decisions remain the highest law in this country.

    Despite whatever advice President Bush received from his lawyers, it is clear that the NSA wiretaps he ordered were illegal and set a dangerous precedent.

    I don't know if the wiretaps are legal or not, but I do know that Supreme Court decisions are not the highest law in this country, and they never have been. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and the three branches of the federal govt are independently obligated to follow it. One 1972 court opinion on domestic security practices does not determine whether the President can expand Echelon to use new technology to catch Al Qaeda terrorists.
     
    Catholic Church supported medieval progress
    David Brooks writes:
    Now another academic heavyweight has entered the arena. In his new book, ''The Victory of Reason,'' the Baylor sociologist Rodney Stark argues that the West grew rich because it invented capitalism. That's not new. What's unusual is his description of how capitalism developed.

    The conventional view, embraced by most of his fellow cultural determinists, is that during the Renaissance and Reformation, Europeans shook off the authority of the Catholic Church. When a secular world was created alongside the sacred one, when intellectual freedom replaced obedience to authority, capitalism and scientific advances were the result.

    That theory, Stark says, doesn't fit the facts. In reality, capitalism developed in the Middle Ages, and the important innovations were made by people in the belly of the faith. Religion didn't stifle economic and scientific ideas -- it nurtured them. ...

    But the more we learn, the more we realize that most of the progress we link to the Renaissance or later years actually happened during the Middle Ages. Roughly a hundred years before Copernicus, Jean Buridan (circa 1300-1358) wrote that the Earth is an orb rotating on an axis. Buridan, a rector of the University of Paris, was succeeded by Nicole d'Oresme (1323-1382), who explained why the rotation of the Earth doesn't produce wind.

    Other medieval Scholastics made the same sort of discoveries in economics and technology. Five hundred years before Adam Smith, St. Albertus Magnus explained the price mechanism as what ''goods are worth according to the estimate of the market at the time of sale.''

    There is another copy here.

    Friday, Dec 16, 2005
     
    Evolution sticker tells truth
    Georgia news:
    ATLANTA - Federal appeals judges roasted the attorney fighting evolution disclaimers placed in Cobb science textbooks during oral arguments before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, suggesting that he misled the court in his legal brief. ...

    Judges also appeared puzzled over the uproar surrounding the sticker - which states that evolution, "is a theory, not a fact" - when its message is supported by information published in the books.

    "It's fascinating to me here that you have a sticker that seems to be technically accurate," Carnes said. "(Evolution) is a theory, not a fact. I mean the book supports that." ...

    [The lower court] found that the stickers violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because they did not have a secular purpose and had the primary effect of advancing religion.

    It appears that the lower court made several errors.

    Thursday, Dec 15, 2005
     
    New York to monitor people with diabetes
    AP story:
    NEW YORK -- Hoping to save hundreds of lives, New York adopted a health-code regulation Wednesday that will make it the first American city to keep track of people with diabetes in much the same way it does with patients infected with HIV or tuberculosis.

    The policy breaks ground because it involves the collection of information about people who have a disease that is neither contagious nor caused by an environmental toxin. It has also raised privacy concerns.

    What's next? Monitoring fat people?

    Tuesday, Dec 13, 2005
     
    Parents rights in federal law
    John writes:
    Phyllis's new column deals with the "triple whammy" of recent court rulings against parents' rights versus the public schools.

    Besides the 9th and 3rd Circuit decisions, previously discussed, Andy discovered a 7th Circuit decision, to which the Supreme Court denied cert on Nov. 28, 2005. Here is the link to the (pdf) decision and the oral argument.

    Unlike the 9th and 3rd Circuits, which were unanimous, the 7th Circuit had a good dissent by Judge Diane Wood, a Clinton appointee who had clerked for Blackmun.

    Another key difference is that, unlike the other cases, in the 7th Circuit the claim of parental rights was made by the child's noncustodial father.

    The oral argument was enlightening. The father apparently could not afford to hire an appellate lawyer, so the court appointed a lawyer named Busbee or Busby as amicus curiae.

    Posner had obviously made up his mind in favor of the school, just as Diane Wood had obviously made up her mind in favor of the father. The oral argument consisted mainly of those two judges debating each other.

    Posner made it clear he does not think parents have any constitutional rights, saying at one point, "I thought Meyer and Pierce were pretty discredited cases, anyway."

    Posner said the father should get all his child's school reports from his ex-wife (and complain to the divorce court if she won't give them to him), because it's unreasonable to expect the school to provide information to more than one parent.

    Part of Posner's argument is that it is too burdensome for schools to maintain separate addresses for divorced parents, and to give both copies of school records. My local school does this already. It is trivial.
     
    Long arm of the law
    Atlanta news:
    ATLANTA (AP) - Transit police handcuffed and cited a man who sold a $1.75 US subway token to another rider who was having trouble with a token vending machine. He vows to fight the citation in court.

    Transit authority spokeswoman Jocelyn Baker said Friday that the officer "acted within the law" after he spotted Donald Pirone, 42, apparently selling the token Nov. 30 inside the West End subway station.

    I didn't know that it was illegal to sell a subway token.

    Monday, Dec 12, 2005
     
    Historian attacks Sen. Joe McCarthy
    I just watched historian Haynes Johnson say this on UCTV:
    McCarthy gives a speech in Wheeling. He waives a sheaf of papers in his hand. He says, I have here in my hand a list of 205 Communists who are active members of a Co spy ring who are at this moment developing and shaping policies of the United States thru the State Department. Bang. That's where it started. He made up this charge. There was no list. It was made up out of whole cloth. Totally untrue.
    When a historian writes a book about McCarthy, then I expect him to be a little more accurate about the facts. You can find most of the speech here. McCarthy did not say that they were spies. The list did exist, as explained here.

    Sunday, Dec 11, 2005
     
    Anchor babies
    Some congressmen are interested in cutting off the free American citizenship for illegal alien babies. Most other countries do not offer citizenship to such babies. The Si Valley paper editorializes:
    Those who argue for this change call the children born to illegal immigrants ``anchor babies.'' That's because once the child reaches 21, he or she can then petition for parents and siblings to become permanent residents. Proponents believe that many illegal immigrants come here to give birth in hopes that their child will be a ticket to legal status.

    But there's no proof of this happening, especially since the alleged scheme would take 21 years to come to fruition.

    No proof?! The scheme is effective immediately because the illegal alien parents are not deported. The baby is their green card until the baby is 21.
     
    Regulating California preschools
    WSJ op-ed:
    Movie director turned child advocate Rob Reiner--best known for playing the role of "Meathead" on "All in the Family"--recently acquired a million signatures to put his Preschool for All initiative on the California ballot next June, his second attempt to launch a "universal" preschool program. The initiative would impose a 1.7% income tax on couples making over $800,000 a year ($400,000 for individuals) to offer three hours of free preschool for all the state's 4-year-olds. ...

    The initiative would require all preschool teachers to obtain both a bachelor's degree and a one-year certificate in early childhood development by 2014.

    The article also says that the initiative has some peculiar unionization requirements.

    This is really a bad idea. Those training courses in early childhood development teach some really wrong ideas, and the preschool teachers may even be worse after taking the classes. This is another nanny state law. They want to regulate baby-sitters.

    A lot of people will vote for this because it is funded by a tax on the super-rich. But that is foolish also. If the super-rich are under-taxed, then we could jack up the tax until they cannot pay anymore, and put the money in the general fund. There are many uses for the money that are better than state-regulated babysitters.

    I am all in favor of taxes that relate to usage of govt services. For example, I think that it is great that road work is funded by gasoline taxes. But the super-rich have no use for state-subsidized babysitters.

     
    NY Times is anti-science
    Jim Holt suggests that the Bush administration (and most of America) is anti-science:
    In rationalizing his opposition to the creation of new embryonic stem-cell lines, for example, the president informed the public that existing lines would be sufficient for medical purposes - a claim that left researchers flabbergasted and proved to be wildly off the mark. On the issue of climate change, American inaction on curbing greenhouse gas emissions is defended on the grounds that there is still some uncertainty about the magnitude and causes of global warming. Administration allies have even maligned the motives of climate researchers, ...
    No, the existing stem-cell have been sufficient for medical research so far. American reluctance to mandate greenhouse gas emission reductions is usually defended on the grounds that such reductions will be very expensive and that it is doubtful whether they will result in any measurable benefit.

    Holt's real complaints are on policy issues, not science issues. It is the folks who confuse science with policy who are anti-science.

    Holt goes on:

    One of the most durable sources of evil in the world has been the idea that humans are divided into races and that some races are naturally superior to others. So it was morally exhilarating to discover, with the rise of modern genetics, that racial differences are biologically trifling - merely "skin deep," in the popular phrase. For the last three decades, the scientific consensus has been that "race" is merely a social construct, since genetic variation among individuals of the same race is far greater than the variation between races. Recently, however, a fallacy in that reasoning - a rather subtle one - has been identified by the Cambridge University statistician A.W.F. Edwards. The concept of race may not be biologically meaningless after all; it might even have some practical use in deciding on medical treatments, at least until more complete individual genomic information becomes available. Yet in the interests of humane values, many scientists are reluctant to make even minor adjustments to the old orthodoxy. "One of the more painful spectacles of modern science," the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi has observed, "is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between 'ethnic groups."'
    What this really shows is how a leftist scientist consensus can ignore the facts, and proclaim some supposedly scientific conclusion for ideological reasons.

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionists think that Darwinism is morally exhilarating. The leftist-abortionist-euthanasiaists think that embryonic stem-cell research is morally exhilarating. The leftist environmentalist no-growth anti-population advocates think that carbon emission limitation proposals are morally exhilarating. I think that we need to distinguish science from the politics and policy choices.

    George writes:

    Are you denying that there were legitimate scientific reasons for thinking that race is a social construct?
    Yes. Scientists don't even talk that way, unless they have a political ax to grind. There used to be a whole field of study called physical anthropology until it became politically incorrect.

    Saturday, Dec 10, 2005
     
    Evolution school books
    Florida school textbooks are influenced by intelligent design:
    Since at least 1995, Biology: The Dynamics of Life, has told students about the origin of life.

    In its 1998 national edition, Glencoe decided to add a few sentences about "divine origins." However, authors warned students that "divine creation is a belief rather than a scientific theory, because it is accepted on faith."

    By 2004, the "origin of life" section on page 388 was changed again. The new wording added "some people believe that the complex structures and processes of life could not have formed without some guiding intelligence."

    It also removed the sentence that said creationism is not considered a scientific theory.

    These changes sound sensible to me.

    Friday, Dec 09, 2005
     
    Tookie's apology
    Death row inmate Tookie is widely credited for his 1997 apology for the harm caused by the Crips (and criticized for not admitting his 4 murders). But it is just another non-apology apology. He says:
    I created the Crips youth gang ... I never imagined Crips membership ... I also didn't expect the Crips to end up ruining the lives ... So today I apologize to you all -- the children of America and South Africa -- who must cope every day with dangerous street gangs. I no longer participate in the so-called gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did. ... I am no longer "dys-educated" (disease educated).
    An apology is supposed to express regret for having done something wrong. If he could not have foreseen the harm from what he was doing, then what did he do wrong?

    This is not an apology. This is a proclamation of his innocence.


    Thursday, Dec 08, 2005
     
    Kansas science maligned
    AP story:
    A national education group says Kansas has the nation's worst science standards for public schools. And the Thomas B. Fordham Institute condemns the state for rewriting its definition of science and treating evolution as a flawed theory. ... The institute described such changes as the result of a "relentless'' promotion of intelligent design.
    No, the Kansas standards do not even mention intelligent design.

    Wednesday, Dec 07, 2005
     
    Afghanistan invasion a success
    ABC News poll:
    Four years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghans express both vast support for the changes that have shaken their country and remarkable optimism for the future, despite the deep challenges they face in economic opportunity, security and basic services alike.
    Iraq may yet be similarly successful.
     
    Law prof fails bar exam
    John writes:
    Kathleen Sullivan, endowed professor (and former dean) at Stanford Law School, former law professor at Harvard, and all-around liberal "rock star" whose curriculum vitae runs 24 single-space typewritten pages, recently took and failed the California Bar Exam.
    She has been living in California 15 years, and her resume shows that she has argued cases in the California courts. It looks to me as if she has been practicing law without a license.

    This is explained by her being a professor of constitutional law. The experts on constitutional law are the first to ignore basic principles of law.


    Tuesday, Dec 06, 2005
     
    Anti-fundy prof beaten
    Kansas news
    LAWRENCE - A professor whose planned course on creationism and intelligent design was canceled after he sent e-mails deriding Christian conservatives was hospitalized Monday after what appeared to be a roadside beating.

    University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki said that the two men who beat him made references to the class that was to be offered for the first time this spring.

    Originally called "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies," the course was canceled last week at Mirecki's request. ...

    One recent e-mail from Mirecki to members of a student organization referred to religious conservatives as "fundies," and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face." Mirecki has apologized for those comments.

    This is unfortunate. This leftist-atheist-evolutionist should have been allowed to teach his course in peace, as an example of anti-Christian propaganda.

    Some people doubt Mirecki's story. It does sound fishy that he would go on a pre-dawn drive on a country road, and run into some intelligent design advocates in the middle of nowhere who beat him up.


    Monday, Dec 05, 2005
     
    Paper questions ethics of delousing
    The lead Page 1A story in the Si Valley paper attempts to expose an ethical breach in a medical experiment.
    Stanford medical school instructor Dale Pearlman: head lice hero or flimflam man?
    A physician invents a new method for delousing hair. He does a controlled study, and shows that it works. He patented it and tried to sell it, without success. Finally, he put it in the public domain, allowing anyone to use it.

    So what is the ethical complaint? That he didn't just put his idea in the public domain first, without testing it!


    Sunday, Dec 04, 2005
     
    Ousting Saddam Hussein
    Au Nguyen is a typical Santa Clara idiot:
    What `mission' was accomplished?

    On Wednesday, President Bush appeared in front of a banner that says ``Plan for Victory'' (Page 3A, Dec. 1). I'm confused. I thought we achieved victory two years ago, when he appeared in front of a banner that said ``Mission Accomplished.'' If we are still in search of victory, then what exactly was the mission accomplished in 2003?

    In 2003, we won the Battle of Baghdad, and disabled the Iraq govt. It was a great military victory. How difficult is that to understand?

    Thursday, Dec 01, 2005
     
    Museum on the Age of the Earth
    I previously questioned these museum claims. I asked, "Do you have a source for this?" I just got this reply:
    Thanks for your inquiry to the American Museum of Natural History Library.

    We spoke with someone in our Exhibitions Department about your question and we were told that you are right -- there were indeed estimates of the age of the Earth that greatly exceeded 6,000 years before Darwin was born, perhaps most notably Georges Buffon, who had already published an estimate of 75,000 years. They also said that several geologists, including James Hutton, as is pointed out in a later section on geology, were already describing processes that would have taken much more than 6,000 years.

    They went on to say that even in the scientific community, these views were not yet widely accepted, especially in England, where most naturalists remained firm supporters of the creationist stance of the Church of England. And among the general public, the religious perspective on Earth's creation was clearly still dominant. Those who cared to put a number on the age of the Earth would have used the Sacred Chronology of Archbishop James Ussher, who by adding the generations cited in the Bible, came up with a date of 4004 BC for Earth's creation. It is this number that is referring to when we say "most people in England believed that Earth was only about 6,000 years old."

    We would recommend for more information on this aspect of the exhibition - "Darwin: A Life in Science" by James White and John Gribbin, and "Evolution, the Triumph of an Idea", by Carl Zimmer.

    We hope this information is helpful to you.

    -Reference Library
    AMNH

    This is unsatisfactory. In the mid 1800s, the age of the Earth was unknown. There were scientists who estimated millions of years, and there was an obscure theologian who said 6 kyrs. I am skeptical that "most people" believed in Ussher's figure.

    Wikipedia says:

    By the end of the 18th century, Ussher's chronology came under increasing attack from supporters of uniformitarianism, who argued that Ussher's "young Earth" was incompatible with the increasingly accepted view of an Earth much more ancient that Ussher's. By the time Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection, which assumed an ancient Earth in order to allow for the immense amount of time required for evolutionary processes to work, the majority of scientists had abandoned the Ussher chronology.
    I suggest that the evolutionist museum is engaged in what I call Flat Earth thinking. That is the idea that because people of some other era lacked today's scientific knowledge, then they must have a stupidity that can be blamed on religion. (The Flat Earth theory was invented by evolutionists for the purpose of making fun of Christians.)

    Wednesday, Nov 30, 2005
     
    Judges and Ideology
    An NY Times letter from Donald M. Solomon says:
    If the administration, in promoting Judge Alito's nomination, agrees that the best judges are those who scrupulously keep their ideological views out of their judicial decisions, why doesn't it nominate liberals who would adhere to that principle?
    Is he being sarcastic? The simple answer is that it has been tried. Republican presidents have appointed a lot of liberal judges. They just don't adhere to the principle.

    Tuesday, Nov 29, 2005
     
    Gen. Odom tries to rewrite history
    Somebody sent me this TV transcript with General Odom recommending that we cut and run in Iraq:
    MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Worse than Vietnam?
    GEN. ODOM: Much worse than Vietnam.
    MR. MCLAUGHLIN: Why do say that?

    GEN. ODOM: Because the consequences will be greater. We got out of Vietnam with very few consequences other than losing 50,000 Americans. Within two or three years after we had withdrawn, or been thrown out in 1975, U.S. credibility was increasing. We began our defense budget increase in 1978. Carter launched a human rights campaign, which initially was directed toward the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was absolutely livid, and the Soviets never got over that. Then Reagan announced the evil empire speech, and that continued - the Soviets saw that as continuity. That led right to the end of the Cold War.
    Now there is some historical revisionism. US credibility was way down in 1975. We cut off all support to S. Vietnam, and it fell to the commies. So did Laos and Cambodia. Countries didn't believe that we would keep our military promises anymore. For more Vietnam info, read here.

    In this CFR interview, Odom argues that President Bush should admit the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and that Iraq will never become a liberal democracy. Odom is a fool. No American president should admit that a war was a mistake.

    I am not sure that liberal democracy is possible in a Mohammedan country. It is a very ambitious goal. That was not the main reason for the war, and I am not sure that Bush ever promised a liberal democracy in Iraq.

    A reader claims that I misinterpreted the above Odom quote. Odom was really just saying that USA credibility bottomed out when we sold out the S. Vietnamese, and in 1978 our credibility was increasing. If so, then Odom's argument is consistent with the idea that American credibility was severely damaged by pulling out from Vietnam. Our credibility was so low that it had nowhere to go but up. Okay, that may be right, but how does it support an argument for pulling out of Iraq?

     
    Richard Cohen refuses to admit mistakes
    Wash. Post columnist and lying Bush-hater Richard Cohen says:
    Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. All the evidence for one -- the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa -- had been challenged. What's more, U.N. inspectors on the ground had found nothing.
    Yes, the evidence for Iraqi nukes was ambiguous. There were reasons to be suspicious, such as in the Butler report. Pres. Bush wanted to take action before Iraq develops nukes. Cohen, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and the other lying Bush-haters in the US Senate supported after seeing all of this evidence.

    Cohen blames the Democrat senators for the way in which they have described their mistakes. But he doesn't explain it himself either. Instead he blames these administration statements:

    As late as August 2003, Condoleezza Rice was saying that she was ``certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them.'' ... Cheney said, ``Increasingly, we believe that the United States will become the target'' of an Iraqi nuclear weapon, and Rumsfeld raised a truly horrible specter: ``Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction'' which would kill ``tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.''
    Maybe Cohen now regrets being persuaded by these arguments, but he certainly had enough facts to make up his own mind, and so did the Congress. If Cohen disagrees with those Rice/Cheney/Rumsfield opinions, then he should have said so 3 years ago when the war was being debated. Now he is just falsely trying to rewrite history.
     
    Two Novaks
    The Wash Post reports that there was another Novak involved in the V. Plame case, and says:
    Fitzgerald has spent the past two years investigating whether any Bush administration officials disclosed Plame's name and employment at the CIA as part of an effort to discredit allegations by her husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, that President Bush had twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Fitzgerald has not charged anyone with the crime he originally set out to prove: the illegal disclosure of a covert CIA operative's identity. Instead, he has focused on alleged wrongdoing in the course of the investigation.
    Here is what bugs me about this whole case. It would be bad if it turned out that Pres. Bush twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war. I cannot find any evidence that he did, but the lying Bush-haters do make that allegation. I think that Bush had a responsibility to defend himself to the public against such charges. If that involved releasing some minor facts about Wilson and Plame that happen to be classified, then he should certainly do that. The public has a right to know his defense. Revealing the Wilson's wife role was essential to the story. It was not wrong and not criminal. It was a good and proper thing to do.

    Fitzgerald cannot make a case that there was anything wrong about revealing Plame's name, so instead he indicts Libby on some minor technicalities. It is the Al Capone strategy -- justify sending someone to jail on a minor offense by suggesting that he really did something worse.

    Somehow Watergate-era reporters have convinced everyone that the coverup is worse than the crime. I don't agree. Fitzgerald knew about a month of his investigation that he would never prove the crime that was supposed to investigate. Instead he spent 2 years trying to create a crime. Fitzgerald is the only bad guy here (besides the lying Bush-haters).


    Monday, Nov 28, 2005
     
    Marriage amendment
    A Congressional subcommittee has proposed the Marriage Protection Amendment:
    Marriage in the United States shall consist solely of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.
    The peculiar thing about this is that it lets the states adopt same-sex civil unions (or domestic partnerships) via a regular statute, but not via the state constitution. Usually the state constitution overrides ordinary statutes, and federal law overrides both. If the MPA passes, then the federal Constitution will say that state statutes override the state constitution under certain circumstances.

    This makes no sense to me. There could be a lot of conflicts between a state constitution and its statutes relating to marriage and civil unions. The FMA will render these conflicts unresolvable.

    John writes:

    BTW, there have been about 6 versions of a marriage amendment introduced in Congress. The version you quote is not in the current Congress. It is the version that came to a vote in the House on Sep. 30, 2004, receiving a simple majority but less than the required 2/3rds.

    I do not follow your statement that "If the MPA passes, then the federal Constitution will say that state statutes override the state constitution under certain circumstances." There are no circumstances in which a state statute can override the state constitution.

    The way I read the FMA, the purpose is for state civil union laws to override the state constitution.

    Sunday, Nov 27, 2005
     
    Lies about aluminum tubes
    I just watched Sen. Joe Biden on NBC-TV's Meet The Press, and he was reciting the Bush-hater line about being tricked into voting for the Iraq War. In particular, he complained that he was misled about aluminum tubes.

    Here is what Biden got from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate:

    Most agencies believe that Saddam's personal interest in and Iraq's aggressive attempts to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes for centrifuge rotors--as well as Iraq's attempts to acquire magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools--provide compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort for Baghdad's nuclear weapons program. (DOE agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program.) ...

    INR's Alternative View: Iraq's Attempts to Acquire Aluminum Tubes

    Some of the specialized but dual-use items being sought are, by all indications, bound for Iraq's missile program.

    So Iraq was suspiciously buying high-precision aluminum tubes, and there was a difference of opinion as to the likely purpose. All of the facts and opinions were given to the Congress. Colin Powell told the UN that he sided with those who thought that Iraq had a nuclear purpose. We are still not sure, as far as I know.

    This dispute was even detailed for the American public in a Sept. 2002 Wash Post story. It appears to me that the Bush administration was more open and honest about pre-war intelligence than any other. Biden is just another lying Bush-hater.

     
    Dilbert on ID
    The Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is driving the leftist-atheist-evolutionists nuts on his blog. He says:
    I propose a little thought experiment.

    Imagine that lightning suddenly carves into the side of the Washington Monument the words “I am God. I created you. Darwin was a nut.” And let’s say there are hundreds of witnesses who all have video cameras and capture it from multiple angles. ...

    Here’s the question: Should teachers be allowed to tell science students about the lightning messages?

    He is trying to zero in on why evolutionists display such an irrational hatred of Intelligent Design (ID). He has a talent for suckering people into saying idiotic things.

    Friday, Nov 25, 2005
     
    NY Times tells truth, retracts
    Last week, the NY Times said:
    Yesterday, Libby's lawyer, Theodore Wells, pronounced Woodward's revelation a "bombshell" that contradicted Fitzgerald's assertion that Libby was the first government official to discuss Plame's CIA connection with a journalist, Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on June 23, 2003.
    The next day, it published this correction:
    Correction: November 18, 2005, Friday A front-page article yesterday about a new disclosure in the C.I.A. leak investigation referred incorrectly to an assertion made by the special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald about I. Lewis Libby Jr., whom he indicted in the case involving the naming of Valerie Wilson, a C.I.A. officer. Mr. Fitzgerald said that Mr. Libby was the "first known" government official -- not the first -- to discuss Ms. Wilson with a journalist.
    Here is what Fitzgerald actually said at his press conference:
    FITZGERALD: At the end of the day what appears is that Mr. Libby's story that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true.

    It was false. He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly.

    I think that the NY Times got it right the first time. Fitzgerald chose his words carefully, and he did accuse Libby of being the first to disclose Plame's name, not just the first known.

    It has been my contention that Libby told the truth, and that Fitzgerald has been lying. We will find out at Libby's trial.

    Here is another journalist, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, telling a confusing and contradictory story about Valerie Plame. She told an interviewer in 2003 that Valerie Plame's CIA identity was "widely known", but then later denied it.

    Libby may call Judith Miller, Bob Woodward, and Andrea Mitchell as defense witnesses. It will appear that either they have selective memories, or that they were confused about the crucial details, or that they have been telling self-serving lies. The jury won't be likely to send Libby to jail just because his recollections differ somewhat from those of a couple of reporters.


    Thursday, Nov 24, 2005
     
    More on the WMD lies
    Bob complains that the real case for war was made by Powell, Cheney, and Rumsfield, and that they lied about WMD. He suggests that I rely on Powell's UN speech for the official Bush case for war.

    Powell said:

    Last November 8, this council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous vote. The purpose of that resolution was to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had already been found guilty of material breach of its obligations, stretching back over 16 previous resolutions and 12 years.

    POWELL: Resolution 1441 was not dealing with an innocent party, but a regime this council has repeatedly convicted over the years. Resolution 1441 gave Iraq one last chance, one last chance to come into compliance or to face serious consequences. No council member present in voting on that day had any allusions about the nature and intent of the resolution or what serious consequences meant if Iraq did not comply. ...

    I asked for this session today for two purposes: First, to support the core assessments made by Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei. As Dr. Blix reported to this council on January 27th, quote, ``Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it,'' unquote.

    And as Dr. ElBaradei reported, Iraq's declaration of December 7, quote, ``did not provide any new information relevant to certain questions that have been outstanding since 1998.''

    POWELL: My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of Resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.

    Most of the speech is a technical presentation and discussion of specific evidence. I believe that Powell has retracted some of this, so I don't know what is accurate and what is not.

    Powell says this about nuclear weapon development:

    Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed.

    These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium. By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for.

    Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher. ...

    Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so.

    It seems to me that Powell didn't know whether Iraq had nuclear bombs or not. He mainly has an argument that Iraq has violated Resolution 1441, and that we should not put up with the violations.

    Maybe Powell overstated the evidence. Maybe some of his sources were unreliable. Maybe he didn't quote enough CIA naysayers. I don't know. But the main thrust of speech was correct. Iraq was in violation of Resolution 1441. It was up to the USA and the UN to decide what those consequences should have been.

    A lot of people back in 2003 did not think that Iraq violating Res. 1441 was reason enough for war. I can understand that. Maybe they were right. But the Congress and the American public was overwhelmingly in favor of the war because of those violations and because of other reasons that just as valid today. The lying Bush-haters who claim that we were misled into war are falsely trying to rewrite history.


    Wednesday, Nov 23, 2005
     
    Princeton concerned alumni
    John sends this Stephen R. Dujack article in the Princeton Univ. paper complaining about Judge Alito being a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP). He says:
    Even today, they lie. The Daily Princetonian reported Friday that CAP's longtime board member Andrew Napolitano '72 denies that the group opposed coeducation! This is like denying that the Catholic Church opposed abortion. Opposition to the presence of women at Princeton was CAP's central precept.

    Disclosure: I went to Princeton, I knew Dujack, and I was not a member of CAP.

    Princeton was all-male until about 1969. The issue during the 1970s was what Dujack euphemistically calls "full coeducation". The university was using sex-based admission quotas. I do not think that CAP opposed coeducation, because I remember it having female student members.

    Dujack was an editor of an alumni magazine that competed with the CAP magazine. He sounds as if he is still hung up on an old rivalry. Why else would he complain today that CAP called something a "laughingstock"?

    Now the university is run by women, and a majority of the students are girls. Male sports like wrestling were downgraded. The alumni magazine has been taken over by the university, and no dissent is allowed. These changes are debatable, and there is no reason for Alito to apologize.

     
    Darwin exhibit
    Here are people complaining about a lack of corporate sponsorship for a museum exhibit on Darwin. From Not Just Another Animal
    In England during the 1700s and early 1800s, few questioned the Biblical story of creation. The prevailing view was that people were created to rule over animals, "over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky."
    From How Old Is The Earth:
    Relying on interpretations of the Bible, most people in England believed that Earth was only about 6,000 years old—not nearly old enough for countless species to have evolved.
    I wouldn't recommend that any company sponsor a science exhibit that takes silly and inaccurate pot-shots at Christianity. Scientists in the 1800s understimated the age of the Earth because they didn't know about radioactivity, not because they were relying on the Bible.

    Tuesday, Nov 22, 2005
     
    Scalia defends Bush v Gore
    The NY Post reports:
    November 22, 2005 -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the high court did not inject itself into the 2000 presidential election. Speaking at the Time Warner Center last night, Scalia said: "The election was dragged into the courts by the Gore people. We did not go looking for trouble."

    But he said the court had to take the case.

    "The issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court [would decide the election.] What did you expect us to do? Turn the case down because it wasn't important enough?"

    I think that the NY Post has distorted Scalia's quote with the bracketed phrase. Scalia probably meant to say that the issue was whether Florida's Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court would decide Gore's appeal, not the election. The election was decided by the voters, and the question before the court was whether there were irregularities that demanded some sort of remedy.
     
    Another biography review
    The Oct. American Spectator says:
    In Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism, Donald T. Critchlow uses the career of the woman feminists love to hate as a lens through which to examine the neglected history of grassroots conservatism in postwar America. Critchlow combines scholarly rigor with fine prose to produce the best book ever written on this subject.
     
    Why we went to war
    As I see it, the American people supported the Iraq War for 4 reasons:
  • WMD. Iraq was known to have used WMD in the past, and was suspected of having development programs. We wanted to destroy those programs before they become an imminent threat.
  • 9/11. We are at war against Mohammedan terrorists, and had to divide the world in countries that were with us or against us. Iraq was not cooperating with inspections, and was therefore against us.
  • Unfinished business. We should have conquered Iraq in the 1991 Kuwait War. Since Iraq was not complying with UN resolutions, we have to finish the job.
  • Nation building. The neocons theorize that Democracy can be brought to the Middle East by first forcing it on Iraq.

    Pres. Bush's reasons for war were articulated in his 2003 State of the Union address. Tony Blair explained it even better.

    The lying Bush-haters are once again trying to rewrite history about the reasons for war. Congressmen who voted for the war are now claiming that they were tricked.

    They were not misled. The war was debated as honestly and openly as any war in the last 100 years. They supported the war for the reasons given, and those reasons are as valid as ever.

    If a Congressman had said in 2003, "I am voting for the Iraq War not because of the Bush-Blair arguments, but because of a secret CIA briefing that Iraq had already assembled nuclear bombs that were an imminent threat to the USA", then he could justifiably complain about his vote being influenced by faulty intelligence. But no one said that. They supported the war for the same reasons that Bush and Blair supported the war.

    I was never convinced by the above pro-war arguments. It seemed obvious to me that we had no proof of WMD, and that the idea of civilizing Iraq was highly improbable. I do not know how I would have voted if I had been in the Congress. But I sure wouldn't vote for the war, and then make up phony reasons against the war later. I think that the people like John Kerry are really despicable. He voted for the war, and now he tries to deny it.

  •  
    Evolution used to suppress appetite
    Evolutionists often claim that Darwinism has had a huge impact on medical research, but examples are scarce, as previously noted. Here is a new Stanford discovery that credits Darwinism:
    Researchers at the School of Medicine uncovered obestatin by using the principles of evolution to pick clues from data held in the Human Genome Project, as well as the genome sequencing projects for many other organisms, among them yeast, fruit flies and mice.

    "Darwin led us to this new hormone," said senior author Aaron Hsueh, an endocrinologist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology. Jian V. Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar in Hsueh's laboratory, is the lead author.

    They found a hormone related to appetite. Much of their work involved searching genetic databases, and it was simplified by assuming that more commonly occurring gene sequences were more important.

    It is hard to see how any of this depends on Darwinism. Darwin knew nothing about genes. His main theory was that natural selection could explain species diverging. The scientists used a gene sequence that occurs in "humans and at least 10 other mammals". Where is the connection? I think that the Stanford scientists are just trying to push an evolutionist agenda (as well as plug some interesting research that may have commercial significance).

     
    God of the gaps
    Judicial supremacist and evolutionist Charles Krauthammer writes in the Wash Post:
    Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development ...
    No, that is not what intelligent design (ID) is. ID gives an argument that certain biological structures could not have arisen by mutation and natural selection.

    If there are people who hypothesize that God might be responsible for "gaps" that science cannot explain, then what is wrong with that? If scientists cannot explain somthing, then they shouldn't object to other people proposing theories.

    He then goes on to argue that whether evolution is an "unguided process" is a religious question, not a scientific question. If that is really his position, then he should be criticizing the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who insist on teaching evolution as an unguided process.

    An upset reader complains:

    Why are you defending ID? You describe it as if it could be a scientific theory. It is not. It is just another name for creationism that was invented by some fundamentalist Christians who thought that they found a loophole in court decisions declaring that creationism cannot be taught because it has a religious purpose.
    I didn't say that ID was scientific. It is more of a philosophical argument. Maybe some evidence for irreducible complexity will be found some day, but that's not my point.

    I was mainly criticizing the way Krauthammer and others try to frame the conflict between science and religion. Religious beliefs about God and creation do not necessarily conflict with science.


    Sunday, Nov 20, 2005
     
    Programmer demand
    IBM VP Steve Mills wrote this for the Si Valley paper:
    California is the clear leader in software engineering and development -- employing 132,200 people statewide, or 18 percent of the nation's total. Santa Clara County has the highest concentration of software engineers and developers in the nation, with more than 32,500 workers.

    Beginning Jan. 1, the baby boomers will start turning 60. Many of the early software pioneers are quickly reaching retirement age, yet their skills remain in high demand. ...

    According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, the nationwide percentage of incoming college freshmen who want to major in computer sciences declined by more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than peak levels in the early 1980s. The proportion of freshmen women who showed interest in computer sciences as a major has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s.

    No, their skills are not in high demand. The next day, the same paper said:
    Silicon Valley's job growth remains sluggish.

    Employers in Santa Clara and San Benito counties added 5,400 jobs to their payrolls in October, but remained 800 jobs short of last year's employment level, according to a state report released Friday.

    The latest report accompanied a downward revision of September's job figures, which were adjusted to show an annual loss of 3,100 jobs rather than a gain of 100. That would have been the first annual gain since mid-2001.

    ``It seems like every time the valley gets its head above water, it tends to resubmerge,'' said Scott Anderson, a senior economist at Wells Fargo.

    The laws of supply and demand work for computer programmers just like anything else. The jobs are being outsourced to India, China, and cheap-labor immigrants. College students are smart enough to see that their fellow computer science grads are not getting good jobs. It is foolish to think that some PR campaign is going to con students into chasing nonexistent jobs.
     
    New Creation and Evolution Theory
    This wacky site reconciles UFO, Bible, and evolution:
    There is a new theory being discussed in the UFO community. This theory has to do with the creation of Homo Sapiens, which is the current breed of humans. It seems as though certain authorities, most of whom are speakers at UFO conferences, have solved the mystery of the missing link.

    According to this new theory, man could not have possibly evolved on earth as in the Darwin Theory. Skulls and slides of skulls and skeletal structures are used to prove that there are too many missing links or jumps in our evolution that cannot be explained in Darwin's Evolutionary Theory.

    The solution that the experts give is that one or many races of extraterrestrials have come to earth, over possibly millions of years, and mated with the existing species of that time period. This caused a change in our DNA, ...

    As for ETs tampering with our DNA, we refer to what is, in our opinion, the greatest history book ever written…the bible. In Genesis 6:2 it is written that, "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they choose". Does this sound like the women of earth had a choice? ...

    They appear to be serious, but it is hard to tell.
     
    Cherokee myth
    John sends this NY Times book review which says:
    John Marshall's Supreme Court declared the Georgia laws invalid, but Jackson ignored this decision.
    It perpetuates the myth about Cherokees dying because Pres. Jackson defied a US Supreme Court decision. There were 2 Supreme Court decisions about Georgia and the Cherokees. The Cherokees lost one in 1931, and won one in 1832. Wikipedia says:
    In reaction to this decision, President Andrew Jackson has often been quoted as defying the Supreme Court with the words: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!". Jackson never actually said this; in fact, because of a legal loophole, he had no grounds for becoming involved unless the Georgia courts formally defied the Supreme Court. That did not happen, since Georgia simply ignored the ruling. What Jackson actually said was that "the decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate." Jackson's opponents criticized him for failing to act against Georgia, but even if he had wanted to intervene—and he did not—he had no legal authority to do so (Prucha, p. 212).
    Even Supreme Court justice Breyer has (falsely) promoted the myth as an argument for judicial supremacy, as I've noted before.
     
    Legality of mousetraps
    I previously reported on a California law requiring licensing of mousetraps. Snopes says that it is an urban legend, and sent me this email:
    The newspaper article you cite is inaccurate. SB 1645 only applies to those who trap nongame animals for profit (e.g., exterminators, wildlife control professionals), and common mouse and rat traps are specifically exempted from license tagging requirements. - David
    Hmmm. I'm not sure. Snopes is pretty reliable.

    Thursday, Nov 17, 2005
     
    Humans and 10 foot apes
    Evolution news:
    FOSSILS have been found that prove this 10ft tall ape once lived alongside early humans. ...

    Gigantopithecus Blackii, drawn above by an artist, roamed South East Asia for a million years mainly eating bamboo. ...

    He said: “Probably the creatures lived up in the caves and bamboo forests, while people lived lower in the river valleys.

    “But it’s likely that humans came face to face with the ape.”

     
    Woodward knew about Plame
    Bob Woodward's disclosure gives more evidence that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is an incompetent hack who botched the Plame investigation and delivered a faulty indictment.

    Fitzgerald's main justification for indicting Libby was given at the press conference:

    In fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson. ...

    He was at the beginning of the chain of phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government to a reporter. And then he lied about it afterwards, under oath and repeatedly.

    This is reminiscent of jailing Al Capone for tax evasion; they couldn't prove his real crimes, so they over-prosecuted him on something that they could prove.

    Fitzgerald's whole premise is that Libby was the source of the Plame leak. Part of Libby's defense is that reporters already knew about Plame when he talked to them. Fitzgerald's plan was to force the reporters to testify that they didn't know about Plame until they talked to Libby.

    Now we know that Woodward knew about Plame before talking to Libby. Maybe others did also. Fitzgerald's statements above are false. I don't think that Fitzgerald will be able to prove his case.

    The reporters will not even be telling a consistent story. Fitzgerald apparently decided not to rely on Judith Miller because of inconsistencies in her story. Here is a conflict between Wash Post reporters:

    Woodward's statement said he testified: "I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst." Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.

    "Are you kidding?" Pincus said. "I certainly would have remembered that."

    Remember that it was the Wash Post that first published Valerie Plame's name, in a Novak article. Perhaps it was Woodward who approved that article, because he thought that her name was not a classified secret.

    (The comments at the above blog discuss Joe Wilson's lies. You can find 10 of Wilson's lies summarized here.)

     
    Courts have no role in fighting wars
    Novak writes Just Say No to Terrorist Lawsuits. The US Senate voted to withdraw court jurisdiction over Gitmo detainees.
     
    Court denies parental rights
    The House of Reps just voted 320-91 to ask the 9th Circuit court of appeals to reconsider its recent ruling that parents have no constitutional rights in schools.

    The big problem with this case is in the dicta. I might have agreed with ruling against the parents for various reasons, but not for the radical reasons chosen by the 9C.

    There is a line of Supreme Court decision going back to the 1920s saying that parents have a fundamental constitutional right right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children. It was reaffirmed unanimously in 2000.

    In Fields, Reinhardt ruled that the parents' fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door," and that a public school has the right to provide its students with "whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise."

    This is a direct attack on parental rights. This is as annoying to some right-wingers as it might be annoying to left-wingers if some court declared that the right use a condom (as declared in Griswold) did not apply in a hotel. Sure, the words "condom" and "hotel" don't appear in the Constitution, but it would be a goofy limitation on an established court doctrine.

    I agree with the House. The Reinhardt opinion is offensive, and should be reconsidered. Volokh may agree with the 9C conclusion, but I doubt that he agrees with the reasoning.


    Tuesday, Nov 15, 2005
     
    Civil War legal precedent
    John sends this NY Times story about an 1869 case which looks like another example of Congress successfully withdrawing jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court approving, and writes:
    It's not just "another example"; Ex parte McCardle is the grand-daddy, the leading case on point, cited in the book.

    [Anthony] Lewis reminds us of the historically important facts of the case. But I question his assertion that "ever since, most legal scholars have regarded it as a terrible blot on the constitutional history of this country." What legal scholars?

    Consider the alternative. As Lewis's column makes clear, if the Supreme Court taken the case and granted the writ McCardle sought, its action would have effectively ended Reconstruction, 8 years before Congress and the President did so.

    Only "unreconstructed" white Southerners and neo-Confederates think the Supreme Court should have forced an early end to Reconstruction. For the overwhelming majority of "scholars," legal and otherwise, the only thing wrong with Reconstruction was it didn't go far enough. They all supported federal civil rights legislation of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, which amounted to a new Reconstruction, enforced by federal troops.

    Lewis being incredibly disingenuous.

    Judicial supremacy wasn't invented until about 90 years later. For most of American history, no one thought that the Supreme Court should be making policy as Lewis now advocates.
     
    Bailey attacks the Pope
    Ronald Bailey has these snide remarks about the Pope:
    On Saturday I opened by New York Times to find articles illustrating two very different approaches that religion can take toward science. The first was a dismaying short AP story in which Pope Benedict XVI was quoted as saying that the creation of the universe is part of an "intelligent project." ...

    The record of the Roman Catholic Church in its encounters with modern science suggests that Pope Benedict XVI might do well to heed the wisdom of Saint Augustine ...

    The comments point out that Bailey's book shows the DNA helix turning the wrong way on the cover.

    I don't know why Bailey would be dismayed that the Pope believes that God created the universe. The Catholic Church has no objection to anything in modern science. Its position has always been that faith can never conflict with reason, and that truth cannot contradict truth.

    Bailey is trying to say that the Church is wrong about evolution for the same reasons that it was wrong about Galileo. He probably doesn't even understand the Galileo dispute.

    The core of the current dispute with the Church is that the leftist-atheist-evolutionists want the history of the universe to be taught as an unplanned, unguided, and random process. The Church believes that God created the universe, and that human life has a purpose. The evolutionists claim that this is a scientific dispute. It is not. It is a theological dispute.

    Here is how the NY Times summarizes Kansas school curriculum changes that have infuriated the leftist-atheist evolutionists:

    The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.

    The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."

    Notice how the evolutionists cite Galileo whenever they can. They think that there is universal agreement that Galileo was scientifically correct, and that the Church was wrong for believing in the Bible in the face of contrary scientific evidence. But the current Pope said (in 1990, before he was Pope):
    At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.
    I think that the new Kansas definition of science is more accurate and appropriate, and that the evolutionists should stay out of theology.

    Monday, Nov 14, 2005
     
    Hypocritical Bush-haters
    This WSJ blog slams the hypocritical Bush-haters. They complain that Pres. Bush won't take responsibility for the Iraq War, but they don't think that Democrats in Congress have any responsibility for their pro-war votes. They alternate between complaining that Bush used too many troops and too few troops.

    Sunday, Nov 13, 2005
     
    Judge Reinhardt, leftist extremist judge
    John writes about The Supremacists:
    I think the book should do more to debunk Reinhardt.

    The new parents rights case (Fields v. Palmdale) is not the first time he has written an astoundingly broad and sweeping liberal opinion in a case that he shrewdly thinks the Supreme Court is unlikely to review.

    On Dec. 5, 2002, he issued a 70-page opinion in Silveira v. Lockyer which discussed the 2nd Amendment at great length and concluded that there is no individual right to keep and bear arms. Reinhardt rejected U.S. v. Emerson (5th Cir. 2001) which was the first (and so far only) federal court to recognize the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment. He also rejected John Ashcroft's famous letter.

    Reinhardt even cited with approval the bogus research of Michael Bellesiles. On Jan. 27, 2003, he issued an amended opinion which omitted the references to Bellesiles.

    Gun groups financed a motion for rehearing en banc, followed by a petition for cert, both of which were denied.

    The guy who unmasked the Bellesiles book points out many errors of scholarship in the Reinhardt opinion here and here.

    Reinhardt is married to Ramona Ripston, who has been executive director of ACLU-SC (ACLU of Southern California) since 1972. It is the third marriage for him, and the fifth for her. They live in Marina del Rey, a posh suburb on the west side of L.A. Ramona was a co-founder of NARAL in 1969 and she has also been a leader in PFAW.

    Ramona is a longtime political associate of the ultra leftwing Mayor Villaraigosa, who gave her a state appointment when he was Speaker of the California Assembly. Ramona is responsible for removing the tiny cross from the L.A. County seal, using the threat of litigation to force the Board of Supervisors to vote 3-2 for a new seal.

    In 2003, Ramona led the campaign to stop the recall based on a phony argument about voting machines. She won the initial victory before a 3-judge panel of the 9th Circuit. Reinhardt recused himself when the case was reconsidered and reversed en banc.

    Reinhardt had no judicial or other relevant experience when Carter put him on the 9th Circuit in 1980. This 1997 article quotes a colleague as saying he is "pushing the envelope harder now" and "He's feeling less constrained."

    Andy writes:
    Yes, Reinhardt is probably the most activist judge in America. He typifies the liberal elite. We refer to him in the book as perhaps the most-often-reversed judge.

    Reinhardt was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court five times in a single Term. That is a record that will surely never be broken!

    This essay says:

    According to constitutional law expert Akhil Reed Amar, writing in FindLaw: "In each of the past six years, the Ninth Circuit averaged between 1.5 and 2.5 [Supreme Court] Justice-votes per case [it reviewed]," writes Amar. "Indeed, when the Ninth Circuit is reversed, it is more often than not reversed unanimously!"
    Amar points out that the opinions written by 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who joined Judge Alfred Goodwin in the 2-1 majority Pledge decision, have 'alone been reversed by the Supreme Court unanimously an unbelievable five times in a single Term.'"
    The leftist supremacists are complaining about Alito, but the real judicial activists are judges like Reinhardt.

    Saturday, Nov 12, 2005
     
    NPR on ID
    NPR actually had a fair story on Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom. Surprising.
     
    Congress limits the courts
    NY Times:
    WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.
    This is yet another example of how the US Congress can remove jurisdiction from the federal courts. Congress's ability to pass such laws is a significant limit on judicial supremacists.

    Friday, Nov 11, 2005
     
    Genetics Fuels Race-Based Medicine
    NY Times says:
    In a finding that is likely to sharpen discussion about the merits of race-based medicine, an Icelandic company says it has detected a version of a gene that raises the risk of heart attack in African-Americans by more than 250 percent.

    The company, DeCode Genetics, first found the variant gene among Icelanders and then looked for it in three American populations, in Philadelphia, Cleveland and Atlanta.

    Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent.

    The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics.

    Until recently, the evolutionists claimed that science had proved that there was no such thing as race.
     
    Godzilla discovered
    CNN reports:
    Zulma Gasparini, paleozoology professor at Argentina's Universidad Nacional de La Plata, said the fierce-looking animal probably terrorized creatures in the Pacific Ocean in the late Jurassic era, just as the film monster Godzilla frightened the people of Tokyo in the movies.

    "We are calling him the 'chico malo' -- 'bad boy'" of the ocean, she said.

    Report co-author Diego Pol of Ohio State University said "Godzilla," whose scientific name is Dakosaurus andiniensis, had a short, high snout and large, jagged teeth for biting and cutting prey.

    Another biologist says, "It's like a crocodile with a dinosaur head on it".

    Tuesday, Nov 08, 2005
     
    Kansas science
    Here is a NY Times editorial about the Kansas State Board of Education:
    Now the current board has narrowly approved new science standards that leave evolution in place but add specific criticisms that schools are urged to teach. Most significant, the definition of science is changed so it is not limited to natural explanations.

    The standards, which define the material to be covered in statewide science tests, won't take effect until 2007 at the earliest. That leaves time for the electorate to once again dump the board members responsible for this lunacy.

    Kansas defines science as a "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." That is not lunacy.
     
    Free Scooter Libby
    I am sticking to my theory that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald misunderstood Libby, and that Libby will be acquitted. Nearly everyone else is saying that the indictment is rock solid, and that Libby will goto jail.

    Michael N. Levy, a former federal prosecutor, just now expresses doubt that Libby can be convicted.

    The false statements that Fitzgerald has zeroed in on, however, are very narrow and specific. The indictment alleges that Libby lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about several matters: stating that Russert had asked him if he was aware that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA; that Russert had told him that ``all the reporters knew it;'' and that he was surprised by Russert's statements because, at that time, he did not recall knowing that Plame worked at the CIA.
    As Levy explains, Libby's recollection could differ from Russert's and Cooper's for a lot of reasons. Without strong testimony from Russert and Cooper, Fitzgerald is left with trying to prove that Libby knew about Plame before talking to Russert in July 2003 (which he can probably prove), and that Libby lied when he said that he was surprised (which I doubt that he can prove).

    The statement that Libby was "surprised" is based on this Libby testimony to the grand jury that he was "taken aback":

    . . . . And then he said, you know, did you know that this -- excuse me, did you know that Ambassador Wilson's wife works at the CIA? And I was a little taken aback by that. I remember being taken aback by it. ... [Libby indictment, count 4]
    I think that Fitzgerald inferred that Libby was taken aback (or surprised) because he didn't know about Plame. But there is a more obvious explanation. Libby was taken aback because he didn't know that Russert knew about Plame, and wasn't prepared for Russert asking him to confirm or deny it.

    Libby goes on to tell the grand jury:

    And so I said, no, I don't know that because I want to be very careful not to confirm it for him, so that he didn't take my statement as confirmation for him.
    I interpret this as Libby saying that he knew about Plame, but was pretending not to know about Plame so that no classified info would be leaked to Russert. If Libby wanted to tell the grand jury that he did not know about Plame, he would have said something this:
    And I didn't know about Wilson's wife, so I told Russert that I didn't know that.
    Fitzgerald's indictment says that Libby's testimony (quoted above) is false because "At the time of this conversation [with Russert], LIBBY was well aware that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA".

    This is wacky. Libby apparently told the exact same story to FBI agents in Oct. and Nov. 2003, as he told to the grand jury in March 2004. The FBI interviews were not recorded. Fitzgerald was apparently convinced that he had caught Libby in a lie, and used the grand jury to make him repeat the lie under oath with a court reporter.

    My problem with Fitzgerald is that he was supposed to investigate the criminal release of classified info about covert CIA agents, and grand juries are supposed to be used to collect info about a crime, not to entrap a witness in a perjury charge with some carefully calculated misunderstandings. If Fitzgerald really wanted to get accurate info to the grand jury, he would have asked questions like these:

    Did you know about Wilson's wife when you talked to Russert? Did you know about her role in Wilson's trip? Were you surprised that Russert mentioned her? If so, was it because you didn't expect Wilson's wife to be involved, or you didn't expert Russert to know about her, or was there some other reason? Did you deliberately mislead Russert by pretending to not know about Wilson's wife?

    Russert has given us a different recollection of his conversation with you. He says that he never asked about Wilson's wife. Is he lying? How do you explain this discrepancy?

    Instead, Firzgerald tries to justify his 2-year investigation by laying a trap on a trivial side issue. He even asked that the witnesses not discuss the matter publicly, so that public info will not interfere with his trap. I think that Fitzgerald should be fired for doing such a terrible investigation.

    Before the indictment, people were expecting Rove and/or Libby to be indicted for leaking classified info, or maybe obstruction of justice for trying to influence the testimony of reporters.

    CNN reported:

    The Times said Fitzgerald questioned Miller about a letter that Libby sent her while she was in jail. Libby assured her that he wanted her to testify, but the letter also said, according to the Times, "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."
    The LA Times similarly reported:
    During her grand jury appearance Wednesday, Miller said, Fitzgerald asked her to read aloud the final three paragraphs of the letter from Libby, in which he stated that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

    "The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words," Miller wrote. "I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job."

    And this AP story (in Fox News, USA Today, and elsewhere) said:
    In urging her to cooperate with prosecutors, Libby wrote Miller while she was still in jail in September, "I believed a year ago, as now, that testimony by all will benefit all. ... The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me."

    One of Miller's lawyers, Robert Bennett, was asked Sunday whether he thought Libby's letter was an attempt to steer her prospective testimony.

    "I wouldn't say the answer to that is yes, but it was very troubling," Bennett said on ABC's "This Week."

    But here is the full letter, and it says:
    Because, as I am sure will not be news to you, the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call. I waived the privilege voluntarily to cooperate ...
    It is weird that the news media truncated the quote, because Libby's story is that the reporters already knew about Plame.
     
    Alito's undergraduate thesis
    Liza says Princeton discovered Judge Alito's senior thesis, from 1972 when he was a student there.
    NOMINEE'S MISSING THESIS RECOVERED Alito '72 believes Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, adviser says ... In his lone dissent, which was not supported in a subsequent decision by the Supreme Court, ...
    Alito's position lost 2-1 on the 3rd Circuit, and 5-4 on the Supreme Court. The article is written to imply that Alito took an extremist position that no one agreed with.
    Many observers have pointed out similarities between Alito and Antonin Scalia, the court's current arch-conservative and constructionist justice, giving Alito the nickname "Scalito." But Murphy rejected those comparisons. "Sam is his own man," Murphy said. "He'll never be 'Scalito.' And then it's a gross insult to say in the mold of [other conservative and constructionist justice] Clarence Thomas. Their IQs are so radically different ... We're not talking about someone in Sam's intellectual league."
    Note how Prof. Murphy, Alito's adviser, goes out of his way to insult Justice Thomas's intelligence. I think that Thomas's court opinions are the most cogently written of any of the 9 justices. Maybe he consistently hires smarter clerks. Maybe it is easier to write a constructionist opinion than an evolving-leftist opinion. I don't see any justification for saying that he has a low IQ except that there are people who expect a low IQ from a token black man. It is offensive for a Princeton professor to make such insinuations. If he thinks that Thomas has made errors, then he should be willing to say so.

    Monday, Nov 07, 2005
     
    New reviews of Schlafly biography
    NY Sun book review:
    Particularly when viewed through the prism of gender politics, Mrs. Schlafly's accomplishment is remarkable. While her counterparts on the feminist left took a movement of the ruling class and rendered it increasingly marginalized, Mrs. Schlafly took a movement of lumpen proletariat and brought it to the center of American power and institutions.
    New Yorker review:
    The larger significance of events is, of course, often obscure to those busy living them out. Exactly what seemed most ridiculous about Schlafly in the early seventies—her antiquarian views, her screwball logic, her God’s-on-our-side self-confidence—was by the end of the decade revealed to be her political strength. First the ratification process for the E.R.A. slowed, then it stalled out entirely. The last state to approve the amendment was Indiana, in January, 1977. Meanwhile, five states that had already voted to ratify rescinded their approval, a move of uncertain legal force but of ominous implications. ... As it became clear that the E.R.A. was going down, the tone of the Schlafly jokes began to sour.

    “I just don’t see why some people don’t hit Phyllis Schlafly in the mouth,” a well-known feminist lawyer, Florence Kennedy, told a Miami radio station.

    The book is Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism.
     
    Dover transcripts
    John sends this link with the transcripts from the Dover, PA evolution trial.

    The trial is over, and now idiot judge is going to decide whether 11 parents will be able to send their kids to a public school evolution class where the teacher reads a 4-paragraph statement about intelligent design. The whole thing is silly.

     
    Invading 7-year-old privacy
    About the story, Sex questions found not to violate parents' rights Phyllis writes:
    When Hillary Clinton proclaimed that it takes a village to raise a child, many people didn't realize that she was enunciating liberal dogma that the government should raise and control children. This concept fell on fertile soil when it reached activist judges eager to be anointed as elders of the child-raising village.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit just ruled that parents' fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children "does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door," and that a public school has the right to provide its students with "whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise."

    Instead of using the "village" metaphor, the judges substituted a Latin phrase that has the same effect. Parens patriae (the country as parent) was a legal concept used long ago by the English monarchy, but it never caught on in the United States and the few mentions of it in U.S. cases are not relevant to this decision.

    The Ninth Circuit case, Fields v. Palmdale School District, was brought by parents who discovered that their seven- to ten-year-old children had been required to fill out a nosy questionnaire about such matters as "thinking about having sex," "thinking about touching other people's private parts," and "wanting to kill myself."

    The Supreme Court has upheld parental rights many times. See: Decisions of the United States Supreme Court Upholding Parental Rights.

    The weird part of Judge Reinhardt's opinion is where he says the US Constitution is evolving, and that privacy rights have evolved from family autonomy to the right to abortion and sodomy.


    Sunday, Nov 06, 2005
     
    Crier, judicial supremacist
    Here is Phyllis Schlafly on CourtTV being interviewed by Catherine Crier about judicial activism. Crier says:
    If the activist judges substitute their opinions for the people (legislature, this sort of thing), then how come the Rehnquist isn't activist because they've overturned more Congressional legislation than any Supreme Court in history?...

    Abortion was legal at the time the Constitution was written. ...

    Well it wasn't all 50 states, but in fact if they determine that the Bill of Rights is being obfuscated by what is going on in the states, they have a duty to do exactly that. ...

    Is it fair ... to say that there is a specific outcome that you would like in a number of cases ...?

    Abortion was not understood very well at the time of the Constitution, and the Constitution is silent on the matter. So states could pass whatever laws they wanted on the subject. States are allowed to change their laws. What Crier is doing is trying to trap Phyllis into saying that she doesn't really want what the Constitution says, because things were different back then. It is a silly trap. Often people try this trap by saying that slavery was legal when the Constitution was written.

    Crier is wrong when she denies that Roe v Wade voided the abortion laws in all 50 states. There were a few states like New York that allowed abortions, but none allowed it as broadly as the Supreme Court mandated.

    Crier is also wrong to suggest that the Rehnquist court was more activist than other courts. The Warren Court was far more activist.

     
    Vatican accepts science
    Evolutionists keep treating this as news:
    VATICAN CITY - A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.
    I don't know why anyone would think that this is news. The Vatican has fully accepted and promoted scientific reason for 100s of years. It opposed fundamentalism during the Protestant Reformation, and continues to oppose it today.
     
    Warren Beatty
    I am listening to Warren Beatty argue against the Arnold Schwarzenegger ballot propositions. His main argument is that the California should have passed similar laws!

    Of course, it should have, but it refused. Sometimes voter initiatives are necessary.

     
    Alito anagram
    John reports that "Samuel Alito" is an anagram for "I am a sellout." Hmmmm.

    Thursday, Nov 03, 2005
     

    I am still trying to figure out whether McClellan has lied, as is widely claimed. The relevant press briefings were on Sept. 29, 2003, and Oct. 7, 2003. Perhaps the most misleading exchange is this:

    Q Scott, you have said that you, personally, went to Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and Elliot Abrams to ask them if they were the leakers. Is that what happened? Why did you do that, and can you describe the conversations you had with them? What was the question you asked?

    MR. McCLELLAN: Unfortunately, in Washington, D.C., at a time like this, there are a lot of rumors and innuendo. There are unsubstantiated accusations that are made. And that's exactly what happened in the case of these three individuals. They're good individuals, they're important members of our White House team, and that's why I spoke with them, so that I could come back to you and say that they were not involved. I had no doubt of that in the beginning, but I like to check my information to make sure it's accurate before I report back to you, and that's exactly what I did.

    Q So you're saying -- you're saying categorically those three individuals were not the leakers or did not authorize the leaks; is that what you're saying?

    MR. McCLELLAN: That's correct. I've spoken with them.

    It now appears that Rove and Libby had discussions with reporters in which there was reference to Wilson's wife.

    One problem I have with this is that the word "leak" has multiple meanings. Some are:

    1. The criminal release of the name of a covert agent.
    2. The authorized disclosure of non-public info.
    3. The unauthorized disclosure of news to a reporter.
    4. The unauthorized discussion of info with a reporter, such as confirming another leak.

    We really don't know whether a leak occurred in any of these senses. The questions seem focused on a criminal leak, but Fitzgerald has apparently cleared everyone of that. We don't know whether Bush or Cheney authorized any disclosures. We don't know whether the reporters learned about Plame from outside the White House.

    Libby apparently has a theory that he didn't leak Plame's identity because the reporters already knew about her. Rove apparently did not know Plame's name so he could not have leaked her name. And both deny committing any crime. So both could have told McClellan that they were not leakers.

    Some people might have heard McClellan and concluded that Rove and Libby didn't even discuss Plame with reporters at all. But I doubt it. Later, McClellan is asked whether Rove told Chris Matthews that Plame was fair game, and McClellan refused to say. So McClellan seemed to be allowing for the possibility that Rove and Libby had some discussions about Plame with reporters.

    When someone is accused of a crime, and gives a carefully worded denial, then I take the denial very literally. If an accused murderer says, "I did not kill with that gun", then I would assume that he is leaving open the possibility that he killed with some other gun.

    Rove's lawyer said:

    "Did Karl purposely set out to disclose Valerie Plame's identity in order to punish Joe Wilson for his criticism? The answer is, 'No,"' Luskin said.

    "He always truthfully denied that he was never part of any campaign to punish Joe Wilson by disclosing the identity of his wife," Luskin added.

    This clearly leaves open the possibilities that Rove disclosed Plame's name in order to defend VP Cheney (from accusations that he sent Wilson to Niger), or that Rove took other actions to punish Wilson.

    I do think that all of these characters are spineless creeps for lamely hiding behind lawyers and not telling us the full story, but I cannot find where any of them actually lied.


    Wednesday, Nov 02, 2005
     
    Bush never promised to fire Rove
    It is amazing how the news media keeps repeating the same lies about the Plame story.

    People say that Pres. Bush changed his position about firing leakers. They say that he first promised to fire anyone connected with the Plame leak, but later backtracked to say that he would only fire anyone convicted of a crime.

    People also say that Scott McClellan lied by saying that no one in the White House was even involved. Here is McClellan's Sept. 29, 2003 press briefing. He is asked a repetitious, confusing, and ambiguous set of questions. Here is how I read what he is saying. He says that he talked to Karl Rove, but all he knows is what has been publicly reported. McClellan says that any allegation of criminal activity should be reported to the DoJ for investigation (and possible prosecution). He refuses to admit that any non-criminal activity needs to be investigated or punished. He does say:

    If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.
    I read "it" as referring to a criminal act. He refers to the Justice Dept. over 50 times. It seems pretty clear that he thinks that a DoJ investigation is the only one that is necessary, and the DoJ only investigates criminal acts. In fact, Bush never changed his position.

    People say that Joe Wilson exposed Bush's lies, but in fact nearly everything Wilson said about the story was a lie.

    In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission.
    Here is another explanation of Wilson's lies.

    The press also says that Libby told the grand jury that he didn't know about Plame until Russert told him. I think that this will also turn out to be a lie.


    Saturday, Oct 29, 2005
     
    Libby's indictment is weak
    John writes:
    Roger says Libby should have kept his mouth shut. Just like Martha Stewart! Instead, like Martha, he stupidly concocted a story that depended on the cooperation and corroboration of several other people.

    If you recall, Martha's stockbroker Peter Bacanovic did indeed go along with Martha's story. But they both forgot about Peter's young assistant, Douglas Faneuil. Doug was not in on the deal, so Martha and Peter went to jail.

    Likewise, Libby concocted a story which he told the FBI just 3 months (not 2 years) after the fact. Five months later, he repeated the same story for the grand jury. But Libby's story foolishly depended upon not being contradicted by 3 high profile journalists.

    Libby now has the burden of proving that at least one of those journalists is lying. He will have to prove that Russert, Cooper and/or Miller learned -- or at the very least, could have learned -- the identity of Wilson/Plame from someone other than Libby.

    I think Libby will not be able to prove that. Therefore he is surely going to jail, unless he negotiates a plea bargain by testifying against others (including Cheney) who were in on the conspiracy.

    This scandal is huge. What has been announced so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Much more is involved behind the scenes.

    I think that Libby and Rove should have kept their mouths shut to Fitzgerald, but that they should have told the whole story to the public. I have no respect for people like them who hide behind lawyers.

    I still think that the case against Libby is weak. All 5 counts involve lying about his conversations with Russert, Cooper, and Miller. Counts 1-3 only paraphrase what Libby says, and it is impossible to say whether Libby was truthful or not. Counts 4 and 5 include exact quotes, and allege these lies:

    4a. Russert asked Libby if he knew that Plame worked for the CIA.
    4b. Libby told Russert he wasn't aware of the Plame-CIA connection.
    5. Libby told Cooper he heard of Plame from other reporters.

    Fitzgerald thinks that 4b is a lie because of other evidence that Libby knew of the Plame-CIA connection. But I think that Fitzgerald is simply misreading Libby's statement. Libby was not denying under oath that he knew about the connection; he was just saying that he was not revealing the connection to Russert. So I think that 4b will be dismissed.

    4a is Russert's word against Libby's. Maybe Russert is lying to cover up another source. Maybe Russert forgot when he was questioned a year later. We don't have Russert's quotes, so maybe Fitzgerald has misinterpreted them also. Maybe there was a simple misunderstanding, such as Russert asking about who sent Wilson, and Libby assuming that Russert was asking about Plame.

    Count 5 could also be a simple mistake. It seems quite plausible that Libby intended to tell Cooper that he heard about Plame from other reporters and didn't, but thought that he did. Or that he did tell Cooper, but Cooper ignored it because he got the impression that Libby knew for sure.

    If I were on the jury, and this were all the evidence, then I'd vote to acquit on all counts.

    John writes:

    Libby's story is that some reporter told him (rather than the other way around) that Wilson's wife worked at CIA. Unless Libby can produce a reporter who will corroborate that story, he's going to jail.

    Your proposed defense is pathetic because it does not address that basic fact. Some reporter has to step forward and testify that he learned about Wilson/Plame from someone other than Libby and then told Libby about it.

    Ain't gonna happen.

    I agree that there is strong evidence that Libby knew about Plame before he talked to the reporters, and that if he denied that to the feds, then he committed a crime.

    But I look at the Libby quotes in the indictment, and I just don't read them that way. Libby is merely explaining to the feds how he pretended not to know about Plame when he talked to the reporters. There is nothing wrong with that. Fitzgerald never asked Libby directly, "Did you know about Plame when you talked to Russert?"

    I don't know why everyone is so impressed with Fitzgerald. I think that he is an incompetent bozo. He spent 2 years doing an investigation, and then just has this trivial indictment. Worse, he cannot seem to make up his mind about indicting Rove. He says that legally he can only talk about the indictment, and yet he insinuates that Libby and Rove have committed other crimes. He subpoenas Miller and Novak, but they are curiously absent from the indictment. I can only guess that he thinks that Libby described those conversations accurately. But most importantly, he has failed to nail down the alleged crime. If Libby were really telling brazen and blatant lies, then there ought to be some quote to prove it. (You can download the indictment from this CNN story.)

     
    McConnell on Bush v Gore
    Judge Michael McConnell is being mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee. In this Slate article, McConnell seems to agree with Breyer's opinion on Bush v Gore, which said that the Florida recount was unconstitutional but that the Supreme Court should have extended the date and ordered its own recounting scheme. I think that was the goofiest of the Bush v Gore opinions.

    I think McConnell says some other stupid things in that column. He says that Breyer's view could have been unanimous, but really only Souter expressed similar views. Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas were against letting the courts intervene in the election, and Stevens and Ginsburg wanted to let the Florida Supreme Court recount it according to its wishes. McConnell thinks that all nine agreed that holding that ordering a manual recount was within the Florida Supreme Court's authority. But that's not true. I don't think that the Florida Supreme Court had any legal authority to order a manual recount under either Florida or federal law, and I don't think that a majority on the Supreme Court thought so either.

    McConnell goes on the say that the decision lacked political judgment. It would have been more acceptable, he says, if Gore lost because his forces were working around the clock scrambling for votes until the deadline, and then came up short. His opinion is surprising for someone who wants to be considered a strict constructionist. If there is a lawful election certification, and the recount is unlawful, then the courts should stop it regardless of political considerations.


    Friday, Oct 28, 2005
     
    Libby was Marc Rich's lawyer
    John writes:
    Isn't it a no-brainer that a person who represented a foreign power should be disqualified from any high position in the U.S. government?

    Such a person was not only allowed in the White House; for the past five years, he has apparently been the single most powerful WH official on foreign policy matters, sitting with Bush and Cheney on every important decision. Mary Matalin called him "Cheney's Cheney": he does for Cheney what Cheney does for Bush.

    The "foreign power" that Libby represented was Marc Rich, the billionaire international gangster who had renounced his U.S. citizenship. Rich was deeply involved in so many international events from his base in Switzerland that he was essentially a foreign power in his own right.

    Rich and his partner Pincus Green were indicted by U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani in 1983 for a variety of crimes. They fled and were on the FBI's list of "10 Most Wanted" fugitives. Both men received full pardons by Bill Clinton on Jan. 20, 2001.

    On March 1, 2001, a Congressional committee chaired by Dan Burton held a hearing about Clinton's last-minute pardons. Libby, then already in his White House job (which does not require Senate confirmation), testified that he had represented Marc Rich from 1985-1989 and 1993-2000. (During the 4-year gap, Libby was working for Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, which was then headed by Dick Cheney.)

    Libby further testified that Rich had renounced his U.S. citizenship when Libby began representing him in 1985.

    I would say anyone who represented a foreign interest should never be allowed into the White House. But especially, someone who for at least 12 years represented one of the world's most notorious international gangsters, a fugitive from U.S. justice, should not have a seat at the table when U.S. foreign policy is made.

    I am trying to make sense out of Libby's indictment. The crux of the case is that Russert's recollection of a phone 2 years ago differs from Libby's in some minor details. It seems clear that Libby either lied to Russert or lied to the grand jury, but lying to Russert would have been legal (and appropriate).
     
    The human haplotype map
    The human genome folks are finally admitting that different racial groups have different genomes, and that such differences may be important in understanding genetic disease. See the NY Times on the hapmap.

    Wednesday, Oct 26, 2005
     
    Evo Devo
    Bob sends this article about evo devo, an alternative evolutionary model.
    Evo devo’s emphasis on switch-throwing represents a profound departure from evolutionary biology’s long obsession with genes. Animal evolution works not so much by changing genes, Carroll maintains, but by changing when and where a conserved set of genes is expressed. In the lingo, evolution is regulatory (involving patterns of gene expression), not structural (involving the precise proteins coded by genes).
    It says that evo devo is not quite a paradigm shift.

    Tuesday, Oct 25, 2005
     
    Importing cheap labor
    Ephraim Schwartz in InfoWorld says:
    It appears there is hard evidence to prove that employers are using the H-1B visa program to hire cheap labor; that is, to pay lower wages than the national average for programming jobs.

    According to “The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers — F.Y. 2004,” a report by Programmers Guild board member John Miano, non-U.S. citizens working in the United States on an H-1B visa are paid “significantly less than their American counterparts.” How much less? “On average, applications for H-1B workers in computer occupations were for wages $13,000 less than Americans in the same occupation and state.” ...

    The average salary for a programmer in California is $73,960, according to the OES. The average salary paid to an H-1B visa worker for the same job is $53,387; a difference of $20,573. ...

    Miano says lobbyists will admit that a small number of companies are abusing the H-1B program, but what he has found in this research is that almost everyone is abusing it.

    This should be obvious. Most, if not all, H-1B computer programmers are hired because they are cheaper than Americans.
     
    George Clooney's troubles
    Maybe I shouldn't pick in George Clooney and his politically misguided (leftist) movie that just bombed. He has other troubles:
    “There was this scene where I was taped to a chair and getting beaten up and we did quite a few takes. The chair was kicked over and I hit my head,” Clooney said in an interview on National Public Radio. ... Clooney’s complaints were dismissed until spinal fluid started leaking from his nose. He has since had numerous operations. ... "And my dog got attacked by a rattlesnake and killed.”

    Sunday, Oct 23, 2005
     
    Not enough is known
    On Miers:
    CHATHAM - Longtime conservative author and political activist Phyllis Schlafly, speaking to a local group Friday night, criticized President Bush's latest choice for the U.S. Supreme Court, saying not enough is known about Harriet Miers' legal philosophy. "She might be a very nice lady, but I think from Bush's point of view, it's a mistake," Schlafly said. "Bush went through the (presidential) campaign leading us to believe he would appoint a judge like (Antonin) Scalia or (Clarence) Thomas, and she's not that. She's 60 years old, and she's never written anything about constitutional issues. We don't have a clue as to what is her constitutional philosophy." ...

    "When Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she had a very clear paper trail. You knew exactly what she would do. You knew exactly that she would support Roe v. Wade ... that she would follow every feminist line ... I think Bush is entitled to have her opposite number," Schlafly said.

    While she did not offer a candidate she would prefer to see in Miers' place, she said there are many far more qualified people, including women.

    "When Clinton appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she had a very clear paper trail. You knew exactly what she would do. You knew exactly that she would support Roe v. Wade ... that she would follow every feminist line ... I think Bush is entitled to have her opposite number," Schlafly said.

    "We have to have somebody who has a strong constitutional philosophy, someone who believes in the Constitution as it was written, not the way they wish it was written ..."

     
    Federal law against lying
    Sen. Arlen Spector thinks that his staff can quiz his political enemies, and send them to jail if they give any false info:
    Meanwhile, he's having his staff talk to Dr. Dobson and the Texas judges to find out exactly what they did or did not say. "There's some talk of wanting to place them under oath," he says, "and I'm opposed to that. It's a violation of 18 U.S. Code 1001 to give a false statement to a federal official, and I think that's sufficient. It carries a jail term. . . . But I don't think anyone's interested in prosecuting someone for perjury. We want to find out what the facts are."
    Liza writes:
    I am really convinced that something has to be done to repeal the vague federal crimes of lying to federal officials (18 USC 1001) and obstruction of justice. We've already seen those statutes abused in a variety of contexts, including Martha Stewart's prosecution and probably forthcoming indictments for the Valerie Plame affair. Now, in today's WSJ, Sen. Spector invoked 18 USC 1001 as a way to throw in jail Jim Dobson and the Texas judges if they aren't forthcoming in telling Spector's staff what was said about Harriet Miers in private conversations. Spector allowed as how he didn't think it was necessary to put them under oath, because 18 USC 1001 already carries sufficient penalties. Can you believe this?

    I'm not aware of any state laws criminalizing lies not made under oath. Why do the feds need such a law?

    I am all in favor of getting rid of those federal lying and obstruction laws. I don't even think that Nixon's alleged Watergate crimes should have been illegal.
     
    Court is soft on homosexual rape
    The Kansas Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional to consider whether statutory rape is heterosexual or homosexual in handing out penalties. Weird. Lots of states give higher penalties to a man statutory raping a girl than a woman statory raping a boy. Nobody thinks that is unconstitutional.
     
    Reasons for opposing Miers
    Mathew D. Staver writes:
    I am deeply disappointed in the president's decision to nominate Miers to fill the seat of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. My opposition is twofold. First, the president had a significant list of individuals who had a long and well-known track record setting forth their judicial philosophy, their interpretive understanding of the Constitution and their positions on specific moral issues. Instead of choosing from this highly qualified list, the president chose an invisible nominee. Second, even if Miers were to turn out to be a good candidate, nominating her sends the wrong message. For 60 years, she has held her views in silence. It sends a terrible message to our future conservative leaders that if they want to be appointed to positions of influence, they must keep their views on the Constitution under wraps and their positions regarding religious and moral issues close to the vest.
    Robert H. Bork makes similar arguments and says:
    Some moderate (i.e., lukewarm) conservatives admonish the rest of us to hold our fire until Ms. Miers's performance at her hearing tells us more about her outlook on law, but any significant revelations are highly unlikely.
    Miers does indeed deserve a fair hearing. Maybe she will impress us. But it is very unlikely.

    Saturday, Oct 22, 2005
     
    Science news
    Greenland news:
    Greenland's icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists. ...

    Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning.

    But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes, say Johannessen and team. ...

    But, they say, the thickening seems consistent with theories of global warming, ...

    Global warming is one of those theories like evolution, where all observations are consistent with the theory, whether anyone predicted them or not.

    Meanwhile, University of Oregon scientists say prehistoric global warming may have saved the Earth from greenhouse sterilization.


    Friday, Oct 21, 2005
     
    Another leftist movie bombs
    Bob writes:
    Your prediction about Good Night and Good Luck seems to be correct. They haven't given up. Good Morning America was hyping it this morning. Looks like they are pushing on a string.
    The chart shows that the movie dropped to 15th place at the box office this week, in spite of rave reviews from leftists in the media.

    Apparently the movie shows Sen. McCarthy exposing a commie working at a sensitive job at the US Army, and shows him criticizing the Army for hiring commies. I think that the average viewer today would not even understand why the pinko movie makers think that exposing commies was a bad thing. Someone who appears to have allegiances to a military enemy might be a spy, or might make decisions against USA interests.

     
    Astrology is a theory
    Evolutionists are bragging:
    Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.
    The actual issue was whether astrology is closer to being a hypothesis or a theory, under some definitions published by the National Academy of Sciences. Under those definitions, astrology is more of a hypothesis, because "... theories are the end points of science." Behe correctly pointed out that common usage among scientists is to use the word "theory" more broadly. A theory might be a collection of unverified hypotheses.

    Evolutionists are peculiarly hung up on definitions. This article discusses some of these definitions, and says:

    Recent criticisms of evolutionary theory caused the NABT (National Association of Biology Teachers) to change their definition of evolution. It was:
    The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.
    Last year, due to criticism that this statement would be used by creationists to attack the teaching of evolution, the NABT dropped the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" from this definition since these they implied that God had nothing to do with the origin of life; a question which the NABT now states can’t be answered by science.
    The critics are correct when they point out that leftist-atheist-evolutionists push their definitions in order to force their unscientific agenda.

    Update: The evolutionists are gloating about some other admissions that Behe made. Behe denied that he was writing a book, but was confronted with evidence that several others are writing a book and expecting him to contribute. Behe also said that his anti-evolution book was peer-reviewed, but it appears that one or more of those peer reviews was not very rigorous.


    Thursday, Oct 20, 2005
     
    Miller promotes grand jury leaks
    Judith Miller now justifies a proposed federal journalist shield law by arguing that grand jury leaks were a good thing in the Balco case!

    I fail to see that anything good came out of the Balco leaks. Barry Bonds and others got unfairly maligned. The leaks did not tell us the extent of steroid use in professional baseball or anything useful. If reporters can publish grand jury leaks with impunity, then we as might as well abolish the secret grand jury.

     

    John writes about this LA Times op-ed:
    The moral people versus the process people. Does Dahlia have a point?
    Dahlia Lithwick covers the U.S. Supreme Court for Slate, but consistently gets the facts and the laws wrong. I think her point is that conservatives are preoccupied with Roe v Wade because they think that it was morally and legally wrong. Some emphasize moral reasons, while other emphasize legal reasons. She pretends to not understand why Roe v Wade would be more objectionable than other bad court decisions.

    She wrote:

    But first, consider this: Roe is quickly becoming legally irrelevant. ... Roe stopped being where the real abortion action was a long time ago.

    And finally, consider the polling data: Most Americans support Roe. The most recent Gallup Poll — from August of this year — shows that 54% of respondents consider themselves to be pro-choice, while 38% think of themselves as pro-life. A Gallup Poll taken last July showed that 68% of Americans do not want Roe overturned, and only 29% do. The most interesting aspect of that polling data, however, is this: These numbers have shifted almost not at all in 30 years. Despite all the screaming and sharpening of pitchforks since Roe came down in 1973, not a lot of minds have changed on the subject.

    The "abortion action" ceased in 1973 when the US Supreme Court said that a woman has a constitutional right to have an abortion at any time during the pregnancy, and for any reason, provided that she gets a physician to do it.

    The polls have never supported the sweeping ruling in Roe v Wade. Here is a summary of the polls. Only 28% say that abortion should be permitted in all cases. (CBS News Poll. July 29-Aug. 2, 2005.) Only 35% say that abortion should be generally available to those who want it. (Pew Research. July 13-17, 2005.) Only 24% say that abortion should be legal under any circumstances. (CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. June 24-26, 2005.)

    Meanwhile, a whopping 80% favor laws requiring that at least one parent be told before a girl under 18 years of age could have an abortion. (CBS News Poll. July 13-14, 2005.) All such laws have been declared unconstitutional under Roe v Wade.

    Interpreting polls about overturning Roe v Wade is a little trickier, because a lot of people misunderstand what Roe v Wade actually did, and a lot of people think that overturning it would mean that a human fetus would have a right to life, and all abortion would be unconstitutional. Nearly all of the polls describe Roe v Wade as legalizing abortion during the first three months. Those polls report 60% or so saying that they are willing to let Roe v Wade stand. The one exception I found was a 2002 LA Times poll which described Roe v Wade as permitting a woman to get an abortion from a doctor at any time. Only 46% were in favor.

    The Supreme Court is not likely to completely overturn Roe v Wade any time soon. It is more likely that the court will hear challenges that deal with the aspects of Roe v Wade that deal with late-term abortion or parental notification or permission. When asked about whether states can ban partial-birth abortions, support for Roe v Wade drops to 20-34%, depending on the poll.


    Wednesday, Oct 19, 2005
     
    Coulter makes a mistake
    John writes:
    Ann Coulter's new column (also here) has an embarrassing blunder about slavery. It's not true that "democracy ... never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slavemasters." That is specifically provided in the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2) as well as the Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress in 1850.

    Dred Scott was not an "escaped" slave -- he was *taken* by his master to free soil. That was the whole point of the Dred Scott case.

    Coulter does makes some good points in her column. The available evidence indicates that Harriet Miers is more like to vote to overturn Roe v Wade than John Roberts. Conservatives are commonly accused of having an abortion litmus test for approval of judges, and they are also accused of just caring about the outcomes of cases, rather than the law. But if those accusations were true, then conservatives would be much happier about Miers than Roberts.

    But in fact Coulter and other conservatives like Roberts better than Miers. Roberts has a judicial philosophy that is grounded in the text of the Constitution and other laws. Miers is being sold to us based on her personal beliefs, not her judicial philosophy, and her qualifications are minimal. If the Miers nomination fails, it will be because many conservatives believe that the nomination was not in accord with Bush's campaign promises.

     
    Radical anti-life scientist lobby
    The journal Nature just published a couple of papers about methods to obtain embryonic stem cells without destroying a viable embryo. You would think that this would be good news for scientists, because it might be a source of stem-cells with fewer ethical objections. But David Magnus and Arthur Caplan, a couple of big-shot academic bio-ethicists, wrote this article for the Mercury News.
    The driving force behind these papers is not science. It is, rather, to use some rather unimpressive technical tricks to meet the objections of some critics of embryonic stem-cell research. In a word, it is scientific pandering. And it is wrong. ...

    Does it make sense to fiddle with embryos to satisfy critics? Hardly. ... Moreover, holding up important research to pursue possible alternatives because there are critics of the morality of existing techniques is a terrible idea. The attention showered upon these articles in the media and by some politicians who oppose embryonic stem-cell research is a very dangerous development for anyone who is interested in doing embryonic stem-cell research or benefiting from it. ...

    There is no evidence yet that primate cloning is possible ... Must science proceed only if everyone in the nation agrees that the research is worth doing? If so, no science will ever be conducted. We would never do research in evolutionary biology since there are creationists who oppose it. ... We should not be trying to appease a minority with scientific flimflammery while delaying promising research that one day may lead to treatments that improve millions of lives.

    Somebody is paying these folks to be bio-ethicists, and they are against the whole idea of addressing the ethical concerns.

    There is a lot of evidence that primate cloning is possible. A lot more evidence than there is for the idea that embryonic stem cell research will improve millions of lives. So far, it hasn't improved anyone's life. These bioethicists are just shills for science labs who want more govt funding with no strings attached.

    Also, there are no creationists trying to stop research in evolutionary biology, as far as I know. The creationists support doing research. It is only the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who try to censor other points of view.

    This article is just more proof that scientists will not put reasonable ethical limits on what they do. Instead they will appoint bogus bioethicists who will justify anything in order to get more federal funding.

     
    Gorilla learns to use tools
    Latest pro-evolution news:
    (AP) A young gorilla in a Congo sanctuary is smashing palm nuts between two rocks to extract oil, surprising and intriguing scientists who say they have much to learn about what gorillas can do, and about what it says about evolution.

    It had been thought that the premeditated use of stones and sticks to accomplish a task like cracking nuts was restricted to humans and the smaller, more agile chimpanzees. ...

    He said the finding indicates that complex tool use may not be a trait developed only by humans and chimpanzees and could have its origins earlier in the evolutionary chain, among ancestors common to both humans and their closest relatives, the great apes.

    Here is a letter to the San Jose paper:
    Gorilla evidence may be misleading

    News flash! Surprised ``experts'' have found that a gorilla using stones to break open palm nuts is another sign of evolution linking man and gorillas! (``Scientists study gorilla who uses tools,'' Oct. 18). This is laughable. Have these ``experts'' ever watched a sea otter smash shelled sea animals using rocks to gain access to their food? Give me a break! I sure hope we didn't have to pay for this research project!

    Tom Corchero
    San Jose

    Corchero is correct. Even crows can use tools, and the evolutionists are always trying to claim that the birds are descended from dinosaurs.

    Tuesday, Oct 18, 2005
     
    Another book review
    RAH writes:
    It's amazing all the things escaping the liberal memory hole these days. I never knew anything about Phyllis Schlafly that wasn't spoonfed to me by the media as teenager in the 1970's, and I was in St. Louis at the time...
    and sends this review of D. Critchlow's new book on Phyllis Schlafly.

    Monday, Oct 17, 2005
     
    Goofy anti-Bush questions
    Here are some kooky leftist questions at White House press conferences.
    Wednesday, October 29, 2003 - 12:15 PM
    Mokhiber: Earlier this year, General (William) Boykin said the following: "George Bush was not elected by a majority of voters in the United States. He was appointed by God." Does the President believe that God played any role in getting him to the White House?

    Scott McClellan: Again, the President has addressed that matter.

    Mokhiber: Not whether God played any role in getting him to the White House.

    Scott McClellan: The President has addressed that matter and I'm not going to go back through it. ...

    Tuesday, February 1, 2005 12:15 PM
    Mokhiber: Scott, last night, in an amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice Department came down in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments at courthouses and statehouses around the country. My question is - does the President believe in Commandment Number Six - thou shalt not kill - as it applies to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?

    Scott McLellan: Go ahead, next question

     
    Threatening family cars
    The New Republic magazine says:
    When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, "because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van."
    She denies that she ever thought that the mini-van was a mainstay of the family. She hates mini-vans.

    The statement doesn't even make any sense because the fuel economy standards promoted sales of mini-vans, because they were exempted as light trucks.


    Sunday, Oct 16, 2005
     
    Yapping on the right
    David M. Shribman says:
    But the yapping on the right -- maybe it is yelping, not yapping -- is indicative of a deep distrust conservatives have about politics even in an era when conservatives dominate politics.

    That may seem contradictory, but it is not. Pick up the phone and call Phyllis Schlafly, whose role in American politics is almost always underestimated on the right and just as often ridiculed on the left. But she was, to use a phrase populated by Dean Acheson, a one-time anti-hero of the right, present at the creation -- at the creation, that is, of the modern conservative movement.

    Here's what she says: "Conservatives are very angry -- and we have a right to be angry. We elected Bush to move the court away from its ideas of judicial supremacy. We have nothing to go on to suggest he's moved the bench one inch."

    So far, so good. But there is more, and it is telling. Faith may be the evidence for things not seen, but conservatives feel they have seen so little that there is little reason for faith. That may strike you as a little self-pitying, but as a measure of the depth of this feeling, listen to the last two sentences of my conversation with Mrs. Schlafly:

    "If we were going to trust anyone, we'd trust Reagan, and he gave us O'Connor," she said in a reference to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose seat Ms. Miers has been nominated to fill. "So we don't trust anybody."

    So right now -- proof that even in our sanitized brand of politics there is room for surprise -- the greatest danger for the president lies not with his determined enemies on the left, who spare no epithet for him. The danger is his friends on the right who are in full-throated rebellion, and who feel duped and betrayed.

    The conservatives are just trying to hold Bush to his campaign promises.
     
    Judith Miller testifies
    She has now testified to the grand jury:
    WASHINGTON (AP) -- Notes by the New York Times' Judith Miller that were turned over in a criminal investigation contain the name of a covert CIA officer, but the reporter has told prosecutors she cannot recall who disclosed the name, the newspaper reported Saturday.
    So why did she spend 85 days in jail? Did she forget the name while sitting in jail? Who is she protecting now? Why did the NY Times want this case prosecuted?

    This case is getting weirder. I say that she should be sent back to jail.

    A lot of people are saying that Karl Rove is going to be indicted because he has testified so many times. But that is not the way it works. He has a 5A right not to testify against himself, so his testimony may have ruined any case against him. It is unlikely that he is a target.

     
    Christianity v Mohammedanism
    New Scientist magazine tries to analyze religion in its current issue, as summarized here:
    In "End of the Enlightenment", they make a point that is both obvious (once you hear it) and profound: Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, which are "often portrayed as being on opposite sides in a 'cosmic struggle' of good against evil," are actually two sides of the same coin. Both are threatened by modernity, especially in the form of secular humanism. The myriad successes of rationalism over the past several hundred years have resulted in a surprising backlash. "Almost everywhere you look -- with the possible exception of western Europe -- fundamentalist religions are on the march." These religions foster an Us-against-Them mentality that we see playing itself out every day in the news. ...

    While we are distracted and terrified by the war, the fundamentalists are busy undermining the pillars of secular society. As New Scientist bluntly says in "Enemy at the gates", "their aim is to destroy science" via a wedge strategy that starts with an attack on Darwinian evolution in the form of the "theory" of Intelligent Design. Every scientific theory that touches on man's place in the universe will likely be attacked: the Big Bang, the age of the Earth, etc.

    This is absurd. The Mohammedan religion is at war with the modern world. The war is supported by prominent religious leaders, relgious teachings, and the hoi polloi in many Mohammedan countries. They support it whether they are fundamentalist or not.

    Christians do not go around planting bombs or supporting terrorist acts. You could argue that Christians have supported the Iraq War, but it is certainly not a Fundamentalist Christian war. The war had broad public support from Congress and American citizens, the vast majority of which are not fundamentalist.

    The comments about science are kooky and paranoid. Evolution is taught in every public school in the USA. There is one small school district in Penn. where some fundamentalist Christians want to also read a one-paragraph statement referring to intelligent design, and the leftist-atheist-evolutionists have made a federal case out of it. This is not an attempt to destroy science. It is an example of narrow-minded evolutionists who want to censor anyone who disagrees with them.


    Friday, Oct 14, 2005
     
    Belief is genetic
    This article claims that twin studies show that there may be a genetic inclination to religiosity in some people.

    Thursday, Oct 13, 2005
     
    Catherine Crier's new book
    I just stumbled across Catherine Crier's new book, Contempt: How the Right Is Wronging American Justice in a bookstore. Crier is a talking head on Court TV. The book is a hysterical rant about how evangelical religious right-wing extremists are taking over American courts. As evidence on the back cover, she says that 79M people watched Justice Sunday II, and that most of the federal appellate judges have been appointed by Republicans.

    The figure of 79M is apparently based on misreading this press release. The show was available on obscure cable TV channels that were available in 79M households, but the number of viewers was far smaller. The figure doesn't even help Crier's case, because if that many people really watched the show, then it would prove that the American public agrees with the conservative court critics, and not with Crier.

    The book's publication date is today, but her timing is bad because she has missed the story of the Miers nomination. Miers is the first evangelical Christian to be nominated to the Supreme Court in about 50 years, and she is being attacked by many of the right-wingers in the book. If there were really a right-wing evangelical conspiracy to take over the courts, then you would think that they would actually work to get someone on the court.

    She attacks Justice Scalia because she says that he is the "flag bearer" for "original intent" on the US Supreme Court. This is proof that she is an idiot. From a 1996 Scalia speech:

    The theory of originalism treats a constitution like a statute, and gives it the meaning that its words were understood to bear at the time they were promulgated. You will sometimes hear it described as the theory of original intent. You will never hear me refer to original intent, because as I say I am first of all a textualist, and secondly an originalist. If you are a textualist, you don't care about the intent, and I don't care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words.
    Scalia is surely the most anti-intent justice on the Supreme Court. He goes out of his way to criticize the other justices for relying on legislative intent. Crier could not read very many Scalia opinions and still think that he favors original intent.

    I am sure that this book has many other problems. These were just a couple of things that I noticed in the bookstore.


    Wednesday, Oct 12, 2005
     
    California political reform
    John sends this article which says that the Arnold Calif. ballot proposisitons are pulling ahead in the polls. Good. I am voting for all of them.
     
    Edward R. Murrow movie
    Hollywood has made yet another anti-McCarthyism movie, Good Night, and Good Luck. As usual, the critics rave about the movie and how important the message will be, but I bet it bombs at the box office, just like all the others. The average American movie-goer doesn't understand why the anti-communists were supposed to be so bad.

    Here are critical reviews by Slate, and the NY Sun. See also Human Events. John says this about the author:

    Allan Ryskind is an expert on Commies and Hollywood. His father, the famous screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, was one of the "friendly witnesses" (along with Ayn Rand) who testified before HUAC in opposition to the "Hollywood Ten".
    The movie was partially funded by billionaire Jeff Skoll, who wants to make movies with a message.

    Monday, Oct 10, 2005
     
    Ethically acceptable stem cells
    Bob says this NY Times article vindicates his stem cell predictions. I think that his prediction was that scientists would figure out a way to create human stem cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells, without creating human embryoes.

    My prediction is that in the long run, Bush's stem cell policy will turn out to have advanced medical research, not impeded it. That is what has happened so far.

     
    VAWA jurisdiction
    Andy writes:
    VAWA, as we all should know, was the centerpiece of the early Clinton Administration when he enjoyed overwhelming control of both houses of Congress. VAWA established a new, highly punitive cause of action for broadly defined "gender motivated" violence or threat of violence.

    Perhaps Rehnquist's greatest achievement was holding together a 5-4 majority to invalidate the provision of this law that opened the floodgates of federal courts to them. We filed a brief requesting that result, and we won. United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000).

    However, only today did I realize just how bad this statute really was. It created a new federal remedy that could be enforced in either federal or state court. Each had concurrent jurisdiction. It's common knowledge that plaintiffs typically prefer state court, where they can go for higher judgments and play the judges and juries better.

    Now get this: VAWA expressly denied defendants the right to remove a VAWA action to federal court! The right of removal to federal court that belongs to defendants in virtually every other action (e.g., for diversity or federal question) was statutorily denied to VAWA defendants!

    This is still in the Code: 28 USC 1445(d). I can't believe this outrageous denial of rights to defendants. This may be useful in reminding liberals how they remove federal jurisdiction when it suits them.

    Unfortunately, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has just been renewed by the Congress.

    Friday, Oct 07, 2005
     
    Leftist law professor attacks Scalia
    On the the Oct. 4 PBS NewsHour, Stanford law prof Pamela S. Karlan said:
    Justices Scalia and Thomas who have voted during their time on the court to strike down more federal laws and more state laws, probably, than any two justices in modern times.
    No, she is wrong. Here is a link to a discussion of an academic study by Gerwitz and Golder saying that Scalia and Thomas have voted to strike down more FEDERAL LAWS than others on the CURRENT COURT.

    The study is just leftist propaganda anyway. The law profs are trying to argue that it is the right-wingers who are the activists, not the left-wingers. The argument is so idiotic that it is silly.

    The Warren Court and subsequent liberals knocked out many 100s of laws that had a huge impact on millions of people. They required forced school busing. They set rules for legislative redistricting, invalidating all 50 state constitutions. They required Miranda warnings and other radical changes in police procedures. They legalized pornography and abortion. Just recently, they allowed eminent domain actions to take land for reasons other than public use, and they abolished the death penalty for 17-year-olds and murderers with IQs below 70.

    What have the conservatives done that could be called activist?

    The ABA (lawyer lobby) Journal says:

    More than half of Americans are angry and disappointed with the nation’s judiciary, a new survey done for the ABA Journal eReport shows.

    A majority of the survey respondents agreed with statements that "judicial activism" has reached the crisis stage, and that judges who ignore voters’ values should be impeached. Nearly half agreed with a congressman who said judges are "arrogant, out-of-control and unaccountable."

    The survey results surprised some legal experts with the extent of dissatisfaction shown toward the judiciary. "These are surprisingly large numbers," says Mark V. Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

    "These results are simply scary," adds Charles G. Geyh, a constitutional law professor at Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington. ...

    Several legal scholars responding to the survey results were startled by the numbers.

    Karlan is probably one of those out-of-touch leftist legal scholars who would be startled. Americans are not angry and disappointed with Scalia and Thomas; they disapprove of the leftist judicial supremacists who think that they can impose their political views on us.
     
    Phyllis Schlafly in the news
    The Wash. Times has just published a biographical article
    ST. LOUIS -- Few living Americans have done as much to shape the nation's direction as Phyllis Schlafly, who is arguably the most important woman in American political history.

    She is the suburban housewife turned best-selling author who heralded conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential campaign as "A Choice, Not an Echo," followed up by becoming an authority on nuclear-missile defense and then, in a stunning upset, led the forces that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

    When asked about her greatest accomplishments, however, Mrs. Schlafly takes care to mention perhaps the most important lesson of her long career -- "teaching conservatives that we can win."

    Along the way, she helped arouse the slumbering giant of American politics -- millions of socially conservative but previously apolitical churchgoers. She saw their potential and figured out how to turn them into a separate force on the political right.

    What Mrs. Schlafly calls the "pro-family movement" helped elect Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House and establish Republicans' decadelong dominance in Congress.

    There is a new book about her by Donald T. Critchlow.
     
    More suspicions about Miers
    David Frum blasts the Miers nomination. Ouch.

    The main arguments for Miers are that Bush knows her, she was a successful Dallas lawyer in a big law firm, and she is a born-again Christian. I am waiting for better arguments. Being a Bush crony is a negative, and we should have no religious tests for government office. I even have questions about how successful a lawyer she was. A lawyer in that position would have earned $400k or more a year, and yet her financial disclosure shows she only has $500k or so.

    You can read her articles here.


    Thursday, Oct 06, 2005
     
    Catholic cardinal still dubious about evolution
    Evolutionists are gloating that Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has backtracked on his denunciation of evolution. His earlier statement is summarized here:
    In his essay, Cardinal Schönborn accepts that human and other organisms have a common ancestry and, by implication, that the species on earth today have evolved over a long period from other species no longer extant. That is, he accepts the historical fact that life has evolved. He distinguishes this acceptable fact of evolution from what he characterizes as the unacceptable "neo-Darwinian" theory that, in the words of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church of which he was an editor, evolution is "reducible to pure chance and necessity." ...

    In the evolutionary process, he writes, there must have been "an internal finality," the Divine plan. He calls attention to the fact that John Paul II, who endorsed the science of evolution in his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, nevertheless insisted in his other writings that there must also be such a principle of finality and direction built into the material process. Such internal finality and direction cannot be omitted from the minimal Christian position.

    Here is the new story:
    “Without a doubt, Darwin pulled off quite a feat with his main work and it remains one of the very great works of intellectual history,” Schoenborn declared in a lecture in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on Sunday. “I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition — that the limits of a scientific theory are respected.”

    Science studies what is observable, and scientists overstep the boundaries of their discipline when they conclude evolution proves there was no creator, said the cardinal, 60, a top Church doctrinal expert and close associate of Pope Benedict XVI.

    I see no change here. He still accepts all scientific knowledge about evolution, but rejects the notion that it is entirely unguided, unplanned, and random, as is claimed by leftist-atheist-evolutionist Dawkins and the Wiesel Nobel cabal.
     
    Canada not so liberal
    I didn't know this:
    In tolerant, open-minded, diverse and creative Canada therapeutic cloning--defined as creating an in vitro embryo with the same chromosomes as any other individual--is a crime punishable by ten years in prison....

    In liberal Canada... the law defines cloning expansively. Future procedures that might avoid religious objections would still be illegal. The goal is to stop certain research altogether.

    In the USA, therapeutic cloning (aka embryonic stem cell research) is completely legal, and is heavily funded in universities, private industry, federal and state governments. The only restriction is that the federally funded research must use approved stem cell lines, of which many are commonly available.
     
    Alternate universe
    Al Gore says:
    How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?
    The scary part is that there is a parallel universe in which Al Gore is the president, according to the many worlds theory.

    Tuesday, Oct 04, 2005
     
    Miers will serve the donuts
    Liza recommends this article which supports Harriet Miers and says:
    As the court’s new junior member, the 60 year old lady Harriet Miers will finally give a break to Stephen Breyer, who has been relegated to closing and opening the door of the conference room, and fetching beverages for his more senior Justices. Her ability to do this type of work with no resentment, no discomfort, and no regrets will at the least endear her to the others. It will also confirm her as the person who cheerfully keeps the group on an even keel, more comfortable than otherwise might be the case with a level of emotional solidarity.
    It also says that Miers is a hard worker, and has other good qualities.

    This is pathetic. The article misunderstands the dissatisfaction with Miers. Conservatives wanted an intellectual like Scalia or Thomas who understands and believes and can defend a legal philosophy of interpreting textual law, not making new law from politics and prejudices. Miers appears to be not up to the task.

    The article says:

    Ms. Miers has actually managed a business, a substantial one with hundreds of employees, and has had to meet a payroll and conform to tax, affirmative acttion, and other regulatory demands of the state. She has also been highly active in a White House during wartime, when national security considerations have been a matter of life and death.
    No, she hasn't managed a business. She was just a senior partner in a law firm. Giving private legal advice to Bush doesn't count for much, because we don't know whether the advice was any good or not.

    John writes:

    OK, so she's a pro-business, corporate lawyer. That's not what conservatives were looking for.

    Corporate/big business interests are, at best, indifferent to the conservative agenda. At worst, they are downright opposed. In either case, they typically resent the amount of time and space consumed by conservative political movements which they view as a distraction to money making business efficiency.

    Nothing in Miers' career as a corporate lawyer gives us much insight as to how she would have voted on the 100 most important Supreme Court cases of the last 50 years.

     
    USA control of the internet
    This USA-hater rants:
    When the US criticizes governmental control, the obvious retort is that there is already one government with extensive oversight powers over ICANN and the core technical functions of the Internet: the USA itself. The US is completely at a loss to explain why it should have that control, to the exclusion of all other governments. Its "but we are different" argument might find a receptive audience among US business interests, but it doesn't fly anywhere else. It's not enough for the US to say, "we are not an authoritarian state like China." For one thing, the US seems an increasingly authoritarian state to many in Europe, what with the Patriot Act and other recent measures forcing everyone entering the country to undergo biometric surveillance. But even if that is not an entirely fair perception, the US cannot claim that it will not use its unilateral power over ICANN for it already has. In August, the Bush administration responded to political pressure from conservative religious groups by asking ICANN to reconsider the creation of a top level domain for adult content. It was inevitable and entirely predictable that other governments, including erstwhile allies such as the European Union, would want their own piece of that power.
    We don't just distrust China. The EU doesn't believe in free speech either, and we don't need their meddling with the internet.
     
    Krugman errors admitted
    The NY Times has to keep issuing corrections when lying Bush-hater Paul Krugman says that Al Gore really won the 2000 election. Krugman's columns are no longer freely available online.
     
    More on Miers
    Buchanan on Miers.
    In a decision deeply disheartening to those who invested such hopes in him, Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren.
    Democrats sometimes claim that conservatives only care about where judges stand on abortion. They are wrong. Miers appears to be anti-abortion, but conservatives are very unhappy about her.

    Monday, Oct 03, 2005
     
    Berkeley lefty snubbed
    SF paper:
    Washington -- House Republicans rejected an effort Tuesday to name a post office in Berkeley after longtime Berkeley Councilwoman Maudelle Shirek after a conservative lawmaker questioned whether the 94-year-old activist represents American values. ...

    But House Republicans have sought to block the effort, mostly through a whisper campaign about her reported past ties to communist leaders and left-wing causes. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, objected Tuesday to Lee's proposal and rallied Republicans to defeat the measure in an unusual roll call vote.

    Lee, who said Shirek helped inspire her to run for elected office, was furious after the House defeated her measure on a mostly party line vote of 215 to 190. The measure needed two-thirds support for passage. ...

    In an interview with the Associated Press, King said Shirek had an "affiliation with the Communist Party" because she was involved with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley.

    It is not clear whether she was really a commie, but what good did she ever do?
     
    A lot of mediocre judges
    Here is a Senator on a Nixon nominee:
    Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they?
    Mediocrity is already well-represented on the Supreme Court.

    Thursday, Sep 29, 2005
     
    Ptolemy was not wrong
    I just watched a Cosmos rerun, and Carl Sagan listed some great scholars and scientists and said:
    There was the astronomy Ptolemy who compiled much of what today's pseudoscience of astrology -- his Earth-centered universe held sway for 1500 years showing that intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
    That is nonsense. Ptolemy was no more wrong than Einstein. Ptolemy had an exceptionally good model of the universe, and it is too his credit that it lasted so long.

    Sagan goes on to say, "We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution." I guess these are atheist code words.

     
    Gould hated right-wingers
    Demski quotes Steven Jay Gould, revealing Gould's political motives for attacking creationists.
     
    Sued for failed to cook the test
    CNN reports on a discrimination lawsuit against FedEx:
    James Finberg, an attorney representing the class, said FedEx normally promotes from within, yet three times the number of package handlers and loaders are minorities compared to drivers, who earn more. Twice the number of minorities fail promotional tests than do whites, Finberg added.

    "FedEx knows that black and Hispanics fail at a much higher rate, but yet has not changed the test," Finberg said.

    I guess the attorney is arguing that the law requiring rigging the test to favor blacks and hispanics.
     
    Evolutionist sympathy is not reciprocated
    An evolutionist blogger says:
    To understand what the Dover school board was trying to accomplish, consider how you would feel if your children, in the course of a compulsory education, were taught doctrines that contradicted your most cherished beliefs — that blandly invalidated your worldview without discussion. Think about being heavily taxed to destroy your own belief system. That's how the people in this community feel.
    Well said. This is the one point that gives me pause in thinking about this issue. While I find the beliefs of Christian evangelicals to be completely irrational, the fact remains that they are deeply held. So, yes, I can imagine how it feels to be forced to pay for an education that you belive puts your child's very soul in jeopardy.

    However, the reason I am not more sympathetic to this view is that I don't belive the sympathy is reciprocated. Sartwell is being very high-minded and ecumenical here, but the religious zealots on the other side do not share his even-handedness. Consider the issue of having “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Do you think for one second that the School Board majority that voted in favor of ID ever worries about telling atheist children that belief in God and loyalty to their country go hand in hand? Of course they don't. Quite the opposite.

    Why can't these evolutionist just agree to fairly tell the truth in schools? This guy seems to think that religious folks need to make some concessions to radical atheist demands.
     
    Compulsory vaccination
    John writes that Natl Review supports compulsory vaccination.

    The article cites a child who died from AIDS-related pneumonia, the 1918 Spanish Flu, and people dying of measles in the Third World. These are not good arguments for mandatory vaccination in the USA. Vaccines are not even recommended for HIV+ kids. Flu vaccines are recommended only for adults, and only kids have mandatory vaccines. No one dies of measles in the USA.

    Catherine Seipp concludes:

    All states allow children more likely to suffer vaccination side effects because of medical problems to enter school unimmunized (as they should), some allow religious exemptions (as they shouldn’t) and some, like California, allow families to opt out for any reason at all (which is why much of the rest of the country regards us as nuts.) ...

    I think California’s lax vaccination laws should be changed pronto ...

    California is indeed full of kooky people (mostly on the Left) who believe in alternative medicine, subscribe to various health fads, etc. We are also filled with legal and illegal immigrants bringing diseases into the state. And yet there are no public health problems that are attributable to "California's lax vaccination laws".

    Tuesday, Sep 27, 2005
     
    Another biography review
    Charlotte Hays writes:
    If Margaret Thatcher was the most important conservative woman of the 20th century, then who was the second most important? A good case can be made that it was Phyllis Schlafly, who almost single-handedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment a generation ago and who - to borrow the feminist terminology - is the founding mother of female conservative activism.
    Her main complaint about the book is that it is more about her political life than her personal life. I have not yet seen the book, but I think that the point was to focus on her political life.
     
    Evolution on trial
    In coverage of the Penn. ID trial, the SJ paper says:
    Evolutionary theory

    A small group of cells 3.5 billion years ago through random mutation and natural selection gave rise to the biological diversity that today thrives on Earth.

    ``What makes evolution a scientific explanation is that it makes testable predictions. You only believe theories when they make non-obvious predictions that are confirmed by scientific evidence.'' Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

    Lander is correct, but he is talking about micro-evolution, and his predictions are really those of population genetics. If a gene is known to reduce the probability that an animal will reproduce, then standard formulas may be used to predict the future of that gene. Population genetics can make and confirm such predictions.

    But how would anyone test the above statement of evolution theory? It seems to be artfully worded so as to be non-falsifiable. Does a "small group" mean one cell or a billion cells? Were random mutation and natural selection the only evolutionary mechanisms, or were their other more significant ones? Is all life descended from those cells, or did other life independently evolve?

    I don't doubt that animals evolve, but the evolutionists insist on these unscientific statements and on bragging about how scientific they are. Their description of evolutionary theory is bit like defining hurricane theory as:

    Atmospheric molecules going thru agitation and circulation give rise to the diverse weather on Earth.
    Such a statement has no content and cannot be tested.

    George writes:

    Your comparison is not fair because you are using definitions of evolution that are intended for the general public. If the theory of evolution were defined in terms of specifics, then creationists would attack those specifics. The public doesn't understand how science works. Theories get revised with new data all the time. The theory is not really wrong just because its specific predictions turn out to be false. They have to use a definition that emphasizes that evolution is a naturalistic process, without committing themselves to any mechanisms or timetables that might turn out to be incorrect.
    I don't think that the evolutionists understand how science works.
     
    Rebutting the TNR book review
    I was going to write a rebuttal to the TNR review of Critchlow's book (discussed below), but much of it is just idiotic innendo like this:
    Midwestern America was honeycombed with people who denounced Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Schlaflys were part of this milieu. The world they idealized was filled with rugged individualists, and it had no place for labor unions, cities, racial minorities, Jews, or liberated women. ... adherents of the Old Right became obsessed with the evils of communism in the years after World War II.
    This is just an underhanded way of implying that Phyllis Schlafly was a bigot. He has no facts or evidence to support it. It is a bit like saying, "Alan Wolfe was raised as a Jew and American Jews were very sympathetic to Soviet Communism."

    Of course the Old Right did consider communism an evil threat after WWII. The USSR really was a nasty oppresive regime; there really were commie spies in our govt; the USSR really was controlling Eastern Europe; and the USSR really was building a nuclear arsenal threatening the free world.

    Here are other criticisms of Phyllis and the book:

    • That in 1952 she advocated increases in defense spending but contradicted herself by opposing a draft and calling for a smaller government.

      He obviously does not understand what Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.

    • That Critchlow fails to realize that "Christian" is just a code word for anti-semitism.

      Eagle Forum has many Jewish members and supporters. One can be a proud Christian without being an anti-semite. Wolfe has a persecution complex.

    • That a certain Cagney and Lacey TV episode was not an incitement to violence.

      CBS promoted the episode as being about an assassin going to kill the anti-feminist leader as she gave a speech to 1000 followers. It was scheduled to be aired on a night that Phyllis Schlafly was giving a speech to 1000 followers. I have never seen any other instance in which a TV network targeted a real person at a real event for an attempted murder.

      Wolfe claims that the episode was postponed for months. My recollection is that CBS postponed it at the last minute for a week or two. But for a week before her big speech, CBS aired promotions about how the show would feature an assassin trying to kill her at the speech.

    • That her views on American nuclear strategy were in line with genuine defense intellectuals, but that she was an amateur on the subject.

    • That Schlafly should be blamed for other right-wing extremist groups like The John Birch Society.

      There is a long history of her enemies accusing her of being a member of Birch Society. It is not true. She had nothing to do with them. Even if it were, it is meaningless. Hardly anyone knows what the Birch Society stood for, except that the Left hated the organization. The Birch Society was staunchly anti-communist, and that is why it was hated.

    • That Schlafly's political involvement was inconsistent with being a good Christian.

    • That Schlafly was not consistent in her opposition to the ERA because she did not oppose all constitutional amendments.

    • That Schlafly was not really a populist because she sometimes took unpopular positions.

    These criticisms are just idiotic.


    Monday, Sep 26, 2005
     
    Another gun control failure
    John sends this Toronto column about how Canada's gun registry has not worked.

    Sunday, Sep 25, 2005
     
    Web picture printing
    One application that seems perfectly suited for the web is picture processing, and yet no seems to be able to make it work. I complained to a leading company, and got this response:
    Greetings Roger-

    Thank you for contacting MyPublisher. I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing trouble while trying to purchase your book. Bellow are some suggestions that should alleviate the "loop" that you mentioned so you can continue with purchasing your book!

    ~ Turn off (disable) your anti-virus and anti-spyware software.

    ~ Your firewall may be set too high. Allow the http://www.mypublisher.com URL to be accessed through your firewall.

    ~ Add MyPublisher to your Internet Explorer Trusted Sites:

    i. Right-click on your Internet Explorer Icon on your desktop
    ii. Click on Properties
    iii. Click on the Security tab
    iv. Click on the Check Mark marked Trusted Sites
    v. Click on Sites
    vi. Add http://www.mypublisher.com
    vii. Click on OK

    ~ If you are using a computer that is connected to a corporate or institutional network (e.g. at college or work), you may not be able to upload your order because of this network firewall and security settings. If this is the case, you will need to use a computer that is not connected to a network.

    When you're ready to reupload your book, we suggest that you only run the BookMaker software and that you close all other software programs for optimal performance.

    If there is anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

    Best Regards,
    Sylvia
    Customer Service Team

    This is pathetic. Their program does into an infinite loop generating error messages, and I have to use the Windows task manager to shut it down. And it certainly won't help to disconnect my computer from the network!

    I've tried ordering prints from Snapfish, Kodak, and others, and I have never successfully gotten prints anywhere but my own printer and the local drugstore.

     
    Mrs. America
    Alan Wolfe reviews a new book in The New Republic magazine:
    Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade
    By Donald T. Critchlow
    (Princeton University Press, 422 pp., $29.95)

    Few living Americans are more deserving of the kind of exhaustive political biography that Donald T. Critchlow has written than Phyllis Schlafly. If political influence consists in transforming this huge and cantankerous country in one's preferred direction, Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the twentieth century. Tireless, committed, strategically brilliant, undeterred: she grew up in the Old Right environment of xenophobic isolationism and helped to transform it into a New Right politics of anti-communism. Had she never been born, the Constitution would now include an Equal Rights Amendment. Without ever serving in the House of Representatives--she ran twice, losing both times--she played an instrumental role in driving moderates out of the Republican Party and replacing them with the hard-right politicians who currently dominate Congress. Tom DeLay owes more to Phyllis Schlafly than she owes to him. ...

    Critchlow is right to insist on Schlafly's influence--but influence is a neutral category. It may be a force for good or a force for ill, depending upon the ideas that animate it. Let it be said of Phyllis Schlafly that every idea she had was scatter-brained, dangerous, and hateful. The more influential she became, the worse off America became. ...

    The ugliness of American politics today can be directly traced back to Schlafly's vituperative, apocalyptic, character-assassinating campaign against the ERA. In Slander, her 2002 contribution to American letters, Ann Coulter described Schlafly as "one of the most accomplished and influential people in America" and "a senior statesman in the Republican Party." Coulter was right. Karl Rove only perfected what Phyllis Schlafly invented. And the wild, filthy rhetoric of Coulter and some of her screaming reactionary colleagues owes a great deal to Schlafly. We are lucky, come to think of it, that Schlafly flourished in the days before cable.

    I guess he was hoping that the book would be a hatchet job. His real complaint is with her political positions, and hates the idea that she would be considered a populist. He thinks that she should be considered an extremist because she did not actively denounce the John Birch Society, and he thinks that it was elitist for her to oppose the ERA because so many legislatures had approved it. He is nuts. The political, academic, and news media elites were overwhelmingly in favor of the ERA. The main opposition came from her populist organization.

    The review says:

    he ERA passed both houses of Congress by huge majorities: 84 to 8 in the Senate, 354 to 23 in the House. It was then approved by 35 of the 38 state legislatures necessary for ratification, before losing political steam. You cannot get more democratic than that. Liberals who are denounced by conservatives for relying on undemocratic courts are almost never praised by them when they do exactly the opposite and take on the rigorous work of passing a constitutional amendment. Schlafly had her reasons for opposing the ERA, but, having set herself so resolutely against a measure that had such widespread support, populism could hardly have been one of them.
    Yes, you can get more democratic. You can get a vote of the actual people, not the legislative elites. Between 1973 and 1992, ERA referenda lost popular votes in Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Vermont, and Iowa.

    The review asks:

    What did Fred Schlafly, whose views on women were suitably retrograde, think of the travels and the commitments of his wife, who was also the mother of his six children? Indeed, who were those children, and how do they feel about their mother? These, too, are questions Critchlow ignores, and his book suffers for it.
    I am one of those six children. I met Critchlow 3 or 4 times while he was researching the book. He did not interview me for the book, and I did not expect to be discussed in the book. I have not yet seen the book. The book was to be about Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative political movement. My personal opinions are of no consequence.

    Saturday, Sep 24, 2005
     
    Unscientific heresy
    Astronomy magazine says:
    More than 400 years ago, the Dominican monk Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for making a heretical claim: that our universe was inifnite and contained an infinite number of worlds.

    Today, cosmologists arguing a similar point - that our universe is but one of many universes comprising a larger “multiverse” - are hoping for a better fate, maybe even a Nobel Prize. There is growing acknowledgement among physicists and astronomers that this idea, outlandish as it sounds, just might be true.

    No, Bruno was executed for religious heresies. And the multiverse theory will not be "true", because it is not testable.

    Friday, Sep 23, 2005
     
    Spector votes for Roberts
    US Sen. Arlen Spector said about John Roberts:
    Other memoranda -- candidly, I was not entirely satisfied with his explanation, but I think we have a man who is considerably different than he was when those memoranda were written some 20 years ago.

    They were best summarized by Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Eagles Forum [sic], saying that they were comments of a young bachelor who hadn't had much life experience when he criticized women for being lawyers instead of homemakers. I think he's a different man. He has a wife who's a prominent lawyer and a homemaker as well.

    I don't think she would have made the comment if she had realized that Sen. Spector would turn it into such gibberish.

    With Senators Kennedy, Biden, Schumer, and Feinstein voting against Roberts, he must be good.


    Thursday, Sep 22, 2005
     
    Random thoughts from Mike
    Mike writes:
    "Apparently the evolutionists cannot agree on whether evolution is random or not."

    This is as stupid as saying that physicists cannot agree on whether the universe is random or not. Yes, at a certain (quantum) level physical effects are random. At another level, thermodynamics (or gravity) plays the dominant role and effects are damn near "deterministic." Why can't you accept the *fact* that evolution, in attempting to describe changes in extremely complicated biological systems can express itself in both random and non-random ways?

    Some genetic changes are random, being caused by cosmic rays. Others, such as self-correction during replication, are programmed into the genetic material itself and hence aren't random.

    The scale between the realms of the genes and that of an entire organism is as broad as that between the quantum and galactic realms. Cut evolution some slack and stop disingenuously attacking one aspect of it based on precepts from another aspect/realm.

    If you ask physicists whether the various theories of physics are random or not, then they will tell you which are and which are not, and the answers will agree. But it is very strange when a committee of Nobel prizewinners issues a statement that evolution is random, and the world's leading evolution says that it is not.
    ID is NOT the answer to your problems with evolution. Cutting evolution some slack and acknowledging that, though not all of its proponents are perfect, it's still a damn good collection of theories, might allow you to rest easier at night. "Survival of the fittest" is just one possible evolutionary mechanism, it does not comprise the entire theory of evolution. It's not even the only mechanism, though promoting it as such might have been a common failing of early evolutionists.
    I never said that ID was the answer but "survival of the fittest" isn't either. It is just a meaningless tautology. A lot of people think that it means that the strongest and swiftest and healthiest animals survive. But no, evolutionist define fitness in terms of survival, so it just means that the life that survives is the life that survives.
    But the bottom line is that true scientists (evolutionists or otherwise) attempt to explain the physical world without resort to a designer or god (call it what you will) -- and they're doing a damn good job. The other side has an *irrational* need to bring a designer into all realms (whether they are ones in which a designer is needed or not). SCIENCE seeks explanations that do not resort to divine intervention and this pursuit needs no justification -- it's a game! RELIGION looks for divine intervention everywhere as justification for its own existence.

    Problems only arise when "people of faith" try to impose their nonsensical beliefs on domains in which SCIENCE is supposed to be taught.

    No, the problems arise when evolutionists try to force people to accept unscientific beliefs, and to censor criticism. True scientists do not do that. A good example is the Nobel prizewinner letter that insists that it is a scientific fact that life is unguided, unplanned, and random.

    Wednesday, Sep 21, 2005
     

    Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick has her usual foolish report:
    So, is Roberts an ideologue? Roberts says no, and most of us are inclined to believe him. If he really is Scalia-without-the-anger, he's the most accomplished liar in world history.
    Where is the lie? Roberts' answers were consistent with Scalia's approach. I could imagine Scalia giving the same answers, and doing it truthfully.

    Scalia, Rehnquist, and Roberts are all ideologues in the sense of adhering to the ideology of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

    There are various leftists who would absolutely hate to see another Scalia on the court. Scalia is the most widely respected Supreme Court justice, and everybody knows it.

    Here are some law professors who are baffled at Sen. Biden and others who say that another Rehnquist is okay, but another Scalia is not. I don't think that Biden knows what he is talking about.


    Tuesday, Sep 20, 2005
     
    The next nomination
    Liza recommends these Notre Dame law student predictions for the next Supreme Court nomination.
     
    A museum explains evolution
    The NY Times quotes this museum brochure:
    What is evolution? Organic evolution is the idea that all organisms are connected by genealogy and have changed through time.

    How does evolution happen? Evolution is probably driven by several processes, the most important of which is natural selection.

    Is evolution 'just a theory'? A "theory" in science is a structure of related ideas that explains one or more natural phenomena and is supported by observations from the natural world; it is not something less than a "fact." Theories actually occupy the highest, not the lowest, rank among scientific ideas. ... Evolution is a "theory" in the same way that the idea that matter is made of atoms is a theory. Is it true that there is lots of evidence against evolution? No. Essentially all available data and observations from the natural world support the hypothesis of evolution. No serious biologist or geologist today doubts whether evolution occurred.

    This is pitiful. If the theory of evolution is more than a fact, then why can't they define it in terms of some facts or at least some specific assertions? All they can give are some vague claims about how organisms have changed over time, and that change is probably partially driven by some animals surviving and some dying.

    Monday, Sep 19, 2005
     
    Law prof wants consistency
    Law prof Robert Justin Lipkin writes:
    Phyllis Schlafly in her recent book The Supremacists has inveighed against wayward courts deciding issues our constitutional design has delegated to state legislatures. ... those opposing same-sex marriage should choose, once and for all, which branch of government is the proper forum for deciding this issue, or embrace both and cease carping at the courts when they enter the controversy.
    His problem is that the California legislature tried to pass a same-sex marriage law that would have been directly contrary to Proposition 22, an initiative passed by the voters in 2000. Under California law, a popular initiative can only be repealed by another initiative. So if a same-sex law had been signed by the governor, then a court challenge would have presumably knocked it out.

    Lipkin seems to agree that the people should have to final say in the matters, but is annoyed at the possibility that the courts might side with the majority. He says:

    Indeed, protecting minorities is often advanced as the courts' raison d'etre. Thus, if courts should be involved in the same-sex controversy at all, it should be to defend proponents of same-sex marriage from conceivably biased majorities.
    This is pretty nutty stuff for a law professor to be saying. If that were really the courts' purpose, then the first thing that it would do would be to free all the criminals. The purpose of the courts is to enforce the rule of law, not their own silly ideas about protecting minorities.

    Sunday, Sep 18, 2005
     
    Evolution may or may not be random
    Defending evolution as one of the 10 big ideas in science, Dawkins writes:
    Natural selection is quintessentially non-random, yet it is lamentably often miscalled random. This one mistake underlies much of the sceptical backlash against evolution. Chance cannot explain life.
    Apparently the evolutionists cannot agree on whether evolution is random or not.

    Saturday, Sep 17, 2005
     
    Confirming judges
    If you are following the John Roberts confirmation battle, then I recommend these legal blogs:
  • Carol Platt Liebau
  • Confirm Them
  • Confirmation Whoppers
  • How Appealing
  • The Volokh Conspiracy

    This article says that conservatives have been very happy with Arlen Spector. You can get better opinions at the above blogs.

  •  
    New Yorker dog cartoons
    The magazine's articles are too wordy and snotty for me, but the cartoons are sometimes funny. See: On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog and Back to pointless, incessant barking.
     
    Evolutionist prizewinners have funny ideas about science
    Kansas news:
    TOPEKA — A group of 38 Nobel Laureates headed by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel have asked the Kansas State Board of Education to reject science standards that criticize evolution.
    I do not think that the people of Kansas need to listen to a "Holocaust survivor" on the definition of science.

    The letter says (from the pdf at the above link):

    Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. ... In contrast, intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent. ...

    Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Neither should feel threatened by the other.

    Suppose I accept the 2nd sentence, and I agree that belief in divine intervention is unscientific because it cannot be tested. The 1st sentence essentially says that it is a scientific fact that the history of life on Earth is unguided, unplanned, and random.

    I am sure that a lot of scientists believe that life is unguided, unplanned, and random, but it is certainly not a scientific fact. Those properties are no more testable than the belief in divine intervention. Indeed, these are more-or-less opposite concepts, so that any test for one would also be a test for the other. If a test could prove that life was unguided, unplanned, and random, then that same test would prove that there has been no divine intervention.

    It is also rather disingenuous for the scientists (and peace prize winners) to say that people of faith should not feel threatened by an attempt to force Kansas students to learn that life is unguided, unplanned, and random. People of faith believe that life has a purpose, and that human life is no accident. The theory of evolution, as these scientists would like to teach it, is a threat to that faith.

    George writes:

    They are not saying that all life in unguided, just that the process of evolution is unguided.
    These folks use the word "evolution" as an all-inclusive term. The National Academy of Sciences has a pro-evolutionist site that defines:
    Biological evolution concerns changes in living things during the history of life on earth. It explains that living things share common ancestors.
    Evolutionists usually give a definition that includes the entire history of life on Earth, if not the entire history of the universe since the Big Bang.

    Thursday, Sep 15, 2005
     
    Are humans still evolving?
    Bob questions the claim that humans have stopped evolving 50,000 years ago. He says that this must be the source of the NY Times quote:
    The possibility that our brains are continuing to adapt is fascinating and important," says Huntington Willard, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "Most laypeople tend to assume that humans are the pinnacle of evolution and that we have stopped evolving. Science, Vol 309, Issue 5741, 1662-1663 , 9 September 2005
    You can tell that Willard is a leftist-elitist-evolutionist-Gouldian by his use of the word "laypeople" and his eagerness to knock man off his pedestal.

    My problem with evolution is not the science, but the unscientific leftist atheist dogma that goes with it. The evolutionists are dominated by leftist egalitarians who like to pretend that all human beings are the same, except perhaps for the environmental effect of the dominant racist imperialist bourgeois ruling class.

    These evolutionists hate to admit that humans are still evolving because that suggests that some people are more evolved than others, undermining their political mindset. When the NY Times says that humans stopped evolving 50k years ago, you can bet that is the message that the evolutionists want you to think.

    When evidence is published that two human brain genes are still evolving, then it is amusing to watch the evolutionist backpeddle. They either don't believe the result, or they want to attribute it to byproduct of some evolutionary pressure on the human body outside the brain. In other words, they might be willing to admit that humans evolve, but they refuse to say that the human brain might be evolving.

    Here is an example of the evolutionist backpedaling, in the current Science magazine:

    Even if the favored alleles did provide some sort of cognitive or cultural advantage, some researchers say that it was unlikely to have been a dramatic one. All normal modern humans are capable of language and symbolic expression, regardless of which alleles they have. "This suggests that the new alleles don't have a big effect on these abilities," says Tyler-Smith, who calls the possible links to events in human prehistory "highly speculative." (If you subscribe, try this link. It is from EVOLUTION: Are Human Brains Still Evolving? Brain Genes Show Signs of Selection -- Balter 309 (5741): 1662 -- Science.)
    Imagine if a creationist downplayed evolution in Galapagos finches by saying that all finches are capable of eating and flying, regardless of which alleles they have. The evolutionists would ridicule them as misunderstanding science, time, genes, evolution, and everything else.

    A July 8 Science article on whether humans evolve said this:

    Although the evolution of measurable traits such as modern human skull shape may be due to random drift, some changes in human body form may have more to do with cultural and environmental factors such as diet. “Over the past 10,000 years, there has been a significant trend toward rounder skulls and smaller, more gracile faces and jaws,” notes anthropologist Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. Most of the change, says Larsen, is probably due to how we use our jaws rather than genetic evolution. With the rise of farming, humans began to eat much softer food that was easier to chew. The resulting relaxation of stress on the face and jaw triggered changes in skull shape, Larsen says. He adds that the dramatic and worldwide increase in tooth malocclusion, tooth crowding, and impacted molars are also signs of these changes: Our teeth are too big for our smaller jaws. Numerous studies show that non-Western people who eat harder textured foods have very low rates of malocclusion, he notes. Similar changes are found in monkeys fed hard and soft diets. “With the reduction in masticatory stress, the chewing muscles grow smaller, and thus the bone grows smaller,” Larsen says. “It is not genetic but rather reflects the great plasticity of bone. It is a biological change but heavily influenced by culture.”
    Science magazine usually pretty reliably pro-evolutionist. It is published by AAAS, and Stephen Jay Gould used to be the president. But the above paragraph just sounds like gibberish to me. If human heads, jaws, and teeth have been changing shape over the last 10k years, then they have been evolving. What other possible explanation could there be? I guess there could be divine intervention, but I don't think that's Larsen's argument.

    If a Christian professor had made an argument like Larsen's, and said it about apes, then the AAAS would probably be organizing a campaign to get the professor fired for not believing in evolution. But apparently it is okay for an anthropologist to not believe that humans are evolving.

     
    Teach the controversy
    Here is an editorial cartoon that I think is supposed to promote evolution and ridicule the "teach the controversy" position of evolution critics.

    I don't see how this helps the evolutionist cause. It analogizes the evolutionists to medieval Catholics, and the ID movement to the Protestant Reformation. I would expect that most Protestants and maybe even most Catholics would be quite happy with teaching the controversy.


    Tuesday, Sep 13, 2005
     
    Better stem cells
    Bob claims that this NY Times article proves his prediction that stem cells will be better understood.

    Bob also worries that Korea might be passing us up in cloning research. However the Korean cloners attribute their success to chopsticks. Wired reports:

    "This work can be done much better in Oriental hands," Hwang told Nature Medicine. "We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks." Hwang also told the journal that his lab works seven days a week.

    Monday, Sep 12, 2005
     
    Field hockey
    Ellen Schlafly is a big field hockey star. I think she is the daughter of a second cousin.
     
    Sen. Spector, again
    Arlen Spector just opened the hearing with a brief statement including:
    I am concerned about what I said is the denigration by the Court of Congressional authority. When the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the legislation to protect women against violence, the Court did so because of our "method of reasoning". The dissent noted that carried the implication of judicial competence, and the inverse of that is Congressional incompetence.
    The method of reasoning was that Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce allows intervention into domestic disputes, because such disputes might deter unhappy wives from traveling interstate.

    Spector says that he wants the Supreme Court to have the last word on Constitutional interpretation. If so, then the Court must surely reject such radical and illogical Congressional reasoning. Congressional action on VAWA was indeed a display of Congressional incompetence.

    He went on:

    Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Eagles Forum, said that there were smart-alecky comments by a bachelor who didn't have a whole lot of experience.
    The Roberts comment was, "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good, but I suppose that is for the judges to decide."

    The comment was correct. Many people do indeed that believe that encouraging more people to become lawyers is not a good thing.

    Update: Phyllis Schlafly had to explain her comment here. In a separate matter, she had to deny calling Arnold Schwarzenegger a "girly-man".


    Sunday, Sep 11, 2005
     
    Arlen Spector, supremacist
    I saw Sen. Arlen Spector on Meet The Press, and he was pathetic. He said:
    Marbury v Madison -- explain for people who don't know the case -- it stands for its judicial word is the final interpreter ...

    I am fully behind the court having the last word. But I think that we've gone outside the balance of power when they take a very extensive record that we have created and say it's insufficient because of our method of reasoning.

    The problem here is that he is confused about judicial supremacy. He claims to believe in both judicial supremacy and the balance of powers, but those are contradictory. The root of the problem is that he misunderstands Marbury v Madison. Too bad we don't have a Senate Judiciary Committee chairman who has a better grip on USA law.
     
    No hurricane trend
    Here are the records on major USA hurricanes. As you can see, there is no obvious trend that can be attributed to global warming.
     
    FEMA head's resume
    A lot of people are attacking Michael D. Brown's FEMA resume, but I think that they are missing the bad parts:
    Prior to joining FEMA, Mr. Brown practiced law in Colorado and Oklahoma, where he served as a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court. ... Mr. Brown was also an adjunct professor of law for the Oklahoma City University. ... He received his J.D. from Oklahoma City University’s School of Law.
    Never hire a lawyer to do a real job. Especially not one who believes in lawyer ethics.
     
    Huge flying dinosaurs
    This paleontologist claims pterosaurs had 6-foot heads, 10-foot necks, 64-foot wingspans, and still flew gracefully. Pterosaurs are commonly known as flying dinosaurs, altho the article does not call them dinosaurs. It sounds unlikely to me.
     
    Lavish tastes of card-carrying lowlifes
    Katrina news:
    Profiteering ghouls have been using debit cards distributed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - intended to buy essentials for evacuated families - in luxury-goods stores as far away as Atlanta.

    "We've seen three of the cards," said a senior employee of the Louis Vuitton store at the Lenox Square Mall in affluent Buckhead, who asked not to be named. "Two I'm certain have purchased; one actually asked if she could use it in the store. This has been since Saturday."

    The distinctive white cards were distributed by the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and carry a value of up to $2,000.

    "It doesn't say anything on the card other than alcohol, tobacco and firearms cannot be purchased with it," the store employee told me. "There's nothing legally that prevents us from taking it, unfortunately. Other than morally, it's wrong."

    The source told me that the two women who had made purchases with the card each bought a signature monogrammed Louis Vuitton handbag in the $800 range.

    Profiteering ghouls? They are just using what they've been given, and following the rules. It may be a sign that too much relief money is pouring into the Katrina coast, but that's all.

    Saturday, Sep 10, 2005
     
    The unlikely universal common ancestor
    A lot of people think that evolution has proved that all life on Earth has a universal common ancestor, but I think that the whole concept is undermined by the theory of horizontal gene transfer. UC David Prof. Michael Syvanen has been writing papers on the subject since the 1980s, and here is a recent discussion.

    Here is a recent evolution paper:

    Since Darwin's Origin of Species, reconstructing the Tree of Life has been a goal of evolutionists, and tree-thinking has become a major concept of evolutionary biology. Practically, building the Tree of Life has proven to be tedious. ... We conclude that we simply cannot determine if a large portion of the genes have a common history. In addition, none of these datasets can be considered free of lateral gene transfer. CONCLUSION: Our phylogenetic analyses do not support tree-thinking. These results have important conceptual and practical implications. We argue that representations other than a tree should be investigated in this case because a non-critical concatenation of markers could be highly misleading.
    Some evolutionists are starting to tacitly admit the possibility that the Least Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) theory is wrong by referring to a "common ancestry" instead of a "common ancestor". Of course they never admit that their main premise might be wrong.
     
    Evolution hasn't influenced much biology research
    Chemist Philip S. Skell writes in The Scientist:
    The modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.1 "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

    I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.

    I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: ... I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

    (Via Denise O'Leary's blog.) This doesn't say anything about whether evolution is right or wrong, but it does rebut some of the extravagant claims that evolutionists commonly make, such as a recent one for numerous medical breakthroughs.

    Thursday, Sep 08, 2005
     
    Scientists argue about whether humans are evolving
    I am always amazed at how often evolutionists seem to not even believe in evolution themselves. The NY Times reports:
    Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, leading to the surprising suggestion that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution.

    The discovery adds weight to the view that human evolution is still a work in progress, since previous instances of recent genetic change have come to light in genes that defend against disease and confer the ability to digest milk in adulthood.

    It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago.

    The new finding, reported in today's issue of Science by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago, and colleagues, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size.

    The controversy is that the research suggests that Europeans have evolved superior brains, using a couple of genes that haven't evolved in sub-Saharan Africans. The leftist-Gouldian-evolutionists refuse to admit that there is any such thing as intelligence, or that it can be measured, or that it evolves.
     
    Nancy Pelosi, Democrat attack dog
    Nancy Pelosi wants to fire the head of FEMA. She says she told Pres. Bush this, and couldn't understand that Bush asked why.

    I would also ask why. There has been a lot of second-guessing about the Katrina situation, but no consensus on what should have been done. If Pelosi thinks that Michael Brown should be fired, then the first step is to figure out exactly what he did wrong. Pelosi could not do that, apparently, and is just looking for a partisan political issue. I think that she is just another lying Bush-hater.


    Wednesday, Sep 07, 2005
     
    Indian tutors
    Liza writes:
    Computer programming and tech support aren't the only jobs being outsourced to India. Now online Indian tutors are tutoring American kids in English grammar. They cost half as much as American tutors.
    How soon can they displace the teaching staff at my local grammar school?

    The NY Times says:

    Daniela, an eighth grader at Malibu Middle School, said, "I get C's in English and I want to score A's," and added that she had given no thought to her tutor being 20,000 miles away, other than the situation feeling "a bit strange in the beginning."
    Besides the apostrophe abuse, the author needs some tutoring on the size of the Earth. No point on the surface is more than 13,000 miles away.

    Tuesday, Sep 06, 2005
     
    Researchers withholding studies
    I emailed Northwestern U. Prof. Jon Miller to ask him for one of his papers on scientific literacy. I mentioned his work previously. He got govt grants to do surveys and write reports on the scientific literacy of the public. He doesn't have any of his papers on his website. He just wrote back with a list of obscure journal references, but no papers.

    This is fishy. Any real researcher on scientific literacy would make his work publicly and freely available. He is trying to use his results to influence public policy debates on science education. And then he doesn't want the general public to see the details.

    Miller writes:

    Most of the journals are accessible in PDF through libraries with access to e-journals. The Biomedical Communication book is available from amazon.com and I think that the Between Understanding and Trust is also available through amazon.com. Both books are in many universities libraries.
    Yes, I know that. Info about living cells and the solar system is also in university libraries. Here is a political science professor who spends his career collecting to prove that the general public is not well informed on scientific isssues, and he refuses to make his (probably unscientific) studies available to the general public. He sounds like a charlatan to me.

    Monday, Sep 05, 2005
     
    Refusing power is not activism
    John writes:
    Linda Greenhouse repeats a common liberal criticism of the Rehnquist Court: "... the Supreme Court's own power grew correspondingly as the justices circumscribed the power of Congress" ("by overturning dozens of federal laws that sought to project federal authority into what the Supreme Court majority viewed as the domain of the states").

    This she calls a "paradox ... because another goal that he accomplished in large measure was to shrink the role of the federal courts by taking them out of the business of running prisons, school systems and other institutions of government."

    The solution to the "paradox" is that most of the federal laws overturned by the Rehnquist Court were laws conferring jurisdiction on the federal courts. They were laws in which a liberal Congress had tried to increase the power of the federal judiciary by authorizing federal courts to exercise new powers over state governments.

    When the Rehnquist Court overturned these laws, it was rejecting power, not taking it. It was following the model set by John Marshall's Marbury v. Madison decision, in which the Court declined to accept a form of jurisdiction that Congress had tried to confer upon it.

    When the Court overturns a law that tries to increase the power of the federal courts by conferring jurisdiction upon them, that should be regarded as judicial restraint, not judicial activism.

    Yes, there have been a lot of liberals trying to make the argument that the conservative judges are the activists. Here is kooky leftist Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz ranting about Rehnquist being a "thug", and misrepresenting his opinions. I put them in a category with the lying Bush-haters.

    Dershowitz has more attacks here. I agree with judge Richard A. Posner who said:

    Dear Professor Dershowitz: ... You traffic in rumor, innuendo, and reckless charges. Do you remember the TV interviews in which, following the deadlocked election, you said that Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, was "corrupt," "bought and paid for," and a "crook" (CNN Breaking News, Nov. 14, 2000, 8 p.m.; Rivera Live, CNBC News Transcripts, Nov. 14, 2000; "The Florida Secretary of State: A Human Lightning Rod in a Vote-Counting Storm," the New York Times, Nov. 20, 2000) and that four of the five justices in the Bush v. Gore majority had financial motives for supporting Bush (Good Morning America, Dec. 13, 2000)?

    Sunday, Sep 04, 2005
     
    No known evolution uses
    Karen Schiff of Oak Park, Ill. writes this NY Times letter:
    It's true that most of us don't fret about quantum physics because its practical uses, such as in transistors and lasers, are clear, even though the theory may sail over our heads.

    Perhaps scientists should follow a similar tack with evolution.

    Why not spell out the numerous medical breakthroughs produced by the field of modern evolutionary biology? Perhaps a focus on the practical side of evolution, rather than its theoretical underpinnings, would give disbelievers pause the next time a loved one needed a medical drug or procedure that owed its existence to Darwin.

    I cannot tell whether she is being sarcastic, or if Oak Park Ill. is a hotbed of NY-Times-reading leftist-atheist-evolutionists.

    There are no medical breakthroughs produced by the theory of evolution.

    George writes:

    How can you say that when evolution is the central organizing principle of modern biology? There are antibiotics that found to kill penicillin-resistent bacteria. There are drugs that were tested on chimps because chimps are so closely related to humans.
    Don't forget the drugs tested on rats, and the evolutionist belief that we are 95% the same as a rat.

    Saturday, Sep 03, 2005
     
    Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies
    John sends this AP obituary:
    Rehnquist, who championed states' rights and helped speed up executions, ...

    Rehnquist was the force behind the court's push for greater states' rights. The chief justice has been the leader of five conservatives, sometimes called "the Rehnquist five," who generally advocate limited federal government interference. ...

    The Rehnquist five were together in the Bush v. Gore decision, which critics predicted would tarnish the court's hard-won luster. The closing paragraph of a book Rehnquist wrote on the court's history may stand as his answer to criticism.

    Rehnquist noted that the court makes "demonstrable errors" from time to time, but he added, "It and the country have survived these mistakes and the court as an institution has steadily grown in authority and prestige."

    No, Rehnquist did not champion "states' rights", and never even used the phrase in any of his opinions. The suggestion that Rehnquist was admitting that Bush v Gore was a demonstrable error is a low blow. It is both false, and inappropriate for an obituary. Rehnquist surely meant that decisions like Roe v Wade were the demonstrable errors. Bush v Gore looks pretty good in hindsight, as the newspaper analysis of Florida votes subsequently proved that allowing the Florida supreme court to devise its own recount scheme would have been a disaster.

    Here is another cheap shot:

    As chief justice, Rehnquist drew complaints when he led a group of lawyers and judges in a rendition of "Dixie" at a conference in Virginia in 1999. He did not respond to a black lawyers' organization that called the song an offensive "symbol of slavery and oppression."
    He served with distinction for many years, and the obituary complains that he sang Dixie?! "Dixie" was also Abraham Lincoln's favorite song, and it was played at his inauguration.
     
    Blaming the feds for Katrina
    John says that we were going to lose New Orleans anyways, and sends this article from 5 years ago:
    (New Orleans) -- By the year 2100, the city of New Orleans may be extinct, submerged in water. A future akin to the fabled sunken city of Atlantis? Yes, according to Dr. Chip Groat, Director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Washington, D.C., "With the projected rate of subsidence (the natural sinking of land), wetland loss, and sea level rise," he said, "New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century." ...

    Over the last 50 years, land loss rates had accelerated from 10 miles to 40 miles per year by the 1970s, with the current rate being approximately 25 square miles or 16,000 acres of wetlands a year. Coastal Louisiana is poised to lose more than 10,000 acres per year for the foreseeable future.

    New Orleans is sinking three feet per century--eight times faster than the worldwide rate of only 0.4 feet per century. Currently, New Orleans, on average, is eight feet below sea level--11 feet in some places.

    Many of the low-lying barrier islands will disappear by 2050.

    This Wikipedia article describes many popular articles with predictions of hurricane risk for New Orleans.

    Liza writes:

    It is clear to me that if anyone is to blame for the response to Katrina in New Orleans, it is the dysfunctional local and state officials, not the feds.

    See the Power Line blog for various informative posts. It turns out that President Bush had to call and personally armtwist the relevant officials to order a mandatory evacuation before the storm hit - without which the disaster would have been far worse. Calling in the National Guard is a state function, not a federal function, and the governor inexcusably delayed that move. When she finally did it, she failed to give a "shoot to kill" order as the Mississippi governor did. It does not seem to have occurred to the mayor to use, say, the zillions of empty and now-flooded school buses to help get carless people out of town. Neither the mayor nor the police chief sounds remotely competent on TV. I don't know why a hurricane-prone city was unable to find bottled water for the shelters and needed the feds to truck in water from faraway places.

    I believe the feds got in there as fast as they could, given the transportation and communication challenges.

    No doubt the lying Bush-haters will blame Pres. Bush. Maybe they'll even blame Ronald Reagan for not stopping global warming.

    Thursday, Sep 01, 2005
     
    Chimps in the news
    Mike sends evolution news. This one actually had some evolutionists claiming that an evolutionist prediction had been proved correct:
    The finding, published today in the journal Nature by California Academy of Sciences anthropologist Nina Jablonski, fills a critical gap in the fossil record ... ``We hypothesized that they were there. This fulfilled our prediction,'' Jablonski said. (Signin key: MUKRI@BUGMENOT.COM / ANURA1)
    So what did they find? They found 3 chimp teeth, the first-ever chimpanzee fossils found.

    This is pathetic. No one thinks that chimps landed here from Mars, or anything like that. Of course chimp fossils were going to be found eventually.

    Nevertheless, the evolutionists go gaga with the most trivial of evidence:

    The discovery of the teeth at the same site as human bones proves that the two intelligent primates lived side by side, she said.

    ``What is nice to think about is this: During most of our history, we lived next to our closest evolutionary relatives,'' she said.

    Lieberman noted that life may not have been totally harmonious. ``Typically, chimps love fruit. Hominids love fruit. You'd imagine some competition among them for some resources.''

    They found 3 lousy teeth, and already they are drawing conclusions about "most of our history". It seems very unlikely that we shared an environment with chimps, since we did a lot more evolving than they did.

    Another chimp story said that a chimp genome had been sequenced.

    The genetic sequences of the most functional parts of the human and chimp genomes are about 99 percent identical, according to the analysis by 67 researchers, including a team from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Part of the chimp genome is not shared by humans; part of the human genome is not shared by chimps.

    When the genomes of the two species are compared more broadly, including non-functional ``junk DNA,'' they are 96 percent identical.

    Of course this is also said to prove evolution:
    "I can't imagine Darwin hoping for a stronger confirmation of his ideas," said Robert H. Waterston, who led the Washington University team.
    This is absurd. Darwin knew nothing of genes. Even before Darwin, biologists knew that humans and chimps were similar. Darwin would have hoped for some proof that mutation and natural selection can make new species. Finding similarities between humans and apes is just confirming what Aristotle knew.

    Mike follows up with this:

    Suppose you saw two cars driving down the street with matching hubcaps?
    I would figure that they had been designed that way. (I'm not sure if he was just trying to feed me a straight man line with that.)

    He adds:

    I'll try once more... Why isn't man at the top of that list of "most intelligent animals? What is man, if not an animal?
    Next, Mike will be asking about the HAL 9000.

    Wednesday, Aug 31, 2005
     
    Most research is wrong
    John sends this New Scientist article:
    Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
    I don't think this describes the new paper correctly. It is written by a Greek epidemiologist named John Ioannidis. He is only talking about certain scientific fields, mainly in medicine. Perhaps it applies to most published medical research papers. I'll have to read it.

    Tuesday, Aug 30, 2005
     
    UK eminent domain
    In the UK, the govt can just grab a home and rent it out if it looks like no one is using it.
     
    Fred Reed attacks evolutionists
    Andy sends this Fred Reed rant.
    Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. ...

    Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. ...

    Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. ...

    I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it.

    I have similarly been accused of being a Creationist. I am not. Reed describes evolutionists well. It is very difficult to reason with them. They are ideologues, not scientists.
     
    Evolutionist articles get sillier
    The NY Times continues its preoccupation with leftist-atheist-evolutionist propaganda. An Arts section article says:
    Bobby Henderson, a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University, had a divine vision. An intelligent god, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, he said, "revealed himself to me in a dream." ...

    Soon he was flooded with e-mail messages. Ninety-five percent of those who wrote to him, he said on his Web site, were "in favor of teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in schools." Five percent suggested that he would be going to hell. ... One woman even wrote in to say that she had "conceived the spirit of our Divine Lord," the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while eating alone at the Olive Garden.

    The history books show that parody isn't always the smartest strategy when it comes to persuasion. Remember Galileo? Some recent scholars say that it may not have been his science so much as his satire, "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems," that got everyone steamed up. Under threat of death, Galileo ended up recanting his view that the earth revolves around the sun, and had to wait 350 years for vindication.

    No, Galileo wasn't threatened with death, and he didn't have to wait 350 years for vindication.

    Then there is the Scientist at work column that interviews a political scientist [sic] named Jon D. Miller who has his own little scientific literacy project. The article says:

    One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century. ...

    Lately, people who advocate the teaching of evolution have been citing Dr. Miller's ideas on what factors are correlated with adherence to creationism and rejection of Darwinian theories.

    These NY Times writers should get their stories straight. This one thinks that Galileo was vindicated back in the 17th century. Either way, tho, they always come to the conclusion that more evolution should be taught in the schools, and that various leftist causes will benefit.

    Monday, Aug 29, 2005
     
    Evolutionist Mike sends some flames
    Some recent postings have gotten Mike excited. About Dennett, Mike says:
    What you conveniently fall to notice is his use of the word "naysayers." Those books that fill our libraries and bookstores do point out how weird quantum effects are, but they don't deny their existence OR attempt to argue against the validity of the theory within the limitations of its domain. They're teaching science. Just as the evolutionists are.
    Following Dennett's analogy, I don't deny evolution as it is defined in the evolution textbooks or as it has been experimentally observed. I don't know anyone who does. The arguments are about extrapolations and extensions of the basic theory. Everyone accepts micro-evolution and the fact that gene populations change from one generation to the next.

    Those books on quantum mechanics and relativity certainly do argue against extrapolations and extensions of those theories. The books openly say that the theories must be fundamentally wrong on some level. Relativity predicts that the small-scale structure of spacetime is smooth, and that the expansion of the universe cannot accelerate. Quantum mechanics predicts the Schodinger Cat and all sorts of goofy things. The books openly say that the theories are too weird to be believable.

    Mike also writes:

    In "Human Zoo" and other bloggings you rant against teaching that man is just another animal. You have also carefully tutored your kids into accepting with pseudo-scientific arguments a list purporting to name the 10 most intelligent animals -- a list on which man doesn't appear.

    If you disagree with the "man is an animal" hypothesis, offer an alternative. Exactly what do you think man is, if not an animal? (Do you at least concede that our bodies are made of animal cells? Or do you want to create a new category in cell biology?)

    I really can't figure out your position on this issue.

    My kids think that the smartest animals are (in order) the parrot, chimp, dolphin, crow, octopus, snow monkey, horse, pig, honeybee, dog. Mike is a dog-lover, and he was particularly annoyed that dogs were last on the list. It is hard to reason with someone who thinks that humans and dogs are on the same intellectual level.

    Mike objects to my approving reference to the Kansas folks:

    Be honest now... those Kansas folks deleted the teaching of evolution from the state science curriculum in 1999.

    Deleted. As in no longer required. Evolution! You want your kids to go through school and never hear about it? That would have been fine in Kansas if "those folks" had had their way.

    They didn't get away with it then, so they're now trying something weaker. Kinda' reminds you of the right wing approach to Roe v. Wade, doesn't it?

    Yeah, let's confuse the hell out of those poor students by teaching all sorts of baseless, conflicting theories in school. They'll get the true story on Sunday anyway. What a plan.

    Your information is incorrect. Kansas never deleted evolution. You can find the 1999 standards archived here, and see for yourself. What really infuriated the leftist-atheist-evolutionists was that the 1999 Kansas standards introduced the concept of falsification. That concept provides a useful way to distinguish science from non-science.

    Finally, Mike says that the Ugandan govt has recalled defective condoms, and now:

    Activists in both Uganda and the United States say the country is now in the grip of condom shortage so severe that men are using plastic garbage bags in an effort to protect themselves.
    This sounds like a racist joke! I refuse to comment.

    Mike responds:

    Mike simply believes man belongs at the top of the "ten smartest animals" list. Mike also feels that dogs occupy a place well above bees.

    Sunday, Aug 28, 2005
     
    Another NY Times evolutionist
    Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett defends evolution in the NY Times.
    First, imagine how easy it would be for a determined band of naysayers to shake the world's confidence in quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity.
    Libraries and bookstores are filled with dozens of books on how weird quantum mechanics and relativity are. Real scientists see that as a good thing. It is only the narrow-minded evolutionists who don't want you to know the limitations of the theory.

    He goes on to complain that intelligent design is a distraction.

    It's worth pointing out that there are plenty of substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the textbooks or the classrooms. ...

    SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

    I agree that intelligent design is not the only alternate theory that the evolutionists are censoring. Some of those other theories may not have many hard facts to support them, but they are still just as plausible as the standard evolutionist dogma, based on everything we know. That is why the folks in Kansas want all scientific alternatives discussed, and do not focus on intelligent design.

    Saturday, Aug 27, 2005
     
    More nutty NY Times supremacism
    Adam Cohen and the NY Times continue to perpetuate silly myths about conservative judges. He says Clarence Thomas is an activist based on categorizing 42 opinions out of a sample of 64, and getting 65.63% The excess precision is a good clue that the study was bogus. Honest studies are not reported that way.

    Then Cohen tries to blame conservatives for the notorious 1857 decision. Conservatives side with Republican Abe Lincoln's strong attacks on that decision.

    Cohen's main complaint is that John Roberts "may hold extreme states' rights views" because he suggested that California toad might not affect interstate commerce. This is not states' rights. This issue involves whether the powers of Congress are those listed in the Constitution.


    Friday, Aug 26, 2005
     
    Human Zoo
    London news:
    Humans Are Ones on Display at London Zoo

    By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD, Associated Press Writer Fri Aug 26, 2:16 PM ET

    Caged and barely clothed, eight men and women monkeyed around for the crowds Friday in an exhibit labeled "Humans" at the London Zoo.

    "Warning: Humans in their Natural Environment" read the sign at the entrance to the exhibit, where the captives could be seen on a rock ledge in a bear enclosure, clad in bathing suits and pinned-on fig leaves. Some played with hula hoops, some waved.

    Visitors stopped to point and laugh, and several children could be heard asking, "Why are there people in there?"

    London Zoo spokeswoman Polly Wills says that's exactly the question the zoo wants to answer.

    "Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals ... teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate," Wills said.

    No doubt it is a leftist-atheist-evolutionist realization of the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle.
     
    War On Science
    A new book titled The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney , will soon be released.

    In Chap. 1, he complains that Pres. Bush promised about 60 embryonic stem cell lines in 2001, but some didn't work out, and now there are only 22 lines available.

    Chapter 5 complains that the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was shut down in 1995. It wrote some reports attacking the Strategic Defense Initiative.

    In Chap. 11, he complains about evolution criticism, and Pres. Bush saying, “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”

    Mooney does concede:

    It must also be acknowledged that much of science emerges from the liberal-leaning academic world. In an interview, Harvard's celebrated cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, explained to me how this political reality tends to wall off certain areas of inquiry that might be seen as supporting conservative viewpoints: "When it's academics who wield the power, the political bias will be on the Left." ...

    So give conservatives a few points, here and there, on the question of left wing science politicization.

    I see the Leftist war on Science, but where is the attack from the Right? Even if Bush exaggerated the number of eligible embryonic stem cell lines, there are still plenty for all the ongoing federal research projects. Why the fuss?

    Thursday, Aug 25, 2005
     
    McCain also against censorship
    Sen. John McCain may be running for president:
    As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans.

    On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.

    McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

    I guess it will be just the Democrats who take the side of censorship.
     
    Flaws in the theory of gravity
    Here is an evolutionist attempt at satire. It describes some problems with the theory of gravity, and suggests that schools teach the controversy.

    The problem is that most people didn't get the joke. In the hard sciences, people believe that it is a good thing to teach the strengths and weaknesses of the theories. The article sounds very reasonable. It is only the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who are ideologically opposed to teaching alternate scientific theories.

     
    Another flat-earth movement
    Evolutionist Karl J. Hittelman praises Klinkenborg, and writes this nonsense:
    Viewed over the long term, intelligent design is merely another flat-earth movement that will eventually dissipate as the overwhelming evidence for Darwinian evolution continues to accumulate.

    It becomes all too obvious that intelligent design is simply not science, because it cannot be tested as required for a theory claiming to be scientific.

    The first paragraph suggests that ID will be disproved by the evidence. If so, then the 2nd paragraph is wrong.

    Of course, there has only ever been one flat-earth movement, and that consisted entirely of leftist-atheist-evolutionists who tried to ridicule religious folks.

     
    Judges do make law
    Erwin Chemerinsky and Catherine Fisk try to justify activist judges in USA Today, but their first 2 examples involved the US Supreme Court trying to reverse the damage caused by earlier activist decisions. The third is hopelessly confused.

    Wednesday, Aug 24, 2005
     
    Evolution and gun control
    Andy writes:
    You mentioned your support of the right to bear arms, but the surest way to lose that right is to increase the percentage of Americans who believe in evolution. The more that people view humans as a form of animal, subject to animal instincts and lack of self-control, the more they will demand gun control. The chief difference between England and America is a much higher belief in evolution in England. Witness its socialism and gun control.
    I don't agree with this. If people are animals, then I want a gun to defend myself. Evolution teaches that when a predator has a big advantage over prey, then the prey gets wiped out. The law abiding civilians need guns so that they will not be defenseless prey.
     
    Evolutionists whine about Nazis
    The NY Times has another article on the leftist-atheist-evolutionists:
    Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race."
    It is amazing how the subject can reduce reputable scientists to babbling idiots. Stanford microbiology professor Leon T. Rosenberg writes in response:
    It is entirely possible that with a sufficient expenditure of money, the country can be set back several centuries in its scientific education and made the laughingstock of the rest of the world.

    Dangerous ideologies sometimes win for a while; witness Germany in the 1930's. Unfortunately, the evolution of ideas is not as well understood and is much more difficult to study than the evolution of life forms.

    Those of us with faith in science and human intelligence will continue to speak out ...

    So his faith leads him to want to censor dangerous ideologies; he is not sure how ideas evolve; and he wants to call his enemies Nazis. I think that is what he is saying.

    Readers sometimes wonder why I criticize evolutionists when they have Science on their side. The Klinkenborg article below is a good example of what's wrong with the evolutionists. His idea of evolution is to take a simple scientific fact -- the age of the Earth -- and claim that it implies animal rights. That is not science.

     
    A Mistake Made in Haste
    Rob Crowther says:
    I have spoken briefly with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller who penned the story today that included a misquote attributed to CSC director Stephen Meyer that he welcomed Bush's statement on intelligent design as promoting "free speech on BIBLICAL origins," when he actually said "biological origins." She apologized for the error saying it was "nothing more than a mistake made in haste" ...
    One of many on the subject.

    Tuesday, Aug 23, 2005
     
    Evolution and animal rights
    Mike recommends this evolutionist NY Times editorial by Verlyn Klinkenborg:
    Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.
    This is a dishonest straw man attack. The ID advocates do not argue for any foreshortening of time. The Earth's age is about 5 byrs and the Universe's age is about 14.5 byrs, and the evidence is overwhelming. The major ID gurus like Dembski and Behe agree with these age estimates.

    Klinkenborg concludes:

    The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here.
    These leftist-atheist-evolutionists become insufferable when they start lecturing us on morals and animal rights. He pretends to be taking a scientific view, and rambles about the age of the Earth. Sure, the age of the Earth is a scientific fact. But that's all he's got, and he jumps to these cockamamy conclusions.

    This is not science. Klinkenborg seems to be persuaded by the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle that the essence of science is knocking Man off his pedestal, and then that evolutionism supports his New Age beliefs.

    Mike writes:

    You should feel ashamed of yourself. Do you really want ID taught during the week, or can we restrict it to Sundays?
    What I want is to teach good science in science classes. The leftist-atheist-evolutionists cannot resist promoting their unscientific ideologies, such as claiming that the age of the Earth implies animal rights. If they are allowed to teach such nonsense, then students should also learn that there are other points of view.

    Mike writes:

    Face it, what you really can't stand is a scientific theory that doesn't provide all the answers. But then none of them ever have. Newtonian mechanics did a great job for a long time, but gave way to the better GRT. Eventually, we may have quantum gravity or a ST replace or extend GRT. No theory yet invented gives all the answers.

    So you can't knock ToE for not explaining the origin of life... especially since ID doesn't either. We need a better, or different, theory for that. (Like quantum effects GRT can't explain, origins may just be beyond the ToE.) ToE just happens to be the best theory so far for explaining the fossil record... which as far as I can tell ID simply disregards.

    Ostriches bury their heads in the sand too. You just have to bend over farther when you're standing on that pedestal reserved for humankind.

    I am not the one who claims that Science or Evolution explains everything. I side with the folks in Kansas who say that students should be taught scientific info about the theory's shortcomings.

    Mike seems to be proposing his own variant of the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle -- it may not be necessary for Science to knock Man off the pedestal if you can get him to stick his head in the sand. Can I call this the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian-Mike-Ostrich principle?


    Monday, Aug 22, 2005
     
    We declared war on Iraq
    The lying Bush-haters like to say that the Iraq War is illegal, but Volokh explains that it is a declared war.
     
    Looking for a designer
    The NY Times gives the evolutionist reponse to intelligent design:
    A cell that had the faces of four presidents on it, while other did not, would no doubt prompt scientists to look for a designer.
    But if all the cells had a copy of Mt. Rushmore, then they would say that science requires rejecting the design theory. And that is more analogous to what the ID folks claim, as they say that all cells have sophisticated features that show evidence of design.
     
    Chimpanzee culture 'confirmed'
    Evolution news:
    Primate experts say they have proven that chimpanzees, like humans, show social conformity.

    By training captive chimps to use tools in different ways, they have shown experimentally that primates develop cultural traditions through imitation.

    This has long been suspected from observations in the wild, but has not been shown directly.

    It suggests that culture has ancient origins, scientists write in Nature.

    The study was carried out by a team at the University of St Andrews in the UK and the National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, US.

    This is not culture. This is just some chimps mimicking other chimps in using a stick to retrieve food. The research can be summarized in 2 words: apes ape. Where do they think the word comes from? The evolutionists will be saying that this research proves that human culture is no better than ape culture.

    Sunday, Aug 21, 2005
     
    Ape to Man
    The History Channel had heavily promoted special titled Ape To Man. It was evolutionist propaganda with a heavy emphasis on missing links. The stars were Piltdown Man and Lucy.

    These are not missing links, they are scientific frauds. There is no good reason to believe that Lucy was a human ancestor. Lucy was just an ape. The only thing human-like about Lucy is that some suggest that she could walk upright. However, even that is hotly disputed, and some say that Lucy was a knuckle-dragger who might have occasionally walked upright only about as well as modern chimps do.

     
    Koreans are cloning dogs, and evolutionist implications
    Jacob Weisberg of Slate says:
    In a world where Koreans are cloning dogs, can the U.S. afford — ethically or economically — to raise our children on fraudulent biology? But whatever tack they take, evolutionists should quit pretending their views are no threat to believers.
    When evolutionists claim that they have a theory that explains all life on Earth and censor alternate points of view, then they are teaching our kids fraudulent biology.

    BTW, Weisberg is a judicial supremacist, a leftist-atheist-evolutionist, and a lying Bush-hater, so it is pure accident if he gets anything right. Weisberg is mainly known for publishing "Bushisms", which are out-of-context quotes or misquotes that Bush-haters find amusing. Here are some of Weisberg's Slatisms.


    Saturday, Aug 20, 2005
     
    NY Times attacks Discovery Institute
    John sends this NY Times article about evolution critics. As usual, the leftist-atheist-evolutionists want to scrutinize the political and religious beliefs of their critics, but refuse to openly discuss their own.

    George writes:

    It is only the politics and religion of the creationists and intelligent design advocates that is relevant. Their views about evolution are directly inspired by religion, even if they deny it.
    Imagine if a major American newspaper published an article about academic Marxists, listed those who were Jewish, and hinted that there was some sort of Jewish conspiracy. There would be huge outcries about religious bigotry. But when the leftist-atheist-evolutionists display religious intolerance, the mainstream media just cheers.
     
    Defending this blog
    A old college buddy of mine tracked me down on a Santa Barbara beach, and expressed bewilderment that I could be expressing fringe opinions on this blog. He wanted to know when and where I got such nutty ideas.

    In particular, he was disturbed by my attacks on judicial supremacists, lying Bush-haters, and leftist-atheist-evolutionists. He has been in academia so long that he was puzzled at how anyone could think that Ronald Reagan was a better president than Jimmy Carter.

    My positions are not really so radical. My opinion on judicial supremacists was the dominant opinion among legal scholars for the first 150 years of USA history, and judicial supremacy has never been accepted by the American people.

    Pres. Bush has taken some controversial stands, and I can see why some people might disagree with some of them. But Bush was reelected by a majority of the people, and the Bush-haters are concentrated in a handful of coastal cities.

    Many, if not most, of those Bush-haters resort to lying in their attacks on Bush. I have no respect for those folks. I am referring to people like Michael Moore, Joe Wilson, and their supporters. Just listening to the mainstream media cheer for those kooks is reason enough to support Bush.

    Then there are the leftist-atheist-evolutionists who have unfortunately taken over our scientific and academic institutions. I come from a background in math and the hard sciences, where new ideas are tolerated until disproved. I dislike it when phony hacks with a political agenda masquerade as having a monopoly on scientific correctness. I prefer to take the side of science and logic. The leftist-atheist-evolutionists are the most intolerant and unscientific folks around. Again, I believe that my views are squarely within the mainstream of the American public.

    Mike writes:

    And no doubt with the no-child-left-behind policy the number of you rightist-jesusfreak-creationists will be increasing. It's worse than seeing the country go to the dogs. I'm considering relocating in the Netherlands.
    You want the land of dope-smoking, prostitution, and euthanasia? It sounds like an evolutionist utopia. There were a bunch of folks who claimed that they'd relocate to Canada if Bush were reelected, but it hasn't happened.

    Friday, Aug 19, 2005
     
    Evolutionists say scientific theory is a paradigm
    Mike writes:
    I suggest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory

    Note that the article starts by stating that the word is about to be defined as it is used in science. Non-scientific laypersons do not use the word in the same sense. To confuse these different uses is to demean the scientific method.

    The article actually says:
    In common usage a theory is often viewed as little more than a guess or a hypothesis. But in science and generally in academic usage, a theory is much more than that. A theory is an established paradigm that explains all or much of the data we have and offers valid predictions that can be tested. In science, a theory can never be proven true, ...
    You can tell that this was written by leftist-atheist-evolutionists, because they are the only ones who believe that a scientific theory is a "paradigm".

    The usage is not correct. Physicists commonly refer to string theory, even though the theory hardly explains or predicts anything. Most ordinary layman theories are more testable than string theory.

    Mike goes on:

    In fact, according to the first paragraph of the "Theory" entry, it is correct to refer to the "theory of evolution," but incorrect to refer to a "theory of intelligent design." It should be "hypothesis of intelligent design."
    I am not sure how that would follow. The article says:
    According to Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, "a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations."
    So for evolution to be a theory, it must satisfy this definition. What is the accuracy of the theory? How many arbitrary elements does it have? What are the definite predictions?

    Mike writes:

    As far as whether string theories are testable, here's what Witten has to say:
    Witten: The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet. So we would hope to test the theory, conceivably directly at accelerators. I suspect that's a long shot. More likely we'll do it indirectly by making more precise calculations about elementary particles based on the existence of extra dimensions.
    Wikipedia says:
    No string theory has yet made falsifiable predictions that would allow it to be experimentally tested. Work on string theory has led to advances in mathematics, mainly in algebraic geometry. String theory has also led to insight into supersymmetric gauge theories, which will be tested at the new Large Hadron Collider experiment.
    So it's successful, even if it can't currently be tested.

    So maybe we can agree to call STs "fledgling theories." When it becomes possible to test a prediction (or those of SGTs to the same extent as in the ToE, we'll elevate its status to that of a true theory.

    I am not sure what Mike's point is. I am not the one who is trying to redefine the word "theory" for some ideological purpose. I am merely reporting on common usage. There isn't any big difference between layman and scientist use of the word "theory". The leftist-atheist-evolutionists claim that there is a big distinction, and they are wrong.

    It is just not true that everyone agrees that string theory is not yet a true theory. Mike's quote above shows that Witten calls it a theory, even tho there is no known way to test the theory.

    Mike further clarifies that the Wikipedia article distinguishes between a "theory" and a "good theory". Evolution is just a theory, and not a good theory. String theory might not be a theory, but Witten is the authority, and if Witten says it is a theory, then it is a theory. Intelligent Design (ID) is a theory under the layman's definition (which he prefers to call the "layperson" definition), and he notes that not all ID advocates have the same views. Evolutionists also have varying views, but Mike says that the differences are exaggerated by my quotes from "that lunatic Stephen Jay Gould". He didn't say so, but I guess he also includes the lunatics who gave Gould tenure at Harvard, the lunatics who elected him president of the AAAS, the lunatics who bought his best-selling books, and the lunatics who made him the best-known and most widely-read scientist.

     
    The proof is out there
    Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) institute, California, says:
    The good news is that the latest polls confirm that roughly half of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction think some of it is visiting Earth. ...

    The UFO advocates are asking us to believe something very important. After all, there could hardly be any discovery more dramatic than visitors from other worlds. If they could prove that the aliens are here, I would be as awestruck as anyone. But I still await a compelling Exhibit A.

    There is something strange about the way the leftist-atheist-evolutionists have faith in intelligent life on other planet, and want to devote resources to looking for it, but they don't want to be associated with the kooks who think that it has already been found. It is a bit like certain religious folks who profess to believe in various miracles, but are extremely skeptical when anyone claims to have experienced one.

    It is also a little strange how these folks claim to be able to recognize intelligent design in outer space, but claim that it cannot be recognized here on Earth.

     
    Appeals Court Tosses Judge's Wiccan Order
    John sends this AP story:
    INDIANAPOLIS - A judge who ordered two Wicca believers to shield their son from their "non-mainstream" faith overstepped his authority, an appeals court said Wednesday in dismissing the order.

    The Indiana Court of Appeals said state law gave a custodial parent the authority to determine a child's upbringing, including religious training. A judge could find that certain limitations were needed to protect a child from physical or emotional harm.

    Courts have no business telling parents how to raise their kids, whether they are married or divorced.

    Friday, Aug 12, 2005
     
    Flying Spaghetti Monster
    Chris sends this joke article:
    Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
    It also tries to correlate global warming with piracy, using phony data. I am not quite sure if it is trying to make fun of the evolutionists or the ID folks, or just science in general.

    Here is an article about evolutionist attacks on George Gilder, and a New Republic article on intelligent design. (I logged in with john9241 - trooper.)


    Sunday, Aug 07, 2005
     
    Evolutionist word dance
    Here is an evolutionist letter in the NY Times:
    One of the most effective arguments used by proponents of creationism or intelligent design to create the impression that the scientific consensus on evolution has shaky foundations is that evolution is "just a theory."

    That this statement really is persuasive to many people reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "theory" in a scientific context.

    It does not imply fundamental disagreement; quite the contrary. The word theory is applied only to an idea supported by facts and analyses of those facts by experts on the subject.

    That scientists do not refer to evolutionary theory as fact is only a reflection of the scientific mentality of continuing to question assumptions and being open to new evidence; it does not imply that there is any competing theory that is considered viable by the scientific community.

    Elizabeth S. Meckes, Palo Alto, Calif., Aug. 5, 2005

    So she says evolution is a fact, but evolutionists don't want to call it that because they want to pretend that they are open to new ideas. And they are only open to evolutionist ideas, and not creationist or design ideas.

    This is nutty. No one misunderstands the word "theory". Scientists use it with the same meaning as non-scientists.

     
    Federalist Society has no ideology
    John sends this NY Times letter:
    The Federalist Party, the party of Washington, Adams and Hamilton, stood for a strong central government. The Federalist Society stands for negative government and states' rights. If its members were honest, they would call themselves, in the terms of the 1790's, the Anti-Federalist Society.

    Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York, Aug. 1, 2005

    Schlesinger is an idiot. No one stands for negative govt and states rights.

    Here is a NY Times article that tries to find out what the Federalist Society stands for. It quotes someone saying, "the society ... has no stated philosophy other than the exchange of ideas", but suggest that maybe it has a "secret handshake". The society's stated purpose is:

    The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.

    Saturday, Aug 06, 2005
     
    Flat Earth Evolutionists
    Leftist-evolutionist-atheist Paul Krugman says:
    I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close. ...

    But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

    The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory.

    The Flat Earth Myth has been entirely promoted by leftist evolutionists like Krugman.
     
    Both sides ought to be properly taught
    The evolutionist blog Red State Rabble wonders whether Bush would support the schools teaching alternative points of view regarding condom use and atheistic secular humanism.

    Sure. The evolutionists are so intolerant and narrow-minded that they cannot imagine people genuinely wanting diverse views to be taught.

     
    Unaccountable evolutionist teachers
    A San Jose newspaper letter says:
    Teachers need tenure protection

    People seem to forget that tenure is necessary to teach. Teachers need to be able to teach evolution without fear of being fired ...

    Michael Goldman, Sunnyvale

    California teachers get tenure after 2 years. There will be a ballot proposition to extend the requirement. I will be voting for it. The evolutionists who want to brainwash your kids without any public accountability will launch a massive propaganda campaign against the ballot initiative.

    Thursday, Aug 04, 2005
     
    Evolutionist
    Bob writes:
    I personally find evolutionist pejorative. It makes evolution sound like like a religion. My opinion of evolution is based only on the scientific evidence. There probably are people who make a religion of evolution, but it is unfair to tar those who accept evolution for scientific reasons with that brush. There is no term I know of for those who accept evolution for only scientific reasons. A lot of people who accept evolution for scientific reasons accept the term evolutionist, but to me it has the ring of homosexuals who call themselves queer, or black people who call themselves nigger.
    Strange. I don't know why the term would be any more pejorative than biologist or ornithologist. It refers to someone who believes in, or advocates, the theory of evolution.

    Perhaps Bob is referring to the fact that evolutionists nearly always also advocate a variety of goofy leftist and atheist causes. They claim to be scientists, but they have some of the most narrow-minded and unscientific views as you will find in all the sciences.

     
    Bush and ID theory
    Pat Sullivan reports that the Air America radio show (that he calls Scare America) polled its audience, and found that a majority disagreed with Bush about intelligent design.

    I have a problem with the way the Left is reporting this story. The Wash. Post story leads with:

    President Bush invigorated proponents of teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools with remarks saying that schoolchildren should be taught about "intelligent design," a view of creation that challenges established scientific thinking and promotes the idea that an unseen force is behind the development of humanity.
    The AP story leads with:
    President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.
    The stories quote Pres. Bush as saying "intelligent design", but he did not. Here is the transcript:
    Q I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?

    THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor -- both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.

    Q Both sides should be properly taught?

    THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about.

    Q So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?

    THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.

    So Air America, AP, and the Wash. Post were all misquoting Bush. It is just another example of lying on the part of the Bush-haters in the media.

    Wednesday, Aug 03, 2005
     
    Scientific Bush-haters
    NY Times evolutionist letters:
    President Bush, in suggesting that there should be time given over to teach intelligent design, continues to display a shameful degree of science illiteracy, consistent with his attitudes toward global warming and stem cell research.

    Since most drug research, including most Alzheimer's treatment research, is based on the principles of evolution, would you recommend stopping that research or financing an effort based on intelligent design?

    A few questions like that would probably end this "debate."

    No, there is no nontrivial principle of evolution that has ever been applied to drug research. These folks are just mindless Bush-haters.

    Georgia writes:

    Evolution principles have been used to study drug resistance. Evolution teaches that if an antibiotic kills some bacteria but not other bacteria in an infection, then the bacteria which is not killed will be more likely to grow. It is a excellent example of Survival Of The Fittest.
    I am sure that the ID theorists all agree that an antibiotic might kill some types of bacteria, but not others.

    Tuesday, Aug 02, 2005
     
    No More Monkey Trials
    Charles Krauthammer says in Time magazine:
    And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

    ... The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

    There is no observation or experimentation about divine providence, and there is no science to contradict what Schönborn said. Krauthammer has been duped by the evolutionists.
     
    California supremacists
    Gay news:
    California's highest court ruled Monday that country clubs must offer gay members who register as domestic partners the same discounts given to married ones — a decision that could apply to other businesses such as insurance companies and mortgage lenders. ...

    "The Legislature has made it abundantly clear than an important goal of the Domestic Partner Act is to create substantial legal equality between domestic partners and spouses," Justice Carlos Moreno wrote for a five-judge majority. "We interpret this language to mean that there shall be no discrimination in the treatment of registered domestic partners and spouses."

    There was also a popular California referendum against same-sex marriage. Private clubs ought to be able to draw the same distinctions that the state draws.
     
    Bush endorses teaching the controversy
    AP News:
    President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life.

    During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

    "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

    The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.

    Christian conservatives — a substantial part of Bush's voting base — have been pushing for the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Scientists have rejected the theory as an attempt to force religion into science education.

    Only the narrow-minded leftist-evolutionists want to censor alternate points of view. There is almost no scientific evidence about how the creation of life on Earth happened, and evolution has no good theory for it.
     
    String Theory
    The NY Times reports on String Theory. It is supposed to be the theory of everything, they don't really have any evidence or a coherent theory or anything resembling actual scientific work. What they do have is a lively debate over whether they should be guided by the anthropic principle or the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle. It is called the Princeton-Stanford split. Those on the West Coast want to put Man on the pedestal, and those on the East Coast want to knock Man off the pedestal.

    At least they are not trying to teach it in the schools yet.


    Monday, Aug 01, 2005
     
    Public views on stem cell research
    Bob sends me polls (like this) on whether the public supports stem cell research. Every poll I've seen shows Pres. Bush's position squarely in the majority. He does not need to change it for any political reason.

    For example, the above poll says that "57% favor federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. So does Pres. Bush. It was Bush who took the initiative in that funding.

    Bob also sent a Harris poll (from the WSJ, not freely online) that asked:

    Do you think this research [on stem cells from leftover embryos] should or should not be allowed?
    74% said yes, and agreed with USA law and Bush policy. Such research is indeed allowed under USA law. (I believe that some countries don't allow it.)

    Sunday, Jul 31, 2005
     
    Funding California cloning
    John sends this San Diego story:
    Unable to sell bonds to finance California's $3 billion stem cell initiative, the state treasurer's office is trying an unprecedented new approach.

    With any bond sale delayed by lawsuits over the initiative, the new plan is to issue "bond anticipation notes" that the state would repay if it wins the legal challenges and is able to issue actual bonds. ...

    There is no certainty that bonds to fund Proposition 71 will ever be issued to pay off the notes. So investors who buy the bond anticipation notes run the risk of never recouping their money. ...

    Harrison said there was never any expectation that institutional investors would be interested in buying the notes because they are relatively risky and unusual. But philanthropic groups would be able to write off a loss as a grant if the state loses the legal challenges and cannot issue bonds and repay the notes.

    This is pathetic. If someone wants to fund therapeutic cloning research, then he could do that directly. Nobody should lend money to this California boondoggle.
     
    The Culture War
    Pat Buchanan says:
    Why has Teddy Kennedy reverted to his apocalyptic rhetoric of Bork-battle days? Why is Chuck Schumer threatening an inquisition of Bush nominees? Why is the liberal media wailing that, to avoid a bloody Senate battle that will “divide” the country and “poison” our politics, Bush must nominate a “moderate” to the Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O’Connor?

    Answer: stark fear. If the Left loses the Supreme Court, the Left loses the Culture War. The Left loses the country. For 50 years, the high court has been its indispensable ally in the campaign to remake America into a secular and egalitarian society. The court has served as the battering ram of a social revolution that has to be imposed upon America—because it is hated by most Americans. ...

    The Left gets it, but many Bush Republicans still don’t. They don’t like moral issues, and they don’t enlist in culture wars. But as the Left has turned the Supreme Court into a judicial tyranny more powerful than the president or Congress in deciding social and moral questions, Republicans have two choices: they can fight the Judges War, or they can lose the war.

    He's right, as usual.
     
    Human intelligence
    This article says that babies can learn sign language.
     
    Spreadsheet inventor
    Randall Stross perpetuates a myth in the NY Times:
    Had Dan Bricklin, the creator of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that gave people a reason to buy a personal computer, obtained a patent covering the program in 1979, Microsoft would not have been able to bring out Excel until 1999. ...

    So why didn't Mr. Bricklin file for a patent for VisiCalc in 1979? Patents for software alone were not an option then. He consulted a patent attorney who said that the application would have to present the software within a machine and that the odds were long that the ploy would succeed. The courts regarded software as merely a collection of mathematical algorithms, tiny revelations of nature's secrets - not as an invention, and thus not patentable.

    Earlier inventors of the spreadsheet (Pardo and Landau) had filed for a patent in 1970. That patent even describes the natural order recalc -- a feature that VisiCalc lacked. In fact, software patents had always been available, if drafted properly.
     
    Hockey stick graph
    John sends this Steven Milloy column about the most famous graph supporting global warming theory:
    Noting that “sharing data and research results is a basic tenet of open scientific inquiry” and that the hockey stick research was paid for with public funds, Chairman Barton asked Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia for the computer code used to generate the hockey stick graph. Dr. Mann had previously refused to provide his computer code to other climate researchers who had requested it. ...

    The American Association for the Advancement of Science, long a proponent of global warming alarmism, chided Chairman Barton in a July 13 letter that Dr. Mann’s hockey stick had already been accepted by the United Nations’ global warming organization and that Congress ought not interfere with that process.

    No real scientist would refuse to release his data and programs.

    Saturday, Jul 30, 2005
     
    Babies cannot be addicted
    A cabal of medical and psychological researchers say:
    Despite the lack of a medical or scientific basis for the use of such terms as "ice" and "meth" babies, these pejorative and stigmatizing labels are increasingly being used in the popular media, in a wide variety of contexts across the country.

    ... almost 20 years of research on the chemically related drug, cocaine, has not identified a recognizable condition, syndrome or disorder that should be termed "crack baby" ...

    The term "meth addicted baby" is no less defensible. Addiction is a technical term that refers to compulsive behavior that continues in spite of adverse consequences. By definition, babies cannot be "addicted" to methamphetamines or anything else. The news media continues to ignore this fact.

    This continues the effort to redefine addiction as a psychological disorder. This is being done for ideological reasons. (See some libertarian support at Reason.)

    It used to be that addiction was defined in terms of medically measurable symptions like tolerance and withdrawal. A definition might also include cravings and habitual use. But the newer definitions typically preoccupation with a drug, continued use in spite of negative consequences, and failed attempts to quit.

    The result of the new definition is that prescribed drugs, like ritalin and prozac, can never be addictive. This is in spite of the fact that some of those drugs are highly addictive in animal studies.

    It also means that the happy dope smoker is not necessarily addicted. If he likes what he is doing and he is able to function, then these experts would say that he is not addicted no matter how much marijuana he has to consume.

    Psychological disorders are also defined in terms of behavior that causes adverse consequences, and not in terms of abnormal brain function or malfunction. Use of prozac and other prescribed mind-altering drugs is often justified in terms of a chemical imbalance in the brain, but hardly anyone has ever been found to have a chemical imbalance. They just have behavior that some medico agrees to try to alter. A compulsive desire to engage in deviant behavior is not enough to get a diagnosis as a psychological disorder.


    Friday, Jul 29, 2005
     
    Most harmful programs
    Human Events has a list of the 10 most harmful govt programs. I would have put the family court on the list. It seems to do far more harm than good.

    There are about $40B in family-court-ordered support payments in the USA every year, according to the latest US Census figures. In many cases, the money breaks up families.

     
    Evolving horses
    I have wondered whether there is any known mechanism in which one species can evolve into a different species with a different number of chromosomes. I still don't know the answer, but apparently it is sometimes possible for animals with different numbers of chromosomes to interbreed:
    Some authorities believe the Przewalski is a direct ancestor of the modern day domesticated horse. Others contend this is not possible as the Przewalski is a different species having sixty-six chromosomes while the domestic horse carries sixty-four. It is possible to cross the Przewalski with the domestic horse, and the resulting hybrid is fertile; however this offspring has sixty-five chromosomes. When crossed again to the domestic horse, the new generation returns to sixty-four chromosomes and little influence of the Przewalski horse is evident.
    I still don't see how mutation and natural selection offer any explanation of how these horses could have a common ancestor.

    Evolutionist Bob writes:

    What is it that you don't see? Mutations can cause duplication of chromosomes as in Downs syndrome. Individuals with a different number of chromosomes can breed with each other. An individual can survive and possibly benefit from mutations on a duplicate chromosome which would be lethal if there were only one chromosome. Evidence for a common ancestor is provided by genetic homology and tracing which genes are on which chromosomes. If you have an argument, please state it so I have some idea of what you are talking about. "I don't still see..." is not an argument and probably not a fact. It is certainly empty rhetoric.
    So did 66-chromosome horses evolve from 64-chromosome horses, or vice-versa? When has anyone observed a mutation beneficially changing the number of chromosomes? How did the change get propagated? I just don't see any theory here.

    Thursday, Jul 28, 2005
     
    Intelligent design is not ignorance
    Jeff Popoff writes:
    Caught your Dark Buzz blog for June 28th citing a fallacious personal attack from an anonymous (pseudononymous?) Bob. Please tell Bob that his mere opposition to ID as stated in your blog is simply opinion and is neither a true proposition, nor valid argument, and thus does not even remotely constitute a real rebuttal, as I am sure you appreciate.

    Feel free to update this posting noting to 'Bob' that I do in fact posses reasonable credentials to posit ID including: Bachelor of Science (Honors Level), Member of Scientific Staff, Bell Northern Research, P.Eng (North America), C.Eng (Europe), Stanford GSB graduate.

    For other intelligent ID advocates, see Discovery Institute, William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells.

    Bob responds:

    Credentials are no substitute for being informed. I am willing to bet that Popoff is unable to refute Dawkins' arguments in The Blind Watchmaker or the point by point destruction of ID arguments on these sites: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/ http://nationalacademies.org/evolution/, and http://www.talkorigins.org/.
    I couldn't find any destruction of ID arguments on those sites.

    Chris responds:

    This [Popoff message] is a standard rhetoric from the ID proponents. Every rebuttal is dismissed as not addressing their ideas making it as difficult to refute ID as it is to nail Jell-O to the wall.

    Allow me to address the "divine watchmaker" analogy originally formalized to popularize the design argument by William Paley in 1802 to show the shortcomings of ID. Indeed if one looks at a complex modern watch one must come to the conclusion that there was a watchmaker. Ignored in this is the long history of evolution of the watch from the first primitive man who realized that there was a consistency in the movement of the Sun through the heavens. From this using a stick stuck in the soil the concept of time as a reproducible period evolved yet further into water clocks and then simple timepieces. The concept morphed and changed until today we have atomic clocks that keep time more accurately than the rotation of the Earth.

    Each clock or timepiece has had a maker, but it was not one maker but the process, the evolution, of individuals working from the success of previous time makers that produced the modern timepiece. Evolution works in exactly the same way. The action that causes change, either genetic mutation through gamma rays, natural selection forced by population pressures, climate change driven by tectonic movement or catastrophic celestial events or any other random natural event is the driver that forces organisms to change and evolve. Each change is built upon the successful foundation of all the previous changes. In this almost imperceptible process we can experience the emergence of insects and plants that are resistant to our pesticides or herbicides. These changes have occurred in less than fifty years; imagine the magnitude of the changes over a thousand years, to say nothing of a million or the three and a half billion years since life first appeared on this planet.

    Can we explain every detail of natural evolution, of course not but that does not require the introduction of a metaphysical actor to make the details explicable. Problems that exist in current thinking about evolution are not dismissed or swept under the rug but are at the heart of the ferment and excitement that characterizes modern science. There is no facet of evolution that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.

    The arguments most often stated in opposition are simplistic. The argument that current micro biological structures are ‘too complex’ to have evolved by chance is only offered by those who fail to appreciate probability theory and the extraordinary length of time evolution has had to work in. (Obviously a problem, if you wish, as many ‘young earth’ ID proponents do, to claim the earth is less than 10,000 years old.) The argument that the Cambrian explosion produced too many new organisms for which there are no examples in the fossil records is only accepted by those who imagine that the fossil record is a complete linear record of all geological time in earth’s history.

    We could go further and dismiss each argument for flaws in evolution and have no more success. This is because ID is a theory that is driven exclusively by Christian faith and the belief that the Bible is an accurate record of the world’s history. It can further be seen by the thrust of ID proponents to attempt to preach their beliefs at children. The desire to teach ‘alternatives’ to students is a direct attempt to make an end run around the scientific community which has steadfastly refused to lower the standard of scientific argument to appease the relentless whining of hacks and religious zealots. By influencing those who are unable to understand the flaws and shortcomings of ID the proponents hope to develop another generation of Americans who are ignorant about science and logic and easily swayed by demagogues.

    I don't believe that every facet of evolution can be explained. Almost all of macro-evolution is unexplained. I also deny that ID theory depends on the Bible being historically accurate. I have never heard ID proponents quote the Bible.

    I'm not sure what to make of Chris's clock analogy. Is he suggesting that maybe God created dinosaurs and other prehistoric species as experiments, and gradually perfected his creation technique until he figured out how to create Man?

    Mike writes:

    Perhaps you're not listening. Here's a nut case with Bible quotes he claims backs ID.
    That site has some curious theories about biblical interpretation, but I couldn't find anything about ID theory as advocated by the Discovery Institute.

    Wednesday, Jul 27, 2005
     
    Hypocritical and illogical pro abortionist
    John sends Terence Jeffrey on Dick Durbin's evolving standard of decency. Read the full Meet the Press transcript here.

    Tuesday, Jul 26, 2005
     
    Howard Dean, lying Bush basher
    DNC Chairman Howard Dean said:
    The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it’s 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.
    The Kelo v New London dissenters were Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor. It was the left-wing Supreme Court that expanded eminent domain.
     
    Judicial supremacy started in 1947
    A critic of The Supremacists challenges its claim that judicial supremacy was an invention of the Warren Court in Aaron v Cooper. He quotes Charles Evans Hughes, the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941, as saying: “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.”

    It turns out that Hughes never claimed judicial supremacy while on the court, but only said the quote in a 1907 extemporaneous speech. According to this discussion, Hughes was governor of New York and the context was that he was actually attacking activist judges.

    According to this Human Events story, Attorney General Gonzales said, "The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is." I guess we should be glad that Pres. Bush did not appoint a supremacist to the Supreme Court.


    Monday, Jul 25, 2005
     
    Smart animals and Scopes
    Evolutionists are always saying how smart animals are, as if they are comparable to humans. But as this NY Times article explains, chimps are just about the only animals that are capable of understanding mirrors as well as a one-year-old child.

    The same paper cannot resist a chance to insert some leftist-evolutionist-atheist propaganda. It discusses the 1925 Scopes trial, and says:

    Darrow's argument that Bryan disregarded scientific evidence was immortalized in this exchange:

    "I do not think about things I don't think about," Bryan said.

    "Do you think about the things you do think about?" Darrow asked.

    "Well," Bryan replied, "sometimes."

    What actually happened was that Darrow called Bryan to the witness stand as an expert on the Bible, and asked him what date could be calculated for Noah's flood, according to data in the Bible. Bryan denied having a literal belief in the Bible, and didn't know a date for Noah's flood.

    So Darrow was not asking about scientific evidence, but about Biblical evidence! In reality, it was Bryan, not Darrow, who understood evolution and was able to debate it.

     
    Constitution is safe for the summer
    The Supreme Court is in recess, so we know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.
     
    Jared Diamond on immigration
    Steve Sailer attacks Jared Diamond for failing to address immigration issues directly.

    Sunday, Jul 24, 2005
     
    Butterfly evolution
    BBC says:
    Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin.

    Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it.

    Glad to see an evolutionist actually admit that no one understands speciation.

    The article reports on new research in Nature:

    For speciation to occur, two branches of the same species must stop breeding with one another for long enough to grow apart genetically.

    The most obvious way this can happen is through geographical isolation.

    If a mountain range or river divides a population of animals for hundreds of generations, they might find that if they meet again they are no longer able to breed.

    But geographical isolation is not enough to explain all speciation. Clearly, organisms do sometimes speciate even if there is no clear river or mountain separating them.

    The other mechanism that can theoretically divide a species is "reproductive isolation". This occurs when organisms are not separated physically, but "choose" not to breed with each other thereby causing genetic isolation, which amounts to the same thing.

    The article claims that if 2 butterfly species live close to each other, then they somehow adopt different color codes on their wings so that they'll know not to mate with each other.

    So this is supposed to explain speciation?! Next they'll be saying that the Neanderthal women had big noses so that the Cro-magnon men would know not to mate with them.

     
    Roberts, unknown conservative
    John writes:
    Today's Washington Post interviewed a liberal Democrat colleague of Roberts who had lunch with him almost every day - 1,000 times in all. The friend thought Roberts was a "staunch conservative" but, when pressed, could not recall a single statement Roberts ever made or position he ever took that clearly marked him as a conservative.
    Sometimes people leap to conclusions that someone is a conservative for the silliest reasons.

    Friday, Jul 22, 2005
     
    Offender profiling
    Schneier rants against profiling people for security purposes, and cites this paper as proof.

    I think that the paper is fallacious and silly. It equates "random" with uniformly random, and has a simplistic notion of profiling. The argument is that if you search passengers based on a profile, then the terrorists will test the system until they figure out the profiling rules, and then will send suicide bombers who don't match the profile.

    But the terrorists are not able to recruit from all profiles equally. If it is much easier for them to recruit 25-year-old arab males, then those men should be the most likely to be scrutinized. Such a security strategy will do better than the uniform random strategy of the paper.

     
    Pres. Bush likes exercise
    John sends this J. Chait column in the LA Times:
    My guess is that Bush associates exercise with discipline, and associates a lack of discipline with his younger, boozehound days. "The president," said Fleischer, "finds [exercise] very healthy in terms of … keeping in shape. But it's also good for the mind." The notion of a connection between physical and mental potency is, of course, silly. (Consider all the perfectly toned airheads in Hollywood — or, perhaps, the president himself.) But Bush's apparent belief in it explains why he would demand well-conditioned economic advisors and Supreme Court justices.

    Bush's insistence that the entire populace follow his example, and that his staff join him on a Long March — er, Long Run — carries about it the faint whiff of a cult of personality. It also shows how out of touch he is. It's nice for Bush that he can take an hour or two out of every day to run, bike or pump iron. Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does.

    Joe writes:
    What an idiotic article. I can't find an article on aging that DOESN'T say that exercise helps cognition. I think that Mr. Chait doesn't get enough exercise.
     
    Gates is baffled
    John writes, "Do you laugh or cry at this?
    Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he's baffled more students don't go into computer science.
    The main reasons are the hard work, long hours, low pay, low status, boring tasks, Dilbert management, high unemployment, and Indian and Chinese outsourcing. Plus, Jay Leno says that computer programmers cannot get girlfriends. Somebody should send the memo to billg@microsoft.com.
     
    Templeton funds Physics
    NPR radio had a story about how The John Templeton Foundation is trying to create a dialog between science and religion by funding physics conferences on topics like multiple universes and string theory.

    My theory is that people in the hard sciences are much more tolerant of religious folks than those in the soft sciences. Academics in the soft sciences like evolution would be adamantly against this.

     
    Roman Polanski wins 'seduction case'
    In England, a child molestation fugitive can win a libel case.
    Film director Roman Polanski has won £50,000 libel damages over a claim that he made sexual advances to a Scandinavian woman just after wife Sharon Tate's brutal murder. ...

    The magazine said its article was substantially true but accepted that the incident did not occur when Polanski was on his way back to Hollywood for Miss Tate's funeral - it maintained it took place about two weeks later.

    It argued that, in any case, Polanski should not receive any damages as his reputation had already been ruined by his 1977 conviction and promiscuous past.

    In the USA, Jay Leno can continue to make fun of Michael Jackson as a child molester, even though he has been acquitted.
     
    Michael Jackson gets his magazines back
    AP news:
    SANTA MARIA, Calif. - The judge who presided over Michael Jackson's child molestation case ordered prosecutors Thursday to return to the entertainer hundreds of items seized by investigators. ...

    Jackson's attorneys have petitioned for the return of all items taken from the entertainer.

    Sneddon argued against returning some items he labeled "contraband."

    Jackson was acquitted. The DA needs to end his vendetta.

    Wednesday, Jul 20, 2005
     
    No Christian terrorists
    I occasionally see people complain about terms like Islamic terrorist, because no one ever talks about Christian terrorists. But the latter is because there is no Christian terrorist movement.

    The main examples cited are usually Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph. But they were not Christians. McVeigh was an agnostic, and Rudolph says that he prefers Nietzsche to the Bible.

    Meanwhile, a recent Pew poll shows that a majority of Jordanians support suicide bombings.

    I think that the better term is Mohammedan terrorist. I think of Mohammedanism as being more than a religion; it includes political and military objectives. And to much of the Mohammedan world, that includes supporting terrorism.

    Mike writes, "Have you ever heard of the IRA????".

    Yes, the IRA committed terrorist acts and its members were Catholics. But the Catholic Church was always opposed to those terrorist activities. Furthermore, the IRA repudiated violence 8 years ago, and hasn't attacked anyone since.


    Tuesday, Jul 19, 2005
     
    John Roberts
    My blog keeps getting hits looking for info about John Roberts. Sorry, I don't know much. Here is all I have.

    More facts about Roberts: He graduated from Harvard (summa cum laude) in only 3 years. He attended an all-boys, private Catholic boarding school, graduating 1st in a class of 22 or 25 students. He took 6 years of Latin. His senior year there was entirely independent study. The school has proudly posted a page about him with pictures from the yearbook. He worked summers at NW Indiana steel mills where his father was an electrical engineer.

    His wife is a partner in a major D.C. law firm. She is on the board of the John Carroll Society. They married in 1996 when both were about 41 years old. They adopted a girl and boy who are now 5 and 4.

    Roberts is a longtime member of the Federalist Society, and his wife is a past president of a Feminists for Life group. (The Federalist Society info was widely reported, but turns out to be false.)

    I agree with Sen. Schumer that Roberts should provide 3 Supreme Court decisions with which he disagreed. It should be easy. Roberts argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court, and I am sure that he did not win them all. He can just name all the ones he lost.

    Update: Felix from NY reports that Roberts is not a member of the Federalist Society. It seems that some conspiracy-minded reporters just automatically assumed that Roberts is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy. But having been told that Roberts is not a member, the Wash. Post looks for another dark motive: "A related question is why Roberts would not want to be a member."

    Update (July 25): Felix from NY reports again that the Wash. Post is hot on the trail of whether Roberts was ever a member of the Federalist Society. It says:

    The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by conservatives who disagreed with what they saw as a leftist tilt in the nation's law schools. The group sponsors legal symposia and similar activities and serves as a network for rising conservative lawyers.

    In conservative circles, membership in or association with the society has become a badge of ideological and political reliability.

    ... many Democrats regard the organization with suspicion.

    They listen to public speeches that are not filtered by leftist law professors. Yeah, sounds very suspicious. A member might actually think for himself!

    The Wash. Post has had to correct itself on this subject last Thursday, and in 2001.

     
    Relying on foreign law
    John sends this M. Edward Whelan III essay on the Supreme Court improperly relying on foreign law.
     
    Bush sticks to his position
    The lying Bush-haters at the Wash. Post and San Jose Mercury News had this story as the top story today:
    After originally saying anyone involved in leaking the name of a covert CIA operative would be fired, Bush told reporters: ``If somebody committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.''
    No, what Bush originally said was:
    If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of. I welcome the investigation. I am absolutely confident the Justice Department will do a good job. I want to know the truth. Leaks of classified information are bad things.
    So what Bush originally said was nearly identical to what he is saying now. This is a good example of a dishonest anti-Bush story.

    Update: The article not only misrepresents what Bush originally said, it also misrepresents what Bush subsequently said. The article says:

    In June of 2004, Bush was asked if he would ``fire anyone found to'' leak the agent's name. ``Yes,'' he replied.
    The actual exchange was:
    Q: And, and, do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so?

    THE PRESIDENT: Yes. And that's up to the U.S. Attorney to find the facts."

    It seems clear to me that Bush is standing by his pledge to fire anyone who leaked a name in violation of the law. He is using "leak" to mean a criminal release of classified info. As usual, the Bush-haters are lying and Bush is telling the truth.
     
    Guns, Germs, Steel
    PBS TV says:
    Jared Diamond's revolutionary theories about the course of human civilization come to the screen in GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: A NATIONAL GEOGRPHIC PRESENTATION, a new three-part television series produced exclusively for PBS. Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning work offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of societies through the lens of geography, technology, biology and economics - forces symbolized by the power of guns, germs and steel. The series airs on PBS Mondays, July 11-25, 2005.
    You may wonder how such a silly and wrongheaded book could get so much attention and praise. I have an explanation. The leftist-intellectual elites are strong believers in the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle:
    The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
    This principle appeals very much to Marxists, atheists, and secular humanists. It even appeals to blog spammers, as a Google search reveals. It is nonsense.

    Jared Diamond's main thesis is to deny human credit for the creation of Western Civilation. He says that it is all an accident of geography. All of the great men who are on pedestals in our history books were no better than the average uneducated savage in New Guinea. They just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

    It is hard to see how anyone like Diamond could get such popular acclaim without subscribing to the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle.

    Bob likes Diamond, and says, "What about James Watson?"

    Bob reads my blog, so he must be joking. I previously pointed out that Watson promotes his own work as a great example of the principle.

    I check the list of Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction books, to see if all the science-related books subscribe to the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle. Sure enough, there are several pro-evolution books. There is a book by Carl Sagan, who is famous for advocating life on other planets and other leftist causes. There is a book on Goedel's theorem, who supposedly shows that humans are unable to demonstrate truth. All try to knock man off the pedestal.

    Bob writes:

    This is a complete fabrication. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond attempts to answer the question asked by a man from New Guinea which can be summarized as, why are we so much better off than people in New Guinea? Diamond rejects genetics as an explanation based on the evidence that there is no disparity in mental capacity between people in New Guinea and us. Obviously culture is critical, but that explanation begs the question. It is clear that culture and genetics are entangled. Diamond's point is that culture is determined primarily by geography which determines what plants can be cultivated and what animals can be domesticated which determines resistance to germs. There is nothing in the book which can be reasonably interpreted as knocking man off his pedestal. If people who are enthralled with pedestal knocking like Diamond's book it isn't because Diamond writes about it in his book. I looked for left wing ideology when I read Guns... and found only one idiotic left wing statement, but it is unrelated to pedestal knocking. The fact that a book is pro-evolution does not mean that it automatically advocates pedestal knocking. I have seen no evidence of pedestal knocking in 3 of Dawkins' books which I have read. Reading books before commenting on them is the preferred approach.
    Before Diamond discovered the Copernican-Freudian-Gouldian principle, he wrote a Nature paper about how low dizygotic (aka fraternal or non-identical) twin rates in Asians may be related to small testis size. He suggests investigating the high twin rate for African blacks. Nobody praises him for that. Later, in his Germs book, he says, "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners", and everybody thinks that he is a genius. Some people have even declared that his book belongs alongside Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure Of Man, as the two greatest books of all time. People support this junk for ideological reasons only.

    To say that all of the achievements of Western Civilization are just accidents of geography is certainly an attempt to knock Man off the pedestal. Similarly, Gould's denial that intelligence is real, measurable, or significant is also an attempt to knock Man off the pedestal. There seems to be no limit to the praise that a socialist soft-science professor can get for his wacky ideas, as long as he is knocking Man off the pedestal.


    Monday, Jul 18, 2005
     
    Executing worm writers
    This column says:
    I'm almost convinced by Steven Landsburg's cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.

    Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.

    The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year.

    Would he execute Bill Gates?

    Msft made a deliberate decision to make Windows vulnerable to computer viruses and worms because it suited its business interests. It has no legal liability, and it likes making users dependent on updates.

    Bob writes:

    When the first worm was (accidentally) released, a colleague suggested that the author be cut in half, referring to the fact that a flatworm becomes 2 living flatworms when it is cut in half. That was about 15 years ago. Isn't it time to focus on MicroSoft which has had 15 years to solve the problem and has only made it worse?
    Solving the problem may not be in Msft's business interests.
     
    Evolutionist censorship
    Evolutions will do anything to censor their opponents. This blog says:
    The Ethics of Mr. Leonard's Research. It has been alleged by three OSU professors at that Mr. Leonard's dissertation was "unethical human subject experimentation" because it examines the question: "When students are taught the scientific data both supporting and challenging macroevolution, do they maintain or change their beliefs over time?" According to the Columbus Dispatch, these professors acknowledge they have not read Mr. Leonard's dissertation, but they believe that Mr. Leonard's dissertation research must have been "unethical" because there are no valid scientific criticisms of evolution. (More info here.)
    Only a leftist-atheist-evolutionist would make such a silly ethics argument in order to try to stop a grad student from doing a perfectly good study on teaching methods.

    Monday, Jul 11, 2005
     
    Iraq myths
    This John Hawkins article debunks 8 Iraq war myths. It is amazing how the lying Bush-haters just say the same nonsense over and over again, no matter how many times it has been debunked.

    Sunday, Jul 10, 2005
     
    Pope on evolution
    Andy writes:
    With the bombshell last week that the Catholic Church is hinting rejection of evolution, it is worth revisiting the statement in French by Pope Paul II that evolutionists seized upon:

    The Pope said: "Aujourd'hui, pres d'un demisiecle apres la parution de l'encyclique, de nouvelles connaisances condesuisent a reconnaitre dans la theorie de l'evolution plus qu'une hypothese."

    The official Vatican newspaper translated this into English as: "Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Encyclical [Humani generis, 1950], new knowledge has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution."

    The evolutionists insisted on translating it as: "Today, more than a half century after this encyclical, new knowledge leads us to recognize in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis."

    I find the evolutionists' translation more awkard than the Vatican's, but the French is ambiguous. Under the evolutionists' view, one would expect a more direct articulation: "... new knowledge leads us to recognize THAT the theory of evolution IS more than a hypothesis."

    Regardless, it is doubtful that Pope John Paul II himself believed in evolution, as most Polish reject the English theory. I don't think the Pope ever supported evolution in his voluminous writings. So who really wrote this statement? Ratzinger? If so, he is apparently on the road to repudiate evolution now.

    Liza writes:
    As I have said before, the "evolutionists'" translation of the Pope's statement is more accurate as a matter of fidelity to the French text. If I were you I wouldn't push your argument below publicly. I suppose there is a slight possibility that as a non-native French speaker the Pope didn't say what he really meant. But of course, as the Viennese cardinal recently explained, there is no reason to believe the Pope thought God was out of the loop.
    Andy could be right about the translation of "one". A few sentences later the Pope said, "And, to tell the truth, rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution." So it makes sense for him to speak of more than one hypothesis. Also:
    The Vatican’s own observatory, quotes his address in their 1996 report. On it’s cover, they quote, “Today ... new knowledge leads us to the realization that evolution is more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.” Along with his quote is a photo of what is labeled as a Martian meterorite.
    So one of those "discoveries" might have been the 1996 claim that a Martian meteorite contained organic matter. That claim has now been discredited.
     
    More on McConnell
    Another blogger writes:
    Saying that McConnell is the most famous social conservative in legal academia is not as meaningless as you believe. As you should know by now, McConnell argued before the Supreme Court that the Boy Scouts should be able to keep out homosexual scoutmasters; he argued that universities shouldn't discriminate against religious student publications; he argued on behalf of school vouchers. Those are just a few of the Supreme Court cases that he actually argued. And then there is his 1998 WSJ piece that criticized Roe on every possible ground. And then his signing of the First Things statement calling for (among other things) the Supreme Court to overrule Roe just as it overruled segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and for a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

    Look, you know how intolerant some of these law professors can be. Michael McConnell has put his neck on the line numerous times. He didn't have to do any of those things. He could have played it safe, been even more popular among his liberal colleagues, etc. Why on earth would a so-called "Souter" argue for so many things that he didn't believe in?

    Tell you what, why don't you run your beliefs about McConnell by someone else who knows the guy? Say, Jay Sekulow, who has said that McConnell is his top choice for the Court.

    Andy responds:
    I've never said or implied that McConnell has "argue[d] for so many things that he didn't believe in." Quite the contrary, I'm assuming that McConnell *does* believe in the things he says, and doesn't believe in what he has obviously refused to say. For example, McConnell has said he opposes invocations at graduation, and I take him at his word. That issue is important enough on its own, but also implies a view against government morality, which is confirmed by McConnell's writings on other issues. This is a *huge* matter.

    I also respect some of the courageous positions McConnell has taken, such as arguing in favor of the Boy Scouts. But not everyone I respect becomes suitable for Bush's rare pick to the Supreme Court.

    It's the distortions of what McConnell says and believes that I object to. Even after our exchange of a dozen emails, you misstate that McConnell signed a statement "calling for ... the Supreme Court to overrule Roe just as it overruled segregation in Brown v. Board of Education." No, the statement oddly avoided saying that, carefully using the term "could" rather than "should". McConnell has expressly favored stare decisis to protect Roe against judicial challenge. He has volunteered that view under oath, and no one seriously doubts his word on this.

    Jay Sekulow has said McConnell will "more likely to be with us than against us," which is not a stirring endorsement. Jay's position is that he'll support whomever Bush picks, and Jay probably views McConnell as a friend. However, others (including myself) feel the stakes are too high to be quiet as liberals pressure Bush from the opposite direction.

    And the blogger responds:
    Two points:

    1. The 1996 statement was written by a bunch of dedicated opponents of Roe, including activists from every pro-life group you can name. But you are claiming that when they compared Roe to Plessy, they didn't really mean to imply that Roe should be overruled. What they really meant was hidden behind the word "could," which meant only that the Supreme Court "could THEORETICALLY" overrule Roe, but was secretly meant to hide the fact that the signers didn't want Roe to be overruled at all.

    Step back for a minute, and think about whether that interpretation is plausible.

    The obvious way to read the 1996 statement is this: The signers wanted the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. But the Supreme Court's last word on the subject (Casey) spoke of the importance of stare decisis, the importance of not "overruling under fire," and so forth. So the signers took on that argument on its own terms. Their message was directed to the Kennedys and Souters on the Supreme Court. And that message was this: "The Supreme Court has overruled itself before, and has done so to its great credit. You [the Court] could do the same here, and it would only benefit your historical reputation as much as the Supreme Court benefited from the Brown decision."

    In other words, imagine a dialogue:

    Supreme Court in Casey: "We can't overrule Roe; to do so would be a sign of weakness."

    1996 statement: "Oh, yes you COULD, and it would be a sign of moral strength."

    It is quite erroneous to seize on the single word "could," take it utterly out of context, and then pretend that the signers really meant to imply that the Court "SHOULD" not overrule Roe. That was not McConnell's intent, and there is absolutely no reason to give the 1996 statement the reading that you do.

    Indeed, the irony is rich here: McConnell, as one of the signers here, attacked the Supreme Court PRECISELY FOR RELYING ON STARE DECISIS, when it could have overruled Roe just as the Brown Court overruled Plessy. And yet you are attacking McConnell for supposedly wanting to preserve Roe through stare decisis.

    Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

    2. It is you who are distorting McConnell's views beyond recognition, based on his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Come on. You know and everyone knows that nominees don't state the full import of their beliefs to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, it's a giant game: The Democrats are trying to trap the nominees into saying their true feelings about Roe, while the nominees are trying their best to hide behind vague or ambiguous phrases.

    That's precisely why several of Bush's nominees said that "Roe is settled law." John Ashcroft said that; Miguel Estrada said that; John Roberts said that; Priscilla Owen said that. But it means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the nominee's own views of Roe. What they are really thinking is more like this: "Roe is settled [but I'd be perfectly willing to unsettle it]."

    Same goes for McConnell's mention of stare decisis. He did NOT SAY that he favored stare decisis, that he believed Roe should be upheld, or anything remotely like that. All that he said was that Casey had relied on stare decisis. Well, so what? The Casey opinion DID rely on stare decisis. McConnell was describing that opinion truthfully. But he was very careful to say absolutely nothing about whether HE agreed with stare decisis here.

    Indeed, McConnell was very smart. For someone who has publicly spent his entire career opposing Roe, he had to mollify the Senate Democrats so that they wouldn't filibuster him. So he said a lot of nice-sounding things about Roe, but if you think about it, everything he said gave ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE as to what HE HIMSELF would like to do with Roe.

    It's a shame that McConnell's own intelligence and ability to survive tough Senate questioning are now being used against him by people who should be his biggest supporters.

    There is a similar discussion here.

    Here is what Ashcroft said, in his confirmation hearings:

    I believe Roe v. Wade as an original matter was wrongly decided. I am personally opposed to abortion. But I well understand that the role of attorney general is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it. I accept Roe and Casey as the settled law of the land. If confirmed as attorney general, I will follow the law in this area and in all other areas. The Supreme Court’s decisions on this have been multiple, they have been recent and they have been emphatic.
    He refused to say whether he would support reversing Roe.

    Liza writes:

    On the topic of Michael McConnell, check out this website if you haven't already. It has a lot of good quotes from McConnell's confirmation hearing, especially regarding polygamy and the free exercise clause. I've seen suggestions elsewhere that he might think there's a free exercise right to abortion, but I haven't been able to find quotes to support those suggestions.

    In any case, I think conservatives should make more of the polygamy statements. They're not widely known. His statements on abortion are a little more ambiguous, but it seems perfectly clear to me that he would be a vote to strike down laws banning polygamous marriage (and by extension, gay marriage) as long as some clergyperson blesses the union.

    I don't know about McConnell, but a lot of these judges seem to believe in judicial supremacy above all else. So no matter how much he thinks that Roe was wrongly decided, he may not reverse if he thinks that judicial supremacy is more important. Do we know what McConnell thinks about judicial supremacy?

    A reader responds:

    Read his 1997 HLR piece. His central thesis was that Congress has a right to interpret the Constitution differently from the Supreme Court. E.g, this paragraph:
    In Boerne, the Court erred in assuming that congressional interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is illegitimate. The historical record shows that the framers of the Amendment expected Congress, not the Court, to be the primary agent of its enforcement, and that Congress would not necessarily consider itself bound by Court precedents in executing that function. That does not mean that the Court is required to follow Congress's interpretation, any more than Congress is required to follow the Court's. But it does mean that the Court should give respectful attention - and probably the presumption of constitutionality - to the interpretive judgments of Congress. For the Court simply to assume the correctness of its own prior interpretations, and fail to take the contrary opinion of Congress into consideration, was unjustifiable.
    Another strong clue is McConnell's introduction to his article on the right-to-die case (which was quoted in Mr. Schlafly's Worldnetdaily piece):
    Last Term, the Roe era came to an end. Washington v. Glucksberg, 9 together with a companion case under the Equal Protection Clause, 10 squarely presented the question of whether federal courts, exercising the power of judicial review, have authority to resolve contentious questions of social policy on the basis of their own normative judgments. In a soft-spoken opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist that did not even cite Roe, a solid majority of the Court answered "no." The Court announced a constitutional jurisprudence of unenumerated rights under the Due Process Clause based not on the normative judgments of courts, but on constitutional text supplemented by the tradition and experience of the nation. Roe v. Wade was not reversed on its facts; the abortion right itself remains secure. But the constitutional methodology under which Roe was decided has been repudiated. The era of judicial supremacy epitomized by Roe is over.
    In other words, McConnell was celebrating the end of "judicial supremacy." (Note that he was most decidedly not arguing that abortion OUGHT to "remain secure," but was merely describing the fact that the Supreme Court had not, in fact, overruled Roe itself.)

    Also, it is simply a misstatement to say that McConnell is a libertarian. No libertarian would write the following passage, as McConnell did in reviewing a book by Ronald Dworkin:

    The quotation from Casey is therefore an inadequate reason for the decision in the assisted suicide cases. A conscientious judge would have to examine the passage from Casey, compare it to the constitutional text and other relevant materials, think about the new context of assisted suicide, and then determine whether it makes sense to say that all matters involving "the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime" are constitutionally protected. Do we, for example, believe that the intimate and personal decision to fry one's brain with crack cocaine is constitutionally protected? Or that the state has no right to interfere when a healthy twenty-two-year-old graduate student hangs himself in a university apartment? Or that the intimate and personal decision to sell one's body for sexual gratification is protected? A conscientious judge, reflecting on such matters, might well conclude that the language of Casey is simply an example of overbroad judicial rhetoric.
    The obvious answer to those rhetorical questions is "No." Whereas any libertarian would say that yes, using drugs or suicide or prostitution are within the rights of the individual.
    I still don't see why McConnell said that "the only avenue for any change is through constitutional amendment", if he really believes that Roe can be reversed by the Supreme Court.
     
    Universal common ancestor
    Here is a 1998 article that throws doubt on the universal common ancestor theory.
    The three kinds of genome offered a broad basis for triangulating back to the ancestral genome. But the emerging picture is far more complicated than had been expected, and the ancestor's features remain ill-defined though not wholly elusive. "Five years ago we were very confident and arrogant in our ignorance," said Dr. Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. "Now we are starting to see the true complexity of life."

    Despite the quagmire in which their present efforts have landed them, biologists have not in any way despaired of confirming the conventional thesis, that life evolved on earth from natural chemical processes. But a ferment of rethinking and regrouping is under way. ...

    A basic source of the confusion is that in the course of evolution whole suites of genes have apparently been transferred sideways among the major branches. Among animals, genes are passed vertically from parent to child but single-celled creatures tend to engulf each other and occasionally amalgamate into a corporate genetic entity. ...

    A new and far-reaching theory about the universal ancestor has been developed by Woese. Though he declined to discuss it, because his article is due to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, colleagues said the theory envisages that all three kingdoms emerged independently from a common pool of genes.

    The evolutionists claim that the universal common ancestor theory is a proven fact, but it is really just a guess.

    Saturday, Jul 09, 2005
     
    Prayer in schools
    Another blogger writes to defend McConnell and to support his position against prayer in school:
    Here's a conservative defense: Do you want government agents telling your children how to pray? Why on earth would you want that? What on earth makes you think that you can count on the government agents to be free from heresy? Are the teachers' unions full of godly people?

    And you never answered my question from before: How do you feel about a Catholic teacher leading the kids in a "Hail Mary"? OK or not? How about a Muslim teacher mentioning Allah? Just another word for God, she says. OK or not? How about a Mormon teacher? You get the point. And if you're not comfortable having Mormons or Muslims teach your kid how to pray, why not give them the same respect?

    Look, I'm all for school prayer -- in private schools and home schools. And in fact, I'd abolish public schools if I could. So there could be school prayer everywhere, as far as I'm concerned. But as long as the government is in charge, I can't think of any good reason why a decent Christian would rely on government-hired teachers for matters of prayer.

    Anyway, saying that McConnell is not conservative because of this issue is like those liberals who deny that Souter is a liberal. After all, they say, Souter doesn't automatically vote against the death penalty, the way that Brennan and Marshall did. Well, ok, so Souter's only a 99% pure liberal, but he's still a liberal. So too, even if you think McConnell is only 99% pure conservative, he's still a conservative originalist. Anyone who is familiar with appellate litigation and legal academia knows that McConnell is (1) the most famous social conservative among law professors nationwide, and (2) the most prominent Supreme Court litigator on behalf of the free exercise of religion.

    And if you think that McConnell is a defender of judicial supremacy, you should read his 1997 Harvard Law Review piece tearing apart the case of City of Boerne v. Flores precisely because the Supreme Court tried to seize too much power for itself under the 14th Amendment.

    Andy responds:
    But to address your point, there should not any censorship of religion in the classroom. What the local Board or State decides should govern. Those who disagree need not participate in the prayers. There is no role for the federal courts in this. The Constitution does not prohibit this now, or when the Constitution was ratified, or any time in between.

    Would I mind if the local public school prayed to Allah? Not any more than the way public school promotes sexual behavior, teaches about suicide, force-feeds evolution, and generally advances a liberal agenda. My recourse is to campaign and vote against the elected officials who passed something I disagree with.

    School prayer is the sine qua non of conservatives, and has been for decades. It reflects views on other aspects of public morality. Anyone who opposes school prayer (e.g., McConnell) is unlikely to be a conservative.

    I haven't followed this McConnell issue, as Andy has. It sounds to me that (1) McConnell is mainly considered a conservative because of his advocacy for religious freedom, and (2) McConnell supports the line of Supreme Court decisions against school prayer.

    This makes little sense to me. Andy's theory, as I understand it, is that McConnell is really a libertarian and not a conservative.

    Personally, I do not favor saying the Hail Mary in public schools, but I see no reason why local school boards cannot make reasonable decisions. I think that it was a little strange when my daughter's local public school had a Christmas singing performance last December, and they could not sing any Christmas songs!

    Those Supreme Court prayer decisions were not about the Hail Mary. They were aggressively anti-religion on both tone and effect. McConnell may have many fine credentials, but I fail to see why any religious conservatives would support him.

    The Powerline blog says that McConnell has "made more clear his view that Roe v. Wade was not only wrongly decided, but utterly indefensible as a matter of constitutional law." Okay, but McConnell has also made it clear that Roe v Wade should be upheld anyway. I don't know who is impressed by such thinking.

     
    Mercury and autism
    USA Today says:
    The argument over what is causing soaring rates of autism has reached a boiling point with furious parent groups and their famous allies accusing scientists and public health officials of hiding information to cover up their own mistakes. ...

    "We're injecting poisons into children," said environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a phone interview last week. ...

    "There is a dangerous mistrust of science," says Paul Offit, an infectious-disease specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "I don't think it's new, but it may be worse."

    Offit and other approved the mercury in the vaccines while on the vaccine makers' payrolls. The problem is not a mistrust of science. Offit is one of these people who think that an educated elite can tell everyone what to do, and if you disagree then you must be anti-science.
     
    Poll: Americans doubt evolution
    Here is a new Harris poll on evolution.

    Only 12% say that schools should only teach that evolution says that human beings evolved from earlier stages of animals. Most people say that creationist alternatives should be taught.

    The poll also found that those who think human beings developed from earlier species has dropped from 44% to 38%. Even among those with postgraduate degrees, belief in creationism seems to outrank belief in evolution.

    And yet there is a leftist-atheist-Gouldian-evolutionist elite in this country that insists on brainwashing kids with its minority views.


    Friday, Jul 08, 2005
     

    Andy is attacked on the Powerline blog and he separately wrote this:
    In my column posted on Worldnet Daily, I complained about frontrunner Supreme Court nominee McConnell's sworn testimony before the U. S. Senate that Roe v. Wade is "as thoroughly settled as any issue in current constitutional law." I have now found the context of that quote, and it is even worse! Here's McConnell's statement:
    At the time Roe v. Wade came down, it was striking the statutes of at least 45, if not all 50 of the States of the Union. Today it is much more reflective of the consensus of the American people on the subject. I believe that the doctrinal analysis offered in Planned Parenthood v. Casey has connected the right much more persuasively to traditional legal materials, and then the weight of stare decisis simply indicates that this is an issue that is settled. It is as thoroughly settled as any issue in current constitutional law.
    My guess is that the neoconservatives and RINOs are pushing McConnell because they would prefer that the Supreme Court not overturn Roe v. Wade. Note that no one else here (other than me) expressed support for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. We need a word to describe those who criticize Roe but don't want judicial reversal of it. Too many of them masquerade as being pro-life. Any pledge on this topic should ask that question directly.
    I would have agreed with McConnell if he just said that Roe was settled law. That is a correct statement, and it says nothing about whether is should be overturned. A few years ago, anyone would have similarly said that the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws was settled law.

    But the McConnell quote goes beyond that in 2 ways that I won't defend.

    1. He says Roe reflects an American consensus. That is false.
    2. He cites "stare decisis" in support of Roe. This can only mean that he is against overturning it.

    Roe v Wade helped prevent an American consensus on abortion. 30 years later, the issue is as divisive as ever. While most American believe that abortion should be legal under various circumstances, only about 5% agree with the Roe outcome, and even fewer agree with the legal reasoning. For McConnell to say that Roe reflects an American consensus is wacky and bizarre.

     
    Catholics partially accept evolution
    Catholic archbishop Christoph Schönborn says:
    EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was "more than just a hypothesis," defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

    But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

    In other words, the Church accepts the science, but not the hokey atheistic philosophy that usually gets taught with evolution.

    Bob writes:

    Can you support your claim that "hokey atheistic philosophy that usually gets taught with evolution"? You have yet to do so. You need more than one example to support your "usually" claim, unless you wish to retract it. Until you supply evidence I consider your claim to be hokey.
    The NY Times has a follow-up article where evolutionists are upset that a Catholic would question evolution.
    Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory. ...

    "Unguided," "unplanned," "random" and "natural" are all adjectives that biologists might apply to the process of evolution, said Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, ...

    Notice the slippery evolutionist logic. First they define evolution to include the entire history of life on Earth. Then they say that there is no debate about the theory. Then some biologists use words like "unplanned", and they imply that it is a concept that everyone must accept.

    Saying that life on Earth is unguided and unplanned is hokey atheist philosophy. It is not scientific fact.


    Thursday, Jul 07, 2005
     
    Missouri smokers lose
    Missouri news:
    Over the last four years, Missouri has recieved over one billion dollars from what's called the MSA, or master settlement agreement. That's money from the big tobacco companies, paid out to settle claims from the states for injuries caused by tobacco use.

    The money is designed to pay the states back for past losses caused by caring for the sick, made ill by tobacco use. The money is also to be used to pay for anti-smoking campaigns, like advertising and hot lines for those who want to quit.

    At least, that's the way it's supposed to work, but in Missouri, not one dime of the tobacco money has been spent on its intended purpose.

    Missouri ranks last among the states in tobacco prevention spending, but third in the number of smokers per capita.

    The states should not have used the courts to try to solve what is really a political problem.
     
    Real strength of evolution
    Some NY Times evolutionist propaganda says:
    Biologists might do well to keep Planck in mind as they confront creationism and "intelligent design" and battle to preserve the teaching of evolution in public schools. ...

    Scientists don't talk often enough or loud enough about the real strength of evolution - not that it is correct, but that it meets the definition of science.

    I thought that the real strength of evolution was that it explains observations or that it helps classify life.

    (The article has a silly error about radiocarbon dating. I wonder if there will be a correction.)

     
    Attacking the Wedge
    Here is an evolutionist attack on the so-called Wedge Strategy against evolution:
    Another problem with the CRSC's plan is that it seeks to replace evolutionary theory at a time when the theory enjoys nearly unanimous support in the scientific community. Thomas Kuhn, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, describes what has happened historically when one theory comes to replace another. He writes that the anomaly of an insufficient theory will have "lasted so long and penetrated so deep that one can appropriately describe the fields affected by it as in a state of growing crisis . . . the emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity." Kuhn's point is clear. Before a new theory in science is sought, there is usually a growing crisis coupled with mounting skepticism, doubt, and the elucidation of cogent reasons for thinking that the existing theory is inadequate. Where is the growing crisis that casts doubt on evolution and methodological naturalism, the tool that led to the theory of evolution?
    That is a leftist-Kuhnian-evolutionist rationale for eliminating dissent. Seeking a new theory must wait for the "elucidation of cogent reasons" and other nonsense. This sounds like Marxist drivel to me.
     
    Conservatives on evolution
    The New Republic magazine asks how "leading conservative thinkers and pundits feel about evolution and intelligent design".
    William Kristol, The Weekly Standard

    Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I don't discuss personal opinions. ... I'm familiar with what's obviously true about it as well as what's problematic. ... I'm not a scientist. ... It's like me asking you whether you believe in the Big Bang."

    How evolution should be taught in public schools: "I managed to have my children go through the Fairfax, Virginia schools without ever looking at one of their science textbooks."

    Does Kristol mean that his kids never looked at their science textbooks?

    Tuesday, Jul 05, 2005
     
    Senator Arlen Specter, supremacist
    John sends this Franck column:
    Specter is Washington's foremost advocate of judicial supremacy, and he has pressed every nominee for the last two decades to embrace a view of the Constitution in which the Congress of the United States is a subordinate agency, subject to the Court's binding authority on all questions of its — the Congress's — own power.

    Here is a sampling from this Spectral line of questioning over the years:

    *To Robert Bork, 1987: "[U]nless there is an appeal and a change in the Court's decision, . . . such a decision does establish a supreme law of the land that is binding on all persons and parts of the Government."

    *To Anthony Kennedy, 1987: "[A]s long as the Court has said what the Court concludes the Constitution means, then I think it is critical that there be an acceptance that that is the final word."

    *To David Souter, 1990: Marbury v. Madison is "the 1803 case where it was decided by the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court had the last word on what the Constitution meant."

    *To Clarence Thomas, 1991: "[T]he Supreme Court has the last word, no doubt in your mind about that."

    *To Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1993: "The decision in Marbury v. Madison established the supremacy of the Supreme Court to decide constitutionality of issues, and there are some up to the moment who dispute that."

    *To Stephen Breyer, 1994: "We know the courts are supreme to both the Congress and the president because the court told us so in Marbury v. Madison. When the Constitution was formed, Congress was number one, the president was number two in the second Article, courts didn't come up until Article Three, but all that was changed. It was renumbered in Marbury v. Madison."

    Probably no senator has ever been so slavishly devoted to the historical falsehood that Marbury v. Madison is the fount of judicial supremacy. In fact that anti-constitutional doctrine is entirely a fabrication of the last century or so, as some of the best recent scholarship has shown.

    I didn't know that he had such a dangerously wrong judicial philosophy. Specter should never have been allowed to be chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When Specter took his oath of office, it was to the Constitution, not to the Supreme Court's interpretation and opinion.
     
    Judge Janice Rogers Brown
    A WSJ op-ed suggests appointing Judge Janice Rogers Brown. She would get my vote.

    Sunday, Jul 03, 2005
     
    Kansas school money
    The leftist-evolutionist-supremacists are threatening to close the Kansas schools.
     
    SF dope heads
    John sends this story:
    There are two medical marijuana clubs for every McDonald's in The City — that's roughly 40 clubs to only 20 restaurants. Even adding the number of Burger Kings leaves fast-food franchises short of cannabis dispensaries. Only the ubiquitous Starbucks chain tops pot clubs, with a total of 71 coffee shops.

    ... "Unfortunately, the demand for fast food evidently isn't as high as it is for cannabis," Elsbernd said. "We have a problem and we need to address it."

    The city is San Francisco.
     
    LA Times on O'Connor
    John writes:
    Spot the howler in this lead editorial in the L.A. Times, now edited by Michael Kinsley, a graduate of the Harvard Law School.
    Hmmm. It says:
    One fact sums up Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's pivotal role on the Supreme Court and the enormity of her resignation — she alone was in the majority of every one of the court's 13 5-4 decisions this last term.
    That cannot be right, because Breyer was the only one in the majority for the last 2 5-4 decisions (on the 10 Commandments). Perhaps Kinsley was duped by this AP story that said O'Connor was the swing vote.

    Or maybe this:

    No one engaged with real-world facts, for instance, could allow Roe vs. Wade to be overturned.
    That opinion is nutty; the real-world facts are that overturning Roe v Wade would not even effect the abortion rate in the USA very much.

    It says, "she voted to strike down state sodomy laws", but it would be more accurate to say that she voted to uphold sodomy laws in 1986. In 2003, she voted to strike down a particular sodomy law, but refused to reverse her 1986 opinion.

    It is amazing how a conservative can gain so much favor from liberal media Kinsley types by favoring abortion and sodomy, even if her opinions are nonsensical and contradictory.

    John adds, "O'Connor was on the losing side of another high profile 5-4 decision: Kelo v. City of New London." Others are listed here.

    Update: This blog says she was in the majority last term in 14 of the 24 5-4 decisions.


    Saturday, Jul 02, 2005
     
    Liberal justice explained
    Liberal-feminist-supremacist court reporter Dahlia Lithwick says this about Justice O'Connor:
    She shocked me again in the fall of 2000, when I was covering oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Justice O'Connor, 70 years old at the time, was listening to an argument about how to count the notorious "butterfly ballots" that had confused Florida voters, especially the elderly. Her characteristically tart reaction to the voters' difficulties- "For goodness' sakes, I mean it couldn't be easier" - crushed any liberal dreams that some heightened feminine compassion would decide this case for Al Gore.

    Suffice it to say, Justice O'Connor is a huge mystery to most women of my generation.

    So women lawyers of her generation expect female judges to be irrational, confused, and willing to use phony arguments about compassion to advance a leftist agenda.

    Friday, Jul 01, 2005
     
    O'Conner didn't really resign
    Andy writes:
    O'Connor made her resignation contingent on, and delayed until, a successor is confirmed. This is the same stunt pulled by Earl Warren.

    I had a good fragment in "The Supremacists" complaining about this tactic, but it was edited out. In fairness, my complaint was not well articulated and I've been meaning to explain further ever since.

    The Constitution does not permit interference by a resigning Justice in the nomination process in this manner. The President cannot nominate and the Senate cannot confirm until there is a vacancy. There is not a vacancy until a Justice truly resigns. Sitting justices need to stay in or get out. Doesn't O'Connor read the Constitution???

    Senators may decide they prefer O'Connor to a replacement, and thereby filibuster a nominee. O'Connor's tactic takes public pressure off of swift confirmation. This may be worth a column that criticizes her in other ways also. The most fickle Justice ever?

    John responds:
    Chuck Schumer immediately picked up on this. Commenting on her contingent resignation today, Schumer said:
    To show Justice O'Connor's brilliance, her letter says she won't resign until her successor is confirmed. This gives us plenty of time. There will be no rush to judgment, because the Supreme Court will have its full complement of 9 people until the Senate chooses someone. We have plenty of time to do our constitutional advice and consent duties, thanks to Justice O'Connor's pragmatic decision to wait until her successor is confirmed. That's another indication of her brilliance.
    Schumer had already left town, but he rushed back to Washington to hold a press conference in which he praised O'Connor as a "pragmatic, non-ideological, and mainstream Supreme Court Justice." He then said:
    We would expect the president to maintain the critical balance of the Court that Justice O'Connor fought so long and hard for by nominating a consensus, mainstream nominee. ... We hope the president chooses someone thoughtful, mainstream, pragmatic -- someone just like Sandra Day O'Connor. In short, we should replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a consensus candidate, not an ideologue.
    I agree with Bork that the only reason her replacement is a hot political issue is that leftist-activist-supremacist judges have politicized the court.

    Thursday, Jun 30, 2005
     
    Nancy Pelosi, supremacist
    Wash Post says:
    The House measure, which passed 231 to 189, would deny federal funds to any city or state project that used eminent domain to force people to sell their property to make way for a profit-making project such as a hotel or mall. Historically, eminent domain has been used mainly for public purposes such as highways or airports. ...

    House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) criticized the measure. "When you withhold funds from enforcing a decision of the Supreme Court, you are in fact nullifying a decision of the Supreme Court," she told reporters. "This is in violation of the respect of separation of powers in our Constitution."

    Congress can certainly place limits on buying land. Pelosi is an extreme judicial supremacist.

    Update: Pelosi's comments were even worse than I thought. She said:

    Q Could you talk about this decision? What you think of it?

    Ms. Pelosi. It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken. It's an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision.

    Q Do you think it is appropriate for municipalities to be able to use eminent domain to take land for economic development?

    Ms. Pelosi. The Supreme Court has decided, knowing the particulars of this case, that that was appropriate, and so I would support that.

    Anyone who says, "almost as if God has spoken", is more than a judicial supremacist. She is a judicial deifier, or a judicial worshipper, or something.
     
    WMD evidence
    Bob sends this fabricated WMD evidence:
    We had a situation where a very important report was made, and it relied something like 98-99 percent in at least one of the weapons categories on a single witness who proved to be a fabricator. And that particular information was known in the community for a long period of time, was passed at least up the chain but never got to secretary, then Secretary of State Colin Powell when he was about ready to make his speech to the United Nations.
    I don't quite follow this. Does "information" refer to what was in the report, or the fact that a witness was a fabricator? Assuming the latter, was the witness proved to be a fabricator before or after the report? Did the author know?

    I am sure it happens every day that someone in the CIA writes a report that turns out to be wrong because of a bad source; or turns out to be right but it fails to reach upper management.

    In 1941 the USA decoded messages that the Japs were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Somehow the messages never reached the proper authorities. Or that is how the story goes. I am suspicious that FDR wanted the attack, but I don't think that anyone has been able to prove it.

    In the case of Pres. Bush, I just see no reason to believe that he wanted war for any reasons except for the ones that he stated. I guess Bob's point is that the Bush administration might have been influenced by some faulty CIA memos. So what? I have no doubt that every administration was influenced by faulty memos.


    Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005
     
    Intelligent design deserves discussion
    Jeff p of San Jose writes in the local paper:
    Why is it that opponents of intelligent design fail to listen to the objective arguments for the intelligent design hypothesis (Page 14E, June 18)? Empirical evidence of intelligent design, based on physics, DNA, biochemistry and astronomy, routinely meets or exceeds conventional scientific methods and criteria based on probabilities or inference by best explanation.

    Intelligent design is not, as skeptics claim, an argument from ignorance or metaphysics masquerading as science.

    Why the personal attacks on the motives of proponents instead of responding to the merits and facts of the case? Is it possible that naturalists and Darwinists cannot offer a better empirical defense against the evidence for intelligent design discovered in the last 25 years?

    Yes, the evolutionist-atheist is to attack motives, not debate the merits.

    Bob responds with a fallacious personal attack on Popoff:

    Opponents of intelligent design fail to listen to the objective arguments for the intelligent design (ID) hypothesis because: the arguments are fallacious, ID can not, even in principle, explain the complexity of life on earth and evolution does, ID does not explain observations as well as evolution, and ID depends on a supernatural explanation of life. Of course ID is "an argument from ignorance or metaphysics masquerading as science." Jeff Popoff is an ignorant twit. Like all creationists, he refuses to read explanations of the scientific literature which would demolish his fantasies. The personal attacks are accurate and merited.
    Popoff does not say that he is a creationist.

    Update: Popoff responds here.

     
    Kerry discovers Iraq
    John Kerry has finally decided to tell us what he would do in Iraq. Somebody should tell him the USA election was 7 months ago.

    Monday, Jun 27, 2005
     
    Kansas amendment failed
    John sends this Kansas City article about local attempt to control Kansas judicial supremacists.

    Other KC news:

    The poll found:

    When asked which direction the board should take, 31 percent said it should require that theories other than evolution be offered; 24 percent said criticism of evolution should be allowed; 25 percent said only evolution should be taught; and 20 percent were not sure.

    When asked which best described their view on the origin of life, 39 percent said creationism; 26 percent said evolution; 16 percent said intelligent design; and 19 percent said other.

    This evolutionist is happy about today's ruling against the 10 Commandments, because it endorses the Lemon Test and cites an anti-creationist opinion. The idea is that it provides a constitutional basis for censoring various scientific opinions just because the source might have had a religious purpose.

    Evolutionists just hate addressing the merits of any issue. All they want to do is to go on personal attacks on the religions and motivations of the people they don't like. That's why they like the Lemon Test.

    Bob writes:

    Stop referring to creationist drivel as scientific opinions. Its like referring to astrology as scientific opinions.
    I am not just talking about creationist opinions. The evolutionists want to be able censor any scientific opinions based on bigoted religious attacks. In particular, they want to use the courts to prevent the changes that are now taking place in Kansas. The Kansas changes involve making the science more accurate, and do not involve teaching creationism.

    Sunday, Jun 26, 2005
     
    Eminent domain ruling was supremacist
    Liza cites George Will to say that the recent US Supreme Court eminent domain decision is an example of judicial restraint, and not supremacist.
    Liberalism triumphed Thursday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government.

    Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises ''judicial restraint'' and deference to -- it sometimes seems -- almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary's indispensable role in limiting government.

    I do not agree with Will that this court decision is the sort of judicial restrain that conservatives have been asking for. those court-watchers. If the Supreme Court merely deferred to the judgment of New London on public use, I might agree, but that is not what it did.

    The Supreme Court:

  • rewrote the Const to change "public use" to "public purpose".
  • redefined "public purpose" to include private developments, and just about anything that comes under a redevelopment plan.
  • adopted a new eminent domain policy to apply to all future eminent domain cases.
  • came to these conclusions for its own policy reasons.

    The upshot is that the Supreme Court essentially legislated what eminent domain can and cannot do, and did it in a way that is not grounded in the text of the Constitution or any statute. It just decided policy. That is not supposed to be the role of the SC, and it is only because of judicial supremacists that they can get away with it.

    The recent marijuana and wine decisions have similar problems. It appeared that the SC liberals made a policy decision about how they want things to be, and then made up reasons to justify it.

  •  
    The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
    Jared Diamond says:
    To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.
    This is leftist-evolutionist-Freudian-Kuhnian-Gouldian-atheist nuttiness. If evolutionists are going to teach this nonsense in schools, then we need laws to force the teaching of alternate points of view.

    Bob writes:

    The Kansas school board is barking up the wrong tree. If they banned teaching Marx, Freud, Kuhn, Gould, and Diamond or required them to be taught in a critical thinking course where they were debunked, no one except the hard left would care.
    The public schools do not ban leftist kooks. They only ban Christians and right-wingers who dare to challenge the leftist kooks.

    Saturday, Jun 25, 2005
     
    Reasons for war
    Bob asks what sort of memo would convince me that Pres. Bush should be impeached.

    I do believe that a US president should be impeached if he lies to the people about a major reason for going to war. The main reason that Pres. Bush gave for going to war was that Iraq was not complying with UN resolutions and WMD inspections. Bush had divided the world into countries that are with us or against us in the war on terror, and Iraq's defiance and suspicious behavior put it among the countries that were against us.

    By all accounts, both before the Iraq invasion and afterwards, Bush did not know whether Iraq had WMD or not. He obviously had no smoking gun, or he would have produced it. It is hard to see how any memo could prove anything interesting about WMD, as there doesn't seem to be any way Bush could have known whether Iraq had WMD or not. He certainly did know that Iraq wasn't cooperating with us in the war against terrorism, and Congress was satisfied with that.

    The people who say that Bush lied are mistaken. It is plainly obvious that Bush told the truth in his reasons for war. In fact, the public had more complete and factual information leading up to the war than any other American war in recent history, to my knowledge, except maybe the Kuwait war. American presidents lied to us to get us into WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and other wars.

    Bob writes:

    The Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and a Deputy Secretary of Defense all made statements about WMD which were false and were ordered by the Bush administration. Bush is as responsible for these statements as he would be if he made them himself. The fact that he ordered others make the statements while he remained circumspect is in itself suspicious. A smoking gun memo showing that the administration concocted evidence of WMD which it did not believe would be enough for me.
    Iraq admitted in 1998 that it had WMD. It was supposed to prove to UN weapons inspectors that it destroyed the WMD, but it refused. The WMD have still not been found, and we don't know what happened. Maybe the WMD was destroyed, maybe Iraq was bluffing, maybe Iraq exported the WMD to Syria, and maybe the WMD is hidden really well.

    Suppose a known violent criminal, who is on parole for a felony conviction, takes a child hostage and claims to have a gun. It appears that he has a gun, and police sharpshooters kill the criminal, saving the child. A subsequent investigation finds no gun on the criminal. How much blame do you put on the police chief for not seeing thru the bluff, and ordering the kill?

    I say none. I would also order the kill. Iraq is analogous.

    Somewhere there might be a smoking gun memo where some CIA staffer says that he suspects that Iraq was bluffing about WMD, and Pres. Bush ignores him. So what? Better intelligence on the existence of Iraq WMD would have had some bearing on the urgency of going to war, but not on the basic decision of whether or not to invade.


    Friday, Jun 24, 2005
     
    Software piracy seen as normal
    New UK study:
    Two UK university researchers found that people did not see downloading copyrighted material as theft. ...

    "Consumers have an awareness of the scale of the problem and cost, but don't take onboard industry concerns or government messages," said Dr Bryce, a senior lecturer in psychology.

    The researchers found that people did not equate downloading a game with the idea of shoplifting the disc from a shop.

    "People are more accepting of it, even if they didn't engage it in themselves," said Dr Bryce. "They don't see it as a great problem on a social or economic level.

    "They just don't see it as theft. They just see it as inevitable, particularly as new technologies become available." ...

    "The government has spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.

    "As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual property."

    It will be a tough sell, as long as the copyright lobby doesn't believe in fair use.

    Tuesday, Jun 21, 2005
     
    Court odds
    Andy writes:
    My odds for next week, though Bush may hold his pick until August:
    Luttig 4:1
    Roberts 6:1
    McConnell 6:1
    Edith Jones 6:1
    Gonzales 8:1
    Alito 10:1
    Garza 20:1
    Wilkinson 20:1
    Rehnquist does not retire 20:1
    a Senator 30:1

    McConnell's and Gonzales' chances would be higher had we not spoken out. Roberts is that high only because Rehnquist is probably pushing him hard. Luttig appears to be the favorite now. Edith Jones would be the best.

     
    USA blamed for boring science films
    Here is how some of the foreign press is reporting the American evolution controversy.
    Pressure from ultraconservative religious groups has prompted some theaters equipped with the high quality panoramic IMAX screens to cancel showings of several movies which refer to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. ...

    The films crimes? Mentioning the idea that the Universe is the product of a "Big Bang" explosion or that the origin of life is in the oceans.

    But the article fails to mention any "ultraconservative religious groups", and it misunderstands Darwinism. Darwin's theory of evolution was about natural selection, not the Big Bang or the origin of life.
     
    Jellyfish
    Evolutionists are scrambling to try to explain the simple jellyfish:
    Recent research undermines that theory. The oldest fossils that can be confidently called cnidarians are just 540 million years old. And Dr. Peterson and his colleagues have made new estimates of the age of cnidarians by studying their DNA.

    The DNA mutates at a roughly regular rate over millions of years, a so-called molecular clock. Dr. Peterson estimates that the common ancestor of living cnidarians lived 543 million years ago. In other words, cnidarians did not appear tens of millions of years before bilaterians.

    Funny how evolutionists can apply the most farfetched extrapolations, and still they always come back to the view that life is a lot more complicated than they thought, and that all the big breakthroughs were created during the Cambrian Explosion.
     
    Refusing to debate
    The NY Times describes scientists who refuse to debate evolution.

    The AAAS chief executive says, "Evolution is not the only issue at stake. The very definition of science is at stake." But he doesn't want any scientists to debate these issues in Kansas.

     
    Wells acting on Darwinian impulses
    A WSJ op-ed describes H G Wells, and tells us to look out for Welles-inanity Wellsianity:
    As it happened, Wells treated the women in his life shabbily. He cheated on his wives and impregnated his mistresses.

    Maybe he was just acting on Darwinian impulses. Wells was in fact a strident devotee of the evolutionary creed, which he learned from the biologist T.H. Huxley at the Normal School. "The War of the Worlds" is best interpreted as an aggressive statement of what C.S. Lewis called "Wellsianity"--the promotion of materialistic science as true faith. The moral of the story may be found in the novel's first sentence, which describes the sobering reality of "intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as our own." Humans aren't noble creatures of God, but animal feed for hungry Martians. If we are to go on living, it isn't for any purpose greater than "the sake of the breed" (as one character says in a late chapter).

    ... We should be grateful that he left his imprint on the science-fiction genre, and almost nowhere else.

    He also directly inspired the invention of the atom bomb. I'd say that he left a very big imprint. Also, Wellsanity now dominates our educational system.

    Monday, Jun 20, 2005
     
    Picture of dark matter
    I found this picture caption in an evolution book:
    Dark matter in the universe (top) and genome (bottom). The top is an image of the galaxy cluster CL0024+1654, the dark matter appears as hazy cloud in the center. The bottom image is of a microarray of the fruit fly genome the bright spots are DNA that encodes genes, the darks spots are DNA that is not expressed.

    UNIVERSE COURTESY OF EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY, NASA, AND JEAN PAUL KREIB (OBSERVATION MIDI PYRENEES, FRANCE/CALTECH, USA). GENOME COURTESY OF DR. TOM GINGERAS AND AFFYMETRIX, INC.

    There are no pictures of dark matter. No one knows what it is or what it looks like. They call it "dark" because it doesn't show in pictures.

    This is like Piltdown Man. The evolution books always have pictures of missing links, even though no one knows what those ape-men really looked like.

    The book is Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom by Sean B. Carroll.

     
    Congress Assaults the Courts, Again
    John sends several judicial supremacist editorials, including this NY Times nonsense:
    The House of Representatives took a little- noticed but dangerous swipe at the power of the courts this week. It passed an amendment to a budget bill that would bar money from being spent to enforce a federal court ruling regarding the Ten Commandments. The vote threatens the judiciary's long-acknowledged position as the final arbiter of the Constitution. ...

    Since the Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison in 1803, it has been clearly established that the courts have the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution.

    No, not exactly. Congress also interprets the Constitution, and Congress has the power to spend money.
     
    Profs and academic freedom
    The AAUP says:
    The Ninety-first Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors deplores efforts in local communities and by some state legislators to require teachers in public schools to treat evolution as merely a hypothesis or speculation, untested and unsubstantiated by the methods of science, and to require them to make students aware of an "intelligent-design hypothesis" to account for the origins of life. These initiatives not only violate the academic freedom of public school teachers, but can deny students an understanding of the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding evolution.
    No, there is no scientific consensus about the origins of life. Claiming "academic freedom" is a little bizarre. It is the evolutionists who want to stop the teachers from describing alternative points of view.

    Saturday, Jun 18, 2005
     
    Evolutionist disproved again
    The famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould is mainly known for writing a book denying the existence of intelligence. Besides various fallacious arguments, he spent much of the book ridiculing 19th century attempts to correlate intelligence with brain volume. (Here is the NY Times review, and a critical review. It ranked 24th on this list of the best nonfiction books of the 20th century.)

    Now comes this announcement:

    RICHMOND, Va. (June 17, 2005) – People with bigger brains are smarter than their smaller-brained counterparts, according to a study conducted by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher published in the journal “Intelligence.”

    The study, published on line June 16, could settle a long-standing scientific debate about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. Ever since German anatomist and physiologist Frederick Tiedmann wrote in 1836 that there exists “an indisputable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man,” scientists have been searching for biological evidence to prove his claim.

    “For all age and sex groups, it is now very clear that brain volume and intelligence are related,” said lead researcher Michael A. McDaniel, Ph.D., an industrial and organizational psychologist who specializes in the study of intelligence and other predictors of job performance.

    The study is the most comprehensive of its kind, drawing conclusions from 26 previous – mostly recent – international studies involving brain volume and intelligence. It was only five years ago, with the increased use of MRI-based brain assessments, that more data relating to brain volume and intelligence became available.

    Gould misrepresented the data in order to promote his political agenda. And yet his book is still widely praised, and Gould was considered a great hero to the evolutionist cause. (He died a couple of years ago.)

    This should be proof that the field of evolution is overrun with unscientific phonies.

    Here is an LA Times article on sex differences between brains, another politically incorrect subject.

    Bob writes:

    Academia is overrun with unscientific phonies. Margaret Mead is still taught despite the demonstration that her field work was fiction and the embarrassing fact that she was responsible for getting the field of parapsychology into the AAAS. Unlike Mead, Gould actually did scientific work which inspired a generation of young scientists to do science which is important and has been tested and confirmed. A lot of his scientific work was misguided. Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life doing misguided work but that takes nothing away from his achievements. Lots of scientists who do important work have goofy political ideas. There are well documented errors in the Mismeasure of Man and those errors should not be taught but that has nothing to do with Gould's useful work.
    It seems unlikely to me that Gould did any good scientific work.
     
    Kansas schoool funding
    News from Kansas:
    In January, the Supreme Court said legislators had failed to do their duty under the Kansas Constitution to provide a suitable education for all children. But the justices were not specific about a fix.

    GOP leaders pushed through a plan to increase state school aid by $142 million, or about 5 percent, while avoiding the tax increases that Sebelius and other Democrats saw as necessary.

    The high court said that the plan was inadequate and that the increase for the next school year must be $285 million, or 10 percent. The court also said it could order much larger spending increases in the future. ...

    The Kansas court has not said what it would do if lawmakers defied the order.

    The leftist-atheist-evolutionist-supremacists want the courts to run the Kansas schools.

    Friday, Jun 17, 2005
     
    Evolutionists say God had no part
    Michael Shermer edits Atheist Skeptic magazine, but he doesn't like anyone being skeptical about evolution. The subject drives him to make Nazi comparisons.

    See Volokh for proof that Shermer wants to impose his atheistic beliefs on everyone.

    Bob writes:

    Shermer conflates science and religion. The claim that "the standard scientific theory" is that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” is wrong. The standard scientific theory is that living things are a result of evolution by natural selection. This means that living things have adapted to live in the world. The issues of whether God is behind natural selection or the creation of the world are religious. Most Americans believe that God is behind natural selection and are not troubled by geology, evolution, the big bang, or any other scientific theory. Shermer is welcome to his religious views and pollsters will persist in asking biased questions in their polls.
    Yes, but the evolutionists are not free to teach their brand of atheism in the Kansas public schools.
     
    Legalizing polygamy
    New Jersey intermediate appellate court holds
    Which leads me to polygamy. My colleagues view the nature of the right to marry asserted by plaintiffs as equally applicable to polygamy. The spectre of polygamy was raised by Justice Scalia in his Lawrence dissent in which he expanded a slippery slope analysis into a loop-de-loop by arguing that decriminalizing acts of homosexual intimacy would lead to the downfall of moral legislation of society by implicitly authorizing same-sex marriage and polygamy as well as "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity."

    It is just as unnecessary for us to consider here the question of the constitutional rights of polygamists to marry persons of their choosing as it would be to join Justice Scalia's wild ride. Plaintiffs do not question the binary aspect of marriage; they embrace it. Moreover, despite the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in this appeal and the myriad of views presented, no polygamists have applied. One issue of fundamental constitutional rights is enough for now. ...

    Tradition in itself is not a compelling state interest. If it were, many societal institutions as well as individual rights would be compromised. After all, slavery was a traditional institution for over 200 years.

    It sounds like he wants the courts to legalize polygamy in a way analogous to the way the courts ended slavery. But of course the courts never ended slavery. The pre-Civil-War judicial supremacists on the court did everything they could to justify and promote slavery. Slavery was ended in the USA as a result of war and a public and political consensus that it is wrong.

    Meanwhile, there are bizarre news stories about polygamist Warren Jeffs.

    Bob writes:

    Polygamy is the logical conclusion of radical feminism. Radical feminists believe the following. The most significant and rewarding relationships women have are with other women. Men are only necessary for procreation. To have a full life women must raise a family, have a career, have a well kept home, have a rich intellectual and social life. Obviously these conflicting goals can only be met by having multiple women in the home with one man to help with the procreation.

    Thursday, Jun 16, 2005
     
    Microsoft wants to depress wages
    Johns sends these quotes:
    “Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said yesterday the software giant is having enormous difficulty filling computer jobs in the United States as a result of tight visa restrictions on foreign workers and a declining interest among U.S. students in computer science.” –The Washington Post, April 28, 2005

    “We’re hiring as many people from college campuses as we can, but there are just not enough of them available.” –Richard F. Rashid, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research, April 28, 2005

    “Lower the pay of U.S. professionals to $50,000 and it won’t make sense for employers to put up with the hassle of doing business in developing countries.” –Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, December, 2003

    Yes, that's why big businesses want to import cheap labor.

    Tuesday, Jun 14, 2005
     
    Designed Dispute
    Kansas news:
    Eighty years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial," Kansas has reopened a national debate over school science standards. Hearings were convened on May 5 by the state board of education to determine whether current criticisms of evolutionary theory may be taught in public schools.

    Proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) had the stage to themselves.

    A pro-evolution group, Kansas Citizens for Science, boycotted the meetings, saying they were a thinly disguised assault on atheism.

    No, this did not come from an Atheist newspaper. Those papers in Alaska are saying things like this:
    As speakers at last week's Alaska Board of Education hearing on state science standards pointed out, the theory of evolution is as sound scientifically as the theory of gravity. Both raise unanswered questions, but they are generally accepted in the world of science, acted upon in real life and, most of all, supported by the preponderance of evidence.
    and this:
    Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a local geophysicist, said some critics characterize evolution as "only a theory," failing to understand that in science, "that's an exalted title" achieved only after extensive verification.
    No, the theory gravity makes quantitative predictions that experiments can verify. Not all theories have an exalted status.

    Bob writes:

    I am prepared to bet that you will find no statement by the Kansas Citizens for Science saying that the Kansas school board hearings are "a thinly disguised assault on atheism."
    That's right. Kansas Citizens for Science does not even admit that it is an Atheist front. Instead it complains that "the minority report contains ID creationist religious philosophy, despite proponents failure to identify it as such", which is just another way of saying that the report is a thinly disguised assault on Atheism.

    Evolutionists are quick to attack the supposed religious beliefs of their opponents. The debate in Kansas has consisted mostly of such attacks, as the evolutionists refuse to debate the merits of the issues. The MSM has sided with the evolutionists and repeated these dubious attacks. If we are going to consider religious motives, then let's look at the motives on both sides.

    Evolutionists like those at Kansas Citizens for Science refuse to debate any scientific issues on the merits. Their main strategy is to try to expose antagonism towards materialist atheism on the part of their opponents. If you don't believe, see this speech.

    Bob writes:

    There is no scientific debate on any of the creationist criticisms of evolution because the creationist criticisms of evolution are not scientific. That is because creationism is not science, it is religion. There is plenty of scientific debate about various aspects of evolution which are not understood. The debates which the creationists have the wits to understand are used as evidence that there are holes in evolution. If the fact that a theory has aspects which are not understood is a criterion for having holes, then all of our theories have holes. A majority of religious Americans accept the scientific theory of evolution as not having a negative impact on their faith. A small minority of unreasonable fanatics who are willing to write checks and spend their lives organizing against science are having an inordinate impact.
     
    Kansas school funding
    The Kansas evolutionists not only want to censor alternative points of view, they want extra funding ordered by the court:
    The Supreme Court today unanimously ordered school funding for the coming school year to be increased no later than July 1 from approximately $142 million appropriated by the 2005 Legislature to $285 million above the past school year's level of funding.

    The figure is one-third of the $853 million amount recommended by a consulting firm retained by the 2001 Legislature to determine the cost of educating students in Kansas.

    Next, the leftist-evolutionist-supremacists will be asking the court to order some of that money to be spent on Darwinist propaganda.

    Monday, Jun 13, 2005
     
    Attack on school vouchers
    The Milwaukee paper has a big expose and attack on the local school voucher program. The left NPR Morning Edition had some anti-voucher excerpts.

    Many of the complaints have no merit. The article complains that one of the voucher schools uses a building that is "partly modernized but still subpar by today's standards". Yes, and this paper's reporting is subpar by today's standards.

    The article complains that the voucher law makes it easy for new schools to start, and for inferior schools to close. Four voucher schools have closed, leaving 115. But that is part of the point of encourage private experimentation in education. The law should allow new ideas to be tried, and to allow for some of those ideas to fail. One of the big problems with the public schools is that bad ideas persist, without any accountability to the parents and kids.

    Another complaint is that a voucher school used a teacher with an expired license to teach in the public schools. Private schools all over the country hire teachers according to their own standards, and do not require teachers to have licenses to teach in the public schools. The private schools usually want to offer something different from the public schools. There is no reason for a voucher school teacher to have a public school teaching license.

     
    Andy on McConnell
    Andy writes:
    In my column posted on Worldnet Daily, I complained about frontrunner Supreme Court nominee McConnell's sworn testimony before the U.S. Senate that Roe v. Wade is “as thoroughly settled as any issue in current constitutional law.�

    I have now found the context of that quote, and it is even worse! Here's McConnell's statement:

    At the time Roe v. Wade came down, it was striking the statutes of at least 45, if not all 50 of the States of the Union. Today it is much more reflective of the consensus of the American people on the subject.

    I believe that the doctrinal analysis offered in Planned Parenthood v.Casey has connected the right much more persuasively to traditional legal materials, and then the weight of stare decisis simply indicates that this is an issue that is settled. It is as thoroughly settled as any issue in current constitutional law.

    My guess is that the neoconservatives and RINOs are pushing McConnell because they would prefer that the Supreme Court not overturn Roe v. Wade.

    Note that no one else here (other than me) expressed support for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. We need a word to describe those who criticize Roe but don't want judicial reversal of it. Too many of them masquerade as being pro-life. Any pledge on this topic should ask that question directly.

    Roe v Wade is settled law, in the sense that there are unambiguous judicial precedents on abortion. But I am a little disturbed that McConnell thinks that it is "reflective of the consensus of the American people". Roe v Wade is really quite extreme. In public opinion polls on the subject of abortion, only about 5% of Americans express views as extremely pro-abortion as what the US Supreme Court has said.

    Sunday, Jun 12, 2005
     
    Harmful books
    The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper says:
    Human Events, a conservative weekly, recently convened a panel of 15 conservative scholars to formulate a list of the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. Some of the books they came up with were fairly predictable. ...

    Conservatives also hated "Coming of Age in Samoa," Margaret Mead's groundbreaking work in anthropology; "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich's book on runaway population growth, and "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill's 19th century philosophical treatise.

    Actually, the books were rated for being "harmful", not dangerous. Mead's book was harmful because it misled a whole generation about human nature, and caused all sorts of bad behavior.

    A lot of bloggers, and now columnists in the MSM, have misunderstood and complained about this list. It appears that they really don't understand how a book can be harmful, and do not understand conservative objections to these books.

    I am expecting some liberal magazines to come out with lists of objectionable right-wing books.

     
    CBS promotes Flat Earth Myth
    Bob Schieffer said this, on CBS News Face The Nation, today, June 12, 2005.
    History has been shaped by three groups of people: those who wondered what was on the other side of the mountain, those who had no interest in what was there, and those who feared what was there. … The third group can’t claim much. They were the ones who urged Columbus to stay home, the ones who refused to look into Galileo's telescope, claiming they already knew what was there. … Which is why I am surprised, as Congress faces the question of stem cell research at the turn that our national dialogue on science has taken. [Full transcript in pdf file here.]
    He is trying to say that anyone who does not go along with the agenda of the leftist-atheist-evolutionist-scientist elite must be a Flat Earther.

    In fact, no one ever refused to look into Galileo's telescope, and the only people who told Columbus to stay home were scientists who correctly argued that he did not have nearly enough supplies to sail to India.

    Evolutionists always use phony Flat Earth arguments like this to bully people into accepting their agenda.

     
    Worst-case scenarios
    I just heard Robert Kaplan start a TV interview by saying:
    The US military has to think in worst-case scenarios. Because we did not worst-case the occupation of Iraq, we got the worst possible result.
    No, we didn't get the worst possible result. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has gone much more smoothly and successfully than most people expected. The only surprise to our military leaders was how well the war has been.

    Thursday, Jun 09, 2005
     
    Tulsa zoo evolution
    From an evolutionist blog:
    The Tulsa Zoo has been ordered by its board to install an exhibit on creationism. The zoo has an exhibit on evolution, but what really got folks riled was a Hindu statue of an elephant (Ganesha), and a piece of art that says "the earth is our mother." The pro-creationism folks say the door was opened by the Zoo when they put the info and icons on other religions in the Zoo.
    An evolutionist named Ron writes:
    Zoos are publically funded amusement parks. We cram as much science as we can into them as a side project/benefit. Science benefits from the public service. A lot of the science is required to maintain the zoos without reliance on raping the wilderness for new attractions.

    Even though I live in Arkansas my family is a member of the Tulsa Zoo. It is a good, well run zoo. They put up a lot of things that aren't science. Beats me why people would object to a biblical display. I'm sure that more than one zoo has sold cute tee shirts with biblical themes on them like the ubiquitous ark cartoon pictures. It is part of our culture whether some people like it or not.

    Most atheist-evolutionists tolerate pagan gods, but not Christianity.
     
    Michael McConnell
    Andy attacks Judge Michael McConnell. He is rumored to be a Supreme Court choice.
     
    Evolutionist censorship
    A Wash Post editorial says:
    The Museum of Natural History is known, among other things, for its collection of fossils and its displays describing Darwin's theory of evolution. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, by contrast, is known for its efforts to undermine the teaching of Darwinism in schools and to promote the theory of "intelligent design" -- life is so complicated it must have been designed by an intelligent creator.

    ... While "The Privileged Planet" is an extremely sophisticated religious film, it is a religious film nevertheless. It uses scientific information -- the apparently "perfect" position of Earth in its orbit and in its galaxy, the uniqueness of its atmosphere -- to answer, affirmatively, the philosophical question of whether life on Earth was part of a grand design, and not just the result of chance and chemistry. Neither God nor evolution is mentioned. Nevertheless, the film is consistent with the Discovery Institute's general aim, which is to drive a wedge into the scientific consensus about the origins of life and the universe ...

    The Wash. Post and the atheist-evolutionist lobby wants to censor a science film because it challenges a scientific consensus and because the makers may have been partially motivated by religious considerations.

    In fact, there is no scientific consensus about the origins of life. There is an atheist-evolutionist consensus that God could not have been involved, but there are also a great many religious scientists who believe that God might have been involved. There is no scientific theory for the origins of life that has much of a following at all. I think that more scientists believe in a God theory than any other particular theory.

    It is offensive to require an atheism litmus test to give a scientific opinion. If this film had been made by an atheist disciple of John Wheeler and his Participatory Anthropic Principle, then no one would object.

    Bob writes:

    Calling The Privileged Planet, a scientific film is like calling Triumph of the Will political reporting. The religion of scientists, whether that religion is atheism, Christianity, or a homegrown faith like that of Ed Fredkin have nothing to do with their science. That is why consensus science is not controversial among scientists of different faiths and nationalities. There is no consensus about religion and there can not be because there is no rational test for the correctness of religious beliefs. That is why we teach science and do not teach religion in our schools.
    There is no scientific consensus on the Antropic Principle. It is perfectly possible, and even desirable, to have scientific films on subjects where there is no consensus.

    Tuesday, Jun 07, 2005
     
    Citigroup loses customer data
    I think that it is pretty lame for Citigroup to blame UPS for its lost data. It could blame UPS for the loss of the tapes, but not the data. Citigroup was completely irresponsible for not encrypting the data.
     
    Jackson jury instructions
    John sends this LA Times story:
    The panel was given the highly unusual task of deciding two sets of molestation allegations by very different legal standards. First, they must determine if it is more likely than not that Jackson molested children in the early 1990s. Then they must determine by a much more stringent standard — beyond a reasonable doubt — whether he molested a 13-year-old cancer patient in 2003.

    The panel also is supposed to view a videotape of the 13-year-old reporting the alleged abuse to detectives, not to determine if his story is true, but to decide whether he had been coached to deliver a false accusation.

    The mental gymnastics the court is demanding from jurors strikes some observers as difficult, if not impossible.

    I think that the evidence should have been restricted to the actual charges. In any other type of case, previous criminal convictions would be irrelevant. And Michael Jackson has never been convicted of anything.

    Monday, Jun 06, 2005
     
    SF bigots
    I think that the San Francisco area has the most narrow-minded and intolerant people around. This 49ers football training video has generated dozens of critical newspaper columns, and the maker has been fired.

    Watch the film. It is no big deal. It is actually appropriate for its intended audience.

    Bob argues that the (left-wing) people who object to the 49ers video are just the same as the (right-wing) people who objected to the Janet Jackson exposure during the Super Bowl.

    I don't see the similarity. The 49ers video was privately made and shown. It was appropriate and legal for its audience, and none of its legitimate viewers complained. The only complaints came from busybodies who saw a stolen copy.

    The indecent Janet Jackson incident was publicly shown to millions of people who were expecting a G-rated event. It violated FCC regulations and offended millions.

    The right-wingers stand for the right of individuals to control what they see. The left-wingers are against private choice, and want to force their views on everybody.

     
    US innovation v France
    The Wash. Post says:
    ... in France, where the unemployment rate has been stuck between 9 and 10 percent for a quarter of a century and where not a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed to break into the ranks of the 25 biggest French companies. By comparison, 19 of today's 25 largest U.S. companies didn't exist four decades ago.

    Sunday, Jun 05, 2005
     
    Journalism credibility crisis
    The Denver Post complains about a journalism credibility crisis, and says:
    Last week's release of the identify of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's "Deep Throat" source in the Watergate story had many IRE journalists hoping the public would be convinced of the good journalism can do - sometimes only with the help of anonymous sources, they said.

    "I think it's good to be reminded, in a time when there's vast criticism of anonymous sources, that sometimes it's worth it," said Shawn McIntosh, a deputy managing editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

    The Deep Throat story only convinces me that mainstream newspapers like the Wash. Post are overrun with dishonest creeps who will promote criminal acts to further their own personal agendas. I do not believe that any good came out of what Mark Felt and Bob Woodward did.
     
    Fat people live longer
    The debate over optimal weight continues:
    Gerberding called a news conference Thursday to discuss the study, which CDC scientists published in April. It concluded obesity causes only about 25,814 deaths a year in the United States -- far fewer than the 365,000 deaths estimated months earlier.

    Even more surprisingly, it concluded people who were overweight but not obese were less likely to die than those who are skinny or at "ideal" weight.

    Scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society disagree with both conclusions. They say the study is flawed, mostly because it included people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease, who tend to weigh less because of those problems and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

    Doing this is "looking at people who are thin because they're sick, not who got sick because they're thin," said Dr. Michael Thun, the cancer society's chief epidemiologist.

    "If you want to define optimal weight for healthy people, you need to start with healthy people," agreed Dr. Meir Stampfer, chief of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health.

    You cannot start with healthy people, because part of the object is to determine what weight is healthy. There are a lot of fat people with health problems as well. Some of those health problems are related to weight, and some are not. If you eliminate all the people with health problems, then you'll be left with people dying of accidents.

    Saturday, Jun 04, 2005
     
    Ben Bradlee, hypocrite and criminal
    The Wash. Post says:
    Fairfield, Conn.: What is your reaction to the strong criticisms leveled at Mark Felt by Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson?

    Ben Bradlee: I am really baffled by Colson and Gordon Liddy lecturing the world about public morality. Both of them went to jail after being convicted of misbehavior surrounding the Watergate cover-up. They were threatening and they paid a price for it. And as far as I'm concerned they have no standing in the morality debate.

    Chuck Colson went to prison for leaking one FBI report. Felt, Bradlee, and the Wash. Post participated in a criminal conspiracy to publish secret info from FBI files for the purpose of embarrassing the President (and making money). Felt was even convicted (and pardoned) of some Watergate-like crimes.

    Friday, Jun 03, 2005
     
    Evolutionists cannot get a date
    NBC News reports:
    Science is becoming a political “hot potato” for some students — transforming what should be a dynamic, fascinating topic into a total turn-off. And some students are choosing silence over losing a prom date.

    “Students face consequences if they choose to accept evolution in a family or a church or a community that patently rejects evolution ... It might affect whether you get a date to the prom, or whether you get that summer job or not,” McCoy said. “You may even anger close family members. Conversations about evolution can make family reunions very tense.”

    I think that the evolutionists are really losing their marbles.
     
    Scalia and Thomas
    John sends this PFAW attack on Justices Scalia and Thomas. Here is how it starts:
    In fact, some of their writings reveal that Justices Scalia and Thomas are far more loyal to right-wing ideology than to any judicial philosophy. For example, both Justices are said to be strict constructionists who do not look beyond the plain meaning of the words in the laws they interpret. The truth is that they often do not adhere to this philosophy. It would be fair to say that, for Scalia and Thomas, "strict constructionism" often has much more to do with construction than with strictness. For instance, in a 1992 case in which a parent challenged the constitutionality of a public school's policy imposing public prayer on all graduation attendees, Justices Scalia and Thomas (joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice White) dissented from the majority, ignoring much evidence on the clear meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment - which forbids government endorsement of religion. (Lee v. Weisman)12 The text is quite clear on its face: "Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion."
    Yes, the text is clear. To show a violation of the clear text, PFAW would just have to show us the law that Congress made, and the religion that was established. The prayer was nonsectarian, with clauses like: "O God, we are grateful to You for having endowed us with the capacity for learning which we have celebrated on this joyous commencement."

    Thursday, Jun 02, 2005
     
    Evolution debate
    Here is an NPR debate on evolution.
     
    Presidential bugging
    Bob sends this:
    With a little help from the CIA, which bugged the Goldwater campaign (E. Howard Hunt, later convicted for taking part in Watergate, told a congressional committee that President Johnson himself ordered this activity), and the FBI, which bugged Goldwater's campaign plane (Robert Mardian discovered this several years later in the Internal Security Division in the Nixon Administration. When he asked J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover blankly replied, "You do what the President of the United States tells you to do."), LBJ was coasting to victory.
    News to me. By comparison, Richard Nixon's worst Watergate crime was that he once authorized one member of his administration to give some false info about the Watergate break-in to another member of his administration. He was loyal to his employees and was trying to protect them. He didn't know that John Dean and Mark Felt were betraying him.

    Tuesday, May 31, 2005
     
    Deep Throat
    The press is accepting the story that Mark Felt was the infamous Watergater leaker code-named Deep Throat. I am skeptical. There have been published rumors about Felt since 1974, and he probably leaked some info. But there are a number of holes in the story, and neither Felt nor the Wash. Post is clearing them up. I think that Deep Throat was a fictional character that was created to sell the Woodward-Bernstein book.

    Assuming that Felt did leak details of a confidential FBI investigation because he hated Pres. Nixon, then he was irresponsible and criminal. He should have been prosecuted along with John Dean and the others.

     
    Definitions of science
    Chris writes:
    Show me anywhere where evolution relies upon peculiar definitions of science. Evolutionary work is full of repeatable experiments, such as the extensive work with fruit flies that I have mentioned before. Fossils are available for all to examine and to use to support or refute other scientist’s interpretation of them. You are going to have to provide a “broad definitions that include giving explanations for nature” that are rejected out of hand by evolutionary scientists.

    “Creationism” is the thesis that the biblical description provided by Genesis is allegorically true and states that the Judeo-Christian God created the earth and all of the life on it, including humans. This is religion because, as of yet, no one has been able to devise an experimental means of proving, or disproving, God’s existence. (Though I would recommend you look at some of the current threads on the Evangelical Outpost Blog for attempts to do just that.)

    “Intelligent design” is the thesis that there are structures in life too complex to have been created purely by random chance. It is an offshoot of Creationism and again fails to provide a mechanism for the designer that is provable by a mechanism other than faith. Further is glosses over the many more designs in nature that are clearly sub optimal and thus begs the question why would a designer leave so many bad designs lying around when there are clearly better solutions.

    I would be interested to hear you cite any other criticism of evolution other than these two since I have not heard of them but I would be interested to hear of them.

    I just listened to a lecture on global warming from a prof who spent half her time repeating that there is no scientific criticism of "climate change", and attacking Michael Crichton. Sure, no one disputes that the climate can change, and her protestations were hiding legitimate controversies related to global warming.

    Likewise, evolutionists like define evolution as change, and they include any changes in the history of the universe. Even the Big Bang and the early history of the Solar System is part of evolution. Evolution is divided into biological evolution and non-biological evolution. Defined that way, I agree that there is no criticism of evolution.

    Here is a discussion with various definitions of biological (or Darwinian or neo-Darwinian) evolution. One of the definitions is "descent with modification". Some textbook definitions are longer, but they mainly just say that populations of organisms exhibit change over time.

     
    Nader wants impeachment
    Ralph Nader cites the Downing Street Memo:
    C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
    and argues for impeaching Bush:
    The president and vice president have artfully dodged the central question: ''Did the administration mislead us into war by manipulating and misstating intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to Al Qaeda, suppressing contrary intelligence, and deliberately exaggerating the danger a contained, weakened Iraq posed to the United States and its neighbors?"
    The simple answer is No.
     
    Bad books
    Here is a Conservative list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

    Bob writes:

    Origin of the Species is claimed to be worse than Foucault or Coming of Age in Samoa. Too bad it didn't make the top 10 so they would have to state the rational for the bad rating. If evolution were properly taught, more people would realize that it is right wing.
    If evolution were taught properly, then it would not be so harmful.

    There are some idiotic comments here. They point out that the list overlooks the Harry Potter books, Catcher In The Rye, and the Warren Commission Report.


    Sunday, May 29, 2005
     
    Judges v Democracy
    John sends this John Leo column:
    Here is the dominant Republican concern in two short sentences, as framed by blogger Mickey Kaus (a conservative Democrat, as it happens): "In the post-Warren era, judges . . . have almost uncheckable antidemocratic power. The Constitution has been durably politicized in a way that the Framers didn't anticipate." Burt Neuborne of New York University law school said recently that his fellow Democrats may be making a mistake by depending so heavily on judges to establish law without seeking true public support.

    Well, that's one way of putting it. Another is simply to say that the Democrats consistently rely on judges to impose legislation that they can't get through the normal democratic process because majorities don't want it. As a result, our politics and our courts have been deformed. A contempt for majorities keeps growing on the left, and contempt for the courts keeps rising on the right. Megan McArdle, the sensible blogger at Asymmetrical Information, says Republicans are determined to pack the court because "it is the only way Democrats have left them to undo the quasi-legislation that liberal judges wrote."

    I can shorten the concern to two words: Judicial Supremacy.

    Saturday, May 28, 2005
     
    Trying to censor a cosmology movie
    The NY Times is upset that:
    Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution

    Fossils at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History have been used to prove the theory of evolution. Next month the museum will play host to a film intended to undercut evolution.

    But the Smithsonian is just allowing a private showing for a fee, and the movie is about cosmology:
    Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment provide a delicate, and probably exceedingly rare, cradle for complex life. But there's another, even more startling, fact, described in The Privileged Planet: those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet-that allow for the existence of complex observers like ourselves-also provide the best overall place for observing. What does this mean? At the least, it turns our view of the universe inside out. The universe is not "pointless" (Steven Weinberg), Earth merely "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark," (Carl Sagan) and human existence "just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents" (Steven Weinberg). On the contrary, the evidence we can uncover from our Earthly home points to a universe that is designed for life, and designed for discovery.
    This is a typical leftist-evolutionist-atheist attack. If anyone merely suggests that life has a purpose, then the evolutionists want to censor him, and brand him an enemy of science and evolution. In this case, it appears that the movie doesn't even have anything to do with Darwinian evolution.

    Chris says:

    Since the quote is a direct blurb from the movie website and takes the comments it chooses out of context it can hardly be considered “typical leftist-evolutionist-atheist attack” whatever that may be. (Rather like the time I was accused of being a “fascist-communist” while discussing hand gun control.)

    The argument that is propounded in the movie is along the lines of intelligent design and from the same source. Life, as we know it, could not exist without the unique circumstances of our reality. The big-bang could have created a physical reality in which the laws of physics would be slightly different. This is like saying if I had been born to different parents, I would be a different person. Well, duh!!!

    This is another argument in the classic proof of predestination. If anything else could have happened it would have, thus nothing else is possible. We cannot possibly know that life is impossible in any other configuration of physical laws until we create a universe with those characteristics and wait to see if life occurs. (I am willing to say that that will not happen in my lifetime.) Therefore, it is impossible to say that life can only occur in the current universe because there is no way to know.

    The only thing we know for sure is that life has occurred in this universe on this planet. If others want to take it as an article of faith that, the Judeo-Christian God caused it to happen, then have at it. What they cannot do is say that that needs to be taught in a science course because it is not science. It is religion or personal belief.

    Your comments relate to the Anthropic principle. It is a controversy on the fringe of science. If a school were to teach this principle, then I think that it should say that it is controversial, and that the scientific views on it are not the only ones.

    Update: Because of leftist-evolutionist-atheist pressure on the Smithsonian to censor the cosmology film, it is showing the film for free. I guess the evolutionists decided that it would be bad for a museum to accept money from an organization suspected of trying to promote a belief in God.

     
    More on evolutionists
    Bob writes:
    You may be able to find a few evolutionists who say the things you claim. This proves nothing. Most of your complaints are about the personal, rather than scientific, opinions of scientists, which are irrelevant. Definitions of evolution are in the province of philosophy of science. The Darwin quote in the piece by Dawkins you link to gives one way of falsifying evolution. Given your straw-man claims about what Dawkins said in that piece I am not surprised that you ignore it. Evolution predicts that there will be no fossils of rabbits found before a specified date. Evolution predicted that all living things would share genes. Evolution predicted that the more distantly related species are, the more differences there are in shared genes. Failure of these predictions would put evolution in doubt. You persist in mentioning observations which put evolution in doubt but refuse to cite them. You have yet to give a scientific argument against evolution. Your arguments are political and philosophical. Scientists reject theories that rely on the supernatural and theories which are capable of explaining any possible observation. Even philosophers agree that this is a defining property of science. I guess that you are shocked that academicians tend to be left wing. People who get their money from the government tend to be left wing. The beauty of science is that it weeds out ideas with nothing to back them up but ideology and politics. If religious people didn't make false claims and bogus arguments which disillusion people there would be fewer atheists.
    When the evolutionists took over the Kansas school board in 2001, they made the following change to the science curriculum:
    Old standard: "Learn about falsification. Example: What would we accept as proof that the theory that all cars are black is wrong? How many times would we have to prove the theory wrong to know that it is wrong? Answers: One car of any color but black and only one time. No matter how much evidence seems to support a theory, it only takes one proof that it is false to show it to be false. It should be recognized that in the real world it might take years to falsify a theory."

    New standard: "Share interpretations that differ from currently held explanations on topics such as global warming and dietary claims. Evaluate the validity of results and accuracy of stated conclusions."

    The evolutionists eliminated the notion of falsification. The evolutionists also eliminated this section:
    If a student should raise a question in a natural science class that the teacher determines to be outside the domain of science, the teacher should treat the question with respect. The teacher should explain why the question is outside the domain of natural science and encourage the student to discuss the question further with his or her family and other appropriate sources.
    It seems to me that the evolutionists want to be able to teach untestable theories, and still be able to ridicule alternate theories.
     

    A Boston Globe editorial says:
    Last year, the Kansas Legislature approved a $500 million initiative to attract biotechnology companies into the state. Kansas will be less appealing to these companies if it becomes a haven for antiscientific dogmatism. Scientists would do well to join forces with business leaders to prevent that occurrence.

    Evolutionary theory guides the development of flu vaccines, which change every year to cope with evolving viruses. Evolutionary theory helps to track HIV infections. Computer scientists have applied evolutionary theory to software programming. Intelligent design can make no such claims. A public education campaign ought to inform Kansans about the value of solid, time-tested science.

    Evolutionary theory has no significant impact on development of flu vaccines or tracking HIV infections. Evolution has inspired some "genetic algorithms" that are indeed useful in some situations. The vast majority of the time, though, you want software that has been intelligently designed.

    Friday, May 27, 2005
     
    Ideas that must not be discussed
    Richard John Neuhaus says:
    Some school boards have very modestly suggested that students should know that evolution is not the only theory about the origin and development of life. What they want students to know is an indisputable fact. There are other theories supported by very reputable scientists, including theories of evolution other than the established version to which students are now bullied into giving their assent. On any question, the rational and scientific course is to take into account all pertinent evidence and explanatory proposals. We can know that the quasi-religious establishment of a narrow evolutionary theory as dogma is in deep trouble when its defenders demand that alternative ideas must not be discussed or even mentioned in the classroom. Students, school boards, and thoughtful citizens are in fully justified rebellion against this attempted stifling of intellectual inquiry.
    Bob writes:
    A "theory" is not a scientific theory because you, Richard John Neuhaus, and a few "reputable" scientists say it is. A theory is a scientific theory when it is based on science. It is hard work to determine whether a theory is based on science. It requires reading scientific literature, following scientific arguments, and for those of us who are not scientists, looking up words in dictionaries and glossaries. It requires understanding unfamiliar concepts and critical thinking. It requires the ability to distinguish between a scientific argument and legalistic cheap shots like those presented by you and Neuhaus. If our schools taught those skills it wouldn't matter what they taught about evolution.
    Okay, but evolutionists want to use their own peculiar definition of science that no one else accepts. Evolutionists don't like traditional definitions of science in term of repeatable experiments, because they hardly have any repeatable experiments. They don't like definitions in terms of falsification, because they are not willing to admit that any observation would falsify their theories. They don't like broad definitions that include giving explanations for nature, because they might include creationism, intelligent design, or something else with potential religious overtones. The evolutionists want to define science as any leftist-atheist-materialist activity that has the support of the scientific establishment.

    Thursday, May 26, 2005
     
    Ridiculing believers
    Chris writes:
    No doubt, there are those who do ridicule those who believe in God (Christian, Moslem, Pantheist, Wicca, Druid, Taoist, and all others) and they may very well be leftists, evolutionists or atheists; just as there are those who, some who may well believe in God, ridicule those who believe in science. Neither group is terribly serious nor am I sure seriously involved in wanting to improve the education our children, as well as the children in Kansas. Rather they are people who live a small, self-centered existence that does not allow them much freedom or joy.

    Science education does not threaten anyone’s belief in God. Neither does a belief in God threaten anyone’s understanding of evolution and the scientific search for a physical explanation of the world around us. They are, in fact, orthogonal to each other and cannot be seriously said to conflict except in people who are so insecure in their faith that they require everyone and everything to support and believe as they do.

    Many serious scientists are deeply religious and hold a deeply felt profound faith in God that helps illuminate their lives and guides their actions as they live and work within the world. Many scientists hold other non-theist beliefs that help illuminate their lives and guide their actions as they live and work within the world. They continue to work diligently to understand how everything around us came to exist. I dare say that some believe that the explanation posited by Genesis in the Old Testament accurately explains the process. No serious person mocks such a belief, as it is a private matter for each person to explore and decide for him or herself. Nor would such a person mock the serious research and attempts that others make to move the science of evolution forward.

    A number of reasons leave evolution open to critics. It is incomplete. Human minds have a great difficulty imagining the timescales and distances involved in an explanation that states that the universe came into existence 12 billion years ago and everything around us came from the primordial hydrogen that the big bang created. We want at a fundamental level a simpler explanation of life and our existence.

    You notice that no one proposes an alternative explanation for the theory of Gravity other than the curvature of the space-time continuum even though it is not mentioned anywhere in the Old or New Testament. It is the incredible complexity of life that makes people question the theory of evolution. Even modern day critics admit that microevolution is a fact as the adaptation of insects to all modern insecticide attest. What they object to is that this sort of microevolution could possibly have given rise to human beings. Yet the critics are unable to propose any explanation that passes Occam’s razor. Each explanation for evolution other than the result of natural processes invokes some entity or power lacking a physical explanation. The argument that speciation could not be possible has been disproved by experiments with fruit flies that have produced different species that no longer can interbreed with their progenitors. The Cambrian explosion is explicable by considering the very animals that Darwin observed having differentiated in the Galapagos Islands. The geologically short time that allowed the Galapagos finches to fill many different ecological niches was at work when a new evolution of invertebrates suddenly exploded into a world empty of any serious competition.

    In a world where math and science is becoming an evermore-important lynchpin of our economic success trying to pretend that, serious science is a threat to people’s belief in God is a recipe for disaster. We need to train more and more children to work with their minds rather than their hands. Teaching them that all truth is only revealed not learned is to allow other countries to produce the scientists and engineers that will power tomorrow’s world. Our hegemony that you are so proud, of will be consigned to the dustbin of history as so many empires before us. Remaking the United States into a theocracy will destroy much of what is great about this country.

    People do propose goofy alternatives to the space-time continuum. There is a current Wired magazine article about one. I think that all scientific theories should be subject to criticism, including gravity and evolution.

    Bob writes:

    Science constrains what it is reasonable to believe as fact. It is reasonable to believe that the explanation of creation in Genesis is a useful metaphor which evokes the appropriate emotions of gratitude and reverence we should have about creation and the universe. It is not reasonable to believe the Genesis account as a scientific or historical fact. There is nothing wrong with pointing out that certain beliefs are unreasonable. Serious people are careful about what they say serious people can say.
    Then you shouldn't mind when I point out that certain beliefs are unreasonable.

    Chris writes:

    I do not know a single scientist who thinks that any scientific thought is beyond critiscm. The major occupation of most science is to poke holes into other people?s theories as well as conducting experiments to provide data that will help to refine any theories more precisely or disprove all or part of a theory. The article you cite is a perfect example of the entire process. Lynd has found a different way of thinking about time and other scientists are excited to try to prove or disprove. Like quantum Gravity a ?chronon? has eluded experimentalist for many years despite their best efforts to determine its existence and duration. Quantum mechanics has already shown that sub atomic particles move freely forward and backward in time violating our concept of causality. That experimental result lacks a coherent theory to explain how particles can come into existence before the collision that produces them.

    It might very well be that Lynd?s work will help us understand results like this. It is even possible that there will be a theorist like Einstein that will smash quantum mechanics like Einstein smashed Newtonian physics. No theory or scientific thought is immune from criticism, nor should they be.

    However saying I do not like what evolution says about human beings is not a valid critisicm. Neither is saying the theory of evolution conflicts with my religious beliefs and interferes with my parental right to teach my children to have the same religious beliefs. These are not attacks upon the theory of evolution but rather on the entire principle of universal public education and the study of science. If you want to have religious beliefs taught in public schools say so. Argue the merits of that concept do not try and pretend that you find some deep flaw in a particular detail about evolution.

    No, I do not want religious beliefs to be taught in public school science classes, nor do I want gratuitous attacks on religion to be taught. The Kansas school board does not want religious beliefs to be taught either.

    The Kansas school debate is all about whether evolution theories should be subject to criticism. The evolutionists want evolution to be taught in a dogmatic manner, with no alternative views allowed.

     
    Reading the Kansas report
    Bob writes:
    Here is one of the stories quoting Kathy Martin as not having read the standard she was voting on.

    TOPEKA, Kan. - (KRT) - None of the eight intelligent design proponents who testified at the Kansas State Board of Education's evolution hearings Friday have read the science standards they want changed.

    Under cross-examination, all eight admitted they simply read the 28-page minority report and not the full 107-page draft of proposed science standards, most of which is not controversial. ...

    After the hearing, Martin said what she meant was she hadn't read the second draft of the science standards presented to the board March 9 because she had read the first draft.

    I haven't read the whole draft either. I just read the changes that are generating the controversy.

    Try asking your congressman whether he has read the USA Patriot Act.

    Bob writes:

    I expect more from members of a board of education than from a congressman whose primary skills are the ability to remember names and to raise funds from special interest groups.
     
    Kansas is Scopes Trial redux
    In the 1925 Scopes Trial, William Jennings Bryan testified on the witness stand, as Clarence Darrow demanded. Darrow tried to attack his beliefs:
    [Bryan] refused to attempt to tell how old the earth might be, although he said: "I could possibly come as near as the scientists do."

    As both interrogations and replies became faster and shorter, the attorney-general was brought forward again to ask the purpose of the examination.

    "The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have not other purpose than to ridiculing every person who believes in the Bible," declared Bryan.

    "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, that is all," fired back Darrow.

    The two faced each other on the platform. The witness asserted:

    "I am simply trying to protect the Word of God against the greatest, atheist, or agnostic, in the United States. I want the papers to know that I am not afraid to get on the stand in front of him and let him do his worst. I want the world to know that agnosticism is trying to force agnosticism on our colleges and on out schools and the people of Tennessee will not permit it to be done."

    Darrow then sandbagged Scopes with a guilty plea, rather than take the stand himself, or let any scientists take the stand.

    The evolutionists were the bigots and ignoramuses in 1925, and they are the bigots and ignoramuses in Kansas today. Their purpose is to ridicule everyone who believes in God, and they will not stand up and defend their leftist-evolutionist-atheist beliefs.

    The 1925 biology textbook cited Piltdown Man as proof of evolution, and advocated white supremacy and eugenics. Bryan understood Darwinism and evolution much better than Darrow, and had legitimate reasons for opposing it.

     
    More stem cell facts
    For those who are worried that the Koreans are the only ones doing human embryonic stem cell research, the WSJ says:
    In fact, federal funding for all forms of stem-cell research (including adult and umbilical stem cells) has nearly doubled, to $566 million from $306 million. The federal government has also made 22 fully developed embryonic stem-cell lines available to researchers, ...

    At the state level, Californians passed Proposition 71, which commits $3 billion over 10 years for stem-cell research. New Jersey is building a $380 million Stem Cell Institute. The Massachusetts Legislature has passed a bill authorizing stem-cell research by a veto-proof margin, and similar legislation is in the works in Connecticut and Wisconsin.

    Then there's the private sector. According to Navigant Consulting, the U.S. stem-cell therapeutics market will generate revenues of $3.6 billion by 2015. Some 70 companies are now doing stem-cell research, ...

    There is now more money available for stem cell research than anyone knows how to spend. It looks like a big boondoggle to me. I predict that most of the money will be wasted.

    Bob writes:

    So, how did the Koreans get ahead of the US in an area where we had a decisive lead? Embryonic stem cells were first isolated and cultured by James Thomson at U. Wisconsin in 1998. The Koreans and the UK can now do something which no US lab is able to reproduce. Patents may prevent US labs from reproducing these results for 20 years.
    So maybe patents will prevent some useless cloning.

    Tuesday, May 24, 2005
     
    Dawkins on ignorance
    Richard Dawkins complains that quoting scientists admitting to ignorance "threatens the enterprise of science itself", and says:
    The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. "Bet you can’t tell me how the elbow joint of the lesser spotted weasel frog evolved by slow gradual degrees?" If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, a default conclusion is drawn: "Right, then, the alternative theory; 'intelligent design' wins by default."
    Here is a typical college lesson in evolution (pdf slides). It argues that evolution is scientific, states a few generalities, and concludes that "Evolution explains the diversity of life on earth".

    It seems to me that if evolutionists are going to claim that the theory explains everything, then it is fair game for critics to try to find things that it does not explain.

    Bob writes:

    After reading all of the Dawkins piece linked to above, I understand. I read a book review once in which the author complained that a book which he had reviewed, "Leadership Principles of Attila the Hun" and called "twaddle" had a quote taken out of context as a blurb on the cover. The reviewer ended the review with the statement that he had made sure that nothing could be taken from the review and made to sound positive. Dawkins is complaining about unscrupulous creationists taking the words of scientists out of context to criticize evolution, nothing more.
    So Dawkins wants his fellow evolutionists to carefully control their language so that nothing they say will be construed to be a limitation on the explanatory power of the theory of evolution?!

    Real scientists are happy to explain what is and is not explained by theory. They are happy to explain what has and has not been empirically demonstrated. Only leftist-atheist-evolutionist science propagandists like Dawkins are so concerned about people discovering the theory's shortcomings.

    Bob writes:

    I defy you to supply the quote where Dawkins or I say anything which justifies your statement [about Dawkins].
    Dawkins says, "It isn’t even safe for a scientist to express temporary doubt ...". The whole point of his column is to encourage evolutionists to avoid expressing doubts or evolution limitations, and to attack efforts to fully inform Kansas students. Dawkins also said in 1986:
    Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
    That is his real problem. He is a propagandist for atheism, and he wants the schools to teach science in a way that promotes atheism and does not allow alternative views.

    Here is another attack on Dawkins' essay.

     
    Stem cell junk science
    Bob writes:
    I'm glad that someone is concerned that conservatives are embracing junk science. I thought that was a lost cause when conservatives started supporting ID. Personally, I reject the assertion that bible banging busy bodies are real conservatives.
    He sends an incoherent stem cell essay by Harvard researcher David Shaywitz. (The essay is not freely available.) It says:
    For true believers, of course, these scientific facts should be beside the point; if human embryonic stem cell research is morally, fundamentally, wrong, then it should be wrong, period, regardless of the consequences to medical research. If conservatives believe their own rhetoric, they should vigorously critique embryonic stem cell research on its own grounds, and not rely upon an appeal to utilitarian principles.
    This is nonsense. He is not a conservative, does not know any conservatives, and may not have ever even read anything that conservatives wrote. Yet he somehow thinks that he knows what conservatives ought to be thinking.

    In fact conservatives do sometimes criticize embryonic stem cell research on its own grounds. It is especially strange to hear a scientist complain about someone else using a utilitarian argument!

    Bob writes:

    Shaywitz is complaining about following deceptive practice. Monday on Lehrer a Republican congressman was shown holding up a folder with 60 some odd "cures" using adult stem cells and a folder showing 0 cures from embryonic stem cells. The complaint is not that a utilitarian argument is being used, but that the particular argument that adult stem cells are more useful than embryonic stem cells is based on junk science. This is exactly what is being implied by the Republican scam artist I mentioned. Of course adult stem cell research is ahead of embryonic stem cell research, it has been funded for more than a decade longer than embryonic stem cell research. Adult stem cell research has never operated under the severe restrictions under which embryonic stem cell research must operate in the US. While US research is pawn in the abortion wars, Korea, the UK, Japan and Singapore are patenting the technology we will need to solve our health care crisis. The end of this research is not organ farms, but an understanding of the molecular basis for the development process by which we become what we are starting from a single cell. The factors which guide this process and which can turn an adult cell into an embryo in cloning will be identified, their mechanisms understood, patented, and used to repair diseased or failing organs in situ. Thanks to the obstructionists, the US is already years behind in this race for intellectual property and the means to save lives. I call that evil.
    The congressman was stating a fact. Adult stem cells have led to useful therapies, and embryonic stem cells have not. If Shaywitz's objection is to that congressman stating facts, then he should say so. Instead, he wrote a dishonest straw man attack.
     
    Supremacists let murderer go
    Liza writes:
    I'm surprised nobody on this list has complained about the Supreme Court's latest outrage - the decision yesterday throwing out a death penalty because the convicted murderer was shackled during the penalty phase of the trial. Again, a Missouri criminal defendant was involved. Apparently the state now has to show that the shackling is necessary because the defendant (who has already been convicted of murder, remember) represents a threat! This decision is especially weird coming so soon after an Atlanta defendant went nuts and killed a few people in the courthouse.

    See also the column on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today by Prof. Lino Graglia of U. of Texas Law School, complaining about judicial supremacy/activism generally. He's coming out with a new book on the subject. His proposed solution seems silly to me - to amend the Constitution to restrict the meaning of the 14th Amendment to the abolition of official race discrimination (in order to get rid of all the due process and equal protection jurisprudence). First of all, it's extremely unlikely such an amendment would ever pass. Second, lots of supremacist decisions don't rely on the 14th Amendment.

    Yes, Graglia fails to grasp the true nature of the problem.
     
    Judicial supremacist is sensitive to criticism
    A Mass. judge just hates it when people call a spade a spade. She is a good example of a judge who ought to be impeached for irresponsible behavior in office.

    Sunday, May 22, 2005
     
    Prof. Larry Tribe
    Prof. Larry Tribe has just canceled volume 2 of his constitutional law treatise. Apparently he is worried that it would be obsoleted by a couple of Bush appointments to the Supreme Court. One can only hope!
     
    Anti-social behavior orders
    Here is a weird British trend:
    ASBO is an acronym for the ''anti-social behavior orders'' that have been introduced by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has promised to extend them in the third term he won in elections earlier this month. An ASBO is a kind of esoteric injunction that bans people from highly specific acts that fall just this side of criminality. Kerry McLaughlin's order, for instance, threatened her with jail if she had more than two guests over after 10 at night.

    Civil libertarians warn that there is little restraint on the imposition of ASBO's, and 97 percent of those requested are approved by court authorities. Some law-and-order politicians want the courts taken out of the equation altogether, so that you can be slapped with an ASBO on a policeman's say-so. They are proliferating. The Guardian reports that a suicidal young woman who tried to drown herself in the Avon got an ASBO that forbids her from jumping into any rivers. Two teenage gang members have to stay out of certain neighborhoods in Gloucester until they turn 24. A girl suspected of shoplifting has an ASBO that will land her in jail if she wears a hooded sweatshirt to hide her face. Britons have long managed to balance a need for order with a tendency toward eccentricity. With astonishing speed, the state has gone into the business of micromanaging morality.

    In Britain, you cannot even encourage a kid to catch a butterfly:
    A spokesman for Butterfly Conservation, a Dorset-based charity, was appalled by the prospect of thousands of net-wielding children charging across the British countryside with murder in mind.

    He said: "Butterflies are in danger across the British Isles - even the most common species are now under threat. We condemn anyone encouraging the killing and collecting of butterflies.

    "Even if you do not kill them, catching butterflies with a net can harm them if you do not know how to use a net properly. Butterflies are very delicate and if we were to encourage people to catch them we would ensure they were properly trained."

    What are they going to do -- license the use of a butterfly net?
     
    Benefits of preschool
    A third-grade teacher says:
    While research suggests that the benefits of preschool tend to wear off by fifth grade, some would argue that the first five years of school are important.

    The positive effects of preschool on young children are very clear to early childhood teachers in elementary schools. At the school I teach at in the Bronx, one student who had never been to school before shouted on the first day of kindergarten, "Stop reading so loud, Teacher ! I am trying to sleep!" Preschool allows students to understand at an early age the roles of the student and the teacher, as well as how to cooperate in a classroom environment.

    In other words, preschool has no benefit to the kids, but it does benefit the teachers by brainwashing the kids into accepting their idiotic and destructive teaching techniques. That kids is probably better off taking a nap.

    Saturday, May 21, 2005
     
    Feminists snivel
    Gumma approves of Judge Janice Rogers Brown, because she testified:
    If my family had a motto, it would be 'Don't snivel'. We had a very clear sense of right and wrong.
    She says that the statements proves that Brown is not a feminist. Feminists are all whiners and snivelers.

    Friday, May 20, 2005
     

    Leftist nut-case Catherine Crier complains on Court TV about how we have a conservative court. Pat Buchanan sets her straight. Most of the Republican-appointed judges are judicial supremacists and liberals. Crier is unwilling to distinguish between judges who rule contrary to the Constitution or to statutes, and judges who rule contrary to "case law".
     
    Burning bibles
    The Mohammedan world does not believe in religious tolerance:
    The Bible in Saudi Arabia may get a person killed, arrested, or deported. In September 1993, Sadeq Mallallah, 23, was beheaded in Qateef on a charge of apostasy for owning a Bible. The State Department's annual human rights reports detail the arrest and deportation of many Christian worshipers every year. Just days before Crown Prince Abdullah met President Bush last month, two Christian gatherings were stormed in Riyadh. Bibles and crosses were confiscated, and will be incinerated.
    Disposing of a copy of the Koran in front of a terrorist prisoner is trivial in comparison.
     
    IBM wants cheap programmers
    A N. Carolina paper says:
    DURHAM -- With a critical shortage of Information Technology workers projected in the coming years, it's crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday. ...

    "The slope shows an unbelievable decline in computer science majors," Astrachan said. "There are smart people no longer even signing up to take our introductory courses. We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences."

    It is a simple matter of supply and demand. IBM pays much more to its lawyers, salemen, and managers than it pays its programmers. Programmers suffer an unemployment rate that is higher than the national average, while other professions have much lower unemployment rates. The USA has policies of importing cheap programmer labor from India and China. The students are acting rationally when they avoid computer science classes.

    Wednesday, May 18, 2005
     
    Filibuster polls
    The mainstream media (MSM) is saying that the polls favor the Democrats in the current filibuster debate. Here is the Time poll question:
    Some Republicans in the Senate want to eliminate the ability of Democrats to use the filibuster, or extended debate, to block the Senate from voting on some of President Bush's judicial nominees. Do you think the Republicans should or should not be able to eliminate the filibuster in this case?
    Time says only 28% support the Republicans. But I wonder what the result would be if the question were phrased more like this:
    Some Democrats in the Senate want the ability for a minority to block the Senate from voting on some of President Bush's judicial nominees. Do you think the Republicans should or should not be able to hold a vote on the nominees?"
    My hunch is that people who don't follow this issue closely are likely to oppose whoever seems to be changing the rules. The Democrats say that the Republicans are changing the rules, but the Republicans say that it is the Democrats who want a minority to be able to use the filibuster to kill judicial nominations, and that has never been done before.

    The use of the word "filibuster" is also confusing. The traditional Senate filibuster was just a debating tactic, and it only delayed votes. It did not prevent votes. The average voter is likely to think that a full debate on judges is a good thing. But what the Democrats really want to do is to veto the nomination with a minority of the votes. They do not just want a full debate.

     
    Expelling preschoolers
    A new study says:
    More than 600 kids are expelled from preschool in New York each year, according to a new study. That means preschoolers get kicked out at a rate nearly 18 times higher than that of kids from kindergarten to 12th grade. Preschoolers are generally three- and four-years-old.
    The preschool lobby is unhappy:
    The fact that children who are just learning how to hold a crayon or recognize the alphabet are being tossed out of classrooms has surprised and alarmed researchers and preschool advocates, who warn that early intervention and support -- not expulsion -- is the key to long-term student success.
    They ought to be alarmed, because they are ideologically committed to a fallacious theory. A lot of 3- and 4-year-olds just aren't ready to be ruined by educators yet. Preschool is just daycare, and I suspect that most kids are better off without it.

    Sunday, May 15, 2005
     
    Darwin on trial
    John sends this Wash Post article about evolution and intelligent design.
    "Evolution is the most plausible explanation for life if you're using naturalistic terms, I'll agree with that." Johnson folds his hands over his belly, a professorial Buddha, as his words fly rat-a-tat-tat. "That's only," he continues, "because science puts forward evolution and says any other logical explanation is outside of reality." ...

    "A lot of the DNA in there is not needed -- it's junk," says Phillip Kitcher, the Columbia University philosopher of science. "If it's intelligently designed, then God needs to go back to school."

    If it turns out that the junk DNA is needed, then I am sure that the evolutionists will say that it is further proof for evolution and for the non-existence of God.

    Bob writes:

    The Wash (com)Post quotes a lawyer to defend ID and a philosopher to defend evolution. In a political fight I guess it is better to have a lawyer on your side. Fortunately, the defense of evolution does not require philosophers. ID on the other hand would not even exist if it hadn't been concocted by Johnson, a lawyer.
    Yes, the scientists followed an AAAS-led boycott of the Kansas hearings. It is hard to find a scientist who will defend the evolutionist position.

    Friday, May 13, 2005
     
    Outsourcing
    John sends this Thomas L. Friedman column and writes:
    The same people who supported outsourcing U.S. computer jobs to India now wonder why college computer departments no longer attract the best students.
    Yes. Simple supply and demand. If computer jobs disappear because of outsourcing, then the best students will go elsewhere. No mystery to it.

    Thursday, May 12, 2005
     
    Buchanan questions WWII
    Pat Buchanan quotes Pres. Bush, and then questions whether fighting WWII in Europe was worth the cost. Critics are calling him an anti-Semite again. Cramer suggests asking the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis? I guess he means to ask the Jews who escaped the Nazis.

    Today, schoolkids are taught that the USA went to war in WWII because of Pearl Harbor and to save European Jews from the Nazis. It must seem strange that Buchanan doesn't mention either. However, I really don't think that saving the Jews had much to do with entering the war in Europe.


    Tuesday, May 10, 2005
     
    Scientific Revolutions
    Jonathan writes:
    Saw Kuhn's "SSR" on your list of harmful books. Maybe you're a "sophisticated methodological falsificationist" and disagree with Kuhn's "psychology of research" approach, but ... harmful? Isn't Kuhn just a sociologist and "mildly interesting"? Where's the harm?

    I think the notions of paradigm shift, "normal" science, and "extraordinary science" are useful for beginners. After that, hell, make them read Popper. Wondering if your detestation of Kuhn is based solely on a naked reading of SSR, or if on the other hand you know something I don't. Personally, in class "way back when" we read SSR, then Popper, then "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge"-- based on the London 1965 symposium where Kuhn led off, then was taken up by (in turn) Watkins, Toulmin, Williams, Popper, Masterman, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. At the end of the book, Kuhn tries to rebut his critics. So I'm just curious as to what "level" you attack Kuhn on, and what's harmful with teaching SSR as a "newbie intro thing".

    Or is your attack deeper than that? As in, are you against any/all study of philosophy of science, psychology of science, or sociology of science as complete timewasters compared to things like math or "hard" science or history of science?

    I guess it sounds odd to attack such a universally praised book. People like Al Gore and Stephen Jay Gould said it was one of the best books they ever read.

    I don't like the book because of the way in which Kuhn denies that there is scientific progress. Furthermore, the book inspired all sorts of other bad ideas.

    For a good criticism of Kuhn from the point of view of a scientist, see Steven Weinberg's essay.

    Bob writes:

    Anyone who defends Kuhn must defend his remarks on "Revolutions and Relativism" p205-206 second edition, in which Kuhn denies that science has anything to do with objective reality and effect endorses relativism in a mealy mouthed fashion. Go ahead, make my day.

    Note Weinberg's misunderstanding of "evolution as described by Darwin, a process driven from behind, rather than pulled toward some fixed goal to which it grows ever closer." Anyone who believes this must account for the fact intelligence has evolved independently at least three times. Independently? Yes, three entirely different brain structures in three distantly related species have produced intelligence. The correct understanding of evolution is that species are pulled toward the "fixed goal" of adapting to an ever changing environment with invariant properties which are not obvious or ascertainable by formal systems or their implementations.

    If science doesn't explain objective reality, then the next step is to say that there is no such thing as objective reality.
     
    Iraq War plans
    The latest UK scandal is this 23 July 2002 leaked memo:
    C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
    I don't know why anyone would be surprised that the USA was making Iraq war preparations in 2002. We had even bombed Iraq as recently as 1998.

    Monday, May 09, 2005
     
    Democrat nonsense on judges
    John sends this Ramesh Ponnuru article as a good response to a Wash. Post column defending Democrats who want to filibuster judges.

    See also this scathing criticism.

    Finally, Caplan says "the current Supreme Court has a right and a center, but no left." This is just silly. If it were the case we would see more decisions overturning Warren and Burger Court precedents and fewer cases that, like Lawrence and Roper, shift constitutional jurisprudence to the left. Any description of judicial ideology along these lines must account for the trajectory of the Court's doctrines, many of which, I would submit, still trend left.
    Anyone who says that we have a right-wing court is just a leftist propagandist.
     
    Emotional-assistance service dog
    I didn't know that non-blind people get to have seeing-eye dogs.
    Another Seattle case in which a merchant got in trouble for not admitting a dog which was accompanying its owner for purposes of psychological assistance (as distinct from the service provided by seeing-eye and hearing dogs for the physically disabled). This time the Wicker Basket grocery store in Ballard was fined $21,000 after owner Hojoon Park wouldn't let the dog into the shop.
    I did once see an apparently normally-sighted man with a seeing-eye dog eat in a restaurant. I figured that maybe he was training the dog, or had some unusual visual problem.
     
    Woman Gets $45K for Cat Killed by Dog
    John sends this:
    SEATTLE (AP) - A woman who sued a neighbor after his dog mauled her cat to death has been awarded more than $45,000.
    I think that a better remedy would have been to just let her shoot his dog.

    Saturday, May 07, 2005
     
    Shiavo's effect on Bush
    Gumma writes:
    It is depressing the way the TV commentators , in evaluating Bush's standing in the polls, or report on his forst 100 days, or whatever, continually refer to the Schiavo case as a negative for Bush without any explanation whatsoever. Everybody is just supposed to understand that it was a Bush/Republican negative. Any ideas for dealing with this?
    Andy writes:
    It should be a negative. Bush hid behind the skirts of the judges. Bush passed the buck. Bush gave quotes like "it's up to the courts to decide this." For pete's sake, ever since Harry Truman it has been understood that the president should not be passing the buck. Bush made himself look less important than a mere probate judge.

    The president is accountable for what the federal judiciary decides. He should be. Hopefully Bush realizes that he won't get away with nominating another Souter in two months, when Rehnquist is expected to resign. But I'm not optimistic, unless conservatives turn up the rhetoric on the issue of filling the vacancy.

    What should Bush have done? Ideally, he should see a crisis like that coming and taken steps long beforehand to avert it. Line up the votes in the Florida legislature, the way a Democratic president would. Tell Jeb he has to take Terri into custody an obtain some fair medical examinations, the way that Clinton would have called Lawton Chiles. Get Terri out of the state the way as Elian was. Launch an early federal investigation, the way Janet Reno would have. But don't hide behind the courts and pass the buck.

    John writes:
    Schiavo is a negative for Bush and the Republicans because they set a goal but failed to accomplish it. Like the CW song, they "fought the law and the law won" - law in this case meaning the judges.

    Americans like a winner. Clinton remains popular because he beat Newt in the great budget standoff of 1995, then he beat impeachment in 1999 and left office in glory. Whereas Nixon left office in disgrace even though few can say exactly why.

    In the Schiavo case, the Republicans who control the Federal and Florida governments were unable or unwilling to come up with a succesful strategy to save Terri. The willful decisions of Judge Greer prevailed, and the matter is closed, with the arrogant Judge Birch having the last word.

    It is understandable and inevitable that political observers would call this a "Bush/Republican negative"; they lost!

    I don't buy this analysis. I don't think that Shiavo was a negative for Pres. Bush. And if it was, you have to ask whether it was because Bush did too much or too little.

    I think that Clinton was severely damaged by the impeachment.

    Schiavo's supporters lost in the sense that Schiavo died, but she may have been a martyr to the cause, and her death may help the cause in the long run. Until she actually died, there were probably a lot of people who didn't believe that the authorities would really starve her.

    All of those same TV commentators claimed that Bush lost the Bush-Kerry debates, and argued that poll data proves it. They were wrong. Bush won the debates. Bush articulated where he stands and why, and Kerry never did.


    Friday, May 06, 2005
     
    Man's refusal to return digit found in custard kills bid to reattach
    Here is proof that we have too many lawsuits by greedy plaintiffs.
    RALEIGH, N.C. — To a dessert shop customer, the severed fingertip found in a pint of frozen custard could be worth big dollars in a potential lawsuit. To the shop worker who lost it, the value is far more than monetary.

    But Clarence Stowers still has the digit, refusing to return the evidence so it could be reattached. And now it's too late for doctors to do anything for 23-year-old Brandon Fizer. ... He refused to give it to the shop's owner, and refused to give it to a doctor who was treating Fizer, who accidentally stuck his hand in a mixing machine and had his right index finger lopped off at the first knuckle.

    Medical experts say an attempt to reattach a severed finger can generally be made within six hours.

    But according to the shop's management, Stowers wouldn't give it back when he was in the store 30 minutes after the accident.

    I was surprised to learn that a small fingertip can sometimes regenerate in a child.

    This story has pictures. I am a little surprised no one forcibly took the finger away from Stowers. I hope that there is an investigation of Stowers, to see what produced his mindset.

    Meanwhile, we are learning more about the background of the Wendy's finger woman. She practices witchcraft, and has a husband who owes $433,000 in child support.


    Thursday, May 05, 2005
     
    Leftist evolution
    Andy writes:
    Politics & Evolution

    Students represent 100% of the future. Just as promoting cigarettes to teenagers ensures many will continue to smoke as adults, hooking grade-schoolers on evolution guarantees most will become liberals as adults. Please read on if you doubt this.

    For example, the more someone views people like animals, the more he will see a need for gun control. For good reason, we do not allow animals to have or play with guns. A similar correlation in views exists for animal rights, environmentalism, population control, taxation, right-to-work and free enterprise itself. The more that a society believes in evolution, the more controlling they will want their government to be.

    Countries with high percentages of belief in evolution, such as the former East Germany, have had the most socialistic governments. America, the most free country in the world, has the lowest percentage of belief in evolution (about 35%). An increase in the percentage of Americans who believe in evolution would have a dramatically adverse effect on politics, as our country would become more like socialistic Western Europe. The battleground is our school curriculum, as it sets the standard for all of society.

    The effect of evolution indoctrination is dramatic on a state-by-state basis. Gore lost the 2000 election because he surprisingly lost his home state of Tennessee. Tennessee has always been very resistant to imposing evolution in its schools, enabling Bush to prevail (as have two Republican Senators and a lack of any state income tax).

    Soon after Bush was elected, his nomination of conservative John Ashcroft to be Attorney General was aggressively contested by Democrats. But eight Democrats crossed the aisle to vote for confirmation; seven of them were from states with the least stringent evolution requirements. Remember Senator Jeffords' switch in 2001 to support Democratic control of the Senate? No problem for him, as he represents a pro-evolution state.

    In the past twenty years New Jersey has swung from a Republican to Democratic state, in response to increasing evolution indoctrination schools, where it now begins as early as the 4th grade. The first President Bush carried New Jersey by 13 points in 1988, yet by 2000 George W. Bush lost it by 16 points on the same platform. In 2001, Bret Schundler, a popular conservative mayor of one of New Jersey's largest cities, lost by a double-digit margin to the liberal James McGreevey.

    A pro-evolution foundation (Fordham) rated these states as having the least evolution indoctrination: Kansas, Wyoming, Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Florida, Alabama, North Dakota, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia and Tennessee. What do they have in common? They are overwhelmingly Republican in voting patterns.

    It was Georgia's resistance to evolution in its schools, for example, that laid the foundation for the stunning upset of its popular incumbent U.S. senator in 2002, thereby allowing the Republicans to recapture the entire U.S. Senate.

    The above list of evolution-resistant states played a crucial role in 2004, as Bush could not have been reelected without the support of West Virginia and Ohio, two states that have kept evolution indoctrination at bay. Bush's narrow victory in Ohio, however, reinforces the need to be vigilant against evolution in schools. Ohio began imposing evolution in its schools in a high-profile struggle in 2003, and Bush did not do as well as Republican candidates have done there in the past. He only won by merely 100,000 votes out of over 5 million cast. Will Ohio's embrace of evolution enable the Democrats to win that state and capture the presidency in 2008?

    If Ohio is lost to evolution and the Democrats, then Republicans will need to pick up either Wisconsin or Pennsylvania (or perhaps Minnesota) to remain in the White House. Bush narrowly lost Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2004. Why did Bush do relatively well in those states compared to others in the North and Northeast? Because both states resist evolution indoctrination in their schools. Wisconsin adopts evolution at the state level, but local school districts have the unique authority to define their own curriculum. Since the 2004 election, at least one school district has allowed (Grantsburg) something other than evolution to be taught. Likewise in Pennsylvania, as the Dover school district has opened its curriculum to a competing theory.

    The ongoing battle against evolution indoctrination has a greater influence on political outcomes than any other single factor in American politics.

    NPR had a story today about Kansas and other states debating the teaching of evolution.

    Chris writes:

    I am happy to believe that the less people know about science the more likely they are to be conservative and Republican. I just didn’t think that anyone would be proud to be walking down the middle of the street proudly waving the banner of “Know Nothingism.” I am always impressed by peoples ability to be proud of their ignorance.

    Wednesday, May 04, 2005
     
    Judges
    Chris writes:
    You Say:
    NY Times slanders judges
    A NY Times editorial has the usual smears on Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. They must be good judges to get such slanderous attacks.
    To paraphrase ‘The Princess Bride’ “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” Unless you genuine believe that quoting directly from a judge’s written opinion is slander. I am willing to assert if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales opinion of Justice Owen‘s is that she is a judicial activist she might very well be.

    I am also willing to say that any member of the Constitution in Exile is unfit for a position on the Federal Bench. Justice Brown is a member of a group that espouses legal beliefs that the only form of environmental protection is agreements amongst neighbors and only enforceable by local ordinance and living in a libertarian lala land. If that is not sufficiently out of the mainstream of contemporary legal thought then nothing is.

    Yes, I do think that it is slander (or libel) to say that a Gonzales court opinion called Owen a judicial activist. It is not true. I blogged about this in 2002 and 2005.

    As far as I can determine, there is no Constitution in Exile movement or group. The issue is debated here. Apparently it is just a big straw man.

    The attacks on Justice Brown are strange. Her attackers do not usually cite any of her opinions. When they do, those opinions are excellent. I actually hope that she does not get confirmed, because we need her here on the California Supreme Court.

    John sends this Michael S. Greve essay writes:

    It just won't fly to try to deny there's a conservative Constitution in Exile movement. Clearly, the Supremacists envisions a Constitution before it was misinterpreted by the Warren Court. A better response is to point out that the Left has its own Constitution in Exile, i.e., leftist legal doctrines that they want to write into the Constitution.
    Yes. The NY Times article attacks the so-called CIE with quotes from Cass Sunstein, who calls himself a moderate. In fact, Sunstein has his own extreme leftist ideas for his own constitution in exile.

    I don't know whether there is a CIE movement or not, but I do know that J. Brown's opinions are on the record. The attacks on her rarely mention that record. When they do, it is often like this:

    In a lead Oct. 25 editorial, "Out of the Mainstream Again," The New York Times cited as one of her "extreme positions" Justice Brown's dissent in a case where "her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets." Also attacking Justice Brown for her dissent in that case, Aguilar vs. Avis Rent A Car Systems, were Sen. Edward Kennedy and the Congressional Black Caucus Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Have they read the full record of the case?
    This Gene C. Gerard article attacks Brown on this case first:
    Justice Brown dissented, and argued that the right to free speech protected the use of racial slurs in the workplace, even when it violated federal laws against racial discrimination. Her dissent essentially ignored many previous rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court.
    Brown's excellent opinion in that case is one of 3 dissents, and it cites 15 US Supreme Court precedents. It does not say that the racial slurs are protected, because she upholds the employee's lawsuit for damages. If that is her worst opinion then I think that Pres. Bush should appoint her to the US Supreme Court. She would be better than 7 of the 9 we have.

    Chris writes:

    You Say: “Yes, I do think that it is slander (or libel) to say that a Gonzales court opinion called Owen a judicial activist. It is not true. I blogged about this in 2002 and 2005.”

    Ah, it is a reading comprehension problem. Where in the following sentence from the NYT does it say that a court opinion of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is being quoted? “Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, suggested that Justice Owen's narrow reading of the law was "an unconscionable act of judicial activism."”

    Please show me the slander here.

    The phrase "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" does come from a Gonzales court opinion, but it did not refer to Owen's reading of the law. The NY Times repeats this falsehood.
     
    Most harmful nonfiction books
    Human Events is collecting lists of the most harmful nonfiction books on the last 2 centuries. Here is mine.
    1. The Interpretation of Dreams, 1909, by Sigmund Freud
    2. Ten Days That Shook the World, 1919, by John Reed
    3. Mein Kampf, 1925-26, by Adolf Hitler
    4. Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928, by Margaret Mead
    5. Behaviorism, 1930, by J. B. Watson
    6. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 1936, by John Maynard Keynes
    7. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, 1946, by Benjamin Spock
    8. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948, by Alfred Kinsey
    9. The Doors of Perception, 1954, by Aldous Huxley
    10. The Affluent Society, 1958, by John Kenneth Galbraith
    11. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, by Thomas S. Kuhn
    12. Silent Spring, 1962, by Rachel Carson
    13. The Feminine Mystique, 1963, by Betty Friedan
    14. Quotations from Chairman Mao, 1966, Mao Zedong
    15. The Population Bomb, 1968, by Paul R. Ehrlich
    16. The Mismeasure of Man, 1981, by Stephen Jay Gould
    17. The Fate of the Earth, 1982, by Jonathan Schell
    18. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, 1991, by Susan Faludi
    19. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, 1991, by Naomi Wolf
    20. Only Words, 1993, by Catharine A. MacKinnon
    I may revise this list. Comments welcome. I was helped by some book lists that I found here.

    There are some idiotic comments here. They point out that the list overlooks the Harry Potter books, Catcher In The Rye, and the Warren Commission Report.


    Tuesday, May 03, 2005
     
    Selling eggs
    Liza sent several message objecting to selling blood and eggs, including:
    In your own words: "in California, there are some laws restricting paying blood donors."

    I never said all payments are abusive. My argument is that we already restrict payments for organs and blood; a fortiori, we should restrict payments for eggs.

    Baby-selling is not okay. Payments for medical care, attorney's fees, and perhaps lost wages for the birth and recovery process sound all right to me. A full nine months' wages as proposed by Andy does not sound wise. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

    I should have made it clear that California has no practical restriction on paying blood donors. Anyone can pay any donor any amount of money for blood, as long as the blood is marked "paid". The blood banks can resell the blood. There are some mild restrictions on the usage of paid blood. They don't matter much because we have a surplus of blood.

    If a law is passed to regulate selling eggs in a manner analogous to current laws on selling blood, then it would not be much difference from current practice.

    It sounds like Liza just wants to cap the price for baby selling at $10k or so.

     
    Evolution news
    Princeton Univ. is holding a Frist filibuster, and they are reading evolutionist essays!

    Meanwhile, evolutionists cannot agree whether there is any reason for parent to take better care of pretty kids.

    Dr. W. Andrew Harrell, executive director of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and the leader of the research team, sees an evolutionary reason for the findings: pretty children, he says, represent the best genetic legacy, and therefore they get more care.

    Not all experts agree. Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University, said he was skeptical.

    "The question," he said, "is whether ugly people have fewer offspring than handsome people. I doubt it very much. If the number of offspring are the same for these two categories, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids."

    Bob writes, "It is my experience that parents favor the kids who look most like them."

    When I get the chance, I'll connect the dots on these issues.

     
    Women earn more
    John sends this John Leo article about women earning as much as men for the same jobs.
     
    Sup Ct vacates feminist ruling
    Andy writes:
    The Sixth Circuit had expanded equal protection to include feminist demands, and forced the entire state of Michigan to revamp its boys and girls high school schedules. I wrote about this here.

    On appeal, the Supreme Court just vacated the ruling and order the Court to reconsider in light of an obscure recent decision about exclusivity of remedies. As best I can tell from a cursory review, the Court is saying that Title IX is an exclusive remedy for these cases and lawsuits using Section 1983 and the equal protection clause should not be allowed. That's great!

    Andy also notes that the US Supreme Court also just agreed to hear a case on the Solomon Amendment. This means that the Court may uphold the power of Congress to require colleges to allow military recruiters on campus.
     
    Congress can enforce the 14A
    Andy writes:
    Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment (and ERA) says that "CONGRESS SHALL HAVE THE POWER TO ENFORCE, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

    The Court does not enforce the Fourteenth Amendment; Congress does. This Section does not say "Congress and the Courts shall have the power ...."

    Most, perhaps all, of the proposed statutes limiting jurisdiction concern the Fourteenth Amendment. These statutes should mention Section 5 as a ground (in addition to Article III) for Congress to define the scope of the courts' jurisdiction. That would double the legal force.

    John cites this Austin Bramwell article for a similar argument, and writes:
    One trouble with the idea is that in the 1997 case of City of Boerne v. Flores (which the author erroneously cites as "Boerne v. City of Flores") the Supreme Court tried to say that it and not Congress will have the final say on the scope of the 14th Amendment, at least insofar as the 14th is used to "incorporate" the 1st Amendment against the states.

    Sunday, May 01, 2005
     
    Science of global warming
    John sends this UK Telegraph story:
    Two of the world's leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming. ...

    The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.

    The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.

    Dr Oreskes's study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government's chief scientific adviser.

    However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

    They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents - and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

    Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication - but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been "widely dispersed on the internet".

    Remember that the next time you read about a scientific consensus on global warming.
     


    Friday, Apr 29, 2005
     
    Bush's Home Run
    John sends this excerpt:
    Q: Mr. President, recently the head of the Family Research Council said that judicial filibusters are an attack against people of faith. And I wonder whether you believe that, in fact, that is what is nominating [sic] Democrats who oppose your judicial choices. And I wonder what you think, generally, about the role that faith is playing, how it's being used in our political debates right now.

    BUSH: I think people are opposing my nominees because they don't like the judicial philosophy of the people I've nominated. And some would like to see judges legislate from the bench. That's not my view of the proper role of a judge.

    Speaking about judges, I certainly hope my nominees get an up-or- down vote on the floor of the Senate.

    They deserve an up-or-down vote.

    I think, for the sake of fairness, these good people I've nominated should get a vote. And I'm hoping that will be the case as time goes on.

    Role of religion in our society? I view religion as a personal matter. I think a person ought to be judged on how he or she lives his life or lives her life.

    And that's how I've tried to live my life: through example.

    Faith plays an important part in my life individually. But I don't ascribe a person's opposing my nominations to an issue of faith.

    Q: Do you think that's an inappropriate statement? And what I ask is ...

    BUSH: No, I just don't agree with it.

    Q: You don't agree with it?

    BUSH: No. I think people oppose my nominees because of judicial philosophy.

    Q: Sir, I asked you about what you think of ...

    BUSH: No, I know what you asked me.

    Q: ... the way faith is being used in our political debates, not just in society generally.

    BUSH: Well, I can only speak to myself. And I am mindful that people in political office should not say to somebody, You're not equally American if you don't happen to agree with my view of religion.

    As I said, I think faith is a personal issue. And I take great strength from my faith. But I don't condemn somebody in the political process because they may not agree with me on religion.

    The great thing about America is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want. And if you chose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim.

    And that's the wonderful thing about our country and that's the way it should be.

    I am amazed at how well the President tolerates loaded and incoherent questions. Bush was being asked about the mischaracterized opinion of some private lobbying group. He probably meant to ask about what is motivating Democrats, but said "nominating" instead. It is not clear how Bush would have any knowledge about what is motivating Democrats, or why Bush would be accountable for what some private individual says. Bush answers the question admirably, and then the questioner has the nerve to complain about it!

    Note that Bush not only tries to be inclusive of all faiths, but he also goes out of his way to include people of no faith. I cannot remember any other USA president accepting nonbelievers like this.


    Thursday, Apr 28, 2005
     
    No money for eggs
    Wired magazine reports:
    Reproductive technologies have a long history of freedom from government regulation in the United States, but that record could now face a setback thanks to new embryonic stem-cell research guidelines released this week.

    Health, not money, should be the priority of women hoping to sell their eggs to science, the National Academies concluded in a 240-page report published Tuesday. As a result, researchers should be barred from paying women for their eggs.

    The recommended prohibition contrasts with the vibrant commercial market already established for human eggs in reproductive medicine. For baby-making, women are now paid handsomely -- in some cases $15,000 or more -- for selling eggs to an infertile couple. And sperm banks routinely pay men from $65 to $500 for their sperm depending on how much is donated and whether the sperm owner releases his identity.

    You can buy the PDF file for $17.

    This is from scientists who supposedly know better than politicians how to make the ethical stem cell guidelines. They say we must spend billions of taxpayer dollars on researchers, equipment, buildings, administrators, and everything else. It is okay to create experimental human life in a test tube, okay to clone humans for the purpose of harvesting organ tissue, okay to abort human fetuses for medical research, and okay to create human-animal chimeras. But there is one thing that is completely unethical and must be forbidden -- and that is to compensate the poor woman who donates her precious eggs! Weird.

    Liza writes:

    Roger, I noticed on your blog that you seem to be objecting to the new guidelines against paying women for their eggs to be harvested for embryonic stem cell work. Those guidelines are the best thing that has happened so far in the debate on embryonic stem cells. They mean that there will be an extremely limited supply of eggs. I have wondered for years where all the eggs would come from for all the promised medical cures. Now I know: they won't come in any significant numbers, if payment is barred. All the tax money in the world won't be able to create embryonic stem cells without eggs.

    I do not approve of paying young women to undergo a risky and uncomfortable operation to remove their eggs, anymore than I would approve of paying people to donate their organs or blood (which is illegal). It is a form of exploitation of cash-poor people, in this case for morally dubious ends to boot. It is currently allowed for egg donations for fertility treatments, but I don't approve of that either.

    John writes:
    I don't think Roger expressed his own opinion about this, although he quoted someone saying that "reproductive techologies" should be "free[] from government regulation." That's the libertarian view, of course, but reproductive technologies have no more reason to be exempt from regulation than banking or any other industry.

    I agree with Liza, but we already have laws that ban the buying and selling of babies and human organs, yet these laws are widely ignored. For instance, most private adoptions involve payments to (or for the benefit of) the birth mother.

    I don't think that there is any law against people selling their own blood. The American Red Cross says:
    Scientific data shows that people who donate blood for altruistic reasons are the safest blood donors. As an extra layer of safety to the blood supply, Red Cross accepts only volunteer blood donors.
    I wouldn't count on some ethics guideline limiting the supply of stem cells. As John points out, people will bypass the rules if they can. The Red Cross seems to get plenty of blood, because we have a surplus of blood donors, but blood plasma donors have to be paid.

    Liza cites this page to support her claim that selling one's own blood is illegal. I checked California law. Health and Safety Code 1626 says:

    1626. (a) Except as provided in subdivisions (b) [Cytapheresis] and (c) [Hemapheresis], it shall be unlawful, in any transfusion of blood, to use any blood that was obtained from a paid donor.
    (b) Subdivision (a) shall not be applicable to any transfusion of blood that was obtained from a paid donor if the physician and surgeon performing the transfusion has determined, taking into consideration the condition of the patient who is the recipient of the transfusion, that other blood of a type compatible with the blood type of the patient cannot reasonably be obtained for the transfusion.
    So in California, there are some laws restricting paying blood donors. Donors can be paid indirectly by membership in a donor club or promises of free blood in the future. Or donors can be paid for blood that is later used in emergencies.

    Also, donors can be paid for blood shipped out of state. I don't know whether that happens much. I believe that there are some countries, such as in the Arab world, where they import a lot of blood because their citizens do not believe in donating blood. Their religious beliefs allow receiving blood, but not donating.

    My guess is that the American Red Cross and other blood vendors lobbied for this law as a way of cutting their blood collection expenses. The legislature went along with it because it presented no significant obstacles to paying blood donors.

    Bob writes:

    Embryonic Stem Cell (ESC) research is research. The need for human eggs will diminish as the knowledge generated by ESC research increases. There is no reason, in principle, why we can't accomplish all useful therapies without eggs. Useful therapies will be based on what is popularly called called "cloning" to avoid rejection. It may happen that valuable therapies are developed before a sufficiently complete understanding of the roll of eggs in returning a nucleus to its embryonic state so that human eggs are required to save lives. The politics of what will happen in that case are predictable. It will not be possible to stand in the way of using human eggs to save the life of someone's child, for example. This will be a short lived problem. Eventually we will be able to do "cloning" to produce embryonic stem cells without human eggs which currently required. Someone is currently working on a process for nuclear transfer (cloning) which modifies the nucleus so that nothing beyond embryonic stem cells can be produced in order to avoid ethical problems. I will not attempt to guess whether this technique will succeed or overcome the ethical objections to cloning if it succeeds.
    Yes, it is possible that adult stem cells will be sufficient for medical therapies, and that embryos will not be needed.

    Andy writes:

    Donating blood does not harm the donor, and may help him. So buying blood donations should not offend anyone. The objection is that the quality and quantity are not as good as simply asking for donations. Libertarian economists can't explain that phenomenon well.

    Paying money for adoptions would only be offensive if it induces the mother to give up a baby she would otherwise keep, or causes people to bid more for "desirable" babies. In reality paying for adoptions probably helps level the playing field amid free abortions, and there is nothing wrong with that.

    Paying for eggs is on the level of prostitution, or worse. I doubt the practice is as prevalent as Ivy League-types think.

    Liza wrote, "I agree that paying for blood is not as generally offensive to morals as paying for organs or eggs ...."

    I don't think paying for blood is offensive at all, but it is ineffective. The harmful effects of trying to buy something better provided by charity is the real problem, though no economist can explain this.

    Liza wrote, "paying for babies as such is always offensive, but paying for expenses incurred in the birth and adoption process is not."

    I would include generous nine-months' wages as part of the "expense".

    Look, if it is OK for society to pay for aborting a baby and sending the mother back to work or school then it is OK to pay for carrying the embryo to term and giving birth. It's arguably offensive not to balance the financial incentives.

     
    Limbaugh's medical privacy denied
    John sends this AP story:
    TALLAHASSEE -- The Florida Supreme Court said Thursday it will not consider an appeal from conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh over prosecutors' seizure of his medical records during an investigation into whether he illegally purchased painkillers.

    The 4-3 order did not explain the court's reasoning.

    I smell a rat. If the vote was 4-3, then there is clearly a legitimate controversy. Rush and the public are entitled to know the reasoning.

    The whole case against Rush was based on blackmailing drug dealers who sold their story to tabloids and got prosecution immunity.

    Bob writes:

    One of the reasons that judicial supremacy wins is that the courts are preferable to congress. If a decision like that came out of the Senate, not only would there be no written opinion, it would have been by voice vote.
     
    NY Times slanders judges
    A NY Times editorial has the usual smears on Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. They must be good judges to get such slanderous attacks.
     
    The Crusades saved Europe
    A Si Valley paper letter says:
    Pope should reach out to Muslims

    Pope Benedict XVI could not accomplish his declared goal as peacemaker more magnificently than by following Pope John Paul II's lead and issuing an official, strong, unambiguous apology to the Muslim world for the Crusades.

    Almost all historians agree that the Crusades were a tragic mistake, and that responsibility for them rests squarely upon the shoulders of the Roman Catholic Church and its Western European followers. Confessing that mistake, accepting responsibility, emphasizing that America was not discovered until 200-plus years after the last Crusade and therefore is not to blame, would strike a huge blow for mutual understanding and peace.

    Don McCleve
    Monte Sereno

    Those same historians probably agree that discovering America was a tragic mistake.

    I always thought that it was a joke to ask, "Is the Pope a Catholic?". And yet, when the new Pope was elected, the news reporters seem to have gone around asking that question.

    I'm not exactly sure why Mohammedan fanatics would blame the Pope any more than Pres. Bush for what happened 100s of years ago. I think that it was a wonderful thing that the Crusades kept Mohammedan invaders from destroying Europe.


    Tuesday, Apr 26, 2005
     
    Janice Rogers Brown
    John sends this LA Times story:
    WASHINGTON — Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech. ...

    "There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate.

    "These are perilous times for people of faith," she said, "not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud." ...

    "It's so shocking that in the middle of this battle she would say such extraordinarily intemperate things," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

    Instead of the Democrats phony filibuster, they should have a real debate on the merits of these judges. They attack Rogers, but they cannot point to any errors in any of her decisions.
     
    FDR and the courts
    Liza is a conservative lawyer who disapproves of all sorts of things that the courts have been doing, but she has been brainwashed with judicial supremacy in law school, and is nervous about limiting the courts. She writes:
    It is true that dicta are not binding. I'm not conversant enough with the facts and issues of the Dred Scott case to say much more than that. But remember that the whole slavery issue took a civil war to resolve. How many issues are worth a civil war?

    I just read a long article in Smithsonian Magazine on FDR's court-packing scheme. He won a landslide victory in the 1930s, both houses of Congress were overwhelmingly Democratic, and he and they were fed up with a long series of Supreme Court decisions blocking economic legislation during the Depression, on debatable Commerce Clause grounds. He hatched the idea of announcing that several new positions would be added to the Supreme Court in order to bring in younger blood. He didn't openly state that he wanted to change their voting patterns; he just complained that the justices were too old. After the plan was announced, it was hugely controversial. Before it went anywhere, one justice was persuaded to start switching his vote on economic cases, which was enough to start upholding New Deal legislation. The bill in Congress died. FDR did achieve his immediate objective of changing the court voting patterns. However, despite his crushing wins in the previous election, it was very questionable whether he would have been able to carry Congress or the country on actually packing the court.

    Is packing the court legal? Yes, I would think Congress technically has the power to create new judicial slots. Is it a good idea? Hardly ever. Do you think it was an appropriate step for FDR to take? Remember that there are going to be times when the apparent majority sentiment in legislatures and public opinion is not what you think is the right legal answer. You want to rein in courts today, but you may want courts to rein in legislators or executives tomorrow. In addition to the eminent domain issue I have raised, consider that were it not for the Supreme Court's aggressive reading of the Constitution in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in the 1920s, parochial schools might have been driven out of existence by hostile state laws.

    Americans want, and conservatives should want, an independent judiciary, not one that does whatever the legislature wants. Threatening legislative action such as court-packing is politically risky, although the threats may in rare cases be worth the political risk. The same goes for other ideas like limiting federal court jurisdiction and impeachment for egregious decisions. Still other ideas for curbing courts are on shakier legal ground and shouldn't be implemented at all, like passing a state law taking whole classes of constitutional cases away from state court jurisdiction.

    I once had a client that tried to enforce a contract with the Mexican national electric utility, which was really an arm of the Mexican government. The utility repudiated a large purchase contract it had made with our client, with several levels of signatures and approvals. The client retained Mexican counsel and I was charged with translating all the pleadings from Spanish to English. The Mexican counsel made it very clear up front that there is no independent judiciary in Mexico. The case languished for years while the judicial system showed no interest in enforcing a contract against its own government. Finally the client got paid, but only because NAFTA was on the verge of being signed and the client threatened to complain to his Senators about the disgraceful run-around.

    That's what it's like in countries without an independent judiciary.

    Pres. Lincoln was opposed to judicial supremacy, and his views dominated legal thinking for 100 years. My opposition to judicial supremacy is not radical or unusual. It only seems radical to brainwashed lawyers.

    You can find a good Lincoln quote in this column. (If not posted yet, find it here.)

    FDR wanted to expand the power of Congress and the Executive far beyond whatever had been done before, and beyond what the Constitution allowed (according to the opinion of many at the time). People often describe FDR's court-packing scheme as a failure, but as Liza's article apparently explains, it was actually a huge success in intimidating the Supreme Court into voting the way that FDR wanted.

    I think that it would have been much better for FDR to propose a New Deal Constitutional amendment. That would have avoided the debate about the legitimacy of the New Deal. The New Deal was popular, and presumably an appropriate amendment could have been passed. As it is, we have a judicial "interstate commerce" doctrine that nobody believes and which undermines our Constitution.

    Liza's suggestion that abandoning judicial supremacy will turn our govt into one like Mexico is just hysterical fear-mongering. America did just fine before the judicial supremacy doctrine that was invented by the Warren Court. It is hard to point to any supremacist decisions that have done any good at all.

    Perhaps Pierce v Society of Sisters (1925) is an example of an activist court decision that reached a good conclusion. I really doubt that states would have abolished parochial schools. The states don't even pay any attention to that decision, as far as I can see. The decision says that the states cannot interfere with the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. And yet state courts do that all the time.

     
    Ginsburg relies on foreign law
    John sends this NRO article criticizing a Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speech. She brags:
    I looked to two United Nations Conventions: the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which, sadly, the United States has not yet ratified. Both Conventions distinguish between impermissible policies of oppression or exclusion, and permissible policies of inclusion, "temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality." The Court's decision in the Michigan Law School case, I observed, "accords with the international understanding of the [purpose and propriety] of affirmative action."
    The key word there is "sadly". She also likes to pretend that the proposed Equal Rights Amendment was ratified, and surely thinks that it is sad that the American political process did not give the results she wanted. So she uses her judicial power to force her views.

    Monday, Apr 25, 2005
     
    Astroengineering global warming
    My local university is offering a lecture from someone who really wants to do something constructive about global warming.
    Speaker: Don Korycansky Center for the Origin, Dynamics and Evolution of Planets (CODEP, IGPP), UCSC

    Title: Astroengineering, or How to Save the Earth in Only One Billion Years

    Abstract: The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within a billion years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. Greg Laughlin, Fred Adams, and I have proposed a mechanism for gradually enlarging the Earth's orbit to keep pace with the Sun's brightening, using gravitational assists by Kuiper Belt Objects to (in effect) transfer orbital energy from Jupiter to the Earth. I will discuss the mechanism in detail, as well providing background on the evolution of the Sun and some possible consequences of this scheme.

    Here is a 2001 news story with more details.
     
    Jury duty
    I just got called for jury duty, so I looked up what some of my responsibilities will be. I found The People v Arasheik Wesley Williams where the Calif Supreme Court discusses jury nullification. I was surprised to learn:
    California judges now have the power of the law on their side when it comes to finding out about jury misconduct. Under a 1998 edict, known as the "snitch" rule, the judge orders jurors to inform the court if a juror is not applying the law during deliberations.
    Jurors take this oath:
    "Do you, and each of you, understand and agree that you will well and truly try the cause now pending before this court, and a true verdict render according only to the evidence presented to you and to the instructions of the court?"
    So if, during deliberations, one juror thinks that another juror is not following instructions properly, he can complain and the judge may conduct an inquiry and kick off a juror. The judge cannot probe into the juror's reasoning in the case, but if a juror admits that he is not following the law, then he can be dismissed.

    Here is the LA Times story.

    I am still not sure how I would apply this. If I am on a jury, and I am ordered to report nullifiers to the judge during deliberations, then how could I possibly identify a nullifier? A nullifier's reasoning is almost always a blend of law and fact. Even if the juror admits to disagreeing with the law or to not following the law, he could very well be exercising his duties correctly, for all I know.

    My local paper reported this today:

    The debate in the jury room was about the law. But in the recent San Jose trial of two Asian-American police officers charged with assaulting a black man, the subtext was race.

    When four Asian-American jurors held out from the majority and voted to acquit the Palo Alto policemen, other members of the jury wondered if they were voting along race lines. And at least one of the four jurors suspected some on the panel were voting to convict the officers because of race bias.

    Apparently it is completely legal for jurors to vote along racial lines, and to disguise some of the reasons for their votes.

    Sunday, Apr 24, 2005
     
    Sugared drinks
    Anne writes:
    I remember Roger complaining a few years ago that he could not find soda made from sugar, only corn syrup. I read recently that Coke and Pepsi offer sugar-based sodas during Passover (this weekend), since corn syrup is not kosher for Passover. It is marked with a kosher symbol (k with a circle or pareve).
    Now there is a useful tip.
     
    Exploding toads
    This sends this story:
    Hundreds of toads have met an unexplained, explosive demise in Germany in recent days, it was reported on Saturday.

    According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre. ...

    Explanations include an unknown virus, a fungus that has infected the water, or crows, which in an echo of the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds, attack the toads, literally scaring them to death.

    I am waiting for what the evolutionists have to say. Crows scaring toads to death by explosion?!
     
    Mathematical ancestry
    I found my mathematical ancestry:
    • Otto Mencke, Ph.D. Universität Leipzig 1668
    • Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen, Ph.D. Universität Leipzig 1685
    • Christian August Hausen, Dr. phil. Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 1713
    • Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner, Ph.D. Universität Leipzig 1739
    • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Dr. phil. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 1765
    • Johann Friedrich Pfaff, Dr. phil. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 1786
    • Carl Friedrich Gauß, Ph.D. Universität Helmstedt 1799
    • Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Ph.D. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 1810
    • Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk, Ph.D. Universität Berlin 1823
    • Ernst Eduard Kummer, Ph.D. Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg 1831
    • Christoph Gudermann, Ph.D. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen 1841
    • Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstraß, Honorary Universität Königsberg 1854
    • Hermann Amandus Schwarz, Ph.D. Universität Berlin 1864
    • Leopold (Lipót) Fejér, Ph.D. Eötvös Loránd University 1902
    • Marcel Riesz, Ph.D. Eötvös Loránd University 1912
    • C. Einar (Carl) Hille, Ph.D. Stockholm University 1918
    • Irving Ezra Segal, Ph.D. Yale University 1940
    • Isadore Manual Singer, Ph.D. The University of Chicago 1950
    Some of these are famous mathematicians. Gauss is the most famous of all.

    Friday, Apr 22, 2005
     
    Judicial supremacy in Bush v Gore
    Right-winger Charles Krauthammer is usually skeptical about the courts, but he just cannot let go of judicial supremacy. He says:
    The Supreme Court is the only institution that could have ended the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 with the immediacy, finality and, yes, legitimacy that it did.
    This is a lousy reason for judicial supremacy. First, the whole fiasco was created by out-of-control judicial supremacists on the Florida supreme court. Without judicial supremacy, the controversy would have ended sooner. Second, our Constitution already had a mechanism for resolving electoral college disputes, and there is every reason to believe that would have happened in an orderly way (with Bush almost certainly the winner). Third, the outcome would have had greater legitimacy if the courts had not gotten involved.

    Krauthammer goes on to say:

    It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said that Roe v. Wade "halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue." Whenever such an obvious sociological truth is pointed out, proponents of judicial imperialism immediately resort to their trump card: Brown v. Board of Education and the courts' role in ending Jim Crow.
    No, the courts did not end Jim Crow. The net effect of Brown was greater racial strife and segregation in schools.
     
    Praising bonobos
    Evolutionists are always trying to figure out what kinds of apes that they would have rather evolved from. Now it seems that they are settling on the bonobos. They are trying to create a model human-like community of bonobos, and suggesting that bonobos may be superior to humans. Bonobos seem ideal to leftist-evolutionist-feminist-egalitarian-pacifists.
     
    Michael Jackson's moonwalk
    PBS Nature just had a TV show on evolution in the rain forest. It said:
    If Michael Jackson's moonwalk can be found in the jungles of Central America, then who knows what we might find next?
    I am going to need some stronger proof than this for Michael Jackson having evolved.

    Thursday, Apr 21, 2005
     
    Schlafly to head Planned Parenthood?
    Ms. Mag says:
    Quote of the Day: Barbara Boxer

    Barbara Boxer just now on CNN’s Crossfire: “John Bolton would be great working with the president in the White House on a political agenda but for this job as UN ambassador, I just can’t imagine. I mean, it’s like making Phyllis Schlafly the head of the Planned Parenthood Federation. It doesn’t fit, you know? It just doesn’t fit."


    Wednesday, Apr 20, 2005
     
    Research on the internet
    AP reports:
    House Majority Leader Tom DeLay intensified his criticism of the federal courts ...

    "Absolutely. We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio. "And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous." ...

    "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," DeLay said in a statement.

    Kennedy should definitely have to answer. If he was going to search the internet, then at least he should have been able to find the facts about who was executing juveniles, and who was not.

    Monday, Apr 18, 2005
     
    Evolution debate on TV
    The TV show Uncommon Knowledge just had an evolution debate. The evolutionist said this:
    Massimo Pigliucci: Philosophers of science have shown that science actually works by competing theories. It never works by somebody getting up and say well, you know, this is wrong and that's the end of the day.
    He is wrong. One of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last several years was that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It showed that all the existing relativity models were wrong, and no one has found a good competing theory. You can find 100s of articles on this subject under the name "dark energy", but no one has a clue as to what the dark energy is.
    Peter Robinson: So as a working scientist then, you have absolutely no qualm about saying to students look, this is a theory, this is a theory, this is a theory. They all have their limitations. Science is always in the making. Now would you also however have no qualms about including a paragraph or two on intelligent design?

    Massimo Pigliucci: I do have qualms for the simple reason that at the moment, and as far as I can see forever, but at the moment certainly intelligent design is not a scientific theory and as such, should not be brought up in a science class.

    Intelligent design theory may soon have some practical applications. There is now be technology for designing viruses that are not similar to anything occurring in nature. If a new disease like HIV shows up, then we are going to want some scientific procedure for determining whether it was designed or whether it evolved.

    It is amazing how evolutionists claim to be scientists, but when they are confronted with certain issues, they dogmatically rely on dubious definitions and principles from the philosophy of science.

    At least he was honest enough to admit that the single common ancestor theory is unproved:

    Massimo Pigliucci: We don't know, first of all, if there was one common ancestor or a pool of common ancestors, if we go all the way back to the origin of life. That is under debate and it's not a crucial component of modern evolutionary theory. It would work either way.
    Bob writes:
    Is your argument is that "the single common ancestor theory is unproved" is because we may have more than one common ancestor?
    The single common ancestor theory says that there was at least micro-organism that lived billions of years ago and is the direct ancestor of all living bio-organisms on Earth today, including plants, animals, people, bacteria, and fungus. The pool theory, as I understand it, says that there was no such single organism.

    I doubt it. Bob keeps telling me that he is going to show me some rock-solid proof. I've never understand how anyone could even claim to have such a proof, based on what we know today.

    For an explanation of how the ancestor pool theory might work, check out Carl R. Woese's 2002 paper On the evolution of cells.


    Sunday, Apr 17, 2005
     
    Lame editorials defend judges
    Here is a silly Georgia editorial:
    Some of the words spoken by the first lady of neo-cons, Phyllis Schlafly, should be a deep embarrassment to her numerous followers. Schlafly is reported to have said that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee and Republican moderate, should be impeached for forbidding capital punishment of juveniles.

    Does this mean that this woman, who spends most of her time fighting abortion rights, is saying that older children should be put to death if they do something wrong?

    This piece of information is so alarming that it makes us think we didn't get the whole story.

    First, Phyllis Schlafly is not a neo-con. The "neo" in neo-con means that they are distingushed from conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly.

    Second, she only spends a small fraction of her time on the abortion. Nearly all of her writings are on other subjects.

    Third, criticizing Justice Kennedy's opinion does not necessarily imply that she is for or against the juvenile death penalty. She thinks that such executions should be based on US law, not on trends overseas, as Kennedy ruled.

    Yes, this Gainesville newspaper didn't get the whole story, but they would not have understood it anyway.


    Friday, Apr 15, 2005
     
    NY Times and intolerance
    The NY Times has another hysterical editorial on the courts. This time it accuses Sen. Frist of "intolerance" because he wants votes on judicial nominees and opposes filibustering them. The editorial says:
    The message is that the Democrats who oppose a tiny handful of President Bush's judicial nominations are conducting an assault "against people of faith." By that, Senator Frist and his allies do not mean people of all faiths, only those of their faith.
    What does this mean? All I can figure is that the NY Times is complaining that Frist does not explicitly say that Jews are being persecuted.

    One of the cases before the US Supreme Court today involved the Ten Commandments, and Frist is on the side of Jewish law. It is the filibustering Democratic party that is attacking the Ten Commandments.

     
    Tom Sell freed
    After 8 years in federal prison without a trial, Tom Sell accepts plea bargain. In an unusual plea, he still maintains that he is innocent.

    Good. I believe that he was innocent, but that he was never going to get a fair trial.

     
    Another idiot law prof
    John sends this LA Times rant from leftist judicial supremacist Prof Cass R. Sunstein:
    In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law. The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are now in the midst of it.
    The rest of the column on to alternate between calling the judicial critic conservatives and radicals. He says, "Originalism is a radical program".

    He seems confused about the conservative complaints, and does not address judicial supremacy. Supremacist judges are at the root of the problem. Either he does not understand the conservative complaints, or he is deliberately misrepresenting them.


    Thursday, Apr 14, 2005
     
    New missing link
    Here is some evolutionist claiming to have found a missing link.

    Be sure and look at the picture of the mangled skull before the computer reconstruction.

     
    La Raza hate mongers
    A La Raza advocate writes in the Si Valley paper:
    The post-modern Mexican diaspora can be said to have begun in 1848 when the sovereign country of Mexico was dispossessed of more than half its territory by the United States. ... They will always seek their way back home.
    I hope someone figures out a way to ship these unhappy radicals back to Spain, Siberia, Africa, or wherever their ancestors come from.
     
    Florida felons still cannot vote
    John reports:
    The 11th Circuit, en banc, has voted 10-2 to uphold the ban on felon voting contained in Florida's state constitution. http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200214469op2.pdf

    The en banc decision reverses the panel decision which wasr criticized in this column.

    The same issue is being reheard by the 2nd Circuit en banc following the Supreme Court's denial of cert to the panel which upheld New York's statutory ban on felon voting.

    Yes, convicted felons are second class citizens.
     
    Rushdie is anti-American
    I just heard a goofy theologian named Bishop John Shelby Spong say on Fox News O'Reilly Factor:
    The only good thing about the Islamic terrorists -- the only good thing -- is that it forced us in the West to recognize that we have also been terrorists towards the Jews, towards the Moslems during the Crusades, towards the heretics.
    Who is "we"? I thought that the Crusades were a just set of wars that kept invading barbarians out of Europe. It was not terrorism.

    Salman Rushdie has turned anti-American:

    Rushdie -- infamous for living for years under threat of death after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 pronouncement that his novel "The Satanic Verses" was blasphemous -- said he believes U.S. isolationism has turned not just its enemies against America, but its allies too.

    "What I think plays into Islamic terrorism is ... the curious ability of the current administration to unite people against it," Rushdie told Reuters in an interview.

    Rushdie said he found it striking how the "colossal sympathy" the world felt for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been squandered so quickly. ...

    Rushdie said his latest novel, "Shalimar the Clown," will be published in September.

    "I decided to murder an American ambassador," he said of its plot, in which a U.S. envoy to India is killed after he retires to America.

    He is lucky that America does not issue a fatwa against him.

    Wednesday, Apr 13, 2005
     
    Cohen bashes Bush again
    Lying Bush-hater evolutionist Richard Cohen accuses Pres. Bush of dishonesty:
    ... intellectual honesty counts for less and less. Thus, you have political leaders from George Bush on down refusing to say whether they put any stock in evolution ...

    Back in 1999, Bush was asked whether he was "a creationist" and he responded by not responding: "I believe children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started." ...

    This proves you can go to Yale and learn nothing -- not about evolution, mind you, but about intellectual integrity.

    Cohen goes on to recite the usual nonsense about Galileo and Scopes, as if they proved that religious folks were always wrong about scientific matters.

    Bush is right. Evolution tells us nothing about how the world started, and children ought to be exposed to different theories. Only narrow-minded evolutionists like Cohen want to censor the scientific truths.

     
    Explaining the Soviet Gulags
    John sends this hysterical rant by law prof Erwin Chemerinsky:
    Constitutional scholars of every political stripe must explain that it strikes at the very heart of our constitutional government for Congress to enact laws and preclude judicial review of their constitutionality or for members of Congress to threaten impeachment of judges for rulings they dislike. Political leaders across the ideological spectrum must denounce the venomous attack on the federal judiciary that has occurred in the last few weeks.

    Sometimes the first assignment in my constitutional class has been for students to read a copy of the Stalin-era Soviet Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. My students are always surprised to see that the Soviet Constitution has a far more elaborate statement of rights than the American Constitution. I also assign a description of life in the Gulags. I ask how it can be that a country with such detailed statements of rights in its constitution could have such horrible abuses.

    The answer, of course, is that in the Soviet Union no court had the power to strike down any government action. An independent judiciary is indispensable to protecting our most precious freedoms. The DeLays and Cornyns who attack the federal courts forget that tomorrow, they may be the ones who need the protection of independent federal judges.

    No wonder American lawyers are so brainwashed. They had law profs who told them that the difference between the American and Soviet political systems is that we have supremacist judges who are appointed for life.

    Tuesday, Apr 12, 2005
     
    Harry A. Blackmun, judicial supremacist
    Andy sends this example of judicial supremacy.
    The court was only one front in the struggle for women's rights during those years. Congress approved the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification. If three-quarters of the legislatures ratified it, the amendment would accomplish what Ginsburg's brief had asked the court to do in Reed v. Reed and make discrimination against women subject to strict judicial scrutiny. Soon, the highly charged politics of the amendment and the uncertainty within the court about how far and how fast to move the law converged in a new case. Frontiero v. Richardson was a suit by an Air Force officer for the right to claim her husband as a dependent for the purpose of obtaining housing and medical benefits, although the husband was not financially dependent on her. Under the laws governing military benefits, a serviceman could automatically claim his wife as a dependent, regardless of their relative circumstances, while a woman could claim her husband only if she brought in more than half the family income.

    ''This must be stricken down,'' Blackmun wrote in his notes before the January 1973 argument. The question is ''by what route and how far.'' That, indeed, was the question: whether to accomplish the goals of the Equal Rights Amendment by judicial decree and make its ratification unnecessary.

    This is from Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times Magazine.
     

    Judicial supremacist Bruce Fein writes in the Wash. Times:
    Mr. Viera explained that, "[Stalin] had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.' " Mr. Viera's harshness was echoed in different moods and tenses by conservative grandees Phyllis Schlafly and Michael P. Ferris. The former insisted the Constitution does not mean what the Supreme Court says it means, and insinuated its true meaning lies with her or others blessed with constitutional epiphanies. That principle would justify popular disobedience to Supreme Court decrees, like the South's massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the bombings of abortion clinics in defiance of Roe v. Wade (1973). The rule of law would wither and a revolutionary state of nature would ensue if the Supreme Court were not accepted as the final arbiter of constitutional questions ...
    Fein is wrong. The US Constitution means what it says, not what some court says it means.

    The Constitution says:

    This Constitution, and the Laws ..., shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, ... [Art. VI]
    Note that it is the Constitution that is the supreme law of the land, not the supreme court's interpretation of the Constitution. The Constitution also specifies the oath of office that presidents have to take:
    Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: - "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." [Art. II]
    Note again that the President's duty is to the Constitution, not to the supreme court's interpretation of the Constitution.

    What I am saying here is not original or revolutionary. It is how the law books have described our political system for 200 years. It is the Rule of Law, as most people have always understood the term.

    But there is a group of judicial supremacists like Fein who don't really believe in the Rule of Law. They believe in a Rule of Judges, where an elite court is empowered to make law based on their own supposed wisdom, and contrary to the text of the Constitution and the will of the people. If Fein wants the Rule of Judges, then he should lobby for a constitutional amendment to make supreme court decisions the supreme law of the law.

    Fein's "popular disobedience" examples are absurd. Nobody thinks that the Constitution permits bombing abortion clinics. Consider this analogy: If a soldier receives an unlawful order from his commanding officer, what should he do? The correct answer, under American law, is that a soldier should refuse an unlawful order. Fein would probably argue that it would be chaotic and unmanageable if mere soldiers were allowed to interpret the law themselves. But that is the way the American system has always worked. Rule of Law means that the written laws are binding, not the interpretation of some elites who think that they know better.

    Fein complains:

    Contrary to the revolutionaries, the chief justice has applauded judicial independence as the crown jewel of the Constitution.
    Yes, Rehnquist's latest complaint is in his 2004 year-end report. He is a judge, and he likes judicial power. He does not like being held accountable, and does not like the idea of impeaching judges for not doing their job properly. He says:
    there have been suggestions to impeach federal judges who issue decisions regarded by some as out of the mainstream. And there were several bills introduced in the last Congress that would limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide constitutional challenges to certain kinds of government action.
    He then goes on to say that judge Samuel Chase was acquitted in 1805, and so all judges should be acquitted today. What he doesn't say is that there is anything illegal or improper about Congress acting to limit the jurisdiction of the courts on certain matters. What the conservative now want to do is to remove court jurisdiction on a couple of matters where the courts have not traditionally had any jurisdiction and where there is no good reason why they should have jurisdiction. There is nothing revolutionary about it.

    Andy writes:

    Fein's article is the worst piece of writing and reasoning I have seen in a while. He repeatedly misspells someone's name (Farris), repeats a silly compound negative (unreluctant), makes absurd analogies, commits grammatical error in his first sentence (antecedent of "its" is unclear), recycles another newspaper article from the same town and, substantively, says nothing coherent.

    FYI, previously Bruce Fein railed against Roy Moore. This is the new split in politics: those who worship the judiciary as though it were Almighty, and those who feel the judiciary should be held in check.

    I am still trying to figure out Bruce Fein. Here are some scathing attacks on judicial supremacists on the Supreme Court:
    Justice O’Connor invented an exception to the color-blind mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment under the bogus banner of intellectual diversity. ...

    Justice Kennedy’s recurring flights of imagination were vividly captured in his Zen Buddhist–like opinion ...

    Like Justice Kennedy, Justice Breyer believes he has been licensed to improve on the handiwork of the Founding Fathers. Their felt need to tamper seems dumbfounding. ...

    Associate Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg ... do not subscribe to the Constitution and its 27 amendments in accord with the original meaning and purpose of the authors.

    The same article attacks supremacist decisions:
    The Supreme Court thus assumes a grave responsibility when it holds that a politically explosive issue is constitutionally nonnegotiable. Thus, Chief Justice Roger Taney presumed to solve political divisions over slavery with his odious Dred Scott opinion. Instead the holdings that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress lacked power to prohibit slavery in U.S. territories accelerated the Civil War.

    The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe is first cousin to Dred Scott.

    But his only remedy is to appoint better judges.

    John sends this Fein column attacking supremacist judges:

    Justices usurp lawmaking choices when they manipulate interpretation to overcome perceived deficiencies in legislation. That explains Justice Thomas' dissent, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Justice Thomas worried that "[u]nder the majority's reasoning, courts may expand liability as they, rather than Congress, see fit. ... [T]he majority substitutes its policy judgments for the bargains struck by Congress, ...
    Hmmm. So Fein seems to be against the courts expanding their jurisdiction beyond the limits set by Congress. And yet he is also against Congress redefining those limits in order to correct bad decisions in the past. He position doesn't make much sense to me, except that he believes that appointing better judges will solve some of these court problems.

    Monday, Apr 11, 2005
     
    Not just Phyllis Schlafly anymore
    John send this Wash. Post article by Ruth Marcus:
    Railing against activist judges is nothing new in American politics. ... But the current uproar is particularly worrisome -- both because of the extreme nature of the restraints being proposed and the degree to which such sentiments are being voiced not by a powerless fringe but by those in positions of authority: It's not just Phyllis Schlafly anymore.
    Her book on supremacist judges was published last summer.

    A lot of people are getting fed up with judges for a lot of different reasons. What made her book unusual is that she attributes most of the problems to a systematic ideological error, and she recommends practical remedies to help restore a proper balance of power.


    Sunday, Apr 10, 2005
     
    Judicial term limits
    Liza writes:
    This WSJ op-ed for Sup. Ct. term limits was quite persuasive. But why limit term limits to the Supreme Court justices? Wouldn't they be helpful with lower federal judges too? I can remember a crotchety old federal district judge in St. Louis who made life miserable for lawyers for decades. He could be as outrageous as he pleased and knew no one could do anything to him.
    The article suggests a constitutional amendment to limit tenure to 15 years, as that is about the historical average for supreme court judges.
     
    Google answers
    You can now Google What is Phyllis Schlafly known for?, and get the response:
    Phyllis Schlafly
    Property: ... an American conservative political activist known for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment ...
    According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly
    Google has some other facts pre-programmed also.
     
    Richard Cohen, Bush-hater
    The lying Bush-haters are still claiming that we fought the Iraq War under false pretenses. They could never find an example where Bush lied, but they point to misleading stories in the NY Times and the Wash. Post, and so they assume that falsehoods must have been leaked to those papers.

    Now, Richard Cohen of the Wash. Post says:

    Shortly before the United States went to war in Iraq, I was in contact with a former member of the U.S. intelligence community. This is what he told me: Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program, no chemical or biological weapons program to speak of and no link to Al-Qaida. He said that if America invaded it would cost us ``perhaps 1,000 casualties'' and would lead to prolonged ``terrorism and harassment.'' I thanked him very much for his views -- and urged the United States to attack anyway.
    The Wash. Post and NY Times did not print this info, because it was a distraction from their pro-war messages. Cohen has no regrets, and goes on to say:
    The United States was going to war. It is now clear that the decision to do so was made shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks -- maybe even the next day. History may well decide that this was the correct decision, that it eradicated terrorism and spread democracy throughout the Arab world and Middle East -- just as the neocons intended.
    So you might expect Cohen to conclude that Bush boldly took decisive action when necessary, accurately informed the public and the news media, and is on track to succeed in one of America's greatest foreign policy ventures. Nope. Cohen does back-flips to somehow blame Bush. Read it yourself to see how Bush-hating can blind a Wash. Post columnist.

    George writes:

    Those quotes are out of context. Cohen is quite critical of Pres. Bush. Cohen says that Bush lied.
    Yes, Cohen is a lying Bush-hater. Eg, Cohen recited this old canard:
    I knew that the most alarming case against Saddam -- that he was an imminent threat to the United States -- was a lie.
    In fact, Pres. Bush did not say that Iraq was an imminent threat, but rather he said that we need to act before it becomes an imminent threat. Here is a discussion at SpinSanity, a neutral site.

    Bob writes:

    I can't comment on Richard Cohen. I do not find his writing useful, so I haven't read what he has to say. There are two fallacies in the argument against Cohen. What Bush said or didn't say is only part of the issue. Bush is responsible for what his high ranking subordinates said about the war. Cheney, Runsfeld, Rice, and Powell all made false official statements on behalf of the Bush administration. The statements were based on information from one source who was described in the most recent report as a liar. Others including Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, and various US intelligence officers disputed the administration claims and turned out to be correct. The fact that Bush knew there was doubt about the statements and sent his subordinates out to make the statements instead of making them himself is evidence of bad faith on Bush's part. The second point is that one can consistently support the war in Iraq and be critical of the way Bush got us into the war. It is a fact that once a country has the capability to make WMD, it is impossible to remove that capability short of annihilation, which we would like to avoid. Instead of stressing that point, the Bush administration cited stockpiles of WMD and factitious mobile bioweapon labs.
    I hope Pres. Bush had some doubts about the WMD evidence. A lot of other people did. I do think that people should judge Bush on what he said, and not so much on what the NY Times, Wash. Post, and neocons said.

    Friday, Apr 08, 2005
     
    WTC collapse
    John sends a New Scientist article on Fireproofing key to Twin Towers' collapse. Andy writes:
    Lo and behold, federal investigators say that the WTC collapsed due to inadequate fireproofing. Well, no kidding. Too bad not a single university scientist or engineer will criticize the lack of asbestos. And I thought the legal profession was bad! Scientists and engineers are great ... as long as they are not with a university.

    The evolution v. creationism debate has an effect on medical research. Evolution, for example, brought us the vestigial organ bias that caused everyone over 60 to have their tonsils ripped out. Also evolution bias brings all this wasted funding of genomes, so that someone can make the meaningless claim that our genes are similar to animals'. Virtually no fruitful therapies have come of this.

    But recently I discovered another difference between the evolutionists and their critics. Evolution critics such as Wells and Johnson question that HIV causes AIDS. I haven't read up on this issue but do wonder myself, given that Magic Johnson was forced out of basketball in early 1992 with a diagnosis of HIV and yet seems as healthy as ever 13 years later.

    No one doubts that AIDS has caused the death of many. I do wonder about this dispute over whether HIV causes AIDS, and what evolution bias has to do with it, if anything.

    It is funny how the WTC articles never mention asbestos. The WTC was designed to use asbestos insulation, but had to stop using it during construction. I doubt that asbestos would have made much difference, but the investigators should certainly look at the question.

    Magic Johnson is presumably taking the same anti-AIDS drugs that have kept 1000s of infected people alive. I just heard a health official claim that HIV infection rates are up because the drugs are sufficiently successful that people don't worry about AIDS quite so much anymore.

    Bob sends

    There is information aimed at the general audience about new medicines derived from venom. For example: SciAm.com, PBS, NY Times, venomdoc.com.

    The effects of the acceptance of evolution on medical research have been manifestly positive. The blame for poor medical practice such as unnecessary tonsillectomy is the result of the hubris of doctors. A proper understanding evolution would have led doctors to ask why tonsils evolved and to answer that question before adopting routine and unnecessary removal.


    Wednesday, Apr 06, 2005
     
    Computer proofs
    The Economist magazine has a nice article on computer-assisted math proofs. It says:
    A 1998 paper which proved another long-standing conjecture using a computer, by Thomas Hales, of the University of Pittsburgh, has only recently been accepted by the Annals of Mathematics, perhaps the field's most prestigious journal, and is scheduled to be published later this year. ...

    Although the Annals will publish Dr Hales's paper, Peter Sarnak, an editor of the Annals, whose own work does not involve the use of computers, says that the paper will be accompanied by an unusual disclaimer, stating that the computer programs accompanying the paper have not undergone peer review. There is a simple reason for that, Dr Sarnak says -— it is impossible to find peers who are willing to review the computer code. However, there is a flip-side to the disclaimer as well —- Dr Sarnak says that the editors of the Annals expect to receive, and publish, more papers of this type—for things, he believes, will change over the next 20-50 years.

    Joel Hass and I published the first computer-assisted proof in the Annals Of Mathematics. We were getting a little impatient when the Annals editors scrutinized the paper for three years, but I guess we should be happy compared to Hales. The Annals did eventually publish the paper with no disclaimer.

    Tuesday, Apr 05, 2005
     
    Nonresident students kicked out
    John sends this Si Valley story:
    SUNNYVALE (KRON) -- Some 300 students heading into one of the five high schools in the Fremont Union High School district were sent home early and for good Monday.

    "We asked them to come to the office, we called their parents and told them they don't go to school here anymore," said Superintendent Steve Rowley.

    The school district is enforcing a policy that limits enrollment to only those students who can prove that they live in the district.

    I don't see any good excuse for this. Under California law, school districts get tax money in proportional to the number of students. There is no reason to exclude students from other districts, unless the school is literally out of space.
     
    NY Times leftist foolishness
    The NY Times defends judicial supremacy:
    When the federal courts took the case but ended up agreeing with Florida's courts, federal judges became the next target. Mr. DeLay issued a veiled threat, saying: "Congress for many years has shirked its responsibility to hold the judiciary accountable. No longer." Asked whether the House would consider impeachment charges against the judges involved, he responded, "There's plenty of time to look into that."

    Several bills pending in Congress seek to tell the courts how do their jobs. House Republicans have introduced a resolution declaring that international law should not be taken into account in interpreting the Constitution, something the Supreme Court did just last month in striking down the death penalty for offenders younger than 18. Last year, during a controversy over the "Ten Commandments judge" in Alabama, Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, introduced a bill to bar the federal courts from applying the First Amendment when officials cross the boundaries between church and state.

    Great. I hope these efforts to limit the judiciary are taken seriously.

    Meanwhile, Krugman's column has his usual hysterical attack on Republicans:

    It's a fact, documented by two recent studies, that registered Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives make up only a small minority of professors at elite universities. But what should we conclude from that? ... One answer is self-selection ...
    Larry Summers got into a lot of trouble for giving that answer to explain female representation among professors.

    Then Krugman goes on to rant about how the Republicans and conservatives are anti-science and anti-scholarship.

    This is just nutty. Conservatives are much more interested in scientific facts and scholarly inquiry. In most public policy debates, it is usually the conservatives who argue in terms of hard facts and logical analysis, and it is the liberals who rely on emotional arguments and namecalling.

     
    Occupational risks
    The Si Valley paper actually had a couple of sensible letters:
    Lack of engineers quite rational

    Carol Bartz (Op-Ed, March 24) repeats the familiar assertion that there is a tremendous shortage of engineers and that more female students should be encouraged to choose engineering as a career.

    As a teacher at Stanford University, I can assure CEOs like Bartz that students are actually quite rational in their career choices. Engineering used to be the choice of risk-averse people because companies hired engineers for life and then paid them pensions. Does anyone at Autodesk (Bartz's company) get a pension? How many people has Autodesk laid off during the past few years?

    The surplus of engineering jobs she cites doesn't exist around here.

    Why should my students major in a field where they will be stuck in a cubicle, only to be laid off every four years, while the folks from marketing are off playing golf with customers?

    Christopher R. Moylan
    Sunnyvale

    Clerks have it worse than cops

    I take strong objection to Donald DeMers, president of San Jose's police officers union, overblowing the hazards of being a policeman (Letters, March 29).

    He states officers worry that they may not return home after working a shift. Well, Donald, get hold of yourself. Police work isn't even among the 10 most-hazardous jobs.

    According to insurance company statistics, timber cutters, commercial fishing crews, pilots, ironworkers, roofers, electricians, farmers and truck drivers are all more dangerous jobs. Not in the Top 10, but more dangerous than being a policeman, is night convenience-store clerk. You don't hear them whining.

    Let's give police officers their due, but not shame them by perpetuating this myth.

    Carmen W. Rowe
    Gilroy

    We should assume that when people decide to be engineers, cops, teachers, or nurses, they are making rational decisions about what is best for them. If there were more demand for engineers or teachers, then people would fill the demand. Currently we have surpluses.

    Monday, Apr 04, 2005
     
    Evolution debate
    Chris writes:
    The entire debate over evolution to which you refer is the “JFK Assassination Theory” of science. Ignore the huge pile of evidence that clearly and unambiguously deals with all of the issues but require work to learn and understand. In fact, pretend it does not exist. Point at the tiny fraction of evidence, which is poorly understood or unclear, and use that to attack the entire edifice secure in the knowledge that most people will take the simplistic outlook that “where there is smoke, there is fire.” Work with the understanding that in our contemporary know nothing culture will welcome attacks on those who deal with science. Many people see education and understanding as negative personal traits and scorn those who have these abilities.

    Individuals will embrace those who cater to their ignorance and believe that it is not important that they have anything other than a negative opinion of those who understand the science. This tide of popular stupidity calls those who try to hold back the seas of ignorance rude and blasphemous. The ignorant mob ridiculed and mocked as an elitist anyone who attempts to present the facts is who should allow individuals the right to believe as they wish.

    This is the culture war and we are losing.

    Here is a NY Times reader who wants to declare war on religion:
    Science, Faith and Fossils
    Published: April 5, 2005
    To the Editor:

    "An Unexpected Softness" (editorial, March 28) speculates that "we're not likely to wake up one morning and read that some embryonic Tyrannosaurus is waiting to be hatched on a remote tropical island."

    True. More likely, we will wake up and find that financing for scientific research will dry up because science offends the beliefs of religious fundamentalists who are willing to actively disrupt anything that runs counter to their faith. While we fight the hard war to resist pernicious religious fundamentalism in the Middle East, we are actively surrendering to it at home.

    Robert Stern
    Englewood, N.J., March 28, 2005

    Is there some religion that opposes digging up T-Rex bones? I have heard that there are a few goofy creationists who believe that dinosaurs lived a few thousand years ago, but I would expect that they would be happy to hear that some T-Rex bones were found that have soft tissue in them as if they were not so old.

    Meanwhile, this NY Times columnist seems to have his own funny ideas about the history of science:

    It's a Flat World, After All
    By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
    Published: April 3, 2005

    In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met "Indians" and came home and reported to his king and queen: "The world is round."

    Columbus found the New World, but he did not discover that the Earth was round.
     
    High qualify preschool
    John sends this LA Times letter:
    Re "Study Touts Benefits of Universal Preschool," March 30: The Rand study based its claims of cost savings on "high-quality" preschool programs, and that is my major concern. California has proved itself incapable of providing high-quality elementary, middle or high school programs. Why should we believe it will do better with preschool? I think it is justified to demand that California significantly improve what exists before tackling more.
    Sandy Whaling

    Sunday, Apr 03, 2005
     
    Gun laws
    It used to be that outrageous over-publicized gun crimes would spur some gun control proposals in various legislatures. But this NY Times article says that some recent events have had the opposite effect.
    Instead of calling for new restrictions on guns after the Minnesota shootings, the coalition, which includes 45 groups, simply asked for "a dialogue on the role of firearms in America."

    Opponents of gun control have had victories in Congress, which let the ban on assault weapons expire last fall, and in states, where the push to allow concealed handguns has been gathering momentum for two years. Since 2003, five states, most recently Ohio, have approved laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons.

    Thirty-five states now require the authorities to issue permits for concealed handguns to most applicants as long as they do not have criminal records, and two, Alaska and Vermont, allow concealed weapons without a permit. Eleven others allow the local authorities discretion in issuing so-called concealed carry permits. ...

    The police and prosecutors have tended to oppose allowing concealed handguns. But Mr. Bucher, the district attorney in Wisconsin, said that was starting to change. As recently as two years ago, he was speaking out against the concealed-handguns law in Wisconsin; in 2000, he testified against it, arguing that the risks to the police during traffic stops would outweigh any potential benefits.

    Now, he said, he believes that the legislation can address his concerns, and that the potential benefits are real.

    It is good to see anti-gun ideologues being persuaded by factual evidence.
     
    The natives are getting restless
    Political correctness alert:
    DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Colorado Gov. Bill Owens apologized for saying "the natives are getting restless" during a conference on tribal gambling. ...

    Richard Milanovich of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs, California, said he "couldn't imagine" any person of stature making that kind of remark.

    What is he saying -- that only midgets and cripples can refer to American Indians as natives?

    Saturday, Apr 02, 2005
     
    Slate on the law
    Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick is known for her idiotic legal commentaries, and now she has a non-review of the book Men In Black. She complains:
    The argument here is not new. In fact, one of the reasons it's impossible to call Men in Black a work of legal scholarship is that there is not an original piece of analysis in it. Levin is railing against the Supreme Court for being a bunch of "activist judges" that "now sits in final judgment of essentially all policy issues, disregarding its constitutional limitations, the legitimate role of Congress and the President, and the broad authority conferred upon the states and the people."

    I can understand completely why the serious legal thinkers of this world have no interest in engaging with Levin on his legal scholarship.

    I can also understand why Lithwick does not make a serious attempt to refute anything in the book.

    Friday, Apr 01, 2005
     
    France v Google
    This Economist magazing article says:
    Now President Jacques Chirac wants to stop this American cultural invasion by setting up a rival French search-engine. ...

    The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. "I do not believe", wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in LE MONDE, "that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google's success."

    Yes, France is losing the popularity contests.
     
    Ms. Wheelchair stripped of title for standing up
    CNN reports:
    APPLETON, Wisconsin (AP) -- Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin has been stripped of her title because pageant officials say she can stand -- and point to a newspaper picture as proof. ...

    Candidates for the crown have to "mostly be seen in the public using their wheelchairs or scooters," said Judy Hoit, Ms. Wheelchair America's treasurer.

    "Otherwise you've got women who are in their wheelchairs all the time and they get offended if they see someone standing up. We can't have title holders out there walking when they're seen in the public."

    It appears that the problem is not that she is capable of standing, but that she allowed herself to be photographed publicly standing up.

    I've already been tricked by several April Fools stories this morning. Even Scientific American says:

    There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. ... you were right, and we were wrong.

    In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies.

    I think that the Sci. American admission is a joke and Ms. Wheelchair is not. I'll post a correction, if necessary.
     
    Judge Birch, supremacist
    Judge Birch (11C federal appeals judge) starts his denial of the Shiavo appeal with:
    An axiom in the study of law is that “hard facts make bad law.” The tragic events that have afflicted Mrs. Schiavo and that have been compounded by the resulting passionate inter-family struggle and media focus certainly qualify as “hard facts.”
    and proceeds with the usual supremacist reliance on Marbury v Madison:
    It is axiomatic that the Framers established a constitutional design based on the principles of separation of powers. See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176 (1803) (noting that separation of powers is one of the governmental principles “on which the whole American fabric has been erected”). The Framers established three coequal but separate branches of government, each with the ability to exercise checks and balances on the two others.
    The full sentence is:
    That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected.
    You know that the judge is a supremacist when he quotes gibberish like this. He is ignoring the legislature, making bad law, and acting like judges are supposed to do that.

    Thursday, Mar 31, 2005
     
    Evolution v blasphemy
    Bob writes:
    The mutant hothead genes and T. Rex bone may or may not turn out to be what some scientists currently think they are. Science will sort it out. The polywater episode is a great illustration. There was a paper published in Science the early '70s describing how water could polymerize under certain conditions. The properties of polywater were described. Soon letters and rebuttal letters appeared in Science. Eventually a letter was published which described reproducing the results in the paper with dirty lab equipment. That was the end of the polywater controversy.

    Mendel's work was seminal. If there are exceptions to Mendelian inheritance, it takes nothing away from Mendel or the work which was based on his work. Evolution has survived scientific scrutiny and new discoveries in the fastest progressing field of science for nearly 150 years. There are no scientific alternatives to evolution which explain the observed results. Evolution is settled science. Critics of evolution are willfully ignorant. When they complain, for example, about not understanding why it isn't possible that genes which produce proteins with the same structure could not have evolved independently one invariably discovers that they haven't read any of the literature or even the basic text books.

    It is interesting that anyone is concerned with blasphemy. I thought that concern was limited to mullahs and their followers. I find that most religious folks are not humiliated by evolution, evolutionists, or science. There is a passionate, vocal religious minority which is so unreasonable that they refuse to accept common sense and settled science who humiliate themselves. My advice to them is to read some of the books they would like to ban.

    Notice his faith that science will sort everything out, that evolution must be believed regardless of contrary evidence, and that it is okay for science to attack religion but not okay to attack evolution.

    In other evolution news, elephants are evolving into trucks. Here is a goofy theory about how the neanderthals went extinct. And there are octupuses who are learning to stand erect and walk on 2 legs. At this rate, they could be crawling out of the sea in about 30 million years. I couldn't make this stuff up.


    Wednesday, Mar 30, 2005
     
    Spanking therapy
    According to this Russian research, spanking is not only good for kids, it is good for adults:
    Spanking is more effective than exercise at keeping the blues at bay, say Russian researchers who carried out tests on caning.

    They recommend that people receive 30 weekly sessions of 60 of the best. High levels of pain make the body produce endorphins or 'happy chemicals' and this leads to feelings of euphoria.

    Endorphins also boost the immune system, release sex hormones and reduce appetite.

    It sounds dubious to me, but there are a lot of shrinks advocating crazier things.
     
    Attorney capture
    Andy writes:
    This Terri case illustrates perfectly the problem of attorney capture, whereby a domineering attorney uses a client as a vessel for the attorneys' own ends.

    This happens often in the law, particularly in litigation. I've seen it done and probably been guilty of it myself. I woke up to it one day when one of my clients went completely around me and settled his dispute directly with the other side, without even telling me.

    Felos captured Michael Schiavo and is using him to advance an agenda (and probably earn more money for Felos). One day Michael will realize he was an accomplice to a gravely immoral act, and it won't be pleasant for him. Maybe he's starting to realize it already.

    The person on the other side of the litigation, however, fails to realize what is going on. He assumes the attorney is working for the client, not vice-versa. He gets angrier and angrier at his adversary, but that just stokes the fire. The more polemic things get, the greater the need for the attorney who is causing it all.

    The solution is for the adversaries to go around the attorneys. I suggested this yesterday and pleaded with those in contact with the Schindlers to do this. Perhaps not surprisingly, my contacts were irritated by the suggestion. Why? Because even those sympathetic to Schindler cannot accept that it is Felos, not Michael Schiavo, who is the real problem here.

    Michael Schiavo is no angel, but he's no Rhodes Scholar either. He couldn't graduate from community college and was living off his in-laws' generosity. He probably changes his mind and love interests frequently. He probably needed a job and was irritated at the burden of Terri's condition, particularly after starting another family. Enter Felos to take over, perhaps find him employment, and tell him what to do.

    I bet it would only take a few hours in a meeting between the Schindlers and Michael, without attorneys, to change everything about this case. There would be a risk that Michael would revert back to Felos' wishes upon returning to him. Felos would say that Judge Greer's decision stands regardless of Michael's wishes, but it wouldn't withstand public outrage. What is surprising is that no one Schindlers' side even sees value in this approach. Perhaps they're not aware of the phenomenon of attorney capture.

    Check out Felos' book and reviews and then tell me if he's the problem.

    I don't know, but everyone who hires an attorney should realize that the attorney may have conflicting interests.

    Monday, Mar 28, 2005
     
    Perils of democracy
    This news story says that political freedom can mean less freedom to tell jokes.
    But after Iraq's Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, Joudi noticed that divisions were emerging among his old friends. ... "Now if you tell a joke about a Sunni or a Kurd, you wonder whether you're hurting their feelings," said Joudi, 42, who's a Shiite. "People are just not relaxed about that stuff anymore." ...

    Under Saddam Hussein's regime, jokes about the Sunni dictator or his tribe were forbidden, but everyone else was fair game. Cracking on Kurds became a national pastime. Shiites, particularly those who come from southeastern cities, were derided as "shiroogi" - a word that means "eastern" but is used pejoratively as uneducated or backward. Sunni jokes are almost always told through one prominent tribe, the Dulaimis of Ramadi, who're stereotyped as bumbling and provincial.

    So I guess that is one advantage of keeping people powerless -- everyone can make fun of them with impunity!
     
    Benefits of global warming
    This Wired article explains some of the benefits of global warming. It could very well cause a net gain in USA GDP.
     
    Critical mass
    New York police are arresting bicyclists who participate in the monthly Critical Mass ride:
    Bicycle advocates, 37 of whom were arrested Friday night during the latest Critical Mass ride, vowed Sunday to fight city efforts to require permits for the monthly bicycle rally. ...

    The city has filed a complaint seeking to require permits for a monthly bicycle rally through Manhattan that typically brings automobile traffic to a standstill.

    The city wants to require permits for use of city streets and of Union Square, the rally's starting point, and to bar participants from publicizing the ride. Siegel called the complaint and the arrests of 37 bicyclists during a ride on Friday unconstitutional, and vowed to fight both in court.

    This is police harassment. They don't arrest car drivers just because there is a traffic jam. They shouldn't be arresting bicyclists they have attracted a crowd. Riding on the public streets is entirely legal.

    The Critical Mass bicycle rides started in San Francisco a little over 10 years ago. It is not a protest or an organized political movement. It is just bicyclists who happen to like riding with other bicyclists so that they will be at less risk of being hit by a car.

     
    Mining religion
    Steven Hayward writes:
    ... in the pages of Jared Diamond’s new best-seller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a particularly frothy passage on page 462 attacking mining companies, Diamond writes:
    Civilization as we know it would be impossible without oil, farm food, wood, or books, but oil executives, farmers, loggers, and book publishers nevertheless don’t cling to that quasi-religious fundamentalism of mine executives: ‘God put those metals there for the benefit of mankind, to be mined.’ The CEO and most officers of one of the major American mining companies are members of a church that teaches that God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway.
    I really doubt that any mining company officers think that way. Diamond just made up that quote. When Diamond is so wrong about present day events analysis, why does anyone believe his tenuous theories about what happened in prehistorical societies 1000s of years ago?

    Sunday, Mar 27, 2005
     
    Shiavo polls
    These Terri Shiavo polls are biased, and have been widely misinterpreted. Besides these problems, consider these Time poll questions:
    Congress met in a special session this past weekend to pass legislation moving the Schiavo case from the Florida state courts, which have repeatedly ruled to remove the feeding tube, to the federal court system. Regardless of your opinion on the Schiavo case, do you think it was right for Congress to intervene in this matter, or not?

    How about President Bush, who signed the legislation this weekend moving jurisdiction to the federal courts? Was it right for him to intervene, or not?

    Congress did not move jurisdiction to the federal court. The Florida state court still has jurisdiction, and its order is still binding and effective. Congress merely said that the federal courts could consider claims that federal rights were infringed.

    I also don't think that it is correct to say that Bush intervened. In legal jargon, to intervene in a case means to become a party to a case. Bush has not taken sides as a party.

    Here are some CBS News questions:

    Do you think Congress and the President should be involved in deciding what happens to Terri Schiavo, or is this a matter Congress and the President should stay out of?

    Regardless of your opinion about the Terri Schiavo case, in general, do you think the federal government should decide whether it is legal for family members to remove a patient from life support, or should each state government decide, or are these issues something the government should stay out of?

    The answers to these are hard to interpret. Someone could answer no to the first question, thinking that Congress and Bush should not be the ones making the feeding tube decision, and still favor their law to allow federal courts to review the matter. I don't think that such a view would be unusual. Most people seem to be in favor of allowing federal court review of death penalty cases, whether they are for or against capital punishment laws.

    The second question got 75% of the respondents saying that the government should stay out of the matter. If taken literally, that means that 75% of the public oppose Judge Greer's starvation order.

    Bob says that can't be right, and claims that people answering the question regard (falsely) that the government includes Congress, the President, the Florida legislature, and the governor, but not the state and federal judges. I cannot imagine why anyone would think that. They are all essential parts of the government.

    I think that it is more likely that most people think that such decisions are ideally made by the patient or her spouse or family, and that they should not be litigated.

     

    The judicial supremacists will cheer when Terri Shiavo dies:
    The message is a blunt and welcome rejection of a crude maneuver by Congress. While judges have a duty to interpret and apply the law as Congress writes it, they also have a duty to stand up to politicians when the law so requires. Perhaps the only happy outcome of this most unhappy case is that the federal judiciary did not let itself become an instrument of political manipulation.
    I don't see how anyone could be happy with judges, when they took 10 years to decide the case, and appear to have overlooked some factual issues.

    Thursday, Mar 24, 2005
     
    Living Will
    Andy sends this:
    Living Will (or Self-Defense Against Judges Trying to Kill Me)

    If I am incapacitated, then:

  • no physician shall be permitted to examine me for the purpose of legal proceedings who has not sworn to uphold the original Oath of Hippocrates, or belongs to an organization that subscribes to it (such as the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons).
  • I consent to the provision of food, water, or medical care by any volunteer and object to any governmental interference with the same.
  • I disapprove of guardianship of me by a spouse who has entered into a long-term adulterous relationship, and also object to any hearsay submitted by that spouse about my intentions.
  • I consent to care by any parent or child of mine who files legal papers to do so, and object to any judicial interference with it.

    ______________________
    Signed by:

    ______________________
    Witnessed by:

  • You can find a more conventional one here.
     
    Correcting mutant hothead genes
    This NY Times story claims that scientists have disproved a central premise of the theory of evolution. They showed that normal mustard plants can result from parents with mutant hothead genes. They claim that human babies also may be getting genes from some source other than the DNA of their parents.

    It is not a total loss for the theory of evolution. The new results might explain the Darwinian fitness of bdelloid rotifers that are renowned for not having had sex for millions of years.

    No, it is not April Fool's Day yet. This appears to be a legitimate story.

    Chris writes:

    Your comments indicate how little you understand the scientific method and the theory of Evolution. There is no individual finding which can disprove the premise of Evolution. The very nature of the theory allows new findings to revise and correct the current thinking of the process that leads to life’s existence. No scientific theory is so brittle and inflexible to collapse upon new and exciting developments. (Well there are some such theories, but they quickly find their place on history’s garbage heap.)

    The fact that there is a mechanism to allow the genomes of individual plants to restore themselves is fascinating information. Upon reflection, a mechanism that has evolved to help protect species from catastrophic mutation would seem inevitable. We know that most mutations are fatal. Many of the core sections of the DNA of all life share large sections of identical genes, as well as poorly understood replicated sections of the same genes. A backup system relying on RNA, the earliest genetic material would have huge utility. Selection for organisms that continue to maintain this backup system would seem obvious.

    This wonderful discovery strengthens and extends our understanding of life and in turn the process that lead to the creation of life. It is unlikely that we will know how life started. It is certain that at least once it did occur. Moreover, the historical record shows that life began as soon (geologically speaking) as the conditions permitted its existence. As a curious social species, Humans are trying to understand the physical process that lead to life and its explosion into the myriad forms we see around us.

    Extending the Theory of Evolution is a simple game with one rule anyone can play. The only explanations allowed are those that involve physical actions obeying the rules of Physics. Anyone can bring forward any explanation that explains the current state of life on this planet as long as you only invoke physical processes that exist today. Imaginary friends are not allowed in this game.

    Mike writes:
    In his latest Scarboroughesque twisting of the truth, Roger blogs:

    "This NY Times story claims that scientists have disproved a central premise of the theory of evolution."

    Hogwash!!!! The NYT article quite clearly points out that the finding in question challenges Mendel's laws of inheritance NOT evolution:

    "If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century."

    In fact, the only reference to evolution is in this paragraph and they find a scientist to deny the finding impacts any Darwinian theory:

    "The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty. Dr. Meyerowitz said he did not see this posing any problem for evolution because it seems to happen only rarely. "What keeps Darwinian evolution intact is that this only happens when there is something wrong," Dr. Surridge said."

    What they do say the finding "undercuts" is why sex is believed to be necessary: "The finding could undercut a leading theory of why sex is necessary." I think that what Roger's comments illustrate is that sex among the religious right is not only unnecessary, it's a danger to the continued growth in intelligence of the human species.

    Mendel's "laws of inheritance" are NOT "evolution!"

    Of course the evolutionists are never going to admit that there are any flaws in their theory, no matter how much contrary evidence is found.

    Blaming the Purdue discovery on Mendel is curious. Mendel knew nothing about DNA. Mendel observed certain generation-skipping traits in peas that were eventually explained in terms of recessive genes in DNA.

    Now these mutant hotheads come along (and no, I am not referring to Chris and Mike!) The Purdue scientists observed some generation skipping traits that were vaguely similar to what Mendel observed, but they claim that the genes causing the traits were not recessive genes or even anywhere in the DNA of the parent plants. If this discovery is confirmed, then it is a big deal because it threatens the notion that all of the genetic information is carried by DNA from one generation to the next.

    The Purdue group doesn't seem to have any good explanation as to how the mutant hothead genes got corrected. Based on what Chris says, I guess the paper would not have been published if it had mentioned hypothetical imaginary friends.

    Anti-evolutionists may also be interested in this news story:

    Scientists could turn Jurassic Park fiction into fact after extracting what look like blood vessels and cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex, it was disclosed yesterday. ...

    Dr Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, in the United States, who led the team, told the journal Science: "It was totally shocking. I didn't believe it until we'd done it 17 times."

    I still don't believe it. The T-rex died 70 million years ago.

    Update: The NY Times now editorializes:

    No one can object if Imax theaters, whether commercial or located in museums, turned down the deep sea film in the belief that it was too boring to draw much of an audience, as some managers indicated. But it is surely unacceptable for science museums to reject the film in part because some people in test audiences complained that the material was blasphemous.
    So science museums are obligated to offend people with blasphemous movies at any opportunity? This is just more evidence that the evolutionist-atheist lobby wants to use science education as a tool for humiliating religious folks.

    Tuesday, Mar 22, 2005
     
    The ONLY 7 Star Hotel in the world
    Be sure and stay at this hotel, if you visit Dubai and you have money to burn.
     
    Fewer college sports quotas
    The Bush administration has relaxed the rules on college sport team sex quotas. The AP story says:
    The Education Department has given universities a new way to prove they offer women equal sports opportunity, triggering some criticism the Bush administration is undermining a landmark anti-discrimination law.

    The federal government has created an Internet-based survey that schools can use to show they are accommodating the athletic interests and abilities of women on campus. Schools have long been able to comply with the Title IX law by proving they have met the sports interests of women, but never before has the government endorsed and promoted a way to measure that.

    Here is the text of the guidance, which purports to offer an "additional clarification" of the third prong of the three-part test. Here is the USA Today story.

    Most college athletic programs comply with Title IX regulations by having an academic proportionality quota. That is, the sex of students participating in varsity sports must be in proportion to those taking academic courses.

    Today's USA demographics are that more girls than boys attend college classes, and more boys than girls want to participate in varsity sports. That is a fact. It is crazy to drop a sport like wrestling in order to meet negative quotas. It would make more sense to drop departments like English and Psychology because too many girls major in them.


    Monday, Mar 21, 2005
     
    Computers are bad for students
    News from London:
    The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.

    The findings raise questions over the [UK] Government's decision, announced by Gordon Brown in the Budget last week, to spend another £1.5 billion on school computers, in addition to the £2.5 billion it has already spent.

    Computers at home distracted pupils from doing homework

    Mr Brown said: "The teaching and educational revolution is no longer blackboards and chalk, it is computers and electronic whiteboards."

    However, the study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: "Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading."

    Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University.

    Buying lots of computers is just another example of schools looking for ways to waste money.
     
    No credit for Bush
    For a couple of years, the Bush-haters told us that the Iraq War had nothing to do with WMD, but with some delusional neocon conspiracy to bring democracy to the Middle East.

    Now the Bush-haters acknowledge that there is actually some hope for bringing democracy to the Middle East, but that Bush shouldn't get any credit because he was really just interested in WMD, or exploiting 9-11, or something else. Eg, see this article.


    Saturday, Mar 19, 2005
     
    Volcano propaganda
    An Imax science movie titled "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" ought to be non-controversial, but test-marketing showed that some people were offended by some blasphemous comments about the origin of life on Earth. Others thought that the movie was boring, and not very entertaining. The leftist funders of the movie refuse to change it, because they want to preserve the pro-evolution message. So some Imax theatres will not show it. The NY Times thinks that this is a scandal.

    Bob writes:

    Next thing you know these alarmists will claim that wackos will be protesting and demonstrating when people make life and death medical decisions about their families.
    Here is a typical evolutionist defense of the film:
    The fundamentalists and Galileo
    The Church made him renounce his teachings... turned out he was right and they were wrong. Those that lead their life based on beliefs and dogma rather than observations and the facts that come from them need to be eradicated from this planet for the better of it.
    No, the conflict between Galileo and the Church was not so simple, and eradicating people for their beliefs will not improve the planet.

    Friday, Mar 18, 2005
     
    Debate on judicial nominees
    John mocks my suggestion that the Senate Repubs have a public debate on just why they want these judicial nominees, and make the Demos explain just why they are opposed. They won't do that. I think that both sides in the Senate are avoiding the real issues.
    After four years of haggling over these judicial vacancies, you say we still need more debate. You still haven't heard enough from the likes of Schumer, Durbin, Leahy, Boxer, and Kennedy. Youe want to hear them explain yet again, ad nauseam, "just why they are opposed."

    I for one have heard enough. It's long past time to end the debate and bring these nominations to a vote.

    This National Review Online article is the answer to anyone who thinks we still need more debate on judicial nominees.

    No, I don't think that the public knows what the issues are. I watched some of the last filibuster. Senators gave boring speech about irrelevancies like ABA endorsements, judicial experience, law school grades, other nominations approved, etc. Anything but the real issues.

    I happen to think that the real issue is judicial supremacy. But I have yet to hear it from one senator on either side.

    I don't think that the Repubs can win on this issue if they are unable or unwilling to articulate what they are fighting for.

     
    Turns the mind to mush
    Ed Felton's blog says that porn politics turns the mind to mush.

    I think that he is right. When people debate the merits of internet filtering, neither side wants to be honest about what can and cannot be done.

     
    Teachers blaming parents
    Here is a teacher study that shows teachers griping about discipline problems in the schools. No mention of corporal punishment.
     
    Shaken baby syndrome
    Andy writes:
    Another big lie is the "shaken baby syndrome" (SBS), which claims that a child can be shaken to death without any external impact or injury to the neck. Every day someone in our country is charged or convicted based on this scam. One study (Duhaime model) showed this was biomechanically impossible, yet the child abuse industry forges ahead. The worst perpetrators are soaking up big grants for this at prestigious universities, fueling the child protective services folks.

    Here's an abstract of an article designed to suppress evidence in trials about how SBS is impossible.

    They ought to have some good scientific evidence before they send parents to prison.
     
    Men differ from women
    Liza sends this LA Times article, which includes:
    All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2 percent of their entire genetic inheritance. That degree of difference is greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative - the chimpanzee.
    Differences between men and women are undeniable. They include differences in brain function. No one could deny them, except maybe a feminist Princeton president.
     
    The science of the unknown
    Real scientists don't just tell you what is known; they can also tell you what is unknown to modern science. Here is a list of 13 things that do not make sense.

    The examples are almost all in the hard sciences. Psychologists and evolutionists just won't admit what they do not know.

    Bob writes:

    False. The debates among scientists about the unknown aspects of evolution are just as vigorous as the debates about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example. The other similarity is that both in the case of evolution and quantum mechanics there is no scientific alternative which explains the known observations. The differences are that progress in understanding evolution has been far faster in the last 50 years than progress in physics and fortunately for physicists there is no religious theory which is an alternative to quantum mechanics. Biology is being used as a stalking horse by groups which want religion taught in public schools.
    The debate over the interpretation of quantum mechanics is more of a philosophical rather than scientific debate. Yes, there are evolutionists who are fond of various philosophical debates, such as whether evolution is algorithmic or contingent or progressive or egalitarian or gradual.

    The Tao of Physics was a popular book that offered an Eastern religious alternative and explanation to quantum mechanics.

    I think that it is funny how evolutionists alternate between saying that evolution was established by Darwin as a scientific fact 150 years ago, and saying that current research is just now figuring out how it works and that we'll all know the true story real soon now.

     
    Marbury v Madison
    Here is another conservative who thinks that the problems with the USA courts are rooted in an 1803 decision.
    Perhaps judicial review wasn't such a great idea after all. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall assumed the power of judicial review over acts of the legislature. According to Marshall, the Constitution vested in the Supreme Court the ability to overturn legitimately enacted laws if those laws conflicted with the Constitution itself.

    It is anything but clear that the Constitution meant to create the power of judicial review. Marshall's opinion is full of holes, both textual and logical. As Judge Learned Hand stated, Marshall's opinion "will not bear scrutiny." Professor Alexander Bickel of Yale University agreed in his work "The Least Dangerous Branch": "The opinion is very vulnerable."

    ... The Supreme Court has consistently, for the past 50-odd years at the very least, substituted its judgment for the judgment of the people, without regard to the Constitution.

    No, that case was an example of judicial restraint, because the court merely refused to issue an order that it thought would be unconstitutional. The problems of the last 50 years were caused by the judicial supremacists on the Warren Court.

    Tuesday, Mar 15, 2005
     
    Ebbers convicted
    Andy writes:
    The nearly communist venue of the Southern District of New York, where pro-government procedures and jealousy of wealth reigns supreme, just nabbed another victim: Bernie Ebbers, guilty on all counts, and facing life in jail. His face turned bright red at the verdict; his wife burst into tears.

    At one point the jury asked to see documents that didn't exist in evidence.

    That's the same venue that convicted John Rigas for living extravagantly and generously. After his conviction, his cable company became the first in the country to pipe hard-core, triple X porn into the subscribers' homes. Rigas wouldn't allow it when he was in charge.

    Samuel Waksal, a brilliant scientist working on cures for cancer, agreed to spend the rest of his productive life in jail just to avoid subjecting his family to that venue.

    That venue was the one that refused to convict Alger Hiss in his first trial.

    Forbes reports that the federal conviction rate for securities fraud in that venue is nearly 100%.

     
    No rational basis for the marriage law
    The SF paper promotes yesterday's same-sex marriage ruling:
    As the case begins the appeal process, one central issue is sure to be Kramer's eye-catching conclusion that there is no rational basis for the marriage law. ...

    Herma Hill Kay, a Boalt Hall professor of family law and author of California's no-fault divorce law, said Kramer's ruling fairly demolished the rationale offered by organizations opposing same-sex marriage: that the current law encourages procreation and childrearing by a husband and wife.

    "I've never thought there was a good answer to the fact that if procreation is the primary purpose of marriage, we've never prohibited heterosexual couples who didn't want to or couldn't procreate from getting married,'' she said.

    That makes perfect sense. The Berkeley law prof who wrote the California no-fault divorce law sees no rational basis to our marriage law. I've always suspected as much! I am surprised to hear her admit it.

    Kay once wrote a brief supporting Roe v Wade. She is currently teaching these courses:

    281 - Family Law (Spring 2005)
    The course provides a basic introduction to laws designed to regulate the formation of intimate relationships between adults, including marriage and cohabitation. It also covers family dissolution, with an emphasis on the custody and support of children and spousal support. ...

    284.1A - Sex-Based Discrimination (Spring 2005)
    The course examines the validity of distinctions based on sex in U.S. law, in light of their history, underlying policies, and social context. ...

    She has no publications on her web site. It doesn't say whether she is lesbian, or married, or what. Here are some of her views on same-sex marriage.

    Kay surely thinks that a pregnant woman has an absolute privacy right to have an abortion. But she pretends to wonder why newlyweds cannot be forced to commit to having children?!

    The marriage law rationale is not that complicated. The state has no ability to determine whether a male-female couple will have children. The state has traditionally encouraged child-bearing couples to get married in order to protect the legal rights of th children. Those protections have been partially negated by the no-fault divorce law, but they still exist.

    It is true that a same-sex lesbian couple can have an illegitimate child, but there is no reason the state should encourage such activities. Children do best, and cause the fewest problems for the state, when they are raised by their natural fathers and mothers.

     
    The Purpose-Driven Life
    The Purpose-Driven Life, a book by Rick Warren, just had its Amazon sales rank shoot from number 57 to 2 in one day. The book has a message that apparently reached the Atlanta judge murderer. Hostage Ashley Smith has an amazing story.
     
    The Population Bomb
    Stanford prof and scaremonger Paul R. Ehrlich writes in the NY Times:
    As Nicholas D. Kristof writes, I said in "The Population Bomb": "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Indeed, the battle goes on, and we're still losing.

    Since "The Population Bomb" was written in 1968, conservatively 200 million people have starved to death. As the Food and Agriculture Organization's 2004 annual hunger report pointed out, hunger and malnutrition kill more than five million children every year.

    Bob responds this article:
    Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate in economics, demonstrated empirically that no famine - mass starvation leading to mass death - ever occurred in a democratically governed country.
    and he says:
    My suggestion for solving the problem of famine is that any country which has a famine goes on the regime change list. People who complain about famine will then have something productive to do. They can volunteer to kick out the bad regime which is causing the famine.
    I don't think that the world has seen a real famine since the 1800s.

    Monday, Mar 14, 2005
     
    Photons with incredible speed
    Sci. American reports:
    Telescopes around the world recorded the brightest explosion ever detected in our galaxy, which sent x-rays and gamma rays careening outward at incredible speeds, astronomers announced on Friday.
    Yes, photons travel at the speed of light. Here and elsewhere.
     
    Perfecting the theory
    Wash Post on teaching evolution:
    Meyer said he and Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman devised the compromise strategy in March 2002 when they realized a dispute over intelligent design was complicating efforts to challenge evolution in the classroom. They settled on the current approach that stresses open debate and evolution's ostensible weakness, but does not require students to study design.

    The idea was to sow doubt about Darwin and buy time for the 40-plus scientists affiliated with the institute to perfect the theory, Meyer said. Also, by deferring a debate about whether God was the intelligent designer, the strategy avoids the defeats suffered by creationists who tried to oust evolution from the classroom and ran afoul of the Constitution.

    I don't think that either side will be perfecting a theory any time soon.
     
    Leftist bias of media
    Study shows anti-Bush bias:
    NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year's election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

    The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.

    Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

    No doubt the news media will justify this by saying that there was more negative news about Bush.

    Sunday, Mar 13, 2005
     
    Death of Environmentalism
    As an intellectual force today, environmentalism is dead.
     
    Harvard elitists
    Here is news from Harvard.
    CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - A Harvard University student's fledgling dorm-cleaning business faced the threat of a campus boycott on Thursday after the school's daily newspaper slammed it for dividing students along economic lines.

    The Harvard Crimson newspaper urged students to shun Dormaid, a business launched by Harvard sophomore Michael Kopko that cleans up for messy students.

    "By creating yet another differential between the haves and have-nots on campus, Dormaid threatens our student unity," the Crimson said in an editorial.

    "We urge the student body to boycott Dormaid."

    It is amazing how leftist Harvard elitists can pretend that they are not elitists. The main reason they goto Harvard is to distinguish themselves from the have-nots in our society.

    Saturday, Mar 12, 2005
     
    Reservists do battle in family court
    The San Diego Union-Tribune has been syndicating Phyllis Schlafly's column since 1977, and now it has finally printed one of them:
    Most reservists called upon to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan have paid a big price: a significant reduction of their wages as they transferred from civilian to military jobs, separation from their loved ones, and of course the risk of battle wounds or death. Regrettably, on their return home, those who are divorced fathers could face other grievous penalties: loss of their children, financial ruin, prosecution as "deadbeat dads" and even jail.
    One critic says:
    I have no sympathy for men who are still held accountable for their actions of choosing to have children and go off to war.
    Usually when Phyllis's critics talk about "choosing to have children", the only choice they mean is the woman's choice regarding whether or not to have an abortion. The father is not involved in that choice.

    I realize that we have a volunteer army, and not everyone agrees with the Iraq War, but it is very strange for any American to suggest that a man is shirking his responsibilities by reporting for military duty and being sent off to fight a foreign war.

    Another letter from Amy Redding says:

    I am outraged by Schlafly's commentary. ... Schlafly's inflammatory article baits a war of the sexes. I guess she thinks we do not have enough division, war and suffering children in this country.
    I am outraged too, but she is blaming the wrong party. The war of the sexes has been fueled primarily by feminism, and Phyllis has spent of her career trying to quell male-female conflicts.

    John sends these links to positive comments: http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_03_06_corner-archive.asp#057990 http://www.theagitator.com/archives/019529.php#019529 http://www.fathersandfamilies.org/site/news.php?id=51&PHPSESSID=a54df9d1e16bcc3e85dbf2e81be88f2a http://www.childsbestinterest.org/ http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1349394/posts http://www.freeconservatives.com/vb/showthread.php?t=19762 http://www.fathers.ca/two_year's_in_iraq_for_fathers.htm http://www.blogsforbush.com/mt/archives/003928.html http://www.digitalbrownpajamas.com/digital_brownpajamas/2005/02/support_our_tro.html http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2005/03/returning_from.html http://www.harrysnews.com/tgReservistSoldiersTreatedLikeDirt.htm

     
    Criticizing evolutionists
    This Fred Reed essay explains a lot of what is wrong with evolutionism.
    Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. ...

    Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does—except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions—overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

    I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn’t a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use)—of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.

    (I found it quoted at Team Hammer.) It is bad enough that the evolutionists are so unscientific, but they are really unbearable when they start lecturing us on what is and is not science. You know that they are not real scientists when they defend their positions by launching into idiosyncratic definitions of common terms like science and theory.
     
    Hate speech
    Here is a Contra Costa editorial against hate speech:
    Hate based on skin color and/or ethnic and cultural differences still festers among us. It's an aggressive monster that actively seeks putrefaction like itself so it may commune and spawn. It spreads like a fungus, seeking to multiply.

    The Internet has been a fertile ground for groups to plant evil seeds. As ways to interact on the Internet's have grown, so grow the hate groups. Online communities, which so innocently attempt to bring like-minded individuals together for virtual socializing, created a nice breeding ground for venom.

    No, it is not talking about Ward Churchill or MoveOn.org. It is attacking Google for failing to censor some private discussions.

    Friday, Mar 11, 2005
     
    Google v Yahoo
    The Google lovers amaze me. They seem wildly impressed that Google now has mail, weather, maps, and customizable news. Yahoo has had all these features for years, and many others. Yahoo search is even as good as Google now.

    I like Google, and I am glad to see them give Yahoo some competition, but Google is overrated and overvalued. Google and Yahoo have about the same market value, but Yahoo has a better and broader range of services.

    (Note: I have another blog on Blogspot.com, owned by Google.)

     
    Racist convict not to blame
    The man who murdered family members of Chicago judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow has just been caught, and all of the finger-pointing at so-called hate groups turned out to be wrong. Everyone was blaming Matt Hale, the former leader of a fringe group called the World Church of the Creator, even tho Hale was in prison and Judge Lefkow actually tried to rule in his favor.

    Hale is serving an up to 40-year prison term for threatening to kill Judge Lefkow, but the case against him was very strange. The evidence against him was an ambiguous tape from an FBI sting operation. The feds said that Hale was speaking in code. It sounds fishy to me.

    St. Louis dentist Tom Sell was also charged with conspiring to kill a federal agent based on extremely flimsy evidence. I believe that Tom Sell is innocent. He has been held in prison for about 6 years without a trial. He also belonged to a political group with politically incorrect racial views. I am suspicious that there might be some systematic attempt to bust up racist groups by framing their leaders.

     
    Convergence of science and religion
    UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes just won a religion prize that is worth more cash than his Nobel prize. See also USA Today. Here is the silly essay on The Convergence of Science and Religion. It doesn't look like a million dollar essay to me.

    Update: Here is a WSJ essay by him.


    Wednesday, Mar 09, 2005
     
    Unethical business school applicants
    John sends this AP story:
    On Monday, Harvard became the second school, after Carnegie Mellon, to announce its blanket rejection of any applicant who used a method detailed in a BusinessWeek Online forum to try to get an early glimpse at admissions decisions in top business schools.
    I think that the rejected applicants did not do anything unethical, and that they should sue the colleges.

    Harvard posted its acceptance letters on an external web site. Applicants were allowed to log in, and check their status. Someone discovered that applicants could get their decision letters before Harvard's intended release date by logging in, and requesting the letter with an appropriate URL.

    I guess Harvard Business School is a little sensitive about having educated a generation of unethical businessmen, but Harvard is blaming the wrong parties. If it didn't want the admissions decisions released, then it shouldn't have put them on an unprotected public server.

    Update: According to this Princeton prof, only rejection letters were posted. So all the applicants found out was whether a rejection letter had been posted.


    Tuesday, Mar 08, 2005
     
    Ready for kindergarten
    The local United Way has a well-publicized report about preparing kids for kindergarten. The biggest recommendation is that kids be sent to subsidized preschool so that they will be ready for kindergarten.

    The study did not even look at the possibility of parents teaching their kids. The closest it got was to quote another source to say:

    Additionally, it is crucial for young children to have literacy experiences prior to entering school, because “failing to give children literacy experiences until they are school age can severely limit the reading and writing levels they ultimately attain”.
    That is because schools do a lousy job of teaching kindergarten. My kindergarten child complains that the only books she gets at school are "too easy". Teaching 5-year-olds is not hard. There is research that shows what methods work best. The schools just have to follow it. It is pathetic that they have to rely on the parents to do what the teachers should be doing.
     
    Merck lied about vaccines
    Malkin's blog says:
    Myron Levin of the Los Angeles Times reports:

    Drug maker Merck & Co. continued to supply infant vaccine containing a mercury-based preservative [thimerosal] for two years after declaring that it had eliminated the chemical.

    In September 1999, amid rising concern about the risks of mercury in childhood vaccines, Merck announced that the Food and Drug Administration had approved a preservative-free version of its hepatitis B vaccine.

    "Now, Merck's infant vaccine line," the company's press release said, "is free of all preservatives."

    But Merck continued to distribute vaccine containing the chemical known as thimerosal, along with the new product, until October 2001, according to an FDA letter sent in response to a congressional inquiry....

    The vaccine was supposed to be pulled because it exposed babies to mercury in excess of govt guidelines.

    More info about mercury in vaccines can be found at www.nvic.org.


    Thursday, Mar 03, 2005
     
    Superstrings in space
    This article claims that we see 2 identical galaxies because of a giant superstring from another dimension.

    Roger Penrose, one of the most brilliant mathematical physicists alive, doesn't believe in string theory.


    Tuesday, Mar 01, 2005
     
    Soldiers become deadbeat dads
    This Human Events column says:
    Most reservists called upon to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan have paid a big price: a significant reduction of their wages as they transferred from civilian to military jobs, separation from their loved ones, and of course the risk of battle wounds or death. Regrettably, on their return home, those who are divorced fathers could face other grievous penalties: loss of their children, financial ruin, prosecution as "deadbeat dads" and even jail.
    Remember this when you hear about deadbeat dads.
     
    Supremacist alert
    The US Supreme Court just outlawed the juvenile death penalty, 5-4, reversing a 1989 decision on point. Note especially Kennedy's reliance on the law in other countries in part IV. Here are some excerpts:
    Yet at least from the time of the Court's decision in Trop, the Court has referred to the laws of other countries and to international authorities as instructive for its interpretation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments."

    As respondent and a number of amici emphasize, Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which every country in the world has ratified save for the United States and Somalia, contains an express prohibition on capital punishment for crimes committed by juveniles under 18.

    As of now, the United Kingdom has abolished the death penalty in its entirety; but, decades before it took this step, it recognized the disproportionate nature of the juvenile death penalty; and it abolished that penalty as a separate matter.

    It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty, resting in large part on the understanding that the instability and emotional imbalance of young people may often be a factor in the crime. See Brief for Human Rights Committee of the Bar of England and Wales et al. as Amici Curiae 10-11. The opinion of the world community, while not controlling our outcome, does provide respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions.

    Just a couple of years ago, I believe that the Supreme Court intended to make this ruling, but chickened out because of the popularity of the pending death penalty charge against the 17-year-old DC sniper. But now that the DC sniper will probably not get the death penalty anyway, they figured that the timing was better now.
     
    Schwarzenegger amendment
    I'm going to have to ask my mom about this Mercury News letter:
    A special-interest amendment

    I think it's curious that the same people who oppose civil rights for gays and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment for women now want to amend the Constitution to benefit just one person, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Talk about your special interest.

    Mark Nelson
    San Jose

    I doubt that there are any such people. I believe that Schwarzenegger maintains an active Austrian passport and claims dual citizenship. I really doubt that any of the Stop ERA folks would want to amend the Constitution to allow an Austrian citizen to run for President of the USA.

    Bob writes:

    About a year ago I ran into some people from Vermont who wanted to know why we had to go outside the country to find a Governor. The staircase wit was that having a governor from another country was an improvement over having a governor from another planet like Davis.
    Schwarzenegger has been a whole lot more effective than Davis. It is amazing, since conventional wisdom was that Davis was much more intelligent, had vastly more political experience, had strong support from the majority party in California, and had every other advantage.

    Monday, Feb 28, 2005
     
    Buchanan opposes LOST
    Pat Buchanan says:
    ``Sovereignty. The issue is huge. The mere mention of Kofi Annan in the U.N. caused the crowd to go into a veritable fit. The coalition wants America strong and wants the American flag flying overseas, not the pale blue of the U.N.''

    So George W. Bush confided to friend Doug Wead before he declared his candidacy. And, twice, President Bush has acted to defend U.S. sovereignty against the encroachments of global government.

    He rejected both the International Criminal Court, which would have ceded power to prosecute U.S. soldiers, and a Kyoto treaty that would have subjected our economy to the dictates of a global EPA. ...

    In her confirmation hearings, Condoleezza Rice was asked by Lugar if the administration supported LOST. The president ``certainly would like to see it passed as soon as possible,'' said Rice. If George W. Bush authorized that statement, writes Phyllis Schlafly, he ``can no longer claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan's conservative legacy.''

    Mike writes that Buchanan must have meant "to whom we would have ceded power". If the court didn't have that power to being with, it couldn't "cede it." Good point.

    Sunday, Feb 27, 2005
     
    Oscars
    It is amazing how the critics and Oscar fans can drool over a couple of box-office disappointments. Million Dollar Baby has only grossed $65M, and The Aviator only $94M.

    Meanwhile, Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Spider-Man 2, The Incredibles, and The Passion of the Christ all grossed over $600M worldwide last year.

     
    Bush backs out of another silly UN treaty
    Trudy writes:
    Here's the key sentence: "Late yesterday, in quiet negotiations out of the public eye, the Bush administration signaled to other nations that it would not unequivocally reaffirm the commitments made by the United States to the world's women a decade ago."
    There is more info on her Desert Light Journal blog. The blog also has good articles on domestic violence and other topics.

    Saturday, Feb 26, 2005
     
    Holding Larry Tribe accountable
    A readers sends this NRO Ponnuru article about the annoying Harvard law prof Larry Tribe.

    Update: Another reader suggests the How Appealing and Volokh blog for more info on this dispute. I having followed the details, but I consider Tribe a very annoying and overrated character, so I watch with amusement.


    Thursday, Feb 24, 2005
     
    Barry Bonds may not be lying
    The press is blasting baseball star Barry Bonds for being a liar. As I understand it, their main complaint is that he testified before the Balco grand jury that he used a substance called "the clear" (and now called THG) without knowing that it was a steroid.

    I don't see how Bonds could have known. THG was completely unknown to modern science, and no publication had classified it as a steroid. It was only afterwards that biochemists decided that it was appropriate to classify it as a steroid.

    Bonds took a variety of nutritional supplements, medications, and ointments. Bonds is not a biochemist. Baseball players are known for being superstitious. It is possible that Bonds knew that "the clear" was a secretly engineered synthetic steroid that would have been banned if the authorities knew about it, but it is also possible that he thought that it was an ointment prepared from legally-available ingredients. Somebody must have persuaded him that it was good stuff, but I don't expect him to have had any biochemical insights on it.


    Tuesday, Feb 22, 2005
     

    A leftist-evolutionist-atheist-Kerry-voter named Mike sends this evolutionist NY Times article and writes:
    Eternal vigilance is required if we are to deny the hoards of ignorant religious rightists even the smallest victory.

    Intelligent design is complete bulls**t! A "scientific theory" must be testable. You might as well say g-d is out there bending light rays and do away with general relativity altogether! Certainly fits observation and goes a long way toward simplifying physics, no? Is your intelligent designer also pulling down all those apples? If so, we don't need Newton's laws either. Clearly, if you pursue this far enough, we don't need to teach science at all. Just extend Sunday school to the rest of the week.

    I had to obscure the profanity in his message, but the word "g-d" is just as he wrote it! Apparently he thinks that the word "God" is more offensive than the word bulls**t.

    To answer his question, Newton's laws are useful whether or not you think that God has anything to will pulling the apple off of the tree. Intelligent design is not a theory about what God can do; it is a theory about the limitations of Darwinian evolution.

    Update: Mike sends an "off the record" explanation for his spelling and his own peculiar style of self-censorship. Hmmm. Maybe you can figure out.


    Monday, Feb 21, 2005
     
    Right-wing conspiracy
    Bob asks why there aren't any right-wing pro-abortion talk radio hosts, and suggests that there must be a vast right-wing conspiracy to stop them.

    I think that his question is a bit like asking for people with Rush Limbaugh's views except that they want to raise taxes. For some reason, right-wingers would rather listen to anti-abortion rhetoric, and left-wingers would rather listen to pro-abortion rhetoric. The situation seems fairly symmetrical to me, so I don't know why he thinks it is a right-wing conspiracy.

    Now Bob writes that it is really an anti-abortion conspiracy, which he insists on calling an "anti-choice" conspiracy, and he suggested Barry Goldwater as a pro-abortion conservative. When I told him that Goldwater is dead, he complained about "Stalinist double talk"!

     
    Blake murder trial
    The Robert Blake trial gets wackier all the time. The latest story is that Crack-Smoking Monkeys Hit Blake Case.
     
    Terry Gross on NPR
    If you want to see how biased NPR is, listen to Terry Gross. She has a radio interview program. Last week, she had a rare interview with a right-winger, Boyden Gray, to balance an interview with a left-winger (Ralph Neas) the previous day on the same subject -- judicial appointments.

    Gross tried her best to hammer Gray with hostile questions the entire time. She only tossed easy softballs balls to Neas, even as he repeatedly made false statements.

    Neas talked about the "founding parents", and rambled on various paranoid conspiracy theories about the Federalist Society and our "constitution in exile". He said "we could lose ... the constitutional basis for progressive government." He said that Bush would not be President, but for a 5-4 Supreme Court majority. Actually Bush would have also been elected president under most of the scenarios involving possibilities of different actions from the Court.

    When asked for specifics, all Neas could do was to misquote Priscilla Owen being criticized by Alberto Gonzalez. What Gonzalez actually said was:

    The dissenting opinions suggest that the exceptions to the general rule of notification should be very rare and require a high standard of proof…. Thus, to construe the [statute] so narrowly as to eliminate bypasses, or to create hurdles that simplyare not to be found in the words of the statute, would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism.”50He concluded his concurrence by responding to Justice Hecht’s additional criticism in the present case: “JusticeHecht charges that our decision demonstrates the Court’s determination to construe the [statute] as the Courtbelieves [it] should be construed and not as the Legislature intended….I respectfully disagree.
    The phrase "unconscionable act of judicial activism" referred to some hypothetical position that was not taken by Owen or anyone else.

    Saturday, Feb 19, 2005
     
    Summers transcript
    Harvard Pres. L. Summers finally released the transcript of his controversial remarks. I don't anything that ought to be controversial. It looks like conventional wisdom to me. It will be interesting to see if anyone tries to refute any of it.

    Friday, Feb 18, 2005
     
    Teaching gun safety
    A NY Times letter says:
    For those who still can't grasp how irresponsible abstinence-only programs are, consider an analogy of a general safety class: A teacher informs students that shooting guns is dangerous, so they should not do that. A student says: "I have a gun, I have a right to shoot it, and I'm going to shoot it. Are there any safety measures I can take to reduce the chances that I hurt myself or someone else?" The teacher (being prohibited from discussing gun use safety) says, "Just don't shoot your gun."
    Bob thinks that this is a good analogy, and that gun safety classes should start in 4th grade.

    I think that the letter writer is being sarcastic. The local schools are not teaching kids how to shoot guns, as far as I know. They seem to have some sort of weird phobia about guns, and do not allow toy guns. They just tell the kids not to touch or shoot guns.

    Bob writes:

    I too am opposed to toy guns. Toy guns lead to poor gun safety and poor marksmanship. Kids should be taught with real guns. Kids should also be taught to hunt so they can see what guns do when you shoot something other than tin cans or paper. It also gives a good perspective on economics by putting food on the table.
    Bob probably thinks that the best way to impress a kid with the power of guns is to let him pull the trigger and watch the bullet kill an animal. And then eat the animal.

    Thursday, Feb 17, 2005
     
    Teacher gripes
    The Time magazine cover story is on What Teachers Hate About Parents. It has a long list of petty gripes, such as parents who don't show up at school, parents who do show up at school, parents who ask questions, parents who expect teachers to teach, etc.

    I hope that they will have a follow-up story on what parents hate about the schools.


    Wednesday, Feb 16, 2005
     
    Lucky we had global warming
    Bob writes:
    The cover story in the March 2005 issue of Scientific American is entitled "How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?". The blurb on the cover is "Did Humans Stop an Ice Age? 8,000 Years of Global Warming". It appears that human agriculture and animal husbandry may have prevented an ice age through global warming. This is a blow both to the climate change fanatics and the PETA wackos. The March issue is not yet on the sciam.com site.

    Tuesday, Feb 15, 2005
     
    Darwin Day
    Here is the latest from the leftist-secular-pseudoscientist-atheist-humanists:
    A group of scientists started the non-profit Darwin Day Celebration seeking to make February 12th, the birthday of Charles Darwin, an international celebration of science, verifiable knowledge, reason and humanity. They are working on to organize massive celebrations during the "big year" of 2009, when the Darwin legacy will be 200 years old, but in the meantime they have a directory of events you can attend on or around February 12th every year, and they can register your own event, too. Considering the recent intelligent design trends, will you celebrate Darwin and Evolution?
    it sounds like these folks have some unfulfilled cravings for religious beliefs, ceremonies, and traditions.

    Saturday, Feb 12, 2005
     
    Voting for Boxer
    Rich Wingerter writes in the Si Valley paper:
    Sen. Barbara Boxer's style is so refreshing that I'm going to start voting for her.
    She has already been elected 3 times, and will not be on the ballot again for 6 years, if ever. I think that she is an embarrassment to California.

    Tuesday, Feb 08, 2005
     
    Attacking anti-evolutionists
    Bob writes this letter to the NY Times:
    Professor Behe disingenuously tells us that intelligent design is not religion. Behe then claims, "we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life." Lawyers and creationists concocted the doctrine of intelligent design to circumvent the US Supreme Court decision that creationism can not be taught in government supported schools. The lawyerly weasel words "involved in life" illustrate the point.

    Behe mentions William Paley, but omits the fact that Paley based his argument for design on the problem of explaining how the complexity of the eye could evolve. The evolution of the eye is now well understood, but this evidence has not disposed of the design argument. No evidence can dispose of the design argument, even in principle, because intelligent design is religion. Knowledge of biology is on the threshold of explaining the details of speciation. It is tragic that when speciation is worked out, creationists will not allow it to be taught in high schools. Behe ends his argument by pointing out that this is a political argument. The creationists have the advantage that the public has not been properly educated in evolution. Science has the advantage of actually delivering the goods and providing undeniable evidence to any objective student. In the end, science will leave Behe and his fellow believers behind. Unfortunately the students who are deprived of an understanding of evolution, which is the organizing principle of biology, will also be left behind.

    The NY Times published this letter already:
    Re "Afraid to Discuss Evolution" (editorial, Feb. 4):

    Not teaching evolution affects more than just the biological sciences. Paleontology, a joint science of biology and geology, cannot be properly understood without evolution, nor can pure geology, or carbon 14 dating, a technique used by geology, anthropology, and archaeology. Any student interested in any affected disciplines and not exposed to evolution would arrive at the next-level class educationally crippled.

    But an even worse casualty would be the conceptual understanding of the scientific method, a procedure whose goal is to completely explain all of a discipline's phenomena. Creationism requires a creator and intelligent design requires an intelligent designer, both of whom intervene at any time to make an otherwise complete explanation moot.

    Richard G. Buchanan
    New York, Feb. 4, 2005
    The writer is a former professor of psychology.

    and this review.

    Monday, Feb 07, 2005
     
    Right to a jury trial
    John sends this article about prosecutors griping about the 6A right for a criminal defendant "to be confronted with the witnesses against him".
    In the past, courts allowed statements from witnesses who don't attend trial if the defendant had a previous opportunity to cross-examine the person, if other courts have historically allowed similar statements or if the statement is deemed reliable by a judge.

    "Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the opinion. "This is not what the Sixth Amendment prescribes."

    Most of the prosecutorial abuses occur in domestic violence cases, where feminists have demanded that husbands be prosecuted even if the wife does not make a criminal complaint. Such prosecutions commonly have the effect of destroying marriages against the wishes of both spouses.
     
    Crazy application of copyright law
    Chicago paid $270M to create its new Millennium Park but you need permission from a private party to photograph it. I thought that 17 USC 120 was supposed to prevent this sort of nonsense.
     
    Things professors cannot say
    Academic freedom has been in the news. There is a big difference between an fraud like Ward Churchill and profs who are punished for telling the truth. Here is a UNLV prof who may have his pay docked because he said that very young, very old, and homosexual people tend to plan less for the future, and that couples with children tend to plan more than couples without.

    Here is more info about the student who was kicked out of college for his spanking views. His rejection letter said:

    "I have grave concerns regarding the mismatch between your personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals," leading to the decision not to admit him, Leogrande wrote.
    Thanks to the Volokh blog, which some other interesting tidbits about academic freedom.

    Friday, Feb 04, 2005
     
    Overlawyered
    John writes:
    The widely-known overlawyered web site, hosted by the excellent writer Walter Olson, reports a "stunning" item posted on Alexander's blog about "My aunt, Anne Schlafly"!

    Reforming this kind of abusive class action is a top priority of the Republican Congress. Yesterday the Class Action Fairness Act (S. 5) was passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. See Wash Times, NY Times, Houston Chronicle, SF paper. In the last Congress this was one of many bills that passed the House but died in a Senate filibuster.

    Anne confirms the story:
    Just remember that I had to settle a frivolous lawsuit on silver dragees. A fishing lawyer named me in a class-action suit. The case never went to trial as all defendants settled. The settlement was not to sell to residents of California. The result: no one in California is able to buy dragrees, even though the California Food and Drug Agency has deemed them safe. And I have lost sales.
    There are many examples of these abuses, and I never hear any good things coming from such lawsuits.

    Wednesday, Feb 02, 2005
     
    Judge throws law to the wolves
    A supremacist federal judge has ruled against regulations that let ranchers defend their livestock from attacking wild wolves.

    Tuesday, Feb 01, 2005
     
    No academic freedom to discuss spanking
    Here is another story about narrow-minded college deans:
    LeMoyne expels man over paper

    While students are guaranteed the freedom of speech, LeMoyne College's recent actions against a student have raised questions of whether or not academic papers are the place to exercise this right.

    LeMoyne College expelled Scott McConnell, a student from its Masters of Education program, for writing a paper in which he advocated the use of corporal punishment in schools, he said.

    The paper, written for a class on classroom management, originally earned McConnell an A-. However, when he attempted to enroll in classes for the spring semester, he found he couldn't.

    "LeMoyne doesn't believe students should be able to express their own views," McConnell said. "If you differ from our philosophical ideal you will be expelled from our college."

    McConnell, who hopes to become an elementary school teacher, was informed last Tuesday that he couldn't continue at the school.

    "LeMoyne has handled the situation poorly," he said.

    McConnell was raised in Oklahoma, where corporal punishment was used when he was a student, he said. In the fourth grade he was paddled by a teacher for being unruly.

    "It worked. I never talked out of turn again," he said.

    The issues that this case raises are very complicated, said Joseph Shedd, chair of the teaching and leadership programs in Syracuse University's School of Education.

    It is about more than just a student's right to express their own opinions, he said.

    "There is no clean dividing line between a person's opinions and his or her ability to make responsible professional judgments," Shedd said in an e-mail.

    He pointed to change in socially acceptable behavior over time to illustrate that standards change. America has evolved from a society in which different genders and different races have been viewed as having different academic ability, Shedd said.

    That last paragraph is puzzling. Apparently college officials believe that America is evolving into a place where certain truths and opinions can no longer be expressed or debated, even in an academic context that encourages the free flow of ideas.

    The student's view are not even that unusual. Most schools had corporal punishment a couple of generations ago, and I believe that it is still legal in 23 states.

    In other news today:

    The survey found that 36 percent of the students believe that newspapers should not be allowed to publish without government approval of stories, and 17 percent of the students believe that the public is prohibited from expressing unpopular opinions.

    Overall, the survey found that high school students express little appreciation for the First Amendment's tenets: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to assemble and the right to petition the government.

    Nearly three-quarters of student respondents said they either don't know how they feel about First Amendment freedoms or take them for granted.

    If a student can get expelled from school for expressing a common opinion in a term paper, then it is no wonder that some students think that they are "prohibited from expressing unpopular opinions".

    I found these notes for a U.Minn. course on "What Does Research Say About the Effects of Physical Punishment on Children?". The notes have a lot of anti-spanking propaganda, but if you scroll down to the bottom you can find this:

    G. Arguments that have been given in support of physical punishment of children

    Note to Trainers: this material is provided for your own background in case anyone should ask about the recent media coverage that especially Diana Baumrind (to a lesser degree Bob Larzelere) has received. This is not intended to be presented.

    1. It stops the misbehavior (especially critical in dangerous situations).
    2. It shows the children who's boss.
    3. Is "part of the parent's cultural and/or religious heritage."
    4. Is a necessary "last resort" when children are "willfully defiant" (Dobson; Trumbull; Larzelere).
    5. Baumrind: "Spanking is not a generative cause of aggression or pathology in children when used appropriately.". . .
      • is controlled
      • is contingent on the child's behavior
      • the child is forewarned
      • parent uses more positive than negative incentives
      • is immediate
      • parent is calm
      • is used privately
      • is carried out in conjunction with reasoning
      • the intention is to correct, not to retaliate
      • is mild; does not escalate to abuse
      • children are not under 18 months or past puberty
        (Source: Pediatrics 98: 830, 857, Oct. 1996)
    6. Larzelere: "The evidence to date suggests that nonabusive spanking has generally beneficial effects* on children under the following limited conditions." . . .
      • with children aged 2 to 6 years
      • used less than weekly
      • used at nonabusive levels of severity, preferably two open-handed swats to the buttocks
      • leaving no bruise
      • used privately
      • used with reasoning
      • used primarily as back-up for less aversive discipline responses (such as reasoning and time-out)
      • resulting in an intermediate level of child distress
      • by loving parents
        (Sources: Pediatrics 98:827, Oct. 1996; FAMSCI post, Aug. 1997)
    Note especially that this point of view and the supporting research are "not intended to be presented". They do want want people to know about research that supports spanking.

    Here is a survey of research on nonabusive spanking.

    George writes:

    The overwhelming majority of academic child psychologists are opposed to spanking. Why shouldn't colleges insist on teaching what is correct?
    They oppose spanking for ideological reasons. Some of them naively think that war and other violence will be abolished if we would only raise a generation of unspanked children. They have no scientific research to show that spanking is harmful.

    Monday, Jan 31, 2005
     
    Forced prostitution or lose welfare benefits
    This UK story reports on the current German welfare state:
    A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

    Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers. ...

    Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. ...

    "There is now nothing in the law to stop women from being sent into the sex industry," said Merchthild Garweg, a lawyer from Hamburg who specialises in such cases. "The new regulations say that working in the sex industry is not immoral any more, and so jobs cannot be turned down without a risk to benefits." ...

    "Now that prostitution is no longer considered by the law to be immoral, there is really nothing but the goodwill of the job centres to stop them from pushing women into jobs they don't want to do."

    Meanwhile, the European Union has formally told Turkey that it must legalize adultery if it wants to join.

    Sunday, Jan 30, 2005
     
    Scientist punished for allowing criticism of Darwinism
    Andy sends this article:
    The career of a prominent researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington is in jeopardy after he published a peer-reviewed article by a leading proponent of intelligent design, analternative to evolutionary theory dismissed by the science and education establishment as a tool of religious conservatives. ...

    The complaint says the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Sternberg's supervisor to look into the matter.

    "First,he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. ... He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; ... he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?'

    The supervisor recounted the conversation to Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."

    The complaint, according to the Journal column, says Coddington took away Sternberg's office, which prevents access to the specimen collection she needs. Sternberg also was assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated toevolution.

    "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out."

    Meyer'sarticle, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," cites mainstream biologists and paleontologists from schools such as the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford who are critical of certain aspects of Darwinism.

    You can read the controversial scientific review article here. If there are any real scientists with a substantive disagreement, then they should publish a rebuttal.

    Bob defends monolithic evolutionism:

    I read the review article. The purpose of peer review is to prevent nonsense like Meyer's article from being published as science. I can't imagine how that article made it through peer review without a conspiracy on the part of Sternberg to find creationist referees. There should be an investigation to clear up this point. The fact that Sternberg claims to be surprised that creationism is scientifically disreputable shows his disingenuousness. I will be interested to see who hires Sternberg.

    Here is evidence that when the details of speciation are worked out, it will not be allowed to be taught in high school, just as evolution is not taught because of pressure by the creationists.

    Notice that Bob implicitly admits that the "details of speciation" have not been worked out yet. I wonder if the evolutionists are willing to allow students to learn that.

    Chris send this blog comment:

    The Council ... would have deemed the paper inappropriate ..., the journal will not publish a rebuttal to the thesis of the paper, the superiority of intelligent design (ID) over evolution as an explanation of the emergence of Cambrian body-plan diversity. The Council endorses a resolution on ID published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which observes that there is no credible scientific evidence supporting ID as a testable hypothesis to explain the origin of organic diversity. Accordingly, the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.
    It is very strange when scientists argue that the integrity of the scientific process requires that published claims not be rebutted.

    Bob writes:

    Not strange at all. I learned in Philosophy 101 that it is impossible to prove that there is no invisible person in the room. That is exactly the case with ID. Similarly, the PTO refuses to examine patents on perpetual motion machines. Creationists get what they deserve: no respect.

    Friday, Jan 28, 2005
     
    Zero intelligence
    Sometime I wonder whether school officials are being deliberately stupid for some ideological reason. The Zero Intelligence blog documents such stupidity almost daily.

    John sends this story:

    The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee, because they feel it runs afoul of the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

    "No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards," Newman said. "It’s our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this."

    The administrators agreed, Newman said, that a spelling bee doesn’t meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards -- because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind.

    "It’s about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all others behind. That’s contrary to No Child Left Behind," Newman said.

    A spelling bee, she continued, is about "some kids being winners, some kids being losers."

    As a result, the spelling bee "sends a message that this isn’t an all-kids movement," Newman said.

    Furthermore, professional organizations now frown on competition at the elementary school level and are urging participation in activities that avoid winners, Newman said. That’s why there are no sports teams at the elementary level, she said as an example.

    The emphasis today, she said, is on building self-esteem in all students.

    "You have to build positive self-esteem for all kids, so they believe they’re all winners," she said. "You want to build positive self-esteem so that all kids can get to where they want to go."

    A spelling bee only benefits a few, not all, students, the elementary principals and Newman agreed, so it was canceled.

    Of course, No Child Left Behind says nothing of the kind.

    A Fark reader suggests this Vonnegut story.

    Bob writes:

    Obviously it is stupid to eliminate a spelling bee for the reasons given in the story. Here are some good reasons to completely eliminate all English spelling bees.
    Bob refers to an R.P.Feynman essay about changing some English spellings to be more phonetic.
     
    LA train wreck
    Andy sends this news excerpt:
    Fox News Network January 27, 2005 Thursday
    Bill O'Reilly with Guest Steven Camarota

    O'REILLY: "Impact" segment tonight, authorities are still investigating Juan Manuel Alvarez, who is charged with causing that train crash north of L.A. that killed 11 people yesterday. Alvarez left his Jeep Cherokee on a railroad track and watched the accident unfold. He's being charged with 11 counts of murder and may face the death penalty.

    "The Factor" has not been able to determine whether Alvarez is an American citizen at this point. In addition the U.S. State Department has issued a warning to Americans about growing violence I should say in northern Mexico, where millions of illegal aliens have been based.

    Joining us now from Washington is Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.

    You know, it's funny. We've been trying to get -- all indications are that this Alvarez is an American citizen. But nobody can tell us for sure. After two days, and this guy's in the news from coast to coast. They don't know, they can't find out. Isn't that -- shouldn't they be able to?

    STEVEN CAMAROTA, PHD, CTR. FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: Well, unfortunately, we don't really have a very good system in place for determining whether people are legally in the country or not very quickly. And so it's not really all that surprising that we arrest someone. And well, we're not sure.

    O'REILLY: Well, can't they get a Social Security number off of him or something like that? I mean, I thought that was the way to verify if somebody was legal or not.

    CAMAROTA: Yes. I mean, if they make a good effort, they probably could determine it. What's not clear is maybe they know and they're just not releasing it.

    We do know that Juan Manuel Alvarez is a victim of the family court. According to the NY Times, he because suicidal 2 months ago when the family court ordered him not to see his 2 kids. His wife asked for, and got, a restraining order.
     
    Grokster
    Andy writes:
    The amicus brief joined by Christian Coalition and Concerned Women of America is written by Viet Dinh, credited by some with having authored the Patriot Act when he worked for Ashcroft. The brief is a slick piece of deception, claiming that we need to shut down peer-to-peer copying systems to restrain child pornography on the internet.

    The argument is ridiculous. This case is about copyright infringement, and child pornography does not use copyright laws in any way.

    Christian Coalition and CWA, and in fact all the named amici, apparently joined a brief that they did not pay for or understand. So what is behind this brief? Check out the brief's footnote 1 disclosures required by the Supreme Court:

    "Petitioners and Respondents have consented to the filing of this brief. Consistent with Rule 37.6, this brief is not authored in whole or in part by counsel for any party. No person, other than amici or their counsel, has made a monetary contribution to the preparation or submission of this brief. Counsel of record is an independent, non-executive director of the News Corporation, parent company of Petitioner Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Bancroft Associates PLLC provides ongoing public affairs and political strategy advisory services to the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Pictures Association of America, of which some Petitioners are members."

    In other words, the author of the brief is a (paid?) director of the parent company of the Petitioner. The law firm of record on the brief is hired by RIAA, the driving force behind the Petition.

    The brief does not even claim to be in compliance with Rule 37.6, but merely says it is "consistent with" it. In reviewing hundreds of amicus briefs, I have never seen such an absurd circumvention of Rule 37.6 as above.

    Oh, what has become of the once-leading conservative organizations?!

    You can find the briefs here and here. The case threatens to ban technology just because it can be used for copyright infringement.
     
    Praising Scalia, court book
    Focus on the Family says:
    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is once again making a plea for judges to focus on the U.S. Constitution—instead of their own political leanings.

    Scalia, who has been mentioned as a candidate to become the next chief justice if the ailing William Rehnquist steps down, said in a recent speech that the Constitution says what it says "and does not say what it does not say." ...

    To learn more about the problem of liberal judges disregarding the constitution—and the role that play in judicial tyranny, we recommend an excellent book: "The Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop it," by Phyllis Schlafly.


    Thursday, Jan 27, 2005
     
    State of Fear
    Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," takes on global warming and climate change, and it finally gets some scientific criticism here:
    He writes that our paper "concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century." But we didn't say that. Instead, we outlined plenty of technologies that must be further developed to stop a probable several-degree rise in global temperatures. We called for a Manhattan Project-style effort to explore technologies we already have.
    It doesn't take a Manhattan Project to explore existing technologies; it would only be used to develop new technologies.
    Further, he invokes the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and Lysenkoism (in the former Soviet Union) as examples of mainstream scientists being led astray. But these were politically driven ideologies.
    I can why these scientists take offense, but global warming is ideologically driven. For years, anti-progress leftists have used environmentalism as an excuse to attack economic development. Those arguments have been rebutted by the fact that advancing technology has generally made the environment better. Recent arguments that we have an underpopulation problem can be found here and here. Now with global warming they think that they have the perfect no-growth argument, because just about everything seems to generate some warmth.

    Bob writes:

    I still don't understand why anyone is worried about global warming instead of the next ice age which will put NY City under 50 feet of ice and is due to start soon if ice ages follow the pattern established long before humans were an environmental factor.

    As to underpopulation, forget about it. Kids no longer run in the black by a long shot. Best case is that they put you in a decent nursing home. More women can support themselves by doing something other than raising kids. No one likes traffic jams. Most people have to drive at least a half hour to find a place to shoot, when I was a kid it was about 10 minutes. A brief look at the life style of friends with kids, even if they are still married, is a powerful ad for Planned Parenthood. The communitarian sensibility that "it takes a village to raise a child" spells increased government interference in and regulation of parenthood. It seems like everyone associated with kids is eaten up with dumb ass. The schools have pathetic teaching and perpetual meetings where they come up with zero tolerance policies. CPS has a reputation worse than the NAZIs. Family courts rival the Soviet Union in dispensing injustice. The Boy Scouts are under assault. Decreasing reproduction makes kids even more precious and spoiled. The global warming argument is a distant millionth among reasons to avoid having kids. Japan seems to be doing fine with a decreasing and aging population.

    Worrying about global warming gives an excuse to restrict CO2 emissions. The best catalytic converters can't do anything about them.

    Tuesday, Jan 25, 2005
     
    Stupid lawyer with no sense of humor
    John sends this Newsday column. from a lawyer defending the arrest of 2 men for telling lawyer jokes:
    Mocking the legal system in a courthouse can be a corrosive force to jurisprudence. If permitted, it would attack the very fabric of our democracy by creating a judicial environment that ridicules and derides those who not just serve the courts but, far more important, those citizens who seek justice. Ultimately, scornful, derisive behavior inside our courthouses would threaten the very laughter that is so crucial to who we are as a free and open society.

    Laughter has its place. But to the pair of self-proclaimed activists it shouldn't come as a shock to learn that a courthouse is not a comedy club. As the proverbial bartender said to the two disorderly drunks, "Take it outside."

    If Lois Carter Schlissel had understood the facts, then she'd know that the pair were "arrested while waiting in line to get into the courthouse". They were outside!
     
    Copernican revolution
    Bob writes:
    This shows that Galileo believed that the Copernicun position was revolutionary:
    [Galileo to Kepler, 1597] ....Like you, I accepted the Copernicun position several years ago and discovered from thence the causes of many natural effects which are doubtless inexplicable by the current theories. ... Copernicus himself, our master, who procured immortal fame ...
    Kepler's reply mentions Plato and Pythogoras, and some of the Pythagoreans believed in a heliocentric system.

    Copernicus's famous book was titled, "On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres", and that refers to the planetary orbs revolving around a point near the Sun. For 100s of years, that's what people meant by the Copernican Revolution.

    I think that Galileo is just saying that he agrees with much of the Copernican model.

     
    Clarence Thomas' America
    The blog site Clarence Thomas' America has a nice description of how Justice Thomas views differ from the rest of the Supreme Court. The purpose of the site is to attack Thomas, but it just further convinces me that he is our best justice.

    Monday, Jan 24, 2005
     
    Man-made greenhouse gases saved world from big freeze
    John sends this article.
    HUMANS may have unwittingly saved themselves from a looming ice age by interfering with the Earth's climate, according to a new study.

    Sunday, Jan 23, 2005
     
    NY Times wants to suppress criticism of evolution
    A long NY Times editorial says:
    Critics of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. ...

    The Cobb County fight centers on a sticker that the board inserted into a new biology textbook to placate opponents of evolution. ...

    "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."

    Although the board clearly thought this was a reasonable compromise, and many readers might think it unexceptional, it is actually an insidious effort to undermine the science curriculum. ...

    A more honest sticker would describe evolution as the dominant theory in the field and an extremely fruitful scientific tool. ...

    Andy writes:
    The genie is out of the bottle on allowing criticism of evolution. Not even the ACLU has enough attorneys to stop the criticisms. This will be yet another example of the internet destroying any censor standing in its way. Add the criticism of evolution to the growing list reflecting the power and influence of the internet. No newspaper publishes any meaningful criticism of evolution, but the internet is awash in it and that is driving the changes in schools.

    Why are newspapers so out of step with the internet on this issue? I'll bet nearly 100% of newspaper editors are diehard evolution supporters. Of course, the vast majority of newspaper editors were also Kerry supporters.

    Bob writes:
    Do you seriously claim that the Cobb county warning stickers and Intelligent Design constitute criticism of evolution? This is like saying that the claims that the earth is fixed and immovable because the bible says that the sun rises, or that the value of pi is 3 because the bible says so constitute criticism of physics and mathematics. People are free to put this on the internet, but teaching it in schools is another issue.

    I would like to know how creationists deal with the lightning advances in understanding life such as this Nature article.

    The sticker says that evolution is a theory, not a fact. If you read the editorial carefully, you'll notice that it admits that the sticker is 100% correct. The editorial really has to strain hard to try to argue that Georgia students should not get the truth.

    I am not sure how how a technical advance in the molecular biology of DNA related to Darwinian evolution. Apparently some RNA-like molecules can turn genes on and off. Darwin didn't even believe in genes.

    Bob replies:

    Typical wacko argument. Attack evolution based on 150 year old science. Keep up the good work.
    I am not attacking evolution, I am attacking the NY Times editorial which focuses on the theory of evolution as it was understood by Darwin.

    Bob writes:

    The NY Times article mentions "Charles Darwin's theory of evolution", "Darwinism", "Darwinian natural selection", and "evolution" interchangeably. Darwin gets proper credit for priority in discovering and articulating the principle of evolution by natural selection. Why would the NY Times wish to limit the discussion to evolution as understood by Darwin? The idea is absurd. Another ridiculous straw-man argument based on feigned misunderstanding.

    Dorothy Rabinowitz on the The Journal Editorial Report weighs in on the Dover county school board here.

    The NY Times does indeed want to limit the discussion of evolution. Read the editorial. It does not want schoolchildren to be exposed to any criticism of Darwinism. The NY Times position is fundamentally anti-science.

    Bob complains about "religion thinly disguised as science". Real scientist do not goto court to try to prevent students from being encouraged to think critically. It is the evolutionists who behave like narrow-mind religious propagandists who know that their dogma cannot stand serious scrutiny.

    I suggest that the Georgia school board prepare a new sticker that says:

    A supremacist federal judge has ordered the truth removed from this sticker because he suspicious about the motives of a school board that would want to tell the truth about a science book.

    Thursday, Jan 20, 2005
     
    Problem with big bang
    Joe writes:
    Is this a real problem for Big Bang? And how do you rate status of Big Bang now?

    Quasar with enormous redshift found embedded in nearby spiral galaxy with far lower redshift: unsolvable riddle for big bang astronomy

    I dunno, but I don't think that you'll find the answer in Genesis.

    Tuesday, Jan 18, 2005
     
    Forcing wives to betray husbands
    John sends this Seattle Pi story about prosecutors who want to make it easier to force a wife to testify against her husband.
    "The bottom line is, accurate and relevant information should be provided to the jury in making a decision about guilt or innocence," said Tom McBride, executive secretary of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. "Why in the world does the institution of marriage need to suppress information from a jury automatically?"

    But the proposal troubles defense attorneys, who say it undermines the whole purpose of the centuries-old privilege -- to protect the sanctity of marriage -- and gives way too much power to prosecutors.

    They say people shouldn't have to look over their shoulders all the time, worried their own spouses might turn against them someday in a courtroom.

    The marital privilege should be strengthened, not weakened. The state should treat a married couple as a unit, and not use its power to bust up marriages. Just as no man should be forced to testify against himself, no man should be forced to testify against his wife.

    Monday, Jan 17, 2005
     
    Mandatory prison sentences
    John sends this Debra J. Saunders column in the SF paper:
    THE DEPARTMENT of Justice reacted as expected to last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed federal judges to set sentences outside federal guidelines. A spokesman said the feds are "disappointed" because this ruling will lead to more disparity in sentencing.

    Bunk. For one thing, that statement suggests that there is less disparity with mandatory guidelines. That's simply not true. There are huge disparities under the present system. Career drug dealers can see their sentences shaved substantially if they testify against other players in their drug ring -- even people below them -- while those new to the trade don't have the knowledge to follow suit.

    There also is disparity between venues. Supporters of the system argue that uniform guidelines mean that offenders serve the same time for the same crime, no matter who or where the judge is. But the present system transfers discretion from judges to prosecutors. Some U.S. attorneys go for the absolute maximum -- decades or more -- for first-time nonviolent drug offenders, while others show more restraint.

    There is the disparity between local and federal prosecutions. As Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco two years ago, a young man prosecuted for possession of five grams of crack would serve months if caught by local police, but a minimum of five years if caught on federal property and prosecuted by federal officials.

    She's right. She is probably the only sane writer for that newspaper.

    John also sends this LA Times column in which Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz blames it all on Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    In the sentencing guidelines case, a 5-4 court majority ruled that a sentencing judge may not increase a defendant's sentence based on the judge's resolution of disputed facts. All such disputes must be submitted to a jury. ...

    The second majority ruled that it would be perfectly all right for a sentencing judge to resolve disputed facts against a defendant and to add years to his sentence based on them, so long as the judge said he was doing so at his discretion, not because he was forced to do it by the guidelines. ...

    The swing justice in both instances was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who failed to explain how she could come to what the other eight justices believed were two irreconcilable positions.

    The core problem is having women on the Supreme Court. They hold too many contradictory positions in their heads.

    Mike writes:

    Are you suggesting that they all be required to attend Harvard so Summers can set them straight? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6838216/

    If this is how you feel, how can you support Bush's choice of Rice for Colin's job? Careful, you don't want to appear contradictory.

    We have two women on the US Supreme Court, and they both seem to lack the crisp logical thinking ability that ought to be a pre-requisite for the job. Sure, some women have the ability, but they seem to be scarce in the judiciary.

    The Secretary of State is a diplomat. It requires a different set of skills.

    John writes:

    Last week, Andy lambasted Justice Breyer for his opinion in the sentencing cases, Booker and Fanfan.

    Andy wrote, "Justice Breyer, who initially helped write the Guidelines nearly two decades ago, was the point man for the defense. ... He then proceeded to engage in an unprecedented display of statutory gerrymandering to salvage his progeny."

    But Andy failed to draw the obvious conclusion that follows from these assertions, or at least to post the query: Why wasn't Breyer bound by the canons of judicial ethics to recuse himself from the case?

    See these posts: http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_01_16_corner-archive.asp#050533 http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_01_16_corner-archive.asp#050528 http://southernappeal.blogspot.com/2005_01_16_southernappeal_archive.html#110605406609962549 http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1105364116296

    Now why didn't Andy think of that??

    Andy responds:
    John omitted how he and Roger generally defended the decision, and were happy to shift blame (unjustifiably) to Congress.

    Like many talking heads that dominate TV and radio, John is more interested in complaining about a lack of recusal than the merits of the issue. Of course the issue of recusal is implicit in my remarks, but I emphasize the more important point that Breyer was substantively wrong to hold in favor of his own work.

    Not me. I think that Breyer's decision is entirely incorrect. I do think that Congress needs to take some action on the sentencing guidelines, especially now that Breyer has made a mess of them.

    Friday, Jan 14, 2005
     
    Social Security angst
    Joe recommends this TechCentral article that traces the Social Security shortfall to a decision in the 1970s to index payments to wage inflation instead of price inflation.

    Thursday, Jan 13, 2005
     
    Evolution is a theory
    John sends this Georgia story:
    A federal judge in Atlanta has declared unconstitutional the evolution disclaimers placed inside science text books by the Cobb County school system and ordered the "stickers" removed immediately. ...

    The stickers send "a message that the school board agrees with the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists and creationists," [Judge] Cooper said. "The school board has effectively improperly entangled itself with religion by appearing to take a position. Therefore, the sticker must be removed from all of the textbooks into which it has been placed." ...

    The disclaimers read, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

    You can see the sticker here.

    Apparently some of the testimony focussed on the definition of a theory:

    The plaintiffs' attorney, Michael Manely, during the trial hit hard on the fact that a scientific theory is not the same as "theory" applied in everyday life. He called on several scientists to testify to that effect, including biologist and textbook author Kenneth Miller.

    Testimony from most of the five school board members who took the stand indicated they had not distinguished between an everyday use of theory and scientific theory.

    The evolutionist claim that scientists and laymen use the word "theory" to mean different things is just plain nutty. There is no difference. The evolutionists are lying to promote their agenda.

    Mike writes:

    You're wrong again. The Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary lists 6 definitions for the word:

    Main Entry:the-o-ry
    Function:noun
    Inflected Form:plural -ries
    Etymology:Late Latin theoria, from Greek the*ria, from the*rein
    Date:1592
    1 : the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another
    2 : abstract thought : SPECULATION
    3 : the general or abstract principles of a body of fact, a science, or an art *music theory*
    4 a : a belief, policy, or procedure proposed or followed as the basis of action *her method is based on the theory that all children want to learn* b : an ideal or hypothetical set of facts, principles, or circumstances — often used in the phrase in theory *in theory, we have always advocated freedom for all*
    5 : a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena *the wave theory of light*
    6 a : a hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument or investigation b : an unproved assumption : CONJECTURE c : a body of theorems presenting a concise systematic view of a subject *theory of equations*
    synonyms see HYPOTHESIS

    I agree with Manely and Miller in distinguished between a scientific theory as defined in 5 and what those misguided board members certainly intended as a denigration of Darwin's ideas (by taking the def in 2 or 6). Evolution is a scientific theory not least of all because it explains the fossil record and relations among existing species; it's NOT unfounded speculation or an hypothesis assumed for the sake of argument.

    No, I think that the school board would be happy with definition 5. If a physics book referred to the wave theory of light, then I think that both physicists and George school boards would be happy saying that it is theory, not a fact, regarding the nature of light.

    Evolutionists are uncomfortable with the word "theory" because they seek the dogmatic certainty of what they regard as their religious rivals. They are just not happy saying evolution is a definition 5 theory.

    I don't even agree that the school board was intending to denigrate Darwin. It appears to me that the school board was suspicious about evolution being used to explain the origin of life, and Darwin himself never believed that evolution could explain the origin of life.

     
    Pollution cools
    John sends this Reuters story:
    Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100, according to research to be aired on British television on Thursday.
    This could be yet another story about how environmentalists are worsening the environment.

    Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005
     
    Arrested for telling lawyer jokes
    John sends this Newsday story:
    "How do you tell when a lawyer is lying?" Harvey Kash reportedly asked Carl Lanzisera.

    "His lips are moving," they said in unison.

    While some waiting to get into the courthouse giggled Monday at the old chestnut, an attorney further up the queue was not laughing.

    He told them to pipe down and when they didn't, the attorney reported the pair to court personnel, who charged them with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.

    It is a sad day when it becomes a crime to tell a lawyer joke on a public street.
     
    Book on judicial supremacy confirmed
    John sends this TNR story that says:
    Pyrrhic Victory: On judicial nominations, conservatives could lose by winning. ...

    Were Bush to appoint several hard-line conservatives to the Court, and were those justices to join Scalia and Thomas in pushing the Constitution in Exile, the abstractions of federalism and separation-of-powers doctrine could very quickly translate into concrete, unpopular policy choices.

    This article is just gibberish. Scalia and Thomas are not pushing some sort of Constitution in Exile.

    John also writes:

    The main argument of The Supremacists is that modern judicial supremacy should be traced to Cooper v. Aaron (1958) and Dred Scott, not (as liberals like to say) to Brown v. Board of Ed and Marbury v. Madison.

    That argument was apparently confirmed by a book published almost simulataneously by the new dean of the Stanford Law School, Larry D. Kramer, entitled "The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review." Kramer's book was highly praised by Newt Gingrich. and sharply critized by Laurence Tribe.

    Andy responds:
    That is an argument nicely echoed, apparently, by Larry D. Kramer. It's great that there is one law professor out of thousands (and a dean no less) who evidently agrees with us. OK, all the better.

    But there is far more in the Supremacists that needs to be put out into the legal culture, such as the overwhelming proof of irrational supremacy by the Court on a variety of issues. Pornography comes to mind in particular, as the Supremacists tell it like no one else has. This needs to be injected into law review articles, then picked up by clerks and courts and briefs, and then ultimately embraced by the Supreme Court.

    What John failed to note was Kramer's devastating rebuttal to Tribe's review, reprinted at the end of the above website, that leaves no doubt about who has the upper hand.

    I agree with Andy. Tribe's criticisms are idiotic and insubstantial.

    Saturday, Jan 08, 2005
     
    2A secures individual right
    This may be belaboring the obvious, but the US Justice Dept just issued this memo:
    The Second Amendment secures a right of individuals generally, not a right of States or a right restricted to persons serving in militias.
    The WSJ says:
    Readying for a constitutional showdown over gun control, the Bush administration has issued a 109-page memorandum aiming to prove that the Second Amendment grants individuals nearly unrestricted access to firearms.

    The memorandum, requested by Attorney General John Ashcroft, was completed in August but made public only last month, when the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel posted on its Web site several opinions setting forth positions on various legal issues. Reaching deep into English legal history and the practice of the British colonies prior to the American Revolution, the memorandum represents the administration's latest legal salvo to overturn judicial interpretations that have prevailed since the Supreme Court last spoke on the Second Amendment, in 1939. Although scholars long have noted the ambiguity of the 27-word amendment, courts generally have interpreted the right to "keep and bear arms" as applying not to individuals but rather to the "well-regulated militia" maintained by each state.

    The next step should be to give some specificity to this view. We should have a national consensus that law-abiding individuals are entitled to own and use a 1911 Colt .45 handgun and a 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. There is some debate about exotic weapons, but these guns have been commonly used by millions of people for generations.

    Bob writes:

    Robert Post, a constitutional-law professor at Yale Law School, said the new memorandum disregarded legal scholarship that conflicted with the administration's gun-rights views. "This is a Justice Department with a blatantly political agenda which sees its task as translating right-wing ideology into proposed constitutional law," he said.
    Sometimes blatantly political right-wing ideology is correct and constitutional. Often blatantly political left-wing ideology is wrong and unconstitutional. To paraphrase the good Dr. Thompson, buy the supremacist ticket, take the supremacist ride.

    Thursday, Jan 06, 2005
     
    Bush favors tort reform
    Bob writes:
    Bush buys into the supremacist interpretation of the interstate commerce clause and is pushing Federal legislation which is unconstitutional according to the text of the constitution.

    I hope that at least some right wingers have the integrity to point this out.

    You will probably get agreement among those right-wingers who think that FDR's New Deal was unconstitutional.

    I was glad to see Pres. Bush visit Madison County Illinois to take on the ambulance chasers. I grew up in Madison County. Plaintiffs find crazy reasons to file lawsuits in Madision County just because it has a reputation for big damage awards for flimsy claims.

     
    Mohammedan emotional distress
    There is a lawsuit pending over this Tucson Citizen letter:
    We can stop the murders of American soldiers in Iraq by those who seek revenge or to regain their power. Whenever there is an assassination or another atrocity we should proceed to the closest mosque and execute five of the first Muslims we encounter.

    After all this is a "Holy War" and although such a procedure is not fair or just, it might end the horror.

    Machiavelli was correct. In war it is more effective to be feared than loved and the end result would be a more equitable solution for both giving us a chance to build a better Iraq for the Iraqis.

    I am surprised that the newspaper would print this letter. An editor should have changed "should" to "could", at the least. Also, it should have clarified that the writer was referring to mosques in Iraq, not Arizona.

    Wednesday, Jan 05, 2005
     
    Dope doc convicted
    Andy recommends this column, and John writes:
    The article does not explain why Dr. Hurwitz apparently prescribed powerful narcotics with a street value of $3 million to a single patient, and narcotics worth $750,000 to another patient. What possible "legitimate medical purpose" could there have been for such outlandish amounts?

    I guess Dr. Hurwitz's defense was that his patients lied or exaggerated their pain, and he believed them and gave them as much as they dope as they wanted. It seems a pretty weak defense when you consider that Hurwitz apparently developed a specialized practice and cultivated a national reputation as a doctor who was willing to dispense extremely high doses of narcotics.

    Andy responds:
    Dr. Hurwitz did not make any money on that "street value," which is irrelevant to a doctor not trading in that market. The article does explain that Dr. Hurwitz was cooperating with the federal government for years, and probably thought law enforcement was doing its job.

    I don't see anything "outlandish" about it, but at any rate malpractice is not a crime, and certainly not a federal crime.

    Your conclusion doesn't follow from your argument. Yes, he developed a specialized practice and was quite public about what he was doing. He did not conceal anything. He had patients in severe pain, some who testified in a compelling manner, and prescribed large amounts of painkillers for them with successful results. How you jump from there to our conclusion of a "weak defense" escapes me.

    Nothing in John's comments rebut the superb column I circulated.

    John responds:
    The street value of drugs he prescribed (actually, he didn't just prescribe the drugs, he *dispensed* them) is relevant, not because Hurwitz shared in that money (I never said he did), but because it indicates the extraordinary quantity of dope he supplied to a single patient.

    Is there support in the medical literature for the appropriateness of such huge doses?

    Are you conceding that Dr. Hurwitz may have committed malpractice? Apparently the jury believed he did.

    Medical malpractice, per se, is not a federal crime. However, if it was permissible for the jury to conclude that Dr. Hurwitz's prescriptions were malpractice, then that fact is relevant to whether the same actions were also criminal.

     
    Bad signature
    Check out this judge's signature. It has no resemblance to his name.

    Tuesday, Jan 04, 2005
     
    Why societies fail
    Bob recommends the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Diamond wrote himself a book review in the NY Times, if you want the executive summary. Diamond's previous book on the subject was Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. That book reinterpreted world history from the viewpoint of trying to explain everything by geography, and it was sufficiently politically correct that it was widely praised among liberal intellectuals.

    I am very skeptical of analyses like this:

    A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies.
    If someone tries to write a one-paragraph explanation of the causes of the American Civil War, the Great Depression, or the fall of the Roman Empire, he'll get endless arguments even tho those events are documented in painful. And yet Diamond thinks that he can look at a few tree stumps and explain illiterate societies that died out hundreds of years ago.

    Bob writes:

    In the case of an Easter Island which currently supports no human population and has no trees but was forested several hundred years ago and supported 30,000 people, tree stumps can tell quite a lot about why the society on the island collapsed.

    I an curious whether you consider the ecological collapse of a society like, say, Rwanda as described by Diamond is right wing, or left wing, or both.

    It is left-wing for the reasons as the evolutionist who wanted all schoolchildren to be taught that man is no better than an insect.

    Bob writes:

    Diamond claims that steep hills are cultivated to the ridge without terracing and that the consequent erosion is reducing the cultivatable land and the food yield. It is harder to show that the "genicide" is due to the agricultural collapse. I haven't read Collapse yet, but from a review the evidence given is that the Hutu killed each other as well as the Tutsi. Diamond is a very craftsman-like in his arguments, I will let you know when I read the book.

    I heard someone say that when they flew over Haiti, it is easy to spot the border with The Dominican Republic because there are trees on one side of the border and none on the other side.

    I claim that both the left and right wing refuse to accept the truth about ecological collapse and consequent social collapse in both Haiti and Rwanda.

    Another misconception of both the left and the right is famine. A Nobel laureate in economics a few years ago pointed out that there have been no famines in democracies. If the do-gooders want to do something about hunger and famine the obvious and effective answer is regime change.

    You might want to check out Diamond's utterly fallacious Discover magazine article on QWERTY. You can find it debunked in this Reason article (but you may also want to check out what the Dvorak true believers say).

    Monday, Jan 03, 2005
     
    Against filibustering judges
    Andrew Hyman has a letter regarding filibusters that was printed in the Washington Times, and writes:
    The inspiration for this letter was an interview in which Phyllis Schlafly urged the Senate to change its filibuster rule so that three-fifths of Senators "present" could invoke cloture.

    Sunday, Jan 02, 2005
     
    Scientists for unlawful research
    Paul Berg (a Nobel-prize-winning DNA scientist) is offended that any politicians would want to regulate scientific research. He writes this in today's Si Valley paper:
    For when science is attacked on purely ideological grounds, its very integrity is at risk. Therefore, one must ask if infringing the inherent right of scientists to freedom of inquiry serves our society best. Perhaps, however, that right is already embodied in our Constitution. ...

    What is so troubling about this dispute is that the quality of the science may no longer be the principal determinant in whether a particular line of research should be permitted.

    So I guess he favors Josef Mengele's Nazi research, Kinsey's child molestation experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, research on exotic weapons, eugenics, cloning, and all the other controversial scientific endeavors.

    Bob writes:

    Did you check out that CWA link? It appears that Reisman is a wacko and CWA is a wacko organization. The claim of molestation experiments is false based on the CWA site.

    No support is offered for the claim of experiments. I'm betting that these people go into the same category as the holocaust deniers, liars.

    Bob's link shows Table 34 from Kinsey's 1948 book. I am assuming that the table is authentic. It looks like a report on child molestation experiments to me.

    The recent Kinsey movie was made by a gay filmmaker for the purpose of promoting Kinsey as a fathers of the gay movement. I haven't seen it, and I would expect it to be homosexual propaganda.

    Bob writes:

    I think I get it now. Compiling data obtained from interviews with pedophiles constitutes child molesting and conducting sexual experiments on children. If people accepted reasoning like that, you could get a Nobel Prize for literature for your blog.
    Maybe Bob should have been Scott Peterson's lawyer.

    Mike rants:

    Yes, Rog, it looks to you like a report on child molestation, because that's how the CWA website author wanted you to see it. (And your powers of discernment have lately been somewhat suspect.) However, it's equally obvious that this data is taken (and presented) OUT OF CONTEXT. Placing it back in context, as "Bob" attempts to do, is apparently not something you're willing to allow.

    Why is it that right-wing radicals frequently apply 'reductio ad absurdem' type arguments to quotes taken out of context, spinning the author's position in their own way simply to *create* the fallacy they seek to root out, then erroneously attributing that fallacy to the poor soul who clearly meant no such thing by his original statement?

    This approach seems to me to be favored above all others by right-wing nuts, allowing them to lie in a manner that appears logical to the uneducated masses (of right-wing sympathizers). EVERY time I've managed to hold in my vomit long enough to read through a Scarborough column, I find that he takes exactly this approach. He doesn't know any other, I guess, and I've noticed that you've been adopting this approach more and more lately yourself. (I'm gratified to see, however, that at least in Bob's case, you haven't stopped stooping to ad hominem attacks as well.) Learning from the master?

    Take for example your conclusions about Berg. You state that he is "offended that politicians seek to regulate research." That's not what he says, it's what you say he says. That's your spin on his comments that serves to introduce the absurdity in his position that you take great delight in ferreting out. Hey, you yourself provide a quote of his that clearly complains about *how* regulation is to be applied, not that it *is* to be applied. From that you conclude that he'd support Nazi-like research?

    (I, on the other hand, am sure he *wouldn't* support such research because it wouldn't meet the "quality of science" criteria that you made the mistake of quoting as his second paragraph. Your argument would have been stronger if you simply omitted that second paragraph, as his first does appear to support your spin on his position and lead directly to your "absurd" conclusion. Fool!)

    Needless to say, I do not find this particular blog entry very persuasive. I think you *do* need to have your head examined by a sandplay psychologist!

    BTW, Evan and I insist that you mischaracterized our conversation over breakfast. He might have indeed regarded you as a curiosity, but he never said you were the only Bush supported he'd ever met. He has friends that voted for Bush, and he even knows some in Santa Cruz. (Yeah, I know, some of your best friends are Jewish. ) *I* raised a question about how comfortable you could feel living in the midst of that largely left-wing community and somehow you confused the two issues. We demand a retraction!

    No, Berg is saying that scientists have an "inherent right" to do whatever scientific experiments they want. He doesn't want any regulation. As for Kinsey, go ahead and put the child molestation in context, if you can.

    Bob writes:

    I was just reminded that Berg chaired the committee appointed by NSF to investigate the dangers of recombinant technology which resulted in a moratorium on recombinant experiments and the NIH regulation of recombinant research. This is hardly a record of not wanting any regulation. Maybe Berg just objects to being regulated by political hacks who pander to religious hypocrites and nuts.

    Saturday, Jan 01, 2005
     
    Hoping Rehnquist retires soon
    Chief Justice Rehnquist just issued his annual report on the judiciary and he devotes 5 out of 18 pages to whining about public criticism of judges. He says:
    Although arguments over the federal Judiciary have always been with us, criticism of judges, including charges of activism, have in the eyes of some taken a new turn in recent years. I spoke last year of my concern, and that of many federal judges, about aspects of the PROTECT Act that require the collection of information on an individual, judge-by-judge basis. At the same time, there have been suggestions to impeach federal judges who issue decisions regarded by some as out of the mainstream. And there were several bills introduced in the last Congress that would limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts to decide constitutional challenges to certain kinds of government action.
    I guess he is conceding that Congress has the power to limit jurisdiction, or he wouldn't be complaining about it.

    His response is to babble about all the power the Supreme Court supposedly got in its 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, and to praise FDR for how he intimidated the Court into renouncing its constitutional interpretation.

    President Roosevelt lost this battle in Congress, but he eventually won the war to change the judicial philosophy of the Supreme Court. He won it the way our Constitution envisions such wars being won -- by the gradual process of changing the federal Judiciary through the appointment process.
    No, the way to change the Constitution is by amendment. FDR wanted to enact dubious policies that everyone had always understood to be unconstitutional.

    Rehnquist stands for judicial supremacy more than anything, and the sooner he is replaced, the better.

     
    Man is no better than an insect
    A Haverford College student writes this letter to Phyllis.
    Your column, "Darwinists top the censorship food chain" (12/29/04), is full of misinformation and in places, entirely wrong.

    In your third paragraph, you write, "But that does not stop an intolerant minority from trying to impose a belief in the ape-to-man theory on everyone else." That humans have evolved from other primates is shown through evidence in the fossil record. Real, touchable, tangible pieces of history have led the scientific community to conclude that it is certainly a fact that humans came from apes. This is not a belief, it is what happened, and is not being imposed on people, but shown to them that it happened. If anything, intelligent design is a belief that is being imposed on people. There is absolutely no evidence, nothing tangible besides writings, that offer an explanation for creation from an intelligent maker. There is no factual support for intelligent design. Intelligent design, and religion, are imposed on children as they grow up. They have no choice as to what to believe, since their parents make that choice for them from birth. Intelligent design is imposed on these impressionable kids, even though zero hard facts have been found to support the idea.

    You continue to bash Darwinists and attempt to use giraffes in text books as evidence against Darwinists. You make the association of inheritance of acquired characteristics with Darwinists and since that theory is wrong, Darwinists must be wrong. But Darwinists do not believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Here you are just completely wrong, it is Lamarck's (1807) followers who believe in this theory. Darwinists attack it just as you, they have said it is wrong all along. You somehow missed this basic part of evolution.

    The Cobb Country authorities are wrong in saying that evolution is a theory. Evolution is not a theory, but rather the mechanisms of evolution, its causes, are the theoretical part. Evolution has happened, and is happening today. Organisms change over time, this is shown clearly in the fossil record, backed by real evidence. Furhermore, evolution has been critically considered for the last 200 years by all of science. The conclusion scientists have come to is that evolution occurs quickly via natural selection. Everytime this theoretical mechanism is challenged, it prevails. It is presented as fact, because nothing has shown that it is not.

    You claim, "if the theory of evolution were well supported, there would be no reason to oppose open debate about scientific claims," and there is not. Evolution and natural selection has plenty of evidence, you only need to look in journals, text books, museums, the ground, any biology classroom, present organisms and their similarities and countless other things. If you substitute your intelligent design in for evolution in the above quote, you will get my meaning. If intelligent design were well supported, maybe there could be a debate. Where is your proof? There is no evidence for intelligent design, and it does not matter if an atheist believes intelligent design, he still cannot prove it in anyway. This is why books written on intelligent design have not been allowed in libraries, because they cannot be presented as factual when there are no facts, no evidence, no support. The fiction section of a library, maybe, but not one for research.

    Later, you say, "evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beautry and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals, no more worthy than dogs or cats." People are no better than any other animal. Humans have interesting mental abilities, but we deserve to be here no more than any other insect, animal, or plant. This belief that we are better, more worthy, than some other organisms is quite similar to the Nazi's belief that Germans were better than the rest of the world. Surely, this is a terrible thing to teach children, that they can be better than an animal, because it will lead them to believe that they are inherently better than other races, other religions, other nationalities. Millions of lives have been lost because of ignorant beliefs like these and it is a terrible thing to be compared to the Nazi's.

    But you compared believing in evolution to being a communist in the former East Germany, a very low blow and pot shot taken by yourself I believe.

    I think your commentary is just plain wrong. Debate in the field of evolution has been and will continue to rage, but only in the midst of theories with evidence and support and a plausible base. And yes, the Red States voted for Bush, and yes they are people like you, who do believe in things like intelligent design and write columns that are factually wrong and idiotic like yourself, and this is the problem with our country. This is why people against Bush feel so helpless, because his followers seem so blind to the facts, to the real world, and to what is the best direction for the world, rather than ourselves. Happy holidays.

    Yes, this guy is a good example of the perils of teaching evolution in schools. I was sympathetic when he tried to argue from the point of view of science, even tho his arguments were fallacious. But then he insists on a completely unscientific assertion, that man is no better than an insect, and he insists that it be taught for essentially political reasons.

    The evolutionists talk all day about how noble Science is, but they will not stick to science in what they want to teach as evolution.

    Bob writes:

    What exasperates me about your attacks on teaching evolution is the assumption you seem to make that the way to combat the unscientific nonsense which is taught in high schools and social science courses is to attack the idea of evolution. The source of the bad ideas you complain about is Marxism, and post modernism, not evolution. Gould, a Marxist, made the bizarre claim that evolution shows that there is no such thing as progress! Relativists claim that cultures are never superior or inferior to each other. Evolution instructs the exact opposite in both cases. By making the obnoxious and false claim that there is a scientific controversy over evolution you deprive yourselves of the strong arguments against the nonsense you criticize and completely discredit yourselves by joining the creationists who are entirely disreputable. It is a scientific fact that we have common ancestors with other living things. Accept it and get to work using evolutionary explanations for why we are better than insects.
    My idea of progress is to permit criticism of Stephen Jay Gould in the schools.

    Friday, Dec 31, 2004
     
    Junk food a health risk
    John sends this BBC story to support his claim that there are lots of studies showing harm in a fast food diet. It says:
    Eating fast food more than twice a week has strong links with weight gain and insulin resistance, a US study shows.

    This suggests eating too much 'junk food' increases the risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, the Lancet study says.

    Boston Children's Hospital experts followed more than 3,000 young people's eating habits over 15 years.

    But other experts said people who ate a lot of fast food were also likely have generally unhealthy lifestyles, increasing their risk of disease. ...

    The US study looked at the eating habits of 3,000 African-American and white adults aged between 18 and 30.

    Participants were asked about their lifestyles, including diet, exercise, smoking and leisure habits at the beginning of the study then again after two, five, seven, 10 and 15 years.

    Those who visited fast-food restaurants more than twice a week (87 people) gained on average an extra 4.5kg (9.9lbs) and had a two-fold greater increase in insulin resistance compared to those who went less than once a week.

    The study was published in the Lancet. There was an editorial with it.
    Professor Astrup said the fast-food industry would argue there was little compelling evidence to show large portions were damaging health.

    But he said: "Appropriate action would be to reduce portions to normal sizes and to sell burgers of lean meat, whole-grain bread or buns, fat-reduced mayonnaise, more vegetables, lower-fat fired potatoes and reduced-sugar soft drinks.

    "Although the price may have to be increased, at least such changes in fast-food meals can have no adverse health effects."

    Professor Astrup acknowledged that some fast-food companies had launched some healthier choices, such as porridge and fruit, in their restaurants.

    He added: "I hope that this trend continues."

    The study complains that two of every three US adults is overweight or obese, and that fast-food restaurants have supersize portions emphasizing "primordial taste preferences".

    I am skeptical about this study. What if a study showed that people who visit grocery stores more often tend to eat more? What if people who take cooking classes tend to gain weight? Another recent study showed that men who get married tend to gain weight. Is that because wife-cooked food is unhealthy? Or that marriage emphasizes primordial taste preferences?

    People eat food at popular fast-food restaurant chains because they like it and it is cheap and convenient. If a study shows that some people like it so much that they eat more than they need, then that does not prove that there is anything unhealthy about the food.


    Wednesday, Dec 29, 2004
     
    Forcing basic medicine on hospitals
    Bob sends this NY Times article on how federal bureaucrats have collected statistics on how well hospitals have followed basic life-saving medical procedures, and then shamed them into improving. It says:
    At least part of the answer, he and others say, is that doctors are unaware of their shortfalls and are rewarded no matter how well they do.

    "Medical care is one of those very strange parts of the economy where you get paid no matter what the quality of the service you provide," Dr. Asch said. "It is like you went to a car dealership and your Mercedes is going to cost you the same as your Yugo."

     
    Real chocolate flavor
    My 7-year-old daughter was puzzled by a bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup which said, "real chocolate flavor". "Isn't it chocolate?", she said.

    I agree that it is confusing. The label is intended to reassure the consumer that the syrup is made with real chocolate. But instead, the skeptical consumer might think that it is just flavored to taste like real chocolate. Hershey would be better off just putting "real chocolate" on the label.

    My hunch is that the label used to say "chocolate flavor", and when people asked if it was real chocolate, Hershey's tried to solve the problem by adding "real".

    Liza writes:

    Hershey's syrup is certainly not pure chocolate. I don't have a can lying around so I can check - the stuff is too artificial for me - but my recollection is that it is heavily diluted with things like vegetable oil. I don't know if there is any actual chocolate, as opposed to some cocoa powder, in it. Chocolate is a combination of something like cocoa, cocoa butter and something called chocolate liquor (which isn't liquor), all of which come from cocoa beans.
    My label says that it made of sugar, water, cocoa, preservitive, salt, diglycerides, emulsifier, xanthan gum, and vanillin. Vanillin is described as the only "artificial flavoring". I don't know why that is called artificial, assuming it is made from real vanilla beans. That is, why is cocoa from cocoa beans considered real while vanillin from vanilla beans artificial?

    Anyway, this sounds like it can be fairly called "genuine chocolate" to me.


    Tuesday, Dec 28, 2004
     
    The Indonesian tsunami
    How is it that 1000s of miles of Asian coastline got hit by 40-foot waves and no one has pictures of it? A lot of people had a couple of hours notice that it might happen.

    Why does the news media call it a "tsunami", rather than a "tidal wave"? I understand why some scientists believe that tsunami is a more technically accurate term, but the news media is usually not so eager to use obscure technical terms. The term tidal wave has been used to describe this sort of tsunami for over 100 years, and I don't see any good reason to stop now.

    Liza writes:

    Like you, I am used to the term "tidal wave" instead of "tsunami." However, some news media have correctly pointed out that tidal waves have nothing to do with tides, so the term is a misnomer.
    It is debatable whether the term is a misnomer. Yes, the word "tides" usually refers to the rise and fall of sea level based on the gravitational pull of the Moon and the Sun. But it is sometimes used more broadly to mean any rise or fall in water level, and the term "tidal wave" has historically been used mostly to describe water waves with non-gravitational causes (usually earthquakes or volcanoes). To complain that "tidal wave" is a misnomer is a bit like saying that "sunrise", "half moon", and "sea level" are misnomers. There are probably nitpicky scientists who want to abolish those terms as well.

    Tuesday, Dec 14, 2004
     
    Restricting parental free speech
    Law prof and free speech advocate Eugene Volokh has written a paper on Child Custody Speech Restrictions.

    He defends the practice of family court judges restricting the speech of divorced parents based on a theory that certain comments might cause psychological harm to the child, and therefore the best interests of the child might warrant such restrictions. He says:

    Parents may strongly want to express themselves by criticizing the other parent. ... these self-expression rights, which are important for speech among adults, are less applicable to parents’ speech to their young children. And the stronger reasons for protecting parent-child speech don’t really apply here. It’s quite unlikely that a father’s persuading a son that his mother is untrustworthy or immoral will produce ideas that the son can later, as an adult, spread to other listeners. Restricting this speech will probably not impair public debate about any issues. Such restrictions also generally don’t involve the government discriminating among political ideas or religious views; and they aren’t useful tools for the government to repress such political or religious ideologies. So restricting such nonideological speech that interferes with children’s relationship with the other parent seems to pose little danger to free speech generally.
    I don't buy this argument. I fail to see how the govt could ever have an interest in sheltering a child from a parent's opinion. I don't think that there is any good evidence that such opinions can ever cause psychological harm.

    I think that there is a useful distinction between expressing an opinion to someone, and harassing someone with repeated and relentless unwanted opinions. Free speech usually refers to the former, not the latter. There is some evidence that parents can harm a child by persistently badmouthing the other parent. Some call it parental alienation syndrome. I can understand family courts wanting to prevent that. But just a parent expressing an opinion seems harmless to me, and almost always beneficial. I don't think that family courts have any business trying to restrict the free speech of parents, unless it is shown that a parent is already causing harm by excessive badmouthing.

     
    Singapore rules
    The USA scored 12th and 15th in the world on standardized math tests in 4th and 8th grades. Singapore was first.

    One reason for this is that Singapore has better math textbooks. The good news is that you can easily buy and use the Singapore textbooks if you want your kids to learn math. The books are in English. That is what I did. The books have a few quirks for Americans, but they are better than the junk the local schools use.

     
    Robert Novak: How Does He Stay Out of Jail?
    John sends this LA Times article with theories as to why Robert Novak is free while other reporters are facing jail terms.

    I think that it overlooks a likely theory: Novak testified that the leaker said that Plame worked for the CIA and helped get Wilson the Niger assignment, but that the leaker never implied that Plame was a covert agent. The name of the leaker then became irrelevant, because Novak had no info about the commission of a crime. So the feds let him go without insisting on the name.


    Sunday, Dec 12, 2004
     
    States rights
    Here is another article in the Si Valley paper complaining about Republican attitudes towards states rights. Jim Puzzanghera says:
    It was Scalia, historically one of the leading proponents of the rights of states, who vigorously challenged the attorney for two California women who want to keep using medicinal marijuana, ...

    The role reversal is emblematic of a larger one taking place in recent years ...

    Landmark rulings in 1995 and 2000 voided federal laws that had banned gun possession near schools and voided federal civil remedies for violent crimes against women, in both cases because the court's majority deemed the laws a violation of states' rights.

    The article is nonsense. Those "landmark rulings" had nothing to do with states rights. The Court did not address the issue of whether the states could ban guns near schools. A couple of states have passed such bans, but they apparently conflict with the 2A, and the Court has not ruled on the matter.

    The ruling against the Violence Against Women Act also did not involve states rights. That Act offered a federal remedy that largely duplicated remedies that were available under state law. The Court ruled against the federal remedy, but did not change the state remedy.

     
    Supremacist judge favors illegal aliens
    Andy writes:
    Another Bush judicial appointee strikes again! Judge David C. Bury, known by the Tucson locals to be a born-again Christian, just enjoined enforcement of Proposition 200 (which had passed last month with 56% of the vote). That referendum cut off public benefits to illegal aliens and required proof of citizenship to register to vote.

    In this insightful analysis, it is observed that "Judge David C. Bury is not a bad guy. He's just a Bush guy."

    Beware, however, that the Washington Times was a remarkable ten days late in reporting this news story (see below). Judge Bury issued his order on Nov. 30th and it was widely reported by the Associated Press and criticized by editorials soon thereafter.

    The article points out that the plaintiffs refused to be indentified, because they are illegal aliens! The judge said:
    It seems likely that if Proposition 200 were to become law, it would have a dramatic chilling effect upon undocumented aliens who would otherwise be eligible for public benefits under federal law.
    Yes, I suppose it would. Just about any effort to enforce the laws against illegal aliens would have a chilling effect on their ability to collect welfare here.

    Here is some more of this judge's wacky reasoning:

    If this court denied the TRO [temporary restraining order], plaintiffs would serve defendants with their motion for preliminary injunction ... and there would be a trial. In the meantime, Proposition 200 would become law and it would be implemented, but under the specter that it might be preliminarily enjoined sometime in the future. Such uncertainty would benefit no one.
    It would benefit the citizens of Arizona. 56% of the voters voted to pass Prop. 200 in the face of very strong opposition. Now they have the uncertainty of wondering whether their votes will mean anything.

    Friday, Dec 10, 2004
     
    Vietnam war lies
    Bob has been tracking down an often-repeated story that American efforts in the Vietnam war were impeded by falsely negative reporting. Bob writes:
    The claim is made in this story that:
    Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the antiwar demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp.
    I can't find a reference for Giap saying anything of the sort. I think it is manufactured disinformation.

    Related disinformation is debunked here.


    Wednesday, Dec 08, 2004
     
    Recent decisions
    Andy writes:
    1. An anti-gun decision by Rhode Island Supreme Court, with a strong pro-gun dissent. Charles H. Mosby, Jr., et al. v. William V. Devine, 851 A.2d 1031; 2004 R.I. LEXIS 120 (June 10, 2004)

    2. Upholding the power of Catholic schools to fire teachers who advocate abortion rights. MICHELE CURAY-CRAMER, Plaintiff, v. THE URSULINE ACADEMY OF WILMINGTON, DELAWARE, INC., a Delaware corporation, MICHAEL A. SALTARELLI, CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF WILMINGTON, INC., a Delaware corporation, BARBARA C. GRIFFIN, and JERRY BOTTO, Defendants, Civil Action No. 03-1014-KAJ, UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 23544 (November 12, 2004)

    3. Indiana state court judge invoking the state's passage of the federal ERA as a basis for overturning an abortion regulation. CLINIC FOR WOMEN, INC., et al., Appellant-Plaintiff, vs. CARL J. BRIZZI, COURT OF APPEALS OF INDIANA, FIFTH DISTRICT, 814 N.E.2d 1042 (Sept. 17, 2004).

    4. Third Circuit ordering school district to allow distribution of Christian fliers: Child Evangelism Fellowship of N.J., Inc. v. Stafford Twp. Sch. Dist., No. 03-1101, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT, 386 F.3d 514, October 15, 2004

    5. Ninth Circuit blocking a deportation by Ashcroft: Cheema v. Ashcroft, No. 02-71311 , UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT , 383 F.3d 848; 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 16213, June 24, 2004, Filed, As Amended August 6, 2004. Second Amendment September 8, 2004.

    6. A decision denying relief to a parent of a public school who committed suicide, and detailing other student suicide cases. The student was on medication. KATHLEEN SANFORD, Individually and as Administratrix of the ESTATE OF MICHAEL R. SANFORD, Plaintiff, v. PAMELA STILES, DENNIS MURPHY, and EAST PENN SCHOOL DISTRICT, Defendants, UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 22948 (Nov. 10, 2004)

    I have copies of these decisions if anyone wants to read them.


    Tuesday, Dec 07, 2004
     
    1A also means free exercise
    Brian writes:
    I've only recently discovered your site, and have barely even begun to read through some of the most recent material there, so this may be an issue that has been discussed in depth before.

    However, I have a question: Why is it that the ACLU, and/or whoever else wants to play, can so eagerly file lawsuits predicated on the Bill of Rights provision asserting that Congress shall make no law establishing a religion...and yet so utterly ignore the second half of the same sentence, which states, "...or preventing the free exercise thereof?" And why, when such things go to court, do Judges seem not to make that connection for themselves?

    There is a history of US Supreme Court decisions (since the 1950s) that blurs the distinction between those 2 clauses. I agree with your point. Both clauses were designed to promote freedom of religion, but an excessively broad interpretation of the first can actual limit the second.

    The Supreme Court is currently hearing a Ten Commandments case, so it is possible that we could have some clarification in about 6 months. More info on 10C cases at Eagle Forum.


    Thursday, Dec 02, 2004
     
    3d Cir invalidates Solomon Amendment
    Andy writes:
    2-1 opinion here. My cursory review leads me to think the grounds were slightly different from our previously discussed court decision that held for Yale:

    I expect this important issue to go to the Supreme Court. It is astounding, even to me, how dependent American universities are on federal money today. Without the federal government all these universities would collapse immediately.

    By the way, shouldn't we be pressing the Bush Administration to cut off funding for the California universities lining up to take embryo "research" money under its recently passed referendum? Just an administrative hint of less funding, without another Solomon Amendment, would have a big effect on the behavior of the subsidized institutions.

    John writes:
    This decision strikes directly at Congress's most basic and absolute power - the spending power. It must be appealed.

    No doubt, the liberal majority is very pleased with itself for basing this pro-gay decision squarely on two anti-gay decisions of the Supreme Court (Boy Scouts v. Dale, 2000, and the 1995 Hurley decision involving the St. Patrick's Day Parade). However, such reliance is thoroughly disingenuous and too clever by half, as the British say.

    The majority's basic fallacy is its finding that a law school is an "expressive association," as the Boy Scouts and the sponsors of the St. Patrick's Day Parade were properly held to be. Under the First Amendment, expressive associations cannot be forced to express viewpoints with which they disagree.

    Law schools and other institutions of higher education are (or at least claim to be) the exact opposite of an agenda-driven "expressive association." On their face, at least, they are open to scholars and students of all viewpoints who are chosen by neutral criteria of academic excellence.

    Higher education is supposed to promote scholarship in various academic fields, not enforce political correctness. Academic freedom, which affords maximum freedom to individual scholars, is inconsistent with the adoption of controversial policy positions by the institution itself.

    Exception: religious institutions whose religious mission is set forth their charter and bylaws. All other institutions of higher learning disclaim any ideology; their mission is simply the advancement of scholarship in the arts and sciences, etc. Hence, they are not expressive associations and do not have the First Amendment right to limit their membership to those who share an ideology.

    This neutrality and commitment to open scholarship is contained in the charter and bylaws of every school. It is a condition of accreditation which, in turn, is legally required before the school can receive any federal funds, including student financial aid as well as federal research funding. Hence, it legally precludes the school from enforcing one particular viewpoint as an "expressive association."

    Andy writes:
    Excellent analysis, John, which will come in handy as this issue winds its inevitable way to the Supreme Court. There will be much public debate in the meantime.

    The Boy Scouts and Irish parade were not taking billions of dollars in federal money the way that universities are (indeed, Ivy League schools along are grabbing more than a billion federal dollars).

    But, look, we shouldn't stand by holding our breath in trepidation about what a few liberal judges might or might not do. The proper response to this latest outrage is for Congress and the Bush Administration to start pulling the plug on the money immediately. Conservative websites, starting with Eagle Forum, should start posting the grants and programs flowing to unpatriotic universities and demand that Bush and Congress stop it. No court will dare overstep its authority and tell Congress or the President that it *must* fund someone.

    These universities are so badly parasitic on government that I bet a conservative campaign alone, even without action by Congress or the Bush Administration, would cause them to allow the recruiters on campus.

    John writes:
    This decision is in the supremacist model: an effort by judges to go beyond the particular parties to the case, to make a broad ruling that purports to bind the whole country.

    The actual defendants are the U.S. Secretaries of Defense, Education, and 4 other cabinet departments. (Presumably, each department funds research projects at the plaintiff universities.)

    The simple solution is for each secretary to step aside for 1 day, or just long enough for the assistant or deputy secretary, on orders from the President, to defund Harvard and any other university that reinstates or imposes a ban on military recruiting, thereby carrying out the will of Congress.


    Wednesday, Dec 01, 2004
     
    The evil of Dred Scott
    John sends this Newsday column by Sol Wachtler:
    Despite his "personal opinion," Taney felt that he was duty bound to interpret the words of the Constitution. As Judge Bork put it, Taney was trying "to be what the public at that time would have understood the words to mean."

    As Justice Taney himself wrote: "(The Founders) spoke and acted according to the then-established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and the laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property."

    It is not true that negroes were only considered property. Only 4 of the original 13 states were slave states. But more importantly, Taney's opinion is not based on the words of the Constitution, but on his perception of popular opinion. Contrary to Wachtler, Pres. Bush was quite correct when he said the Dred Scott decision was a good example of an improperly reasoned decision.

    John writes:

    Only 4 of the original 13 states were slave states?? Actually, 6 of the original 13 were slave states at the start of the Civil War, of which 4 seceded and the other 2 remained in the Union.

    But in Dred Scott, Taney was looking back at the situation when the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787. At that time, slavery was legal in almost all of the original 13 states. e.g., NJ and NY did not finally and totally abolish slavery until the 1840s.

    But what Taney failed to notice was that even in 1787 there were a significant number of free blacks, and there is no good argument that they should not have had civil rights.

    Also, I think one has to concede that Taney did base his opinion on some of the words of the Constitution: "No person shall be ... deprived of ... property without due process of law." But the problem is he failed to give similar weight to other words of the Constitution, including: "The Congress shall have power to ... make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States."

    Taney's opinions deprived free negroes of their rights. He had no words in the Constitution to justify that.
     
    Lawyer joke about cigars
    Bob sends this story:
    A Charlotte, NC lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company. In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost "in a series of small fires." The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. The lawyer sued ... and WON! (Stay with me.)

    In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer "held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire" and was obligated to pay the claim. Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires."

    NOW FOR THE BEST PART... After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

    This ... was the First place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest.

    The story is not really true.

    Sunday, Nov 28, 2004
     
    Judges attack schools
    Andy sends this Economist story:
    The courts are making a mess of America's schools

    ONE reason that America's public schools do badly in international rankings, despite getting more money, is that nobody is really accountable for them. The schools are certainly not run by Washington: the federal government pays only 8% of their costs. Most of their money comes from state and local government, but often responsibility for them lies with school boards. And within the schools themselves, head teachers usually have little power either to sack bad teachers or to expel rowdy pupils.

    Until recently, the main villains of the piece had seemed to be the teachers' unions, who have opposed any sort of reform or accountability. Now they face competition from an unexpectedly pernicious force: the courts. Fifty years ago, it was the judges who forced the schools to desegregate through Brown v Board of Education (1954). Now the courts have moved from broad principles to micromanagement, telling schools how much money to spend and where—right down to the correct computer or textbook.

    Twenty-four states are currently stuck in various court cases to do with financing school systems, and another 21 have only recently settled various suits. Most will start again soon. Only five states have avoided litigation entirely.


    Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004
     

    Andy writes that the outrages worsen further in the Dr. Sell case. Here is the St. Louis paper story AP story.

    Tom Sell has been imprisoned for 8 years without a trial, and still cannot get a trial. From what I have been able to learn, I believe that he is innocent of all charges, but he may be guilty of some insurance overbilling. He has been tortured in a federal mental prison. He already went to the US Supreme Court to avoid being forced to take experimental psychiatric drugs. Judge Donald J. Stohr appears to be acting about of personal malice towards Sell. He says that Sell must be imprisoned indefinitely without trial because he has a "delusional disorder of the persecutory type". It's not a delusion -- he really is being persecuted.


    Thursday, Nov 18, 2004
     
    Leftists dominate govt institutions
    My friends Mike and Susan came to town visiting their son in college. They treated me as a curiosity, as the college kid said that he had never met someone who supported or voted for G.W. Bush. Their parents gave the silliest reasons for supporting Kerry. They asked what the connection was between Iraq and al-Qaeda. I said just the indirect ties states by Bush and the 9-11 Commission. The response: "So why didn't we first invade the countries with direct connections." We did; that country is called Afghanistan.

    Then Mike claims that Kerry is smarter than Bush. I pointed out that Bush's test scores were higher than Kerry's. So he claimed that he saw a map on the internet that showed that Blue states have higher average IQ scores than Red states. The map turned out to be a hoax, as the Economist magazine admits.

    Now Mike writes:

    [See this article] From today's NYT's education section. This isn't a study "by state," but it's enlightening nevertheless. Democrats outnumber Republicans in academia 7 to 1!
    Yes, isn't it outrageous how colleges are only hiring left-wing biased profs to indoctrinate the next generation!

    Of course it is no surprise that govt employees will vote for tax and spend liberals. Even private universities like Stanford get most of their money from the govt.

    Note that the disparity is the greatest in the soft subjects like the humanities, not the hard subjects like science.

    You'll also find that the welfare class votes Democratic.


    Sunday, Nov 14, 2004
     
    Liberals are undemocratic
    John sends this Wash Post article by David von DrehleDavid von Drehle:
    For many Democrats, the worst thing about the election result is the prospect of President Bush's appointing a new generation of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. But in the long run, a rightward shift in America's courts could be one of the best things to happen to liberalism in years.

    Half a century after the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation case, reliance on constitutional lawsuits to achieve policy goals has become a wasting addiction among American progressives. The recent battle over gay marriage, in courts and at the ballot box, demonstrates that liberals today are more adept at persuading like-minded judges than they are at persuading undecided voters. Over the past 40 years, while progressives were winning dozens of controversial court cases on issues ranging from abortion to school prayer, the Democratic Party failed nine times out of 10 to win a majority of the votes for president.

    Over time, though, voters matter -- just as they mattered on Nov. 2, when liberalism took another beating -- and gay marriage was rejected in 11 out of 11 state elections.

    Whatever you feel about the rights that have been gained through the courts, it is easy to see that dependence on judges has damaged the progressive movement and its causes. Liberals "became lazy at some point," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has worked for groups as diverse as the Christian Coalition and the Democratic Leadership Council. "By relying on the judiciary, their political muscles have atrophied."


    Wednesday, Nov 10, 2004
     
    The culture war
    When the elder G. Bush lost the 1992 election, a lot of pundits said that it was all because Pat Buchanan referred to the culture war at the Republican Convention.

    Now Buchanan, author of Where the Right Went Wrong, now says:

    "I feel like we've finally got our country back," a lady told my wife the morning after John Kerry conceded.

    George W. Bush was re-elected president as his father was not because he converted the election of 2004 into a triumphant and epic battle of the culture war, as his father refused to do in 1992.

     
    A Brit who supports Bush
    Phyllis sends this Paul Johnson article that lists many good reasons for voting for Bush, and ends:
    I cannot recall any election when the enemies of America all over the world have been so unanimous in hoping for the victory of one candidate. That is the overwhelming reason that John Kerry must be defeated, heavily and comprehensively.

    Monday, Nov 08, 2004
     
    Chief Justice Clarence Thomas
    Drudge reports:
    BUSH CONSIDERS CLARENCE THOMAS FOR CHIEF JUSTICE

    President Bush has launched an internal review of the pros and cons of nominating Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as the chief justice if ailing William Rehnquist retires, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

    I doubt that Bush has the guts, but Thomas is the obvious choice. Of those currently on the Supreme Court, he is the only one under 65, and (as far as I know) the only one with significant managerial experience. More importantly, he has accumulated a distinguished record of constitutionalism on the court that is unmatched by any justice in decades. His written opinions have a clarity and coherence that has gained the respect of legal scholars. Leftists often attack him, but rarely attack his reasoning.

    But it is because he is so good that his political enemies hate him so much. There would be a huge campaign against him. It would be ugly.


    Friday, Nov 05, 2004
     
    The morons at slate.com
    Slate.com has posted unlenting anti-Bush propaganda for months, and on election day it was bragging about a Kerry victory based on exit polls. Slate columnist Jane Smiley says:
    Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. ... The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America.

    The reason the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections is simple: A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers.

    NY Times columnist Paul Krugman says:
    resident Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is.
    The Democrats ran a campaign of the hate-filled and illogical attacks on Pres. Bush. The major public opinion-shapers -- news media, entertainers, teachers, etc -- gave us a year of anti-Bush propaganda. It was a campaign that primarily appealed to America-haters and morons. These supposed intellectuals on the Left seem to be totally clueless about why they lost the election.

    Try this quiz to identify whether quotes came from John Kerry, Michael Moore, or Osama Bin Laden.

    John writes:

    It's not true that late returns increased Bush's victory to 52-47 with a margin of 4.7 million votes. Powerlineblog corrected that inaccurate information. It's still 51-48 with a margin of 3.5 million votes. See Yahoo, CNN, or USA Today.

    Bush's margin in battleground states:
    FL 381,000
    OH 136,000
    NV 22,000
    IA 13,500
    NM 8,600
    NH (9,000)
    WI (12,000)
    OR (68,000)
    MN (99,000)
    PA (128,000)
    MI (166,000)

    In no state was any 3rd party candidate decisive this year.

    Bush won a majority of counties even in most of the states Kerry carried. The only states Kerry won a majority of counties were in New England.

     
    John Edwards made his fortune by fraud
    Sen. John Edwards made millions of dollars as a slimebag lawyer persuading gullible courts that obstetricians should pay huge judgments based on a theory that failing to do a caesarian delivery caused hypoxia, which in turn caused cerebral palsy. Now that the election is over, the NY Times reveals:
    A new study undermines the long-held belief among obstetricians that oxygen deprivation, or hypoxia, is the main cause of cerebral palsy in premature infants.

    The study, published in the October issue of The American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, found that the brain injury that leads to cerebral palsy was much more commonly associated with infection than with hypoxia.

    Thankfully, we were just saved from what probably would have been the most anti-science administration in many years.

    Thursday, Nov 04, 2004
     
    Defying NY Times, USA votes Republican
    The NY Times, desperate to put some anti-Republican spin on the election, has this headline today:
    Defying Bush Administration, Voters in California Approve $3 Billion for Stem Cell Research
    Actually, the Bush Administration took no stand on the issue, and has made no attempt to ban state or private spending on stem cell research. It was a Bush initiative that started federal spending on embrionic stem cell research.

    Wednesday, Nov 03, 2004
     
    Bush won by about 100,000 votes
    I predicted that the presidential election would not be as close as those in 1960, 1968, 1976, or 2000. Checking that against the latest figures, Kerry would have needed 18 more electoral votes to win. He could have gotten that by getting 137k more votes in Ohio, or by getting 127k more votes in Arkansas, Iowa, and New Mexico, or by getting 144k more votes in Colorado, Iowa, and New Mexico.

    A mere 46k more votes in Nevada, Iowa, and New Mexico would have given Kerry 269 electoral votes and a tie with Bush, but Bush would have won the tie-breaker in Congress, so I don't count that possibility. It would have taken 112k votes to win those states as well as Alaska.

    Therefore, I calculate Bush's margin of victory as 112k votes. That is slightly more than Nixon's margin in 1968. The 1960, 1976, and 2000 elections were closer. By this analysis, the 2004 election is only the 5th closest election in my lifetime. (These numbers may change as more ballots are counted or recounted.)

    It is curious how little the electoral map has changed since 2000. Pres. Bush was exactly the president that everyone expected, except for the Iraq War. The news media tried to convince everyone that the Iraq War was the big issue of the campaign, but I wonder whether it really changed anyone's votes. I've heard people say that they were voting against Bush because of the Iraq War and then admit that they would not have cared if Kerry had done the same thing. So I think that would have voted against Bush anyway, and were just using the Iraq War as an excuse.


    Monday, Nov 01, 2004
     
    Paul Weyrich misquote
    Phyllis is quoted here as going into a diatribe against the neocons, but she denies it.

    Saturday, Oct 30, 2004
     
    Another Bush-hater law prof
    John sends this Wash Post article by idiot leftist law prof Cass Sunstein and David Schkade:
    Appellate judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush show more conservative voting patterns than do judges appointed by any president in the past 80 years. As a result, the average vote of a federal judge has been growing much more conservative.
    Their first example involves liberals who voted against free speech rights in political campaigns. His analysis starts in 1976 because before that date, nearly all judges favored free speech rights in political campaigns. Around 1976, restricting free speech during political campaigns became a liberal cause. Sunstein and Schkade found that Republican judges were more likely to uphold campaign free speech rights after 1976.

    So how does this imply that the federal judges have been growing more conservative? It looks like just the opposite to me.

    There seems to be no limit to the extent that leftist law profs like Sunstein will lie to promote their political candidates.


    Friday, Oct 29, 2004
     
    Stupid arguments for Kerry
    Law prof. Lessig says:
    The New Yorker’s November 1 editorial on the upcoming election is by far the most thorough and compelling explanation I’ve seen of why we should vote for John Kerry.
    The editorial begins:
    This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, ...
    This is crazy. Nasty, unfair, personal attacks against Bush have outnumbered attacks on Kerry by at least 10 to 1, no matter how you want to measure them.

    The New Yorker magazine then goes on to recite the usual leftist lies about how Bush stole the 2000 election, about why we went to war in Iraq, and about how Bush has governed.

    Nobody likes Kerry. Kerry's support depends entirely on lies and idiotic arguments from Bush-haters. These Bush-haters have taken control of the news media, academia, Hollywood, unions, the welfare class, and a few other groups, and they have deluged the world with anti-American propaganda.

    A Kerry win will not be a mandate for the Kerry plan because there is no Kerry plan. It will only mean that a President can be run out of office by a leftist elite spreading idiotic lies.

    I am not sure whether anyone is really stupid enough to think that Bush is responsible for most of the campaign ugliness, but it doesn't matter.

    I ask a Kerry supporter to give me his best pro-Kerry argument, and he says, "Bush lies, and he's stupid". No, Bush does not lie, and he is not stupid. He has done a fine job as president, and has exceeded expectations in almost every way. But applying that standard, Kerry and the Bush-haters do lie, and they do say a lot of stupid things.

    I'll be voting for Pres. Bush. And I believe that he is going to win big next week. I just don't think the public is really stupid enough to believe the Kerry campaign.

    My prediction is not based on any personal knowledge. I live in a county full of dope-smoking morons, and they will surely vote overwhelmingly for Kerry. Nader might even compete with Bush for 2nd place. But I don't believe that people in Ohio and Florida are that stupid.

     
    Bogus tech scorecard
    John writes:
    On the eve of the election, libertarian technology journalist Declan McCullagh publishes a scorecard rating members of Congress on how "tech-friendly" they are.

    If you look at the positions he chose to "score" as "tech-friendly" (12 House votes and 10 Senate votes over the period 1998-2004), you can see how completely absurd this scorecard is.

    I like McCullagh's blog, Politech, but John's right that some of those issues aren't really tech friendly. For example, expanding the H-1B visa program was good for tech employers, but bad for tech employees.

    Wednesday, Oct 27, 2004
     
    More nonsense on Bush v Gore
    I continue to be amazed at how Democratic partisans misrepresent the 2000 presidential election legal dispute. The Republicans have done a lousy job of defending themselves.

    The Slate legal columnist writes a lot of nonsense on the subject, including this myth:

    In 1831 and 1832 the Supreme Court decided two cases involving the Cherokee Indians, ultimately upholding the rights of the Cherokee nation over the State of Georgia. President Andrew Jackson wanted the Cherokee land, however, and when he heard of the Supreme Court's ruling he is said to have replied, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."
    This is nonsense. Jackson never said that quote. The Cherokees were not party to the 1832 case, and the US Supreme Court ruled against the Cherokees in the 1831 case:
    If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.
    This Wash Post column argues that judicial intervention in the 2000 presidential election was unnecessary and undesirable:
    It's no accident that the statutory scheme puts the decision squarely in the hands of elected officials, state and federal. Choosing the president is a political, not a legal matter, and voters who disagree with the choice should be able to hold those who make it to account.

    Even if you think (as I do not) that the Florida Supreme Court was acting in a partisan manner, the court should have stopped that behavior without deciding the winner. All it had to do was vacate the lower court's decision, set out the proper legal rule, and send the case back to the state court.

    That is exactly what the US Supreme Court did! Its first (unanimous) ruling said:
    Specifically, we are unclear as to the extent to which the Florida Supreme Court saw the Florida Constitution as circumscribing the legislature’s authority under Art. II, §1, cl. 2. We are also unclear as to the consideration the Florida Supreme Court accorded to 3 U. S. C. §5. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida is therefore vacated, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
    And the majority opinion in the final ruling said:
    None are more conscious of the vital limits on judicial authority than are the members of this Court, and none stand more in admiration of the Constitution’s design to leave the selection of the President to the people, through their legislatures, and to the political sphere. When contending parties invoke the process of the courts, however, it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront.

    The judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

    But it is not what the Florida supreme court did. It refused to acknowledge the US Supreme Court, refused to accept the factfinding of the lower courts, refused to remand its case to lower courts, refused to let the election officials do their jobs, and decided that a 4-3 majority on its own court could rewrite all the election rules and do its own goofy recount.

    The biases of Slate.com are plain to see on this page, where the Slate staff and contributors vote 45-4 to support Kerry over Bush! No doubt the biases are similar at the NY Times, Wash Post, PBS, and NPR. NPR's Terry Gross just had a interview complaining about Bush v Gore. She would never interview anyone defending the decision.

    I just saw David Boies interviewed on the PBS Charlie Rose show. He admitted that Bush would have won the Florida vote under the recount that Gore was proposing, according to a news reporters analysis, but that the Republicans must have thought that Gore would have won, because they contested Gore's proposals so vigorously!

    There were many recount proposals under discussion -- recounting undervotes, overvotes, or all votes; recounting in 4 counties, all counties, or some other subset; several different ways of counting hanging chads; whether to assume that some counties had satisfactorily recounted ballots; what to do with certain ballots with minor irregularities; etc. We know now that Bush would have won under 80% to 90% of these scenarios, but not all the scenarios. Bush did not want to take an unnecessary chance on losing, even if that chance was only 10%. Furthermore, it is now clear that the vote counting procedure could have been manipulated to favor Gore, and there would be none of the pre-election checks and balances for insuring a fair count. Bush had good reason for believing that the recount was going to be rigged against him.


    Tuesday, Oct 26, 2004
     
    David Boies lies about Bush v Gore
    David Boies writes in a NY Times op-ed this:
    The 2000 election left many voters feeling disenfranchised, frustrated millions more and tarnished the image of American democracy at home and abroad. The United States Supreme Court's decision to intervene (for the first time in history) in a presidential election, ordering Florida election officials to stop counting votes and effectively determining the winner, troubled legal scholars and average citizens alike.
    The USSC did not order Florida election officials to stop counting votes. It ordered the Florida supreme court to stop counting votes.

    Boies goes on to say:

    If anyone took Bush v. Gore seriously as legal precedent, uniform voting machines in each state would be constitutionally required.
    No, it is not clear that any of the judges even thinks that having uniform voting machines is a good idea, much less constitutionally required.

    It is not clear that a court-ordered non-statutory recount could ever be a good idea either. Maybe if there were massive fraud, interference from an act of God or terrorism, or some unforeseeable circumstances. But if there is such a court-ordered recount, then it would have to respect basic fairness concerns. In the case of the proposed Florida recount, it would have been a whole lot less fair than the count it would be replacing, and that is why the US Supreme Court was nearly unanimous in rejecting it.

     
    Left-wing book banners
    When left-wing scientists attack Pres. Bush, they often start out by complain about the Bush administration's refusal to censor a Bible-inspired book about the Grand Canyon. The Clinton administration had banned the book in the national parks. The NY Times reports:
    Brad Wallis, executive director of the Grand Canyon Association, the nonprofit group that runs the stores, said the association did not market the book as science. The association decided to stock it, he said, because it is a professionally produced presentation of "a divergent viewpoint." In the main store, the only one large enough to have separate sections for different kinds of books, "the book was placed in the inspiration section, and we never moved," Mr. Wallis said. "It was never in the science section." ...

    Some have argued that because the store offers books about the culture and legends of the Navajo and Hopi tribes it is appropriate for it to sell books on the legends of creationists as well.

    Real scientists do not go around banning books. The fact that they want to allow Navajo legends just proves that they are just on an anti-Christian rampage.

    John writes that this NY Times story has more confusion about whether GWB is really an evangelical or not. Meanwhile, Kerry has gone berserk quoting the Bible.


    Monday, Oct 25, 2004
     
    John Kerry's wants to continue past failures
    On Nov. 3, everyone will be complaining about what a pathetic campaign that John Kerry ran. Today's news says:
    "With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us," Kerry said.
    That is what I am worried about! Kerry devoted most of his energies to opposing the Vietnam War, and we lost the war. He might similarly help us lose the war on terrorism.
     
    Justice Breyer admits bias against Pres. Bush
    Sup. Ct. Justice This Wash Post AP story says:
    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he is not sure he was being truly impartial when the high court was asked to settle the disputed 2000 presidential vote in Florida.
    Breyer also made the rare admission that he and some of his colleagues base some of their decisions on predictions of factual consequences from amicus briefs!
    Breyer also said many jurists, himself included, take into account contemporary matters raised by the public, citing briefs from organizations defending affirmative action.

    "Do I read the newspapers and try to see which way the political wind is blowing?" he said. "No. But we do decide through briefs that are submitted. . . . They are people trying to tell us of the impact of our decisions in their bit of the world."

    Breyer is an idiot and an embarrassment to the Court. He is trying to say that if he got an amicus brief in Bush v Gore saying that the country would be better off under Gore, then that would be a good reason to throw the election to Gore.

    I don't know whether there were any amicus briefs in Bush v Gore, but a desire to put Gore in office is the only explanation for Breyer's peculiar opinion in that case.

    George writes:

    Breyer is just saying that for issues like affirmative action, he needs to read amicus briefs to learn the consequences. Abolishing affirmative action would have a lot of ramifications. How else are the judges going to figure out what is good for the country?
    Judges are not supposed to be figuring out what is good for the country. Facts should be only be presented at the trial, where witnesses can be sworn in, cross-examined, and rebutted. Appellate courts are only supposed to be determining whether the trial court acted correctly, and not collecting new and unsworn evidence.

    Affirmative action (in particular) exists largely because of some myths that are promoted by some people in influential positions. For Breyer to twist the law to yield to those myths is irresponsible, and an abuse of power.


    Saturday, Oct 23, 2004
     
    Vaccine liability crisis
    Joe sends this email rumor about how a flu vaccine liability crisis was caused (in part) by a frivolous lawsuit from John Edwards!

    The rumor is debunked on Snopes and About.com. These sites say it is an email hoax. They also note that Chiron is a US company (based in Oakland Calif). It is hard to see how it would be escaping liability by using a UK plant to make the vaccine.

    But I am still wondering:

  • why 4 out of the 6 flu vaccine makers stayed out of the USA market?
  • why the USA is the only country with a flu shot shortage?
  • why the vaccine makers are currently lobbying for special liability protection under the VICP, if there is no vaccine liability problem?
  • whether Edwards ever represented vaccine patients with bogus claims?

    Apparently we don't really have a free market in flu shots, or the other 5 makers would be making a killing by selling their doses on the open market, and flu shots would be readily available to anyone who wants to pay a few extra bucks.

    John sends this article explaining some of the technological problems in flu vaccine production.


  • Friday, Oct 22, 2004
     
    Commie advertiser blacklist
    I am too to remember the 1950s, but can someone please explain this CNN attack on a conservative group:
    Calls for advertiser or network boycotts are nothing new, dating as far back as the 1940s and 1950s when McCarthy-era activists successfully blacklisted advertisers deemed to have communist leanings.
    There were commies making movies in Hollywood, but who were the commie advertisers?

    I think that the CNN/Money reporter is mixed up. There were advertisers who were afraid to sponsor commies, but they didn't want their products associated with evil anti-American causes. There was no need to organize a boycott of commie products, because no one would want to buy commie products anyway.

     
    Is Bush stupid?
    Many liberals say that they are voting for Kerry because Pres. Bush is stupid. This is an odd reason, because liberals usually claim that they don't believe in IQ. But if you are going to vote that way, then get the facts. This site points out that both Bush and Kerry are on the record as having taken military IQ tests. The scores are not directly comparable, but it does appear that Bush scored slightly better than Kerry on those tests. Bush also did slightly better on SAT scores, according to this site.

    Some people say that you can tell that Bush is stupid by just listening to him. He certainly stumbles on his words more than Kerry. But I actually think that Bush communicates better than Kerry. When I listen to Bush, I usually understand whatever point he is making and where he stands on the issue. Kerry is a double-talker who just babbles contradictory nonsense. Even his supporters don't know what he is talking about. For proof, just ask a Kerry supporter where he stands on the Iraq War. You will get a gibberish answer.

     
    Kerry's babbling
    John sends this parody of Kerry, describing what he might have said at the debate if he had no time limit.

    Bob writes:

    I thought that the Mary Cheney issue was boring and wasn't going to get a lot of press. Oops. I just watched last night's SNL. If you judge by SNL, the Mary Cheney issue is the big one. They hammered Kerry and Mary Beth Cahill relentlessly. They beat up Bush, but it seemed trite and pro forma. I don't know how likely SNL viewers are to vote or how much they are influenced by SNL, but this isn't good for Kerry. One of the best lines occurred in a parody of the debates. Here is the dialog:
    Lehrer: Senator you have repeatedly criticized the President's conduct of the war in Iraq and have said that you have a plan. What is it?

    Kerry: Jim, I think that if you were to ask Mary Cheney, Vice President Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, I'm sure she would tell you 1 that she is being who she is and 2, that we went into Iraq the wrong way. You see, unlike this President, before invading Iraq, I would have made certain that we had a true international coalition on board. Not just Britain, but our other European allies as well as allies from Asia and the Middle East including Iraq itself. Just imagine how much easier this would have been if Saddam Hussein had joined us."

    Cruel, but fair.

    Thursday, Oct 21, 2004
     
    The evil of Dred Scott
    Slate's Lithwick spreads a lot of false Bush-hater propaganda in opposition to potential Court appointments, and then wonders why others are commenting on how the election my influence the courts.

    Among her usual idiotic comments is this:

    Dred Scott actually represented something quite the opposite of judicial activism. That case was a good example of "originalist" interpretation or "strict construction." And as Timothy Noah observed, the only other explanation for the Dred Scott reference was that it was code for: "Bad decisions must be overturned, and Roe v Wade is going down!"
    No. If she'd read The Supremacists, she'd learn that Dred Scott was the first major supremacist court decision, and was the model for the foolishness of the Warren Court. Bush attacked Dred Scott because it is a famous Supremacist decision, because everyone disagrees with it, and because he was taking a stand against such supremacist decisions.

    Bush could have attacked Roe v Wade, but then people would assume that he was attacking it because of a personal opposition to abortion. Judicial supremacy was what he wanted to attack.

    I agree with Bush. It is foolish to have a litmus on one particular decision when there are 100s of cases with the same mistaken logic.


    Wednesday, Oct 20, 2004
     
    Public does not want leftist judges
    This may explain why Kerry and Edwards avoid discussing court appointments:
    A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found 53 percent of those surveyed believe President Bush would do a better job handling Supreme Court nominations while 37 percent favored Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry.
    Leftists are scared about losing their majority on the Supreme Court, but they don't want to spell it out for the voters. The voters don't really want judicial supremacists.
     
    Phony gene counts
    Scientists supposedly completed the map of the entire human genome in 2001. The day before the big White House publicity stunt, a Clinton aide asked the two rival factions for some hard facts to announce, such as the number of genes. Realizing that they'd look ridiculous if they claimed to have sequenced all the human genes but couldn't tell us how many there were, they cooked up an official count by averaging some blue-sky estimates in last-minute emails.

    Now, they have a new story:

    The new estimate is 20,000 to 25,000 genes, a drop from the 30,000 to 40,000 the same group of scientists published in 2001.

    By comparison, the tiny roundworm C. elegans, a favorite research subject, has around 19,500 genes. A small flowering plant in the mustard family, Arabidopsis, has about 27,000.

    Bob writes:
    In 2001 a rough draft of the genome was announced. It could "look ridiculous" to not to know the exact count of genes given a rough draft of the sequence only to those ignorant of biology.
     
    Kerry's dishonorable discharge
    The New York Sun reports various pieces of circumstantial evidence that Kerry received a dishonorable discharge from the Navy. It is hard to see any other explanation for the evidence.

    It now appears that Bush's military service was more exemplary than Kerry's.

    Volokh has some discussion about whether the 14A of the US Constitution makes Kerry ineligible to be President.

    Bob writes:

    I wonder what you expected. Cheney said it would be a cake walk. If you thought it would be worse than it is, I congratulate you on figuring out what Cheney's word is worth. Here are some opinions of military officers on the topic.

    Lt. General Bernard Trainor who was Bush's envoy to the Middle East said "anybody that tries to put a good face on this situation-- that they're desperate-- I think that they're just whistling in the dark"

    General Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM commander said “There has been poor strategic thinking in this,”

    Lt. General William Odom, former head of the NSA said " Well, the president set forth there war aims as I remember. One was to get rid of WMD there, the second was to overthrow the Saddam regime and third was to create a constitutional democracy which is pro-America. The first two, can be considered either irrelevant or accomplished and the last one is the issue. And there's not going to be a constitutional regime that's pro-American anytime soon, I don't think in several decades."

    If you think Lehrer is a Bush hater, remember that he is a former Marine officer.

    If you can find any quotes saying that the Iraq War has gone worse than expected, send them.

    Zinni also says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time, and that his plan was to use twice as many troops.

    In the Trainor quote, the word "desperate" refers to the Iraqi resistance.

    The aim of installing a pro-America constitutional democracy in Iraq is indeed an extremely ambitious one. If you can show me that Cheney ever said that achieving that aim would be a cake walk, then I'll agree that he was overselling the war.

    Bob writes:

    The goal of the Iraq war was to protect America from WMD produced by Iraq and delivered to terrorists. All other goals are subordinate to that goal. Iraq remains and will remain capable of producing WMD regardless of any action short of annihilation. Only by having an acceptable government in Iraq can the goal of the war be achieved. If Cheney was talking about something else, he is a more deceptive than I thought.
    As far as I know, Iraq has not delivered any WMD to terrorists. I don't have the Cheney quote, so I don't know what he was talking about.

    Chris sends this web site with assorted questions and theories about Bush's service. Among other theories, it claims that the forged CBS/Killian memos are actually authentic, but we've been tricked into believing that they are fake by evil genius Karl Rove!

    Bob writes:

    Terrorists had not attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol with passenger jets before 11 Sep 01. Unless an acceptable government is in power in Iraq we will not be safe from WMD made there.

    Apparently Cheney never did say that the war in Iraq was going to be a cakewalk. Attribution of the cakewalk remark to Cheney is a left wing shibolith. Russert said it in an interview with Cheney. A cakewalk remark was made by By Ken Adelman in the Wash Post. Here is something that Cheney did say on Meet the Press, 16 Mar 03:

    MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

    VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

    The remarkable thing about the interview is the lack of attention given to the issue of insurgency.

    There is finally cause to believe that the insurgency is being contained and rolled back and things may have finally turned around in Iraq. Kerry has taken positions which will prevent him from succeeding in Iraq regardless of our prospects there.

     
    Iraq War much better than expected
    Another Bush-hater argument that makes no sense to me is the claim that he has lousy military tactics. Kerry and his supporters complain that bin Laden got away at Tora Bora, that insurgents were underestimated, that we used too many or too few soldiers, that we declared victory too soon, etc. (The Tora Bora myth rebutted here here.)

    None of this makes any sense. The Iraq War has been extremely successful. Casualties are far below what most people expected. The US has been extremely open about letting reporters know exactly what is going on at every step, and yet the after-the-fact second-guessing has been minimal.

    Polls show that the armed forces will vote 3 to 1 in favor of Bush over Kerry. Bush's military tactics must be pretty good for him to get such overwhelming support. If the commander-in-chief had really botched the war, then the officers and soldiers would want to replace him.

    Kerry seems to be getting desperate, as he has backed off the war criticism, and jumped on loony urban legends about the military draft, social security, and flu vaccines.

     
    2004 election will not be close
    It is annoying to hear so many people misstate basic facts about the history of the Electoral College. Eg, people say that Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and lost the election, and that was the first time since the 1800s.

    Winning the popular vote means winning a majority. Gore did not win the popular vote, as a majority of the voters voted against Gore in 2000. Presidents won the popular votes only in 1952, 56, 64, 72, 76, 80, 84, 88. Clinton never won the popular vote.

    Gore did win a plurality of the popular vote in 2000 and lost, but Nixon did the same in 1960.

    To measure how close an election was, I believe the best way is to look at how many votes a loser needed to have won in order to change the outcome. The closest elections in my lifetime were 2000, 1976, 1960, and 1968. (Data from this article.)

    Gore could have won in 2000 with about 500 more votes in Florida.

    Ford would have won in 1976 with about 18k more votes in Ohio and Hawaii.

    Nixon would have won in 1960 with about 60k more votes in Illinois and Texas.

    Humphrey would have won in 1968 with about 106k more votes in New Jersey, Missouri, and New Hampshire, assuming Democratic control of the House.

    In spite of all the media claims about how close this election is going to be, there is very little chance that it will be as close as any of those 4 elections.


    Tuesday, Oct 19, 2004
     
    Evolutionist Bush-hater
    Here is another example of an intellectual Bush-hater. Richard Dawkins is a brilliant British evolutionist, and he wrote this letter to try to persuade Ohio citizens to vote against Pres. Bush. He compares Bush's invasion of Iraq to a citizen who uses a gun to defend his home from intruders! A Brit named Tony Martin actually got a 10-year jail sentence about 5 years ago for using a shotgun in his home for self-defense. Here is a discussion in another British paper.

    It is hard to explain how people could be so smart about some things, and yet say such idiotic things about Pres. Bush. I've heard rants from homeless people that make more sense than Dawkins' letter. He sounds like a complete moron.


    Monday, Oct 18, 2004
     
    The global warming hockey stick
    John sends this amazing account by a Berkeley Physics prof about the discovery of some systematic errors in the global warming hockey stick chart that supposed shows that global temperaturely are ramping up sharply. He also tells about how the respected science journal Nature has suppressed his criticisms.

    Chris sends Brad LeLong's blog with a contrary view. Hmmmm. It appears that there are some errors on both sides. I guess we'll have to wait for more analysis.

     
    Pat Buchanan endorses Bush
    Pat Buchanan savagely attacks Pres. Bush, and then says:
    Yet, in the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing.

    The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. But why should Kerry be rewarded? He voted to hand Bush a blank check for war. Though he calls Iraq a “colossal” error, “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he has said he would—even had he known Saddam had no role in 9/11 and no WMD—vote the same way today. This is the Richard Perle position.

    Assuredly, a president who plunged us into an unnecessary and ruinous war must be held accountable. And if Bush loses, Iraq will have been his undoing. But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America.

    Most of what he says is correct. The arguments against Bush do not translate into arguments for Kerry.

    Friday, Oct 15, 2004
     
    Justice Thomas thinks for himself
    John sends this Wash Post article which makes the argument that Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court Justice who is most willing to reconsider previous rulings that are plainly wrong.

    Here is a list of 35 cases in which "Justice Thomas wrote a lone concurring or dissenting opinion that calls for overruling or revisiting established constitutional precedent."

    Most of the other justices are judicial supremacists who believe that the Court makes the law, and that Court precedents are more important than the text of the Constitution.

    The Wash Post article tries to portray Thomas as some sort of radical, but actually 30 out of the 35 cases on the list are concurrences. Furthermore, the criticism is contrary to the usual (ignorant) criticism of Thomas -- that he doesn't think for himself. He clearly thinks for himself, and is the most original thinker on the Court.

    I don't think that listing lone opinions is a good measure of hostility to stare decisis. In many cases, Thomas objects to nonbinding dicta in previous opinions. Correcting dicta is not really overturning precedent. Also, it was the 4 leftists on the Court who just voted to reconsder a precedent from only about 15 years ago regarding whether a 17-year-old murderer can be executed. Their willingness to overturn precedent is much worse because they are doing it for political reasons, as opposed to Thomas, who just wants to more faithfully adhere to the text of the law. Other recent examples of liberals overturning precedent including barring the death penalty for low-IQ murderers, and finding a constitutional right to homosexual anal sodomy.

     
    Bush-haters for Bush
    John sends this column by a Bush-hater who will be voting for Bush. Better yet, read Pat Buchanan's new book. There are indeed a lot of reasons for disliking GW Bush, but John Kerry is worse on every single issue.

    Thursday, Oct 14, 2004
     
    Kerry appeals to morons
    I have come to the conclusion that Kerry appeals entirely to morons. There is not one pro-Kerry argument being made by the Kerry-Edwards campaign that makes a lick of sense.

    Take, for example, stem-cell research. The Kerry campaign repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresents what Bush has done, and spouts unrealistic promises. (See this Bush campaign rebuttal.) Kerry said, in the 2nd debate:

    Chris Reeve is a friend of mine. Chris Reeve exercises every single day to keep those muscles alive for the day when he believes he can walk again, and I want him to walk again. ... And I believe if we have the option, which scientists tell us we do, of curing Parkinson's, curing diabetes, curing, you know, some kind of a, you know, paraplegic or quadriplegic or, you know, a spinal cord injury, anything, that's the nature of the human spirit.
    A couple of days later, Reeve dropped dead, and Edwards followed up with this:
    If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.
    The Kerry family is sitting on a billion dollars, and is overseeing a foundation that looks for worthy causes for spending the money. Private research on cloning and stem-cells is completely legal and unrestricted. If stem-cell research is really going to cure all those diseases, then Kerry could fund the research, gain ownership of the patents, save millions of lives, make billions of dollars, and become a real hero. He would probably even be elected president in 2008, as he would then have a real accomplishment that he could point to.

    But that won't happen. There is so much money going into stem-cell research already, that Kerry would have trouble finding ways to spend the money. And there is no research on the horizon that would make Reeve walk again. They as might as well be talking about research to raise Reeve from the dead.

    Bob writes:

    I agree that anyone Kerry appeals to is a moron. That does not mean that anyone who votes for Kerry is a moron. I know someone who is manifestly not a moron who claimed that he "never votes for a politician", he "always votes against them". When challenged, he admitted that he voted for Reagan. While, I don't agree with my friend's statement, my votes for both of the Bushs were actually votes against their opponents. In the case of G.H.W. Bush, I have concluded that my vote for him and against Clinton was an error. If Clinton had been defeated in 1992 I doubt that Republicans would have won a majority in the Congress, or that welfare reform would have been enacted. There are indeed, plenty of reasons to be opposed to George W. Bush, but I can not imagine voting for an unrepentant supporter of the Sandinistas and the nuclear freeze movement who promises to give us more of the same. I will vote against Kerry this time and hope that it is not an error. A one term Kerry Presidency would be good for the Republican party and devastating to the Democrat party. A one term Bush Presidency might encourage Republicans to snap out of it.
     
    Debate gay-baiting from Kerry and Edwards
    The Kerry-Edwards gay-baiting attacks on Cheney's daughter are weird. Both Kerry and Edwards insisted on declaring that she is a lesbian, and tried to score political points. Kausfiles says:
    When I criticized John Edwards for gratuitously mentioning Dick Cheney's gay daughter, I got lots of email suggesting that Edwards was simply being nice. Sorry, that won't fly after Kerry bizarrely, needlessly and explicitly raised the subject again ("I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, ....") There must be some Machiavellian strategy behind the Democratic urge to keep bringing this up--most likely it's a poll-tested attempt to cost Bush and Cheney the votes of demographic groups (like Reagan Dems, or fundamentalists) who are hostile to homosexuality or gay culture or who just don't want to have to think about it. Or maybe Kerry was just trying to throw Bush off stride.
    Whatever the reason, it was creepy and offensive. Where did Kerry find the focus groups who were turned on by such a slimy personal attack?

    Mrs. John Edwards has joined the gay-baiting:

    In an interview Thursday with ABC Radio, Elizabeth Edwards said of Mrs. Cheney: "She's overreacted to this and treated it as if it's shameful to have this discussion. I think that's a very sad state of affairs. ... I think that it indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences. ... It makes me really sad that that's Lynne's response."
    Note the odd choice of words. Mrs. Edwards is suggesting that it is shameful to have a lesbian daughter. Furthermore, her reference to Mary Cheney's sexual "preference" is in contrast to Kerry's debate position that Mary Cheney was born with an innate homosexual orientation. There is no scientific support for Kerry's opinion, and most scientists have the belief that homosexuality is determined after birth and is not innate. I think that the Kerry Edwards team has a lot of explaining to do.

    Some commentators are saying that John Edwards' debate gay-baiting was okay because Dick Cheney did not object to it during the debate. I think that it is more likely that Cheney's pointed refusal to comment was simply an attempt to politely ignore an offensive remark, and to keep his daughter out of the debate.

    Marti writes:

    Here's what John Kerry really meant: It's all about the purity of one's bloodline! People are born with homosexual tendencies. It is genetic. Your daughter is a lesbian. My daughters, of couse, are not.
    Bob says that Bush's campaign tactics are much worse, because in the 2000 S. Carolina primary it has been alleged that Bush supporters spread rumors about McCain's wife and adopted child.

    First, I cannot find any credible source that shows that Bush or the Bush campaign had anything to do with spreading those rumors. The closest I can find is this rant from Molly Ivins in The Nation. She hints that Karl Rove had something to do with it, but she uses the passive voice and does not directly accuse Rove or Bush.

    Second, I don't know how to evaluate a claim about spreading rumors. But in the case of Kerry and Edwards, I saw them launch their personal gay-baiting attacks myself on national TV, so I can safely conclude that Kerry and Edwards are despicable characters.

    Bob also questions whether most scientists doubt that homosexuality is determined at birth. There have been a number of studies that have attempted to show that homosexuality is genetic. They have failed to find any genes linked to homosexuality. A quick search brought sites that claim that there have been studies on identical twins reared apart. Apparently they looked at homosexuals and found that about 50% of their identical twins were also homosexual. That's high, but it is not 100%. I'm no expert on this subject, and I am just posting what I believe to be conventional wisdom. I'll post more evidence if I run across it.


    Monday, Oct 11, 2004
     
    Abortion code words
    Slate columnist and Bush-hater T. Noah says:
    In the Oct. 8 debate, President Bush baffled some people by saying he wouldn't appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who would condone the Dred Scott decision. ... it was an invisible high-five to the Christian right. "Google Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade," various readers instructed me, and damned if they weren't on to something. To the Christian right, "Dred Scott" turns out to be a code word for "Roe v. Wade." Even while stating as plain as day that he would apply "no litmus test," Bush was semaphoring to hard-core abortion opponents that he would indeed apply one crucial litmus test: He would never, ever, appoint a Supreme Court justice who condoned Roe.
    Dred Scott and Roe v Wade are indeed the Supreme Courts two most famous (and infamous) supremacist decisions. Hardly anyone is willing to defend the supremacist reasoning behind these decisions, and Bush is to be praised for only wanting to appoint "strict constructionists" who will interpret the Constitution instead of trying to make their own law.

    It appears that Bush does not have an abortion litmus test for judicial appointments, because he appointed several pro-abortion judges to the Texas supreme court. But I certainly hope that he really does have an anti-supremacist litmus test.

    Bob writes:

    Besides being incoherent, Bush was completely wrong about the Dred Scott decision in the debate. Bush says:
    BUSH: Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

    That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

    Article IV, sec 2 of the Constitution says:
    No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
    The reasoning and scope of Dred Scott are indeed supremacist personal opinion. The result Bush complained about in the debate is not a personal opinion, it is the text of the Constitution.
    That clause might have been used to return Dred Scott to his master in the South. But the Supreme Court went way beyond that. It ruled that the Constitution allows slavery in the territories, even tho Congress had banned it there, because of a 5A property right. Under the Court's reasoning, it would have been unconstitutional for a Southern state to abolish slavery, because that would deprive the owners of their property rights. That is what Bush was talking about.
     
    Kerry and Bush-haters
    John Kerry says in the debate that we need stem cell research so that Christopher Reeve can walk again -- and 2 days later he is dead. Please, Kerry, don't do any research for me!

    It was bad enough under Clinton having a First Lady who really wanted to use her maiden name; if Kerry wins, we'll have a First Lady who would rather use some other man's name! Apparently she values her first husband's billion dollar fortune higher than the USA presidency.

    I just tuned into an SF KGO Bush-hater saying that Kerry won the second debate because Bush refused to admit to specific errors! Actually, I thought that Bush gave a good answer. He admitted to a couple of bad appointments, but politely refused to mention Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill by name. And he stood by the decision to invade Iraq, which is, of course, what the Bush-haters want him to admit was wrong. The question was an obnoxious one, like "When did you stop beating your wife?".

    Some people say that we used too many troops in the Iraq War, and some say too few. Some say that we waited too long, and some say we didn't wait long enough. I am sure that Bush did make some mistakes, and perhaps historians will be able to figure it out 10 or 20 years from now.

    Deborah Tannen says:

    If women react to Mr. Bush's made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured. That's because it drives many women nuts when men won't say they made a mistake and apologize if they do something wrong.
    Let's hope that the voters are not so idiotic.

    Sunday, Oct 10, 2004
     
    Tom Sell refuses to plea bargain
    John sends this St. Louis story about Tom Sell. He has been imprisoned for 7 years without trial, and I believe that he is probably innocent, and certainly not deserving of 7 years in prison.
     
    NY Times reporter may goto jail
    The NY Times has self-serving editorial in defense of making one of its reporters goto jail instead of obeying the law. It was the NY Times that created a phony issue by publishing false accusations by Joseph C. Wilson against GW Bush. When the truth started to leak out, it was the NY Times that wanted a criminal investigation of the leakers. Now it turns out that it is the NY Times that is breaking the law. I hope that their reporter serves a jail sentence.

    Saturday, Oct 09, 2004
     
    Moslems don't just kill infidels
    Bob sends this article about Mohammedan attitudes about whom they should kill and not kill.
     
    Clarence Thomas
    John sends this Wash. Post profile of Justice Clarence Thomas. I cannot even figure out the headline:
    Enigmatic on the Bench, Influential in the Halls
    Image as an Uncompromising Jurist Belies His Engaging Demeanor as a Mentor
    The article doesn't really justify the headline, except perhaps for this:
    What's clear is that Thomas's judicial profile has become sharper with each passing year. He has grown more defiant, less compromising -- content to reside outside the court's power center. His tenure on the court has been marked by strongly worded dissents and concurrences that prod and provoke, but that leave him on the margins of influence. And yet inside his chambers, and across the nation, he has become an effective spokesman for his ideas, displaying through personal interactions the kind of empathy not often evident in his court writings.
    Thomas is not enigmatic at all. He has a coherent legal philosophy, and his court opinions are among the best written and logically explained of any coming from the Supreme Court. Some may call it "uncompromising", but I'd call it "principled". But either way, why would it be surprising that he does favors for his friends and enjoys conversations? I don't get it.

    Friday, Oct 08, 2004
     
    Kerry thinks ERA passed
    John Kerry said, in the last debate:
    Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected?

    These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law.

    Since when does the Constitution ever require equal pay for women? The ERA never passed.
     
    Joe McCarthy in Salem Museum
    Ken Jennings won another Jeopardy episode with this:
    Category: Famous Names. A: The last thing visitors see in the exhibit area of the Salem Witch Museum is a huge photo of this politician. Q: Who is Joe McCarthy?
    Sure enough, the Salem Museum says:
    Finally, a large picture of Senator Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Welsh asks visitors to consider the phenomenon of witch hunting. The formula for a witch hunt - fear + trigger = scapegoat, is written across the photo: Contemporary examples of witch hunts - the Japanese American internment after Pearl Harbor, the McCarthy hearings on Communism and the persecution of the gay community at the start of the AIDS epidemic - bring the lessons of stereotyping and prejudice full circle.
    It explains:
    The parallels between the Salem witch trials and more modern examples of "witch hunting" like the McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, are remarkable.
    Just what are those parallels? A desire to expose evil influences on our society? No, the museum says that witches must be good people because their beliefs predate Christianity:
    It is widely understood that witchcraft is a pantheistic religion that includes reverence for nature, belief in the rights of others and pride in one's own spirituality. Practitioners of witchcraft focus on the good and positive in life and in the spirit and entirely reject any connection with the devil. Their beliefs go back to ancient times, long before the advent of Christianity; therefore no ties exist between them and the Christian embodiment of evil. Witchcraft has been confused in the popular mind with pointy black hats, green faces and broomsticks. This is a misrepresentation that witches are anxious to dispel.
    And commies, Japanese illegal aliens, and AIDS carriers practicing unsafe sex also have a reverence for nature? This stuff is just too nutty.

    Thursday, Oct 07, 2004
     
    Rush has no medical privacy
    A court upheld the seizure of Rush Limbaugh's medical records:
    Andrew Schlafly, general counsel for the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, said the ruling could have far-reaching effects on how patients choose a physician and what medical information a patient might share.

    "We've done surveys that show patients already withhold information from their doctors, and this is going to make that much worse," Schlafly said. "Patients are going to engage in doctor shopping to find a doctor who will protect their confidences ... It's the end of privacy in medical records."

     
    Reporters defy courts
    John sends this AP story:
    Fitzgerald also has issued subpoenas to reporters from NBC, Time magazine and The Washington Post. Some have agreed to provide limited testimony after their sources — notably Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is Vice President Cheney's chief of staff — released them from their promise of confidentiality.

    Miller and Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, said they would not agree to provide testimony even under those circumstances.

    Novak never has said whether he has been subpoenaed.

    I see no excuse for the press refusing the subpoenas. What are they trying to cover-up? Honest news reporters want to publish news, not cover it up. Perhaps they are covering up their complicity in spreading lies about Bush.

    Tuesday, Oct 05, 2004
     
    Pat Buchanan's book
    I just got a review copy of Pat Buchanan's book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency.

    I expected a strong attack on GW Bush. Buchanan ran against Bush 41, and abandoned the Republican Party to run as a Reform Party candidate for President.

    He presents some useful history that ought to be more widely known. On many issues, such as the courts, he is exactly correct.

    If Buchanan is right, then the Bush's handling of the Iraq War is profoundly mistaken. 10 years from now, it may be apparent that the war was a great mistake that caused many problems. Nevertheless, it hard to imagine anyone liking the book and then voting for John Kerry. No matter how misguided Bush may be, Kerry is many times more misguided.

    I'll have more on the book later.

     
    Iraq insurgency
    Bob sends this article as proof that the US military did not expect the Iraq insurgency:
    "We had a hope the Iraqis would rise up and become part of the solution," said former Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. military's Central Command until his retirement last August. "We just didn't know (about the insurgency)."
    The article also says:
    As he noted in his book, Franks initially projected that troop strength in Iraq might have to rise to 250,000 for the U.S. to meet all of its objectives, but it never got higher than 150,000.

    "The wild card in this was the expectation for much greater international involvement," he said in the interview. ...

    Though an insurgency was feared, there was no assumption it would happen, he said.

    So Franks feared an insurgency, but expected that we'd have a lot more troops and avoid it. Glad to hear that he thinks positive.

    Obviously the military considered dozens of scenarios. I am sure that no one is too surprised by anything that has happened. No one expects generals to be perfect predictors of the future.

    Bob writes:

    We have no more than 150,000 troops to send. That is why Shinseki's estimate was unwelcome. Interesting that Franks agreed with Shinseki, kept his mouth shut and carried on.

    Excellent selective quoting. He also said "We just didn't know (about the insurgency)."

    Both Franks and Bremer say that the administration assertions that troop strengths were adequate according to military commanders were false.

    I ignored the parenthetical comment, because Franks didn't say it. Someone was putting words in his mouth. A more accurate quote would have been: "We just didn't know (whether Iraqis would rise up and become part of the solution)."

    The NY Times article says that Kerry is joining criticism that says we didn't have enough ground troops in Iraq. So now he wants more troops for the wrong war at the wrong time? Where was Kerry last year? It appears that Kerry will join in with any criticism of Bush, no matter how contradictory it is to his other positions.

    The article quotes Bremer as saying that we have enough troops in Iraq now, and as saying last year that we had enough ground troops for the invasion.


    Monday, Oct 04, 2004
     
    Bush goes nucular
    Bob writes:
    I have a new, improved take on why the elite hate W. Bush does not care about elite opinion and goes out of his way to express it. Bush has a decidedly anti-intellectual leaning. As some say, he has gone nucular. When his alma mater, Yale, insulted his father when he won the Presidency with protracted debate on whether to bestow the traditional honorary degree, W wrote off Yale without a second thought. It took years of lobbying by one of his close friends and his daughter's decision to attend Yale to end the estrangement. Bush political positions and giveaways are carefully crafted to win votes, with no regard whatsoever to elite opinion. The elite are filled with fear and loathing toward powerful politicians who are indifferent or hostile to their values and opinions.
     
    More judicial supremacism
    Phyllis writes:
    As per my recent 2 columns, it appears that (1) we could have enhanced the chapter on Judges Impose Taxes to include the School Funding litigation, and (2) we could have had a chapter on Judges Steal Property Rights because the bad decision 54 years ago was under the Warren Court, too.

    There is no end to The Supremacists and the wrongness of the Warren Court. At the time, I thought the major problem was its pro-Commie decisions.

    Yes. Judicial supremacy is the root of the evil of the courts.

    John writes:

    The 50-year-old decision of Berman v. Parker (1954), which watered down the 5th Amendment's requirement of "public use" to include the broader "public purpose" (later watered down even further to include "public benefit"), was decided unanimously by the Warren Court with an opinion by William O. Douglas.

    A new development may well test whether conservatives are truly committed to a stricter reading of the 5th Amendment as proposed by this week's column.

    Just last week, major league baseball approved moving the last-place Montreal baseball team to Washington, D.C., which has been without a team for 33 years. The move is conditioned upon construction of a brand new stadium to be 100% publicly financed at a cost of $440 million.

    It turns out that the site that has been selected for the new stadium is currently (and for the past 30 years or so has been) one of the main gay nightclub districts of D.C.

    By day, the area consists of dingy warehouses and seedy apartments. Late at night, it becomes alive with lights, traffic, and thousands of partiers.

    The stadium would totally displace about two dozen gay businesses that would be unlikely to relocate successfully. As the column points out, business owners receive nothing when their leased property is bought out from under them by eminent domain.

    To add to the irony, the area in question is barely a mile from the property whose condemnation 50 years ago was upheld in Berman v. Parker.

    The gay partiers will not be compensated either.

    Saturday, Oct 02, 2004
     
    Single-sex schools
    Andy writes:
    I had missed this remarkable proposal. Note that courts would probably strike it down under an expansive view of the Equal Protection Clause for gender (see VMI case).

    The drop-off in performance by many girls and a few boys is dramatic in a co-ed teenaged classroom, as I have observed firsthand and nearly any (objective) teacher would agree.

    John writes:
    These are correctly described as "single-sex" schools and/or classrooms, not "same-sex." Note that the officials quoted in this story only use the correct term "single-sex," but the NYT reporter insists on using "same-sex" throughout the story.

    This is similar to the way the liberal media constantly use the ambiguous word "immigrant" (which is never used in legal procedings or by government officials) instead of the precise, accurate, correct and official term "alien."

    Liza writes:
    This was covered in an Education Reporter Brief several months ago and will be further discussed in the forthcoming Oct. issue. Lots of spublic chool systems are acting on the new freedom to have single-sex classes or schools.

    Yes, I remember noticing John's point when the story first ran. It seemed like loaded language intended to somehow link single-sex education with the entirely unrelated concept of same-sex marriage.


    Wednesday, Sep 29, 2004
     
    Lies about Bush v. Gore
    John sends this TNR article about Bush v. Gore.

    These legal article about Bush v. Gore are just packed with lies. Skipping down to one of its claims at random, it says:

    Scalia wrote, the issues should be regarded as "political questions" to be regulated exclusively by legislatures, not courts. Of course, if Scalia applied the same standard in Bush v. Gore, he would have agreed with Justice Stephen Breyer that it, too, was a "political question" to be resolved by Congress rather than the Supreme Court
    That is not what Breyer said in Bush v. Gore. Breyer not only wanted the Supreme Court to intervene in the election, he wanted to order the Florida judges to do an additional vote recount according to a peculiar scheme that he devised. He declared that the schemes proposed by Gore and by the Florida courts judges were unconstitutional.

    It was Scalia and the other conservatives who opposed using a judge-concocted recount scheme to the presidential election.

    A new Vanity Fair article on Bush v. Gore uses info from pro-Gore Supreme Court clerks, and reveals some previously unknown details. Eg, Justice Stevens had originally signed onto Breyer's opinion that the Florida recount was unconstitutional. But when Stevens found out that Kennedy noted that the Court was 8-1 against the constitutionality of the Florida court's recount, Stevens changed his vote.

    The only one who denied constitutional equal-protection concerns was Ginsburg. Her opinion originally had a footnote explaining away the concerns based on a New York Times report that blacks had encountered trouble voting! Apparently she thinks that some racist hearsay from a left-wing newspaper is reason enough to ignore constitutional guarantees, and to allow court manipulation of a presidential election.


    Monday, Sep 27, 2004
     
    Larry Lessig, Bush-hater
    I was just looking at Lessig's blog, and have some observations. Lessig seems very intelligent. Lessig is a hard-core Bush-hater. About 80% of Lessig's posts relate to intellectual property (IP) law. There is not a single post that says that Kerry would be better than Bush on IP law. A couple of posts suggest that Kerry would be worse. There are dozens of posts complaining about IP law policies of the Clinton administration, but none opposing Bush's IP law policies.

    It is not clear why Lessig hates Bush so much. There is an occasional reference to opposing the Iraq War, but that is way outside his main interests.

    So why is a smart prof. like Lessig so pro-Kerry?

    Andy writes:

    This is a superb question. There is a reason for it, and it is worth debating what that reason is. Lessig is particularly baffling because I think he comes from a Republican family.

    Some possible answers:

    Perhaps Lessig's wife is a Bush-hater, and that influences him.
    Perhaps Lessig is currying favor with liberal Silicon Valley types and law firms by bashing Bush.
    Perhaps Lessig is a media icon wannabee, and the media (except for Fox News) are Bush-hating.
    Perhaps Lessig thinks Kerry would send some government money in his general direction.
    Perhaps Lessig is simply following the mood of law school students, which is a very liberal group.

    Actually, when you realize that Nobel prize winners are almost unanimously in favor of Kerry, Lessig's position is not so surprising.

    Some persuasively argue that the Bush-hating phenomenon boils down to a hatred for born-again Christians. Lessig may not fall into that category himself, but he is in a law school culture that is markedly hostile to religion.

    I don't buy the religion theory. GW Bush is a Methodist. He never calls himself "born again", as far as I know. Clinton is a Southern Baptist, and Kerry is a Catholic. Surely those religions are more disliked that Methodists.

    Liza writes:

    I definitely buy the religion theory. Large numbers of people are deeply suspicious of evangelicals in politics. It explains the intense hatred for Bush 43 as opposed to Bush 41, and the vilification of Ashcroft. Bush is considered an evangelical or born-again Christian. Many mainline Protestants, Jews and atheists think it's really dangerous when a politician thinks he's getting orders from God. I wish they would focus their animosity on the real religious threat - Islam - rather than evangelical Christianity, but there is no question their animosity is a real factor in U.S. politics.

    I can confirm that Andy's characterization of Bush's religious outlook is correct. Bush may not be a "fundamentalist" (the type that believes in the literal truth of every word in the Bible), but he has been open about having a midlife experience of finding Jesus and giving up drinking. He uses evangelical lingo, talking about "love" and "heart" a lot. In a presidential debate, he named Jesus as his favorite philosopher. I recently read an anecdote describing Bush as praying effusively with clasped arms with some White House staffer or visitor who asked him to pray for a relative undergoing surgery for brain cancer. Moreover, evangelicals recognize and accept Bush as one of their own, as someone who "walks the walk" as well as talks the talk. Methodism and born-again evangelical Christianity are not mutually exclusive.

    Gumma writes:
    You all are missing the importance of body language. It's not what Bush says. It's his body language. That shows him to be Bible-believing sorta fundamentalist Christian.
    Andy writes:
    Roger wrote, "Can Liza or Andy document their views? Maybe I've missed it, but I've never heard Bush describe himself as someone who suddenly found Christ, or even talk like an evangelical. Quotes, please?"

    Liza gave you one: at a key primary debate with John McCain, Bush said Jesus was the most important person in history to him. McCain said Teddy Roosevelt. A friend of mine who is a fallen-away Catholic complained to me about Bush's remark.

    But it doesn't matter whether Bush really is a born-again Christian. All that matters is that the Bush-haters perceive him as one. And their hatred is not because they fear Bush will make a wrong decision (as Liza implied), but because they oppose recognizing the authority of religiously devout people, period. Using my analogy of Middle East hatred, you can bet that many Moslems don't care if Jewish politicians run the country better!

    Liza writes:
    Okay, Roger, check out the second article I found in a quick google search. This is loaded with actual Bush quotes about his religious views. If this doesn't convince you he's essentially evangelical or born-again, nothing will. He doesn't go out of his way to use those labels, but he doesn't disavow them either.

    Of course, "evangelical" is a somewhat loose term, as Bush recognizes. It doesn't refer to a monolithic church like Catholicism, and one can belong to any of a big variety of Protestant sects and still be considered evangelical or born-again. But I suspect you have very little personal experience of evangelicals or you wouldn't be arguing what is common knowledge about Bush. The common thread is that they have a defining moment in their life when they accept Jesus Christ as their savior (the "born-again" moment) - even if they were already Christians before. That clearly happened with Bush. There is also a distinctive way of talking about one's faith and of praying that is nothing like, say, what typical Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians do. It involves a more direct relationship with God and the Bible. Church hierarchy doesn't figure in the mix.

    I don't think that Liza knows what an evangelical is. An evangelical Christian believes that it is his duty to preach the Gospels to nonbelievers, so that they may be saved.

    Those quotes from Bush are expressing mainstream Christian beliefs.

    No, I don't rely on "common knowledge about Bush". If I relied on common knowledge among academics, then I'd be voting for Kerry.

    Snopes says that it is an urban legend that Bush is an evangelical.

    Here, evangelicals say that Bush is "simply mistaken" when he said, "I believe we [Christians and Muslims] worship the same God."


    Sunday, Sep 26, 2004
     
    Prof Larry Tribe is a plagiarist
    Andy writes:
    After the plagiarism scandal among liberal icons has sullied three "scholars", it has now reached L. Tribe himself. Thanks to John for circulating this article.

    Tribe's copying in his book GOD SAVE THIS HONORABLE COURT seems even worse than the other three scandals.

    This doesn't surprise me. For years I've said that Tribe is an intellectual phony. Only the media followers seem to think otherwise.

    The Weekly Standard lists Tribe's achievements:

    1. He's argued thirty-six cases before the Supreme Court, an astonishing number, and they include such landmark cases as the 2000 Bush v. Gore.

    There's nothing intellectual about arguing before the Supreme Court, nor is 36 a particularly "astonishing" number. Some have argued over 100 cases there. Also, Gore dumped Tribe in favor of David Boies for the key 2000 Bush v. Gore argument.

    2. [Tribe] just represented the losing side before the Florida Supreme Court in John Kerry's effort to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot.

    Wow, that's a real claim to fame! He loses a liberal argument before the most liberal court in America. And he then whined about it afterwards!

    3. He's produced the bestselling textbook American Constitutional Law, now in its third edition.

    Liberal professors promote this liberal book, which is a rat's nest of incoherence. The work reminds me of Michael Moore. There's nothing intellectual about it.

    4. He's written such books as the 1985 Constitutional Choices and the 1991 Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes.

    Nothing insightful here. I've never heard anyone even discuss these books, let alone praise them.

    5. Tribe was recently named one of Harvard's rare "University Professors," replacing Archibald Cox, who died this spring.

    What a laugher that "honor" is.

    That's it, folks. Omitted was the fact that Tribe dropped out of a math graduate program and was initially passed over by the Law Review. No one can think of any insightful contribution by Tribe. Scores of professors and students at Harvard and elsewhere have contributed more.

    The plagiarism was probably from Tribe's ghostwriter. Either way, there appears to be some academic misconduct.

    Yes, Tribe is nothing but a partisan political hack, with no significant intellectual accomplishments. Some of his articles are idiotic. He charges $1 million for each Supreme Court oral argument, so he has gotten rich from his reputation.

    Update: Tribe has now apologized. There is more info on the Harvard plagiarism blog.

    John sends this NRO article which says:

    A bright young man or woman could get tenure at Harvard Law School with a publishing record that would not even qualify him for a job interview at the Harvard History Department.

    ... Dershowitz is correct that most Harvard lawyers simply play by different rules than other academics do.

    Yet this is not an excuse. It is a restatement of the problem.

    I’ve often wondered whether American legal education is not a vast waste of time and money.

    Yes, it is true that law schools like Harvard Law have appalling low academic standards compared to other departments at top universities. Usually, the law professors do not have doctoral degrees, and do not have any significant research accomplishments.

    Friday, Sep 24, 2004
     
    Dan Rather has a history of lies
    Bob writes:
    Ellen Forman's letter to the Boston Globe, linked above, beautifully illustrates the position liberals find themselves in. The media can no longer be counted on to save the day. Ten years ago Rather would have been able to make his story stick, at least through the election, now it was all over in 2 weeks. Rather may even be held accountable for a bogus story he did on Vietnam vets in 1988 as his web unravels.

    The pathetic argument that the documents may be forgeries, but the contents are true won't fly. Journalists such as Ken Auletta say that it isn't a respectable argument.

    When New Yorker writers and and Duke University journalism professors, formerly of Time magazine, appear on Lehrer and trash the liberal icon Dan Rather, it's game over. We have emerged from the dark days when network anchors told us how it is.

    The transcript is from the biased Bush-haters at PBS. Auletta defended the CBS cover-up of the source of the Rather memos, and defended other aspects of CBS's anti-Bush bias. He said:
    in fairness to CBS, they have Barnes' coming on, the former speaker of the House, saying that he got, he used political influence to get Bush in the National Guard, is a very compelling and important story. And CBS deserves credit for that, but there have been questions about their documents, and about whether they rushed to get that story on the air.
    Barnes is a Democrat, a Kerry fund-raiser, and a crook. His story was a tired rehash of what he said in the 2000 campaign, and it was rebutted then. It was not news. It was anti-Bush propaganda.

    Dan Rather's error was not that he rushed the story. The problem is not that there are questions about the documents. The documents have been proved to be forgeries. Rather and CBS knew that the memos were probably forgeries, but went with the story anyway because of partisan political reasons and because they thought that the White House was not going to question the memos. PBS and Auletta are trying to imply that Bush is at fault somehow, but they have nothing on Bush.


    Thursday, Sep 23, 2004
     
    The Florida judicial supremacists
    The judicial supremacists on the Florida high court are at it again. See NY Times.

    If judges want Terri Schiavo dead, they say it is unconstitutional for the governor or legislature to keep her alive.

    Nobody complains when a governor intervenes to stop the execution of a murderer, so it is a little odd to hear judges complain about saving the life of an innocent woman.

     
    Kerry's IP man
    Lessig's blog says:
    Word now is that Bruce Lehman, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and Commissioner of Patents, is spreading the word that he is running IP policy on the Kerry campaign. In the scheme of extremists, few are more extreme. Of all the government “Czars” in our form of government, he proved himself to be most to be feared.

    Yet another bit of depressing news, if true, from this extraordinarily important campaign.

    Lessig is depressed because he is a Bush-hater who is disappointed with Kerry's campaign.

    Lehman was a terrible patent commissioner. He didn't even have a patent background. Clinton only appointed him because of his sexual preference, according to press reports.

     
    Newt Gingrich against judicial supremacy
    John sends this Wash Times op-ed, and says "Newt must have read The Supremacists!"

    Gingrich says:

    The truth is that the modern notion of judicial supremacy is an invention of the Warren court. In the 1958 case Cooper v. Aaron, the court claimed that Marbury had "declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution." But as Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer has noted, the notion of judicial supremacy is "just bluster and puff... the Justices in Cooper were not reporting a fact so much as trying to manufacture one."

    The time to reassert the right of the American people to instruct the court through the Legislative and Executive branches has come. America is a free nation and it is the duty of those who would represent the American people to find mechanisms for our generation which block activist judges from stripping us of the freedoms and values we believe in. Sen. Jon Kyl and Rep. Todd Akin's bill to prevent federal courts from ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance accomplishes this task, and is in the spirit of the popular constitutionalism of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It should be passed immediately.

    These points were all clearly made in Phyllis Schlafly's recent book.

    Tuesday, Sep 21, 2004
     
    Protect the Pledge from court meddling
    Congress may strip Court jurisdiction over the Pledge of Allegiance. Good. I hope the Democrats are afraid to vote against it, with the election coming up.

    John sends this PFAW propaganda, and writes:

    The Akin bill does NOT "bar the federal courts from enforcing the U.S. Supreme Court's 1943 decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette." That's just a flat-out lie.
    Update: Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said, "Protect the pledge from what?" Read the bill, Nancy. The House passed it.

    Friday, Sep 17, 2004
     
    Response to Supremacists criticism
    Bruce Fein criticizes The Supremacists in a Wash. Times op-ed. Here is a response.

    Fein argues that the Supreme Court would never rule against both popular opinion and the Constitution. But that has been false ever since the Warren Court activism of the 1950s.

    As The Supremacists carefully documents, the Supreme Court has issued unpopular and unfounded decisions in the areas of criminal law, religion, taxes, abortion, school busing, etc. Fein seems to agree that many of those decisions were bad, but disagrees about what can be done about them.

    In case the Supreme Court exceeds its jurisdiction, Fein says that amending the Constitution is the only legal remedy. But the Constitution already gives Congress the power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts, and Congress has used that power dozens of times. There is no need to amend the Constitution to give Congress a power that the Constitution already grants explicitly to Congress.

    For example, most people are against same-sex marriage. Marriage has always been a matter of state law, and there is no good reason why the federal courts should have jurisdiction over the definition of marriage. The Republic Party Platform endorses Congress limiting federal court jurisdiction so that the federal courts will not mandate same-sex marriage. That would allow the courts to have their traditional jurisdiction over federal cases and controversies, but limit their ability to meddle in certain particularly sensitive political questions.

    The main point of the book is to attack judicial supremacy. We don't want nine unaccountable judges having the last say on controversial political policy issues of the day, like same-sex marriage and the pledge of allegiance. The book supports the separation of powers, and the checks and balances that are already in the Constitution.

    I also couldn't figure out why Fein says, "Eight constitutional amendments have reversed Supreme Court decisions." I count Amendment 11, and maybe 14 and 15, but I don't see any way to get to eight.

    Bob writes:

    Here is another reason why judicial supremacists get us into trouble. Thomas Sowell has written a book, Affirmative Action Around the World which clearly shows the evil effects of affirmative action in the US and elsewhere. Sowell clearly shows that affirmative action would not be possible in the US without riding roughshod over the Constitution. This interview explains the argument clearly:

    Peter Robinson: I'm going to quote you yet again, "The historical evolution of affirmative action in the Unites States would be difficult to understand without first realizing the first fact, the legal obstacles which such policies must overcome in order to be acceptable in American courts of law as well as in the political arena." Legal obstacles such as?

    Thomas Sowell: The Fourteenth Amendment.

    Peter Robinson: Fairly substantial legal obstacles.

    Thomas Sowell: That's right. And politically you have to represent preferences and quotas as not being preferences and quotas. And you have to represent them as being temporary.

    Peter Robinson: The Fourteenth Amendment says or guarantees?

    Thomas Sowell: Equal treatment of all citizens.

    Peter Robinson: But individual basis...

    Thomas Sowell: That's right.

    Peter Robinson: It is implicitly opposed to group...

    Thomas Sowell: That's right. Every citizen, not every group of citizens or whatnot. And so you got to overcome that. And so you've got to pretend that this is really just an anti-discrimination policy. And that pretense gets pretty tense sometimes.

    Peter Robinson: "The transparent dishonesty with which quotas and preferences have been instituted and maintained here in the United States," you write, "is a dishonesty reaching into the highest court in the land as the Weber case demonstrates." Take us through what took place in the Weber case.

    Thomas Sowell: In the Weber case, Weber was a worker in a plant in Louisiana and he wanted to get into a training program which would qualify him for higher jobs, and he was turned down. And blacks who had lesser qualifications than him were admitted. And so he took this to the Supreme Court. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 said, "individuals," and Justice Brennan, someone with a great verbal sleight of hand, turned this around. Said, well, but the real intent of Congress, you see, was this or that and so he then ruled against Weber and then when the dissenting opinion of Rehnquist said that this reminded him of the great escapes of Houdini. That, you know, the language was so plain and clear, in the law itself. And it was also plain and clear if you got into legislative history where they talk about the possibility of quotas and Hubert Humphrey who was pushing the Civil Rights Act said, you know, I'll eat my hat if this thing turns out into quotas. Well, he wasn't there to eat his hat.

    Sowell said:
    Small in size but huge in importance, Phyllis Schlafly’s The Supremacists is must-reading for those who want to stop activist judges from taking away the people’s right to choose their own laws and policies.
    This letter to the Wash Times editor was published:
    Law from whole cloth

    Bruce Fein gets it all wrong when critiquing Phyllis Schlafly's book "The Supremacists: The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It" ("Courts run amok?" Op-Ed, Tuesday).

    Mr. Fein scolds Mrs. Schlafly for not having sufficient fear of the majority, pointing out, correctly, that "the Founding Fathers most feared majority oppression." Amazingly, Mr. Fein then devotes almost the entirety of his commentary to proving that the Supreme Court is not to be overly feared because it has a better-than-200-year history of service to majority will, no matter how often that will undergoes massive changes. As Mr. Fein writes, "For more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has never persisted in affronting popular orthodoxies."

    Mr. Fein then cites several examples, going back to 1896, of the Supremes siding with majority sentiment. One may quibble, as I do, with whether those examples point to the Supremes siding with the majority or with liberal elite opinion, but nobody, not even Mr. Fein in this piece, will tell you that the Supreme Court does what it is supposed to do: simply interpret the Constitution, with no bias toward majorities, minorities, elites or any other interest group. That's with good reason, for as any conservative worth his salt knows, the Supreme Court has been making up law out of whole cloth since at least 1937.

    There are four constitutional methods for dealing with an arrogant Supreme Court. They are: amendments (which are rare and sometimes take decades to be enacted); new appointments (useless — no matter who appoints them, the justices ggenerally do as they please); impeachments (a real laugher — when was the last Supreme Court justice impeacched?); and amending the Supreme Court jurisdiction, a power granted to Congress in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution. This step leaves no room for doubt and could be signed into law in days, as it takes just a simple majority vote in Congress and the President's signature.

    Mr. Fein does not tell us, but I would love to know why he endorses the first three methods while being adamantly opposed to the fourth, even though all four methods are part of the original Constitution that came out of Philadelphia in 1787.

    RICK LYNCH Purcellville, Va.

    Yes, the Supreme Court issues rulings all the time that are based on neither the Constitution nor the majority. Sometimes, as Lynch says, the court sides with liberal elite opinion. For example, when the Supreme Court knocked out the death penalty in the 1960s, it was just siding with a liberal elite minority. The majority favored the death penalty, and the Constitution approves of it in several places.

    Wednesday, Sep 15, 2004
     

    The LA Times agrees that the CBS memos are faked, but it cannot resist an assortment of cheap shots at Bush. Eg, it says:
    Bush gave a smirky speech Tuesday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years. All of that is true, but not about him.
    What does that mean? G.W. Bush served honorably for 4 years in the National Guard. There is some question about how he was excused from some duties during his 5th year, as there is some question about how Kerry was excused from his duties after serving 4 months in Vietnam. But there is no question that Bush flew F-102 fighter planes in the Texas National Guard.

    The LA Times has another story on the CBS memos today, reporting that Killian's secretary says that the memos are forgeries. But the story tries to put an anti-Bush spin on it by using the headline, "Ex-Guard Typist Recalls Memos Criticizing Bush".

    Another LA Times story today has the headline, Rather Rides Out Latest Partisan Storm. No, Dan Rather is not riding out the storm. This is the end of his career. He will never be taken seriously again. He has executed a partisan political hoax of the highest order, and he has been caught. For proof that they are fake, see the blogs, such as Peter Duncan.

    Chris writes:

    He received preferential treatment to be able to enlist. He enlisted for a six year term. There is no documentary record for his being excused for any of his fifth or sixth year. In fact the written record from the time is quite clear. He failed to meet his commitment. He was removed form flight service because he missed a flight physical he was ordered to complete. There is some evidence that he would have failed the physical but he failed to follow a direct order to complete the physical.

    He cost the US Taxpayers over a million dollars to learn to fly and then blew off his commitment. He should have been ordered to active duty when he failed to complete his required training exercises that he committed to, he did not complete sufficient training exercises to receive his honorable discharge. It was because of his political connections that this was allowed to happen.

    GW Bush was excused from his commitment when the Vietnam War ended, and 1000s of others were also being excused from their commitments. He was trained to fly F-102 fighter planes, but those were being phased out, and he wasn't needed anymore.

    John Kerry was similar excused from his commitments. He was allowed to leave Vietnam after a mere 4 months, because he had 3 phony Purple Hearts. He was excused from additional commitments in 1970 so that he could run for Congress.

    If you want to make the case that GW Bush benefitted in life from the accomplishments and political connections of his father, then I agree with you. He never would have become President otherwise. Whether he got preferential treatment getting into the National Guard or Harvard, I don't know and I don't care.

    The Bush-haters at CBS News spent 4 years digging for dirt on Bush's military service, and the best smear that they could find was 4 forged memos. Kerry is crazy to base his presidential campaign on comparing Bush's military service record to his own. Bush served his country honorably, and went on to do bigger and better things. Kerry was a disgrace to his country during the Vietnam War, and hasn't accomplished much since. On election day, I believe that more people will vote against Kerry because of his Vietnam record, than those who vote for him because of that record.

    Chris responds:

    There is no way you can characterize John Kerry’s purple hearts, as well as his other medals, as “phony” without casting into doubt every medal awarded in Vietnam.

    Active service personnel, such as my self, were indeed excused from active reserve and inactive reserve duty once the principal tour of duty was completed. There was no such excused absence for members of the National Guard, either implicit or explicit. In fact the requirements for completion of National Guard were explicit, Bush agreed to them and then failed to attend the required exercises as well as failing to complete any of the make-ups required for discharge. At the very least it is a disgraceful record for the Commander-in-Chief.

    To try and make it appear that there is any comparison of Bush’s record of deception and deceit to someone who volunteered for Vietnam, volunteered for Swift Boat service, was wounded and decorated for his service is despicable.

    Other vets with Purple Hearts needed more than a band-aid. Kerry never spent a day in the hospital, and got those awards based on his own self-serving and dishonest accounts. See the Swift Boat Vets for more info.

    Chris responds:

    Strange how otherwise intelligent people will listen to total crap and in the light of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” believe it.

    Purple Hearts are awarded by the command structure. Any wound requiring medical attention is eligible for a purple heart if the injury is incurred in a combat situation. The submission is completely out of the control of the service person and in fact does not allow their input.

    Your linking to the Swift Boat Vets in such a uncritical manner eliminates any need to take you seriously. A casual search of the web will invalidate every single allegation that they make. Furthermore, as I said before if what they say is taken at face value all medals awarded in the Vietnam war are completely suspect.

    If Kerry's testimony is taken seriously, then those Vietnam Vets are mostly war criminals anyway.

    If you don't believe the Swift Boat Vets, then try his treating physician, or his commanding officer:

    "He had a little scratch on his forearm, and he was holding a piece of shrapnel," recalled Kerry's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Grant Hibbard. "People in the office were saying, `I don't think we got any fire,' and there is a guy holding a little piece of shrapnel in his palm." Hibbard said he couldn't be certain whether Kerry actually came under fire on Dec. 2, 1968, the date in questionand that is why he said he asked Kerry questions about the matter.

    But Kerry persisted and, to his own "chagrin," Hibbard said, he dropped the matter. "I do remember some questions, some correspondence about it," Hibbard said. "I finally said, `OK, if that's what happened . . . do whatever you want.' After that, I don't know what happened. Obviously, he got it, I don't know how."

    Normally, I'd ignore what happened 35 years ago, except that the Kerry campaign treats it as his main qualification for Presidency. Kerry brags about his Vietnam experience, but refuses to answer any questions about what really happened.

    Bob writes:

    It is amazing that anyone can be so blinded by hatred and partisanship that they will accept forged documents as evidence and accuse the eye witnesses of lying. Bush signed a form 180 releasing all of his military records, Kerry has not. If Kerry signed the form 180 we might be able falsify or validate the swift boat veterans claims.
    Chris writes:
    Where in anything I have said am I referring to the recently released memos?

    Once again people accept the Republican slander machine when it tells lies. Kerry has signed his form 180 and posted all of his military records I refer you to JohnKerry.com. Bush has on the other hand has been releasing his in drips and draps trying to explain away the missing records with a fiction that they were inadvertently lost and the miraculously found.

    The testimony mentioned above is directly contradicted by the records from the time. Which to believe? The record as shown form the time in question or politically motivated hate speech of the present?

    See also [this Wash Post story].

    According to this Wash Times story, Kerry claims to have released all of his records, but has not signed a Form 180 for official release of records. Bush has.

    Bob responds:

    Thurlow adequately rebutted the charges in the Washington Post story. Thurlow said,
    "I am convinced that the language used in my citation for a Bronze Star was language taken directly from John Kerry's report which falsely described the action on the Bay Hap River as action that saw small arms fire and automatic weapons fire from both banks of the river.

    To this day, I can say without a doubt in my mind, along with other accounts from my shipmates -- there was no hostile enemy fire directed at my boat or at any of the five boats operating on the river that day."

    Thurlow is corroborated by other eye witnesses and lack of battle damage reports.

    There is absolutely nothing on Kerry's site that indicates that he has signed a form 180. If you have a citation which shows that Kerry has signed a form 180, bring it on. Kerry has made available the military records in his possession which he felt like making public. The form 180, which Bush signed, allows anyone who is interested to obtain all military records.

    If Kerry makes his military records available, we can talk about what they say.

    I don't get Chris's argument that challenging Kerry's awards means that "all medals awarded in the Vietnam war are completely suspect". If Kerry's Vietnam testimony is taken at face value, then not only are all medals suspect, but all those who served in Vietnam are suspected war criminals.

    Chris responds:

    Thurlow’s Bronze Star was awarded for the same action for which Kerry received a Bronze Star. If, as he now describes it was a benign rescue action of a boat that struck a mine it means that he is not worthy of the decoration he received since it was awarded for the same action and clearly describes all of the boats receiving fire from both shores. Are we now going to question every medal awarded in Vietnam. Certainly if we accept the Swift Boat Vet’s claims Kerry is not eligible for any of his awards. It seems to me that if the system was that bad in Kerry’s case it is quite reasonable to assume that the majority of other awards are equally suspect.

    Rather I would offer [this Reuters story]:

    The U.S. Navy has rejected a legal watchdog group’s request to open an investigation into military awards given to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry during the Vietnam War, saying his medals were properly approved.

    If you watch the testimony that Kerry gave to the Congress you will see that he was relaying personal testimonials from other service men of atrocities they witnessed and sometime participated in. There are those who wish to pretend that not harm or wrong was committed by American Servicemen in Vietnam but those of us who were there know this was not true. Kerry simply spoke the truth about the acts of some servicemen. The fact that there are those who are uncomfortable with the truth or with their own actions does not change the direct experience and testimony of many vets from the time. At no time has Kerry or anyone that I am aware of suggested that all servicemen are war criminals.

    This entire discussion is a perfect example of the Republican slime machine. We have taken a discussion based on facts and a paper trail of Bush’s failure to complete his National Guard service and it has morphed into a acceptance of patent lies about Kerry’s honorable volunteer service in Vietnam.

    Will Rogers was right, “I’m not the member of any organized party, I’m a democrat.”

    Nothing here involves any Republican slime machine. The Swift Boat Vets have hated John Kerry since the 1970s for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan politics. Dan Rather's libelous attacks on G.W. Bush was exposed by nonpartisan bloggers.

    There is a Democrat slime machine that includes Dan Rather, CBS News, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, and many others. They spread deliberate vicious lies. When exposed, they say that the evidence is faked but accurate. It is not accurate. Dan Rather should be facing a criminal investigation right now. I believe that it is a crime to forge govt documents, and Rather continues to lie about the authenticity of the letters.

    It has been the central John Kerry campaign strategy to win the election by showing that Kerry's military service was somehow superior to Bush's. I don't think that the Republicans ever wanted to open that issue, because nearly everyone knew Kerry was a war hero, and assumed that Bush received privileges by virtue of his father's name. But now that Kerry has made an issue out of it, lets look at it. Bush has released his records, and they include 4 years of distinguished service and an honorable discharge. The evidence against him consists of forged memos.

    As for Kerry, forget what the Republicans say. I don't even know what they say. Just listen to Kerry. He changes his story repeatedly. I cannot even tell whether he is proud of those medals, or if he is embarrassed by them. Did he want America or N. Vietnam to win the war? He talks about his Vietnam service in all his speeches, but he refuses to answer any questions about it. Does he think that the American soldiers were all war criminals or not? I can understand why the Swift Boat Vets despise him.

    Bob writes:

    If Kerry deserves his medals because they were properly approved regardless of what he did to earn them, then why doesn't Bush deserve his properly approved honorable discharge from the ANG?

    A "discussion based on facts" should contain some references which support assertions about the "paper trail of Bush's failure to complete his National Guard service", the "patent lies about Kerry's honorable service", and that "Kerry has signed his form 180".

    Chris writes:
    Doesn't this directly corroborate my statement that all medals awarded in the Vietnam War are now suspect?

    Here we have a person receiving a Bronze Star because another person filed a false report and Thurlow was awarded his medal because of it. He didn't, at the time he received his medal, question the award? He uncritically accepted the third highest award for valor awarded by this country for an event he now describes as not involving contact with the enemy?

    Do you really believe this?

    No matter whom I believe, it does appear that some medals were handed out cheaply in Vietnam.

    Chris sends this "forgeries yet ... accurate" letter. The letter has some other canards about Bush, such as an unsupported accusation from a Kerry fund-raiser with a crooked past. See this story.

    I think that all the coverage of Bush's National Guard service will help him, because he actually performed much better than most people think.

     
    Explaining Bush quotes
    Mike thinks that he has proof that Bush is irrational, and challenges me to find context for this quote:
    I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children.
    That is an easy one. The context was the Oct 11, 2000 Presidential debate. The comment makes perfect sense in context. Bush was complaining about racial minorities not being taught to read properly in the public schools. He followed up with the No Child Left Behind law.

    Tuesday, Sep 14, 2004
     
    Supremacist judges may raise school taxes
    John writes:
    Andy did a good job rounding up the new wave of supremacist litigation over school funding. Good catch about the Bill Gates law firm.

    This article published June 7 was apparently the first national report on the new type of supremacist school litigation. It confirms the column's claim that "half the states" are facing the threat of such suits.

    This article says school funding suits have been filed in 15 states and threatened in 10 others, for a total of 25 states.

    The WaPo article makes the interesting observation that "the funding lawsuits have led to a test of strength between the courts and state legislatures." Exactly our point.

    These lawsuits are filed in state courts and rely on vague provisions about education in state constitutions. This table (in 3 formats) shows the relevant provision in each state constitution.

    Andy writes:
    According to John's articles, the price tag of this latest example of judicial supremacy does appear to be in the "billions" in many cases. For example, this is from CNN's story:
    In New York, a State Supreme Court judge has ordered the state to revamp its funding system and come up with an additional $4 billion to $10 billion in school aid over the next three to five years. The judge on Aug. 3 named a panel of special 'referees' to come up with a plan.
    I think that a column on this subject is in the works.
     
    Smart people support Kerry
    Andy writes:
    Roger quoted the Daily Princetonian as saying, "To computer science professor Andrew Appel, who has given $4,000 to Kerry this year, the imbalance is not unexpected. 'Does it surprise me that smart people should be supporting Kerry?' Appel said. 'No.'"

    I graduated the same year as Appel, who majored in physics. The smartest physicist in that class was a born-again Christian, who is unlikely to support Kerry.

    It is funny how liberals pretend that they are smarter, and even go out of their way to praise the alleged "brilliance" of a fellow liberal. Clinton, who couldn't even earn a degree at Oxford, Bradley, Kissinger, Tribe, McNamara, etc., the list of phony liberal geniuses is too long to recount here. But if liberals are so smart, how come they don't produce anything intellectual? All the bona fide intellectual greats in history have been conservative (or religious zealots).

    Not to pick on Appel, but his research papers and even the topic of his course have degraded over time. Typical liberal intellectual: unrealized potential.

    John replies:
    A bestselling book about 10 years ago was entitled "Smart Women, Foolish Choices"

    I see no use in trying to argue that liberal professors at Princeton and elsewhere aren't really smart. Of course they are smart. But the question is why do such smart people tend to support the "mommy party" (with its emotion-driven, half-baked political agenda) instead of the "daddy party" which offers logical, rational arguments supported by the best social science research?

    The fact that Clinton didn't complete his degree at Oxford doesn't mean he isn't smart. It simply means he had "other priorities" (to quote Dick Cheney's explanation for why he avoided military service).

    I've listened to academic types tell me about their support for John Kerry, and for the most part, they give arguments that don't make any sense. They cite arguments that are too stupid for even Michael Moore. Eg, they'll say that Bush lies and he is against same-sex marriage. When I point out that Kerry says that he is also against same-sex marriage, then they say that Kerry is just saying that to get elected.

    These academics are certainly smart in some ways, but they also lack basic critical thinking skills.

    Volokh's blog points out that, on average, Republicans have more years of education that Democrats. Yes, there is no doubt that the Democrats are better at attracting low-IQ voters. The question is how they attract well-educated voters.

    Mike, who has a Ph.D. in Math, cites this MSNBC story:

    In June 2003, Mahmoud Abbas, then the Palestinian prime minister, said that in a conversation with Bush, the president told him: "God told me to strike at al-Qaida, and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did."

    "I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to be president."

    Mike writes:
    There are only two possible explanations for this: the man is stupid, or the man is insane. Frankly, I think he displays more than a little of each characteristic.
    I think that it is a little disturbing that Mike would cite an anti-American terrorist crackpot for his info on Pres. Bush. Here is more about Abbas:
    Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the number 2 official in the PLO and architect of the Oslo Accords, authored and has refused to retract a book claiming that "the Zionist movement was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews." The book is entitled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement. The book also claims that the Nazis may have really killed less than one million Jews. (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 26,1995)
    Mike sent his 2nd source, an article about the the Amish:
    A member of the group told Bush that since most Amish do not vote, they would pray for him instead.

    Bush had tears in his eyes when he replied, according to an Amishman who was present. Bush reportedly said he needs the prayers of the Amish and that having a strong belief in God is the only way he can do his job.

    Most American presidents have said similar things. If Kerry is elected, it is a good bet that he will say that he relies on his faith in God to do his job.

    Mike also forwards this Bush quote:

    I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.
    Mike may be interested to know that all 42 Presidents acknowledged God in their addresses upon assuming office.

    Sunday, Sep 12, 2004
     
    Utah banning Santa Claus
    Currently, Utah allows Santa Claus an exception in its aviation code, but it is now considering changing the law. Santa won't be able to fly low over Salt Lake City.
     
    Did all life evolve from a single cell?
    A NY Times Science news story says:
    Scientists analyzing the genomes of microbes believe that they have reconstructed the pivotal event that created the one-celled organism from which all animals and plants are descended, including people.
    It sounds fantastic, but it was really just some wildly speculative computer simulation. The article also says:
    In 1977, shortly after the first DNA sequences of genes became widely available, Dr. Carl R. Woese of the University of Illinois showed that all life originated from three basic types of cell, eukaryotes, bacteria and archaea, the last a kind of bacteria found in boiling geysers and around volcanic fissures in the ocean floor.

    Dr. Woese's three cell kingdoms have become the accepted account, even though it was not entirely clear how the three might have evolved from the first cell.

    "There's still a cloud down there at the root," Dr. Woese said in an interview.

    I am skeptical that all 3 branches originated from a single cell. Evolutionists point to common genes as proof. But there are at least two other possibilities. One is that the genes evolved independently. We know that wings evolved independently several times, so why not genes?

    Second, we now know that genes can leap from one species to another. So two species could have some common genes, not because of common ancestors, but because both got the genes from the same third species.

    Bob writes:

    So, it isn't evolution if ... what? Bacteria and archaae exchange genes by fusion, phage, and just picking up DNA across their membranes and then divide to produce "offspring". Evolution occurs in bacteria and archaae even though they pass around genes through means other than sex as we think of it.
    Evolutionists would call it evolution no matter what happened!

    Bob writes, "What do you call it?"

    I think of Darwinian Evolution and Common Descent as two different theories. Common Descent says that all animals and plants are descended from a first one-celled organism, as described in the NY Times. I think that Common Descent is rather unlikely, based on current scientific knowledge. It certainly is not an established fact.

    Bob writes:

    You claimed that because cells swap genes between species that they may not have evolved from a common ancestor. If some of the genes of a cell of species A came from species B then species B is an "ancestor" of species A. It is possible for two species to be ancestors of each other. This does not in any way rule out the theory of a common ancestor. It makes the theory of a common ancestor more likely.
    This is a good example of an evolutionist changing the definitions in order to imply that the theory was correct all along.

    Bob replies: "You have a definition? Bring it on."


    Saturday, Sep 11, 2004
     
    Study shows excellence of Bush appointments
    A new academic study has shown that Pres. Bush has appointed excellent judges, and that his re-election will help partially correct the left-wing bias of the federal courts in the last few decades.

    No, that wasn't exactly the spin they tried to put on their study, but that's what the data show.

     
    Dan Rather exposed
    I believe that the Dan Rather memos have now been clearly established to be fakes. But Rather is digging in his heels, and refusing to apologize. Eg, see this blog, and its links.

    Fox News had former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein on yesterday, and he defended Rather's show (in response to questions from Tony Snow on the O'Reilly Factor):

    I have a lot of faith in the producer of this segment only because I worked with her for a long time, and she is absolutely peerless, I'd say, in the profession -- she is a crack journalist. She's the same producer who broke the Abu Ghraib story ...

    In this case, she's worked on this story for four years. This is a multiple Emmy-winning producer.

    Four years!! It seems very likely that CBS News and Dan Rather knew that the memo were faked, and held up the story for maximal political damage to President G.W. Bush. My guess is that CBS News and Rather were planning on releasing the story a couple of weeks before the election, but with Bush pulling ahead in the polls based in part on negative publicity about John Kerry's service record, they felt that they had to do some immediate damage to Bush's service record. Rather has no credibility left.

    Yes, Fox News is a lot more fair and balanced than CBS News.

    Klein is the same one who said:

    Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.

    Thursday, Sep 09, 2004
     
    New LA Seal
    Los Angeles is trying for a politically correct change to its official seal.
     
    Republican Platform attacks judicial supremacy
    The good news is that the Republican Platform adopted by the Republican National Convention in New York City last week really faces up to the problem of the judges. Here is a direct quote from the Republican Platform in the section where it upholds marriage as the union of man and woman:
    President Bush said, `We will not stand for judges who undermine democracy by legislating from the bench and try to remake America by court order.' The Republican House of Representatives responded to this challenge by passing H.R. 3313, a bill to withdraw jurisdiction from the federal courts over the Defense of Marriage Act. We urge Congress to use its Article III power to enact this into law so that activist federal judges cannot force 49 other states to approve and recognize Massachusetts' attempt to redefine marriage.
    Here is another direct quote from the Republican Platform where it recognizes that the problem is exactly what I've been saying -- "judicial supremacy" -- and that we must stop this usurpation of power by the judges:
    The Pledge of Allegiance has already been invalidated by the courts once, and the Supreme Court's ruling has left the Pledge in danger of being struck down again -- not because the American people have rejected it and the values that it embodies, but because a handful of activist judges threaten to overturn common sense and tradition. And while the vast majority of Americans support a ban on partial-birth abortion, this brutal and violent practice will likely continue by judicial fiat. We believe that the self-proclaimed supremacy of these judicial activists is antithetical to the democratic ideals on which our nation was founded.
    Then the Platform spells out the remedy:
    The sound principle of judicial review has turned into an intolerable presumption of judicial supremacy. A Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, will restore the separation of powers and re-establish a government of law. There are different ways to achieve that goal, such as using Article III of the Constitution to limit federal court jurisdiction; for example in instances where judges are abusing their poor by banning the use of `under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance or prohibiting depictions of the Ten Commandments, and potential actions invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
    For more, read the Judicial Supremacists book.

    Wednesday, Sep 08, 2004
     
    Kerry's gun photo-op was a flop
    The Drudge Report revealed that the shotgun John Kerry used in his pro-gun photo-op had a pistol grip stock. Kerry co-sponsored a bill last year to ban such guns. Read about it here, where there is also reference to the question about whether Kerry lawfully acquired the gun.

    I am not sure anyone will believe the Democratic Platform which says, "We will protect Americans' Second Amendment right to own firearms"!

    Meanwhile, here is GW Bush saying something silly:

    Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country. -- President George W. Bush, 9/6/04

    Tuesday, Sep 07, 2004
     
    So-called censored stories
    A left-wing group gives its list of the most censored media stories. No. 3 is Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists. It claims that:
    Twenty Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter to the President condemning the suppressing and distorting of federal science.
    But here is the letter, and only 12 prizewinners signed it. And the complaint is about scientists in policymaking roles, not about doing science. I commented previously here.

    Sunday, Sep 05, 2004
     
    Bias at the LA Times
    Patterico's Pontifications ridicules pro-Democrat bias at the LA Times. When Kerry failed to get a bounce from the Democrat Convention, they attributed it to a lack of swing voters. Now read how they explain the latest polls.

    Ever since the Swift Boat Vets launched their attack about 5 weeks ago, Kerry has refused all questions from reporters. Kerry is turning out to be a worse candidate than Gore, and possibly as bad as Dukakis.


    Saturday, Sep 04, 2004
     
    How Bush remade the party
    John sends this David Brooks column, and writes:
    How Bush remade the party of Gingrich, Reagan, Goldwater and Taft into the party of Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and T.Roosevelt.
     
    Dumb letter of the day
    The Si Valley Mercury News has this dopey letter today:
    I am distressed by the effectiveness of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. It is causing me to lose faith in our democracy. Something must be done.

    My suggestion may seem radical, but sometimes big problems require big changes. We should set up a special court of federal judges to determine the merit of accusations against any candidate running for national office before these charges can be leveled in television, print, or radio ads. Laws do not protect candidates from libel -- especially when the candidate is running for president. The prize is too great and the consequences too small.
    -- Jennifer Zilliac, Palo Alto

    She must have a very strange faith in democracy. The judges would have to first consider banning Fahrenheit 9/11.

    The Swift Vets' book, Unfit for Command, is now No. 1 on both the Amazon and NY Times best sellers lists. Does she want to ban that book also?

     
    Japanese-American whiners
    On Eric L. Muller's blog, liberal japonicus writes:
    Roger, you wrote: "It is axiomatic that if the alleged victim testifies that no crime occurred, and there is no other witness or physical evidence, then the defendant should go free"

    Why was that axiom suspended for Japanese-American citizens [in the WWII internment program]?

    The Japanese-Americans were not being punished; they were being temporarily relocated for the good of the country and for themselves.

    I'll tell you what bugs me about the Japanese-American whining. During WWII, my father was drafted and shipped off to war. He had no choice. So were his brothers and friends. My mother was put to work in an ammunition factory. My grandparents needed ration stamps to buy food and necessities. They were all American citizens.

    Millions of Americans suffered far worse during WWII. They were killed in battle, or crippled, or had their lives ruined. Most Americans suffered hardships (as did most of the rest of the world). And yet I have never heard any of them complain about it!

    The only complaints I hear are from Japanese-Americans and their liberal sympathizers. From what I have read, the Japanese-Americans were treated quite well, and have been compensated 4 times. Why aren't they willing to accept this minor sacrifice, when others accepted much greater sacrifices to help win WWII?

    I accept the argument that the relocation was not a military necessity, and that, in hindsight, it may have been a mistake. But so what? Most war-time decisions are not made out of military necessity. Our leaders made 100s of decisions every day, and some of those resulted in 1000s of deaths. Some were mistakes. Most were not necessary.

    Michelle Malkin has done an excellent service by documenting the military rationale for the relocation. It was not just pure racism, as our schoolchildren are taught.

    The Japanese internment continues to be cited today in political discussions about racial profiling, Guantanamo, etc., as if there were a universal consensus that the internment was evil. Malkin must have realized that some people would hate her for writing such a political incorrect book. The book exposes facts that undermine their favorite arguments.


    Friday, Sep 03, 2004
     
    Vaccine update
    Kildare, over on the IsThatLegal blog, writes:
    Malkin is touting your blog for its supposed insight on vaccination policy. I see your musings on the subject have not been updated in TWO years. In addition, Malkin is linking a speech critical of vaccination policy on your site. A speech from a Stanford prof. who has been DEAD FOR FOUR YEARS.

    Immunization has indeed been a hot topic, new studies have just been released, but it appears you can't be bothered with the latest info, which might make your position remotely nuanced and responsible.

    So, where did you get your M.D.?

    I guess this anonymous poster also thinks that a degree is necessary to have an opinion. For the record, I have a Ph.D., not an M.D.

    I haven't updated the vaccine pages because the subject is no longer a pressing concern for me. When I skipped the scheduled vaccines for my kids, I did a lot of research on the subject in order to try to be sure that I was doing the right thing. Now, most of the vaccines (that I was complaining about) have been taken off the market because of safety concerns. So for me, the case is closed.

     
    Republican platform opposes judicial supremacy
    Recognizing that judges are trying to replace self-government by "we the people" with the Rule of Supremacist Judges, the Republican Platform states:
    The sound principle of judicial review has turned into an intolerable presumption of judicial supremacy. A Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, will restore the separation of powers and re-establish a government of law. There are different ways to achieve that goal, such as using Article III of the Constitution to limit federal court jurisdiction; for example, in instances where judges are abusing their power by banning the use of `under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance or prohibiting depictions of the Ten Commandments, and potential actions invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
     
    Bush accepts
    About the courts, G.W. Bush said in his acceptance speech:
    And we must protect small-business owners and workers from the explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across our country. ...

    As I have traveled our country I have met too many good doctors, especially OB-GYNS, who are being forced out of practice because of the high cost of lawsuits. To make health care more affordable and accessible, we must pass medical liability reform now. ...

    Because the union of a man and woman deserves an honored place in our society, I support the protection of marriage against activist judges. And I will continue to appoint federal judges who know the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law.

    Kerry's lame response to the Republican speeches was to whine about how V.P. Cheney was not drafted during the Vietnam War.

    Kerry needs to learn that his Vietnam War experience is a net loser for him. He faked his medals and ribbons, he lied about his 4-month experience in Vietnam, he admitted to war crimes, and he disgraced his fellow soldiers. I'd rather vote for someone who never fought.


    Wednesday, Sep 01, 2004
     
    Defending the internment
    A silly law prof, Eric L. Muller, is on the warpath against Michelle Malkin for defending the WWII Japanese internment. Her main point is that decrypted Japanese communications (code-named "MAGIC") and other considerations provided a military basis for the decision. It wasn't just racism.

    Now Muller and some other nitwits are lobbying to have Malkin blackballed from radio and TV because she is not a professional historian! Muller himself is just a lawyer with no doctoral degree or relevant credentials.

    He seems to think that Malkin conceded that she was wrong when she said:

    Eric points out that once the decision was made to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, many ancillary decisions were made -- and MAGIC doesn't explain all or even most of them. True, but beside the point. My book focuses primarily on the policies formed in early spring 1942, when the decision was made to evacuate all ethnic Japanese from the West Coast.
    I say Malkin won that argument. Liberals like to cite the Japanese internment in order to argue against racial profiling, but they cannot even get their facts right.

    Update: Muller defends himself here. He also complains that Malkin's book is selling very well and she is getting a lot of TV and radio interviews, while his book is not selling and he cannot get equal time on TV and radio. I think that the problem is that Muller has nothing new or different to say; he is just reciting the same myths that already permeate the textbooks.

    Update: Muller keeps complaining. This time, he claims to have a smoking gun by evidence that FDR told Canada that the Japanese were foolish in thinking that the early 1942 attacks on the Pacific Coast would be effective. But FDR does not say anything about whether future attacks might be effective, or whether the existing security measures were necessary to blunt the effectiveness of possible attacks.

    Update: Muller is now making Nazi analogies, as predicted by Godwin's Law.

     
    Bush v Kerry polls
    An excellent site summarizing presidential election polls is www.electoral-vote.com. It now shows the red states jumping into a lead for Bush. It is possible that Kerry will only win a few states in the Northeast and West coast, plus Illinois where the Republican party has been decimated by scandal.

    Monday, Aug 30, 2004
     
    Bush-haters
    I still think that the Democrats have made massive strategic errors in this election. They seem to have bet everything on (1) ill-will created by the Bush-haters, and (2) conservative respect for Kerry's Vietnam experience.

    I think that those are Kerry's biggest negatives. It seems quite likely that he lied to get his medals and ribbons, he used those lies to cut his service short, and he has been lying about his service ever since. When he returned from Vietnam, he told stories about atrocities that make him look bad whether they are true or false. I would normally be willing to forgive Kerry's youthful excesses, but when Kerry based his whole campaign on his status as a Vietnam war hero, then they are hard to ignore.

    I am becoming convinced that the Bush-haters have broken brains. I have heard many otherwise-intelligent folks tell me that Bush lies, is stupid, and didn't really win the election. Some claim that he is a puppet of the Israeli lobby, and some claim that he is a puppet of the Saudi lobby. (He surely can't be both!) Michael Moore says Bush went to war in Afghanistan in order to help Unocal build a pipeline there, and others say that the Iraq War is somehow going to make profits for some old buddies of Bush. Sometimes they babble about Bush taking away Constitutional rights, or ignoring the UN, or being a practicing Christian, or other such nonsense. Some will say that Bush campaigned as a moderate who is a uniter, not a divider, but he as ruled as an extreme right-winger.

    All of these arguments are easily refuted, and don't really make good arguments for Kerry anyway. The Bush-haters are just brainwashed yellow-dog Democrats who would never vote Republican anyway.

    I think that Republicans dominate talk-radio because the Democrats take positions that they cannot defend. I live in an extreme left-wing area, and the radio stations have a hard time finding left-wing hosts who do not make fools out of themselves.


    Sunday, Aug 29, 2004
     
    Bush tax cut favored the poor
    This Detroit News article shows that
    the income tax burden has shifted upward for the rich and downward for everyone else.
    Here, "rich" means the top 20% of income earners. The data is based on a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

    Saturday, Aug 28, 2004
     
    California's best judge
    California's supreme court justice Janice Rogers Brown seems to be our best anti-supremacist judge. Bush tried to appoint her to the federal DC Circuit court, but the Senate filibustered. You can find articles supporting her nomination, and explaining the controversy, here and here. NOW opposes her. Apparently, the combination of being black, female, libertarian, and Christian makes a lot of enemies.

    Here is a recent decision in which she showed that she is the only reasonable judge on the California supreme court.


    Sunday, Aug 22, 2004
     
    Kerry lies
    John Kerry uses his Vietnam experience as his main qualification for office, but he cannot stand to have a little criticism. Now, he whines that there is some vast right-wing conspiracy that is out to discredit him.

    Check out this July 1971 NY Times story. It says:

    When Mr. Kerry, a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, attempted to introduce relative of war prisoners at a news conference, four women shouted, "That's a lie," and "What office are you going to run for next?"
    Kerry cannot blame G.W. Bush for that.

    Saturday, Aug 21, 2004
     
    Bush-hating worse that Clinton-hating
    A lot of people argue that the Bush-haters are just like the Clinton-haters of a few years ago. I say that the Bush-haters are much worse.

    A mainstream publisher (Knopf) has just published Checkpoint: A Novel. It is a rambling rant by a fictional person who is thinking about assassinating Pres. Bush because he disagrees with the Iraq War and other Bush policies. The Amazon.com sales rank is 670, which is pretty good for an obscure novel.

    I regularly follow right-wingers, but I've never heard anyone attack Clinton in any similar way.

     
    Whorf hypothesis
    There has been a long debate in linguistics over whether language influences how people think. Now someone has found an Amazon tribe with only words for one, two, and many, and they cannot count!

    It is only a matter of time before someone documents the limitations of non-English speakers.


    Friday, Aug 20, 2004
     
    Bush lies?
    Bob tries to justify to claim that Pres. Bush lies. He says this Bush statement is a lie:
    I strongly oppose human cloning, as do most Americans. We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts, or creating life for our convenience.
    I guess the lie is that Bush is implying that cloning research is motivated by a desire to grow human beings for spare body parts. I don't read his statement that way. In that speech, Bush proposed federal funding for a certain form of cloning research, provided that ethical concerns were followed. It was the first federal research for cloning since Congress banned such funding in 1996.

    See this NewScientist article for a typical view of what is possible with cloning, and what ethical problems arise.

    Bob also says that Bush has claimed that his policies have made forests less vulnerable to fire. I don't how this could be a lie, as the Clinton forest policy was very pro-fire, and allowed a lot of forests to burn down. Just about any policy change would make the forests less vulnerable.

    Bob responds:

    The Bush proposal does not allow federal funding for any form of cloning. Bush allows research only on existing cell lines. This is particularly annoying because the most promising technique for cancer research is to take a human egg, remove the nucleus, transplant the nucleus of a human pre-malignant cancer cell, manipulate the cell to divide, create a cell line from the resulting stem cells which can be used to study exactly how cancer transforms into malignancy. Federal funding is not permitted for this research.
    Actually, it is Congress that does not fund the cloning research that Bob suggests. The research is being done with private and with state money.

    Bob cites this Bush statement:

    You see, the undergrowth issue, the problem of too much undergrowth creates the conditions for unbelievably hot fires. These forest firefighters will tell you that these hot fires that literally explode the big trees can be somewhat mitigated by clearing out the undergrowth. And by the way, the undergrowth chokes off nutrients from older trees. It makes our forests more succeptable to disease. We got a problem. It's time to deal with the problem. And that's what we're going to talk about.
    and says:
    Bush's initiative calls trees up to 30" in diameter undergrowth. I call that a lie.
    Also, he says:
    Basic research is funded by the federal government, not by the states and private industry. If the cloning research mentioned above provides the knowledge necessary to cure cancer, it will be the George W. Bush and the Republican Congress who will be responsible for the deaths which occur due to the delay in doing the research upon which a cure is based.
    Nonsense. They can do all the basic cancer research on rats. After curing cancer in rats, they can experiment on human beings.
     
    Kerry's court
    John sends this NRO article on how John Kerry would swing the US supreme court sharply to the left.
     
    USA declared war
    Among the sillier complaints about Pres. Bush is that we are fighting undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Congress has approved both wars. The UN even approved the Afghanistan war, and giving the war ultimatum to Iraq.

    Phil disputes this, and says:

    This is an up-to-date page that includes all the US military interventions, including the current war in Iraq.
    That is one interpretation. I also refer you to this CNN transcript:
    JONATHAN KARL, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): With virtually no dissent, Congress authorized the president to use all necessary and appropriate force against all those tied to the attacks. SEN. JOSEPH BIDEN, FOREIGN RELATIONS CHAIRMAN: For constitutional purposes, it's the same as the declaration of war. There is no constitutional difference between authorizing the president to use this kind of force and saying, "We declare war."
    On your list, notice the conspicuous omissions of Panama, Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, etc. In my opinion, they should have all had congressional votes. Those who object to the Iraq war on authorization grounds should really be unhappy about all those other wars.

    Phil responds:

    Roger, this is not an "interpretation". Read the whole page. It distinguishes Congress authorizing the use of force, and a formal declaration of war. There is special significance to a "formal declaration of war", as it says on that page. If there was no difference, Biden would not have gone out of his way to say that it is not distinguishable. It's like an audiophile telling us that his sound system sounds the same as Luciano Paveratti, that he can't tell the difference. But the real Luciano is not singing in his living room, in the flesh. It's a digital recording.

    If it's the same as a declaration of war, why not just declare war? The reason is because it's not the same. It may be similar, but it's not the same. That is what all the encyclopedias will tell you. I can get the same information from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or any other encyclopedia you choose. You choose one, and I will produce a page from it that agrees with the encyclopedia page I sent you. You can't hang your case on the words of one senator who was playing fast and loose with his rhetoric. The unanimous well-researched authoritative writings of all the encyclopedias in the world win over Senator Biden's one careless remark.

    An encyclopedia carries more weight than the Senate foreign relations chairman who introduced the resolution?!

    Taken literally, Biden only says that they are indistinguishable under the US Constitution. Conceivably, there could be some difference under UN law, or veterans' benefits, or something else.

    I think that they don't say "declare war" because they want to maintain some UN legal fiction that war is obsolete.

    I don't usually agree with Biden, but in this case I believe that he is right. Congress can use synonymous language, and the meaning is the same.

    Even your encyclopedia article says, "The United States formally has declared war against foreign nations eleven separate times."

    This suggests that some of the other declarations were informal declarations of war, but still declarations of war.


    Thursday, Aug 12, 2004
     
    Woman collects $45k for 10C
    John sends this story, and adds, "I wonder if the $45,000 was for attorney's fees or the plaintiff's damages?" It says:
    SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- A woman has accepted a settlement in her federal lawsuit challenging the display of a plaque featuring the Ten Commandments in a southwest Missouri school cafeteria.

    The Humansville School District has agreed to pay Carrie M. Roat $45,000 as a part of the settlement. The district also agreed to not display any religious symbols and pledged to stop officials from leading students in prayer.

    Roat claimed in the suit the plaque on the cafeteria wall where high school and junior high students eat violated the Constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state.

    She also said it served as "an unambiguous symbol of Christianity and of the Christian faith and belief."

    Someone should tell her that the 10 Commandments are part of Jewish law, not Christianity.
     
    SF mayor must obey the law
    The Calif supreme court ruled 7-0 today that SF mayor Newsom exceeded his authority by trying to issue same-sex marriage certificates. Links to the court papers are with this CNN story. Bob asks whether this is judicial supremacy, because Newsom was applying his own constitutional interpretation.

    I might agree that it would be example of judicial supremacy of the court ordered the governor on what to do. But Calif governor and attorney general took the position that the mayor actions were illegal, and the question was whether Newsom could defy the executive and legislative branches of the Calif govt, alter state marriage forms, and issue bogus licenses.

    There was a situation about 30 years in which a rogue California state agency took some unpopular action based on its own novel constitutional interpretation, and the people actually amended the California constitution to put a stop to such behavior. I suppose you could say that the clause gives the courts supremacy over lower state agencies. I do not believe that the courts should have any such supremacy over the governor, and there is no such clause in the federal constitution.

    The Calif court also ruled 5-2 that the 4k same-sex marriages were void. I don't necessarily agree with that opinion, because those parties were not before the court. They have their own lawsuits pending.

    George writes:

    You refer to the Calif. Const. art. III sect. 3.5:
    An administrative agency, including an administrative agency created by the Constitution or an initiative statute, has no power: (a) To declare a statute unenforceable, or refuse to enforce a statute, on the basis of its being unconstitutional unless an appellate court has made a determination that such statute is unconstitutional. ...
    The court opinion does not rely on this section, but instead invokes general principles of judicial supremacy to say that local officials cannot interpret the constitution. It even acknowledges the possibility that Newsom could be correct in his interpretation, but says that "rule of law" requires that only a court is allowed to come to that conclusion.
     
    Lawyers scarier than terrorists
    Govt agents wanted to warn casinos and show them videotapes about terrorism threats, but the casinos were more worried about lawyers filing lawsuits! The Las Vegas paper says:
    "The information, unfortunately, was not taken as seriously as we believed it to have been," Detroit-based Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino said in an interview. "The reason that he (the FBI agent) was given for the low turnout was because of liability. That if they heard this information they would have to act on it. It was extraordinarily unacceptable and absolutely outrageous."

    Wednesday, Aug 11, 2004
     
    Selling fine wines across state lines
    The judicial supremacists are currently before the US Supreme Court to lift restrictions on mail-order sales of alcoholic beverages. See this blog, for examples of strained legal arguments.

    The fact is that section 1 of the 21A repealed Prohibition, and section 2 gave the states the power to regulate imports of alcoholic beverages. End of story.

    Zywicki says that the plain meaning of the 21A must be ignored, because otherwise a state could ban the import of kosher wines! Yes, a state could even ban the import of all wines. The Supreme Court should not be invalidating a section of the Constitution just because of some absurd hypothetical scenarios.

     
    Stem cell fraud
    A lot of people seem to think that Kerry's best political issue is opposing Bush's ban on stem-cell research. Millions of people are suffering from Alzheimer's (senility) as a result. Kerry is pro-science, while Bush is anti-science.

    But it is all a big lie. Slate says:

    The federal government spent nearly $200 million on adult stem-cell research last year and nearly $25 million on research involving the roughly 20 approved embryonic lines. As today's Washington Post observes, what Bush actually did was "to allow, for the first time, the use of federal funds" for embryonic stem-cell research.
    In addition, states, universities, drug companies, foreign agencies, and others are pumping 100s of millions of dollars into stem-cell research. Stem cell researchers are swimming in cash.

    This WashPost article says that stem cells are unlikely to help anyone with Alzheimers. If it were really true that senility treatments were within reach, then you could be sure that private companies would be funding, patenting, and marketing it. Universities like Harvard and Stanford have billions of dollars of their own money that they don't know what to do with, and they are willing and able to spend it on stem-cell research if it will bring prestige, medical cures, and Nobel prizes.

    If it turns out that some disease will be treatable by cloning millions of human embryos, and harvesting their organs, then we will have a big ethical debate. In the meantime, Kerry is just lying to the public when he says that stem-cell research has been banned.


    Tuesday, Aug 10, 2004
     
    Eminent domain in Detroit
    Property rights activists and anti-judicial-supremacists were excited by the Michigan supreme court's reversal of its infamous Poletown decision. The Poletown case allowed Detroit to use eminent domain to destroy a large neighborhood just so that General Motors could build a factory. The new decision says:
    It is true, of course, that this Court must not “lightly overrule precedent.” But because Poletown itself was such a radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles and over a century of this Court’s eminent domain jurisprudence leading up to the 1963 Constitution, we must overrule Poletown in order to vindicate our Constitution, protect the people’s property rights, and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor—not creator—of fundamental law.
    But the decision is no such vindication. It has sweeping pronouncements purporting to define when eminent domain can be justified, and dicta making the decision retroactive. It complains about the way the Poletown decision confuses "public use" and "public purpose", but then comes to the unusual conclusion that the meaning of "public use" is not to be taken from the 5A of the US Constitution, or the dictionary definition, or the understanding by Michigan citizens who ratified their constitution, but the meaning that judges today infer that legal scholars had in 1963 when the Michigan constitution was last overhauled. The result of that definition still allowed private property to be destroyed and sold to purely private interests, under complicated, court-approved circumstances. The original Poletown decision deferred to the legislature for certain matters of judgment, but this new decision gives no such deference, and claims that any eminent domain decision is reviewable by judges. The supremacists are not giving up any power here.
     
    Stanford Law dean attacks judicial supremacy
    A WSJ book review praises a new book by the Stanford Law School Dean attacking judicial supremacy.
    In "The People Themselves," he shows that the men who wrote the Constitution would have been aghast at a judicial monopoly on its interpretation. At the time, judges did not claim some exclusive power of constitutional settlement. They believed that judicial review stemmed from their duty to interpret all relevant laws in the course of litigation. But they did not dispute that the White House and Congress had their own duty to interpret the Constitution in the course of their own official actions. ...

    ...presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln refused to yield all authority to judges. They embraced "departmentalism"--each branch of government claiming an equal right to discover the Constitution's true meaning.

    Only recently has judicial supremacy gained wide acceptance, and it has done so with a vengeance.

    This is all correct. Prof. Larry Kramer goes on to recommend some sort of political-legal constitutional interpretation, and I am not sure what that is all about. But it is good to see a legal scholar acknowledge that judicial supremacy is a construct of the Warren Court in the 1950s, and is neither essential nor desirable for out American system of government.

    Monday, Aug 09, 2004
     
    Judge Colin Powell?
    Bob suggests that Bush promise to nominate Colin Powell to the next US Supreme Court vacancy because (1) he is not a lawyer, (2) polls say he is the most respected man in the world, and (3) it would help win undecided voters.

    I don't get why the qualities that have earned him respect in previous jobs (soldier, diplomat, etc) are such desirable qualities in a judge, or why we need a judge who is admired elsewhere in the world. If anything, I think that judges are respected too much already, as people don't realize what terrible jobs that they are doing. As a result, they have been corrupted by increased power.

    I'd like to see some court appointments who are opposed to judicial supremacy. For more info, read this book. Law schools now brainwash all their students with judicial supremacy, so perhaps Bob thinks that appointing a nonlawyer might give a non-supremacist. But why a soldier/general/diplomat? Because he supposedly has centrist political views? And why should that matter, if he is not a supremacist?

    Powell does have some negatives. Those who think that Bush lied about Iraq will presumably also think that Powell lied.

    Bob responds:

    The most important reason for appointing Powell to the USSC is the fact that Powell is not perceived as an ideologue. One of the raps which sticks to Bush is that he is likely to appoint right wing ideologues to the USSC. One of the reasons the argument against judicial supremacy has a chance of capturing broad political support is the fact the American people are skeptical of, if not downright hostile to ideology. This is apparent from the fact that both Presidential candidates are throwing their ideological baggage overboard. Reagan was popular with the American people precisely because he blew off the ideologues while sticking to his deeper principles. Appointing Powell to the USSC would reassure the American people that Bush is not committed to appointing ideologues to the USSC.
    Bush is already committed to appointing Supreme Court judges who are from the mainstream, who are not judicial supremacists, and who will follow strict interpretations of the Constitution. I suppose you could say that following the Constitution is an ideology, but he is clearly opposed to those who intend to use their political ideologies to make new laws.

    So where does Colin Powell fit into this? Unless Powell is committed to strict interpretation of the Constitution, Bush would be reneging on his earlier promises. I think that the only reason some people might want Colin Powell on the Supreme Court is that he is ideologically and politically committed to affirmative action and abortion.

    At the recent Democratic Convention, none of the lawyers who have taken over the party (Kerry, Edwards, Bill Clinton, Hillary, Obama, etc) was willing to attack Bush's court appointments. Apparently their political strategists have decided that the issue is a loser for the Democrats. People are much more worried about the ideologues that Kerry might appoint to the courts. (See Phyllis Schlafly column.)

    Colin Powell will not even be speaking at the Republican Convention, as he did in 2000.

    Bob responds:

    I read the link and there is no such commitment there, just mealy mouthing from a White House flak. The mainstream is currently supremacist. This is what we agree should change. My point is that public confidence in Bush would increase by appointing Powell, leaving him free to pursue an anti-supremacist agenda. It would also free the anti-supremacist agenda of the suspicion that it is a stalking horse for right wing ideology. Adherence to the constitution is not an ideology.
    This describes Bush's 2000 campaign position:
    Throughout the year, Bush tried to frame the issue in terms of philosophy, saying his ideal nominees would base their judgments strictly on the words of the Constitution. Pressed to name a justice who fits that mold, Bush pointed to Scalia and Thomas. ...

    The issue figured in the candidates' first presidential debate. "I'll put competent judges on the bench, people who will strictly interpret the Constitution and will not use the bench to write social policy," Bush declared.

    Bush still opposes judicial supremacy, from a recent campaign speech:
    We will not stand for judges who undermine democracy by legislating from the bench and try to remake the culture of America by court order.
     
    Illegal aliens want citizen fetus
    An AP story says:
    Lawyers for a deported Mexican woman who is eight months pregnant are seeking her return to the United States to protect the unborn baby's health. They also say under federal law the fetus is a viable human being and thus might be eligible for citizenship rights.

    That argument sounds like a long shot to some on both sides of the immigration debate. But in May, a U.S. District Court judge in Kansas City, Mo., approved a stay of deportation for a pregnant Mexican woman after raising, among other concerns, the question of whether her fetus could be considered a U.S. citizen. The judge is reviewing the issue.

    These are crazy arguments. Even American birth should not automatically confer citizenship, as the 14A says:
    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
    There is some debate about the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof".

    Sunday, Aug 01, 2004
     
    Complicated Microsoft tip
    Printing an email message shouldn't be complicated, but it can be under Msft Windows. Sometimes it prints in tiny sup-10-point type, and the remedy is an arcane sequence of font size changes and reboots! Here is how the NY Times explains it:
    Q. I use Outlook Express 6 for e-mail. Sometimes I want to print messages I receive. Even though the type in the message is 10 points or larger on the screen, my printer still uses the smallest type size available. How can I correct this?

    A. Outlook Express, the free Microsoft e-mail program included with the Windows operating system, is closely linked to Internet Explorer, the free Web browser that also comes with Windows. If you change your settings in Outlook Express and see no results, you may also have to adjust them in Internet Explorer.

    Before printing, open Internet Explorer, go to the View menu and select Font Size. If you have changed to a larger size and get small type when you print an Outlook Express message, Microsoft suggests a few further steps.

    First, start Outlook Express and go to the Tools menu, choosing Options. Click on the Read tab and then on Fonts. Select Smallest in the Font Size box and then click on O.K. before quitting Outlook Express. Start the program again, and repeat those steps to get to the Font Size setting. Change the size to Medium, click on O.K., and then restart the computer.

    Next, open Internet Explorer. Go to the View menu, then Font Size, and select Smallest before quitting Internet Explorer. Restart the computer. Start Explorer, go back to the font settings and change the size to Medium before quitting the program.

    Once you have made all these adjustments, try printing the message in Outlook Express again.

    Note that 2 steps involve reducing the font size, even tho you really want a bigger font.

    Wednesday, Jul 28, 2004
     
    Fletcher v. Peck
    An early supremacist court decision was Fletcher v. Peck, 1810. It found a Georgia state law to be unconstitutional.

    As explained here, the Georgia law was really just an act to repeal a crooked law from a year earlier. A Supreme Court justice had personally profited from the earlier crooked law. Furthermore, the 11th Amendment should have prevented the Court from even hearing the issue.

    This case gets cited as an earlier precedent for judicial supremacy, but it is a terrible decision.

    In another matter, the Supreme Court ruled in Wooley v. Maynard 430 U.S. 705 (1977), that it was unconstitutional for New Hamshire to require the motto "Live Free or Die" on its license plates! We are not free as long as we have a supremacist court.


    Monday, Jul 26, 2004
     
    More on court jurisdiction
    John writes, in response to Liza's objections below:
    Liza, did you read the testimony of Martin Redish, the nation's foremost scholar of this question, at the June 24 hearing? He has a dry academic style, but the bottom line is that Congress does have the power to remove any subject matter from federal court jurisdiction.

    Another law professor, Michael Gerhardt, was invited by the Democrats to express an opposing view. (He had previously testified that Congress didn't have power to impeach Bill Clinton.) Gerhardt expressed the instinctive reaction of the law school culture: You can't do that! It was like a small child throwing a tantrum. But he didn't say why. His paper was conspicuously lacking in support in the text of the Constitution, in Supreme Court decisions, or recognized scholarship.

    As Hart and Wechsler pointed out over 50 years ago, the decisive point is that the Judiciary Act of 1789, passed by the first Congress which included many men who wrote the Constitution, withheld from the federal courts the power to consider and decide "federal questions." Federal question jurisdiction was first conferred by act of Congress in 1875. It follows that Congress can withdraw that power in whole or in part.

    Liza responds:
    Yes, I read Redish's testimony, and found it troubling. He states:

    "The constitutional directive of equal protection restricts congressional power to employ its power to restrict jurisdiction in an unconstitutionally discriminatory manner."

    He never actually says that a removal of jurisdiction over DOMA cases should work, and he describes the precedents as sparse and confusing.

    I'm not saying that limiting jurisdiction to hear DOMA cases is a waste of time, but it's certainly not fail-safe, because the recent tendency of courts to find new rights for gays is based at least partly on equal protection analysis.

    I disagree with Liza. Withdrawing jurisdiction is fail-safe, because the US Constitution gives Congress the final say in the matter (Art. IV Sect.1)

    Only a judicial supremacist would think that Congress is unable to read the Constitution and act on the powers that it plainly has, just because some activist judges want to push a gay-rights agenda.

    John writes:

    In addition to Art. IV, Sec. 1, which gives Congress the power to modify the Full Faith and Credit clause, Sec. 5 of the 14th Amendment gives the Congress the power to enforce the Equal Protection clause.

    Pursuant to that power, Congress created federal jurisdiction for civil actions in federal court against state and local officials for purported violation of federal rights - 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, et al. Hence, Congress can withdraw or modify that power without the court's permission.

    Redish's testimony did contain the statement quoted by Liza that Congress may not "employ its power to restrict jurisdiction in an unconstitutionally discriminatory manner."

    The only example he gives to illustrate this limit on Congress's power is that the courts would not allow Congress to withdraw federal jurisdiction "in cases brought by African Americans, Jews, or Women." Redish does not give any authority for such a limit; perhaps he thinks the example is so outlandish that no authority is necessary.

    It does open the door to the argument made by the Democrat law professor, Michael Gerhardt, that Congress likewise cannot withdraw federal jurisdiction from cases brought by gays seeking a judicial redefinition of marriage.

    However I think that would be a classic case of "proving too much": If Congress can't remove gay marriage claims from the federal courts, then Congress can't remove ANYTHING. Indeed, Gerhardt's testimony makes it clear he doesn't think Congress can constitutionally remove ANY jurisdiction. And we know that's not true from the incontestable research of Hart-Weschler and Redish.

    Yes, I agree. Redefining marriage is something over which the federal courts have never had any jurisdiction, and there is no good reason why they should have jurisdiction now.

    John responds:

    It would be more accurate to say that the federal courts have never had jurisdiction over a state's definition of marriage. However, the Supreme Court has reviewed the federal definition of marriage, specifically Congress's prohibition of polygamy in the Utah Territory.

    See: Reynolds v. U.S. (1878) (or here)
    Davis v. Beason (1890) (or here)
    http://www.churchstatelaw.com/casesbytopic.asp?topic=Polygamy
    http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/history/plural_marriage/Legislation_EOM.htm
    http://www.law.georgetown.edu/glh/rbernstein.htm


    Saturday, Jul 24, 2004
     
    Limiting court jurisdiction
    Liza writes:
    The Supremacists pins a lot of hope on the strategy of limiting federal court jurisdiction over issues like the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA), and I see the House just passed Akin's bill to do the same, although it is expected to die in the Senate.

    My question for the enthusiasts of this approach is: How do you answer the critics who say that the federal courts wouldn't allow a loss of jurisdiction for a reason they deem unconstitutionally discriminatory? For example, we can be sure the federal courts would strike down a limitation of their jurisdiction to hear cases on race discrimination. So, how does limiting their jurisdiction to hear challenges to DOMA solve the problem of federal judges' meddling in the definition of marriage? If they consider heterosexual-only marriage unconstitutionally discriminatory, can't we expect them to strike down a limitation of their jurisdiction over that topic as unconstitutional?

    Andy replies:
    I wouldn't use racial discrimination as a guide to what Congress can limit. No one thinks the Boy Scouts could discriminate based on race, but they can discriminate based on everything else, for example.

    If a judge flouts a limitation on jurisdiction passed by Congress, then the next step is to introduce articles of impeachment. That will likely cause the judges to respect the law. I doubt the courts would dare stick their finger in the eye of congressional power. Look at how the Supreme Court recently turned its tail and ran away from the Pledge dispute.

    John replies:
    Liberals always raise the specter of race discrimination whenever conservatives challenge the power of federal courts.

    They raised that bogus warning after each of the so-called state's rights decisions of the current Supreme Court -- for example, two cases in which Eagle Forum filed amicus briefs, the VAWA case (U.S. v. Morrison) and the English language case (Alexander v. Sandoval), as well as the whole series of so-called 11th Amendment cases, such as Alden v. Maine et al.

    That overlooks the fact that the original supremacist decision was Dred Scott, on which today's decisions such as Roe v. Wade logically depend. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court reviewed a civil rights law passed by Congress, declared it unconstitutional, and a Civil War ensued.

    After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress passed a whole series of civil rights laws (including 3 constitutional amendments), some of which were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases (1883).

    There the matter rested until Congress passed a series of Civil Rights laws in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, and 1991; and Voting Rights laws in 1965, 1975, 1982, and 1992; as well as two more constitutional amendments (the 23rd and 24th).

    So it is a liberal myth that the federal courts, rather than Congress, is the primary protector of civil rights. Even the much-ballyhood Brown decision merely reversed the court's own previous Plessy decision.

    But Liza warns that the Supreme Court may not recognize a limitation on federal court jurisdiction if they deem that Congress has acted for a "discriminatory" purpose.

    She adds, "we can be sure the courts would strike down a limitation of their jurisdiction to hear cases on race discrimination" and hence they would probably refuse to let go of the power to review other forms of discrimination as well.

    To do so, however, the Supreme Court would have to come up with a completely new theory of its jurisdiction that has no precedent in 215 years of its jurisprudence. It would have to overrule dozens if not hundreds of prior decisions that have acknowledged the power of Congress to create, regulate and limit federal jurisdiction.

    The supremacist notion that the Supreme Court would (or should) refuse to let Congress regulate its power to review claims of "discrimination" rests on the widely held belief that such power is part of the original constitutional plan of separation of powers, as expressed in Marbury v. Madison.

    As The Supremacists explains, that notion is totally wrong. Even John Marshall would have agreed that at the time of Marbury v. Madison, the federal courts had no power to review such claims. Since the federal courts did not claim such jurisdiction back then, there was no need for Congress to remove it.

    The power of federal courts to entertain such claims is not in the Constitution and did not exist for the first four-score years of the federal judiciary. It is not even in the 14th Amendment. It was created and conferred by the Reconstruction Congress in 1871. See: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/1983.html

    Any lawsuit asking a federal court (quoting Liza) to "consider heterosexual-only marriage unconstitutionally discriminatory" would have to be brought under that statute. As every litigator knows, every federal lawsuit must begin by pleading its jurisdictional basis. Without that jurisdictional statute, 42 U.S.C. 1983, no federal court could even hear a case challenging marriage, let alone decide the question.

    Since Congress passed the statute in the first case, it clearly has the power to repeal or modify it at any time.

    John makes excellent points. If his argument seems to legalistic, then just use common sense. The US Constitution has been amended to directly deal with racial problems, so it seems appropriate for the federal courts to consider those amendment when trying to decide a racial case. But the US Constitution has almost nothing to do with marriage law, and there is no good reason for the federal courts to even look at marriage policy.

    Liza writes:

    Are there any law professors who really think limiting federal court jurisdiction would stick for an equal-protection-type issue (assuming Congress passes such a bill)?

    The testimony by other witnesses before the House committee did not inspire confidence.

    All law professors believe in judicial supremacy, and have an erroneous view of the American legal system. They are hopeless. The book was written so that the rest of the population could be educated.

    Bob writes:

    If Congress removes DOMA from the jurisdiction of the Federal Courts, the Republican party better have a PR campaign ready to deal with the confusion and irritation caused by the definition of marriage differing between states.
    Explaining DOMA is easy. DOMA has the overwhelming support of Republicans and Democrats. Bill Clinton signed it into law. It is not even very controversial, except among those in the radical fringe who would never vote Republican anyway.

    John Kerry is the one with the PR problem. His current position is that he is against same-sex marriage and also against DOMA. So he thinks that democratically elected legislatures should ban same-sex marriage, but it is okay if supremacist judges force it on us anyway. It confirms that Kerry is a judicial supremacist, and that is reason enough to vote against him.

    Bob writes:

    DOMA is easy to explain. The problem is that Senator Santorum is is trashing DOMA on TV. Santorum favors the Constitutional amendment which would prevent the States from legislating definitions of marriage as the States always have. An alliance between the likes of Teddy Kennedy and Rick Santorum against DOMA would be ugly.

    The more Kerry talks about gay marriage, the better for Bush. The problem for Republicans is that Kerry isn't talking about it. The conventional wisdom is that whoever brings up gay issues loses. I think that is correct. People don't want to hear about it.

    You are mixed up here. Santorum voted for DOMA, and he is not on TV trashing DOMA. Santorum will surely vote in favor of withdrawing federal court jurisdiction over DOMA. Santorum apparently prefers a stronger measure, but he certainly supports DOMA.

    It is primarily Kerry's home state and Kerry's supporters who are raising the same-sex marriage issue. Kerry has said more about it than Bush has.


    Friday, Jul 23, 2004
     
    Supremacist O'Connor complains about jury trials
    CNN says:
    MONTEREY, California (AP) -- [Supreme Court] Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told dozens of top judges and prosecutors Thursday that she is "disgusted" by a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision that cast doubt on federal sentencing guidelines and could undermine tens of thousands of cases.
    The case involved a man named Blakely who was denied his right to a jury trial, and the judge sentenced him based on his own fact-finding. The curious thing is that O'Connor does not defend Blakely's sentence. Her only complaint is that other criminal defendants might similarly demand their rights to a jury trial.

    The Blakely decision just talks about Blakely's sentence, and that's all. O'Connor is more interested in handing down grand rules that give judges more power in a broad range of cases. She would rather let Blakely serve an extra long sentence in order to serve her suprmacist goals.

    Curiously, the two big criminal-defendant-rights cases this year were argued by the same lawyer, and Justice Scalia wrote both majority opinions.

    Update: A Wash Post editorial begs the Supreme Court to issue some supremacist dicta to accompany the Blakely decision:

    the acting solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, warned the Supreme Court that "the federal sentencing system has fallen into a state of deep uncertainty and disarray" since the court's bombshell decision last month in Blakely v. Washington. He begged it to clarify the law immediately -- though the court is out of session for the summer. The Senate, likewise, passed a unanimous resolution urging the court to "act expeditiously to resolve the current confusion and inconsistency." ... Legislatures -- including Congress -- are unsure what laws they need to rewrite.
    I hope the Court stays on vacation. All the Court did was apply this from a 2000 decision:
    Other than the fact of a prior conviction, any fact that increases the penalty for a crime beyond the prescribed statutory maximum must be submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

    Wednesday, Jul 21, 2004
     
    Supremacist judge wants to control prisons
    A federal judge doesn't like the new California contract with the prison guards, so he wants to personally take control of the state prison system! John writes:
    Supremacist Judge Thelton Henderson is remembered as the judge who tried to throw out Prop 209, but was overruled by his own 9th Circuit.

    Monday, Jul 19, 2004
     
    The Sun is getting hotter
    A London newspaper says:
    Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
     
    Foreigners want judicial supremacy in the USA
    John writes:
    Here's a supremacist brief in which Gorbachev asks the Supreme Court to use foreign "norms" to overturn U.S. law.

    WASHINGTON (AP) - Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, the American Medical Association and 48 nations are among those lobbying the Supreme Court to end the execution of killers who committed their crimes before age 18.

    Most Americans are in favor of executing ruthless murderers like the 17-year-old DC sniper. The US Supreme Court upheld the practice as recently as 2002. The Constitution has several approving references to capital punishment.

    But now that the DC sniper is probably not going to be executed anyway, the Court may decide that it can get away with inventing some new doctrine on the matter. In 2002, it cited evolving trends in order to say that a murderer has to pass an IQ test in order to be executed.


    Saturday, Jul 17, 2004
     
    DA with a quota
    I have heard of cops having to write a quota of tickets, but I never heard of a district attorney with a quota of front page indictments. Andy sends this AP story:
    The Sun published documents including [Maryland U.S. Attorney Thomas] DiBiagio's agenda for a May staff meeting, which outlined goals he wants to accomplish by "Nov. 6" to make the Maryland U.S. attorney's office the nation's "premier office." He wrote that he wanted "Three 'Front Page' White Collar/Public Corruption Indictments" by that date.
     
    Is Blakely supremacist?
    The Supremacists attacks various US Supreme Court decisions on the criminal justice system like Miranda and other Warren Court decision. After the book went to press, the Court decided Blakely v. Washington by a 5-4 vote on June 24, and a law prof argues:
    Blakely is the biggest criminal justice decision not just of this past term, not just of this decade, not just of the Rehnquist Court, but perhaps in the history of the Supreme Court.
    Already there are thousands of sentences that have been thrown into doubt, and there is a 4-way circuit split on what to do about it. The appellate courts are begging for Supreme Court guidance.

    Blakely may well be the biggest case of the last year, but I just don't think that it is supremacist in the way that the Warren Court (and succeeding) criminal decisions were. Those decisions just invented new rules out of thin air, and commanded policemen and others to obey them. When the other branches of the government tried to tinker with those rules, then the Court rudely reasserted its authority. The Court pronouncements went far beyond any facts in cases that were before the Court.

    All Blakely did was to reassert the 6A right to a jury trial for a criminal offense. Blakely pled guilty to one crime, but got an extra long sentence based on the judge doing his own fact-finding (over Blakely's objections). The Court did not attempt to rewrite the federal sentencing guidelines, even tho it appears that aspects of those guidelines do violate the 6A right to a jury trial.

    The Blakely decision only limits what judges can do. It does not assert power over other branches of government. The upshot is likely to be that judges will have to be more dependent on jury fact-finding for their sentencing. That is the way it ought to be. Perhaps Congress will revise the federal guidelines in order to recognize that fact. Justice Breyer, a strong judicial supremacist himself, was one of the authors and principal proponents of those guidelines, and he'd like to let judges usurp power from juries. He's wrong. The Blakely decision is a good one, and not a supremacist one. We can only hope that the 5-4 majority holds as the Court is being bombarded with related cases.


    Thursday, Jul 15, 2004
     
    Illiterate artist
    Livermore (Calif) commissioned an artist $40k to make a tile mosaic in front of its new library, but the artist misspelled Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Einstein, and Van Gogh. She refuses to fix it unless she is paid more money. She is a hispanic, and she thinks that she had some sort of right to misspell those names.
     
    Crooked asbestos lawyers
    John sends this story about Baron and Budd, and other crooked asbestos lawyers. They have drain billions of dollars out of the economy with bogus lawsuits based on junk science. See the link to the US Senate statement that details how the lawyers coach their witnesses to lie in court. Fred Baron is a close ally of John Edwards and is one of the principle profiteers in this scam. He justifies the way he coaches witnesses by saying that any lawyer in this country that is worth a damn works the same way. I think that Edwards and Baron are thieves who should be put in jail.

    Wednesday, Jul 14, 2004
     
    Florida judges trying to meddle with the election
    The Florida judges aren't waiting for the presidential election to try to intervene. A court just ordered Florida officials to do more to help felons become eligible to vote.
     
    Leave marriage to the states
    Some hypocritical liberal politicians are ducking the same-sex marriage issue by claiming that it should be left to the states. These folks never want abortion or anything else left to the states, except possibly dope-smoking. But if they really want to leave it to the states, then they should support withdrawing federal court jurisdiction from DOMA. That is the most effective proposal on the table for leaving the issue to the states.

    Those who support a federal marriage amendment are also trying to leave the matter to the states, as the people and legislatures of all 50 states oppose same-sex marriage. The main purpose of the amendment is to prevent the states from being overruled by the courts.

     
    More lying Bush-haters
    Joseph Wilson, who launched the whole attack on Bush that 16 words in his State of the Union address contained a lie, has now been exposed as a liar. It turns out that it was his wife that recommended him for his trip to Africa. Wilson had launched another supposed scandal by claiming that she had nothing to do with it.

    This Weekly Standard article exposes some anti-Bush lies in the Knight-Ridder papers.

    And the NY Times has been caught a few times as well. A recent article about Kerry choosing a VP ended with a completely gratuitous cheap shot about Pres. Bush taking a fake turkey to Baghdad. It had to publish this correction on July 11:

    An article last Sunday about surprises in politics referred incorrectly to the turkey carried by President Bush during his unannounced visit to American troops in Baghdad over Thanksgiving. It was real, not fake.
    Update: Wilson got an award for truth-telling, but I am wondering what truths he ever told. I thought that his whole claim to fame was that he went to Niger, proved that a crucial letter was a forgery, wrote a report showing that Iraq was not trying to buy uranium, briefed VP Cheney, and thereby showed that Bush's 2003 State Of The Union speech had a 16-word lie. Now it turns out that Wilson had nothing to do with the forged letter, that there is solid evidence that Iraq really did try to buy uranium, that Wilson's report was ambiguous, and that Cheney never even saw Wilson's report. Wilson now concedes that his recent book, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity", had "a little literary flair". His central allegations are all false.

    The major news media now concede that Wilson was a big liar, but they refuse to admit their own culpability in the matter. Here is the LA Times complaining that all the war bloggers are denouncing Wilson.


    Monday, Jul 12, 2004
     
    California malpractice law
    John sends this AP story:
    California's medical malpractice (search) law, cited as a model by President Bush, has reduced awards in malpractice trials by an average 30 percent, according to a study released Monday.

    But because the landmark law capped attorney fees as well as jury awards, the net recovery by injured patients and their families fell only 15 percent, the study said. Payments to plaintiffs' lawyers dropped 60 percent.

    The law limits non-economic damages. It has been a big win for everyone except the ambulance-chasing lawyers.

    Sunday, Jul 11, 2004
     
    Bogus european claim to invention
    Here is a European claim:
    The Europeans have invented the internet, but the Americans have come up with all business ideas for it. ...

    The Internet is by and large considered an American invention, a myth that is even kept alive in the US. A short look back into the history of this technological revolution corrects this mistake. The qualitative leap, which first lifted the Internet from the sphere of universities, computerfreaks and the military, took place in Europe. The British Tim Berners-Lee invented the html-standard, which turned the net into the world wide web and rendered it practicable and usable for millions of users. The MP3-standard, which reduces music files to a twelfth of their original size and brought the music industry to the brink of ruin, was developed by a few scientists at the Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen (the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits) in Erlangen, Germany. And finally the net in its current format could not exist if it wasn't for the Finnish Linus Thorvald who invented the Open Source-software Linux.

    Most of this is nonsense. The internet was invented in the USA back around 1970. I don't think that anyone in Europe was even connected to it until about 10 years later. Linux would be nowhere without the American GNU project, or without being heavily promoted by IBM. Everything good about it was copied from ATT Unix. If Linux didn't exist, then those people would just be using BSD instead. Some people today prefer BSD to Linux, and BSD is totally free.

    The HTML and MP3 formats were significant advances, but minor compared to what was done at Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Real Networks, and elsewhere in the USA.


    Saturday, Jul 10, 2004
     
    Sen. Hatch needs to read the book
    Sen. Orrin Hatch says that a constitutional amendment is the marriage amendment is the democratic way to save marriage. He needs to read The Supremacists. Congress can just withdraw federal court jurisdiction from DOMA.

    Pres. Bush also supports an amendment, and doesn't mention withdrawing jurisdiction. John Kerry's spokesman says, "I think most people are going to see that as absolutely over the line and egregious. You don't amend the Constitution to roll back rights." Hmmm. I guess Kerry thinks that same-sex couples have a right to marry, and the homosexual-sympathizing judicial supremacists are unstoppable.


    Wednesday, Jul 07, 2004
     
    Racist and Supremacist Boston judges
    John sends this NRO article about how 2 federal judges named Garrity abused their powers and made racist decisions that drove people out of their homes. It says:
    Between them, the two judges Garrity (a fawning Times reporter observed) had taken control of Boston's public schools, jails, public-housing system, and even its sewer system. When asked by the reporter about the secret of his and the better-known Arthur Garrity's success in seizing direction of the policymaking process, Paul Garrity explained, "The easiest way to achieve control is to have people realize that if they get out of line, you'll nuke them. I suspect that [Arthur] Garrity would nuke them. I know that I'll nuke them."
    Nearly everyone agrees that the Boston public school busing order was a big mistake. Judicial supremacy is the core of the problem.

    Sunday, Jul 04, 2004
     
    Jackpot Justice,The Wal-Mart Case
    This article explains some of the problems with class action lawsuits. The Wal-Mart lawsuit will just be a big waste of money, except for a few greedy lawyers.

    Thursday, Jul 01, 2004
     
    Not a conservative court
    Ben Shapiro rights points out that we do not have a conservative Supreme Court.

    Justice Scalia said:

    This court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.
    The case was Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, decided June 29, 2004.

    Monday, Jun 28, 2004
     
    O'Connor the supremacist
    There was another supremacist ruling from the Supreme Court today. They admit that the Bush administration has the authority to do what it is doing at Guantanamo Bay, but it wants judges to have the last say anyway.

    John writes:

    The Supreme Court has decided the Hamdi case in four divergent opinions with an unusual lineup of Justices. None of the opinions, however, alludes, even in a footnote, to the uncertainty of Hamdi's claim to U.S. citizenship. Hence, we failed in our objective to get the Supreme Court to declare Hamdi's citizenship to be an open question.

    The plurality opinion by O'Connor states without qualification that Hamdi was "Born an American citizen in Louisiana in 1980," thereby implying a determination that the accident of Hamdi's birth was sufficient to establish his citizenship. That is exactly what we dispute.

    A concurring opinion by Souter properly states that Hamdi's citizenship is merely an unresolved claim "According to Yaser Hamdi’s petition for writ of habeas corpus, brought on his behalf by his father, the Government of the United States is detaining him, an American citizen on American soil ..."

    A dissent by Scalia describes Hamdi as "a presumed American citizen." Scalia's opinion argues that U.S. citizens should either be prosecuted in court, as John Walker Lindh was, or tried for treason.

    A separate dissent by Thomas makes no reference to Hamdi's citizenship apparently because Thomas thinks it doesn't matter whether Hamdi is a citizen or not. In Thomas's view, full due process rights can only be claimed by what he calls "loyal citizens," not enemy combatants.

    O'Connor said, in the Hamdi case:
    We have no reason to doubt that courts, faced with these sensitive matters, will pay proper heed both to the matters of national security that might arise in an individual case and to the constitutional limitations safeguarding essential liberties that remain vibrant even in times of security concerns.
    Yes, we have plenty of reason to doubt.

    Andy writes:

    Hamdi our mission partially accomplished. Only four votes found that Hamdi is a citizen based solely on place of birth. We wish the number were zero, but four is still less than the majority. We made it very difficult for the open borders people to cite Hamdi as precedent for citizenship-by-birth.

    In another case today, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that incriminating info cannot be used even tho it came after a Miranda warning. The problem, according to the supremacists, was that some inadmissable info was also obtained before the warning!

    Bob writes:

    You are barking up the wrong tree. The problem is Congress. Congress has passed vague and contradictory laws concerning habeas corpus. If Congress had its act together the USSC would not be forced to sort out their mess. The USSC would not dare to overrule clear and constitutional laws enacted by Congress. In my opinion, Congress is fond of vague and contradictory laws to evade accountability. Congress is delighted when the manage to shove off the controversial hard choices on the Supreme Court.
    John sends this TNR article, explaining how Scalia and Thomas have distinct judicial philosophies, and vote differently quite often.

    Saturday, Jun 26, 2004
     
    Supremacist law professor
    An extreme judicial supremacist law prof, Michael J. Gerhardt, testified before a House subcommittee last week. No matter what the question, he maintained that the courts have the final say on everything, and whatever the courts say is the law. He admitted that the Constitution provides for Congress being able to limit the jurisdiction of the courts, but insisted that once jurisdiction is given, then Congress needs a "compelling justification" to remove it. It also must be a neutral justification. And the courts would have the final say on what is compelling, and what is neutral.

    The courts are overstepping their authority! If that isn't a compelling neutral justification, I don't know what is. But anyway, the Constitution has no such language.

    Gerhardt really showed his nuttiness when someone asked what could be done if the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to pedophilia. He replied that the only answer would be to amend the Constition, as was done after the Dred Scott decision.

    He is omitted one little detail -- the US Civil War. In order to amend the Constitution, the USA had to first fight a terrible was that killed half a million people and nearly destroyed the nation. Correcting Dred Scott was surely the most painful and costly fix to a bad court opinion in the entire history of the world.

     
    Nevada pot smokers
    Pro-marijuana activists are trying get a ballot initiative in Nevada, but they forgot to file a box of 6k signatures! Even if they get it on the ballot, they'll probably forget to vote.

    BTW, 420 is now a popular codeword for marijuana.


    Friday, Jun 25, 2004
     
    Al Gore, Bush-hater
    I understand that Al Gore is still sore about losing the 2000 election, but his latest Bush-hating rants are just nutty. Andrew Sullivan shows how Gore's Iraq comments contradict what he was saying just 2 years ago.
     
    Limiting the courts
    Phyllis Schlafly testifies on limiting the federal courts regarding marriage law. Here is the Wash Times story.

    Thursday, Jun 24, 2004
     
    Right to a jury trial hanging by a thread
    The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of a jury trial. A convicted criminal got an extra sentence based on the judge's own fact-finding, bypassing his 6A right to have a jury decide the facts. The judicial supremacists would rather let the judges do whatever they want.
     
    Immigrants get affirmative action slots
    While the courts encourage schools like Harvard to give affirmative action admissions to black students, most of the benefits are not going to descendants of American slaves. They goto various dark-skinned immigrants, mostly from Africa or the West Indies, and also to some biracial students. It is funny how Harvard and the courts can be so openly racist, and liberals think that it is just great.
     
    Cicero inspired Jefferson
    Thomas Jefferson wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." I didn't know that he was partially inspired by the ancient Roman Senator Cicero who wrote:
    And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.
    I guess some judges would like to ban this quote as an endorsement of Cicero's religion, whatever that was. (He predated Jesus Christ.)
     
    Lawyer predicts supremacist ruling
    Walter Dellinger in Slate predicts that the Supreme Court will want judicial review of military detentions. He writes about drawing the lines between liberty and security and says:
    ... the justices are not about to let any institution other than the court have the final say about where those lines should be drawn.

    A central theme of the Rehnquist Court—perhaps the central theme—has been the primacy of the current Supreme Court itself. The signature case is Dickerson, the case that decided whether Congress could overrule Miranda. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the opinion smacking down Congress' attempt to make Rehnquist's own dissenting view the law. This court really is supreme. The idea that people can be held by U.S. authority without any access to courts or lawyers will be a hard sell to these judges.

    He then goes on to ridicule President Nixon's view of presidential power. When David Frost asked Nixon if the President can do something illegal if it is in the best interests of the nation, Nixon replied that sometimes an action is legal just because the President orders it.

    Nixon is right, of course. Eg, a war-time order from the commander-in-chief is not reviewable by the courts, and becomes a lawful order just because the President says so.

    The alternative -- that something becomes lawful just because the Supreme Court says so -- is much more offensive. Nixon got booted out of office when he lost the support of the American people, but Rehnquist is still in office.

     
    Slate kills Clinton summary
    Slate.com had a great synopsis of Bill Clinton's autobiography, but now it is gone. You can find a dead link here. I wonder if Slate got a threat from the publisher?

    John sends this link to a cached copy. -- Update: Try this cached copy. It is still missing from Slate on June 28. Here is a another copy on someone's blog.

    Bill Clinton's autobiography reveals that after Hillary found out about the Lewinsky scandal, he brought 3 ministers into the White House once a week for intensive marriage counseling. That should be enough proof that he was unfit to be president.

     
    Web portals
    Keeping track of web portal consolidation is tricky. Most of the good search engines are either defunct (like Northern Light) or have been taken over. As I understand it, the remaining field is:
  • Google
  • Yahoo, Altavista, AlltheWeb, Inktomi, Overture
  • Looksmart, Wisenut
  • AskJeeves, Teoma, MyWay, Excite, iWon
  • Gigablast

    Other portals like AOL and MSN seems to license their searches from other search engines, altho Microsoft is developing its own search technology and may soon be using its own search engine if it isn't already.

    The major directories are:

  • Yahoo
  • OpenDirectory (used by Google, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape)
  • LookSmart (used by AltaVista, Excite, MSN)

    There are also various specialized search engines and portals.

    Update: The Microsft search engine has a long way to go before it is competitive.


  • Wednesday, Jun 23, 2004
     
    Clinton misunderstands abortion law
    John writes:
    Professor Bill Clinton spent two weeks misleading his class with an erroneous interpretation of Roe v. Wade.
    As the article explains, the trimester theory is a myth. Roe v. Wade said that any pregnant woman has a constitutional right to an abortion throughout the entire 9 months, provided that she can get a physician to do it.
     
    Out-of-control judges
    A Boston federal judge says that federal sentencing laws were unconstitutional because they don't give judges enough power. Those sentencing guidelines do have some problems, but the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the guidelines themselves in 1989.

    A federal appeals judge in NY, Guido Calabresi, has gone on a bizarre tirade attack the Bush v. Gore decision and comparing Bush to Mussolini.

    Wired magazine says a Utah federal judge has agreed to temporarily block enforcement of a Utah law that would ban spyware.

    An Oakland area mom is upset with a racist federal court decision:

    "It's discrimination, it's a violation of my son's civil rights and it's racism," Lewis said. "We're fighting this all the way."

    The ruling comes from the 1979 case of Larry P. v. Riles, in which a judge decided that IQ tests could not be administered to African-American children to determine their placement in special education classes in California. ... The district is following a state directive by withholding the test from African-American children, Cowick said.

    Lewis said district officials told her that if she really wanted her son to take the test, she should mark him down as a Caucasian because he is biracial. She refused.

    Update: Calabresi refused to retract his comments comparing Bush to Mussolini and Hitler, and issued a letter saying that he was sorry for any embarrassment that he might have caused the court. His partisan political comments violated judicial ethics, and he had to make some sort of statement.

    This is an example of what some people call a non-apology apology. He pretends to apologize, but actually just blames everyone else for being offended.

    Update: A blogger called The Spoons says:

    So Calabresi says that the Supreme Court acted illegitimately, that Bush came to power like Mussolini, and that all Americans must unite to vote him out of office.

    And Calabresi now "apologizes" that his results could too easily be taken as partisan.

    Spoons translates: "I'm sorry that I said something that simpleminded conservative critics have misunderstood. I should have realized how stupid they are, and tailored my remarks accordingly."

    Here is Judge Calabresi's lame and offensive non-apology letter. I say that the judge should be impeached.

    Update: Volokh reports that some Congressmen have written a formal complaint letter. They complain about about Judge Calabresi's partisan Bush-hating comments. I am also offended by his judicial supremacist comments. He said that the Supreme Court legitimately has the right to put a President in power, just like the king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in. The final say on a USA presidential election rests with the Congress, not the Supreme Court.


    Tuesday, Jun 22, 2004
     
    Unlicensed lawyer to be appointed a judge
    Andy reports that Bush has appointed an unlicensed lawyer to be a DC Circuit appeals judge.
    Thomas B. Griffith, nominated last month for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, lost his Washington license for not paying bar association dues. He got the license back by paying what he owed.

    Griffith lacks a law license in Utah — where he provides counsel on "all legal matters" to BYU — because he never took the state bar exam.

    Andy writes:
    The longstanding mystery of why Bush withdrew Miguel Estrada's nomination has now apparently been solved. Orrin Hatch wanted to appoint an unqualified buddy of his instead!
    John sends this article that exposes some fallacies about law licensing. It says:
    Many an affluent lawyer would sink into the doldrums of mere middle-class comfort if the public learned the dirtiest secret of all: any intelligent, educated adult with a little exposure to the practice of law can perform about 60-75% of the legal tasks that lawyers now charge a fortune to perform. Most menial legal tasks aren't even performed by lawyers -- they're farmed out to legal secretaries, paralegals, and interns, with the lawyer's name attached as an afterthought. I myself learned nearly everything I know about the practice of criminal law from watching court cases, reading old transcripts, and reviewing official filings -- not from law school, and certainly not from preparing for the bar exam. Anyone could learn about the law and its practice as I did. And perhaps more people should. But if capable citizens took charge of their own legal destinies, a great many Mercedes would go unbought as rich lawyers fell from grace with the bank. And so the bar exam hoax continues.
    I am all in favor of appointing non-lawyers to being judges.

    Saturday, Jun 19, 2004
     
    Clinton rips enemies, including court
    The new Bill Clinton autobiography will attack some enemies, according to the NY Times leaks:
    The book's length gives the former president plenty of room to settle scores, and he does so with his customary elan. He takes the whip to Republicans in Congress, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, the National Rifle Association, even the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 1997 that the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case against Clinton could go forward while he was in office. He called that decision one of the most politically naive and damaging court decisions in years.
    Politically naive and damaging? That is a strange comment.

    Being against judicial supremacy, you might expect me to say that the President should not have been required to conform to mundane court procedures. But Clinton's court case was not about his impeachment or his authority as President or anything like that. It was only a claim by Paula Jones that Clinton pay her a sum of money to compensate her for some damages that she allegedly suffered in Arkansas. Legally, it is not that much different from a bank suing him for nonpayment of a loan. Clinton should have just paid the money and disposed of the case. He chose to contest the payment, and to do that, he had to testify. That is all the Supreme Court said.

    A lot of people were offended by some of the inequities of the Jones lawsuit. She filed years after the fact; she had no hard evidence of wrongdoing or harm; she was allowed to go fishing into the defendant's sexual history; and her sexual history was sheltered. But these are the inequities in every sexual harassment lawsuit, and some of them are the result of laws that Clinton promoted.

    The NY Times book review trashes Clinton's book.

    Update: I just tuned in CBS 60 Minutes, and the first thing I heard was Bill Clinton saying, "The judge ruled that the Jones case had absolutely no merit." Clinton is still lying. The Jones case ended by Clinton agreeing to pay $800k or so in damages to Jones. The judge merely accepted the settlement.

    The Wash Post review says that the book proves that Clinton lied to the grand jury about when his Lewinsky affair started. The date was a key point in his impeachment.

    Up until now, I had thought that Clinton told the truth to the grand jury. But he apparently lied in order to conceal the fact that the affair started while Monica was an unpaid intern. I guess he thought that it was more acceptable to have an affair with a paid employee.


    Friday, Jun 18, 2004
     
    More Bush-hater lies
    The Bush-haters have backed off claiming that Bush lied about WMD, and now claim that he lied about Saddam Hussein being responsible for the 9-11 attack. Eg, the Slate Whopper feature says Bush lied.

    As explained here, Congress's declaration of war against Iraq required Bush to certify that attacking Iraq would be consistent with the war on terrorism. That is all Bush did, and he was telling the absolute truth. We would not have wanted to goto war if it was going to interfere with the war on terrorism.

    Kerry voted for that resolution. I am sure that Kerry thought what everyone else in Congress thought -- that Iraq had some ties to terrorist organizations, but did not plan the 9-11 attack. That is also what the 9-11 Commission is saying in its reports, and it corroborates what Bush has said.


    Thursday, Jun 17, 2004
     
    Cohen is wrong about FDR
    Richard Cohen says that Reagan was not great like FDR. He concedes that winning the Cold War was a substantial achievement, but not a great one like FDR's economic policy:
    The Great Depression was a different matter. Here FDR was the indispensable man. It wasn't that his alphabet soup of new government agencies -- WPA, CCC, etc. -- restored prosperity (World War II did that), it was that by creating those agencies, by putting people to work, by expanding welfare, by moderating the inherent cruelty of winner-take-all capitalism, he saved capitalism itself. FDR did that. Another president might not have.
    No one who lived during the Great Depression would think that the New Deal was successful at putting people to work, and no one who lived during WWII would think that WWII restored prosperity. The New Deal was an economic failure, and the USA had very high unemployment rates throughout the 1930s. Then WWII did succeed in putting people to work, but it did not restore prosperity. People needed ration coupons just to buy basic necessities. Prosperity did not come until after FDR was dead and WWII had ended.

    OTOH, monetarist policies under Reagan did end the high inflation and high unemployment of the 1970s, after a couple of painful years. Reagan was very unpopular for those policies in 1982, but eventually everyone agreed that they were just what we needed. Reagan was much greater for carrying out unpopular policies that worked. FDR carried out popular policies that didn't work.

     
    Clarence Thomas on constitutional law
    John sends this LA Times article attacking Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas's views are unpopular among liberal law profs, but he exactly right in every case mentioned. He should be promoted to Chief Justice when Rehnquist retires.

    In Thomas's most recent opinion about the Pledge of Allegiance, he points out that states could have official prayers under the Constitution. The 1A says:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ...
    Note that it restricts Congress, but not the states. The post-Civil-War 14A says:
    ... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. ...
    This has been interpreted to mean that individual liberties guaranteed by the Bill Of Rights at the federal level must also be guaranteed at the state level. That is, if Congress cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion, then the states cannot either.

    But Thomas points out that there are really 2 religion clauses in the 1A: one about no establishment and one about free exercise. These are very different. Other court decisions just lump them together and read them both to imply a wall of separation between church and state. This confusion has caused many problems.

    The LA Times quotes an idiot law prof as saying, "He acts as though the Civil War didn't happen, or it didn't matter." An anti-religion activist says, "Utah could be officially Mormon". But these quotes are nutty and ill-informed. Thomas accepts that the 1A and 14A guarantee the free exercise of religion. Any attempt by Utah to force people to be Mormons would be clearly unconstitutional. Furthermore, Utah's own constitution says:

    Article I, Section 4. [Religious liberty.] The rights of conscience shall never be infringed. The State shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of public trust or for any vote at any election; nor shall any person be incompetent as a witness or juror on account of religious belief or the absence thereof. There shall be no union of Church and State, nor shall any church dominate the State or interfere with its functions. No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for the support of any ecclesiastical establishment.
    So Thomas's view would have no effect on the people of Utah, except that perhaps a Utah resident complaining about the Pledge Of Allegiance would have his case heard by a state judge instead of a federal judge. But that's the way it ought to be anyway, as federal judges should not even have jurisdiction over such silly issues.

    Monday, Jun 14, 2004
     
    Bamford's Pretext
    The bookstore has a new Bush-hater book. The latest is from James Bamford, A Pretext for War.

    Before 9-11-2001, Bamford complained about how USA intelligence agencies were too powerful and too invasive. Now he complains that they didn't know enough about al-Qaeda. Before the Iraq War, he complained that Bush was making the case for war without presenting proof of WMD or imminent threat to the USA. Now he is still unhappy about the decision to invade Iraq, but acts like he has a big intelligence expose by just repeating what has been well-reported. Here is the Wash Post book review and the LA Times book review.

    Behind the war decision and other mideast policy decisions, he says, is some sort of Zionist conspiracy. I don't buy it. The decision to give Iraq an ultimatum had the unanimous support of the UN, and the decision to declare war against Iraq had the support of Congress, including the vote of John Kerry.

    It was the NY Times that used to run daily stories about how Iraq had WMD, and now it is the NY Times that has run 43 front page stories on Abu Ghraib in the last 47 days. (This is according to Bill O'Reilly today. I guess Reagan's funeral spared us a couple of days.)

    I can understand the people who were against the Iraq War all along, and who were against the Bosnia and Kosovo wars for similar reasons. But these Bush-haters make no sense to me.

     
    More anti-man propaganda from Dear Abby
    Today in Dear Abby, a wife complains that her husband got drunk at his birthday party, and on another occasion she had to sit by herself at a sporting event while he bought beer. Dear Abby suggests that she join a 12-step program and consider divorce. They have one baby, and another on the way. Bad advice. He is probably not an alcoholic.

    Another writer is woman with a jealous boyfriend. She says the problem is that he doesn't trust her, but she doesn't trust him either, and is paranoid that he has hacked into her computer. More telling, perhaps, is that she says:

    He says I treat my friends, and even strangers, better than I do him. I don't feel that way.
    Maybe she doesn't feel that way, but she probably acts that way, and if so, then she is the one who is dooming the relationship. If she is serious about him, then she needs to make it clear to him that he is more important to her than her friends.

    But that's not what Dear Abby says. She says that the boyfriend is a potential abuser and that she should end the relationship immediately! I think that Dear Abby gives terrible advice to women.

    It sounds crazy, but I've seen wives treat total strangers as being more important than their husbands. Even when it is pointed out to them, they'll give wacky justifications, say that they feel their husbands are more important, and continue the destructive behavior.

    It is completely normal for a man to expect a potential mate to treat him as more important that other friends. And when she refuses, it is completely normal for him to suspect that her loyalties are elsewhere. It doesn't mean that she is sexually unfaithful, but it does mean that she lacks the commitment that is necessary for an enduring relationship.


    Sunday, Jun 13, 2004
     
    Reagan critics
    The anti-Reagan folks can't keep their mouths shut. They want to blame him for AIDS, even tho he spent far more money on AIDS research that anyone knew what to do with. They imply that he was almost impeached for the Iran-Contra scandal, even tho he cooperated fully with the investigation, and was completely exonerated of any wrongdoing.

    I just heard a supposedly-neutral radio host on an NPR affiliate say that "everyone would agree that Reagan was anti-union". Reagan did order some illegal strikers back to work once, but was actually pro-union. He was a union leader himself. Other presidents, such as Bill Clinton, ordered lawfully-striking union workers back to work. Reagan never did.

    There are also a lot of annoying experts on TV who say they knew Reagan, and found him inscrutable. They praise his optimism, but they could never figure out what he was optimistic about. Reagan was a man of faith and principle. It is not that complicated.


    Friday, Jun 11, 2004
     
    Atheist censorship
    Andy writes:
    As this action illustrates, atheism ultimately leads to censorship. First Newdow insists that others cannot pledge allegiance "under God", and next Newdow insists they cannot criticize him on the internet.
    The defendant didn't show up, and Newdow won a $1M default judgment. Newdow lost related lawsuits against The Alliance Defense Fund and WorldNetDaily. The issue seems to have something to do with whether Newdow said under oath that the Pledge of Allegiance caused his daughter emotional damage.

    The question of whether Newdow lied is unresolved. Here is the petition to disbar him. It does appear that he misled the court, but I haven't studied the details, and I don't want to get sued myself.

    Update: The US Supreme Court just ruled 8-0 against Newdow, and 5 of the 8 agreed that Newdow said that the case had to be thrown out because Newdow misled the court about his custody of his daughter. They said that the truth only became apparent when Newdow's daughter's mother filed a motion to the court explaining the real story.

    You can check Newdow's web site for his side of the story, but it appears to me that he lied to the court about some other matters as well. Eg, his complaint said that he is an ordained minister, and the SC repeated this without question, but his ordination is from a phony mail-order diploma mill called the Universal Life Church. The first paragraph on its web site says:

    You can become a legally ordained minister, instantly, online, at this website. The Universal Life Church is totally non-denominational, interfaith and welcomes all religions. After you fill out the ordination form, you will receive a pop-up instant credential, which serves as your receipt of your ordination. Print it immediately.
    Newdow's complaint says:
    The daily, governmentally mandated recitation, in the public schools, of any pledge containing a religious statement such as "under God," inflicted upon a child who holds religious beliefs offended by such a statement is a blatant violation of the Free Exercise Clause.
    This is also a lie, because his daughter is a Christian who is not at all offended by saying the Pledge.

    George writes:

    You are calling Newdow a liar. Aren't you worried that Newdow will hit you with a million dollar libel lawsuit?
    Newdow is a crackpot. His 15 minutes of fame are over. His kooky legal theories aren't going anywhere. He has a point when he says that the courts apply the Lemon Test inconsistently, but he lost 8-0 at the Supreme Court.

    Thursday, Jun 10, 2004
     
    Judicial supremacy in Colorado
    The NY Times has a supremacist editorial tomorrow attacking the 3 right-wingers on the US Supreme Court. It says:
    But Chief Justice Rehnquist's dissent, joined by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, is bluntly dismissive of the Colorado Supreme Court. In the dissenters' view, the court was merely "purporting" to decide the case exclusively according to state law....

    The dissent attracted little notice because it fell one vote short of the four votes needed to review a case. But it is disturbingly reminiscent of the court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, in which five justices who had long been extremely deferential to state power suddenly overruled the Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida election law.

    Cases like these quite naturally invite skepticism. As the court learned in 2000, it does grave harm to its reputation if it appears to be deciding election-law cases for partisan advantage. In cases of this sort, the court must make a special effort to show that it is acting on the basis of legal principle, the only basis for a court to act. By departing from his deeply held belief in state autonomy to side with the Republican Party in a redistricting case, Chief Justice Rehnquist has once again invited the public to question this court's motives. [The case is Colorado General Assembly v. Ken Salazar.]

    The NY Times is being extremely dishonest here, because those 3 justices have not departed from any previously-held beliefs. The US Constitution (I-4-1) gives the state legislatures and the Congress the power to regulate elections for federal offices. Rehnquist's opinion merely sides with the Colorado legislature exercising this power. So Rehnquist is siding with state autonomy, as represented by its general assembly.

    The NY Times similarly misrepresents Bush v. Gore. First, there where 7 US Supreme Court justices who found Florida Supreme Court's interpretation of Florida election law to be unconstitutional. Second, the 3 right-wingers did defer to Florida in that they agreed that the election should be administered according to pre-election law defined by the state legislature and by election officials in the executive branch.

    The NY Times editorial is so bizarre that the only way to understand it is to realize that the writer is a radical judicial supremacist and a federalist hypocrite. The Colorado supreme court has usurped the power of the state legislature, as explained in the Denver Post. To agree with the Colorado supreme court, you have to believe that the courts have supremacy over the legislature, in spite of any language to the contrary in the federal and state constitutions. But you have to believe in a very peculiar sort of judicial supremacy, because you'd have to believe that the Colorado court decisions are not appealable to the higher US Supreme Court. Nearly all judicial supremacists believe that the higher courts should always get their way.

    The NY Times cannot bring itself to actually agree with the Colorado supreme court decision, so instead it settles for accusing the right-wing justices of partisanship and hypocrisy. They are neither. There were 4 Republican appointees who voted for the Democrats. The right-wingers were being completely consistent with their longstanding textual interpretations of the Constitution.


    Wednesday, Jun 09, 2004
     
    Santa Cruz politics
    Santa Cruz is a central California beach town that gets most of its money from tourism and govt agencies. You would think that the hottest issue there would be what to do about the horrible traffic on Highway 1. But the City Council has voted to remain neutral on widening the highway, and instead voted for a resolution to impeach Rumsfield. It appears that they are unhappy that a couple of terrorists in Baghdad had to wear underwear on their heads.
     
    Flagburning amendment
    Congress is considering a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to ban flagburning. The LA Times attacks the idea.

    It is a silly idea, but for different reason. A much simpler solution exists. Congress could simply pass a law removing flagburning from federal court jurisdiction. Issues like that have traditionally been under the jurisdiction of the states anyway, and there is no good reason for the federal courts to be involved. Removing jurisdiction can be done by a simple majority, and avoids amending the Constitution. That should be easy, as majorities have voted for flagburning amendments in the past.

    The LA Times also repeats the lie about the "first amendment to limit, rather than extend, the rights of Americans." There have been several such amendments already. The 11A removes the right to sue states in federal court. The 13A abolishes the right to own slaves. The 14A (as interpreted by activist courts) limited many rights, too numerous to list. The 16A limited the right to earn income without govt interference. The 18A abolished the right to buy liquors, and the 21A limited our ability to have a liquor-free community. The 22A limited our right to elect a president of our choice. The 15A, 19A, 23A 24A, and 26A diluted our voting power, and thereby diminished our rights to vote.

    You might think that it is silly to describe abolishing slavery as abolishing a right, but the US Supreme Court had ruled the Bill Of Rights guarantees a right to own slaves, and that it would be unconstitutional for the govt to take away that right.

     
    Sex bias in reporting
    This SJ Mercury News story about sequencing the DNA of a wallaby was written by woman:
    Female wallabies have yet another edge over their human counterparts: Their embryos often enter a ``hibernating phase,'' delaying development and birth until a more convenient time.

    Happily, humans do not share the wallabies' habit of mating again within an hour of delivering young. This unique trait is credited with the creature's population explosion.


    Tuesday, Jun 08, 2004
     
    Reagan on the dime
    After abandoning the dime, Reagan supporters want to put his image on the $10 bill. Wrong bill, I think. We should re-issue the $500 bill with Reagan's portrait. There used to be a $500 bill with McKinley, and nobody cares about him anymore. But Europe has a 500 Euro note that is worth about $500, and we need a similar note. As it is, it takes too many bills to buy a car with cash.

    Monday, Jun 07, 2004
     
    Ronald Reagan
    The news has been appropriately respectful of Reagan's death, for the most part. Andy complains that the first sentence in the lengthy NY Times obituary is:
    Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former film star who became the 40th president ... imbued with a youthful optimism rooted in the traditional virtues of a bygone era ....
    G H W Bush (41) was on TV saying how Reagan promoted the New World Order! He then quickly correctly himself, and said that Reagan promoted "peace".

    My local NPR affiliate had a bunch of left-wing kooks like Helen Caldicott on, who proceeded to trash Reagan.


    Sunday, Jun 06, 2004
     
    Firing Judge Roy Moore
    One of the Alabama judges who fired Judge Roy S. Moore, Champ Lyons Jr, has written a lengthy defense of his vote titled, "HIS MONUMENT, MY OATH, AND THE RULE OF LAW." Moore was fired for refusing to removed his Ten Commandments monument. The essay is mainly a rebuttal to Tom Parker who said:
    [Alabama General Bill] Pryor thinks that the rule of law is what courts say, rather than the Constitution itself, That's what [is] wrong with our federal courts.
    (Tom Parker just defeated one of Lyons's colleagues in an election.)

    Apparently this criticism hit home, as Lyons explains that he used to take his oath of office more seriously, and he used to speak out against judicial activism. But he explains a historical argument that turned him into a judicial supremacist:

    In Marbury, Chief Justice Marshall formulated the mechanism now known as judicial review through which the Supreme Court determines the legality of conduct of the other branches of government based upon that Court's interpretation of the meaning of the United States Constitution.

    Chief Justice Marshall based his ruling on an implication drawn from the fact of creation of three branches vesting only one with judicial power. In so doing, Chief Justice Marshall announced a principle that no less formidable a legal scholar than Judge Learned Hand, a giant in our judicial history, would later describe as ungrounded in constitutional text but mandated by practical necessity.'

    Yes, this is the standard supremacist line, but it is wrong. Marbury v. Madison (1803) did not determine the legality of conduct of another branch of government; it only an example of the US Supreme Court applying the Constitution to itself.

    If judicial review is really a practical necessity, then why is it that the necessity never arose in the first 100 years of the American Constitution? Marbury v. Madison was not an example. The first occurrence of judicial review was Dred Scott (1857), and all that did was to help cause the Civil War. Later came Lochner v. New York (1905) which is also widely criticized for being unnecessary judicial activism. And now we have all sorts of activist rulings, the vast majority of which have done more harm than good.


    Saturday, Jun 05, 2004
     
    Legality of the Pledge
    The PBS TV show Uncommon Knowledge had a debate on the Pledge of Allegience. This is one of the rare PBS shows that permits a right-wing viewpoint along with the usual left-wing propaganda.

    I think that Kmiec is correct, and that Newdow will only get one anti-Pledge vote at the Supreme Court. Chemerinsky predicts that the Court will say that the Pledge is unconstitutional.

    Chemerinsky made some very lame arguments, and Kmiec did not do an adequate job of rebutting them. Chemerinsky argued that the "nation under God" phrase was motivated by politicians wanting to reject "godless Communism", but failed to explain how that supports an establishment of religion. Does he think that anti-Communism is a religion? That seems to me to be just more evidence that the phrase had a secular political purpose, rather than a religious purpose.

    Chemerinsky also claimed to be unable to see the difference between "nation under God" and "nation under Jesus". Jesus Christ founded a particular religion. The term God is used in connection with all religions, as well as for various secular purposes.

    I don't believe that Chemerinsky, Newdow, and other atheists are really so offended by the term "nation under God". They just say that they are offended in order to pursue an ideological attack on religion.

    One point that they ignored was the Blaine Amendment. That was the 1875 proposed constitutional amendment that was supposed to erect a wall of separation between church and state. It was supported by anti-Catholic bigots and was narrowly defeated in Congress. But nobody at the time thought that the Blaine Amendment was implied by the existing US Constitution, and no one thought that even the Blaine Amendment would abolish statements like the Pledge of Allegiance. (Many states did pass their own Blaine Amendments.)


    Friday, Jun 04, 2004
     
    Anyone without a cell phone?
    According to this Slate article:
    Tim Long, an analyst at Bank of America, in May projected that 650 million wireless handsets would be sold this year and 730 million next year. Trikon Technologies Inc., which makes equipment used in the construction of cell-phone components, said in a recent release that the worldwide handset market is "forecasted to reach 1 billion units by 2006."
    If nobody throws any cell phones away, then at that rate we'll have enough for every person on the planet by 2009. (No, I still don't have one yet, and my kids don't either.)
     
    Father wins custody after mother makes baseless accusation
    Usually judges ignore perjury in family court, on the theory that everybody lies. Many mothers have learned that they can win custody by making accusations of abuse, whether there is any evidence or not.

    In a NY case, a former Playboy playmate lost custody of 4-year-old twins because she made false molestation accusations against the father.

    This is refreshing news. Child custody should not be determined by who is willing to make the more outrageous accusation.

    George writes:

    Those kids belong with the mother. Surely you can't think that the twins should be separated from the only parent they have really known.
    That mother belongs in prison. No, I don't believe that she can be a good mother and also so cruelly manipulate her kids into hating their father.
     
    Impeach bad judges
    A Wash. Times op-ed wants to impeach a bad judge:
    The only lawful remedy for such black-robed radicals — who have manifestly hijacked the law and the lives of the most innocent members of society for their own ideological purposes — is impeachment by the House and removal by the Senate. The power is available, although rarely applied. It should be exerted in this case, and in others so extreme. Each member of the House should draw up articles of impeachment against Judge Hamilton or co-sponsor such a resolution. Those who do not should be prepared to explain why they are willing to let such an outrage against decency and the rule of law go unchallenged. Judges recklessly intent on suborning the popular will must be restrained by the powers granted to the chosen representatives of the people.

    Thursday, Jun 03, 2004
     
    Activist federal judge in Nebraska
    John writes:
    U.S. Rep. Steve King, who represents 32 counties in Western Iowa, has been leading a campaign against federal district judge Richard Kopf who sits in Lincoln, Nebraska. SF story Omaha story

    King conspicuously attended a hearing in Judge Kopf's courtroom, then stepped outside and told the press that Congress should restrain activist judges from imposing their personal views on society.

    Judge Kopf apparently didn't like that one bit. Speaking from the bench he said arguments against activist judges are "stupid and superficial."

    Kopf is presiding over one of 3 cases challenging the federal partial-birth abortion ban. Kopf had previously overturned the Nebraska PBA ban; his order was upheld by the Supreme Court, 5-4, in Stenberg v. Carhart.

    Kopf is the same judge who banned the Ten Commandments monument in Plattsmouth, NE. His order was upheld by a 3-judge panel of the 8th Circuit, but the panel decision has been vacated and will be reargued before the 8th Circuit en banc.

    In one of the two other PBA cases, yesterday a Clinton-appointed judge in San Francisco overturned the law in a scathing 117-page decision.

     
    ACLU likes Goddess Pamona, not cross
    The ACLU pressured Los Angeles into removing a tiny cross from its official seal. It was allowed to keep Pomona – the goddess of gardens and fruit trees. LA Times story LA County Seal

    New book: The Supremacists

    A new book by Phyllis Schlafly called The Supremacists exposes the evil of judicial supremacy, and what to do about it.

    I am going to regularly point out judicial supremacist thinking, as it is pervasive among law profs and judges, and almost entirely harmful.

    Today I read this excerpt from a US Supreme Court hearing last week about Jose Padilla:

    JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: But if the law is what the executive says it is, whatever is "necessary and appropriate'' in the executive's judgment, as the resolution you gave us that Congress passed, it leads you up to the executive, unchecked by the judiciary. So what is it that would be a check against torture?

    A. Well, first of all, there are treaty obligations. But the primary check is that just as in every other war, if a U.S. military person commits a war crime by creating some atrocity on a harmless, you know, detained enemy combatant or a prisoner of war, that violates our own conception of what's a war crime. And we'll put that U.S. military officer on trial in a court martial. So I think there are plenty of internal reasons --

    My problem is with the premise of Ginsburg's question. Nobody is saying that the law is what the executive says it is. Everyone agrees that the executive is obligated to obey the law. Ginsburg only says it that way, because she believes that the law is whatever the Supreme Court says that it is, and thinks that is the only way the law could work.

    The fact is that the Executive Branch is obligated to uphold the law in all sorts of ways that are not reviewable by the courts. War is just one example.


    Wednesday, Jun 02, 2004
     
    Enron
    Why are Californians shocked by the Enron tapes? California deregulated power trading so that traders could arbitrage and address uneven distribution. Of course traders just want to make money for themselves. It is unrealistic to expect traders to want to lower California energy prices, as opposed to making money.

    This is some evidence of collusion to temporarily shut down power plants in order to manipulate prices. But the real fault is with the regulatory scheme that created incentives for power companies to shut plants in time of need.


    Tuesday, Jun 01, 2004
     
    Frenchman misunderstands US election
    A Frenchman named Marcel denied that G W Bush was elected, and wrote:
    All I read, or saw on TV news, seemed to indicate that, considering the mess of the vote recounts, the decision was let to the Supreme Court (where a majority of judges was for Bush).
    All the counts and recounts favored Bush. The Florida election would have been certified for Bush, but a 4-3 majority on a Florida court seemed determined to keep ordering recounts until one favored Gore. The Florida court was still inventing new recount schemes when the deadline arrived for reporting results (a month after the people voted). All the US Supreme Court did was to put a stop to the court's interference in the election.

    Monday, May 31, 2004
     
    Libertarian kook
    The US Libertarian Party has nominated a kook to run for president. His opinions sound like the uninformed ramblings of someone in junior high school.

    Meanwhile, MoveOn.org is appealing to a different set of kooks:

    This weekend, millions of Americans will go see The Day After Tomorrow -- the movie the White House doesn't want you to see. Thousands of MoveOn members will be there to enjoy the show, to help get people talking about the real danger of a climate crisis, and to take action to prevent one. Get a sense of this movie's drama ...
    I suggest watching Indendence Day to get people talking about the real danger of illegal aliens.

    Sunday, May 30, 2004
     
    Judge okays namecalling
    A Boston federal judge has declared that it is legal to falsely call someone a homosexual. The AP story quotes the judge:
    "In fact, a finding that such a statement is defamatory requires this court to legitimize the prejudice and bigotry that for too long have plagued the homosexual community," she wrote in her opinion Friday. ...

    She pointed to a Supreme Court ruling last year that found a Texas sodomy law unconstitutional, and to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling last year that it would be unconstitutional to prevent gays in the state from marrying.

    This is really wrong-headed. First, those court decisions were particularly controversial and outrageous examples of judicial supremacy, and even the authors would be unlikely to endorse such an extension of their reasoning.

    Second, defaming someone is broader than accusing someone of a crime. It might be libel to call someone a Communist, an adulterer, or a flag-burner, even tho the courts say that it is legal to be those things.

    There may be an upside to this. If the federal courts declare namecalling a constitutional right, then the politically correct speech codes might be demolished. We may soon be able to call people queers, niggers, faggots, etc, and some federal judge will say that we are just exercising our constitutional rights. Companies may no longer be able to fire an employee for calling someone a faggot.

    Bob suggests that the word faggot is derived from using bundles of sticks to burn homosexuals at the stake. This appears to be an etymological urban legend. It might be related to burning heretics, but not homosexuals. This reminds me of the story that the phrase "rule of thumb" was related to an old law about beating wives. The story is bogus.


    Friday, May 28, 2004
     
    Bogus fingerprint science
    Be wary of anyone giving scientific conclusions that he claims to be 100% exact and certain. Real scientists understand that when they draw conclusions based on looking at limited evidence, there is a nonzero probability that they are wrong.

    The FBI continues to claim 100% certainty about a fingerprint match, even tho they make mistake. An Oregon lawyer just spent 2 weeks in jail as a terrorism suspect, because of a similar fingerprint.


    Thursday, May 27, 2004
     
    Women initiate most divorces
    A UPI story:
    An AARP survey published Thursday found most women who divorced after 40 say they initiated the split, contrary to conventional wisdom. ... 66 percent of women respondents say divorce was their idea.
    I believe that most other surveys have found that divorce is usually initiated by the wife, not the husband.

    Tuesday, May 25, 2004
     
    Wacky legal theory
    Law professors and judges sometimes say the silliest things about the law. Here is the new Alabama chief justice Champ Lyons explaining the firing of Judge "10 C." Moore. Lyons says that he is obligated to uphold US Supreme Court decisions that are contrary to the US Constitution. He says that any intellectually honest scholar would agree that the decisions are unconstitutional.

    Lyons took an oath of office to the Constitution, not to some court's deliberate misinterpretation of the Constitution. I think that Lyons is irresponsible, and should resign.

    Then Lyons presents a proposal to amend the Constitution to require the Supreme Court to stick to the text of Constitution most of the time! This judge has some serious misunderstandings about constitutional law. Unfortunately, some of his misunderstandings are quite common.

     
    Dumb quote of the day
    When a California agency tried to ignore a law by declaring it unconstitutional about 30 years ago, the people of California passed a constitutional amendment requiring a court opinion before some state agency willfully violates the law. Now the same-sex marriage advocates call this amendment an obscure statute, and want it ignored.

    UC Berkeley Law Professor Stephen Barnett said:

    Once you call the mayor an administrative agency, it's hard to know where to stop.
    Hmmm. Maybe other public officials might have to obey the law also?
     
    Racist judge
    John sends this story about a California judge who cited a UN treaty to help justify racial discrimination.

    Meanwhile, also in Berkeley, the law school is protesting one of their profs, John Yoo, because he wrote a memo for the US DoJ on the scope of the Geneva Conventions. Berkeley students used to be advocates of free speech.

    Update: John Yoo defends his Geneva interpetation.


    Monday, May 24, 2004
     
    Why I do not donate
    Occasionally I get a call or letter from Princeton Univ. asking me to donate. I wonder why anyone donates.

    Princeton's endowment is so large that it could fund all of its expenses from just the income from that endowment. It does not need either tuition or annual giving campaigns. Princeton also gets millions of dollars from govt-sponsored research. It doesn't need any of it.

    At one time, class dues were used to support PAW, the alumni magazine. But the university took over PAW as a public relations device, and took editorial control over everything that is printed. It is now just a freebie being used to promote the university.

    The school has so much money that it recently decided to tear down and rebuild about 5 dormatories on campus, including one of the ones where I lived one years. When I was there, the dorms were called "New New Quad". It was not because the dorms needed replacing or anything like that -- they were actually some of the most modern dorms on campus. The only problem is that they were built with brick, and some people thought that they were ugly.


    Friday, May 21, 2004
     
    Palo Alto Cougar
    California passed a law against hunting mountain lions a few years ago, and not an overpopulation of lions is encroaching on the suburbs. When a lion wandered into a residential area in Palo Alto, the police came and shot the lion. The local animal lovers are upset. Here are some letters to the local paper:
    Why couldn't the city of Palo Alto (Page 1A, May 18) have spared the life of a non-threatening mountain lion? This animal posed no immediate danger to anyone. Clearly this animal was scared wandering into unfamiliar territory.
    Miguel Yrure Newark

    I do not understand why the Palo Alto police department couldn't have tranquilized this animal and relocated it. We live in mountain lion territory, they do not live in ours. It was wrong to kill this animal.
    Terri Kiplinger Sunnyvale

    I am angry that, in more than four hours of searching for the mountain lion in Palo Alto, no attempt was made to tranquilize the animal when it was finally located. Merely killing it removes the possibility of studying the animal while it is alive and possibly learning why it came into an urban area in the first place.
    Rob Knight Santa Cruz

    It came into an urban area because it is a wild animal looking for food! There was no way to capture it safely, because it was already in a residential area, and no way to relocate it safely to mountain lion territory, because that territory is already saturated with mountain lions.

    Now Palo Alto has a memorial for the dead cat!

    Update: More letters:

    The police officers stated that the tranquilizer gun would not have worked fast enough and that the lion was a threat to children. How easy it is to kill an animal and yet child molesters and gang bangers are not shot on sight -- and they are a greater danger to our children. Instead they get a trial and go to jail with three squares a day while our tax money pays for all of it.
    The lion was just doing what was natural -- looking for food since we have taken up all of its habitat with new homes.
    Suzanne Stephenson Sunnyvale

    Yes, to have darted the mountain lion with a tranquilizer and then released it to a sanctuary would have been sentimental -- indeed, it would have been the action of a virtuous society. Obviously we have not yet evolved to that higher ethical plane of existence.
    A cat treed by a dog and surrounded by at least 12 armed police officers posed no possible threat. Let us be honest about that. A god of the wild had condescended to visit us -- but we were not worthy of it.
    Ronald D. Brown Mountain View

    Why do you think there are mountain lions in our backyards? Has anyone stopped to realize that maybe, just maybe, development on the Peninsula and in South Bay has gone too far? Maybe someone in government or law enforcement needs a tranquilizer dart shot in his butt as a wake-up call -- we've overdeveloped, and we are the problem, not the mountain lions.
    Don't make the wildlife pay for our mistakes. What a sad, sad day.
    Jamie Wolf San Jose

    I thought that we had evolved into a higher plane in which humans are valued more than wild cats. I think that all stray cats in the suburbs should be shot on sight.

    Update: Good Thomas Sowell column.


    Thursday, May 20, 2004
     
    Tom Sell, in prison without trial
    Liza sends this St. Louis story about dentist Tom Sell who has been in federal prison for 7 years without trial. Judge Donald J. Stohr has finally agreed to watch videotapes of Sell being abused by prison guard, after 4 years of requests. Here is a previous story about Sell.

    I am convinced that Sell is innocent, and that he is being imprisoned and tortured because of personal vindictiveness on the part of Judge Stohr and his friends. Apparently Sell disrespected Stohr's friend, Magistrate Judge Mary Ann Medler, and annoyed a black FBI agent by being opposed to forced racial school busing. Other federal agents were offended by his Waco Branch Davidian conspiracy theories. Stohr retaliated by ordering Sell to be forcibly drugged with experimental anti-psychotic drugs that are not even FDA approved. Sell persuaded the US Supreme Court to delay his drugging, but he still sits in prison with no end in sight.

    A lot of people were outraged over the so-called abuse at the Abu Graib prison. Where is the outrage about Tom Sell? Sell has been abused much more than anyone at Abu Ghraib.

     
    Caffeine manipulated
    The tobacco companies had to give up defending their products when it was revealed that they manipulated the nicotine levels of cigarettes in order to keep their customers addicted.

    How long will it be before the big gourmet coffee vendors are similarly called onto the carpet? The jumbo 20 oz cup of Starbucks coffee has a whopping 400 mg of caffeine. By comparison, a typical 8 oz cup of drip-brewed coffee has 85 mg of caffeine, and a 12 oz can of Coca-cola soda has 35 mg of caffeine. (Note that Coca-cola says that they only add enough caffeine to make the coke taste good; they are apparently concerned about over-caffeination charges.)

    Bob writes:

    The Italian government regulates the amount of caffeine in coffee. When the Italians attempted to apply these regulations to energy drinks made in other EU countries and imported into Italy, the EU sued the Italian government in an EU court. Guess who won. The court determined that the Italians didn't make a scientific case that the regulated levels of caffeine are bad for you. [Cases here and here.]
    The EU allows trade in cigarettes, also. The same people would probably say that nicotine is not bad for you either. (The nicotine causes the addiction, not the cancer.)

    Sunday, May 16, 2004
     
    McDonalds
    McDonalds needs a healthy CEO. With the new movie Super Size This claiming that Big Macs are dangerously unhealthy, McDonalds could only responds by eliminating super-size fries from the menu. Meanwhile, their CEO dropped dead of a heart attack last month, and the replacement CEO already has colon cancer.

    Saturday, May 15, 2004
     
    Brown v. Board
    E. Volokh doesn't understand how anyone can oppose racial discrimination and also oppose Brown v. Board of Education. That was the 1954 Supreme Court decision that said that "separate but equal" public schools are inherently unequal. Monday is the 50th anniversary of the decision.

    The decision doesn't really make any sense, as something cannot be both equal and unequal at the same time. But it was an important decision, because:

  • it repudiated the pro racial segregation decision of Plessy v Ferguson, 1896.
  • it paved the way for judicial supremacist rulings that are fundamentally contrary to our constitutional system of govt.

    A neutral govt history site says this:

    But the decision also raised a number of questions about the authority of the Court and whether this opinion represents a judicial activism that, despite its inherently moral and democratic ruling, is nonetheless an abuse of judicial authority. Other critics have pointed to what they claim is a lack of judicial neutrality or an overreliance on allegedly flawed social science findings.
    Everyone agrees that Plessy was wrong, and since the main point of Brown was to repudiate Plessy, most people praise Brown. If the Brown dicta had been ignored, it would have been fine. But it led to supremacist rulings that let to shutting down the Little Rock schools, forced racial school busing, forced taxation, and other undemocratic and unconstitutions applications of dubious racial theories.

    A NY Times editorial praises Brown, but laments:

    Nationally, 70 percent of black students now attend schools in which racial minorities are the majority.
    Why is that bad? In California, the majority of school kids are hispanic. The (non-hispanic) whites are the biggest racial minority, with about 30%. So white kids who happen to attend a majority-white school in California have the same complaint as the black kids in the above quote -- they belong to a racial minority and attend a school with a lot of students of their own race.

    Most blacks see nothing wrong with attending school with other blacks, and oppose forced racial busing.

    Tom Sowell writes in today's WSJ:

    What the Warren court presented as legal reasoning was in fact political spin. The success of that political spin, in a case where most of the country found racial segregation repellent, emboldened the Supreme Court--and other courts across the land--to use emotional rhetoric to impose other policies from the bench in a wide range of cases extending far beyond issues of race or education. ...

    Brown v. Board of Education was the crucial case establishing a pattern in which rhetoric beats reasoning--and we are still paying the price today. The painful irony is that black schoolchildren, the supposed beneficiaries of all this, have gained little or nothing in their education.

    George writes:
    When the NY Times refers to minorities, it means non-white minorities. Whites cannot be considered minorities, even if they are minorities in some states, because whites are part of the dominant culture of western civilization.

    Without Brown v. Board, black kids would still be at the back of the bus. That is because studies have shown that schools deteriorate once the percentage of blacks exceeds about 25%. That is why black kids need to be going to majority (80%+) white schools, or they won't learn anything. The NAACP and the Supreme Court recognized this, and that is why Brown v. Board was a great decision. Unfortunately, white people recognized it also, and moved to the suburbs. The Supreme Court didn't have the guts to desegregate the suburbs.

  •  
    Tax the damages
    John sends this LA Times story about an idea from Calif. Gov. Schwarzenegger. He wants a 75% tax on punitive damage awards. Several states have such a tax already. The idea is that punitive damages were intended to punish the guilty defendant, but there is no good reason why the plaintiff should get a big windfall. I say that the tax should be 100% on everything over $100k.

    Thursday, May 13, 2004
     
    Meese on Judicial Supremacy
    Former US Attorney General Ed Meese once gave an excellent speech against judicial supremacy at Tulane U. in 1986. He was widely attack, as is often the case when someone prominent speaks some uncomfortable truths. I put the speech online, because it does not appear to be readily available elsewhere. (My copy asserts a Tulane copyright, but that is obviously not correct as Tulane cannot copyright the speech of the US attorney general.)
     
    Congress doesn't understand the Army
    Only 5 US congressmen and 1 US senator have kids serving in the US military.

    Sunday, May 09, 2004
     
    Ad brainwashing
    Why do people prefer Coke when Pepsi wins the blind taste tests?

    Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has done some MRI experiments to try to find the answer. It appears that Coca-cola's marketing campaigns have a brainwashing effect that makes people think that Coca-Cola brand Coke taste better. Here is the NY Times story. Montague even claims to have found the areas of the brain where this brainwashing takes effect.

    This explains a lot. It appears that most adults are susceptible to this sort of brainwashing. I've wondered why many adults have such a fondness for certain foods that kids hate. The kids haven't been brainwashed yet. If those foods really tasted good, then kids would like them also.

     
    Trans-gendered Darwin critic
    Bob writes about this NY Times interview:
    Homosexuality in animals is a well known fact. I don't know what the big deal is. The NYT doesn't give a clue about what Roughgarden's idea is of how homosexuality comes about. Is she a creationist, or what? I have no intention of reading her book to find out. I'll have to wait for the executive summary which was not provided by the NYT. The complaint about bias is typical of mediocre scientists. I suspect that her gender issues have helped her career in the same way that Stephen Jay Gould's marxism garnered academic allies who defended his errors, mediocre to bad scientific work, and pompous writing.

    I just looked Roughgarden's book up on Amazon and found a rave review by Paul Ehrlich, a liar and scientist who makes idiotic predictions. Ehrlich lied in a speech he gave in which he claimed that the quote Quayle cited from Gore's book "Earth in the Balance Ecology and the Human Spirit" in the Quayle-Gore debate was made up out of whole cloth. The quote is:

    QUAYLE Well, I'm tempted to yield to Admiral Stockdale on this. But I -- you know, the fact of the matter is that one of the proposals that Senator Gore has suggested is to have the taxpayers of America spend $100 billion a year on environmental projects in foreign countries --

    GORE That's not true --

    QUAYLE Foreign aid -- well, Senator, it's in your book. On page 304 --

    The quote cited by Quayle is on page 304 of Gore's book as stated.

    Here are some of Ehrlich's idiotic predictions are here and here.

    There is a very funny South Park which starts when a dog turns out to be gay.

    Homosexuality makes evolutionary sense as a mechanism for population control. The problem is how genes which confer homosexuality can spread in a population. There is evidence that homosexuality is triggered by in utero stress on the mother. This mechanism would allow the genes in question to spread in the population.

    I recently heard an interesting analysis. Consider a hunting group of around 10 males. 10 is the average hunting group size for hunter gathers. If game is scarce, one gay guy in the group means that the gay guy will contribute to the hunting, but will not have a family which needs food. This results in a percentage more food available for the rest of the community similar to the percentage of homosexuals in the hunting group.

    These theories sound dubious to me. There are animal groups with 10 adult males in which only the alpha male is allowed to mate with the females. So are all the other males homosexuals?

    Bob responds:

    I don't know whether the alpha male strategy operates on overpopulation. I believe that bonobos don't have alpha males. Even if alpha male were a strategy for dealing with overpopulation, it does not preclude other strategies. Various species have various strategies for sharing food and dealing with overpopulation. Even among a single species, various strategies occur.
    I don't get it. Did the Stanford professor have his/her sex change operation because he convinced by Paul Ehrlich's overpopulation arguments, or because of an effort to mimic bonobos? Either way, it is fallacious. Bonobos do not have sex-change operations. I would say that Darwinian theory predicts that this prof's genes will be removed from the gene pool, but I bet that he/she is a cloning advocate.
     
    Do they really hate us?
    Americans are wringing their hands about how we are hated in the rest of the world, but I wonder they do. Various anti-American interests have tried to boycott American products, such as those sold by Ford, McDonalds, Coca-cola, and Kodak, but according to this NY Times article, people are buying American as much as ever. Even in Mohammedan countries.

    Saturday, May 08, 2004
     
    Phonics works
    Bob sends this story from Science magazine:
    Training the Brain to Read

    Phonics tutoring of problem readers actually changes how their brains operate, demonstrates a new imaging study from Yale. The work shows that 8 months of phonics--a method that separates words into their component sounds, as opposed to the "whole language" approach--produces gains that persisted a year.

    The researchers, led by pediatricians Bennett and Sally Shaywitz, imaged the brains of 49 poor readers, aged 6 to 9, while they performed simple letter-recognition tasks. Instructors then gave 37 of the subjects daily phonics tutoring for 8 months, while most of the other 12 got ordinary remedial reading.

    The phonics students made sustained improvements, and brain imaging showed "substantial normalization" of the brain's "reading pathways" (see illustration), the researchers report in the 1 May issue of Biological Psychiatry. In particular, their brains showed more activity in an area that recognizes words instantly without first having to decipher them. The work shows that in many poor readers, "the system is there but has not been activated properly," says Sally Shaywitz.

    Educators need to dispense with the notion that because "children are hard-wired to speak," reading should also come naturally, she says. "We're running 40% reading failure rates" as a result of that attitude, says Reid Lyon of the reading and language branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. "The converging scientific evidence is very clear" that poor readers need to be taught the "building blocks" (phonemes) of words, he says.

    All the previous research also showed that phonics works better than whole language. The trouble with phonics, as I understand it, is that it is boring for the teacher, and hard to do in a group setting. It works best one-on-one with a motivated teacher who can pace the material to the progress of the student.

    I just taught my kid with Turbo Reader.


    Friday, May 07, 2004
     
    Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad
    An anonymous reader says that the picture of U.S. Army Spc. Lynndie England is a feminist's dream. She has been turned into a mean soldier, and is dominating a naked male prisoner like a dog on a leash.

    The news media and Congress is really overreacting to this. No one was killed or injured. Rumsfeld says that the Army announced these abuse allegations to the public in January. What do people expect? Once women are trained for combat, and shipped off to war on the other side of the world, they aren't likely to be nice to enemy prisoners.


    Thursday, May 06, 2004
     
    Brain Fingerprinting
    I just learned about Brain Fingerprinting. It promises to be a new law enforcement tool. It is somewhat like a lie-detector test, but instead of trying to figure out directly whether a suspect is lying, it tries to determine whether he has previous familiarity with a fact or image. If a suspect denies being at the scene of the crime, it can provide evidence that he knows too much. I am not sure enough studies have been done to justify using it in court, but it will surely be a useful interrogation tool.
     

    Liza sends this long article on the Massachusetts Chief Justice and same-sex marriage advocate. She recently gave a speech advocating that judges mine the work of foreign courts, such as from her native country in Africa. When she talks about Mass. precedent, it is usually to some mythical slavery case that never even happened. She apparently held up her decision mandating same-sex marriage in order to quote the Supreme Court endorsing homosexual anal sodomy.

    Meanwhile, I just listened to Frisco Bush-bashing radio station KGO 810 AM interview local lawyer Arnie Levinson with his scare stories about how reelecting Bush will give us an extreme right-wing court. The guy is just reciting idiotic leftist propaganda. We have a predominantly left-wing court now. You cannot find any judges on the court today who are actively pursuing a extreme right-wing agenda. But you can find lots on the left. That Mass. judge is just one example. (She is on a state court, unaffected by Bush appointments.)

    The Bush-bashers recite this myth about how reelecting Bush will bring a return to back-alley abortions, because one Bush appointment will reverse Roe v. Wade. That opinion is just crazy. First, it would take at least three anti-Roe appointments to reverse Roe v. Wade, assuming that Rehnquist is one of those to retire. Second, neither Bush nor other Republican presidents have a history of appointing anti-abortion judges. Stevens, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter were all Republican appointments, and have all voted to uphold a constitutional right to abortion throughout the entire 9 months. G W Bush appointed several radical pro-abortion judges to the Texas supreme court. Third, even if Roe v. Wade were reversed, abortion would continue to be legal and available to the vast majority of Americans. Maybe a couple of states like Pennsylvania would regulate it, but pregnant women in those states could just get a bus across the state line if they don't like the regulations.


    Sunday, May 02, 2004
     
    Zero Tolerance watch
    For a good blog on silly "zero tolerance" school board policies, see ZeroIntelligence.net.

    Friday, Apr 30, 2004
     
    Adults with autism
    The NY Times has an article about adults who suddenly discover that they are mentally retarded. Often it happens after they have a child diagnosed with autism. Then they watch the movie Rain Man and think that they must have some hidden genius-level talents.

    It goes on to say that some marriages have been improved by wives gaining an understanding of how their husbands are mentally defective. Here is an example:

    "She'll say something about how terrible her clothes look," Mr. Jorgensen explains. "I'll say, `Yes, honey, those are terrible-looking clothes,' when really she's wanting some affirmation that her clothes don't look terrible."
    This is really wacky. It is the wife who is confused about whether she wants an opinion or a compliment, who is insecure, and who lacks basic communication skills. Diagnosing autism in kids is a big fad, and now it seems to be spreading to adults. The movie Rain Man did not help, as it was a truly terrible movie.

    George writes:

    You have to understand subtle behavior clues if you want to get along with people. There must be something wrong with these men if they are unable to pick up on the clues.
    No, there is nothing wrong with a man giving a direct answer to a direct question from his wife. There is something wrong with the growing trend to label standard male behavior as abnormal, sick, or even criminal.

    Here is another example from Wednesday's Dear Abby. The first letter is a complaint from a young wife with 3 small kids who wants to bail out of her marriage. Her biggest specific complaints are that he doesn't make breakfast for the kids and that he refuses to go for marriage counseling about it! The poor guy probably works long hours to support his family, and thinks that his homemaker wife should be willing to make breakfast for the kids. Dear Abby (who is really the daughter of the original Dear Abby) says that the husband is sick and that the wife should get a divorce.

    Another letter was from a girl who complained about too much sex with her boyfriend of one year. Dear Abby's advice was to refer her to a rape counselor!

    This advice is just abominably bad. The only reason that it doesn't raise eyebrows is that our society is already bombarded with anti-men psychobabble.

    Chris quotes the first Dear Abby letter and writes:

    I take from this that the major complaint is verbal and emotional abuse which is just a little different from not making breakfast.

    It undercuts your argument that there is much ”anti-men psychobabble” unless you think that emotional and verbal abuse is standard male behavior and should be accepted and condoned.

    Yes, the wife complained that her husband was "verbally and emotionally abusive." But without some context or some specifics, the complaint is meaningless. Everyone who is dissatisfied with his or her marriage accuses the spouse of some sort of mental cruelty. It is boilerplate.

    The wife said that she asked her husband to leave, and that she doesn't love him anymore. That usually means that she wants his house and money, custody of the kids, and child support for the next 16 years. She wants him to goto marriage counseling, but only for the purpose of changing him. She shows no interest in learning what she can do to make him happier, or to improve the marriage.

    In evaluating a complaint, it can be as important to notice what is not said, as what is said. My hunch is that this is an extremely selfish, ungrateful, and nagging wife. She needs a lesson on how to have a happy marriage, and she is not going to get it.


    Thursday, Apr 29, 2004
     
    Cross is unconstitutional
    John sends this SF CA story about a California city having to remove crosses from its logo. I live in Santa Cruz, which means Holy Cross. Do we have to change our name?

    Tuesday, Apr 27, 2004
     
    Academic Red-shirting
    The NY Times has an article on academic red-shirting. There is a growing trend for parents to start their kid in school later, by repeating a year in pre-kindergarten, in order to give them an academic advantage. The NY Times suggests that affluent families might be getting an unfair advantage over poor families who don't want to pay for an extra year of pre-kindergarten.

    But the article also cites experts who say that there is no advantage at all, and probably a disadvantage:

    The irony of it, said Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development in Chicago, is that parents who hold their children out of kindergarten because it is too academic add to pressures a year later to make it even more academic. Dr. Meisels is one of the most outspoken critics of what has become known as academic red-shirting.

    ''Parents who observe a kindergarten class in the spring before their child enters school and are not sure if their child will do well because it's very academic in orientation may keep him out another year,'' Dr. Meisels said. ''Then, lo and behold, the year after that, their child is bored. The parent then goes to the teacher and says, 'He's not being challenged. You've got to give him more work' and this sets up a cycle that makes kindergartens more and more academic.''

    Does holding children back make a difference? Opinions are mixed among early childhood education experts, but the growing consensus seems to be that younger children learn just as well as older ones, and schools should be able to teach all age-ready students. But many teachers and parents think some younger children do better to sit out a year. ...

    Experts hope to learn more from a current federal study. Researchers are following through the fifth grade 22,000 children who entered kindergarten in 1998. Data from the kindergarten year found that older kindergartners slightly outperformed their younger peers in prereading and premath skills. But the differences were small and many younger children outperformed the older ones, said Grover J. Whitehurst, director of the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Whatever slight academic advantages older students might have in the early years typically evaporate by third grade, experts say. In a 2002 report, Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford, found that existing research showed that on average older children did not academically outperform their younger peers. Nor are there social or emotional benefits to being older in the grade, her own research has found.

    ''It's one of the conventional wisdoms that take hold in our society that parents are giving their children a great advantage if they're older,'' she said. ''But there's real data out there showing that for most children that's not true, and parents should know there's a downside if their children are intellectually capable of handling kindergarten.''

    For one, older children who are ready for a more challenging program can become bored and misbehave in class. Dr. Robert S. Byrd, a pediatrician at the University of California Davis Medical Center, analyzed data from the National Center for Health Statistics for 9,079 children ages 7 to 17. He found that teenagers who were older in their grade because they had started school late were twice as likely to have behavior problems as classmates who had entered at the usual age.

    The local public school near me encourage academic red-shirting, because they say that the California curriculum standards are too tough. They think that it is easier to begin reading instruction in 2nd grade rather than 1st grade, I guess. And then if you don't want to red-shirt your kid, they complain that your kid will be a year younger than all the red-shirted kids.

    The red-shirting doesn't make much sense to me. I don't think that there is an academic advantage at all. The main advantage seems to be that boys might be better behaved if they are a little older. But it would be better if school just learned to accommodate restless boys a little better.

     
    Kerry's medals
    Conventional wisdom says that Kerry's war record is a big plus for him. After all, he is a war hero, credited with 20 or 30 kills personally. But after watching him on ABC Good Morning America, I think that he is very weak on the issue. He is still lying about throwing his medals away. And worse, we still don't know where he stands -- is he proud of those medals, or is he ashamed of them?

    Bob writes:

    Kerry was not lying about his decorations. Karen Hughes is the liar. See the 4/28 Lehrer. Tom Oliphant was there and reported what happened. Kerry may be pathetic at explaining himself, but he is being lied about by the Bush campaign.
    Here is Kerry defending himself on his web site, and on ABC Good Morning America. Karen Hughes said that Kerry pretended to throw his medals away, and Bob thinks that was a lie.

    Here is what the Dallas Morning News says:

    Kerry's Medals: Changing answers undercut candidate's image

    12:01 AM CDT on Wednesday, April 28, 2004

    It's one of the dumbest things a politician can do: reinforce a negative stereotype that others have of him.

    Over the years, Vietnam veteran John Kerry has offered different responses to a simple question: Did he hurl his war medals at the Capitol during a April 1971 protest organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War? His changing answers play right into the perception by some Americans that he is someone who will say anything to get elected.

    Last week, Mr. Kerry told The Los Angeles Times that he never tossed his medals and that he never even had "implied" otherwise. And in December, he insisted to ABC News' Peter Jennings that he merely had thrown away his combat ribbons and the medals of two other veterans.

    So what are Americans supposed to make of a videotape recently obtained by ABC News in which Mr. Kerry says – in a November 1971 interview on a Washington news program – that he "gave back ... six, seven, eight, nine medals" to protest the Vietnam War?

    Which John Kerry should Americans believe – the one who said, 33 years ago, that he tossed his medals or the one who has denied, at various times in the years since, that he ever did any such thing? Which one is running for president?

    The problem isn't that Mr. Kerry may have performed a dramatic act in the name of principle more three decades ago. It's that his backtracking since then suggests he may not have the firmest grasp on the meaning of the word.

    I think that Kerry is in serious trouble.

    Bob responds:

    Kerry may be in trouble. My opinion, based on his behavior and record apart from his Vietnam service and antiwar protests, is that he would not be an improvement over Bush. It may or may not be true that Kerry changed his story about his decorations. What is false, is the lie Karen Hughes told when she said "I also was very troubled by the fact that he participated in the ceremony where veterans threw their medals away, and he only pretended to throw his. Now, I can understand if out of conscience you take a principled stand and you would decide that you were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so, I think that's very revealing." Kerry did not "pretend" to throw anything. Hughes has sunk to the level of Michael Moore and Bush approved it.
    I think that it is correct to say that Kerry pretended to throw his medals because he did throw medals, and he told news reporters that he was throwing his own medals, but in fact he was not throwing his own medals. According to his current story, he threw his ribbons along with someone else's medals.

    But Hughes is a pro-Bush political operative, so I don't know why anyone would be surprised that she puts an anti-Kerry spin on the story. Both campaigns do distort the truth on occasion. For examples on both sides, see SpinSanity.org or FactCheck.org.

    As for Kerry being in trouble, the Village Voice says:

    John Kerry Must Go

    Note to Democrats: it's not too late to draft someone -- anyone -- else

    April 27th, 2004 11:45 AM

    WASHINGTON, D.C.-- With the air gushing out of John Kerry's balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn't have what it takes to win and has got to go. As arrogant and out of it as the Democratic political establishment is, even these pols know the party's got to have someone to run against George Bush. They can't exactly expect the president to self-destruct into thin air. With growing issues over his wealth (which makes fellow plutocrat Bush seem a charity case by comparison), the miasma over his medals and ribbons (or ribbons and medals), his uninspiring record in the Senate (yes war, no war), and wishy-washy efforts to mimic Bill Clinton's triangulation gimmickry (the protractor factor), Kerry sinks day by day. The pros all know that the candidate who starts each morning by having to explain himself is a goner.

    What to do? Look for the Dem biggies, whoever they are these days, to sit down with the rich and arrogant presumptive nominee and try to persuade him to take a hike. Then they can return to business as usual—resurrecting John Edwards, who is still hanging around, or staging an open convention in Boston, or both.

    If things proceed as they are, the dim-bulb Dem leaders are going to be very sorry they screwed Howard Dean.


    Monday, Apr 26, 2004
     
    National ID cards
    I am glad to see crypto-advocate Bruce Schneier oppose national ID cards, but his argument that they make us less secure rings hollow.

    We already have the US passport as an official national ID card, and the state drivers license as an unofficial national ID card. (The drivers licenses are issued by the states, but the states conform to federal specs, and law inforcement info is shared across state lines.)

    Furthermore, the feared national databases already exist. Police can quickly check vehicle or drivers license numbers against govt databases. They also exist in the private sector. They get checked every time you buy something with a credit card or do something that requires a credit check.

    Schneier says:

    But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American -- one that is immediately accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools and so on. The security risks are enormous. And when the inevitable worms, viruses or random failures happen and the database goes down, what then? Is America supposed to shut down until it's restored?

    Proponents of national ID cards want us to assume all these problems, and the tens of billions of dollars such a system would cost -- for what? The promise of being able to identify someone?

    These problems have been solved. Google's database is 1,000 times larger, and its online all the time.

    Saturday, Apr 24, 2004
     
    Oppie was a Commie
    The SF Chronicle is just discovering that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Communist. He lost his security clearance in 1954 when he got caught in an assortment of lies about his association with commies. It seemed clear that he was either a commie or a fellow traveler. Various leftist academics still claim that he was a victim of some sort of witch-hunt. They never should have let him on the Manhattan Project in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a Soviet spy. There was at least one highly-placed Los Alamos atomic spy who was never caught.

    Just a couple of weeks ago, the Dallas Morning News praised Oppenheimer by repeating various myths:

    Oppenheimer's humiliation still haunts science

    ... Half a century ago this month, the man who made the atomic bomb project successful was humiliated because he refused to align his moral compass to the prevailing political winds. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nation's top theoretical physicist in the 1930s, ...

    Over the next few years, Oppenheimer courted controversy by his reluctance to endorse efforts to build the superpowerful hydrogen bomb. Conflict in particular came with Edward Teller, a physicist whom Oppenheimer had angered back in Los Alamos by denying him a coveted job. Oppenheimer's loyalty was called into question, ...

    Oppenheimer was against the H-bomb because it was going to be used to defend the USA against the commies, and he was a commie. All commies who lied about their secret connections to the Soviets were denied security clearances. It was not a matter of personal spite.

    Thursday, Apr 22, 2004
     
    Symbolic thinking in Africa
    Someone found a handful of tiny pea-sized shells in the Blombos cave in Africa, and scientists claim that it is proof of symbolic thinking about 75k years ago.

    I collected some shells as a kid. Some of them had holes in them. The shells didn't symbolize anything. Simple crows are smart enough to do the same thing. This theory is really a stretch.


    Wednesday, Apr 21, 2004
     
    PBS Bias
    I happened to see the PBS News Hour yesterday, and I was just reminded of what a stupid and biased program that is. It spent about 10 minutes reciting the gripes of some school district that had substandard test scores. The school officials blamed it all one student who had Down's syndrome and another girl who claimed that she had a learning disability that prevented her from learning her multiplication tables. The school risked losing some federal funding if their scores did not improve. The school did not want to test the Down's kid, but the parent had been convinced that the testing was a good thing.

    This is a typical PBS/NPR story. Just a lot of whining about some govt program, without any critical analysis. I really doubt that one test score from a Down's boy is significant to the school average. The feds cannot cope with figuring out whether some girl really has a learning disability. The simple thing to do is to expect the school to test everyone, and to count on the law of averages to balance the smart kids with the dumb ones.

     
    Addicted to BBQ
    Dr. Nora Volkow has been a leader in a propaganda campaign to say that ritalin is not addictive when used as prescribed for ADD (or ADHD). It acts just like cocaine when it is abused, and is on the DEA Schedule II for that reason, but we are supposed to believe that the millions of kids on ritalin are not addicted.

    Now Volkow uses some more of her dubious brain scan evidence to say that the following are addictive: bacon-egg-cheese sandwich, cinnamon bun, pizza, hamburger with cheese, fried chicken, lasagna, barbecue, ice cream, brownie, and chocolate cake.

    The evidence is that people's brain get excited when they taste their favorite foods. I think that she is a nut.


    Tuesday, Apr 20, 2004
     
    Palestinian needs
    A NY Times op-ed says:
    For the last five weeks I have been traveling through the Middle East, meeting diplomats, officials, policy experts, military leaders, students and ordinary citizens. I learned something very important the greatest single cause of anti-Americanism in the Middle East today is not the war in Iraq; more surprisingly, it is not even American support for Israel, per se. Rather, it is a widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people.
    Count me in. I do not care about their so-called rights and needs. And I hope that they don't get compensated for waging a long and disastrous war (as the article suggests).

    Friday, Apr 16, 2004
     
    Jamie Gorelick
    When Henry Kissinger was appointed to head the 9-11 commission, I wondered whether a worse choice was possible. Now we know. Jamie Gorelick. The witnesses should be investigating her, not Gorelick investigating the witnesses. It appears that she has more culpability for 9-11 than anyone else in the government.
     
    Ditch the computer
    John sends this article that says:
    The first thing [Clinton administration FBI Director Louis J. Freeh] did was tell the bureau to get rid of the computer on his desk ...

    Thursday, Apr 15, 2004
     
    Lessig v. Manes
    Larry Lessig and Stephen Manes are having a nasty debate about copyright law on their blogs.

    Lessig objects to Manes calling his Eldred v. Ashcroft arguments "flaccid":

    "Flaccid"? I've already taken responsibility for failing to persuade in Eldred. But this is the most astonishing part of Manes's argument. He really does believe that it makes sense for Congress to extend -- again and again and again -- the term of existing copyrights. He might find the arguments against that "flaccid." But Steve Forbes, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly -- as well as a bunch of right thinking sorts from the other side -- disagree.
    Just to clarify -- Phyllis Schlafly did indeed take Lessig's side in that case, but she didn't take a public stand on whether or not Lessig's arguments were flaccid. What she did do was to have Eagle Forum submit amicus briefs on his side at the DC Circuit and the Supreme Court. That amicus brief persuaded the dissenter in the DC Circuit panel that ruled 2-1 against Lessig, and is the main reason that the Supreme Court even agreed to hear the case. The majority refused to directly address the argument from the Eagle Forum brief and the dissent because Lessig had repudiated it.

    Before the Supreme Court, Lessig continued to disavow the Eagle Forum position, and he made weak and flaccid arguments instead. In fairness to Lessig, I think that he would have lost no matter what arguments he made. But I think that he is wrong to conclude that those submitting amicus briefs on his side would all agree that he was making strong arguments. On the contrary, they were submitting amicus briefs because they thought that his arguments were not strong enough.

     
    Abortion - breast cancer link
    Andy writes:
    Jane Orient was kind enough to send me the full Lancet article on the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) connection. I will copy and mail it to anyone willing to analyze it in detail.

    Contrary to the headlines, the Lancet article shows a large ABC correlation among breast cancer victims asked if they had obtained an abortion. The Lancet article excludes the studies showing the highest correlation and includes dubious studies, but the article still illustrates a strong connection. 33 out of 39 studies in Lancet's own table show an increased risk of breast cancer from abortion. Its table shows studies in France, Greece, Australia and Germany displaying relative risks of 1.35 or above. But actually the correlation is much higher, because the Lancet relative risk compares abortion to not having a pregnancy. The proper comparison is between abortion and childbirth, and that contrast demonstrates the far greater increased risk.

    The Lancet article claims that women under-report abortion. If true, then that would drive the real ABC correlation even higher. If a breast cancer victim had an abortion but denied it, then that would artificially depress the correlation. Under-reporting of abortion causes under-reporting of its causation of breast cancer.

    Ignoring the voluminous data showing a correlation, Lancet cites smaller "prospective" studies that report abortion prior to the woman contracting breast cancer. If under-reporting is a problem, then it would be a far greater problem with prospective studies. A woman has no reason to include abortion in her medical history for a routine check-up, or completely unrelated medical conditions. Healthy women who prospectively report a prior abortion would be over-represented by women preparing to give birth. However, giving birth is known to be preventive of breast cancer. For this group, the effects of the abortion on breast cancer are masked or even offset.

    One sentence in the article gives away the ruse. In the prospective studies, "[o]n average, the age of the women with breast cancer was 50.4 years and they had 2.4 births." This is not representative of most breast cancer victims. 80% of breast cancer victims are over 50; the average number of births by such victims are less than 2.4 births. The Lancet article has preselected its sample to consist of the least likely breast cancer victims among women who had abortions.

    There are many additional flaws to the Lancet article. Its pro-abortion bias is overwhelming. For example, it talks in terms of women "hav[ing] been at risk of illegal abortion for part of their reproductive lives." (p. 1013). The authors picked studies advancing their agenda, and admitted to excluding studies showing higher correlations between abortion and breast cancer (id.). They also excluded older women, who are most likely to contract breast cancer, by an irrational elimination of studies predating the full legalization of abortion in many countries. Moreover, the article includes almost no information about how the prospective studies were really performed.

    It seems plausible to anyone that putting dirty soot in clean lungs might cause some problems. Just watch anyone coughing while trying to smoke his first cigarette. But abortion seems quite similar to natural miscarriages that happen to millions of women. Are you claiming that miscarriages are correlated with breast cancer?

    John writes:

    Those who believe there is a link between abortion and breast cancer have an explanation for why natural miscarriages generally do not raise the breast cancer risk. See here for details.

    In addition to the apparently greater risk of breast cancer when pregnancy is interrupted by abortion (but not miscarriage), there is also a greater risk of breast cancer among women who delay their first full-term pregnancy for any reason. There is a higher incidence of breast cancer among among Catholic nuns.

    Andy writes:
    There's an obvious difference in natural miscarriages, the body is healing itself. In abortion, an outside interference is doing something to the body.

    According to the pro-abortion Lancet article itself, 40 retrospective studies of natural miscarriages show an overall relative risk of breast cancer of 0.98, while 39 retrospective studies of abortion show an overall relative risk of breast cancer of 1.11.

    Note that no one is claiming that abortion is the only cause of breast cancer. But it clearly is a cause. Professor Joel Hibrand, of the City University of New York, calls abortion the most preventable cause of breast cancer.


    Monday, Apr 12, 2004
     
    The PDB
    I don't get all these Democrat attacks on Bush over the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB. They act like it is a smoking gun. The memo briefly recites some 1990s intelligence about Bin Laden, says that there are 70 FBI investigations ongoing. The most ominous part is where it refers to an unconfirmed 1998 report wanted to hijack US aircraft in order to gain release of some extremists.

    That 1998 intelligence was 3 years old, and we now know that it was false. There was a hijacking on 9-11, of course, but it they took no hostages and made no demands. A more ominous statement, in retrospect, was from Bin Laden himself in a 1998 ABC News interview where he theatened to attack the USA.

    Even if anyone really think that this PDB demanded some immediate presidential action, what would that action be? To double the number of FBI investigations to 140?

    Here is Slate's T. Noah, claiming that C. Rice lied. But reading the transcript, I say that it is Ben-Veniste who was being dishonest. It is actually a good example of a manipulative interrogation. The technique is to ask a loaded subjective question followed immediately by an objective question. When Rice answers the objection question, then Ben-Veniste acts like he got the answer to his loaded subjective question as well, and cuts off further reply. Most witnesses will fold under such pressure, and allow the questioners misreprepresentation to persist.

    In this case, the PDB was classified, and Ben-Veniste desperately wanted the TV viewers to get the impression that Rice was acknowledging that the PDB warned of imminent attacks, and that Bush ignored the warnings. Rice doesn't fall for the trap, and she corrects the impression that Ben-Veniste tried to leave. She was right to say, "It was historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information."

    I had assumed that the President had better intelligence on Bin Laden than this. The gist of the PDB is: Bin Laden has been wanting to attack the USA for several years, and the FBI is trying to figure out what he is up to. That's all.

     
    NY Times bias
    Fox's Bill O'Reilly is upset by this NY Times story:
    "The Passion" is a big hit within its Christian market niche. ... It had a movie-star director willing to spend his own money, who understood how to target large numbers of well-organized church groups and political conservatives. He was able to deploy partisan news-media pundits like Fox's Bill O'Reilly and ABC Radio's Sean Hannity to appeal to their constituents to show their support by seeing the movie. They responded in droves.
    I have to agree with O'Reilly. Only Hollywood and the NY Times would think that the American Christian market is just a "niche". Most of the media publicity about the movie was anti-Christian propaganda from the NY Times and others with a similar point of view.

    Update: The NY Times actually issued a correction on April 16:

    An article in The Arts on Monday about the box-office success of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" during Holy Week misstated the use he made of talk show hosts to publicize it. He discussed the film with conservatives like Bill O'Reilly, on Fox television, but did not "deploy" them to encourage their audiences to see it, and Mr. O'Reilly did not recommend it.
    I am sure O'Reilly is still unhappy that the NY Times writes regular stories about Al Franken's struggling radio show, and has never mentioned O'Reilly's far more successful radio show.

    Sunday, Apr 11, 2004
     
    No one knows physics
    This British poll says that only 2% could answer this question:
    The world is made of atoms; what is the nucleus of an atom made of?
    Either "quarks", or "protons and neutrons", was considered correct.

    It refers to a documentary that I happened to see. It shows a bunch of Harvard grads, still in caps and gowns, who cannot explain why it is warmer in the summer than in the winter. The most common explanation was that we are closer to the Sun in the summer. But then they get really confused when asked about the Southern Hemisphere.

     
    Meta-inventions
    Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, lists these 14 cognitive breakthroughs since 800 B.C. Murray calls them "meta-inventions":
    Artistic realism; Linear perspective; Artistic abstraction; Polyphony; Drama; the Novel; Meditation; Logic; Ethics; Arabic numerals; the Mathematical proof; the Calibration of uncertainty; the Secular observation of nature; and the Scientific method.
    What I can't figure out is why logic and mathematical proof are listed separately. What is the difference?

    The only explanation that I can figure is that Aristotelian logic is usually taught in a non-numerical manner, and people think of numbers when they think of mathematics and mathematical proof. However the best examples of early mathematical proofs are in Euclidean geometry, and most of those proofs are non-numerical. Aristotelian logic was just a straightforward application of mathematical proof.

    Bob quotes Albert Einstein:

    As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
    Yes, and according to Relativity, Euclidean geometry is only an approximation to observable space. Einstein could have said the same thing about logic, and it would mean the same.

    Friday, Apr 09, 2004
     
    Changing Minds
    I just listened to an NPR interview of Howard Gardner, who just wrote a book on the Seven Levers of Mind Change. He is a Harvard psychology prof who previously wrote a book on the 7 intelligences.

    Gardner is a leftist, and while he claims that he and his fellow academics are rational beings, he claims that other people, especially right-wingers, are not. His book purports to examine the supposedly irrational ways in which other people reach conclusions.

    On the show, Gardner said:

    Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science pointed out that older scientists almost never buy the new paradigm. That is, people who were 50 in Einstein's time never became Einsteinians, and Einstein, when he was 50, never became a quantum mechanical. Instead, and Kuhn points out, you have to wait for the younger generation because they are open to a new kind of ideas.
    This is just nonsense. Kuhn did have a very peculiar idea that science was an irrational process. (I think Kuhn preferred the word arational, but that is not in my dictionary.) Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics were readily accepted by the physics establishment of the day.

    George writes:

    Gardner isn't so one-sided. He cites Margaret Thatcher as someone who has changed minds, and he describes himself as a fundamentalist about science.
    The Thatcher example is amusing because he refuses to admit that any right-winger could convince anyone of anything by reason. He theorizes that she fooled people because of the way that her message resonated.

    Gardner defines:

    Fundamentalism are ideas we are so committed to that we say under no circumstances will we change our minds.
    That's not fundamentalism; that's intransigence. He seems to misunderstand both fundamentalism and science.

    Wednesday, Apr 07, 2004
     
    Evolution disclaimer
    John sends this story about a federal judge who thinks that it violates the First Amendment to have the following sticker on Georgia biology textbooks:
    This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
    What religion is being established by saying that evolution is a theory? Or does the sticker threaten the free exercise of religion?

    Meanwhile, the comic strip Pardon My Planet showed Jerry Falwell with a flat-earth globe in his home. But of course Christian fundamentalists do not believe in a flat earth. The Flat Earth Myth is one that is exclusively promoted by evolutionists.

     
    ATT fires worker for his beliefs
    Joan sends this story:
    A federal judge has awarded a Denver-area man $146,269 after AT&T Broadband fired him in 2001 for refusing on religious grounds to sign the cable company's diversity policy.

    Albert A. Buonanno, 47, argued that Denver-based cable giant AT&T Broadband, since bought by Comcast Corp., could not require him to "value" the behavior and beliefs of others, notably homosexuals, if doing so violated his own Christian beliefs.

    In addition, Buonanno said he could tolerate religions contrary to Christianity but not value them or hold them in esteem.

    Particularly amusing is the man's job title: quota specialist.
     
    Kepler conjecture
    The Annals of Mathematics has agreed to publish the non-computer portions of T. Hales's proof of the Kepler conjecture. The Annals sat on Hales's manuscript for several years, and ultimately rejected the computer part. The NY Times says:
    In a new policy, The Annals has decided that computer-assisted proofs have merit, but the journal will accord them a lower status than traditional proofs, regarding them more like laboratory experiments that provide supporting evidence.

    "In some cases, it's not a good idea to verify computer proofs," Dr. MacPherson said. "It took the effort of many mathematicians for many years, and nothing came out of it."

    (Slashdot commentary here.)

    I wonder now if I am the only one to publish a computer proof in the Annals. I wrote a paper with a computer-assisted proof of a conjecture about soap bubbles, and the Annals sat on it for a long time, but eventually published it. Now it appears that the Annals doesn't want to try to very computer-assisted proofs anymore.


    Monday, Apr 05, 2004
     
    Buy back stolen guns
    John sends this story about some poor citizen who was robbed of his guns, and then had trouble getting the police to give his guns back.

    I don't quite understand why the Penn. police think that he needs a background check. He already owned the guns.

     
    Physician privilege
    Andy this Palm Beach Post story:
    AAPS "calls the seizure of patient records 'an assault on the private practice of medicine. It's an issue that every doctor in the country is concerned about,' said attorney Andy Schlafly.

    The group, the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, has about 4000 independent practitioners as members. Two other small groups concerned with prosecution of doctors and patients in relation to pain medication also have joined the fight. None of the nation's major medical groups has weighed in.

    Schlafly questions what happens next after prosecutors have the records. 'The doctor has to testify against a patient? That's like an attorney testifying against a client, a priest against a confessor,' Schlafly said. 'It's a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath.'"

    John writes:
    (1)Why is it better to seek medical records by subpoena rather than by judge-approved search warrant?

    (2) Suppose the State Attorney had used a subpoena instead; would Andy still object and, if so, on what grounds?

    (3) Is it Andy's position that medical records can never be obtained as evidence against a patient because they would always violate the doctor-patient privilege? I never heard that a privilege can be claimed for written records. Isn't it merely a testimonial privilege?


    Sunday, Apr 04, 2004
     
    Hockey overtime
    The NHL (pro hockey) has some odd rules about ties. If a game is tied after regulation time, a 5-minute sudden-death overtime period is played. The teams play with 1 fewer player, in order to encourage scoring. If a goal is scored, the winner gets credit with a win, and the loser gets credit with a tie.

    What I don't get is why I never see a team pull its goalie in overtime. Replacing a goalie with an extra attacker gives a significant scoring advantage. The risk is that the other team will score into the empty net, but both teams are assured of at least a tie anyway so the risk is minor.

    If it is a game between 2 rivals for the same playoff spot, then a team might not want to let the other team get a cheap win. But in most games, hockey teams just care about their own records, and not the opponents'.

    Mark explains:

    It happens very rarely since if a team pulls it goalie in overtime and it is scored on, it loses the point for the tie in regulation. I know of only one situation where this has happened. Vancouver, needing a win in their last game to keep their playoff hopes alive in 2000, were tied after regulation. They were scored on which ended their playoff chances. It ended up being a moot point since San Jose won in a later game, which would have eliminated the Canucks anyways.
    See NHL rules, note 5.

    Saturday, Apr 03, 2004
     
    Legality of Crypto
    Some people apparently think that cryptography used to be illegal in the USA. Eg, a new book called Cryptography For Dummies says:
    Until fairly recently, it was unlawful for average American citizens to even own encryption technology. [p.28]
    In fact, there was never any such law.

    David Eather writes (from Australia) that Horst Feistel was harassed by the NSA and unable to hold a crypto job for much of his career because of unwritten laws against crypto.

    In fact, Feistel had a very good crypto research job for IBM. His main difficulties from the US govt came as a German immigrant trying to get USA citizenship during WWII. He subsequently got a couple of military crypto research jobs, but those vanished when such work was consolidated in the NSA. I don't know whether he ever applied to the NSA for a job. He was never restricted in his personal or private sector work.

    Feistel is well-known for being the principal designer of the IBM Lucifer cipher in the early 1970s. It was cutting edge research for IBM at the time, but only because NSA work was classified. NSA then helped IBM improve Lucifer into another cipher that eventually because the US
    Data Encryption Standard.

     
    French Terror Alert
    Bob sends this:
    NEWS FLASH!

    FRENCH TERROR ALERT LEVEL RAISED

    In light of the Madrid bombing, France has raised their terror alert level from "run" to "hide". The only two higher levels in France are "collaborate" and "surrender."


    Thursday, Apr 01, 2004
     
    Using religion to promote evolution
    John sends this NRO article about a govt-funded pro-evolution group using religion to promote evolution.

    The site says:

    Most Christian and Jewish religious groups have no conflict with the theory of evolution or other scientific findings. In fact, many religious people, including theologians, feel that a deeper understanding of nature actually enriches their faith. Moreover, in the scientific community there are thousands of scientists who are devoutly religious and also accept evolution.
    I guess these evolutionists think that it is okay to use religion to promote evolution, but unconstitutional to allow religious criticism of evolution.

    The Berkeley evolutionist site also says this:

    The problem is that we humans are hung up on ourselves. We often define progress in a way that hinges on our view of ourselves, a way that relies on intellect, culture, or emotion. But that definition is anthropocentric.

    It is tempting to see evolution as a grand progressive ladder with Homo sapiens emerging at the top. But evolution produces a tree, not a ladder—and we are just one of many leaves on the tree.

    No, I don't think that anthropocentricity is a problem. (The site defines Anthropocentric as "centering on humans and considering all other things in relation to humans.")

    Bob writes:

    Does this mean that you will stop accusing "evolutionists" of being hostile to religion?
    No. The evolutionists behind that site are indeed hostile to religion. And here is a page by Eugenie C. Scott on religion at the site you recommended. She signed onto a "Humanist Manifesto III", and disdainfully lumps religious believers in with Flat Earth believers. (She apparently doesn't even realize that the Flat Earth myth is a joke.)

    Bob writes:

    If Scott lumps religious believers in with flat earth believers, she also lumps them in with evolutionists. Scott defines a spectrum from creationists to evolutionists. From left to right she lists Flat Earthers, Geocentrists, Young Earth Creationists ... Materialist Evolutionists. Scott provides a footnote on the Flat Earthers. Do you claim that there are no believers in the flat earth? Clearly it is a joke, but so is geocentrism and young earth creationism, yet there are those who don't get the joke and unreasonably believe this nonsense. I would check the footnote before I bet that there are no flat earth believers. At least Scott talks about a spectrum of belief rather than dishonestly lumping all creationists together as you do with evolutionists. I, for example, defend evolution as a scientifically established fact, but I do not agree with the Berkeley site you cite above and resent the implication that I do. Unfortunately there are Marxists who twist evolution to serve their agenda. Evolution also has a reputable right wing interpretation, which is unfortunately ignored by entirely too many right wingers.
    There are no Flat Earthers. It is a myth.

    I think that Bob objects to the Berkeley site because it mentions micro-evolution, and he doesn't think that micro-evolution can be distinguished from macro-evolution. I'll have to get a clarification.


    Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004
     
    Effect of music piracy
    A Wash Post story says:
    Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry's assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line.
    If this is correct, then the whole theory about irreparable harm that underlies the RIAA lawsuits evaporates.

    Meanwhile, a Canadian judge has ruled in favor of P2P networks and against the record industry plaintiffs.

     
    Bush will win
    InstaPundit wonders why the Iowa Electronic Markets show Bush gaining over Kerry, when it hasn't been a good month for Bush.

    Dick Morris has an explanation. All the publicity from the 9-11 Commission and Richard Clarke has drawn attention to Bush's anti-terrorism efforts. Even tho much of it has been critical, nearly everone believes that Bush will be much stronger on anti-terrorism than Kerry. The more terrorism is in the news, the more it benefits Bush. Kerry's only hope is to talk about domestic economic issues like jobs.

    I think that Bush will win easily in November. Bush will have to make a lot of mistakes to lose. Not letting C. Rice testify was a mistake, but just a minor one, and one that has apparently now been corrected.

    George writes:

    You don't think that Clarke is credible? Kerry is a war hero, and if he seizes the terrorism issue, then Bush is cooked.
    No, I don't think that Clarke is credible. He is just a disgruntled ex-official like Paul O'Neill who has been talked into being a partisan attack dog for the election.

    Yes, Kerry served in Vietnam for 4 months. He got 3 Purple Hearts for 3 injuries, but nobody seems to be able to say what those injuries were. Maybe he scratched himself shaving and needed a band-aid.

    Kerry is much more famous as an anti-war hero. In the 1970s he attacked the whole US military, and in the 1980s he led support for the nuclear freeze movement. Yes, Bill Clinton got elected even tho he had a history of loathing the military, but Kerry is worse and those views are more unpopular now.

    Chris writes:

    Why are ad-hominum attacks against those you oppose acceptable while the same on those you support unacceptable. You dismiss any political argument you hear that does not agree with your politics as "Bush hating" and thus unnecessary of thought or rebuttal.

    It is hard to dismiss a thirty year veteran of government service with Republican leanings as a ‘partisan attack dog.’ It is particularly hard to dismiss Clarke’s critiques because of the inability of the administration to counter the substance of his arguments.

    Have you served in the Armed Forces? Do you have any Purple Hearts? Are you really suggesting that during Kerry’s tour in Vietnam he was not seriously involved in fighting the Viet Cong? You think that Bush’s service in the National Guard where he was removed from flight service is a better preparation for being Commander in Chief that Kerry’s experience? Are you saying that leading opposition to a war that the vast majority of Americans now recognize was a huge mistake was wrong or inappropriate?

    It is easy to dismiss Clarke's arguments because they have no substance, because they contradict his earlier statements, and because he has joined the anti-Bush campaign. He complains about how Bush let the 9-11 attack happen, but when Clarke was in a position to do something, he never recommended anything that would have prevented the 9-11 attack.

    Clarke complains that we should not have gone to war against Iraq a year and half after 9-11 because that distracted from the hunt for bin Laden. I do not agree. Our military cannot be paralyzed for years just because one bad guy is hiding in a cave somewhere.

    No, I didn't serve. Yes, Kerry served in dangerous combat for a couple of months. No, I do not think that Kerry's service prepared him well to be Commander in Chief. What did he learn from it? He became very anti-military. No, I don't think that most Americans agree with the things that he said about the Vietnam war. And I hope that they don't agree with what he said about the nuclear freeze. Kerry was opposing the very successful Reagan Doctrine that won the Cold War.

    My main problem with Kerry is that his foreign policy positions are so incoherent. I've tried to listen to his various explanations of his votes on the wars in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc, and I don't even see the pattern. He makes no sense.

    Chris responds to my comments about Clarke, saying:

    Try this link .
    That blog makes 2 points: (1) That Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist made stronger anti-Clarke statements on the Senate floor than he was willing to say elsewhere, and (2) White House spokesmen reversed themselves about whether Bush met with Clarke and asked him to investigate Iraq.

    Frist's behavior is easily explained by the (overlooked) fact that comments on the Senate floor are privileged, and not subject to libel suits. If Frist repeated them outside the Senate, then he could find himself the target of a publicity-seeking lawsuit, and be unable to get it dismissed because the relevant documents are classified.

    I don't know why anyone would be surprised if Bush asked Clarke to investigate Iraq. I am sure Bush had dozens of meetings in which he asked dozens of officials to investigate Iraq. Whether one of those was with Clarke, I don't know, and I don't see why it would have any particular significance.

    Bob writes:

    I find Clarke credible on the facts, but disagree with his opinions. I hear Republican attack dogs claim that Clarke has contradicted himself and they cite opinions or squishy facts which are subject to interpretation. Meanwhile, members of the Bush administration are contradicting each other on matters of fact such as whether we had a military plan and capability to execute such a plan against the Taliban before 9/11. We will see whether Frist can nail Clarke with perjury. I bet that there will be no indictment and will give odds against a conviction.

    Clarke's factual claims against the Bush administration are weak and tepid. Bush didn't give top priority to al Quida before 9/11, but who did? Liberals make a big deal of Clarke's claim that the invasion of Iraq weakened the war on al Quida. This is not a matter of fact, but an opinion which is easily refuted. Bin Laden and many of his top al Quida henchmen have been hiding out in Waziristan under the protection of the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, who created the Taliban. Tenet claims that uncovering Kahn's nuclear weapon development shop was a CIA triumph. Perhaps, but it would have been meaningless without the smoking gun evidence against Pakistan provided by Libya and Iran. It is difficult to argue that Iran and Libya would have cooperated as much as they have on nuclear proliferation without the example of Iraq to encourage them. The result of the smoking gun evidence on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation is at least some cooperation from Pakistan in cleaning the Taliban and al Quida goons out of Waziristan. This would never have happened without the invasion of Iraq. Clarke claims that the special operation forces which were redeployed from Afghanistan to Iraq would have been able to hunt down al Quida. Nonsense. Pakistan has been off limits to US military operations.

    It is as though Clarke has thrown a dummy hand grenade into a Bush cabinet meeting. The only harm has been done by Bush administration people behaving in an unseemly manner and not getting their stories straight. Clarke should have been ignored. Attacking Clarke's credibility was a huge blunder. I haven't yet heard any claims against Clarke's credibility which amount to 1/10th the Bush administration's credibility problems with their statements on WMD.

    The claim that Bush did not make counterterrorism efforts a top priority is old news. Bob Woodward's book, Bush At War, quoted Bush himself as saying that he had no "sense of urgency" in catching bin Laden before 9-11. That was 2 years ago.

    The Bush poll numbers are up. I think that Bush has been helped by counterattacking Clarke.

    Even the anti-Bush leftist lawyer Larry Lessig finds Clarke to be not credible because of his various contradictions.


    Saturday, Mar 27, 2004
     
    Abel Prize
    The Abel Prize (ie, Nobel Prize for Mathematics) was just award to M. Atiyah and I. Singer for their Index Theorem. The first prize went to J.-P. Serre last year. Good choices.

    Thursday, Mar 25, 2004
     
    Computer science in decline
    The Si Valley paper reports that university computer science enrollments are sharply down.

    No surprise. It is the law of supply and demand. 10% of info tech jobs are being outsourced offshore, according to this estimate. That is enough to send many thousands of workers scrambling for new careers, and leaves no room for new workers.

     
    The search for the missing link
    For 100 years, evolutionists have been searching for the missing link that connects humans to apes. Several fossils have been proposed.

    Now, new researchers claim that the missing link is a gene, not a fossil! The claim is that 2.5 Myrs ago, a human ancestor had a gene mutation causing all his kids to have weak jaws. With weak jaws, they had to talk their way out of trouble instead of biting their way out, and this was the crucial breakthrough that led to them evolving into humans (after a couple of million years).


    Monday, Mar 22, 2004
     
    Silly quote
    Today's Si Valley paper has a story on same-sex couples that says:
    More than half of same-sex couples own their own home. And though they can't legally marry, as many as a third have tied the knot before.
    So apparently they can legally marry -- a third of them have done it before!

    I suppose that it is possible that some of them never got a divorce, and hence cannot legally marry because of bigamy laws.


    Sunday, Mar 21, 2004
     
    Tom Sell, held without trial
    Andy sends this St. Louis story about the continuing saga of Tom Sell. He is a dentist who has been held in prison without trial since 1998, on various implausible charges. The case is very strange. It does appear that various federal judges and agents were out to get him for various reasons.

    Wednesday, Mar 17, 2004
     
    Martha's Stewart's bad advice
    John writes:
    This article names the high-priced lawyer whose bad advice led to Martha's downfall: John Savarese of Wachtell, Lipton.
    The Martha Stewart case will surely go down in history as one of terrible legal advice. Stewart only went to trial because of terrible (and probably criminal) advice from Savarese, and she had very bad lawyering at trial as well. She spent a lot of money on lawyers, but probably would have been better off with a public defender.

    Liza writes:

    I read this article and I don't think Martha's lawyers should be faulted for the outcome. She was extremely difficult to "manage."
    John responds:
    Liza, do you also think Bob Bennett should not be faulted for Clinton's impeachment? In 1998 Alan Dershowitz said it was legal malpractice for Bennett to permit Clinton to be deposed in the Paula Jones case, knowing full well he could be questioned about other women. Bennett should have insisted that Clinton default the Jones case to avoid testifying.

    The parallels between Martha Stewart and Bill Clinton seem stronger than ever. It was inexcusable for the Wachtell lawyer to permit Martha to tell and retell her unbelievable, unprovable story to U.S. government investigators.

    Martha hired that lawyer to keep her out of jail. Instead, following his bad advice is what is sending her to jail, just as surely as if the lawyer had testified against her.

    And then there was the lawyer who approved Martha's written statement to her own shareholders, retelling the same bogus story. (That's what led to the additional securities fraud charge, which the judge dismissed just before the jury deliberated.) Despite the length of the New Yorker article by the usually insufferable, Clinton-defending Jeffrey Toobin, he doesn't even mention that additional statement so I don't know if it was advised by the same Wachtell lawyer, John Savarese.

    I agree with John. Bob Bennett and John Savarese are two of the worst lawyers imaginable. If they had been bribed to sabotage the interests of their clients, it is hard to see how they could have done a better job of ruining their clients' lives. Just about any other course of action would have been better.

    Bennett was litigating the case with a strategy that had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Clinton would have been better off defaulting the case than winning, both in terms of money paid and adverse publicity.

    Bennett's and Savarese's behavior was not only foolish and incompetent, but it was very likely criminal as well. Their careers have been saved only by the attorney-client privilege.

    Liza writes:

    Roger and John do not have the experience of representing many clients that I, and to a lesser extent Andy, have. I have news for you Clients who hire expensive lawyers are usually not sheep, i.e., they don't necessarily follow their lawyer's advice or tell them everything. We know Martha Stewart was a pain in the neck for anyone to deal with - abusive, stubborn, demanding, very busy, hard to reach, with a terrible temper. She evidently considered her travel schedule, including a quick trip to Germany, more important than preparing for the federal questioning with Savarese. We also know that, like Bill Clinton, she was a liar. Both may well have lied to or concealed facts from their own attorneys. The article below indicates that Martha's lawyers presented her with a plea bargain deal and she rejected it. She also did things without consulting her lawyers which they would surely have objected to, like attempting to doctor an e-mail, doing the pre-trial interview with the New Yorker writer, and proclaiming her innocence on her web site right after the guilty verdict.

    We have no reason to blame the lawyers in either Martha's or Clinton's case.

    No sympathy here. You want to represent crooks and liars, and then complain that they are difficult to deal with?!

    Of course Clinton and Stewart are not sheep. They shouldn't just blindly follow lawyer advice. I would have also rejected that plea deal. It was a lousy deal. I might have also withheld facts from my attorney. But Clinton and Stewart ended up with legal strategies that they would have been very unlikely to adopt on their own. Those strategies have bad lawyering written all over them.

    John writes:

    Liza misses the point. Obviously, the lawyers can't be blamed for whatever the client did before the lawyer was hired, or against the lawyer's advice. I do blame the lawyers for the advice they gave their clients, the course of action the lawyers chose, and the statements the lawyers approved.

    Both Clinton's and Stewart's reputations preceded them when they walked into their lawyer's office. Both lawyers had every reason to know what kind of people they were dealing with. High priced lawyers are expected to have the strength of character and personality to effectively control such difficult clients.

    Before Bill Clinton sat for that deposition, his lawyer knew or should have known that his client was a world-class womanizer and prevaricator; that the Paula Jones case was being supported by Clinton's political enemies; and that a change in the Federal Rules of Evidence (which Clinton himself signed as part of VAWA) permitted discovery of other women.

    Those facts were more than enough for a competent legal counselor to forbid him to depose in that case and Bob Bennett's failure to do so was clearly malpractice.

    Similarly, Martha Stewart's character - in particular her abusive treatment of servants and underlings - was widely known when she consulted lawyer Savarese. The story she told to explain her Imclone stock trade was simply not believable. Savarese had to know that the story lacked any documentation and depended on the corroboration of servants who could not be relied upon.

    And of course he had to know it's a felony to deceive or mislead federal investigators even if you are not under oath. Hence, it was clearly malpractice for him to permit Martha to tell and retell that story.

    Liza points out that the lawyer could only recommend a plea bargain but could not force Martha to accept it. Of course, that was long after she had made the false statements which I maintain her lawyer should have prevented. But even at the point where the plea bargain was available, I doubt that her lawyers advised her just how dire her situation was. I doubt they told her frankly that she had no case and was certain to be convicted. Instead, they allowed her to think she might actually win at

    John, I think that you are a little mixed up here. The lawyer works for the client, not vice versa. Clinton and Stewart do not take orders from lawyers, even if they do charge million-dollar fees.

    Andy writes:

    Toobin's article is what one would expect from a liberal interesting at first glance, but lacking in substance.

    Its most obvious flaw is that he omits any real discussion of the jury. That would be like writing about a presidential administration without analyzing the president. A waste of time at best.

    Toobin is right that great prosecutors can be lousy defense attorneys. No kidding. How about this one people trained as attorneys often make poor analysts.

    There was never any chance that Martha would plead guilty, because her injury would have been nearly as bad as being convicted at trial. Plea bargains only happen when there is a big delta between the two.

    John responds:
    No, I disagree. Once hired, the lawyer's job is to act in the client's best interest, using his best judgment. Contrary to Roger, a good lawyer is far more likely to give orders to the client than take them.

    A lawyer's job will frequently involve giving strict orders to the client about what the client may or may not say or do. The Clinton and Stewart cases illustrate how a lawyer's failure to control the client can be legal malpractice.

    A client who doesn't like taking the lawyer's orders can fire the lawyer and get another one. Unless and until that happens, the lawyer is in charge.

    The idea that a good lawyer had to let Clinton decide whether to give that deposition, or let Martha Stewart decide whether to give that stock story to federal investigators, is just preposterous. In both cases, the lawyer's job was to prevent that calamity, to rescue the client from the client's folly and recklessness.


    Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004
     
    Same-sex marriage
    John sends this good NRO analysis on how the courts may say that the constitution requires same-sex marriage, even without invoking the full-faith-and-credit clause. It cites the Warren court anti-miscegenation reasoning in the appropriately-named Loving v. Virginia (1967).

    If Matthew Franck is right, then HR 3313 may be misguided and ineffective. That is the bill to withdraw jurisdiction from DOMA.

    The obvious solution, as I see it, is to add a section to HR 3313 withdrawing federal court jurisdiction from state DOMA laws.

    Also, now that I look at it, HR 3313 seems to have another loophole in that it allows federal court jurisdiction over the definition of marriage (but not over full faith and credit). Why? this seems to be an open invitation for judges to create same-sex marriage havens.

    John responds:

    Hostettler's H.R.3313 removes federal court jurisdiction over both parts of DOMA. H.R. 3313 has two substantive sentences, which track the two parts of DOMA.

    The first sentence removes federal court jurisdiction over any claim that state DOMA laws passed by 38 states (as authorized by 28 U.S.C. 1738c) violate the Full Faith and Credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.

    The second sentence removes jurisdiction over any claim that the federal definition of marriage (1 U.S.C. 7) violates the Constitution.

    It is true that H.R. 3313 does not withdraw federal jurisdiction over a claim that a state's own definition of marriage (as opposed to a state's refusal to recognize marriages from other states) violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That's because the federal DOMA does not address that question.

    The philosophy behind the federal DOMA, passed in 1996, was that the federal government has no power to prevent a state from enacting same-sex marriage within its own state, but that such marriages should not be recognized by other states or the federal government. H.R. 3313 is designed to protect the federal DOMA law (and state DOMA laws enacted pursuant thereto) from review by the federal courts.

    When DOMA was drafted, the judicial imposition of marriage came only from Hawaii - a state court interpreting state law. That's still the most important theory with Massachusetts and similar cases pending in NJ, California and several other states.

    If one of these state supreme courts rules against gay marriage, it's possible the losing party would try to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court claiming that state marriage law violates the 14th Amendment.

    That goes beyond DOMA, so it would be very tricky to add another section to H.R. 3313 to cover that "loophole." Presumably one would want to cover only same-sex marriage without disturbing previous Supreme Court decisions outlawing interracial and plural marriages.

    No. Hostettler's H.R.3313 says:
    No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or determine any question pertaining to the interpretation of section 1738c of this title or of this section.

    Neither the Supreme Court nor any court created by Act of Congress shall have any appellate jurisdiction to hear or determine any question pertaining to the interpretation of section 7 of title 1.

    Note that the 2nd sentence only removes appellate jurisdiction. It does not use the same language as the 1st sentence.

    There are 2 loopholes.

    1. A district court judge in SF could order SF to issue same-sex marriage licenses, and require the feds to honor them. The ruling would not be appealable, and not binding on other states.

    2. A federal appellate court could say that the 14A requires same-sex marriages, thereby mandating them nationwide.

    I suggest:

    1. Changing the 2nd sentence of HR 3313 to remove all federal court jurisdiction, just like the 1st sentence.
    2. Adding a 3rd sentence saying:

    No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or determine any question pertaining to the constitutionality of any state law limiting marriage benefits to opposite-sex couples.
    The idea is prohibit the federal courts from challenging state DOMAs. A state court could still invalidate a state DOMA, but that would have no effect on other states.

    John responds:

    I cannot explain why the second sentence is limited to appellate jurisdiction (even though it applies to all federal courts, not just the Supreme Court). I can't explain why the two sentences are worded differently. There's no legislative history, so we'll just have to ask Hostettler what he had in mind.

    First of all, you're talking about the states' own marriage laws, not the DOMAs. (State DOMAs are the laws passed in 38 states since 1996 which limit the recognition of marriages from other states. H.R. 3313 as it stands does prohibit federal courts from challenging state DOMAs.)

    Second, you're making a substantive change which will make the bill politically harder to pass, for two reasons (1) it raises tricky legal questions that have never been confronted before, and (2) it goes beyond the federal DOMA that Congress already passed.

    A major selling point of H.R. 3313 is that it merely protects the DOMA that Congress already passed by huge margins (342-67 and 85-14). It doesn't ask people to do anything new, just to stand by what they have already done.

    A considerable number of Senators and Reps have said they think DOMA takes care of the issue at the federal level and they see no need to do anything further unless DOMA is declared unconstitutional. Hostettler caters to that attitude by insuring that DOMA can't be declared unconstitutional.

    Those Congressmen are wrong, as the NRO article explains. I thought that John agreed to that. Furthermore, I've demonstrated that Hostettler's bill has 2 major loopholes.

    Yes, of course I am making 2 substantive changes, because Hostettler's bill is fatally flawed.

    The purpose of DOMA was to say that federal law should not be used to promote same-sex marriage. Withdrawing jurisdiction, as I've proposed, is intended to keep the federal courts from circumventing DOMA, so that neither federal law nor federal courts will promote same-sex marriage. Hostettler's bill just doesn't do it.

    Chris writes:

    Without understanding your fixation of preventing same-sex marriages I think there is a deeper problem with this approach.

    What is to prevent Congress, or the states, from passing further laws that are immune from judicial oversight. Couldn’t Congress pass a law, say declaring that woman are the property of their husband and not free to institute divorce proceedings and declare that law free from judicial review? When does this process end?

    The entire point of judicial review is to make sure that all of our laws adhere to the principles laid out in our constitution. Since this understanding changes and morphs over time there is progress from an earlier views which allowed slavery, the denial of the franchise to woman, the ability of the police to torture suspects and other behaviors which we would find aberrant to the current world view in which we find ourselves now. Certainly, in the future, we will find that policies and laws currently considered appropriate and proper will no longer be tolerated.

    Trying to cast our prejudices beyond the reach of the Federal Courts seems an approach doomed to failure.

    Congress only controls the federal courts, and the laws for property and marriage are almost entirely matters for the states. So Congress cannot ban divorce or anything like that.

    The USA law on slavery and women's vote was not changed by enlightened judges, but by the 13th and 19th amendments to the Constitution. When activist judges were asked to rule on slavery, the Supreme Court gave us the aggressively pro-slavery and prejudiced Dred Scott decision of 1857.

    If the judges were really sticking to the Constitution, then I'd have no problem with it. But we now have judges who think that the whole point of judicial review is pursue their own agendas, rather than adhering to the principles laid out in our constitution.

    I don't care that much about same-sex marriage, but I do care that we have a government that has been taken over by crooked judges.

    Chris responds:

    I understood this entire discussion to be about Congress's attempts to override the states' controls over marriage and to prevent the federal courts from ruling on the issue altogehter.

    In a further discussion on the entire subject I offer the following Slate Article.

    No, the idea behind keeping the federal courts from ruling on marriage is to let the states do what they want. The federal Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) allows states to pass same-sex marriage laws, if they wish. Removing federal court jurisdiction from DOMA would only reinforce that.

    I happen to have a low opinion of Dahlia Lithwick, that Slate columnist. This column is about a proposal for Congress to override a Supreme Court decision, "to the extent that judgment concerns the constitutionality of an Act of Congress". It would be somewhat analogous to overriding a presidential veto. The sponsor, Ron Lewis, proposed it as a regular law or as a constitutional amendment. He said:

    America's judicial branch has become increasingly overreaching and disconnected from the values of everyday Americans ...

    Our Founding Fathers created three separate branches of government, each with equal checks and balances on the other. Our founders also ensured that each branch, including Congress, play a role in constitutional interpretation, requiring officials in each branch to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution. ...

    In his first Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln warned, ``The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.''

    I agree with these points. I am dubious about the effectiveness of his plan, because Canada has a similar law and it doesn't do much good. But Lewis makes a lot more sense than Lithwick.

    Lithwick misstates the bill, and complains that it does not cover the Pledge of Allegiance case because that was a 9th Circuit ruling. But that Pledge case is currently being reviewed by the US Supreme Court, and could possibly resulted in a ruling that the Congress acted unconstitutionally when it added "under God" to the Pledge about 50 years ago. If that happens, then I certainly think that Congress should do something about it.

    Here is a summary of Ten Bills to Battle Judicial Activism.


    Sunday, Mar 14, 2004
     
    Da Vinci ripoff
    John sends a NY Post story (no longer online) about evidence that the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code plagiarized a plot from a 1983 novel, The Da Vinci Legacy.

    Mike writes:

    This was discussed -- with no accusation of "plagiarism" (so that definitely overstates it!) -- in a NYT Book Review editorial (inside back page, I think) a week or two ago.

    Only claim I see here is that Brown's book (alone with others) is a spin-off of "Plantard's hoax." Claiming it's plagiarism, is like claiming all vampire books plagiarisms. I don't think embellishment of a (well-known) fictional plot is the same thing as plagiarism!

    Yes, but the NY Times story does not mention the books by Lewis Perdue with extremely similar plots.

    Bram Stoker might be suing the various Dracula vampire ripoffs, except that the copyright expired a long time ago.

    Update: Lewis Purdue sends this page outlining the similarities.

     
    Bernie Ebbers
    John sends this article about MCI WorldCom writing down $74B in losses, and writes, "Did somebody say Bernie Ebbers was a 'genius'?"

    Andy responds:

    Yes, I did. And the article supports what I said, showing how WorldCom has enormous revenues and $6B in cash, all while transforming the entire telecom industry. AT&T, in contrast, could ultimately be headed for the real trash heap. Of course the current management of WorldCom has every incentive in Chapter 11 to redo its accounting and write down every asset that it can. It will make that powerful company look as broke as possible. But nothing in the article demonstrates that Ebbers did anything wrong. The only corruption here is between the current management of WorldCom and Oklahoma, which is dropping its criminal indictment in exchange for the promise of 1600 jobs for the state! Worse, it will continue its witchhunt against Ebbers, the man who created the jobs enjoyed by WorldCom's current management. That illustrates how utilitarian, demented criminal "justice" has become.

    Thursday, Mar 11, 2004
     
    School science project
    My kid's school had a science fair, and I got to see what she is learning for science. Her project was on answering, "How do octopuses glide at the bottom of the sea?" She was supposed to develop a hypothesis, test it, and come to a conclusion.

    Unfortunately, she didn't have any access to any real octopuses, and she was in over her head anyway, so all she could do was to look it up in an encyclopedia. Nevertheless, she had a nice looking exhibit that made it look like some experiments were done, and it had the conclusion:

    To swim, octopuses squirt water from a special siphon in their bodies. A siphon is a tube shaped organ of a clam, oyster, or certain other shellfish for drawing in and expelling water.
    I read this in her classroom, and said, "so the octopus swims by just sucking in water and spitting it out?"

    She then adopted a look and tone of embarrassment, and said, "Oh Daddy ... I don't know what 'expelling' means, but I am sure the octopus doesn't do any spitting!"

    I wonder if there was any scientific learning in this exercise at all.

     
    Martha's Stewart's guilt
    John sends this NRO column by Andrew C. McCarthy complaining that some of his fellow conservatives think that Martha Stewart was wrongfully prosecuted. His main premise is that Stewart was guilty of the crime of insider trading, but the prosecutor waived that charge out of beneficence. He says Steward deserved what she got because she could have been convicted of insider trading. He says:
    Under settled legal standards, a person such as Stewart, who trades after being tipped off to material, non-public information, may be found guilty of insider trading under the misappropriation theory if she knows the tip came from a violation of someone else's fiduciary duty.
    No, I don't think that is well settled. Very few people have been prosecuted under such a theory, and it is my understanding that most of them have gotten off. But even if you accept that standard, Martha probably didn't know whether Waksal was lawfully selling, or whether Peter Bacanovic was lawfully transmitting the info.

    I think that it was almost surely the case that Stewart was not prosecuted criminally for insider trading because she would likely be acquitted. As it turned out, by dropping the charge, she was effectively acquitted on the charge.

    McCarthy also complains about Stewart being guilty of defrauding her investors, but she was also acquitted on that charge.

    McCarthy makes a comparision to Bill Clinton's perjury, but I don't buy it. When Clinton lied in the Paula Jones case, he was doing so to defraud Jones out of some money. No one lost money or was harmed by what Stewart did.


    Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004
     
    Medical privacy
    John sends this NY Times Safire column on medical privacy:
    "Congress created a zone of privacy relating to medical information," says Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel. "Who would have thought the first one to violate it would be the federal government?"
    Who would have thought?! Is this clown kidding? About 3 years ago, Eagle Forum recommended that every write public comments to HHS saying:
    The proposed regulations maintain current practices that permit public health officials an open door to accessing personal health information without patient consent. However, the proposed regulations expand the definition of a public health official to include government officials from agencies such as the EPA, NTSB, OSHA, FDA, and others. This broad definition is quite troubling and entirely unacceptable. Public health official access should be more limited, and patient consent should still be required.
     
    SF news, as reported in Chicago
    This Chicago Sun-Times story about Rosie O'Donnell is no longer online, but you can still see the headline on Google:
    Rosie weds longtime girlfriend, slams Bush

    Monday, Mar 08, 2004
     
    NPR Bias
    I just listened to NPR news, and was reminded about its leftist bias. It said that 2 men were married in New Jersey, without mentioning that the alleged marriage is unlikely to be recognized by most govt entities.

    NPR had a long segment on how, 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, many minority kids have to attend schools that are mostly minority, and are consequently receiving an inferior education. It quoted Latinos with extremely anti-American views.

    It failed to mention that:

  • California schoolkids are only about 30% white, so the "majority minority" is expected from the demographics.
  • All California schools get the same per-capita funding.
  • California schools are in a fiscal mess caused by Democrat overspending and illegal aliens.

    It is absurd to blame low Mexican-American literacy on white segregationists. I am annoyed that my tax money supports such kooky propaganda.


  • Sunday, Mar 07, 2004
     
    The Passion
    Mel Gibson's The Passion is already among the top 50 money grossing movies of all time. I cannot think of another movie that has been so stunningly successful in the face of so many people who disapprove of it. Or one that defied conventional wisdom so much.
     
    Judge Breyer's ABA speech
    In researching In looking at the history of US judicial supremacy, I am amazed at how the same wrong stories get told over and over again, even tho the facts are so easily obtained. Everyone misrepresents Marbury v Madison, the Cherokee cases, Cooper v. Aaron, etc.

    Judge Breyer's 2001 ABA speech is a good example. He says:

    The lawyer's third, and perhaps most important public service role is that of teacher -- a teacher of our most basic legal and constitutional values. Three cases will help illustrate the importance of that role to our Nation.

    The first case brings us back to the Indian Nations. In 1832 the Cherokee Indian tribe lived on land guaranteed them by treaty. They found gold on that land. Georgia tried to seize the land. The Cherokees sued. And eventually the Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia, held in favor of the Cherokees. Georgia then refused to obey the Court. President Andrew Jackson reportedly said, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." And Jackson sent troops to evict the Cherokees, who traveled the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, thousands dying along the way.

    The Court decided the second case, Cooper v. Aaron, more than a century later. Nine Justices signed an order making clear that the Southern States had to follow Brown v. Board of Education and desegregate their schools. This time the President, President Eisenhower, sent troops to enforce the Court's order, not to defy it. And the Governor of Arkansas backed down, opening the doors of the segregated white school to the black children who wished to enter.

    You may take as my third case any of our Court's most controversial recent decisions, ranging from abortion, to religion, to Bush v. Gore. ...

    These accounts are almost completely wrong. The 1832 case involved prosecuting some missionaries on Cherokee land under state law. No gold was involved. Jackson didn't say the quote, and there was nothing for him to enforce. The Trail of Tears was after Jackson left office.

    He says that Eisenhower sent troops to enforce Cooper v. Aaron. In reality, he sent the troops in 1957, and withdrew the troops at the end of the school year in 1958, before Cooper v. Aaron. The Arkansas schools were being desegregated. Then Cooper v. Aaron threw the Little Rock schools into such chaos that the high schools were closed for the entire 1958-59 academic year. You can read the chronology here.

    Of course Breyer likes Cooper v. Aaron because it was the first statement of judicial supremacy since Dred Scott 1857, but that is no excuse for getting the facts wrong. It appears that his whole judicial philosophy is shaped some faulty judicial supremacist propaganda.

    There is no telling what additional goofy things Breyer might have said about abortion, religion, and the 2000 presidential election. Breyer (along with Souter) had the strangest Bush v. Gore opinions. He said that Gore's proposed recount was unconstitutional, and the recount ordered by the Florida high court was also unconstitutional, but it Breyer had his way, he'd order his own peculiar recount according to his own theory about how the vote counting should be done, and then he'd declare that to be constitutional.


    Saturday, Mar 06, 2004
     
    Sierra Club racists
    For a long time, those wanting to preserve the environment have recognized that population growth is their biggest threat. But the Sierra Club has been taken over leftists with other concerns, and in 1998 they changed their policy, and decided to be neutral on USA population growth.

    Now 3 candidates for the Sierra Club board want to take stands on population issues, and a racist hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center, is attacking them and claiming that there are member of other racist hate groups who are planning to vote for the 3 candidates! The president of the Sierra Club is trying to turn the whole thing into a racial issue.

    It is a standard leftist strategy to cry "racist" whenever someone wants to control immigration.

    You can read more details here.


    Friday, Mar 05, 2004
     
    You cannot say Pro-Life
    Reuters reports on leftist political correctness at the LA Times:
    A Los Angeles Times music critic who wrote that a Richard Strauss opera was "pro-life" -- meaning a celebration of life -- was stunned to pick up the paper and find his review changed by a literal-minded copy editor to read "anti-abortion."

    Music critic Mark Swed said the copy editor was adhering to a strict Times policy banning the phrase "pro-life" as offensive to people who support abortion, and didn't seem to realize that the epic Strauss opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" had nothing to do with that politically charged issue.

    Even the correction needed a correction. (The corrections are described here.)

    Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004
     
    Another failed smart card experiment
    Target spent $50M on a 3-year Visa smart card experiment, and is now killing it. Smart cards have been test-marketed many other times in the USA, and the outcome has always been a failure. When will they learn?
     
    Doctor shopping
    John sends this article:
    Parents of cranky children with ear infections be warned Antibiotics may no longer be what the doctor orders. Two leading medical groups are expected to recommend this spring that doctors stop treating most ear infections in children with antibiotics, federal health officials said Tuesday.

    The move contradicts years of pediatric practice and is expected to disappoint weary parents of whimpering, infected toddlers.

    Liza writes:
    Well, this is a difficult tradeoff. Not using antibiotics can result in hearing loss, which this article doesn't mention.

    In my experience, toddlers have lots of ear infections, which cause pain and extremely sleepless nights, and antibiotics seemed to be the only thing that solved the problem.

    This is a good example of the need for doctor shopping. Some have expressed the opinion that doctor shopping is something that only a rich junkie like Rush would do. The fact is that there are millions of Americans who see a physician for a routine problem, expect to get a routine medication, and find that the physician denies them the prescription for some obscure ideological reason. Many people just goto another physician to get what they want.

    There are also physicians who under-prescribe, because they want the patient to come back for a check-up, or they distrust the patient, or they are following some questionable guidelines, or because of some other obscure reasons. Many patients find this petty, annoying, or condescending, and simply goto another physician to get what they need.

    I don't think that the Florida doctor shopping law applies to antibiotics, but hardly anyone knows that. The point is that going to another physician to get another prescription is a common and justifiable practice, and I don't see anything wrong with it.


    Sunday, Feb 29, 2004
     

    The NY Times describes pro-evolution groups who fight creationist and other evolution skeptics:
    Eugenie Scott, executive director of the center, said it was fair to compare the swift formation and seemingly spontaneous organization of many of those groups to the young, Internet-driven base of support that drove the presidential candidacy of Howard Dean — with one difference. "The Dean supporters are messianic in their zeal to change the world," she said. "We aren't. There's no salvation in evolution."
    I guess both sides can agree on that last sentence.

    Bob writes:

    What puzzles me is what the sides are. The evolution side is clear. What is the other side?
    According to the article, the pro-evolutionists were organized in opposition to groups like the Discovery Institute. Looking at its web site, you might wonder at first what it all has to do with evolution. But look at this current press release:
    Earlier this week the Ohio Academy of Sciences (OAS) cited Florida State University law professor Steven Gey as the authority for its claim that the "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plan being considered by the Ohio State Board of Education is "illegal." On Thursday, Gey will be the featured speaker at an event sponsored by opponents of the lesson.

    "The choice of Gey merely underscores how weak the evolutionists' legal argument is," says Dr. John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. "Gey has a track record of promoting legal views that can only be called far-out." For example:

    • Gey argues that nude sunbathing should be given "constitutional protection."
    • Gey claims that "moral relativism" is a "constitutional command," and judges should "require every government action to have a primarily amoral purpose and effect."
    • Gey believes it is unconstitutional for the government to restrict even hardcore pornography, contrary to current legal precedents. He justifies this by claiming that Darwinian evolution has established the need for moral skepticism.
    • Gey insists that the current Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional.
    According to Gey, the "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plan violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because it promotes intelligent design, which he claims is religious.
    The resistance to the teaching of evolution is mainly to all the baggage that comes with it. Those who are aggressively pro-evolution almost invariably believe that evolution should be a tool to promote abortion, cloning, secular humanism, animal rights, gay marriage, and an assortment of other liberal causes.

    Bob writes:

    Yes, there are wackos who are aggressively pro-evolution. Most people who are pro-evolution are primarily concerned with improving the miserable state of K-12 science education. Here is the primary site pro-evolution site.

    You will not find there promotion of abortion, cloning, secular humanism (does that mean Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, or what?), animal rights, gay marriage, or any other liberal causes.

    Your argument is There are liberals who promote evolution, therefore evolution is a liberal plot. I was hoping you could point to anti-evolution people who aren't wackos. Bring them on. Or, as an optimist, I can quote Ronald Reagan, "There must be a pony in there somewhere."

    Ok, I looked at your pro-evolution site. This page complains that a draft science standard in Georgia that replaced "evolution" with "changes over time". But that is how the common science textbooks define the term. Evolution is defined as change over time, and biological evolution is defined as change in the genetic composition of a population over time. Stellar evolution is defined as the change in stars over time.

    Next, there is a statement by Missouri scientists to attack a proposal "to mandate the teaching of 'intelligent design' creationism alongside Darwinian evolution in public school science classes." But the proposal actually says:

    If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught, biological evolution and biological intelligent design shall be taught and given equal treatment.
    It appears that the proposal not so much concerned with Darwinian evolution, as with the origin of life on Earth. Darwin had no opinion about the origin of life, and the term Darwinian evolution refers mainly to the changes in animal and plant populations over time. Even today, theories about the origin of life on Earth are highly speculative.

    The Missouri scientists have 3 objections to the proposal:

  • the proposal appears to be motivated by "wedge" politics.
  • it may not pass legal criteria for what may be taught as science.
  • Intelligent Design ideas have not been useful in generating new scientific research papers.

    These arguments are lame. If the scientists wanted to be useful, they could have clarified some scientific issues in the proposal. It is annoying to see scientists quoted as authorities on political and legal issues. The only way to make sense out of the scientists position is that they want to teach that:

    The first simple life was developed from basic elements and simple molecules through the mechanisms of random combinations, naturally occurring molecular structures, other naturalistic means, and millions of years. [quoted from Missouri proposal]
    and they don't want any criticism or alternative ideas allowed.

    Bob replies:

    The standard textbook "The Molecular Biology of the Gene" by Watson et al says "But by the end of the nineteenth century, the scientific argument was almost complete; both the current geographic distribution of plants and animals and their selective occurrence in the fossil records of the geologic past were explainable only by postulating that continuously evolving groups of organisms had descended from a common ancestor. Today, evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles." That says it clearly enough for a normal 7th grader to get it. ...

    Evolution suffices. What would non Darwinian evolution be? The primary objective here is to oppose evolution as described by Watson above. Intelligent Design (ID) was constructed to conflict with evolution. ID says there is "irreducible complexity" in biological organisms and systems. In other words "I can't figure out how this evolved, therefore it is impossible that it evolved." This is an old logical fallacy first brought up in the 19th century about the eye. It is now well understood how the previously irreducibly complexity of the eye evolved from light sensitive molecules found in bacteria.

    You misquoted the scientists. The scientists did not say the proposal was motivated by "wedge politics". They quoted the inventor of ID, Phillip Johnson, as saying that it was a "wedge" to get religion into the public schools.

    It isn't science, it's religion, just like creationism, then "creation science", both not teachable in public schools.

    It would be remarkable if a law professor came up with something that generated new scientific papers.

    This is how some politicians in Missouri define evolution. Why do you suppose reputable scientists would want to teach that?

    Here is another quote from the Missouri politicians:

    Theory philosophically demands only naturalistic causes and denies the operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure in the initial or subsequent development of life;
    I have never heard a reputable scientist make this argument. Even Richard Dawkins, an extreme example of an atheist evolutionary scientist, does not deny "the operation of any intelligence, supernatural event, God or theistic figure in the initial or subsequent development of life".
    Darwinian evolution would be Darwin's version of the theory. The theory has been refined and corrected since Darwin's day, but I would not include the single common ancestor theory as being part of Darwinian evolution. I think think that Darwin ever stated that hypothesis, and probably didn't even believe it.

    The Watson textbook illustrates what annoys the anti-evolutionists. Apparently Bob thinks that it is perfectly acceptable for a school biology textbook to include derogatory remarks about the religious beliefs of others, but not okay to mention any religious beliefs in any positive manner. He wants 7th grade science classes to teach that religion is wrong.

    The point of the Missouri proposal is that science classes should either stick to established science. If the classes teach highly speculative theories, then it should also mention alternative theories.

    Bob responds:

    I hope we can all agree that the current theory of evolution should be taught. Darwin (and Wallace) are part of the history of science which is no substitute for science. If you are trying to make it sound like scientists believe in Saint Darwin, give it up.

    It is a great American tradition to point out that religion is wrong when religion makes bogus scientific claims. When people with misguided religious views attack science, there is nothing wrong with scientists pointing out the facts. Do you claim that Watson is wrong on the facts? As to mentioning religious beliefs in a positive manner I wouldn't object to mention of the exemplary position of the Catholic Church on the issue of evolution.

    There is nothing speculative about evolution as described by Watson. That is what scientists agree should be taught. Theories of the how life on earth got started are currently speculative. I believe there is a scientific consensus on this.

    It was the statement of the Missouri evolutionist scientists who used the term "Darwinian evolution". Complain to them if you don't like it.

    Watson is not expressing facts; he is an atheist expressing an anti-religion opinion. He says that the single common ancestor postulate is the only explanation for the origin of life on Earth, and that only irrational religious fundamentalists disagree. The first part is inaccurate, and the second is just a gratuitous attack on religion. If that postulate were really a proven scientific fact, then where is the research paper proving it?

    Here is a typical evolutionist page promoting the single common ancestor postulate, and discussing the search for the Last Universal Common Ancestor. As you can see, there is some interesting science involved, but the whole idea is thrown into doubt by horizontal gene transfer. Watson acts like this was all understood 100 years ago, but it is not even understood today.

    Bob demonstrates the attitude of the evolutionists. They think that school science classes can be used for anti-religion propaganda, but they get all indignant at the mere suggestion that those with an alternative point of view have their views represented accurately.

    Bob responds:

    Watson says "...continuously evolving groups of organisms had descended from a common ancestor." He does not say only one ancestor. It is reasonable to interpret Watson as meaning at least one common ancestor. Watson's statement does not rule out horizontal gene transfer. The first part is accurate despite the fact that it was written before the evidence for horizontal gene transfer was available. Read the latest edition of Watson's text for references to papers and a summary of the experimental evidence for his statement. The second part is an attack on specific religions which attack evolution. Fair and square.

    Exactly what is the alternative point view you keep talking about? If you mean ID or another religious doctrine, say so. If you mean a scientific theory, what is it?

    Yes, Watson does say one common ancestor. If he had meant several ancestors, he would have used the plural.

    Bob is admitting to the evolutionist agenda: use science books to attack religion, and use legalistic arguments to prevent any religious criticism of the standard evolutionist dogma.

    If those Missouri scientists are so concerned about the accuracy of biology textbooks, then why don't they complain about all the textbooks that say that the "Lucy" fossil is a human ancestor? The Science channel regularly has shows that imply that it is a universally accepted fact that Lucy is our ancestor. The whole Lucy theory was shot down 3 years ago when another fossil was found. Now Lucy is just a bonobo chimp.

    As for alternatives to the common ancestor theory, I think that the horizontal gene transfer theory is more likely. Under that theory, two animals could share some genes without ever having had a common ancestor.

    There are also those who believe that the origin of life on Earth is best explained by God creating hundreds of distinct species. While this explanation is not particularly scientific, science does not have much else to offer. No one has any idea what those first life forms were like, or how they came into being. Some people even think that they came from Mars! If the textbooks are going to give some wildly speculative theory for the origin of life on Earth, then it ought to give some alternatives.

    Bob responds:

    Again, Watson is factually correct "Today, evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles." Science is based on logical argument and evidence. "Religious criticism" of science is not based on logical argument and evidence. What scientific response to "religions criticism" is possible other than to point out that the religious criticism is scientifically wrong? There is nothing legalistic about objecting to teaching religion as science. It is legalistic when a law professor constructs a religious argument disguised as a science in order to "wedge" religion into public schools. Other cultures have gone down the path of constraining science to conform to religion and the results are societies with medieval economies and militaries. The Soviet Union required the teaching of evolution to conform the the Lamarkian principle of the Marxist religion and set Soviet biology back 40 years.

    If there were a political movement passing laws to require teaching of the Science channel in K-12, scientists would object. Neither entertainment nor religion should be taught as science. Don't complain to scientists about TV, complain to Hollywood. Maybe Nova will take on the Lucy issue sometime. Try writing the producers.

    Depends on what you mean by ancestor. Bacterial sex isn't like sex on TV or in the movies. Since we have common ancestors with bacteria, a useful definition of ancestor is necessarily broad.

    Not only is the creation theory not scientific, it is contradicted by the proverbial mountain of evidence. The fact that a story isn't scientific doesn't make it a bad story. There is no scientific objection to free exercise of religion (or entertainment) until religion is taught as science.

    How life on earth began is not well understood. The objection is to giving alternatives which are not scientific and claiming that it is science. Religious alternatives should not be taught as science.

    No, Watson is not factually correct. If evolution is defined as "changes over time", as many textbooks do, then everyone accepts it. If evolution is defined to include the common ancestor theory, as Watson defines it, or to include the origin of life on Earth, as the Missouri proposal defines it, then a lot of scientists do not accept it.

    See my blog for where Watson's recent book recites an idiotic Freudian-Marxist-Gouldian misreading of science history, and then changes it in order to stroke his own ego!

    Bob seems to think that the PBS Nova shows on evolution are better than the Science channel shows, but I think the opposite. Here is a 1997 PBS Nova show that was entirely devoted to the notion that the Lucy fossil was a human ancestor. It starts:

    In the remote past, more than three million years ago, a tiny female lived by a lake on the edge of the lush forests of Africa. She was part ape, part human. She lived a brief life, but her story continues to unfold. By an extraordinary set of circumstances, she left tantalizing clues to her life and our origins. Who was she and what can we discover about this earliest of our most ancient ancestors? We know she existed because we found these, her fossilized bones, in the very spot where she died all those years ago, ...
    Yes, we know that this 3-foot-tall chimp existed, but we don't know that she was part human or a human ancestor.
    That skull tells us for certain that our earliest known ancestor was a small-brained creature, capable of walking upright, much like modern humans. It tells us that our ancestors first stood up, and only got smart later. ...

    We believe Lucy's species was the root of the human family tree. She is our earliest ancestor, the missing link between ape and human.

    No, Lucy's skull does not prove any of those things. This is like Piltdown Man all over again. I am sure that religious fundamentalists aren't the only ones pointing out the flaws in such reasoning. But if they are -- well, somebody has to do it. PBS Nova did not allow any contrasting view on its TV show.

    Bob responds:

    What text books define evolution as "changes over time"? If you want better science education, I hope we can agree to get rid of them and use text books with the best current science.

    The Missouri proposal was put together by politicians pandering to fundamentalists. Their definition is not the scientific definition of evolution. If we start letting politicians define evolution we are headed straight toward the Lysenko problem the Soviet Union had.

    No, it isn't like the Piltdown Man. The Piltdown Man was constructed out of parts of a gorilla skull and a human skull with parts filed off. No one claims the Lucy fossils are not genuine. If you disagree with the experts on the interpretation of the Lucy fossils you are free to publish. You may be turned down by some journal referees, but you can publish somewhere. If you are correct, eventually you will be vindicated. It may take a long time as with Mendel, but science will sort it out and your great grandchildren will be proud. Contrast this to astrology and religion where wrong ideas persist for millennia. This is not to say that astrology and religion should be stamped out. Entertainment and religion operate on the emotions. If they produce desirable emotional states they serve a useful purpose. Problems occur when entertainment and religion are confused with science.

    Here is a typical evolutionist definition, with discussion:
    In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.
    Evolutionists have a long history of misrepresenting the expert consensus. Piltdown Man was discovered in 1911. There were skeptics, and published contrary comments, such as this:
    One American scholar, William K. Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History, did at least suggest the possibility of a hoax. In 1914 Gregory remarked in a journal article that someone at the British Museum had confided to him that "a negro skull and a broken ape jaw" had been "artificially fossilized" and "planted in the gravel bed to fool the scientists."
    The evolutionists claimed that the jawbone couldn't be from an ape because no ape fossils had ever been found in England! Of course, no missing link fossil had been found in England either, so that was illogical.

    Nevertheless, the claim that Piltdown Man was a missing link was taught in the textbook at issue in the 1925 Scope "monkey" trial in Tennessee. The evolutionist establishment insisted that no criticism of that textbook be allowed.

    Now the textbooks are teaching that Lucy is a missing link, and supposed scientists are lobbying the legislatures to prevent any criticism.

    I agree that science will sort it out and your great grandchildren. In the meantime, I don't want the anti-religion evolutionist ideologues censoring the textbooks.

    Bob responds:

    [TalkOrigins.org site] isn't a textbook, it's an internet news group! What next, urban legends? I could point to snake handlers as representing anti-evolutionists and be more fair.

    When you can't defeat an argument, use an ad hominem attack as you did on Watson. An even weaker argument is to attack an entire group when you can't defeat their arguments. Evolutionists have cleaned house. The perpetrators and supporters of the Piltdown Man fraud have been discredited. Religion could learn from this and clean their house of people like Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and ID supporters.

    Scientists are lobbying legislatures to stop teaching religion as science. Show me a scientist who wants to prevent scientific criticism of Lucy as a missing link and I don't mean some twerp or K-12 teacher from an internet news group.

    I don't want any ideologues censoring textbooks. Neither do reputable scientists. The goal is merely to keep religion from being taught as science.

    The quote is actually from an evolutionary biology textbook, and then cited by some evolutionist as being an exemplary definition.

    I'll believe that evolutionists have cleaned house when PBS stops running silly and one-sided missing link shows, and the scientific establishment admits that Williams Jennings Bryan was right in the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial.

    Andy writes:

    Roger, you're making mincemeat of the evolutionist on your blog.

    Perhaps Watson's promotion of evolution enamored him with the Nobel committee (who gave him a shared prize), but his statement is propaganda in many ways:

    (1) most people in the United States and other free countries reject evolution. I think only 35% believe in evolution in the US.
    (2) millions reject evolution for logical or scientific reasons. I think 100 scientists signed the recent letter to Ohio.
    (3) only the most hard-core evolutionists claim it is "fact". Real scientists don't even use the term "fact" to describe theories.
    (4) the "common ancestor" theory is widely rejected by evolutionists. They now claim that populations evolve without a common ancestor.
    (5) nothing about the "current geographic distribution of plants and animals" supports evolution.. E.g., explain American Indians.
    (6) the swipe at fundamentalists is particularly unworthy of a scientific textbook.

    About five years ago, I predicted that the internet would bring reform to evolution teaching within ten years. Five years into that prediction, the changes are beginning. The pace will accelerate.


  • Saturday, Feb 28, 2004
     
    Gore whining
    One of Al Gore's kids complains about Ralph Nader running. She recites the usual complaint that Nader cost Gore the 2000 election:
    In both Florida and New Hampshire, Mr. Nader's vote total significantly exceeded the margin by which Mr. Bush secured the electoral votes.
    The same reasoning would say that Pat Buchanan cost Bush four states -- Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In those states, Gore's margin over Bush was smaller than the Buchanan vote.

    Even more annoying are the claims that Gore would have somehow been better for the economy and foriegn policy. The economy tanked in Spring 2000, about 8 months before Bush took office. Gore just pretended that the crash didn't happened, and promised more of the status quo. We are still suffering from that crash, but it is important to realize that it happened in the Clinton-Gore administration.

    As for foreign policy, a lot of people assume that Gore would not have gone to war against Iraq. But the Clinton-Gore administration did bomb Iraq, and supported a policy of regime change. So it seems certain that Gore would have made various war threats against Iraq. The question is whether he'd follow thru on those threats. We don't know, but we do know that his VP pick, J. Lieberman, is even more a mideast hawk than G.W. Bush.

    Remember that the Clinton-Gore administration invaded Haiti in order to install the install the Marxist dictator J-B Aristide in power, and the country is now in chaos.

    The real problem with Nader is that he is going to be out there telling the hard-left Bush-haters what they want to hear, and John Kerry will be backpedaling on his voting record.

    Update: Bob denies that the USA invaded Haiti in 1994, because he says that Haiti surrendered before any shots were fired. Likewise, he says that we didn't invade Japan in WWII.

    I don't see that distinction in any of my dictionaries. We used military force to take over and occupy the country. I call that an invasion.

     
    School jealousy
    I've heard of public school advocates who complain about all sorts of crazy things, but this one has me scratching my head. A Santa Cruz public high school is doing very well, according to this article, and yet the local socialists are upset because they think that it is elitist. It is a charter school, but it also an ordinary public school that charges no tuition and accepts anyone who applies (subject to space limits). It is not a magnet school. It gets funding from the state based on how many students it has. (About $6300 per student, I think.)

    Apparently the chief complaint is that the charter school is not a real public school because it attracts good students and motivates them the learn!

    This year, the school was left with a waiting list of 291 children after the Feb. 19 admissions lottery. ``People are desperate to get their students in here,'' PCS Principal Jan Keating said.

    Thursday, Feb 26, 2004
     
    Naomi Wolf comes unglued
    Prominent feminist Naomi Wolf complains that 20 years ago a Yale prof flirted with her after they had both been drinking at a dinner party. It was an isolated and harmless incident, she concedes, and it was not sexual harassment.

    But after 20 years, she now publicly names the prof for the first time, and asks Yale what it is going to do about it! Yale says that the statute of limitations has expired.

    Wolf is dissatisfied because info about current Yale student complaints is not in the public record, and she is not sure that students can bring forward complaints confidentially and effectively. Furthermore, she is annoyed that under the tort law, students cannot collect damages unless they show that they have been damaged somehow.

    Wolf is nuts. If there is any wrong here, it is Wolf trying to libel someone about a 20-year-old innocuous incident.

     
    Genocide
    With all the Bush-haters clamoring for proof of WMD in Iraq, what do they say about the proof of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo?

    Even the prosecutor has lost confidence:

    THE HAGUE -- The prosecution in Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial moved yesterday to rest its case two days early as the chief prosecutor conceded her team had not produced "the smoking gun" to convict the former Yugoslav president of genocide, the most serious charge against him.

    "I know that I don't have the smoking gun on the count of genocide, and we will see what the trial chamber decides," chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said in an interview only minutes after she signed a motion to end the prosecution's two-year case.

    When the prosecution takes 2 years to present its alleged proof, then I am satisfied that there is no proof. Presenting proof would only take a couple of weeks.

    Note also that there is no jury, and a couple of other Serb officials have already been acquitted of genocide (but convicted of other charges).


    Tuesday, Feb 24, 2004
     

    Slate's Chatterbox columnist T. Noah accuses Bush of judicial activism, and two types of hypocrisy, in opposing gay marriage. He is persuaded by animal rights guru Peter Singer who claims that Bush's support for a marriage amendment contradicts his campaign statement:
    Larry King: So if a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?
    G.W. Bush: The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's [rights] issue like you're trying to get me into. … In my state of Texas, if we tried to have gay marriage, I would campaign against it.
    Notice how Noah (and perhaps Singer) dishonestly inserts the word "rights" into the quote. Bush did not say that it was a "states rights issue". He said that it was a "states issue". It is a ploy to associate Bush with Southern Democrat segregationists, because the same-sex marriage advocates think that the court should redefine marriage just like they abolished Jim Crow laws. It is dishonest, misleading, and incorrect. The transcript is online, and Bush quite correctly said that it was a states issue. It is a states issue, and not a states rights issue.

    There is no hypocrisy, and Bush's position has not changed. He is correct that states can vote on gay marriage. The current controvery is not over any state voting for gay marriage, but over courts imposing same-sex marriage over the will of the people.

    As I understand it, the animal rights community is split into two camps. There are those, like Singer, who think that animals should have rights like adults, and that people should be allowed to have sex with, and possibly marry, animals. Others, like Noah apparently, think that animals are more like children and cannot properly consent to sex with adult humans, so sex with animals is more like statutory rape.

    Singer's new book (to be released next month) is an anti-Bush rant. Like most of the other Bush-haters, he is infuriated by what he perceives to be contradictions by right-wingers:

    [Singer] asks whether an administration that emphasizes smaller government should be intervening in state right-to-die cases and whether someone so vocal about the value of individual merit should be rewarding birthright by eliminating the estate tax.
    Noah's other alleged Bush hypocrisy is that Bush is concerned that the Defense Of Marriage Act will be found unconstitutional by a court:
    If Bush really believed marriage was something to be decided legislatively, he'd wait until a judge struck down the statute before waving the white flag on its constitutionality.
    Massachusetts considered passing a constitutional amendment to defend its definition of marriage, as many other states have done, but the legislators were persuaded to wait for a court decision. When the court decision came, it ordered the legislature to allow same-sex marriage before a constitutional amendment could be passed!

    So Bush wants to be prepared for a judicial supremacist decision. For that, Noah calls him a judicial activist! Noah is nuts. I think that it is amazing how the Bush-haters will go to great lengths to try to show some alleged inconsistency in Bush's position. Bush's views are squarely within the mainstream, and the views of the Bush-haters are way out on the fringe.

    George writes:

    Why do you deny that this is a states rights issue? Bush wants a constitutional amendment that will deprive the states the right to determine their own marriage laws.
    I am denying that Bush's statement in his Larry King interview had anything to do with states rights. Bush was asked if he, as a candidate for president, would take a stand on a state vote regarding marriage. He rightly refused the bait. A state vote would be a state issue, not a federal issue, and Bush was running for president.

    But no state is voting to legalize same-sex marriage. The scenario that now concerns Bush is that Mass. courts will require same-sex marriage in Mass., a federal court will declare DOMA unconstitutional, and then all the other states as well as the federal govt will have to accept same-sex marriage. That threat is certainly a federal issue, and Bush's proposed constitutional amendment is only intended to address that threat.

    Liza writes:

    Depriving federal courts of jurisdiction to hear DOMA won't accomplish anything. A plaintiff could just bring the suit in Massachusetts court, where he/she could be sure of a sympathetic hearing.
    Yes, it would accomplish something. It would prevent Missouri and other states from being forced to recognize Mass. same-sex marriages. It defends our view of federalism.

    It is ok with me if some state changes its own marriage laws, according to the wishes of its people. It might even be a useful experiment. I just object to courts taking over the political process, and I object to one state forcing all the other states to accept something with which they strongly disagree.

    Some states allow 1st-cousin marriages, and most do not. The latter do not have to recognize any 1st cousin marriages, even if they were validly performed in another state. Apparently most people think that the status quo is constitutional, and I agree with it.

    This Amer. Spectator article points out that John Kerry once supported a constitutional amendment (ERA) to require same-sex marriage. He also voted against DOMA and supported the Mass. high court ruling (but now regrets it).

     
    More on legal theory
    John writes:
    I would like Andy and Roger to apply their respective arguments to Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

    That case featured a broad and sweeping opinion by Hugo Black applying the Establishment Clause to the states on the basis of Jefferson's "wall of separation" metaphor - the first case to do so.

    After expounding those principles, "dicta" as Roger says, the majority nevertheless concluded that the facts of the case did not justify forbidding the state of NJ from paying for transportation of children to attend Catholic schools.

    However, subsequent cases forbidding prayer in schools, invocations, Christmas displays, the Ten Commandments, the Pledge, etc., ultimately rest on the Hugo Black dicta in Everson.

    The Everson case was a 5-4 decision rendered before Warren and Brennan went on the court. The 4 dissenting justices would have overruled state indirect aid to parochial schools, which they said was logically required by the dicta in Black's majority opinion.

    Black remained on the court throughout Warren's tenure, during which he continued to write the majority opinions in Establishment Clause cases, but now he had the votes to implement and enforce his dicta by actually overturning state action.

    Here is the majority dicta:
    The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertain- [330 U.S. 1, 16] ing or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever from they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State.' Reynolds v. United States, supra, 98 U.S. at page 164.
    I don't have any problem with this. The dicta is ambiguous, and nonbinding. The decision is reasonable, and not supremacist.

    I do have a problem with the dissent:

    The Court's opinion marshals every argument in favor of state aid and puts the case in its most favorable light, but much of its reasoning confirms my conclusions that there are no good grounds upon which to support the present legislation.
    Yes, of course the Court should put the law in its most favorable light before considering its constitutionality. It is irrelevant whether the judges think that there are good grounds for the law. That is not a question for the courts.

    Much of the dissent is based on the assumption that only Catholic schools will benefit, and the fact that kids from private for-profit schools do not benefit. The assumption is false; many other religious schools have been built since then, and some may have existed then, I don't know. Maybe the availability of busing would help other schools start.

    The private, for-profit school argument might be interesting if the plaintiff were a student at such a school, and was demanding the bus passes. But no, the plaintiff was an anti-Catholic taxpayer. The dissenters would have really been out of line if they had succeeded in invalidating the bus passes because of some for-profit school angle that wasn't even an issue in the case.

    I am not even sure the taxpayer should have any standing here. It is possible that the parochial school bus passes are saving the taxpayer money, because they are taking some kids from the public schools and alleviating the public school tax burden.

    So I say that this would have been a judicial supremacist decision if the minority had gotten another vote, but it didn't. The majority is reasonable, and appropriately deferential to the legislature.

    there is a big difference between dicta that supports a decision, and dicta that does not.

    Eg, consider hypothetical decisions:

    1. Retarded murderers should be executed. This defendant was properly convicted, and we uphold his death sentence.

    2. Retarded murderers should be executed. But this defendant did not know right from wrong, and we overturn the death sentence.

    The 1st sentence seems like over-broad dicta in both cases. But it is completely benign in case 2. In case 2, the 1st sentence is not binding, and its broadness only serves to narrow the actual outcome of the case. That is sound and logical, and I agree with using devices like this to narrow a ruling. Court rulings are supposed to be narrow.

    It is case 1 that is problematic, because it is unclear whether the 1st sentence is dicta or not.

    So I agree with the Everson majority reciting some broad dicta about separation of church and state before uphold bus passes for parochial school students. It was a device for narrowing the decision.

    Andy responds:

    Roger, the upshot of your unique view of Supreme Court (and American) history seems to be this it doesn't matter why someone does something. You downplay or completely ignore the reasoning used by a Court to reach a verdict. You act as though the final outcome is all that matters.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. Why the Court (or people) do things is more important than what they do. If a teenager declines to buy narcotics based on the reason that he didn't have enough money with him, then that teenager will eventually become a drug addict. The fact that he first declined to buy is misleading.

    One's reasoning is more telling than the outcome of a decision.

    Ditto for the Court and all intellectual activity. You can spot the style of reasoning early, and predict the result later. Utilitarians like Posner are destined for incoherence and moral bankruptcy. Holmes was ultimately headed to rule based on his personal prejudices, and did so brutally in the case of Buck v. Bell.

    C.J. Marshall told Georgia it lacked power over the Cherokee lands. President Jackson and Georgia simply defied the second ruling. A few years later, the Trail of Tears sent the Cherokees on a death march to Oklahoma, I think.

    I am saying that the dicta are nonbinding. The view is not unique -- it is what the textbooks say. The reasoning may be illuminating, but it is significant only as it relates to the outcome.

    Dissents are also illuminating, but not binding.

    Andy's example shows his logical error. You cannot predict whether that teenager will become a drug addict.

    President Jackson and Georgia certainly did not defy the second ruling. How could Jackson have defied the order? Jackson was in charge of the feds, not Georgia. Georgia lacked jurisdiction because Marshall thought that it was a federal matter. There was nothing in the ruling to limit Jackson.

    Georgia didn't defy it either. It let go the 2 white missionaries that it had prosecuted. That was in 100% conformance with the ruling.

    The Trail of Tears was 6 years later. I think that 20% or so died. Marshall didn't rule on that, and Jackson was not in office.

    Andy illustrates how he has been brainwashed in law school. I show him the facts, and he still clings to his ideas. I doubt that his homeschooled students are such judicial supremacists!

    Doing some more research, I've discovered the gap in Andy's legal education. It turns that most law schools used to teach a course in Legal Methods, but Harvard and many other law schools dropped it in the 1970s and 1980s! See this law review article, The Disappearance of Legal Method, 70 Temple L. Rev. 393 (1997), complaining about it.

    The web site has articles on what a course should teach, and sure enough, it includes explaining how to properly analyze dicta in a court decision. If only Andy had a homeschooled legal education, he might have learned something!

    John writes:

    Note the typo in the Findlaw version you quoted. The phrase "whatever from they may adopt to teach or practice religion" should be "whatever FORM they may adopt ..." The correct version is here.

    I do have a problem with the majority opinion.

    In support of the principle that the First Amendment is "made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth" amendment, the opinion cites only one case, Murdock v. Pennsylvania - but that case involved the Free Exercise clause, not the Establishment clause.

    In Hugo Black's dicta paragraph ("The 'establishment of religion' clause of the First Amendment means at least this"), at least half of his points actually implicate the Free Exercise clause.

    Black erroneously bootstraps a Free Exercise argument to support his conclusion that the federal courts have the power to enforce the Establishment clause against the states. It doesn't follow.

    Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion in the school voucher case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), pointed out Black's error.

    In the era of the Warren Court, Black did get his extra vote and used it in many subsequent cases.

    John also writes:
    Roger makes an important point and the article he cites is very interesting. I did have a traditional first-year course in Legal Method (it was called "Elements of the Law" and was based on a course of that name at Columbia U. Law School, using course materials developed there by Karl Llewellyn). And, ahem, I "booked" the course.

    What you learn in that course is how to disregard what courts SAY and focus on what they DO. You learn how to construct broad and narrow rules that produce the result the court reached. Ultimately, you arrive at the "ratio decidendi" (legal rule that the case stands for).

    "Elements" and similar Legal Method courses are founded on what was called the "legal realism" school of legal study, of which Karl Llewellyn was a leading exponent, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes.

    Legal realism used to be considered somewhat progressive, but its advocates seem downright conservative compared to the Crits (critical legal studies) who now control American law schools.


    Monday, Feb 23, 2004
     
    Chickenpox vaccine
    The NY Times reports:
    Vaccination against chickenpox has been routine in the United States for nearly a decade.

    But outbreaks of the illness among children who have already been immunized have raised new concerns about the effectiveness of the vaccine and the age when it is given.

    Now a new study is adding to the debate. Researchers at Yale Medical School reported last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association that the effectiveness of the chickenpox vaccine fades substantially a year after it is administered. The vaccine also appears to confer less immunity to children younger than 15 months.

    The chickenpox vaccine has been approved for use in the United States since 1995. Some experts have questioned whether it should be used at all, arguing that immunizing children just pushes the disease into adulthood, when it is usually more severe.

    Many states are mandating chickenpox vaccine. It may well be better to get the disease young when it is harmless, and get lifelong immunity.
     
    Marriage and judicial supremacy
    John sends this Boston Globe article on gay marriage, and says that the situation raises a lot of questions concerning judicial supremacy.

    The article stress the differences between the Mass. and SF CA approaches by same-sex marriage advocates. It says:

    Whereas San Francisco officials chose to ignore -- and ultimately test -- a state law restricting marriage to heterosexuals, in Massachusetts gay rights lawyers made a strategic decision to work within the law.
    By "work within the law", they mean that want to persuade the judiciary, and then rely on judicial supremacy to override the wishes of the executive, the legislature, and the people. I do not call that working withing the law. It is lawless and undemocratic.

    Here is a law prof articulating judicial supremacy:

    Harvard University constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who supports the SJC ruling, said he sees a huge difference between what San Francisco's mayor has done and what Crews proposes. The difference, he said, is that California's high court has not ruled definitively on marriage licenses for same-sex couples.

    "When the highest court has spoken, it is not appropriate for another branch of government to interpret the constitution," Tribe said. If Romney or the Legislature acted to block the SJC's ruling, Tribe said, "that would be exactly equivalent to a Southern governor saying `education is the subject of the state, and I will not comply with the Brown v. Board of Education decision' " by the US Supreme Court, which mandated school desegregation.

    I wonder whether his treatise has such nonsense.

    I think that the Mass. court is far worse than what the SF mayor has done. Mayor Newsom is just a rogue govt official who can be removed or prosecuted according to lawful procedures that exist for rogue officials who disobey the law. The Calif. governor and attorney general say that they will put a stop to what he is doing, and not recognize those marriage certificates.

    But the Mass. court action is abhorrent to our whole system of govt. There is no way a court should ever be dictating laws to a legislature.


    Saturday, Feb 21, 2004
     
    Ban popcorn?
    This company memo bans microwave popcorn because they cause 60% of all fire alarms in office buildings.

    I must admit that I've done this myself. Everyone was mad at me. I later learned that the company microwave oven had a software bug in which time cancelled from a previous operation gets quietly added to the time entered for the next operation. So I could put in my popcorn, set it for 4 minutes, and it would cook an extra 5 minutes if someone an hour earlier had removed his lunch with 5 minutes left on the timer.

    If my $15 toaster can figure out when my toast is done, I think that the company ought to be able to buy a $100 microwave oven that can figure out when the popcorn is done.

     
    Andy defends Rush
    Andy is defending Rush's medical privacy.
     
    Bad Einstein story
    The Si Valley has a lot of bad headlines, but this one is particularly bad. This story about cosmological dark energy has this headline in the print edition:
    Einstein's Dark Side

    Hubble supports physicists's universe-ending scenario

    The story is about how the universe is expanding in a way that no one expected 5 years ago, and some are now predicting that the mysterious dark energy will rip apart the universe in about 100B years.

    The story doesn't really have much to do with Einstein. The only connection is that back in 1920 or so, someone gave a relativistic argument for the expansion of the universe.
    Einstein didn't believe it, and introduced a fudge factor into relativity theory in order to avoid it. When it turned out that the universe really was expanding, Einstein decided that he had blundered.

    Just 5 years ago, it was discovered that not only is the universe expanding, but the expansion is accelerating in a way that is not explained by relativity theory. So some people have postulated huge amounts of "dark energy, and modeled the expansion with another fudge factor. This just doesn't have much to do with any universe-ending scenario from Einstein.


    Friday, Feb 20, 2004
     
    Irish Virus
    If you get this email:
    Greetings, You have just received the "IRISH VIRUS". As we don't have any programming experience, this Virus works on the honour system. Please delete all the files on your hard drive manually and forward this Virus to everyone on your mailing list. Thank you for your cooperation.
    and you are not sure what to do, refer to Symantec for instructions.
     
    Armageddon cuts
    If you are a California voter looking for reasons to vote against Prop. 57, here it is:
    If voters refuse to authorize the bond under Proposition 57 on the March 2 ballot, Schwarzenegger says he'll have to make "Armageddon" spending cuts ...
    You'll also want to vote against Prop. 55 (increases debt by $12B) and 56 (makes it easier to raise taxes). Prop. 57 and 58 have to both pass for either to take effect, so I guess that I'll have to vote against both.

    Thursday, Feb 19, 2004
     
    More bad science
    I just watched a TV show call "Evolutionary" on the Science channel. It was a rerun from 2002, and told about the discovery of the Lucy fossil from about 3M years ago. All of the scientists on the show took it to be a scientific fact that we descended from Lucy apes, and they described details of that evolution. It told about how Lucy apes diverged into humanoids and another species when some Lucy apes figured out how to use tools to eat the brains of wildebeest carcases that were abandoned by hyenas on the African savannah. Only one Lucy ape skeleton has been found because that one was carried away by an eagle.

    Of course all of this is just wild speculation. The theory that we are descended from Lucy apes is no longer even accepted, because another ape fossil that is just as human-like has been found from the same period, and everyone agrees that we cannot be descended from both.

    Meanwhile, a left-wing organization of scientists has attacked the scientific integrity of th Bush administration. The story got a lot of publicity, so I thought that I'd check the report for specifics. Picking what seemed to be one of the more specific charges in a news story, I read what it said about lead poisoning:

    There is strong documentation of a wideranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political agenda. These actions include: appointing underqualifi ed individuals to important advisory roles including childhood lead poisoning prevention and reproductive health; ...
    Sounds bad, right? We're all against lead poisoning. The report says that the CDC lead poisoning standard has been reduced over the years from 30 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood to 10, and a scientific advisory committee was considering lowering it again. The Bush administration appointed a prominent toxicologist named Dr. William Banner to the committee. The report said:
    Banner declared that, in his view, studies had never adequately demonstrated a link between lead exposure and cognitive problems in children at any level below 70 micrograms per deciliter. .... As one medical researcher explains it, Banner’s position either ignores or willfully misreads some four decades’ worth of accumulating data on lead exposure in children.
    A footnote says that the anonymous "medical researcher" refused to identify himself.

    What am I missing here? Shouldn't we have some diversity of opinion on the committee? Shouldn't we have someone demanding cold proof of the benefits to some policy recommendation that is going to cost billions of dollars? If he is wrong, then why is it so hard to find someone who is willing to say publicly that he is wrong? Banner is attacked for being an expert witness in court cases, but shouldn't we be glad to have someone who is willing to stake his professional reputation on a scientific point, and be cross-examined under oath? How much damage can one guy do, since he can easily be outvoted by the rest of the committee if he has fringe views? Why are these folks pretending that the issues are purely scientific, when it is plain that they are largely public policy issues and are necessarily political decisions?

    I hate it when people pretend that good science requires secrecy, or avoiding contrasting views, or anything like that. I don't know how they got 20 Nobel prizewinners to sign this rubbish. Hmmm, now that I check the list, I see that there are really only 12 Nobel winners on it. What do you bet that they all voted for Al Gore in 2000?

    Bob writes:

    I completely agree that secrecy and avoiding contrasting views has no place in science. Neither do meretricious scientists. It is interesting to contrast your statement above to your following statement:
    It does says that some people have criticized Paul Offit, and then cites him as if he is a neutral observer about vaccines. He is a paid lobbyist for drug companies that sell vaccines.
    After looking into this a little, I discovered that Thompson rejected 3 scientists recommended by CDC and replaced them with 3 scientists who take money from the lead industry. If the scientists who were rejected were paid by plaintiff's lawyers they should have been rejected for the panel. Likewise scientists on the lead payroll. If the administration can't find scientists with contrasting views who aren't paid off, there probably aren't valid contrasting views.
    I think that you are mixing a couple of issues here. If the committee is doing science, then their conclusions should objectively follow from the evidence, and it shouldn't matter if anyone has a financial bias. No one should have to take their word for anything, and critics would be able to examine the evidence themselves.

    If the committee is doing policy, then it is balancing various objectives according to some sort of political process. Finding a committee is not just a matter of finding scientists with impeccable scientific qualifications. You may not agree with their objectives.

    My comment about Paul Offit was really a complaint about the WSJ. The WSJ implied that he was being intimidated into silence by his critics. That is absurd, and he is well-paid by his drug-company sponsor to keep talking.

    I was just pointing out how ludicrous it is for the WSJ to complain about the vaccine advocates are being silenced. Who is being silenced?!! Has the CDC shut down its web site? Has the AAP stopped publishing its recommendations? Have any states repealed their vaccine laws?

    The WSJ editorial is nonsense. The medical establishment is overwhelmingly pro-vaccine, and it will be for the foreseeable future. No one is being silenced!

    The vaccine advocates are not worried about being silenced. They just don't want any criticism of any kind.

    Offit has also been on the CDC vaccine advisory panel (ACIP). Maybe he still is, I don't know. One of my complaints about the ACIP is that it is completely controlled by vaccine industry lackeys like Offit. They have to issue conflict-of-interest waivers just to get a quorum. The ACIP does not even have one member who could be described as a consumer advocate or a vaccine skeptic or a libertarian or a policy expert or anyone like that, and it never has. Having Offit on the ACIP would not be so bad if there were some other points of view represented. There are not.

    My hunch is that the lead committee was loaded down with toxicologists who have staked their reputations on removing lead at any cost. They might want to shut down the whole lead industry. Maybe they are right, but that is a political issue. I'm glad that there are now a couple of scientists on the committee to keep then honest and make them justify their conclusions. It would be great if the Bush administration similar rejected some CDC nominations for the ACIP, and replaced them with consumer advocates.

    Bob writes:

    As I understand it, the role of advisory committees is to tell policy makers what the scientific consensus is when there is a consensus. Sometimes there is no scientific consensus. Ideally the committee would report that there is no consensus if this is the case. Another problem occurs when there is a scientific consensus and the committee is packed with disreputable scientists to create the impression that there is no consensus. This is what scientists are complaining about in this case.

    Advisory committees should give scientific information relevant to policy decisions, an assessment of the reliability of the scientific information, and predictions of the repercussions of various policy alternatives. Policy should be made by politicians, but it should be based on the best scientific information available.

    There is a lot of scientific work on the effects of lead.

    The legitimate scientific debate is on the effects of various concentrations of lead. It up to informed citizens and politicians to weight the costs and benefits of removing lead. It up to the scientific community to let us know when the scientific process is being politicized.

    No, these advisory committees actually make policy recommendations that are usually followed. The lead committee was considering changing the standard for acceptable lead concentrations. That is a policy position. The complaint of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nobelists was that they did not want anyone on the committee with arguments sympathetic to the lead industry. They are wrong. Legitimate concerns and arguments of the lead industry should be represented on this policymaking committee. The leftist scientists want a committee where only one side of the lead argument is made.

    Bob writes:

    Maybe this is the problem. I would like to see less political advisory committees. The effects of lead concentrations is a scientific question on which the Nobelists claim there is a consensus of scientific opinion. A few scientists paid by the lead industry disagree. Scientific papers on the question which the "leftists" claim reflect the consensus are listed above. Where are the papers published by the lead industry scientists?
    The advisory committee is being asked to make a political decision -- whether it is good policy the change the lead concentration limit. I think that the lead industry should be allowed to have input to that decision. The Nobelists only complained about the views of one member of a committee. If that one member is able to present legitimate views that would otherwise be ignored, so much the better. If he has no paper to support his position, then I am sure he will be outvoted.

    Here are a couple of leftist kooks who have written a column in The Nation magazine, saying that someone sympathetic to the lead industry should not be able to express his views on the committee. They call Bush's appointments, "The New Scopes Trials". Need I say more?

     
    Prosecute Newsom?
    SF mayor Gavin Newson might be prosecuted under either California Penal Code Section 115, which "prohibits the knowing procurement of any false or forged instrument to be filed or recorded in any public office." Or Section 359:
    Every person authorized to solemnize marriage, who willfully and knowingly solemnizes any incestuous or other marriage forbidden by law, is punishable by fine of not less than one hundred nor more than one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in the County Jail not less than three months nor more than one year, or by both.
    Volokh points out that Newsom can argue that he did violate the law "willfully and knowingly" because he has a goofy theory that the marriage law is unconstutional, but that tax protesters, who have a theory that the tax law is unconstitional, get no sympathy from the judges.
     
    Scientific American magazine
    I tried to catch up on my reading of Scientific American magazine, and I had forgotten how annoyingly left-wing it is. The Jan. issue had an article about some village in Turkey that supposedly had a modern non-sexist society in 7000 BC. The evidence? There is no written record, so the only evidence was that the male and female bone were in comparable condition!

    The Dec. issue has a cover story on how genetics proves that there is no such thing as races among humans.

    The clincher is the obituary of Edward Teller in the Nov. issue. It cites a Nobel prizewinner as saying that the world would have been a better place without Teller! Teller was a brilliant physicist who had a long lifetime of public service. His biggest crime was that his technological optimism and anti-Communism led him to help persuade Ronald Reagan to announce research and development of a missile defense program that ultimately helped win the Cold War.

     
    John Kerry
    I predict that Kerry will only win about 10 states in November. His main appeal is to hard-left Bush-haters who believe that Kerry is the most electable Democratic candidate. They apparently think that some Republicans will like him because his is rich, a member of Skull And Bones, and an experienced and skilled Washington politician.

    I think that they are misjudging Kerry's voter appeal. The 3 hottest political issues of the day are the Iraq war, same-sex marriage, and free trade. Kerry is a flip-flopper on all 3 issues, and has no coherent message. All 3 issues will be net vote losers for him. The only issue that can save him is the economy, but no one is going to be interested in Kerry's proposed tax hike, when the Bush tax cuts seem to be finally working and the economy is improving.

    At least Howard Dean has some dedicated follower. John Edwards has some personality. Kucinich and Lieberman have causes that they sincerely believe in. Kerry just seems like another McGovern or a Dukakis to me.

    I didn't mention Wesley Clark, because I don't think that he is really running for president. I think that he is just trying to sabotage the Democratic party, either because he is really a Republican, or because he is doing a favor to the Clintons who are priming Hillary to run in 2008.

     
    Ken Starr on Msft
    John sends this Ken Starr op-ed on Msft violating its antitrust consent agreement. I was following his logic until he got to this:
    The unanimous D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals got it exactly right in 2001, when it established the accepted parameters of behavior by a monopolist. This time, the court can establish remedy guidelines that ensure that consumer choice and competition can become real.
    No, the DC Circuit gutted the case, and eliminated the possibility of any meaningful remedy. Msft can even be bolder than it was before. It is amazing how much Msft gained by losing a case. Where was Ken Starr 10 years ago? Oh yeah, he was writing a report on Vince Foster's death as part of his Whitewater investigation.

    Wednesday, Feb 18, 2004
     
    School budget deficit
    I just got a letter from my local school board complaining of drastic budget cuts, and telling of dramatic cuts in services unless we all donate $365 per child per year.

    Meanwhile, the teachers union is sponsoring radio ads to boycott Safeway, Ralphs, and Albertsons grocery stores. The complaint, as I understand it, is that the grocery workers no longer have completely free health coverage, but now have some sort of co-pay. The grocery workers are not striking at the local stores. (At least not in N. California where the radio ads that I heard were playing.)

    I am offended by the teachers' attitude. First, I don't think that public govt employees should even be unionized. They are adequately represented thru their elected officials.

    Second, I think that they should stick to educational and employment issues, and not issues in some completely unrelated industry.

    Third, if Safeway and its workers are agreeable to the arrangement, what business is it of anyone else to try to break that arrangement? I always thought that there were laws against secondary boycotts, and tortious interference with contracts.

    I have no sympathy with my local school district, either. They rejected my kid in the second grade. It would have been a free $6k for them, because they had a vacancy. Maybe I'll post the details another time. I ended up having to transfer the kid to another school district. I didn't think that they could legally reject a kid like that. At any rate, I figured that they must be swimming in cash that they could so casually blow off $6k like that.


    Tuesday, Feb 17, 2004
     
    Rogue prosecutor
    Andy writes:
    Last summer I complained about the unjustified prosecution of basketball player Chris Webber, whose main "crime" was testifying against the government in a (secret) grand jury proceeding against someone else. Webber was ultimately forced to plea to a reduced charge to end the witchhunt.

    Now the harm in allowing a rogue prosecutor to continue comes home to roost in the Bush Administration. The same prosecutor has sued Ashcroft and attempted to publicly humiliate the Bush Administration. The prosecutor should have been fired long ago to prevent this recent travesty.

     
    Practicing law without a license
    All states in the USA have laws against anyone practicing law without a license, and a lawyer from another state is usually treated just the same as someone with no law license at all.

    The Connecticut governor is facing impeachment, and both the prosecution and defense are using out-of-state lawyers. Here is the CT UPL law.

    Apparently even the governor and the legislature don't really believe in these laws themselves. Texas once tried to prosecute the publisher of a self-help will kit. A popular outcry caused the legislature to pass an exemption for such kits.

    Here is a study showing a possible link between mercury and autism.


    Monday, Feb 16, 2004
     
    Vaccines and autism
    Andy writes:
    John circulated an extraordinary editorial by the WSJ. Apparently fighting the Clintons for eight years was tame compared to how the parents of autistic children let the WSJ have it over its biased commentaries. (see below if you did not receive it from John).

    The WSJ should get lambasted again for acting as a stooge for the vaccine industry. Its unusual editorial below relies on innuendo and half-truths to defend its position. No one is trying to silence doctors who recommend immunization. The problem is the pressure placed on doctors and parents to coerce immunization, which include barring kids from public and private school over the senseless Hep B vaccine. Other flaws in its editorial below praising the NAAR without disclosing its likely biased corporate funding (Roger, do you know its funding?); decrying higher measles rates in Ireland without disclosing a likely lack of injury; and stating "that thimerosal has never been credibly linked to autism" without noting an article we published in AAPS JP&S.

    Yes, I saw it, and disregarded it. It was titled, "Autism and Vaccines -- Activists wage a nasty campaign to silence scientists." But there is no nasty campaign, and no scientists were silenced. It does says that some people have criticized Paul Offit, and then cites him as if he is a neutral observer about vaccines. He is a paid lobbyist for drug companies that sell vaccines.

    The critics of our national vaccine policy mainly want:

  • informed choice for parents
  • no conflicts of interest among policymakers
  • public disclosure of research data that is either govt-funded or used to set govt policy.

    There is nothing anti-science about this, and no one is trying to silence scientists. If anyone is silencing scientists, it is the drug companies who use trade-secret laws to suppress the detail of the vaccine studies that they cite to promote their vaccines.

  •  
    Efficient food production
    John sends this Wash Post article challenging efficiencies. Liza writes:
    This article has a scary conclusion - that we should outlaw "super-efficient technologies"!

    However, I sympathize with some of the points. Big Food is loaded with health risks. Fresh, preferably locally grown food is more healthful and tastier. Herbivores should never have been turned into carnivores. Europeans, who cling to an inefficient model of local agriculture, eat much better than most Americans. Efficiency isn't everything.

    It's also true that it's become harder to obtain a lot of little services that used to make life more pleasant - grocery store checkout, gas pumping, travel agents handling airline tickets, talking to a human being on a business phone line instead of an interminable voice mail menu, finding competent salespersons in big stores - but it's no use whining about them. They won't come back because most people don't want to pay extra for them.

     
    Right to be insulted
    Phyllis was recently quoted:
    Bueler was criticized for a recent club newsletter he wrote that said "Liberals welcome every Muhammad, Jamul and Jose" who enter the country illegally and strain government resources. On Saturday, Bueler said he stood by the statement. Schlafly commended Bueler for making it.

    "I think it was appropriate," Schlafly said outside the meeting room. "They don't have the right to be insulted."

    and writes:
    The reporter omitted the word NOT. I said you don't have the right NOT to be insulted.
    I guess she is used to being misquoted.
     
    Medical consent
    In response to a Malkin column, a pediatrician named Mark says:
    Something Ms. Malkin never clearly stated was *why* she objected to her child recieving the Hep B and the Prevnar. Maybe I missed it, but just because she says, "I object" doesn't mean she has sensible reasons to do so. If she objected for objection's sake, then I think the pediatrician was completely right to ask the family to find a new doctor. Who needs the headache of having patients/parents like that in one's practice?
    Mark is apparently aware that the HBV vaccine is unnecessary for most babies, and that parents often have rational reasons for skipping or postponing it. But unless the parent articulates such a reason and that reason is acceptable to him, then Mark wants to get rid of that patient!

    Lots of people like to make their own medical decision. They like to get recommendations from physicians, but they don't always follow those recommendations and they don't find any necessity to explain themselves to the physician. Mark has an attitude problem. I recommend avoiding physicians with his attitude.

    Chris writes:

    While it is true that many people want to make their own medical decisions they often make them for emotional or irrational reasons. Your examples are perfect illustrations of this attitude. HBV is not given to the infant for the purposes of helping the infant at that time but to provide protection for the child once they reach an age where they may be exposed to Hepatitis B, often through their own ill-considered actions. Once the person is old enough to be threatened by Hepatitis B and likely to be infected they are almost guaranteed to be beyond reach of any reasonable vaccination program.

    Another common reason for parents choosing to avoid vaccinating their child is the ‘free rider’ theorem. Simply stated the parent feels that they can avoid both the dangers of the disease and the vaccination by relying on the vast majority of parents following the recommendations of pediatricians and having their children vaccinated while their ‘special’ child is safe from the disease, because of the vaccination of others, but free from the infinitesimally small risk of the vaccination itself. Otherwise know as the ‘screw you jack, I’ve got mine’ approach to community involvement.

    Often people fail to follow physician advice because they are in denial, “my child will never suffer this disease” or “I will get better without doing anything.” The person doesn’t want to think about the possibilities and thus avoids the issue altogether. In fact often they feel a deep resentment towards the physician who is seen as the cause of the problem, “if the doctor hadn’t told me I had cancer I wouldn’t be sick.”

    A common reason is the embracing of an answer that ‘feels’ right and then casting about to justify the explanation. The parent feels that the vaccination is unnecessary and finds endless crap on the internet to justify this response. They even elevate the irrational to the explanation, high power lines cause cancer, vaccinations cause autism, and anti-depressants cause suicide. Ignore the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that we as a country are healthier then any society in history and focus on the small ambiguous bits of evidence and build it into a conspiracy against parents. Hey maybe the mafia and the CIA really did assassinate Kennedy!

    Heaven forbid that your doctor should expect you to trust their judgment when they spent the time in school, residency and then in practice with the sole goal of keeping you and your children health and alive. (Okay so money, and big money figures in their too.) Expecting something other than paranoia, denial or selfishness as a reason to avoid treatment seems like what one would want in a doctor. You and your kids might even end up healthier and happier for it.

    There is a national schedule for childhood vaccinations, set by a CDC committee. When a pediatrician gives a kid a vaccine, he is not giving his judgment. He is just following the schedule. H can't deviate from the schedule, or he'd get complaints from schools and others who require adherence to the schedule. So it is silly to either trust the pediatrician, or to argue with the pediatrician, about what is on the schedule. It is not his decision. It is like arguing with a McDonald's order taker about what is in a Big Mac or whether it is good for you.

    I posted my reasons for skipping the HBV vaccine for my kid. I guess you will think that my reasons were not good enough to outweigh the opinions of someone who has been thru medical school, and that I am a free rider. Does it matter that the vaccine has since been withdrawn from the market because its mercury content exceeded EPA guidelines? I didn't know that at the time, but I could see that the system of recommendations was broken, and it is still broken.

     
    The V-chip
    Thomas Hazlett says that the V-chip is a failure because no one uses it, and because it didn't stop Janet Jackson's indecency.

    When the V-chip law passed in 1996, the industry lobbied hard against it, complaining that it would make TVs more expensive and support censorship of TV shows. Hazlett concedes that it did neither, but points to a survey showing that only 8% of households use the chip, and that the true percentage is probably less. So he says that the law was ineffective, and that Congress should avoid passing any such laws in the future.

    His conclusion doesn't follow. If 8% benefit from the chip and it didn't cost anyone anything, then that sounds like pure win-win to me.

    One problem with applying the chip to Janet Jackson was that the Super Bowl halftime show was not rated for nudity. If the network had been honest, and accurately rated the show, then it would have risked losing some small percentage of its viewers. Not 8%, but even if it lost 1%, that might have been enough for CBS to avoid nudity during the Super Bowl.

    So I draw a different conclusion: the FCC should make the broadcast networks label their shows more accurately. If 8% of the people use the V-chip, then the FCC could fine CBS 8% of their Super Bowl revenues. That would send a message.

     
    Medical privacy
    John compares Rush Limbaugh's medical privacy to that of partial birth abortionists, and add:
    There are major differences between this case and Rush Limbaugh's medical records. Ashcroft is being sued by doctors who claim that the PBAs they performed were medically necessary. So of course Ashcroft is entitled to discover whether that is true. My understanding is that his subpoenas do not require any identifying data about the women involved.

    Sunday, Feb 15, 2004
     
    Msft source code leak
    The news has a big story about a Msft source code leak. The leak will cause little or no damage to Msft. I am suspicious. Msft may benefit because it gives Msft the excuse it needs to cut off Mainsoft. Msft had to give Mainsoft the source code as part of an antitrust settlement, and Mainsoft is not helping Msft at all.

    Update: Someone found a buffer overflow already based on the leaked code. Msft has already fixed it, but those running MSIE 5.0 are vulnerable.

     
    Slanted movies
    Andy writes:
    My list of the most conservative and liberal films. Most conservative films:
  • 1. Spider-man (promotes many conservative themes and mocks liberal ones)
  • 2. Ben Hur (triumph of faith)
  • 3. Manchurian Candidate (threat of Communism, despite swipe at McCarthy)
  • 4. High Noon (Wild West at its best)
  • 5. Gods and Generals (featuring the greatest American General, Stonewall Jackson)

    Most liberal films:

  • 1. Dr. Strangelove (mocks national defense and Teller)
  • 2. 12 Angry Men (bleeding heart at its best)
  • 3. The Graduate (parents are idiots and vicious and it's all their fault)
  • 4. It's a Wonderful Life (humanism in all its glory)
  • 5. Inherit the Wind (lies about the Scopes trial to mislead millions)
  • That last film certainly did mislead millions. Today's SJMN says:
    The most famous statute was Tennessee's Butler Act, under which high school teacher John Thomas Scopes was successfully prosecuted in 1925.

    The Scopes trial was a public-relations disaster for creationism. Its champion, William Jennings Bryan, underwent a humiliating examination by Clarence Darrow about his adherence to a literal reading of the Bible. Still, the trial exerted a chilling influence on science education.

    It sounds like someone watched the movie. Scopes was not successfully prosecuted (his conviction was reversed on appeal), Bryan was not humiliated, and Bryan testified that he did not adhere to a literal reading of the Bible. The trial did not chill any science education.

    Andy writes:

    Right. All the Murky News reporter had to do was read the trial transcript. Bryan was not a literalist, and he chewed Darrow up on cross-examination. The humiliation, if any, was probably Darrow's. Afterwards, Darrow pled his client guilty in order to break his promise to take the stand himself. Reporters were astounded by the surprise ending, and (except for HL Mencken) described it accurately.

    Tennessee kept the Scopes law intact until around 1970, keep evolution bias out of its schools to this day, and Gore astoundingly lost his home state and the presidency partly as a result. People who claim that the evolutionists won a victory in the Scopes trial, PR or otherwise, are just stating their own bias.

    Anne says that Dr. Strangelove was modeled after Curtis LeMay, not Teller. I agree that Dr. Strangelove was not modeled after Teller. There is no resemblance. Why would a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis be giving Nazi salutes? Teller was a research scientist.
     
    Cooking the jury pool
    John sends this Houston Chronicle article about how voir dire is used to cook the jury pool. Here is the scam. Some ambulance-hasing lawyer files a bogus lawsuit asking for pain, suffering, mental anguish, and punitive damages. The he asks prospective jurors what they think of the lawsuit in which McDonalds was ordered to pay millions of dollars for serving hot coffee. If the prospective jurors say that they disagree with McDonalds having to pay for hot coffee, then they are bumped from the jury pool for being biased against the plaintiff. One recent case could not find 12 supposedly "impartial" jurors from a group of 93!

    Saturday, Feb 14, 2004
     
    Legalizing the acknowledgement of God
    Congress has introduced a bill to withdraw court jurisdiction over the acknowledgement of God. Roy Moore, the Alabama 10C judge, supports. It makes a lot of sense to me, and it is much more practical than amending the Constitution. Somebody has to tell the judges that they've usurped their authority.

    Thursday, Feb 12, 2004
     
    Judicial supremacy
    Bob writes:
    The best argument I can think of against judicial supremacy is based on the notions of separation of powers and checks and balances. If the judicial branch disagrees with both the executive and legislative branches and there is no popular consensus on an issue it is unwise for the judicial branch to intervene. It is risky to defy the opinion of the USSC. Public opinion is fickle. Presidents and Congressmen who defy the USSC based on popular support may find that they are out of office after such an adventure if popular opinion is swayed. If they think they can get away with it I don't see anything in the Constitution to prevent it. If the USSC is defied occasionally, it would discourage the court from some of their more high handed opinions. Some problems should be left unresolved until a consensus is reached. All of the above means that the judicial branch is not and should not be subordinate to the other branches. Healthy deadlock requires equality of the branches.

    I always wondered why Dred Scott wasn't directly overturned. Perhaps the USSC feared that pulling on that thread would unravel the judicial supremacy sleeve. Just a thought.

    Dred Scott was directly overturned by the 13th Amendment.

    The best argument is that we fought a revolution against being subordinate to the dictates of unelected and unaccountable rulers. Judicial supremacy is as foolish as royalty.

    Chris writes:

    I always spelled it Kludge as well.

    Judicial Supremacy

    It would be nice if the judiciary was omniscient but they aren’t. They are as human an institution as the legislative or executive branch and thus allowed their fair share of mistakes.

    In spite of that the power of the judiciary to overrule the legislative and executive branch is indispensable to our way of government. Without ‘judicial supremacy’ there is no check on popular legislation that directly contravenes the constitution. As you demonstrate it is possible for the legislature to overrule the courts but the process is difficult and time consuming. The founders were rightly concerned about the country being swayed by passions that would lead to unjust laws. By leaving the judiciary, and originally the Senate, above the fray they hoped that the intemperance of the moments would be balanced by more contemplative organs.

    A more important point that the founders did not expect was a legislative branch that has become hereditary. There are but a handful of competitive seats in most state and federal legislatures and this has lead to the entrenchments of a political class that does not allow the open and robust debate the founders envisioned. Without competitive seats in the Congress it is possible for the party with the most access to money to achieve control over the elective branch without actually representing the majority opinion within the country.

    Without an independent judiciary the current Congress would quite happily legislate the opposition out of existence.

    I am persuaded by this kluge dictionary entry. The reason is that the spelling kluge is older, and the word is pronounced to rhyme with huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge, as opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge.

    Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004
     
    Martha Stewart
    Conventional wisdom now is that the testimony against Martha Stewart is very damaging, and that she will be found guilty. But I don't see it, and I think that she will be acquitted.

    So what if she altered a phone log? Maybe she thought that it was inaccurate or misleading. Maybe she was afraid that it would be used in a witchhunt against her. Maybe it referenced something, of which she could not remember the details. There could be a lot of reasons. The prosecution is not claiming that she has to keep full and accurate phone logs, or that her revision was inaccurate, or that the change was to cover up a crime. I guess that they are hinting that it might have been to cover up insider trading, but she is not being charged with insider trading. So why is the supposed change of any consequence?

    I think that the feds have a very weak set of charges, and it all hinges on a sleazy stockbroker who is testifying to save his own skin.

    Update: Now it turns out that the FDA has approved ImClone's cancer drug Erbitux. The brains behind the company is sitting in jail. Apparently the FDA made a mistake with its earlier rejection of the drug. Stewart invested in a drug that actually works, and now she is being prosecuted for the fallout from an FDA mistake? I don't see who was harmed by what she did.

    George writes:

    Martha Stewart lied to cover up her insider trading. That seems obvious, and she ought to be convicted of that. What difference does it make whether the ImClone drug works or if anyone was harmed?
    Martha Stewart was not an ImClone insider, and the feds cannot prove insider trading. If they cannot prove insider trading, then how can they possibly prove that she lied to cover it up?

    Even if Martha lied, she was not under oath. People only think that lying is wrong if it was under oath, or if someone got cheated, or there was some other objective harm. She was selling a good stock with a good product. People who lie to cover up illegal acts are never prosecuted for lying; they are only prosecuted for the illegal acts. So why should anyone be prosecuted for lying to cover up legal acts?


    Tuesday, Feb 10, 2004
     
    Dark matter
    Astrophysicists are convinced that the universe is about 95% dark matter and dark energy, but the Economist magazine is skeptical, and says:
    IT WAS beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles—the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution.
    First, the word is spelled kluge, not a kludge. Second, the Ptolemaic theory was not wrong. It was the best theory around for 1400 years. No other quantitative scientific theory has done so well for so long. Even today, the motions of the planets are sometimes quantified in terms of a sum of circular motions. (Nowadays, it is called a Fourier decomposition.)
     
    NASA fakes photos
    NASA has admitted that it faked the red coloring of the Martian rover pictures. Yes, Mars is reddish, but NASA doctored the pictures to make Mars look much more reddish than it really is. NASA had tried to deny it, but critics found conclusive proof.

    This is very embarrassing for NASA. I know that it common uses color enhancement to liven up astronomical pictures. But artificially painting Mars red? Inexcusable.


    Monday, Feb 09, 2004
     
    Vaccine data
    John sends this story about the vaccine-autism debate, and writes:
    Note 2nd-to-last paragraph U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, M.D., "is pressing the CDC to give outside researchers access to the study data"!

    Sunday, Feb 08, 2004
     
    Judicial supremacy
    Here is another example of outrageous judicial supremacy. Congress passed a completely innocuous law asking the Justice Dept. to make some reports on whether federal criminal sentencing is within the official guidelines. A judge has now declared the law unconstitutional because the dissemination of information might generate criticism of the judiciary! I would impeach the judge who wrote that opinion.

    Friday, Feb 06, 2004
     
    Judge wants corruption cases
    John sends this story, and writes:
    Public corruption and white collar crime cases could also be prosecuted in state court. The judge does not explain WHY he thinks they are more appropriate for federal court than drug and gun cases.
     
    Gloria Steinem
    This is from an interview published today:
    [interviewer] ... many of the right-wing media shills took aim at Howard Dean’s wife because she’s chosen to pursue her work as a physician. She’s a doctor and she wants to stay close to her patients, rather than be out on the campaign trail. And once again, the right-wing males took after her simply because she wants to pursue her professional career.

    Gloria Steinem: I think that that’s hypocritical because there are right-wing women who are pursuing their professional career and not staying home. I think they’re using it as a target of opportunity. Phyllis Schlafly doesn't stay home.

    People criticized Mrs. Dean because she did stay home, and failed to support her husband running for the important job in the world. Being president is a very demanding job, and there is considerable doubt about whether Howard Dean is up to the task without the support of his wife.

    Phyllis Schlafly is a widow, and her youngest child is 39 years old. Why does anyone care if she travels?

    See the rest of the interview (and the rest of the web site) for more confused, hysterical, and paranoid rants.

     
    Hockey death
    I just came from a hockey game in San Jose where a player died. Very unusual. The cause of death was unclear. The SJMN story is here.

    Thursday, Feb 05, 2004
     
    John Kerry, crypto-fascist
    John Kerry voted for the USA Patriot Act, and now criticizes Attorney General John Ashcroft for enforcing it. But Ashcroft's record in favor of basic civil liberties is much better than Kerry's.

    John Kerry sponsored a bill to limit American to crypto systems with "key escrow" backdoors. His proposal was similar to proposals from the former Democratic Attorney General Janet Reno and her FBI director. Meanwhile, Kerry's fellow US Senator John Ashcroft sponsored an excellent bill to repudiate such requirements, and encourage use of crypto with no backdoors. For more info, see: here.

    John Ashcroft is the current US Attorney General. He believes that we have a fundamental right to use cryptography, and that crypto is good for society as well. Think about that when you hear Kerry attacking Bush and Ashcroft.


    Wednesday, Feb 04, 2004
     
    Jackson's trail of murder
    Bob writes about how Pres. Andrew Jackson defied a US Supreme Court order, and sent 4k Cherokees to their death.

    I can't find where Jackson did either. Congress passed The Indian Removal Act of 1830 to move the Cherokees.

    The USSC/Marshall upheld the Act, because the Cherokee nation claimed to be a foreign nation, and because the court shouldn't be telling legislatures what to do. It doesn't sound like Marshall believed in judicial supremacy himself.

    There was another case in 1832, but it just looks like it involved some federalism issues. It just said that a Georgia act was preempted by the feds. In connection with this, Jackson said, famously, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."

    But this was apparently in reference to the 1832 decision, not the 1831 decision. The 1832 was against the state of Georgia. The feds were not a party. Jackson probably thought that there was no reason to enforce it anyway, as the feds had their own plans for moving the Cherokees. Or maybe he was just applying the convential federalism of the era.

    I don't see where Jackson defied the USSC. At worst, he failed to intervene on behalf of the Indians, in their dispute with the state of Georgia. Jackson's quote may have just been a federalism statement.

    Here is Jackson on the Indian removal, and he clearly thinks that he is doing the Cherokees a favor. More quotes are here.

    The 4k deaths occurred when the Cherokees were finally forcibly moved (in the so-called Trail of Tears) from Georgia to Oklahoma during the administration of Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren.

    So I don't agree that we have a mass murderer on our money, or that thousands died because an outlaw president refused to knuckle under to judicial supremacy.

     
    Kennewick Man
    John writes:
    Kennewick Man proves that American Indians are no more "native Americans" than we are.
    Glad to see that the feds will allow Kennewick Man to be studied. He was apparently here before the American Indians, and his tribe was wiped by the invading Indians who were settling in N. America from Asia. Some Indians today wanted to bury the evidence, so people will think that American Indians are the true indigenous people.
     
    HBV vaccine
    Michelle Malkin objected to her newborn baby getting the HBV vaccine. I had a similar experience when my kid was born. The pediatricians won't tell you the real reason for the vaccine, and may not even know themselves.

    You can get more info at the Immunization Policy FAQ home page

    Chris writes:

    It seems the simple answer to the question of receiving the HBV is answered in the by the CDC page:
    The incidence rate of hepatitis B has not dropped so dramatically yet because the infants we began vaccinating in 1991 will not be at high risk for the disease until they are at least teenagers. We therefore expect about a 15 year lag between the start of universal infant vaccination and a significant drop in disease incidence. [from section 1.]
    That prediction has not proved correct. If that were right, we wouldn't start seeing a HBV decline until 2006. Instead, the CDC says:
    During 1990--2002, the incidence of acute hepatitis B declined 67% ... the majority of this decline occurred during 1990--1998.
    Most of the USA cases are among Asian immigrants. Malkin is a first-generation Filipino-American, so maybe the pediatrician thought that she was at risk based on looking at her. I don't know.

    A JAMA letter a couple of years ago said:

    There is no scientific evidence to justify HBV vaccination before the age when those risk factors associated with the HBV transmission (sex, needles, etc) become relevant. Recent risk-benefit analyses show HBV vaccination among children carries one of the largest unjustified risks ... [JAMA.2001; 286: 535-536. -- not freely on web any more]
    In response, the vaccine policy defenders gave these alleged benefits:
    1. It is too confusing to just vaccinate those who need it.
    2. There are some (very rare) cases of young kids at risk.
    3. It gets all the kids on the vaccine schedule right away, so they'll be more likely to get the other vaccines on schedule.
    4. It is easier to get to babies than adolescents.
     
    Gay marriage
    The folly of judicial supremacy is illustrated in today's news about judicially-ordered same-sex marriage. The Mass. high court has given the state legislature special instructions to pass a same-sex marriage law! In particular, it advised against passing a draft civil-union law that the legislature was considering. It gave a deadline, and implied that the Ontario Canada law should be copied. There is no case or controversy in the usual sense. It is just social engineering and policymaking on the part of arrogant judges.

    It appears that the court even had to water down its code of judicial conduct in order to issue this advisory opinion.

    Meanwhile, Ohio has had to pass its own Defense of Marriage Act in order to try to head off the effects of runaway judges. (This action has been misreported as Ohio moves to prohibit gay unions and Ohio Legislature Votes to Ban Same-Sex Unions. The law does not ban any unions -- gays will continue to be free to form whatever unions they please. The law only refuses to treat such unions like married couples.)

    If the people of Mass. want to change their marriage law, then they have a political system for that. But they are living under judicial tyranny if they let judges rewrite their laws for them. This never happened before the Warren Court. Except for Dred Scott, and a terrible price was paid for that mistake.

    This Mass. news has to be bad for John Kerry. He claims that he is against gay marriage, but he voted for same-sex marriage in the federal Defense Of Marriage Act, he is a senator from Mass., and the Democratic convention will be in Mass. He will be portrayed as a wacky eastern liberal who is out of step with the people. His voting record also has other contradictions.

    Bob says:

    I don't know why anyone cares about the homosexuals anyway. Why should anyone object if they marry? The psychologists once classified homosexuality as abnormal, but that was because the people on the committee didn't even know that homosexuality occurs in nature among animals.
    I don't think that it quite accurate. The term homosexuality used to just mean same-sex sexual relations, but the more politically correct definition today is the practices of those with same-sex sexual orientation. The latter has never been observed among (non-human) animals. I would say that it is more accurate to say that bisexuality has been observed in nature.

    Bob's a big proponent of evolution, and he thinks that humans are animals, so he probably thinks that anything humans do will eventually be discovered in lower animals. Oops, he wouldn't call them "lower" animals. Ok, non-human animals. Maybe more grant money will be available for this sort of research in a John Kerry administration.

    BTW, if you want to know all the wacky things that the shrinks now think are abnormal, here is a free version of the DSM-IV. I don't know if any of that stuff has been observed in animals.

    Chris writes:

    I have to agree with Bob here. What is wrong with allowing homosexuals to enter into long term stable relationships with the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual people?

    It never ceases to amuse me when people who are in favor of freedom from government have a conniption fit when others exercise that freedom. How exactly is society harmed by individuals entering into a marriage contract? Why is it anyone else’s concern when two men decide that to affirm their love for one another by entering into a union where the foreswear others and cleave only unto themselves?

    How is my marriage weakened or harmed by another’s actions? I would suggest that marriage is harmed far more by the pious hypocrisies of those who rail against homosexuals while practicing serial infidelity and adultery. I, however, am not going to suggest that we should make such actions illegal and go so far as to amend the constitution to do so and to call out the power of the state to prevent this activity.

    Why is it a valid political position to pass laws to enforce the religious beliefs of a subset of the American people?

    My opinion is that marriage laws should reflect a broad consensus of the American public. If that consensus includes same-sex marriage someday, then so be it. There is no such consensus today, and my concern is that we have a judiciary that is out of control. The root of the problem is judicial supremacy.

    The basis for the Mass. high court opinion is that the 4-3 majority says that it could not find a rational basis for opposite-sex marriage. This opinion is bizarre. Opposite-sex marriage law is present in virtually all cultures throughout the world, regardless of religion, and has existed for thousands of years. The burden of proof should be on those who want some other system to show that it is better. The Mass. high court is irrational, because it gives no evidence that a change would be better.

    Bob writes:

    I just heard [a talk show host] on the radio saying that the primary reason for marriage is to care for children. I agree so far. Then he said that because homosexuals can't have children with each other that they could only have children through adoption. Homosexuals have children all the time the old fashioned way, without adoption. Sometimes they are married when they have children, sometimes not. All of the issues of child rearing and custody pertain to homosexuals.

    My take on the outrageous action of the Massachusetts Supreme Court is that the people of Massachusetts had it coming. They elect people like Kerry, Kennedy, and Barney Frank which they inflict on the rest of the country. Now the complain when allies of the people they elect use their high handed, elitist, authoritarian tactics in their own state. Tough.

    We have similar kooks in California, in both elected office and as judges, and we have similar problems. Just a few months ago, we were nearly denied a chance to have an election for governor, because a couple of crooked judges on the 9C had a radical plan to redo our elections.

    It doesn't prove anything to say that homosexuals can often mimic the lives of heterosexuals. The state passes laws to encourage certain types of relationships, for good and just reasons like rearing the next generation in a stable manner. People are free to form whatever private relationships they wish -- be they polygamous, incestuous, adulterous, homosexual, bisexual or whatever -- but the state can choose not to encourage such relationships. If someone wants to start a serious reexamination of what the state should encourage in the way of personal relationships and sexual practices, then I think that is great. There are probably some changes with which I'd agree. But the gay lobby and the judicial supremicists do not want that. They want to just mandate a change based on some hokey discrimination argument, instead of looking at what people really want or what is good for society.

    The Mass. Governor is hinting that he may take a stand against judicial supremacy:

    With the Dred Scott case, decided four years before he took office, President Lincoln faced a judicial decision that he believed was terribly wrong and badly misinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. Here is what Lincoln said:
    Contrary to the court's opinion, marriage is not "an evolving paradigm." It is deeply rooted in the history, culture and tradition of civil society. It predates our Constitution and our nation by millennia. The institution of marriage was not created by government and it should not be redefined by government. ...

    "If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

    By its decision, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts circumvented the Legislature and the executive, and assumed to itself the power of legislating. That's wrong.
    You know the judges are left-wing kooks when they talk about "an evolving paradigm".

    Update: The NY Times has an article on homosexuality in the animal world. It describes penguins at the zoo, and says:

    Mr. Bagemihl said homosexual behavior had been documented in some 450 species. (Homosexuality, he says, refers to any of these behaviors between members of the same sex: long-term bonding, sexual contact, courtship displays or the rearing of young.
    I am not sure what to make of this. It appears that the definition of homosexuality is so broad that it would include humans with same-sex friends. The article also that while the gay lobby argues that animal homosexuality should make human homosexuality more acceptable, the political implications are really not so clear.

    The SJMN printed an edited version of the story. It omitted the definition of animal homosexuality, and it omitted these quotes:

    "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes."

    "In Nazi Germany, one very common interpretation of homosexuality was that it was animalistic behavior, subhuman".


    Monday, Feb 02, 2004
     
    California teachers are well paid
    The Si Valley paper explains:
    Teacher housing crisis a myth

    For years, Silicon Valley has taken as gospel that teachers are among those hardest hit by the region's housing crisis.

    ``Lots of teachers have to live in places like Salinas, Patterson and Modesto because they can't afford to buy homes here,'' Roccie Hill, executive director of the Housing Trust of Santa Clara County, said in January. ``It's a harrowing commute, it's a frantic lifestyle. They never get to see their own kids.''

    But a Mercury News analysis of home ownership rates has found that the overwhelming majority of teachers who work in the heart of Silicon Valley also live here -- and in homes they own. In this respect, teachers fare far better than the average Silicon Valley worker, including those with college degrees.

    The results raise fundamental questions about the true nature of teachers' economic situation and how best to improve it.

    In past years, some cities, including San Jose, have launched housing assistance programs for teachers. One local school district built a 40-unit apartment complex for those newest to the profession. And now Silicon Valley business and education leaders want to put a countywide parcel tax on the November ballot, in part, they've said, to help teachers strapped by high housing costs.

    But according to newly released census data:

  • At the peak of the boom, in 2000, 87 percent of teachers who worked in Santa Clara County lived here. An additional 9 percent lived in nearby Santa Cruz, Alameda and San Mateo counties. Less than 2 percent commuted in from Contra Costa County or the Central Valley.
  • Contrary to popular belief, about two-thirds of the teachers who lived and worked in Santa Clara County owned homes here, compared with 51 percent of the overall workforce age 21 and older living in the county and 61 percent of those with at least a bachelor's degree.
  • Teachers also owned homes at a higher rate than many other professions, including software engineers, network administrators and accountants.
  • The article goes on that average public school teacher salary is $58,000 for 9 months work, plus about 25% in benefits. That is equivalent to a gross pay of about $97k per year. Plus there are other perks like tenure, which are hard to find elsewhere.

    The myth persists that teachers are underpaid. In reality, they are overpaid.

    Andy writes:

    I don't see how the 25% could include the pension. The 25% would consist of health benefits (perhaps 10-20%), savings plans (perhaps 5-10%), vacation, matching contributions, etc. I bet Eagle Forum pays its employees 25% extra in benefits, maybe more. Most private companies do.

    The pension benefits are far greater. I think a public school teacher can work only 20 years and then retire with permanent salary for the rest of her life that exceeds her average salary while she worked.

    The 25% figure was based on a summary of the California state budget. I had a figure for teacher salaries, and a figure for teacher benefits, and I divided. I believe that it included current pension benefits, but I could be mistaken. It does not take into account the possibility that pension obligations might be greater in the future. I think that most private employees get 15% or less in benefits. If you have better figures, let me know.

    Andy writes:

    So Roger took the state's own figures as gospel. The value of teacher's pensions are surely greater than 25% of their annual salary. Perhaps the state underestimates its future liabilities by assuming teachers will quit before their pension kicks in. Ha ha ha.
    It is possible that the state is underfunding the plan.

    Chris writes:

    Interesting how you figure that a teacher who earns $58,000 actually got $97,000 that year. Most teachers have to work an additional job during the summer to make ends meet.

    Further Andy states “I think a public school teacher can work only 20 years and then retire with permanent salary for the rest of her life that exceeds her average salary while she worked.”

    Nice thought but a typically bogus conservative argument to engender ill will and to demonize the group being critisized. The truth is:

    “The basic retirement formula under the DB Program is calculated by multiplying the member’s years of credited service by his or her final compensation and an age factor based the member’s age at the time of retirement (currently 2 percent at the normal retirement age of 60). The age factor ranges from 1.1 percent at age 50 to a maximum 2.4 percent at age 63. A member may retire starting at age 50 with 30 years credited service, or starting at age 55 with at least 5 years credited service.” (Taken from http://www.faccc.org/advocacy/calstrs/pdf/strsanalysis_ab1207.pdf)
    Thus our hypothetical teacher after working for thirty years can earn a maximum of 30 * 2.3% * $58,000 or $40,200 per year in retirement which is adjusted down by the amount of Social Security that the teacher collects. Surely a princely sum.
    In California, the big teachers union has just started broadcasting radio ads urging a boycott of three grocery store chains, because of a labor dispute that has nothing to do with teachers. It sounds like the teachers union has too much money.

    Sunday, Feb 01, 2004
     
    Judicial supremacy
    The PBS TV show Uncommon Knowledge was on judicial supremacy today. The standard dogma among law profs is Marberry v. Madison (1803) established judicial supremacy in the USA, and that it is essential to our system of government. The law prof guest made those arguments, but they were demolished by the other guest.

    The first (and biggest case) to make an issue out of judicial supremacy was the Dred Scott decision (1858). It was a radically racist and activist decision that stripped negroes of their citizenship, even where they had lived as free citizens in the North. It declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because it banned slavery in Maine and a few other places.

    Of course the law profs all like judicial supremacy, and don't want to admit that the seminal case was Dred Scott (1957). Marbury v. Madison was just a case in which the court refused to do something that it thought was unconstitutional. Not until Dred Scott did a court assert that it had the power to tell another branch of the USA how to interpret the Constitution. The idea that judicial supremacy or review came from Marbury v. Madison is just a big myth promoted by leftist law profs.

    Judicial supremacy was formally claimed by the US Supreme Court in Cooper v. Aaron (1958). That was another radical and racist decision.

    The idiot law prof claimed that judicial supremacy was needed add finality to cases like Bush v. Gore (2000). The 2000 election dispute was almost entirely a creation of judicial supremacy ideas. The Florida Secy of State was going to lawfully and properly certify the election. Trial courts rejected Gore's claims, as they did not find any evidence of wrongdoing. Then the Florida supreme court decided to rewrite the election rules, and order a goofy partial manual recount of undervotes, thereby overriding the decisions of the executive and the legislature. Such a decision would have been unthinkable before the Dred-Scott-Warren-court doctrine of judicial supremacy.

    Bob asks what would have happened in the 2000 election without judicial supremacy? As it was, he says, the Florida court got spanked for its intervention.

    The Florida supreme court never really got spanked for the worst thing it did. It decided that it could redo an election recount under its own rules, and it would be fairer and better because of judicial supremacy. There is no way an appellate court should ever be doing anything but accepting or rejected the decisions of lower courts, and there is no way a court should be telling the executive branch how to run an election.

    By and large, the liberal law profs justified the Florida court behavior on the grounds that such court exceed their authority all the time. The US supreme court reversed the Florida court, but it did so on the grounds of inequities in the proposed Florida judicial recount. Nobody questioned the authority of the courts to rewrite election rules.

    Without judicial supremacy, the Florida supreme court would never have issued such outrageous rulings. And if it did, then the Florida Secy of State would have followed her constitutional obligations and certified the election anyway, as provided by the statutes. If the Florida supreme court really thought that there was some election recount inequity, it could have kicked the cases back down to the trial courts to reconsider the evidence and look for a remedy.

    If it is hard to imagine a functioning government without judicial supremacy, then just look at the bulk of American history. We have really only had it for the Dred Scott decision, the Warren court, and a few post-Warren decisions. Dred Scott was, of course, one of the most disastrous court decisions in all of human history, as it helped trigger the US Civil War. The US Supreme Court has backed off of some of the excessive activism of the Warren Court. If it repudiates judicial supremacy and reverts to the way the courts have functioned for 100s of years before Warren, then we will all be better off.

    Bob writes:

    You are conflating several different meanings of judicial supremacy. Meaning 1 is that for each specific case adjudicated by it, the decision of the US Supreme Court is binding and final. Meaning 2 is an exception to meaning 1 when one of the parties is a branch of government coequal to the judiciary. Meaning 3 pertains to whether decisions of the USSC more general than a specific case are binding.

    The way I heard the discussion on Uncommon Knowledge, there is no controversy over meaning 1. Meaning 1 is clearly spelled out in article 3 of the Constitution. Robert George (the other, non law professor guest) believed that Marberry v. Madison could be interpreted as being restricted to meaning 1. The meaning of Marberry v. Madison was debated in the Senate, for what that's worth. Apparently not much, because neither guest cited the Senate debate beyond mentioning that it occurred. Jefferson weighed in on Marberry v. Madison saying that it would cause judicial tyranny. The last two points make it clear that judicial supremacy originated with Marberry v. Madison, not Dread Scott.

    The Constitution is silent on meaning 2. Both Jackson and Lincoln defied the USSC. History has vindicated Lincoln and condemned Jackson. Meaning 2 seems like a mixed bag at best.

    The legal principle of precedent establishes meaning 3. I would like to hear exactly how meaning 3 would change as envisioned by the opponents of judicial supremacy. An argument for meaning 3 is finality. After 32 years it remains unclear whether Roe v. Wade is final. Premature finality isn't final. In absence of consensus the history of broad USSC decisions is less than satisfactory.

    I find it remarkable that conservatives are anxious to overturn a judicial principle dating to 1803 because they don't like current USSC decisions. With few exceptions, the powers of the USSC are the power to strike down laws, not make them. Conservatives sometimes make the argument that the USSC engages in judicial activism when finds rights not explicitly stated in the Constitution. Conservatives who make this argument should be ashamed. The 9th and 10th amendments explicitly state that the fact that a right is not enumerated in the Constitution cannot be used to disparage that right. This is an invitation for the USSC to discover rights.

    A fourth meaning of judicial supremacy which was not discussed in the Uncommon Knowledge show is whether USSC decisions are binding on lower courts. We have witnessed Federal judges repeatedly defying USSC decisions with no repercussions. The lack of criticism by law professors of these lawless actions of federal judges is problematic. I do not understand how such contempt for the Constitution can be considered "good Behavior" as mentioned in Article III, Section 1.

    A related issue also not discussed in the Uncommon Knowledge show is the fact that except for "Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls and those in which a State shall be Party", where the USSC has "original jurisdiction", Congress may regulate and make exceptions to its jurisdiction. The language is too clear to argue with and provides a clear limit to judicial supremacy. The fact that Congress has not found it possible to use this power in politically significant ways indicates the relative disrepute of Congress compared to the USSC and the wisdom of the founding fathers.

    I don't agree that history has condemned Andrew Jackson. His 1832 veto of the Bank of the US charter spells out the folly of judicial supremacy [meaning 2] pretty well:
    Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.
    I also don't think that it is correct that Jefferson said that Marberry v. Madison would cause judicial tyranny. What he said was:
    To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. [More quotes here.]
    The difference is that Jefferson did not believe that Marbury v. Madison created judicial supremacy. Marbury had sued to get a job to which he had been appointed. The USSC ruled that he was legally entitled to that job, but Jefferson did not let him have the job. If Jefferson believed that he was bound by the constitutional interpretations of the USSC, then he would have given the job to Marbury. He did not, and Marbury never got the job.

    So there really is no 1803 judicial supremacy principle. My hunch is that the supposed importance of Marbury v. Madison is a 20th century invention, created by law profs and judges who needed to cite some sort of precedent for their wacky judicial supremacy ideas, and it was just too embarrassing to cite Dred Scott.

    You wonder about the finality of Roe v. Wade (1973), but that is a common problem when judges try to make law, instead of just deciding cases as they are supposed to. Roe v. Wade is the USSC's most famous case, next to Dred Scott, and it has been repeatedly and emphatically affirmed with votes to spare, and yet you still wonder if it is final.


    Friday, Jan 30, 2004
     
    No evolution in Georgia
    John sends this NY Times article saying:
    A proposed set of guidelines for middle and high school science classes in Georgia has caused a furor after state education officials removed the word "evolution" and scaled back ideas about the age of Earth and the natural selection of species. ...

    Georgia's schools superintendent, Kathy Cox, held a news conference ...

    A handful of states already omit the word "evolution" from their teaching guidelines, and Ms. Cox called it "a buzz word that causes a lot of negative reaction." She added that people often associate it with "that monkeys-to-man sort of thing."

    As an extra plus, Jimmy Carter is embarrassed!

    Bob writes:

    It is a sad day when people take a position where they are wrong and a bozo like Carter is right. It is bizarre to see a defense of Orwellian language. Eliminating the word evolution in order to dispel the evolution debate is like eliminating the word abortion to dispel the abortion debate.
    Actually, the pro-abortion rights crowd does try to eliminate the word, and they call themselves "pro-choice". In the case of Georgia, it sounds like Ms. Cox wants to promote an evolution debate, not dispel one.
     
    Antidepressant Makers Withhold Data on Children
    The Wash Post reports:
    Makers of popular antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor have refused to disclose the details of most clinical trials involving depressed children, denying doctors and parents crucial evidence as they weigh fresh fears that such medicines may cause some children to become suicidal.

    The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills.

    Mind altering pills like these are increasingly given to kids.
     
    Msft kills COM
    Microsoft's business strategy involves changes its API every 3 years or so, and now it is killing COM and DCOM.
    Microsoft software architect Don Box said the company will not invest much more in Component Object Model (COM) and Distributed Compound Object Model (DCOM)--Microsoft's mechanisms for sharing objects between programs.

    Instead, Box said, programs will use managed services based on the Extensible Markup Language to communicate with each other. Box is leading the work on the "plumbing" part of Longhorn, called "Indigo," which is effectively the successor to Microsoft .Net and as such will dictate how programs are written in future Windows platforms.

    I guess the great object-orientation fad has been replaced by the great XML fad.

    Thursday, Jan 29, 2004
     
    Intel64
    Intel finally admits that it will ship AMD64 clones. Forget the Itanium. It is a dog. The x86 will dominate for the forseeable future.
     
    Jury voir dire
    Liza writes:
    To change the subject, I recently underwent my first voir dire as a prospective juror. Not surprisingly, I wasn't selected out of a 20-person jury pool to serve on the 7-person jury for a federal civil case involving some guy suing a credit reporting company.

    What really annoyed me was all the nosy questions tossed at the jurors, who are required to answer under oath. There seems to be no limit on what the lawyers can ask you, in a general, interrogatory-style way. As a practical matter, you have to answer the questions in public, in front of a lot of people. (If it's a really private matter, you can ask to speak to the judge privately, but this isn't practical most of the time; it would take too long and would irritate everybody.) Some questions are to be expected, such as whether you know the parties or their lawyers. But most should be completely irrelevant to jury selection. For example:

    Have you or has any member of your family ever been involved in any litigation?
    Is any member of your family a lawyer?
    What civic organizations do you belong to?
    Have you ever owned a business?
    Have you ever looked at your own credit report? Did you dispute anything on it? If so, what? How was the matter resolved?

    On the written questionnaire mailed to me in advance, I was even asked to list my hobbies!

    Lawyers are nearly always thrown out, on the theory that they will use arguments in the jury room that aren't known to the other jurors.

    Last time I was called, I brought the kids. I told them the kids would not be a problem at all, then cut them loose to run wild in the courthouse. I was dismissed.

    Irritate everybody? That's just what you want to do!

    I agree -- those questions are obnoxious and irrelevant.

    John responds:

    I would have no objection to these questions and don't understand the basis for Liza's complaint.

    Of course prospective jurors have to disclose how they support themselves, their source of income and position in the community; their relationship to and/or prior experience with the legal system; their relationship to and/or prior experience with the parties or subject matter of the case to be tried (here, credit reports).

    All that information is obviously necessary to fairly evaluate a juror's impartiality. Liza and Roger do not explain which of these questions they think is irrelevant and why.

    Liza responds:
    Roger is right. The answers to those questions shouldn't disqualify anybody, including a judge, so why ask them? Most of the 20-person jury pool had some experience (either personally or through relatives) with the legal system, and many had had issues involving their credit reports. So what? If such experience would be deemed a disqualification, they wouldn't have even able to assemble a jury.

    Why do the lawyers need to know the name of every organization I pay dues to? Why do they need to know a juror's hobbies, or whether a juror has ever owned a business? It's none of their business.

    Unlike Roger, I would have been perfectly willing to serve on the jury, because I think we all have a duty to upgrade the jury pool and I don't have pressing responsibilities that would get in the way. Roger, if you make a nuisance of yourself and never serve, you can't legitimately complain when you are stuck in front of a lousy jury.

    I was willing to serve on a jury, and I do not think that it is making a nuisance to ask for privacy when responding to irrelevant and nosy questions. It is the questioner who is creating the nuisance by asking the question. You are just following their own rules when you ask for privacy.

    I would be unlikely to serve anyway, because my answers to some of those voir dire questions put me in an objectionable category. But my serving on a jury is not going to get me a better jury later when I might be on trial. Maybe we'd have better juries if more people objected to the ways in which jurors are mistreated.

    Andy writes:

    Everyone is biased and opinionated. Frankly, I'd question the impartiality of anyone who denied that. I can ask you for a few of your opinions and then predict with 95% certainty your view on an apparently unrelated topic. And if your hobby is attending VFW gatherings, then an accused terrorist doesn't want you on his jury. That is his right to exclude you in order to attain impartiality.

    In a lawsuit by someone against a credit reporting agency, Liza complained that she was asked if she ever disputed anything on her own credit report. It's a relevant question for the defense to ask.

    Roger wrote, "Most of those questions have to do with cooking the jury pool, not impartiality."

    Voir dire only removes jurors. No one has the power to place people on juries, but only to remove them. Impartiality can only result from inadequate voir dire.

    I agree that impartiality can only result from inadequate voir dire, if that is what Andy really meant. The more people are eliminated by voir dire, the more partial the jury.

    Andy still doesn't explain why having her own credit report dispute is relevant. It might be relevant if she had the dispute with the same credit reporting agency, and still harbors a grudge, but that's all. Something like half of all credit reports have errors on them, and there is nothing unusual about having a dispute. Are you saying that the jurors should be chosen from the half of the population with no reason to dispute a credit report, or from the other half that might be more knowledgeable on the process? I don't get it.

    Andy writes:

    Roger and Liza are arguing against basic principles of entropy. The more information and the greater the number of adversarial challenges to (removals from) a jury, the less biased the empaneled jury will be. It's the "arrow of time." Equilibrium is a jury with a net bias of zero.

    But then, one has to accept basic principles of entropy first before applying them. I'm not sure anyone else here really does.

    Huhh? Voir dire is all about removing info from the court. Anyone who knows anything about law, or law enforcement, or credit reports, or have any life experience that might be brought to bear on the case is excluded. Also, anyone with a brain or who shows sign of independent thought is excluded. Anyone who has a life is excluded.

    Entropy means disorder. The more voir dire, and the more the jury verdict is the random result of know-nothings.

    Did you read about the arguments that are being kept from the Martha Stewart? Part of the purpose of voir dire is to make sure that the jurors are dullards who won't figure out what is being withheld from them.

    Andy writes:

    I didn't get a commitment from Roger that he accepts basic principles of entropy. Most academics today implicitly avoid them, and some physicists even expressly argue against them. This is a waste of time for you that reject entropy truths, but here goes anyway.

    The initial jury has a relatively high degree of bias or "order", towards one side or the other. The more the replacements, based on the greatest amount of information, the less the bias. The jury then tends towards a "disordered" state (in terms of bias). Its entropy increases over time, thereby serving the interests of justice. And you won't find this in any textbook.

    Roger writes, "Entropy means disorder. The more voir dire, and the more the jury verdict is the random result of know-nothings."

    Like Roger's other claims, this lacks logical support. One side inevitably prefers smarter jurors than the other side does. The replacements are likely to be, on average, just as smart as the excused jurors. The questions Liza objected to have nothing to do with intelligence anyway.

    Roger writes, anyone with "any life experience that might be brought to bear on the case is excluded."

    That may be true, but for good reason. People, like human chess players, tend to cling to the past too much in evaluating new situations. The greatest chance of bias is when someone thinks his personal experience, rather than reasoned deliberation, yields the best answer.

    Then let's get some judges with no legal experience!

    Liza writes:

    Yes, I think the jurors who were most likely to have an intelligent, informed opinion about business and credit were excluded, including the ones who owned their own business and the ones who had worked in the lending industry (and me, a lawyer with long experience in lending issues).

    As a result of these kinds of exclusions, the people who remained on the jury were the least likely to have an understanding of the role of credit reports in the economy, and the consequences of socking credit reporting companies in a big way for their mistakes. Just as more-informed people understand that when medical malpractice judgments go sky-high, a consequence is that everybody pays more for medical care and needed specialists leave the state. This understanding doesn't preclude a fair assessment of the case at bar, but it is likely to temper decisions on issues like punitive damages, which are highly discretionary with the jury.

    Roger, when I questioned your willingness to serve on a jury, I was really basing my comments on the fact that you brought Milli and Neva to the courthouse. Surely you did that on purpose to make a nuisance of yourself and get excused.

    About 200 people were called for jury duty for 1 trial. That is about 10x what is needed. The court kept everyone waiting for about 2 hours before anything happened. Some clerk notified us that jurors were entitled to $5 a day under the law, but tried to persuade us to waive the $5. (I didn't get the $5 -- that only applied to those who are actually seated on a jury.) I was very likely to get excused anyway.

    Jurors are not respected. They are usually forbidden to ask questions, or to discuss the case before it ends. These are policies that have no purpose except to show hostility towards people who think for themselves. I wouldn't mind being a juror, but the court system does not want me.

    Andy writes:

    Liza's comments suggest that she has strongly held views in opposition to lawsuits against credit reporting agencies. That's precisely the sort of bias that should be identified and eliminated during voir dire. Questions about your employer, occupation of your spouse, hobbies, and personal experiences with the subject matter would properly flesh that out and lead to a challenge. Liza's strong opinions are better taken to the legislature than to a courtroom.

    Liza and Roger seem to want "intelligent" jurors. Perhaps they'd like an IQ test to qualify jurors? What a disaster that would be "intelligent" jurors can be more biased and less willing to engage in jury nullification than others.

    One characteristic of self-described "intelligent" people is that they are very slow in changing their fundamental beliefs. Many times, the smarter they think they are the longer it takes, as they overvalue consistency. That is not an attractive trait for a juror.

    Neither Roger nor Joe had anything meaningful to offer on entropy. Instead, Joe remarked, "Here we go again. Does evolution violate the laws of thermodynamics, Andy?"

    This is the evolution police at work. The discussion had nothing to do with evolution, but principles like entropy (or massive floods) undermine belief in evolution. So it becomes necessary to discourage and even censor any discussion of those principles. I doubt 1 in 100 college graduates understands entropy, or realizes that the landscape is a former sea bed.

    I am not asking for an intelligence test. I think that jurors should be a random sample of the population, and that the current hostility towards intelligent jurors be eliminated. In most states, jurors are forbidden to take notes! Jurors should be allowed to take an intelligent approach to their jobs.

    I agree that most people don't understand entropy. Most people don't understand any college-level science. But entropy does not undermine evolution, and Andy's application of entropy to jurors doesn't make any sense.

    I don't think that Liza's comments showed any bias. People who understand the credit system are likely to make better jurors, not worse.

    Liza writes:

    Andy's characterization of my views is incorrect. I don't oppose lawsuits against credit reporting agencies. I have had mistakes on my own credit report and understand the irritation they can cause. But I also understand that actual monetary damages are seldom significant in these cases, some mistakes are inevitable, and if we stick a credit reporting agency with $50 million of punitive or emotional distress damages for a dumb little mistake, there will be a social cost in addition to the private cost to the defendant. That's not bias; it's an understanding of the system. If everybody with such an understanding is weeded off the jury because of fears of partiality, you are left with people who think their job is to be Santa Claus, showering vast sums of corporate money on someone just because he claims to be distressed by a mistake.

    It was clear in the voir dire that the plaintiff's attorney was primarily seeking emotional distress damages, because he repeatedly asked jurors to indicate whether they had any philosophical objection to awarding such damages.

    That is just cooking the jury pool to ask questions like that. The plaintiff just doesn't want anyone intelligent enough to understand the problems in awarding such damages.

    Did you read about what a slimeball lawyer John Edwards was? I had assumed that he would be an effective VP candidate. But now I think that he'd lose a lot more votes than he'd gain. A lot of people will just think that he is a crook who is draining money from our economy. He got rich by suing good physicians and convincing gullible jurors of bogus theories. Most of his money was in exorbitant fees for obstetricians not doing Caesarian deliveries.

    John writes:

    This subject was previously exposed in an article posted Jan. 20 on a conservative news site.
    I missed. I naively assumed that if he is a successful politician who brags about his courtroom wins, then they must be legitimate wins. But he has made a fortune on a quack theory that cerebral palsy is caused by obstetricians failing to do Caesarian births. Meanwhile, the medical community believes that too many Caesarians are being done, not too few. Edwards is a walking example of why we need tort reform.
     
    WMD
    Bob writes on WMD:
    Here is my revised rant on Bush:

    President Bush is badly mismanaging the WMD issue. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Diane Sawyer
    Diane Sawyer "But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still —"
    President Bush "So what’s the difference?"

    Strategically Bush is correct. The ability to produce WMD can not be removed once a country has the capability. Politically Bush is full of hubris. Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice all told the American people and the world that Saddam Hussein had WMD on hand. This is almost certainly false. The alternatives for the President are:
    1 keep changing the subject and dodging the question of why what the administration told the world about WMD was false
    2 find some WMD in Iraq
    3 produce Iraqis who explain exactly what happened to Saddam's WMD
    4 fix the problem.

    The fix I have in mind would culminate in a press conference with Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenant (or the current DCI), the congressional intelligence committee chairmen, and the ranking Democrats on intelligence committees who are on board. The topic of the press conference is reform of American intelligence. The primary point is that American intelligence took a wrong turn in 1977. We need to have a robust human intelligence capability and the DCI has agreed to be evaluated on progress toward this goal. I recommend that Bush's people read "Fixing Intelligence For a More Secure America" by General William E. Odom for starters.

    The hand wringers who worry about the communist husband of an American leftist being killed in a foreign country by someone on the CIA payroll will scream about this. Fine. The President needs to assure us that a robust CIA would not become involved in domestic operations or used in coverups. The role of the congressional intelligence committees is to prevent exactly this sort of thing, not to enforce an overly fastidious doctrine of political correctness on our spies.

    If Bush sticks with option 1 above I predict that he will lose. It is arrogant to expect the American people to not care that they have been told rubbish. Bush can not afford to have the charge of arrogance stick. If he persists in this folly he deserves to lose the election.

    Send me the quotes. All Bush et al had was a suspicion that Iraq was developing WMD. Why didn't they ever tell us whether the WMD was nuclear, biological, or chemical? If they didn't know that, then they sure didn't know much about those WMD.

    The 2002 Bush state of the union speech said:

    First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans and bring terrorists to justice.

    Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.

    I always had the impression that we were invading Iraq in order to prevent them from developing WMD. The Iraq war has successfully done that. Where is the lie?

    Bob writes:

    Here are a few quotes from Bush on WMD. Please comment. Much more to follow.

    The following are no longer claimed to be true by David Kay.

    "U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence."

    "From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors."

    "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

    Chris writes:
    You say, “I always had the impression that we were invading Iraq in order to prevent them from developing WMD. The Iraq war has successfully done that. Where is the lie?”

    What Bush said as a rational to launch a preemptive war was that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMD that he could us to immediately to threaten the US. Further he said that Hussein had ties to terrorist organizations to which he would supply chemical or biological weapons that would be used against the US. He explicitly said that the UN weapons inspectors were being duped and that only the invasion of Iraq would eliminate the WMD. These were the only reason Bush used to justify his taking the United States to war.

    We now know, unequivocally, that these rationales were false. Further we know that the intelligence did not in any way shape or form support these suppositions except in the most extreme interpretations that ignored the main body of information and latched onto some small outliers in the data to make the case of an immediate threat.

    Now, when there are no WMD or connections to terrorist groups, the administration is making the argument 1. Saddam Hussein was a really bad person and 2 the Iraqi people are now free to enter a new and democratic era and that is sufficient justification for the war. Saddam Hussein was a really bad person. We all hope that the Iraqi people do indeed enter into a prosperous and democratic future. These are not sufficient reasons to go to war. Where do we stop? What country do we invade next because their dictator is a really bad person and the countries people are not free and democratic? Would the American people have agreed to invade Iraq at the cost of many lives and much treasure to overthrow Hussein and to bring the blessings of democracy and liberty?

    Was it the right thing to do? The answer is clearly no. And this answer will become increasingly apparent when we hand over sovereignty in July and the first act the sovereign government does is ask us to leave. What happens then?

    Bob responds to Chris:
    David Kay, who had access to the intelligence, directly contradicts this. If Bush deceived the American people about Iraqi WMD, then so did Clinton. Yes, I know that it is tiresome to point out Clinton deceptions.

    Yes it was the right thing to do. For 3/4 of a century despicable Arab leaders have been making the case that we couldn't touch them because if we did militant fundamentalists would take over, or ethnic strife would cause social disintegration, or their would go communist, or other bad consequences would occur. Bush cut the Gordian knot and now despicable Arab leaders are cleaning up their acts.

    The fact that it was the right thing to do does not excuse the bogus reasons Bush gave for doing it.

    Chris responds to Bob:
    The problem here is that you are using the 'ends justify the means' argument without addressing what the consequences of the current administration argument are.

    Are you seriously suggesting that it is in our national interest to remake the political map of the Middle East through the force of arms? Further it is by no means clear that the current Iraq policy will have the desired outcome.

    What happens when the Iraq government asks us to leave this summer? They will not have the ability to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq that the Turks will attack. What happens when the Shite majority declares a Shirai and proceeds to implement it?

    Are we going to invade Iran, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Egypt or any number of other non-democratic arab states to provide them with the blessings of liberty?


    Wednesday, Jan 28, 2004
     
    Howard Dean, anti-privacy candidate
    Howard Dean gave a speech in 2002 about upgrading state drivers licenses to a sort of national ID card. You can read criticism on other blogs here. The source of these ideas appears to be his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, who is closely allied with Wave Systems. Wave System was a big cult stock during the big internet bubble, and still promotes technology to regulate how people use PCs.

    Update: The news just reported that Dean demoted or fired Trippi.

    Update: Don't feel sorry for Trippi. The NY Times says:

    Mr. Trippi forfeited a salary as a campaign manager but collected commissions — said to be as high as 15 percent in some cases — based on advertising buys.
    I wouldn't mind getting 15% of $40M.

    John sends this NY Times op-ed, Will We Remember 2004 as the Year of the Dean Bubble? Dean's crash has some analogies to the internet bubble.

     
    Bush's illiteracy
    I am surprised that this error is still on WhiteHouse.gov:
    Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.
     
    Leatherman tool
    The feds have now released info that at least a couple of the 9-11 hijackers had Leatherman tools, not box-cutters. That explains why the airport security personnel got so agitated when I flew with a Leatherman tool in 2002. They spotted it with the x-ray right away, as if they had been trained to look for it. The supervisor told me that they confiscate Leathermans, but let me fly with it anyway. I guess I didn't meet the profile.
     
    Fahrenheit 451
    A San Jose Mercury News editorial praises Fahrenheit 451, a trashy sci-fi novel from 50 years ago:
    In ``Fahrenheit 451,'' people have surrendered privacy, freedom and individual responsibility to a repressive government that plies them with fast cars, mind-numbing drugs and wall-to-wall wide-screen TVs. Books are condemned as subversive; firefighters burn them and the homes of those caught possessing them; hence the title of the book, which is the temperature at which paper catches fire.

    ``Fahrenheit 451'' follows the tormented transformation of Montag, a firefighter ...

    But today's readers may see inklings of Bradbury's narcissistic, sub-literate society in the Patriot Act, surveillance technology, designer drugs and even PlayStation 2.

    Fahrenheit 451 was a really stupid book that is only popular because its politically correct and overdone message about censorship. So why does the SJMN change the "fireman" to a "firefighter"? The heroes in the book don't make those kinds of changes when they memorize the books that are being burned. And Montag sets fires, rather than fight fires.

    And what does the book have to do with the Patriot Act?

    Elsewhere the newspaper slams the Republican governor with an editorial and a news story saying:

    Governor broke campaign law, judge rules

    Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger broke state law last year when he used a loophole to loan his campaign committee $4 million, a move that prevented voters from knowing before Election Day who would end up paying the governor's campaign bills, a judge ruled late Monday.

    No, he didn't break the law. He borrowed $4M from a bank to help finance his campaign, and personally guaranteed repayment. There is nothing illegal about that. The California Fair Political Practices Commission ruled in a similar case that the candidate could repay the loan with campaign funds. All this judge did was to rule that the CFPPC was wrong, and that Schwarzenegger has to repay the bank himself. There was never any violation of anything.

    There are just some typical examples this week of the goofy and biased left-wing politics of the SJMN.

     
    Patriot Act
    I found this on another blog:
    I always find it interesting that the PATRIOT Act’s harshest critics, those who claim to be champions of civil liberties, kept their mouths shut when Congress passed child support collection legislation that enables the government to search all the records of banks and utilities for so-called deadbeat dads, suspend the driver and professional licenses of those so identified, take their passports, place liens on their property, and impose draconian levies on their incomes for life. While this is arguably a good cause, these measures are clearly encroachments on civil liberties that have much more immediate and wide-spread effects than the PATRIOT Act.
    I don't even think that it is a good cause. I find it very annoying when people are more concerned about maintaining the privacy of the public library records of foreign terrorists, than they are of American citizens who are just trying to earn an honest living.
     
    Copyright extension debate
    I thought that the copyright extension debate would die with the Eldred decision, but it continues. The NY Times has a long article on The Tyranny of Copyright? that describe efforts by the Copy Left to put more works into the public domain.

    At the other extreme, Landes and Posner published an article saying:

    In this paper we raise questions concerning the widely accepted proposition that economic efficiency requires that copyright protection be limited in its duration (often shorter than the current term). We show that just as an absence of property rights in tangible property would lead to inefficiencies, so intangible works that fall into the public domain may be inefficiently used because of congestion externalities and impaired incentives to invest in maintaining and exploiting these works. ... A further benefit of indefinite renewal is that it would largely eliminate the rent-seeking problem that is created by the fact that owners (and users) of valuable copyrights that are soon to expire will expend real resources on trying to persuade (dissuade) Congress to extend the term.
    That last sentence seems really silly. The same reasoning would say to give everyone subsidies, so that they don't have to lobby for them.

    A bunch of economists filed an Eldred amicus brief saying that copyright extension would not be a significant incentive for new works. Milton Friedman said that it was a no-brainer. A couple of other profs wrote a critical article. While I think that these arguments for indefinite copyright are profoundly wrong, it is good that people are bringing them out into the open.

    The economist criticism is quite silly. The main argument is that there is sometimes a snob effect, in which a property might be more valuable if it is somewhat scarce. Eg, someone might rather have a house design that has not been copied by all the neighbors.

    It argues that copyrights do not interfere with the production of new works very much, but its examples are weird. One example is someone who copied a plot device from the movie It's A Wonderful Life. But the paper authors don't even realize that the movie copyright had expired, and the movie was in the public domain. The other example was a parody of Gone With The Wind. Yes, the parody was published, but only after a costly and risky legal fight that would have scared away most publishers.

    Then it creates a wildly implausible scenario in which a very tiny increase in incentives would result in many new books being written.

    There is the notion that some people have that if a property could produce income, and someone should own it and exploit it. Economists make this argument about cattle grazing land, because an owner would keep it from being overgrazed. But it is hard to see how a copyright could be overgrazed. This paper does not prove that it is possible.


    Tuesday, Jan 27, 2004
     
    Martha Stewart's trial
    Andy writes:
    The ridiculous prosecution of Martha Stewart proceeds, with the government's main claim that she lied in stating her innocence.

    However, the jury selection suggests that the defense is going for a hung jury at best, and may not even get that. Eight moderate women dominate the jury, rendering the four men irrelevant. The defense is banking on the female majority disagreeing with each other. They included jurors with a track record of personal litigation for that apparent purpose.

    If the prosecution is smart, then it will emphasize a conspiracy between Stewart and her stockbroker to lie. Most people now see conspiracies everywhere, even where they do not exist.

    IMHO, the defense would have been better off seating so-called "Bush haters" as jurors, and seeking a verdict that repudiated the Bush Administration. It should have given up on gender-based selection, and picked Village Voice readers instead.

    Description of jurors from the AP [is here], though it is pathetically inadequate.

    She might be better off going without a lawyer, because her lawyer's hands will be tied. From the news:
    In a defeat for Stewart, a judge has ruled defense lawyers can't argue she's being prosecuted for asserting her innocence and exercising her right to free speech. The judge also ruled the defense may not ask jurors to speculate about why Stewart hasn't been charged with insider trading.
    And no doubt Stewart's lawyer is forbidden from telling the jury that he is forbidden from arguing that she is being prosecuted for exercising her free speech. If she were her own lawyer, she'd be able to get that message to the jury.

    How else is Stewart going to rebut federal prosecutor Karen Patton Seymour's opening trial statement, which said:

    ``The reason that Martha Stewart dumped her shares is because she was told a secret,'' Seymour said. ``A secret tip that no other investors in ImClone had.''
    John sends this LA Times story about how vital evidence is excluded from other big cases.
    Consider the murder trial of actor Robert Blake. The problem for the government in this case was never figuring out who would have wanted to kill Blake's wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, but who didn't want to kill her. Even the prosecutors acknowledged that Bakley "might be considered by some to be what is commonly referred to as a 'grifter' or 'con artist.' " That raises an obvious problem for the prosecution, which admits that it has no forensic or eyewitness testimony linking Blake to the murder.

    In a circumstantial case, the existence of possible alternative murderers can be devastating, so the prosecutors have asked the court to keep Bakley's past from the jurors, including evidence of potentially hundreds of men scammed by her in lonely-hearts cons, as well as disgruntled customers of her past pornography business.

    One of the most cited potential suspects is Christian Brando, the son of Marlon Brando who pleaded guilty in 1991 to killing his sister's boyfriend. Brando had an affair with Bakley and was reportedly outraged by her initially convincing him that her baby was his and trying to "game" him over the pregnancy. In a taped conversation, a clearly upset Brando tells Bakley, "You're lucky somebody ain't out there to put a bullet in your head." A former friend of Brando's came forward recently to say that she heard Brando say, "Somebody needs to put a bullet into that girl's head." He allegedly said this to stuntman Ronald "Duffy" Hambleton, who allegedly responded with, "Yeah, that's right."

    ...

    In the case of basketball star Kobe Bryant, the prosecutors are seeking to exclude evidence that could be highly damaging to the alleged victim and to their case. The defense wants to introduce evidence that it says will show that the woman had sex with another man soon after the alleged rape — conduct that presumably would be in sharp conflict with the normal reaction of a rape victim. The defense also wants to introduce evidence that the woman allegedly has taken anti-psychotic medication and twice attempted suicide in an attempt, they say, to attract her boyfriend's attention.

    I hope the jurors get on the net and find some of the info that is being hidden from them.
     
    E-money
    John comments on this watch that doubles as a wireless debit card:
    Who would want a card that is accepted by only one brand of gas station, one chain of grocery stores, and one fast-food chain? That's not money, but a glorified affinity program.

    Like a gift certificate that can only be redeemed at one merchant, it is not real money. Money, by definition, is a medium of exchange that is generally accepted in payment.

    Who said I was looking for a smart card? A smart card gives merchants, providers, and other third parties access to a database of every transaction made with the card. If the card is further tied to a bank account (as a debit card), then the bank has that database, which it can share with others.

    What I'm looking for is a way to spend electronic cash that preserves the key attribute of cash - anonymity.

    Since it is wireless, I wonder what prevents you from accidentally spending all your money -- to some crook who happens to be walking past you on the street.

    The website says that Speedpass protects your information in a confidential and secure database. It also touts the advantages of having your personal info distributed to retailers and financial institutions, so that you can benefit from marketing programs.


    Monday, Jan 26, 2004
     
    UK scared of pistols
    John sends this UK story about how the Brits are all excited about finding one pistol.
    MOST TERRIFYING GUN IN THE WORLD SEIZED

    The first fully automatic handgun to surface in the UK - capable of firing 1,100 rounds a minute - has been seized in a police raid. It is a Glock 18 ...

    "If it was fired on the streets of London by someone unused to its immense firing capability, there could be a massacre. ...

    The report said the Glock can fire "armour-piercing ammunition". It has a compensation device to keep it straight during firing.

    The gun is just a 9mm pistol. The average USA cop carries a more powerful gun.

    When it says "capable of firing 1,100 rounds a minute", it just means that it can fire at that rate, not that it will actually fire 1,000 rounds in a minute. With a 19-round magazine, it can fire all of the rounds in about a second, but then you have an empty gun that has to be reloaded. Most people (police or criminals or citizens) prefer a semi-auto pistol that lets you fire individual shots. If the gun empties in one second, then you better aim the gun correctly on the first shot, and you better hope that you don't have to shoot anyone else.

    9mm ammo is probably the most popular ammo in the world. I guess you could get 9mm armor-piercing ammo, whatever that means, and put it in the Glock, but you could also put that ammo in any other 9mm gun.

    The hysterical tone of the article would only be possible in a society that is disarmed, ignorant of guns, and afraid of guns.

     
    Neanderthals
    John sends this NY Times article saying:
    Although many scientists think Neanderthals were a subspecies, which could have interbred with Homo sapiens, new research appears to confirm the more widely held view that Neanderthals and modern humans were significantly different, enough to qualify as separate species.
    Then is it just a coincidence that Neanderthals had big noses, and so do European humans?

    Sunday, Jan 25, 2004
     
    Bush vetoes
    John sends this AP article on presidential vetoes:
    President Bush is on track to become the first chief executive since John Quincy Adams in the 1820s to complete a full term without vetoing one bill.
    It refers to the official US stats.

    It is also an example of a chart that is written by people who do not understand the zero. It shows 4 dots where it should show 0. It is funny how otherwise-educated people have difficulty with the concept.


    Saturday, Jan 24, 2004
     
    American Govt exam
    Andy has been teaching an American Govt history class to homeschoolers, and has posted an exam on his web site.

    Friday, Jan 23, 2004
     
    Rush on trial?
    I had assumed that Rush Limbaugh had already made his deal with prosecutors, but John sends this story saying that prosecutors are asking for a guilty plea to a felony for "doctor shopping". Until this case, I didn't even know that doctor shopping was a crime. If I were he, I'd demand a jury trial. (Of course he hasn't been indicted or charged, yet.)

    Thursday, Jan 22, 2004
     
    Mail-order sperm
    Lesbians can now just order sperm on the internet from ManNotIncluded.com. One happy lesbian just gave birth.
     
    Stephen Hawking
    Prof. Hawking's 2nd wife is beating him up again. The famous mathematical physicist is wheelchair-bound.

    John writes that "contrary to rumor posted on your blog", Hawking denies the abuse.

    Yes, that's what the other story (above) says also. I'm glad to see someone is fact-checking me. But just imagine if the sexes were reversed. Police are now trained to ignore a wife's denial that there is any abuse. She could be suffering from some spousal abuse syndrome that causes her to value the marriage more highly than a possible abuse claim. So sometimes the husband is prosecuted anyway, over the wife's objections, on a theory that the wife has no right to live in an abusive relationship.

     
    Politics of choice
    A NY Times op-ed by Barry Sschwartz says:
    The value of choice has been a consistent theme for the president and his administration. Problems in education, health care and a host of other issues, Mr. Bush has repeatedly argued, can be addressed in large measure by expanding the options available to people. ...

    Though this logic may seem compelling, there is growing evidence that the emotional logic (the psycho-logic) is deeply flawed. Indeed, for many people, increased choice can lead to a decrease in satisfaction. Too many options can result in paralysis, not liberation.

    ... it appears not to be true that more choice inevitably leads to more freedom and greater happiness. Indeed, there may be a point when choice tyrannizes people more than it liberates them. The implication of this news, both for individuals and for government officials, is that sound social policy simply cannot consist of throwing an ever-greater menu of options at the American people.

    By "choice", she is not referring to abortion, but to many other ways in which Republicans advocate letting people choose what to do with their own money. Her evidence includes:
    Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf.
    There is something to this. If a store has 24 varieties of jam on the shelf, the consumer is overwhelmed by the choice. When I am faced with that, then I am less likely to buy jam. But the problem is not really the choice. I want the choice to buy my favorite brand of jam.

    The problem is that the store is not being discriminatory about his jam buying. I will infer that the store just carries whatever jams that his distributor is peddling, without any attempt to figure out what is good. Furthermore, the store gives no way to make an intelligent choice. It does not let customers sample the jam to see what is best. And no one wants to try out 24 jars of jam before settling on one.

    I choose to shop at a food store (Costco) that deliberately limits selection. Last time I was there, it only had only one brand of jam. It is not my favorite brand, but it is a pretty good one, and I could buy it with confidence that it must be good or the management would not have selected it. Furthermore, the store was offering free samples to taste.

    For my favorite jam, I have to goto Trader Joe's. Again, I probably would not have even tried the jam, unless I had confidence in store management in selecting good jams.

    So I guess that I am a prime example of the consumer that enjoys limited choice. But Schwartz seems to want the government to limit my choices. Somehow, I don't think that govt regulation of the jam market would help me any. The existence of choice in the market is crucial to me getting the jam I like, even if I cannot cope with a shelf full of 24 unfamiliar brands.


    Tuesday, Jan 20, 2004
     
    Trashing Bush
    Bob trashes George W. Bush:
    He is the anti-libertarian president who has brought us larger, more intrusive government, enlarged deficits, increased agricultural subsidies, pushed for socialist corporate welfare programs like an oil give-away in ANWR, pandered to busybody prigs, failed to roll back anti-gun legislation, failed to simplify the tax code, and made numerous attempts to reduce our freedom. Details available on request.

    The really bad news is that there are no alternatives. The Democrats are worse and the Libertarians are avowed losers.

    Most of the Bush-haters are left-wing kooks. There is no relief on the horizon.

    Monday, Jan 19, 2004
     
    MikeRoweSoft.com
    John send this story about how Msft took a domain name from some kid named Mike Rowe.

    There are a couple of lessons here. First, you need to start worrying when you are up against the world's richest company, and it hires a law firm named Smart & Biggar.

    Second, in just about any legal dispute, an offer to settle the case is considered to be prudent, and the fact that you made a settlement offer cannot be evidence of guilt. But in domain name disputes, a standard practice of big companies who want domain names is to bait the name-holder into making an offer to sell. Once that happens, the big company can almost always win the dispute by using the settlement offer as proof that the name-holder is guilty of domain name speculation. So if you own a domain name, you have to let the potential buyer name a price first.

     
    Google IPO
    Google is about to go public amid fanatical excitement, but investors have discovered a fatal flaw in Google's business strategy -- it has no customer lock-in.

    So now Reuters reports that Google has bought some email companies in order to have an email service like Hotmail, and serve up ads in email messages. I guess this makes sense for Google, but there are a zillion other portals offering free email, and I think that Google will still be grossly overvalued.

     
    Abestos fraud
    Andy sends this article:
    In a 137-page study, Brickman calculates that almost a half-million meritless claims have resulted in payments to plaintiffs and their attorneys totaling $28.5 billion. He estimates the suits have driven 67 companies into bankruptcy and eliminated 50,000 jobs.
    It is more evidence that lawyers are a big drain on the economy. The courts cannot cope with technical issues.

    Friday, Jan 16, 2004
     
    Mrs. Howard Dean
    I think that it is very strange that Howard Dean's wife is sticking to her medical practice and staying away from the public. He obviously needs her support, and she would presumably be a big asset to his campaign.

    Bob says:

    I think she is doing the responsible thing. Her patients need her. If she abandoned them for a year, then they might get inferior care from someone else.
    That would be even stranger than I thought, if that is her reasoning. She would have to have a giant ego to think that she is so much better than all the other Vermont physicians, and some misplaced priorities to think that some routine medical care is more important than electing the next president of the USA.

    Update: Mrs. Dean just made a surprise trip to Iowa.

    Dean has said she is too busy to leave her patients and their teen-age son in high school and join him on the trail, and he did not want to force her into the typical role of a political wife.
    She also kept her Jewish name and religion.

    Chris writes:

    You are saying that it wouldn’t bother you that a doctor to whom you have gone to for years to abandon you and all her other patients? Is it not really a reflection of the role that society forces on woman that they need to abandon their life whenever their husband requires it of them?

    I think that Ms. Dean is doing absolutely the right thing in providing continuity of care for her patients. If Howard is elected president she will be able to transition her patients to another doctor in a thoughtful and organized manner, though I would certainly support her if she decides to continue to care for her patients. Ego has nothing to do with it. In most case people find the changing of doctors a difficult and stressful process. Over time Ms. Dean has learned her patients and earned their trust, it would be callous of her to simple leave them without helping them transition to new care. Further, if Howard is not elected she would have disrupted her patients as well as her practice for no useful purpose.

    As Howard gets closer to being elected I am certain she will be forced to spend more time campaigning to help dispel the almost certain character attacks the Republicans and their running dogs on the concept of a woman who exists in her own right and not as an appendage of her husband. It is sad that even in this day and age that there is even any discussion of the appropriateness of a woman following her own career and life separately from her husband.

    No, it would not bother me in the slightest if my regular doctor abandoned me. There are plenty of others who can serve an equivalent function. And even if some people were bothered for some reason I don't understand, I certainly think that affecting the election of the President is a good excuse.

    I don't know why Mrs. Dean is avoiding politics. Maybe she is devoted to her medical patients. Maybe she is publicity shy. Maybe she is a poor public speaker, or does poorly on interviews. Maybe she is a right-winger who does not support Howard Dean's campaign positions. Maybe she just hates politics. Maybe Howard Dean doesn't want her involved for some reason. Maybe she hates to travel. But regardless, any of these reasons beg for more explanation. If she becomes the First Lady, will she remain in Vermont diddling with her patients?

    Physicians often present an illusion of having established a patient relationship. A physician might look at a patients file for 30 seconds before an office visit, and say, "Hi Bill. How are you? Is that back still bothering you?" He can say this even tho he has completely forgotten the patient, and the patient feels good about it. But it's no big trick; just about any other physician can do the same thing with the same file.

    Update: Dean just got blown out in Iowa, and his wife is now apparently willing to use the name "Judy Dean" for campaign purposes. I just found this quote on InstaPundit (from a book review):

    Our culture is quick to point out the responsibilities husbands have to wives—they should help out with the housework, be better listeners, understand that a woman wants to be more than somebody's mother and somebody's wife—but very reluctant to suggest that a wife has responsibilities to her husband. The only people willing to say so are right-wing conservatives, and they end up preaching to the choir; ...
    It sounds like hyperbole, but the Dean story proves it. Here Howard Dean is in the midst of the most important ordeal of his life, and has a chance to become the most important man in the world, and some people think that his wife has greater obligations to maintaining some minor and insignificant business relationships. The opinion is bizarre. I don't see how any woman can have a happy marriage unless her first obligations are to her husband.

    Bob writes:

    I ran out of time trying to find the number of doctors in Vermont, but it is well known that doctors are scarce in rural areas. Last time I checked, Vermont was mostly rural. Dean's wife faced with the problem of finding a temporary replacement which would be nearly impossible in a rural area, giving up her practice, or limiting the time she spent campaigning. She made the right choice.
    Bob is assuming that Mrs. Dean is staying in order to address some alleged physician shortage in rural Vermont. I very much doubt that there is a shortage, and that such a shortage had any bearing on his decision. But even if such reasoning made it the "right choice", similar reasoning would say that she should stay in Vermont if Howard Dean is elected president, and that Dean should never have run for political office in the first place.

    Update: Slate reports on Jan. 22:

    Dr. Judith Steinberg, M.D., explained that she stays at home because she has her own private practice
    and my patients are my patients and they really depend on me and I really love it. It's not something I can say "Oh, you can take over for a month." It just doesn't work like that.
    She can't let someone take over for a month, or she won't? Physicians do commonly take vacations. It is not a big deal. This just fuels speculation about what her real reasons are.

    Thursday, Jan 15, 2004
     
    Ritalin
    The pro-ritalin groups are citing another new study that supposedly shows the wonders of ritalin. The title is:
    Rapid improvement in academic grades following methylphenidate treatment in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
    Sounds good, right? Read on, and find that it only studied 19 kids, and used no controls. For controls, it might have been interesting to have some ADHD kids on placebos, some non-ADHD kids on MPH (ritalin), and some non-ADHD kids on placebos. But it didn't do that.

    Then the study concludes:

    The MPH treatment ... showed minimal change on neuropsychological functioning in Taiwanese ADHD children.
    The main reason that millions of US kids are on ritalin is that it supposedly improves neuropsychological functioning. If it is not doing that, then what good is it? The title should have been, "No measurable benefit found for ritalin to ADHD kids". (The article explains that there might be other explanations for the apparent academic gains. Such spurious gains are common in uncontrolled studies.)
     
    Bush-haters
    I just heard Charlie Rose interview Michael Moore and Al Franken.

    Moore went into one of the usual anti-Bush tirades:

    He [Bush] took us into war based on a lie ... Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 with Osama bin Laden.
    When Rose pointed out that Bush never said that, Moore responded:
    What did all the polls show? That the majority of Americans believe that Saddam helped to plan 9/11 with Osama bin Laden.
    IOW, Bush is a liar because the Bush-haters have successfully convinced millions of people that Bush is a liar.

    Moore also recited the distorted story about some Saudis leaving the USA after Sept. 11.

    Franken plays a similar game. Half the time he pretends to be making a serious charge that all the right-wingers are liars. The other half of the time he is making jokes with various stories, smears, and half-truths. When Rose asks about his accountability, he hides behind the label satirist. Apparently a satirist is allowed to lie, but a right-winger is not.

    John sends this NRO epistemology alert. It quotes Rumsfield as saying that truth will win out, and attacks academic postmodernists:

    The names most often associated with this worldview — i.e., that reality is socially constructed, and that objective truth cannot be had — constitutes a glittering who's who of late 20th-century thinkers in France and America ...

    It would be difficult to overstate the influence of epistemological pessimism on European and American campuses, each replete with its own postmodern fiefdom in which Einstein's objectively verifiable theory of general relativity morphs into the absurd, self-negating notion of the general relativity of truth, and in which Heisenberg's rigorously reasoned uncertainty principle is bastardized into the idea that nothing is certain.


    Wednesday, Jan 14, 2004
     
    Stressed out in Santa Cruz
    KGO-TV reports:
    While many think of it as laid back, the Santa Cruz County region ranked 13th on a list of 114 mid-size metro areas considered the most stressed out communities in the nation.
    More details in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

    The survey was a study of several indicators. We score well in weather, as we have some of the best weather in the world, but we have a high concentration of crazy people here.

     
    Iraq, Bush, and 9-11
    Some Bush-haters are claiming that Bush lied during the 2000 election because Bush never told the American people that he wanted regime change in Iraq. They act like it is some sort of big revelation that Bush actually considered military action against Iraq before 9/11/2001.

    Here is what he said in one of the 2000 campaign debates.

    BUSH: The coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it’s unraveling, let’s put it that way. The sanctions are being violated. We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction. He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence, should I be the president. Q: You could get him out of there? BUSH: I’d like to, of course. But it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.
    So everyone surely expected Bush to give Iraq ultimatums, and to follow up with military action, if necessary. That is what Bush I did in 1990, and what Clinton did.

    No one ever said that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attack. What 9/11 changed was Bush's foreign policy. Bush declared war on terrorism, and against those entities who fail to cooperate with the USA in the war on terrorism. Iraq was given an ultimatum, and failed to cooperate.

    John writes:

    Roger provides an excellent, concise refutation of Democratic attacks on Bush's Iraq policy. One could also point out the hypocrisy of most of these same Democrats who supported Clinton's 1998 war against Iraq and his 1999 war against Yugoslavia.

    Today's USA Today publishes a 1995 letter by Howard Dean urging Clinton to take "unilateral action" against Yugoslavia over Bosnia, i.e. to attack Yugoslavia with U.S. air power without UN authorization.

    Yes. A lot of people have conveniently forgotten that Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, so it is fair to say that we were at war with Iraq. They've also forgotten that we invaded Bosnia and Kosovo with UN approval.

    Tuesday, Jan 13, 2004
     
    Is Hamdi a citizen?
    John wrote:
    Today the Supreme Court agreed to review the detention of Yaser Hamdi, an enemy combatant captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield in Afghanistan.

    Hamdi claims U.S. citizenship by reason of the fact that he was born in Louisiana, where his parents were working in the oil industry. His parents, who were Saudi citizens, took him back to Saudi Arabia when he was still a small child and he never returned to the United States.

    The decision below, a 3-0 decision by a panel of the 4th Circuit, said that "Hamdi is apparently an American citizen" and assumed that fact without deciding it.

    One organization following this case has prepared a memorandum showing why Hamdi should not be considered a U.S. citizen.

    It is critical that these arguments be presented to the Supreme Court.

    No doubt the Supreme Court, like the 4th Circuit, would like to decide this case on the assumption that Hamdi is a citizen. (If it was clear he was not a citizen, they would not have bothered to take the case.)

    Our goal would be to get the court to state clearly that it is assuming, not deciding, the question of Hamdi's citizenship. Better still if we could achieve a footnote giving reasons why he may not be a citizen.

    The argument is based on parsing and analyzing the 14A:
    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
    The question is what "subject to" means. If it means nothing, then why is it there? The argument says that Hamdi was a Saudi subject, and not a US subject. There are some cases to support this reasoning.
     
    Intel random numbers
    I just noticed that Intel killed its Pentium random number generator. Last year it said:
    "To the best of our best knowledge, no one is using it today," said a spokeswoman for Intel. Intel has no plans to redesign or improve on it, she added.
    And now it says:
    End of Interactive Support Announcement: These products and tools are no longer being manufactured by Intel.
    I'm not surprised that Intel killed it. The feature was so poorly designed that it was almost unusable. It didn't catch on.

    One problem was that there was no reliable way to detect the presence of the function. Another problem was that apps could not use it if there was the possibility that another app was using it. Another problem was that it was unpredictably slow. Another problem is that it did not give access to the raw random numbers, but only numbers that had been processed by a pseudo-random number algorithm.

     
    Illegal alien amnesty
    We don't know the details yet on G. W. Bush's plan. Giving amnesty to all the illegal aliens would be a disaster, and trying to deport them all would require building concentration camps. Here are some positive things that can be done to help solve the problem.
  • Register all illegal aliens, and give them temporary visas. Fingerprint them and maybe even take DNA samples.
  • Empower local law enforcement to help deport those who do not register. They would not be allowed
  • If parents claim that they shouldn't be deported because their child is an American citizen (by virtue of being illegally born here), then deport the parents anyway. They can either take the kid, or put him in an orphanage.
  • Pass new laws like Calif. Prop. 187 to cut off welfare to illegal aliens. (Prop. 187 was partially in conflict with some US SC rulings, but 90% of it could be reinstated without legal problems.)
  • Impose a new alien payroll tax on companies employing foreign workers in the US. The tax would support some of the social costs of the immigration influx, such as schools and prisons. Those who don't pay the tax would face stiff penalties, just as they face for evading other taxes.
  • Avoid giving amnesty to illegal aliens. INS should give preference to those who follow channels legally.
  • Seal the border with Mexico.
  • Abolish the H-1B program, or reduce it by 90%.

  • Monday, Jan 12, 2004
     
    Schools
    Michael writes:
    You mentioned that you don´t consider private secondary schools to be economically sustainable, but you don´t explain why. Could it be because public education creates an artificially subsidized market and also steals money from those who send their kids to private schools through a coercive system of taxation?
    Yes, it is hard to compete with a free product.

    Thursday, Jan 08, 2004
     
    Bad contracts
    Lawyers like to argue that only a lawyer should draft contracts. This one says that you can edit one down from a standard form, but advises against it because:
    Your time is not free. And when you are done, your contract will be too short. Because business people have some strange belief that all contracts should be short, and that clauses dealing with unlikely events are less important than brevity.
    Brevity has its advantages. Such contracts are usually easier to understand and enforce. Often the parties cannot predict what they want in the case of those unlikely events anyway.

    Read this story about a contract dispute between Novell and SCO. Novell sold the Unix business to SCO in 1994, and probably spent $100k on lawyers drafting the contracts. But the contracts are ambiguous about the most important part of the whole deal: Who owns the Unix copyrights? A simple and amateurish one-page agreement would have been more effective.

     
    Counselors doing harm
    Bob writes about harmful marriage counselors:
    If a marriage counselor has been trained by those who practice the techniques used in memory recovery, they can indeed do harm. I believe that recovered memories are generated by techniques called thought reform or brainwashing. Margaret Thaler Singer worked with American POWs who were victims of Chinese brainwashing during the Korean war and describes the techniques used in "Cults in Our Midst The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace". Singer describes brainwashing techniques and documents their use by cults. Then read "Abduction Human Encounters With Aliens" by John E. Mack, M.D.. Mack is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Center for Psychology & Social Change. In this book he describes how he treats victims of UFO abduction. My conclusion is that his techniques are variants of the thought reform techniques described by Singer. From what I have read and heard from victims of psychologists who have practiced memory recovery I conclude that their techniques are also examples of thought reform or brainwashing. In both cases, memories of far fetched sexual molestation are generated by techniques such as hypnosis and group self criticism.

    Techniques available to trained psychologists are sufficiently powerful to convince people to believe that they have been abducted by space aliens or sexually molested by innocent parents. These techniques may be appropriate to help sick patients, but are also capable of doing harm.

    The recovery memory method is based on Freudian quackery. Freudian psychoanalysis is based on the hypothesis that very early childhood memories are retained and repressed, and cause adult neuroses. Freud's ideas never had any scientific basis, all all attempts to verify Freud's ideas have failed.

    Andy writes:

    Roger, I see you're attacking marriage counselors on your blog.

    Marriage counselors are simply mediators, and mediators are far preferable to litigation. This is no different from any other dispute. Do the parties want to resolve it with assistance by a mediator, or turn the matter over to a pure stranger (judge) to make arbitrary decisions?

    As to marriage disputes themselves, I'm convinced that most are simply due to lack of attention by one (or both) spouses to the other. We are creatures of attention, and women probably need it more than men. Without attention, we're lonely and unhappy.

    I don't think many marriage counselors would be happy calling themselves simple mediators -- they give advice. Nor do I think that they are substitutes for judicial decision-making. I'd like to see some empirical evidence that they do some good.

    Wednesday, Jan 07, 2004
     
    Yelling at kids
    John sends this story on yelling at kids:
    Dr. Murray A. Straus of the Family Research Laboratory in Durham, New Hampshire, surveyed 991 parents, and found that "98 percent had used some form of psychological aggression, such as yelling, threats of spanking, and name-calling, to discipline their children by the time they were five years old."

    ("Only 98 percent?" my wife asked. "Some lied," I answered.)

    It explains how parents need to nag kids like: "Don't run on the ice".

    I yell at kids too, but I think that there are more effective methods than telling a kid not to run on ice. It is much better to the kid on ice, and let her slip and fall in a controlled and safe manner. I figure that the kid will eventually slip on ice no matter what I tell her, so I as might as well make sure she does it safely. That way she learns much better.

     
    Intel makes chips, not innovations
    The NY Times quotes Intel spokesman John H. F. Miner:
    "At Intel, we rely on external innovation," Mr. Miner said. "We just build the chips."
    Wow. Intel is one of the biggest and most profitable high-tech companies in the world, and admits that it cannot invent anything new.

    Tuesday, Jan 06, 2004
     
    The Butterfly Effect
    The butterfly effect is idea that very small causes can produce dramatically out-of-proportion effects. A mathematician named Edward Lorenz showed in the 1960s that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas. There is also a movie about to be released with that name. (The trailer is here.)

    There needs to be another name for the notion that we can prevent tornadoes by killing all the butterflies. I'll call it the butterfly fallacy, unless I think of something better. Often someone will claim that A causes B, where A is anything and B is some bad thing, and then people will try to ban A in order to prevent B. When they find that the ban on A causes other bad things, they blame the law of unintended consequences. When they find that B is not even diminished, they get real confused.

     
    Amnesty
    G W Bush thinks that his reelection will be helped by offering registration and amnesty for illegal aliens from Mexico. He should talk to Gray Davis, who thought the same thing. As it turned out, his plan to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens only clinched his ouster.

    Monday, Jan 05, 2004
     
    Martha Stewart jurors
    Andy writes:
    Jury selection is tomorrow for Martha Stewart. Some court observers feel that most trials are effectively over upon jury selection and opening statements. Alger Hiss' first attorney understood that. His second attorney may not have.

    Martha Stewart should seek to seat jurors who are:
    (a) the wealthy and the Martha Stewart wannabees
    (b) the upper East Siders who voted for Bill Clinton
    (c) the alienated, outraged or downtrodden who dislike US Govt
    (d) people who trade frequently in stocks
    (e) business owners

    John was kind enough to circulate a NY Post article on this topic. I have my pick but will await the opinions of others.

     
    Bad headlines
    The San Jose Mercury Newspaper has terrible headline writers. Today's paper has a page 1 story with the headine: Incredulous scientists pore over photos sent back by Mars craft. But nothing in the story indicates that any scientists were incredulous, as the Mars craft did just exactly what it was supposed to do. It would be incredulous if it were sending back pictures of little green men.

    The story was just a copy of the Wash Post article with the headline: A Triumphant Landing on Mars.


    Sunday, Jan 04, 2004
     
    Alleged molesters are innocent until proven guilty
    When an convicted murderer on death row gets off of death row somehow, the liberal newspapers celebrate him as some sort of mistreated innocent. But when some alleged child molesters go free because they were wrongfully prosecuted, the San Jose Mercury News Top Story is Victims of molesters relive pain after ruling.

    The ruling was that accused molesters could not be prosecuted after the 6-year statute of limitations has expired. Some of those people were serving life sentences based on flimsy evidence from 20 years earlier. They were not lawfully convicted, according to the US Supreme Court, so they should just be called alleged victims and alleged molesters.

    The SJMN has been on the warpath against sex offenders, and has had a series of articles urging an expansion of Megan's laws.

    George writes:

    Some of those molesters confessed to their crimes. You would not be so forgiving if it happened to you.
    If it happened to me, I wouldn't wait 6 years to complain about it. I am not forgiving them, but I do think that it is nearly always impossible to get to the truth behind an alleged sex crime when the first complaint comes in 6+ years later. The confessions may have been part of plea bargains that got them reduced sentences.

    Chris writes:

    “If it happened to me, I wouldn't wait 6 years to complain about it.”

    I can appreciate you would feel this way about molestation and often the most difficult thing to understand about molestation is the reaction of the victims. It is very common for those molested to either suppress the molestation or to be in such thrall to their molesters that they find it difficult if not impossible to admit the molestation even to themselves.

    This does not go as far as the ‘suppressed memory’ movement would suggest but it is not at all uncommon for victims to be in denial for even years after the event. In fact when discussing the molestation of young children, particularly by their parents or a close family member it is important to remember that this can prevent the complete integration of their personalities. It is such a deep and fundamental betrayal of trust that many victims never recover and the molestation destroys any opportunity for a normal life.

    For an individual who has not experienced the deeply destructive effects of this type of event on their life can never really comprehend the behavior of the victim. It is similar to the relationship that one has with a psychotic individual. As a ‘normal’ person it is impossible to understand the disturbed individual’s behavior because the behavior is viewed through a prism of rationality that does not exist in the disturbed individual.

    The same is true of the victims of molestation which makes it difficult to relate to their behavior after the fact.

    I think that the statute of limitations should be reduced for most crimes and civil complaints. When an Anita Hill or Paula Jones brings some complaint about some incident years into the past, and it is nothing but her word against his word, then it just isn't possible for the courts to find the truth.

    I am skeptical that there is any such thing as permanent psychological damage. Many people have horrible things happen to them, and yet go on to live normal and well-adjusted lives.

    Even assuming that the damage is so severe, and that the courts can determine guilt, I still question whether the judicial system can do anything constructive. More likely, it will just make a bad situation worse. And what about the damage done to the innocent, even if they are acquitted?

    There was a recent case in Santa Cruz of a man who was tried and convicted of raping his wife. She wasn't really his wife, but they lived together for several years, had at least one child together, and continued to have some sort of strange love-hate relationship even after they separated. At the trial, the woman testified that no rape ever occurred. She never made any complaint at the time of the alleged rape, either, and there were no eye-witnesses or physical evidence. All the cops had was a comment she made later in a fit of anger.

    The jury was persuaded by 2 witnesses, neither of which even knew the facts of the case:

  • The defendant's previous ex-wife was flown in from Oregon to badmouth him.
  • A prosecution expert witness testified that the defendant matched the profile of a wife-raper.

    The jury decided that the alleged victim was lying to protect the defendant, because she thought that he was a good father to their kid, and she wanted to keep him out of jail so he could continue to see the kid. The conviction was likely to get him a 10-year sentence. (I got all this info from one of the jurors.)

    Chris writes:

    “I am skeptical that there is any such thing as permanent psychological damage. Many people have horrible things happen to them, and yet go on to live normal and well-adjusted lives.”

    I think you need to say ‘appear’ to lead normal and well-adjusted lives. The reality is far different and far sadder than we want to admit. You have many cases where the best that the individual accomplishes is the appearance of normalcy to the outside world while the sense of well-being and happiness that we all take for granted does not exist.

    Do individuals overcome horrible events in their lives? Absolutely. Do many individuals that have terrible, on-going abuse, physical, emotional or sexual, fail to overcome them or become a fraction of what they might have been? Absolutely. By and large the issue is the length of the events, there frequency and their severity as well as any access to help and emotional support from some other players in their life.

    The events that you relate as a rebuttal to my remarks are an excellent example. In the case you mention the woman is unable to conceive of any solution to here life that excludes a man, whom testimony showed, physically and emotionally abused her and her son on a consistent basis. She was the victim of earlier abuse that taught here that the environment she lived in was normal. Her son will almost certainly grow up to abuse others. The courts, however imperfectly are attempting to stop this cycle of abuse and violence that stems from our earliest history.

    Generation after generation of children raised in chaotic and abusive family circumstances (at all levels of the socio-economic ladder) grow up and perpetuate the life that they were raised to. They become sociopaths, predators in the case of men, and the willing victims in the case of woman.

    Denying this unpleasant truth by trying to force our courts to stop being involved is a sad response and ultimately will only increase the number of victims.

    Another view comes from a New York judge:
    A village judge has resigned after he was accused of saying most women enjoy abuse and ask to get "smacked around" and that domestic violence cases are a waste of the court's time.
  •  
    Help Save California
    The California state govt is in a fiscal mess, but there is a simple thing that California parents can do to help: Keep your kid home from school more often. Every day your kid stays home from school, either for medical, personal, or other reasons, California saves about $35.

    With flu bugs prevalent, the schools are easily accommodating the absences. The student's education would probably even benefit if he played hooky every Friday and read a book instead. If every kid was absent every Friday, then the state would save billions of dollars.

     
    Pete Rose
    I am sure that everyone will say it is now a proven fact that Pete Rose bet on baseball, when his new book admits it. But I don't buy it.

    Rose has apparently been told that such an admission is the only way that he'll get what he really wants -- reinstatement by MLB and eligibility for the Baseball Hall Of Fame. The admission is also probably the only way his book will be a best-seller. So whereas people usually assume that an admission of guilt is true, I think that it is just another piece of self-serving self-promotion that should be viewed with skepticism.


    Saturday, Jan 03, 2004
     
    Posner censors speech again
    Andy writes:
    Judge Posner just upheld censorship of a teacher who merely published school test questions to criticize them. The decision spells trouble for accountability in testing, not to mention free speech.

    Meanwhile, Judge Posner is getting goofier in his language, probably with the hubris that he can change grammatical rules. Here is one example: The teacher "did this because he thought them bad tests ..." (Slip op. at 4).

    Posner criticized the teacher for not citing Posner's Aimster decision, where Posner said that it was clearly a copyright infringement to fast-forward thru a recorded commercial. He also says:
    He insists that he had to copy six tests out of the 22 to 44 tests given in January 1999 (it is unclear from the record which number is correct, so we will give Schmidt the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is the higher number) in order to drive his criticisms home. But he does not explain why, or indicate witnesses or documents that might support such an argument. Granted that he had to quote some of the test questions in order to substantiate his criticisms, why entire tests? Does he think all the questions in all six tests bad? He does not say. What purpose is served by quoting the good questions? Again, no answer.
    But later Posner mentions that Schmidt did give the obvious explanation for why an entire test has to be copied:
    The memorandum argues that if Schmidt quoted only a few of the questions, the school board would respond that he was cherry-picking the worst.
    So Posner is really just complaining that Schmidt made the argument in a memorandum cited by his appellate brief, instead of in the appellate brief itself!

    Part of the problem here is that Posner subscribes to a theory of copyright law that says that unpublished works should have stronger copyright protection than published works. This turns copyright theory on its head, since the whole point of copyright law is to promote the availability of publications.

    Posner also says:

    If ever a “floodgates” argument had persuasive force, therefore, it is in this case. ... If Schmidt wins this case, it is goodbye to standardized tests in the Chicago public school system; Schmidt, his allies, and the federal courts will have wrested control of educational policy from the Chicago public school authorities.
    US copyright protection on unpublished works has only been available for about 25 years. Obviously, the schools have been using standardized tests a lot longer than that. The testmakers can use trade secret laws and other laws to protect their confidentiality if they wish.

    Similar arguments used to be given for why the ETS SAT exam must be kept secret. And yet the old exams are now published, no ill effect (except that ETS is exposed to more public scrutiny.


    Friday, Jan 02, 2004
     
    Marriage counselors
    People commonly believe that (1) the purpose to marriage counselors is to save marriages, and (2) marriage counseling works. I doubt both. I think that most marriage counselors would say that their purpose is more to help people understand themselves and their partners, and to help making decisions about their lives. If the marriage counselor thinks that the marriage is doomed, then she will push divorce and try to alleviate guilt about it.

    It is easy to find people who claim that they have been helped by marriage counselors, but it is just as easy to find people who say they've been helped by vitamin C or dubious food supplements. The apparent benefit can be explained like the placebo effect. Marriages have their ups and downs, and people are most likely to see a counselor at the bottom of a trough. Maybe they would have improved faster without the counselor.

    Also, successful counselors are good at convincing clients that their services are worthwhile. Astrologers, acupuncturists, and other quacks do the same thing. But I don't think that there is any scientific evidence that their services are worthwhile.

    If you want to get an idea about how shrinks are supposed to be diagnosing people, see this summary of the DSM IV.

    George writes:

    Maybe counseling doesn't help some people. But it can't do any harm, and it surely helps others, so it surely has an overall positive effect.
    Counselors, shrinks, and other therapists can certainly do a lot of harm. They can give very bad advice, either because they don't have all the facts, or they have different value, or whatever, and people can foolishly follow that bad advice because it has an air of authority. Bad advice and bad diagnoses do a lot of harm.

    Even when therapists give good advice, they can harm people because they don't learn to solve their own problems.


    Wednesday, Dec 31, 2003
     
    Astro pictures
    This expanding star made Space.com's list of the 10 best pictures of 2003.

    Tuesday, Dec 30, 2003
     
    Poincare conjecture solved
    The Boston Globe is reporting that the (3 dimensional) Poincare conjecture has been solved. This is one of the 7 math problems with a $1M Clay prize.

    The Poincare conjecture is one of the most elusive problems in mathematics. Many brilliant mathematicians have found arguments that seem to almost work, and many alleged proofs have been shot down. It will take a few months to check this one.

    Update: I see that the experts still cannot decide whether Hales' proof of the Kepler Conjecture is correct or not. Just too many details to check.

     
    OnStar wiretapping
    Do you have one of those fancy new monitoring systems in your car like OnStar? They can be lifesavers in case of emergency, but they can also be used for secret court-order FBI eavesdropping of your conversations in your car!

    The 9C court narrowly rejected such a surveillance order in this case, but for obscure technical reasons and not privacy. The story makes it seem likely that other surveillance orders are already in effect.


    Monday, Dec 29, 2003
     
    String theory
    Here is some expert criticism of string theory. The latest problem is that many theorists have come around to the view that string theory will have no predictive power unless the anthropic principle is assumed; and that's just a fancy way of saying that it will have no predictive power. Certainly not in the way that the unified field theorists have always dreamed about.
     
    Democrats for Bush
    Andy writes:
    Andy scoffed at the possibility that Bush could get more votes in 2004 than he got in 2000. This article well expresses where many of those new votes are coming from.
    The gist is that only Bush has the guts to face the Mohammedan terrorist threat.
     
    Vaccines
    Some people will call you anti-science if you criticize vaccines. Michael Fumento is upset about people who object to forced military anthrax vaccines, and the WSJ is upset about those who think that autism might be related to thimerosal (mercury) in childhood vaccines.

    The military anthrax program was crooked from the start, with juicy contracts going to military insiders to produce dubious vaccines against a dubious threat. There was no good military or scientific or medical justification for vaccinating everyone. All the law says is that the US Army must either use FDA approved drugs, or get consent of the soldier, or get an appropriate executive order. It seems reasonable to me.

    Mercury probably doesn't cause autism. But everyone now agrees that mercury is neurologically dangerous, and shouldn't be used in vaccines. The issue is whether vaccine makers should have any liability for putting mercury in vaccines. There is the possibility that the courts will inaccurately assess the risk in lawsuits. Maybe it is even probable, since most judges are scientifically illiterate. But Congress should do more to fix the courts, and not just pass special-interest laws that shelter the financial interests of big companies that are allied with the Republicans.

     
    Third World Clans
    Bob recommends this WSJ article on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and this NY Times article on Iraq. They explain the backwardness of Third World countries in terms of clan loyalties. Most Iraqis marry their cousins. Here is another article on that point.
     
    Michael Jackson's shoulder
    Michael Jackson complains that the police dislocated his shoulder. That might be possible if he had a dislocation in the past (and didn't have it surgically repaired). But I don't believe it. He is lying.

    Update: I see that plenty of others are saying that Jackson is lying about this and that his CBS 60 Minutes interview contains other lies. And the NY Times reveals that Jackson was paid $1M for the interview, even tho CBS claims that it never pays for news interviews.

    Update: The NY Times reporter has credibility problems.

     
    Depressing wages
    John sends this Bloomberg News article on Indian software outsourcing. It quotes Msft's Steve Ballmer, Intel's Andy Grove, Federal Reserve Banker Alan Greenspan, and an Indian trade association in support of the supposed need for a USA national policy to depress wages for engineers. Ballmer's idea is to flood the market with a gross oversupply of engineers. With engineering unemployment rates already near an all-time high, artificially jacking up the unemployment rate would surely depress wages further, and perhaps increase Msft profits.

    What's next? Flooding California with illegal Mexicans in order to depress strawberry picker wages and makes strawberries cheaper? Oh yeah, we're already doing that.


    Sunday, Dec 28, 2003
     
    Catholic schools
    Andy writes:
    At dinner Wednesday evening I remarked that private secondary schools are generally economically unsustainable, and are going broke. I noted that since 1965, half of all Catholic high schools have closed.

    My claims were met with disagreement by everyone else at the table. Specifically, Aunt Eleanor and the others said Catholic schools in St. Louis were thriving.

    Now I have the stats. Nationwide, the number of diocesan high schools have dropped from 1,566 to 786 between 1965 and 2002. Parochial grade schools have declined from 10,503 to 6,623 during the same period, and enrollment in those schools have dropped from 4.5 to 1.9 million.

    Is St. Louis an exception? Maybe it is doing slightly better, perhaps due to problems in its public school system. According to a Riverfront Times article, the archdiocese had 202 parochial elementary schools in 1965. "This year, it's down to 137 schools. Next year, the number will drop again."

    The main reasons for the precipitous decline in Catholic schools are sharply rising tuition, which Catholic families cannot afford, and loss of Catholic character.

    What I haven't been able to confirm is whether non-Catholic private schools are also declining. Their costs are rising sharply also, but they have a broader customer base and can benefit from the exodus from public schools.

    Homeschool statistics remain completely unknown in major states.

    JG writes:
    The Council for American Private Education (CAPE) Web site has a lot of interesting statistics; one of my favorites is that 30% of public school teachers consider "students unprepared to learn" as being a "serious problem."
    The site says that student enrollments have been increasing:
    According to the report, "Enrollment in private elementary and secondary schools increased 18 percent between 1988 and 2001, and is projected to increase 7 percent between 2001 and 2013." By way of comparison, enrollment in public schools "increased 19 percent between 1988 and 2001, and is projected to increase 4 percent between 2001 and 2013"
    But Catholic schools have been losing market share to nonsectarian and conservative Christian schools. So maybe one explanation is just that
     
    What is a turn?
    John sends this story about a judge trying to evade a DUI because state law fails to define a turn. Only a lawyer would think that his guilt or innocence should depend on whether the cop had a good reason for stopping him, as opposed to whether or not he was really driving drunk.
     
    Sex differences
    50 years ago, a magazine article could write about the differences between men and women without worrying about political correctness. Here is a fine example.
     
    Patent agent ethics
    The US PTO published a proposed new code of ethics for patent agents.One of the proposed new rules is:
    Sec. 11.102 (c) A practitioner may limit the objectives of the representation if the client having immediate or prospective business before the Office consents in writing after full disclosure by the practitioner.
    Ok, simple enough. But in support of the rule are these remarks:
    The terms upon which representation is undertaken may exclude specific objectives or means. Such limitations may exclude objectives or means that the practitioner regards as repugnant or imprudent, or which the practitioner is not competent to handle. For example, a patent agent who is not an attorney should exclude services beyond the scope authorized by registration as a patent agent, such as preparing and prosecuting trademark and copyright registrations, patent validity or infringement opinions, or drafting or selecting contracts, including assignments.
    These remarks significantly misstate the law.
  • Limitations on the practice of law vary from state to state, and are not so easily summarized.
  • Patent agents can and do often offer services that are not directly authorized by the USPTO. Eg, a patent agent might offer engineering or marketing advice, and there is nothing controversial about it.
  • The patent agent license has always been construed to include giving legal advice that is necessary or incident to USPTO filings. For most patent agents, filing patent assignments is essential to maintaining an independent practice. But the above remarks imply that a patent agent cannot even download the official USPTO assignment form and hand it to a client. Also, it is often necessary, appropriate, and lawful for patent agents to give patent validity and infringement opinions.

    The following rationale would make more sense:

    For example, a patent practitioner who is not a licensed engineer could exclude services such as engineering advice, if such advice is improper under the applicable laws.
    George writes:
    The above statement does say that patent agents should not be doing assignments or infringement opinions. Since the statement came from the US PTO, isn't that proof that doing those things is outside the license granted by the US PTO?
    No, it isn't. The USPTO is doing a thorough overhaul of the ethics rules for patent practitioners, and replacing 37 CFR 10 with a proposed 37 CFR 11. It could easily put in a rule against patent agents doing assignments, or put in any other limitation on patent agents, if it wanted to. It could refuse to accept patent assignments from patent agents, and it could put "for use by attorneys and inventors only" on the blank assignment form. It doesn't.

    After considering the possibility that patent agents might have some limitations, the rule it proposed is one that lets patent practitioners voluntarily limit their responsibilities in a written client contract. If patent agent responsibilities were already so limited under law or ethics rules, then there would be no reason to put such limits in a private contract. So apparently the US PTO is tacitly acknowledging that patent agents can lawfully give a wide range of legal advice.


  • Saturday, Dec 27, 2003
     
    Data Quality Act
    Andy writes:
    The Data Quality Act (2001) has enormous potential for cleaning up misinformation put out by our government. Just as language often determines the outcome of debates, underlying data has a powerful influence on policies and litigation. For an overview of the Act, see this.

    Take a sacred cow the assumption that asbestos in brakes pose a health hazard. In August, a Philadelphia law firm invoked the Data Quality Act to demand that the EPA correct its demagoguery about asbestos. Specifically, the law firm send a letter demanding that the EPA stop claiming that asbestos in brakes is dangerous to the health of mechanics. The EPA's claim has been promoting costly lawsuits against the auto industry and forcing the removal of asbestos from brakes, endangering all of us who drive on highways (asbestos is superior to other materials used in brakes). The attorney's letter is here.

    Two months later, the Agency responded by promising to put a note on its written and electronic versions that it is in the process of updating its information. It also promised to involve the public before adopting a new position.

    Should we be invoking the Data Quality Act on other issues?

     
    No glass ceiling
    Andy sends this story:
    Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that, as of Nov. 30, women represent 50.6 percent of the 48 million employees in management, professional and related occupations.
    Apparently there is more discrimination against men, than women.

    Thursday, Dec 25, 2003
     
    Activist court
    A Wash Post op-ed tries to make the case that the Rehnquist court is much more activist than any US supreme court since the 1930s New Deal. It is written by an idiot law professor named Cass R. Sunstein.

    In the years before Rehnquist, the supreme court:

  • decided that the Constitution required forced school busing;
  • declared all existing state legislatures unconstitutional;
  • wiped out the death penalty;
  • revised most police procedures, including Miranda warnings;
  • wiped out all state abortion laws;

    The Rehnquist court has never done anything as activist as the above decisions. It has invalidated a few laws, but only in cases where Congress was doing something that it had never dared to do before, and where the court decision was inconsequential. I think that the Rehnquist court is the least activist of the 20th century (and that Sunstein is an idiot).

  •  
    McDonalds
    It is amazing how the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit of a few years ago continues to polarize people's view of the judicial system. To most people, myself included, it is a textbook example of a frivolous lawsuit.

    Meanwhile, others adamantly argue that the complaint was valid, and that anyone would think that McDonalds should have to pay up if they only knew all the facts. The especially damning facts are:

  • McDonalds rejected an out-of-court demand for money.
  • The woman did not have a cup-holder in her car.
  • Some of McDonalds' competitors have slower service and colder coffee.
  • McDonalds had paid some claims for coffee burns in the past.
  • McDonalds could have achieve better tasting coffee at lower temperature, by buying more expensive beans and taking other steps.
  • McDonalds experts had estimated that 50 or so out of every billion cups of coffee served would result in burns, and decided that the rate was tolerable.

    Of course McDonalds expects lawsuits. All big companies the size of McDonalds have 100s of claims and lawsuits going on at any given time. It is part of doing business.

    It is amazing how people can be offended when a business makes a business decision. All major businesses make 100s of decisions like those every day. It is impossible to do business any other way.

    Some people are offended that McDonalds does not immediately switch from (beef) hamburgers to soy burgers, because of the risk of e.coli, heart disease, mad cow disease, or whatever. If you think that eating at McD is too risky for you, then I suggest you eat elsewhere. The fast food market is hotly competitive, and you ought to be able to find some restaurant to your liking.

  •  
    Science news
    Here are a couple of 2003 science stories I missed.

    Prozac was thought to be a miracle drug because it is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Now it turns out that Prozac doesn't do that, and that it would cause depression if it did.

    The African primate skeleton Lucy was thought to be a 3.5M year old ancestor of humans. Now they have found another ape fossil of about the same age, but quite different from Lucy. These two fossils are obviously different species and there is as much reason to think that one is a human ancestor as the other. They cannot both be human ancestors. So the whole Lucy theory has been scrapped. Yet another missing link turns out to be bogus.

    Bob says:

    That's not fair. Piltdown Man was a hoax. Lucy was just an academic overstating the importance of his results.

    Do you have a cite for the Prozac result?

    No. I got it from a recent TV show on the Science channel. A simple web search turned up lots of sites that love or hate Prozac for various reasons, but I didn't find the result.

    Wednesday, Dec 24, 2003
     
    Bush's spending
    Chris writes:
    I have attached a spreadsheet that I created from Government figures which break down the federal tax dollar imbalance each state receives and assign them to whether the Bush or Gore received the electoral votes from the state.

    I am curious how one can justify that the candidate who ran against the size of the Federal Government received far and away the majority of votes from states that receive more in federal dollars that they pay in taxes. Further how does the current massive deficit spending by the republican congress square with the purpose of shrinking the Federal Government?

    Or, as I suspect, we have reached the point where the partisan histrionics is the only signal getting through and there is no longer any coherent political philosophy in either party? Perpetuation of power is the only goal in politics as well as the enrichment of campaign contributors and concern for the national welfare is a fools game?

    I don't remember Bush promising to reduce the size of the federal govt. If he did, then he sure hasn't kept that promise. Federal spending has shot way up during the Bush administration, even before 9/11. Bush hasn't vetoed a single spending bill. He has also actively pushed new spending for education, medicare drugs, and other programs.

    At any rate, both parties seem to buy votes by promising goodies to special interest groups, and they have both done it for a long time.

     
    Medical journal corruption
    This UK Guardian article says that half of all medical journal articles are written by ghostwriters. The writers are employed by big drug companies in order to slant the results towards their commercial interests.

    Tuesday, Dec 23, 2003
     
    Lessig on Posner
    Lessig usually goes on anti-copyright rants on his blog, but now he praises the views of his old boss, Judge Posner.

    But Judge Posner says that one of his favorite copyright decisions is his one on Aimster. In it, Posner declares that the US Supreme Court Betamax decision found it to be unquestionably copyright infringement for a consumer to fast-forward thru a commercial:

    The third was skipping commercials by taping a program before watching it and then, while watching the tape, using the fast-forward button on the recorder to skip over the commercials. The first use the Court held was a fair use (and hence not infringing) because it enlarged the audience for the program. The copying involved in the second and third uses was unquestionably infringing to the extent that the programs copied were under copyright and the taping of them was not authorized by the copyright owners—but not all fell in either category. ... it was apparent that the Betamax was being used for infringing as well as noninfringing purposes—even the majority acknowledged that 25 percent of Betamax users were fast forwarding through commercials
    But I can't find where the Betamax decision says that it is an infringement to fast-forward thru commercials. It mentions the matter, and says this:
    In a separate section, the District Court rejected plaintiffs' suggestion that the commercial attractiveness of television broadcasts would be diminished because Betamax owners would use the pause button or fast-forward control to avoid viewing advertisements
    But it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the outcome. I really doubt that Lessig agrees with any of this.

    Andy writes:

    Judge Posner, I'm afraid, grasps for that last defense of a bankrupt philosophy censorship. Even if he were right that amicus briefs are a waste of money, why does he insist on censoring them? Far more plausible is that Judge Posner doesn't like being shown up by amici. But that is no excuse to censor them.

    On the website of the interview of Posner, he confirms that he is a worshiper of the incoherent Oliver Wendell Holmes, and can only rely on a silly putdown of the Economist's scathing review of his latest book.

    I agree that Holmes is incoherent. This biography says:
    A cornerstone of Holmes's judicial philosophy was his opinion that, "The life of the law has not been logic, but experience." He insisted that the court look at the facts in a changing society, instead of clinging to worn-out slogans and formulas. Holmes convinced people that the law should develop along with the society it serves. He exercised a deep influence on the law through his support of the doctrine of "judicial restraint" which urged judges to avoid letting their personal opinions affect their decisions.
    In other words, Holmes's philosophy was to let his own personal political and opinions drive his own judicial decisions, but to discourage all other judges from doing the same thing.

    Monday, Dec 22, 2003
     
    Earthquake
    The 6.5 earthquake was centered about 80 miles from me, but I didn't even feel it.
     
    Internet or internet?
    Andy writes to Wired magazine:
    I enjoy reading Wired for its forward-thinking articles. But why do you still spell "internet" with a capital "I"? It is inevitable that the geeky capitalization will be discarded over time. Already the Economist has converted to a lower-case "i". In the recent decision by the stodgy Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Verizon v. RIAA, the court converted to a lower-case "i". Wired does not use capital letters for "television" or "telephone"; how much longer will it treat the internet like an oddity?
    Yes, there is no good reason to capitalize internet. Maybe some people think that it is a trademark, I don't know.

    We'll know that they are just idiots following obsolete style rules if they publish Andy's letter with the punctuation symbols moved inside the quote marks.

    Lots of magazines and other publishers have severe misunderstandings when it comes to trademarks. Eg, some think that they are under some obligation to use the symbol TM or circle-R when referring to a trademarked name. And even when they think that, they are wildly inconsistent about when they acknowledge a trademark.

    Others refuse to say something like "Roger xeroxed the page", and want to use "photocopy" instead. Photocopy means to copy onto film using a photographic process. To xerox a page means to copy it onto plain paper. The Xerox corporation hired someone to invent the word in order to describe plain-paper copying, because the word photocopy was inaccurate.


    Sunday, Dec 21, 2003
     
    Gay poll
    Here is a NYT/CBS poll on same-sex marriage. The NY Times headline is:
    Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage
    But the support is not really that strong -- the public opposes it by the overwhelming margin of 61-34. The CBS News headline for the very same poll story is:
    Opposition To Gay Marriage Grows

    The poll questions are biased, although not quite as bad as the Pew poll I attacked before. The NYT/CBS questions are:

    Homosexual relations between adults should be ... [legal, not legal, no opinion]

    Do you favor or oppose a law allowing homosexuals to marry? [favor, oppose, no opinion]

    Do you favor or oppose a constitutional amendment only between a man and a woman? [favor, oppose, no opinion]

    I don't think that any states had law against such a vague concept as "homosexual relations". The laws were mainly against anal sodomy. Occasionally the laws were against oral sodomy, or same-sex anal sodomy, or something like that. The question should have been more specific, like "Do you favor or oppose laws against anal sodomy?"

    The next question should have asked about same-sex marriage. The marriage laws require the spouses to be of the opposite sex. They don't say anything about the sexual orientation of those getting married. The fact is that those with a homosexual orientation are allowed to marry, just like everyone else.

    The more significant result of the poll is that a majority of the people support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Such an amendment to the federal constitution would be a very radical and dubious move, and it shows that most people are disgusted with the courts trying to force the gay agenda on the American public.

    Both polls show a sharp split between those who think that homosexuality is a choice, and those who think that it is an orientation that cannot be changed. The NYT/CBS poll puts 44% in each camp, and says that the big majority of the support for gay marriage comes from the latter. That explains why we are always hearing propaganda that homosexuality is an inborn trait.


    Friday, Dec 19, 2003
     
    No RIAA subpoenas
    John writes:
    Eagerly awaiting expert reaction to today's bombshell USCA-DC decision in RIAA v. Verizon, with opinion by Andy's old boss, the "good Ginsburg." Nothing on Roger's blog yet.

    Here is a roundup of news reports: 1 2 3

    Here is the full text.

    Despite this court's notorious hostility to amicus briefs, 3 amicus briefs were filed, 2 for Verizon and 1 for RIAA.

    Here is Phyllis's column criticizing the [DMCA] law before it was passed.

    I am sympathetic to the result, and I am glad to see this DMCA section gutted because I think that it is a lousy law, but I think Andy's old boss has been smoking dope again. The opinion is nutty. Ginsburg seems to think that 17 USC 512(h) was written only to subpoena ISP over works that are on the ISP's own servers. But there is no need for such a subpoena to identify the infringer, because the ISP would be the infringer in that case.

    I found this Ginsburg statement especially bizarre:

    ... the legislative history of the DMCA betrays no awareness whatsoever that internet users might be able directly to exchange files containing copyrighted works. That is not surprising; P2P software was ‘‘not even a glimmer in anyone’s eye when the DMCA was enacted.’’

    The internet has always been used for peer-2-peer file sharing. That goes back at least 20 years, and maybe 30. The whole purpose of 512(h) is to identify P2P file sharers. I cannot think of any other purpose for it, and I am baffled that Ginsburg doesn't think that this is clear from the legislative record.

    John writes:

    The DMCA was signed into law in October, 1998. Napster was founded in May, 1999 the first software that enabled practical P2P file sharing between computers that had no prior connection with each other.
    The whole purpose of 512(h) is to identify P2P file sharers.
    but only where some of the infringing material is stored on the ISP, not where the ISP is "acting only as a conduit for data transferred between two internet users."

    Thanks to newly elected Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), who has conducted a vigorous investigation of RIAA's subpoena practices, RIAA and MPAA are unlikely to get any more legislation passed. 1998 was the high water mark of the copyright industry.

    Napster popularized a particular form of P2P file sharing, but how do you think that people transferred files before Napster? Usually it is P2P. On some older networks, one peer might have to upload a file to a server, and then let the other peer download it from the server. But the internet has been peer-to-peer since the 1970s.

    Before Napster, people would share their music with other protocols, such as ftp, http, or nntp. Files on my computer might go directly to other computers, with only transitory fragments being on intermediate ISP servers.

    For most people, ordinary email is P2P. I could set up my email program to automatically send out MP3 files to anyone requesting them. Would Ginsburg say that I would be out of reach from DMCA subpoenas because no one realized that was a possibility in 1998?

    That makes no sense. A P2P computer network may have been an innovation in the 1970s, but it is absurd to say that it was invented in 1999. It is the main way people have been using computers for the last 10 years.

    Whom are you quoting about the "conduit"? That language is not in the DMCA. Sec. 512(h)(1) says:

    A copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner's behalf may request the clerk of any United States district court to issue a subpoena to a service provider for identification of an alleged infringer in accordance with this subsection.
    It seems pretty clear to me that the purpose is to force a service provider, who is acting as a conduit, to identify a user who is transferring files. What other purpose to the section could there be?

    On p. 13 Ginsburg give the theory that the purpose of 512(h) is for an ISP hosting a user web page on an ISP server, or for an ISP hosting an information locating tool.

    But the subpoenas would not be needed in either case. If the ISP is hosting infringing web pages, and copying those web pages for anyone making a request, then the ISP is a direct infringer. The copyright owner can just sue the ISP (after it follows the take-down provisions of the DMCA). The copyright owner only needs the subpoena in the case that the ISP has no liability and no take-down obligations.

    Joe writes:

    Yes - Alexander is pushing hard for resumption of downloading. I am, of course, playing the grinch.
    You'll lose the battle when Alex gets to college. Today's college students see nothing wrong with downloading.

    When you went to college, you probably had a hi-fi and some records. If someone told you that you had to pay performance rights to play music for everyone on your floor, or that you had to donate money to listen to a noncommercial radio station, you'd look at him like he is nuts.

    Today's students don't have hi-fis and records. They have computers and speakers or headphone, and fast internet connections. They plug in, and music comes down the wire. No one charges money for the music, and there is no obvious reason why they should pay. Nor is it clear who they would. They know that some old fogeys don't think that they should be listening to internet music, but those same old fogeys don't think that they should be listening the hip hop music either.

    Imagine trying to convince Alex that he should call in pledge to his local NPR affiliate. You might say:

    You are freeloading if you don't pay. The station is noncommercial so it depends on listeners like you. .... Yes, I know that they have commercials anyway, but they are separate from the big media oligopoly that dominates the airwaves. They can have alternative views, like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, that are shunned by big business. ... Yes, they'll still broadcast whether you pay or not, but if you pay then they'll be less dependent on govt money and be less afraid to tell the truth about American imperialism in the middle east. Besides, the media should be community supported anyway, so that our consumption habits are not dictated by the Coca-Cola company.
    Alex would just roll his eyes and say that you are asking him to promote a business model that he doesn't believe in, and nobody says he has to pay, so he is just not going to pay.

    It is similar with online music. The RIAA has a convoluted legalistic argument that the music CD distribution companies should also control the online distribution of music, and the best way to facilitate that is to shut down the Napster-like programs. But there is no legal, business, or political consensus that the RIAA is correct. Ask Alex or a typical college student to comply with the wishes of the RIAA, and he will just roll his eyes and wonder why anyone should promote a business model that is bad for society. They think that the music labels are evil, and the sooner they go out of business, the better.

    John asks:

    If you are right about the internet being peer-to-peer before 1998, then why didn't RIAA make that argument? How could the judges be do dumb? And why hasn't anyone else attacked the opinion by making the same point? Doesn't the RIAA have any friends in the media?
    Good questions. The RIAA doesn't seem to have any friends on the web sites that I regularly visit. I don't know what arguments the RIAA made, but the judges seemed to be trying to use their own knowledge to override the plain meaning of the DMCA.

    As for how the judges could be so dumb, remember that these are the same judges who sabotaged the Microsoft antitrust case. Even tho Msft had a consent decree saying that they could not force the bundling of application software, these judges said that Msft could do it anyway, and they threw antitrust enforcement into chaos. They also made those rulings based on some pretty fundamental misunderstandings of some basic technology. So yes, I think that they are technological illiterates.

    As for others, I think that most of them think that the courts are just political anyway, and they just look at the results. Consider the recent 9C medical marijuana decision. An objective observer would say that the plaintiffs had no standing, because they were not being prosecuted and not even under any threat of prosecution, and that the feds had authority to regulate medical marijuana under the established precedents related to the Commerce Clause. But medical marijuana is a popular cause, and no one criticizes an opinion favorable to it.

    I checked the EFF brief, and it argues against the subpoenas on due process and other constitutional grounds, but does not question that 512(h) applies to material where Verizon is a conduit, not a host.

     
    Survey: Parents yell at kids
    JG found this story about a survey:
    Nearly all U.S. parents yell, threaten or use other forms of so-called psychological aggression to discipline their children, the results of a new study suggests.

    Researchers say it's time to shift the widespread cultural acceptance of these methods.

    The study, which looked at a nationally representative sample of 991 parents, found that 98 percent had used some form of psychological aggression, such as yelling, threats of spanking, and name-calling, to discipline their children by the time they were five years old.

    Next, the pediatricians will come out with specific recommendations against yelling at kids, and Sweden will pass a law against it.
     
    Paypal scams
    Bruce Schneier writes in the SJMN that we've seen 3 waves of network attacks: hardware, syntactic, and semantic. The 3rd one is typified by bogus PayPal email that tries to trick you into revealing your password to a thief so he can pull money from your bank account. His conclusion is very pessimistic, as he says that people are too unsophicated and computer security technology is useless.

    Schneier is wrong. There is a technological fix. IBM and HP call it TCPA. Intel calls it LaGrande. Microsoft calls it Palladium or NGSCB. You will hear a lot more about it.


    Thursday, Dec 18, 2003
     
    Michael Jackson
    I think that Michael Jackson is going to be acquitted. Kobe Bryant, also. Scott Peterson will fry.
     
    Science peer review
    Leftist environmentalists have been accusing GW Bush of biased science. Now the Bush administration proposes to make govt science more scientific:
    The proposal, scheduled to take effect early next year, would require all government agencies to set up a formal, external "peer review" for any scientific study that could affect major federal regulations or "important public policies." Advocates say the plan will reduce bias in government science and regulation.
    The leftists are more upset than ever, because it will be harder to use bogus science to promote their agendas.

    Chris writes:

    Huh?

    Apparently you mysteriously read some other article than the one to which you posted a link. Where in the article is there any comment or mention of ‘leftist bogus science?’

    The objections are to the insertion of an additional layer of bureaucracy into what is currently already a heavily reviewed scientific process. Further the major concern is the exemption of permit applications from this process:

    The proposal favors industry in other ways, critics argue. For example, it exempts from peer review so-called "permit applications," such as a chemical company's request for permission to sell a new pesticide.

    Please present some evidence where there has been any regulation implemented on ‘bogus science.’

    I've never heard so much complaining about scientific peer review.
    Govt policies are justified by bogus science all the time. Consider the gasoline additives MTBE and methanol. Govt science claimed that it reduces air pollution, so it was mandated. MTBE makes my gasoline more expensive, and it pollutes the ground water, and it makes mileage worse, and it doesn't even improve air pollution. Methanol is similarly a big waste of money.

    Or look at govt forest policies. Supposedly the policies are determined by environmental science, but instead they just contribute to horrible forest fires. You hardly ever hear about forest fires on private timber land. The bad fires are on the land managed by govt scientists who are supposed to be preserving the forest.

    There are lots of other examples where some dubious govt science is used to promote some agenda that is different from what the science really says. Clean air, endangered species, breast implants, asbestos, global warming, etc. I'll try to post some more specific examples later.


    Wednesday, Dec 17, 2003
     
    WTC asbestos
    Andy has his own theory about how asbestos should not have been banned from the WTC. After 9/11, NY Times science writer James Glanz said:
    Virtually as one, experts on the development, testing and use of fireproofing materials say no standard treatment of the steel, asbestos or otherwise, could have averted the collapse of the towers in the extraordinarily hot and violent blaze.

    But some wonder whether asbestos insulation might have kept the towers intact long enough for more people to have escaped. And more important, they say the disaster at the World Trade Center exposes a gap in their knowledge about many fireproofing materials.

    But now he says:
    Whether the collapse of the twin towers was inevitable given the structural damage done by the hijacked planes, or whether the towers would have been able to stand with better fire protection is still not known. The exact sequence of failures that led to the towers' falling has not yet been determined either.
    So maybe asbestos might have saved the towers after all.
     
    Wright Brothers
    The Wrights' invention of the airplane has gotten a lot of press. John sends this NRO article saying the Wrights' big accomplishment was landing, not flying, and this article saying that they did it on their own money while their competitor was getting big govt grants.

    Several articles correct give credit to others besides the Wright brothers, but I found this NY Times op-ed annoying. The author, Paul Hoffman, seems to want to blame the Wrights for (1) protecting their trade secrets until they were ready for market; (2) patenting their invention; and (3) trying to enforce their patents. He concludes:

    In the end, the advance they made in flight technology was quickly squandered. European aviators lost little time in following the Wrights into the air.
    I don't know what Hoffman thinks that the Wrights should have done. If they had revealed their secrets earlier, or had failed to protect their patent rights, then competitors would have copied their advances sooner. The Wrights' whole purpose in risking their lives, savings, and careers was to go into the airplane business, and using patents was the only way they could see to do it. If it weren't for patents, they would not have built and flown that airplane. At the same time, they weren't sure that patents would adequately protect their interests, as Hoffman acknowledges, so they had to try to keep some secrets to stay ahead of the competition. And they were right -- their competitors were eventually able to get around the Wrights' patents.
     
    Libel case loses
    Andy writes about this story, and says:
    Effort to Silence Elaine Donnelly Fails ... Again. Elaine Donnelly and her Center for Military Readiness (CMR) have courageously exposed failed feminist policies in the military for decades. In 1994, the Clinton Administration wanted women pilots in combat positions. But a mere two months after the first ones were assigned, Lt. Kara Hultgreen tragicallly died during a routine landing exercise on an aircraft carrier.

    CMR reported that Lt. Patrick Jerome Burns, who had briefly instructed Lt. Hultgreen and the other first women combat pilot, described the placement of women pilots into combat aircraft as "politically driven." CMR and Lt. Burns wrote that "Navy policy on the integration of women into fleet F-14 squadrons is, thus far, an abject failure."

    The other woman combat pilot, Lt. Carey Dunai Lohrenz, sued CMR for libel. She complained that CMR's reports hurt her career. With the assistance of a high-powered law firm, she pursued seven years of litigation against Elaine and CMR. On August 16, 2002, the lawsuit was dismissed, but the law firm appealed to the D.C. Circuit.

    Last Friday, Elaine won her ultimate victory. The court held that the act of choosing combat aircraft when there was a "controversy about women in combat" made Lt. Lohrenz a limited-purpose public figure. Public figures are generally fair game for full public debate. As a bonus, the court was dismissive of Admiral Bien's feminist claim that "no instructor interviewed had stated that Lt. Lohrenz and Lt. Hultgreen were unsafe to fly." The Court explained that "Donnelly knew that Lt. Burns had been interviewed and claimed that he had said precisely that to Admiral Bien."

    Of course Donnelly won. What she did was to write to the Senate Armed Services Committee and complain that Air Force affirmative action policies were resulting in unqualified pilots. If that is not free speech, what is?

    The main injustice here is that Donnelly's lawyer, Kent Masterson Brown charged her about $600k and diddled with the case for about 8 years before getting Donnelly off the hook. I think that Brown botched the case.

    If Donnelly had been sued in California and the anti-SLAPP law applied (and if Donnelly had a decent lawyer), then she would have been able to get the case dismissed quickly, and she would have collected attorneys fees from the pilot with the questionable qualifications.


    Tuesday, Dec 16, 2003
     
    Champerty
    John writes:
    As I have noted several times here, to general disbelief, champerty is illegal in Florida and will be punished. As it should be.
    David Boies is accused of an ethic violation. Another story says:
    The Florida state Bar has filed an ethics complaint against famed Microsoft litigator David Boies, alleging that he violated its rules by paying more than $400,000 in legal fees for a client his firm is representing in a Palm Beach County contract dispute. Boies, who represented Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election recount battle, is charged with representing the affluent client for free as well as paying fees to other law firms who worked on her case.
    I think that it is amazing that these big-shot lawyers have such fancy reputations for losing cases. David Boies is mainly famous for losing the Bush v. Gore and Napster cases. Mark Geragos is now the hottest criminal defense lawyer in the USA, and is handling the two highest-profile cases (Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson), but he is mainly famous for losing the Winona Ryder case.

    Monday, Dec 15, 2003
     
    Mass. homosexual ruling has a loophole
    The Mass. supreme court gay-marriage opinion has gotten a lot of attention. It was rumored for months, and the 4-3 decision was very carefully deliberated and worded. Much of the scrutiny has been over whether the opinion has a civil union loophole, like the similar Vermont opinion. But I claim that it has more serious loopholes.

    The main thrust of the opinion is to redefine marriage:

    We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.
    This definition depends on the definition of spouse, and the opinion does not give one. The obvious definition is the one in US federal law:
    In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife. [DOMA]
    All existing laws in the US and the 50 states are consistent with this definition. Likewise all the common law and religious traditions. Some dictionaries define spouse as marriage partner or something like that, but that would also mean the same thing, as a marriage in the USA has always been between a man and a woman.

    So I conclude that the Mass. supreme court really hasn't redefined marriage at all. A union of spouses can only be a union between a man and a woman.

    Now you might think that this is a silly technicality, but the judges spent months agonizing over the precise wording of that definition, and I can only assume that they chose their words deliberately. Now let's look at the actual court order:

    We declare that barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution.
    Again, it is carefully worded, but look at what it really says. It says that Mass. cannot deny benefits to someone who "would marry". It does not mention those who seek civil unions, or same-sex marriage-like vows, or anything like that. It does not redefine marry. It only says that someone who "would marry" is entitled to marriage benefits. But there is no one in Mass. who would marry someone of the same sex, because "marry" is not defined that way.

    The Mass. court could have declared that same-sex couples are entitled to marry, if they wish. It acknowledged that the plaintiffs asked for exactly that:

    In their complaint the plaintiffs request only a declaration that their exclusion and the exclusion of other qualified same-sex couples from access to civil marriage violates Massachusetts law.
    But the Mass. court pointedly stops short of issuing such a declaration.

    So what is the point of the opinion, if not to legalize same-sex marriage? I think that the court is inviting the legislature to redefine "marry", "marriage", and "spouse". If and when our society, culture, and law accept that same-sex couples may marry, then Mass. marriage law will have to recognize them as well. If I were the Mass. legislature, I'd wait 179 days and then pass a resolution declaring that the Mass. constitution and the federal Defense Of Marriage Act are consistent, and that no court has said otherwise.

     
    The UN wants to take over the internet
    This NY Times story says a UN committee is blaming the USA for the internet:
    The United States nonetheless took its lumps at the conference.

    "Even if it is not true, there is a perception that the U.S. government is running the Internet," said Eli M. Noam, who is the head of the Institute for Tele-Information at Columbia University and was a session moderator at the conference.

    Many public comments were similar to those expressed by Shashi Tharoor, the United Nations under secretary general for information and communications, who said in an interview, "Unlike the French Revolution, the Internet revolution has lots of liberty, some fraternity and no equality."

    So these idiotic bureaucrats think that the French revolution was a success, that the internet was a failure, and that the UN needs to remove the internet from USA control.

    Saturday, Dec 13, 2003
     

    Coase explains Dean Andy writes:
    Roger, that is a brilliant article you forwarded from the Washington Post. In fact, it is the best newspaper article I have read in a very long time.

    It recognizes that Dean defeated the entire Democratic establishment simply by harnessing the power of the internet. It explains how an insight by Coase in 1937 (not the one for which he won the Nobel Prize) predicted this type of development in a general economic way.

    The article pulls up short, however, in addressing whether an internet-powered candidate like Howard Dean can defeat the President of the United States. Is the internet that powerful? I think it is. The establishment is telling us that is not possible. But the establishment also told us that Dean could not win the Democratic nomination, yet look at him take it by a landslide.

    It's also interesting the Washington Post article was written by a Clinton appointee. Note the contrast with Bush appointees, who could never write such an insightful article.

    John responds:
    Interesting analysis, but flawed. The author, like many economists, views a world of individual autonomous economic agents, without regard to law, borders, language, history, or culture.

    No matter how much the internet has contributed to Howard Dean's success, it doesn't follow that we are likely to have successful third-party candidates in a few years. The clue that the author doesn't know what he's talking about is in his penultimate paragraph, where he cites the third parties in New York state as a model for the whole country, and extrapolates to imagine a third party electing a president.

    New York has unique laws that make third parties possible, but most states have other laws that effectively make them impossible. Specifically, New York permits candidates to be listed on two or more parties in the same election. That is the essential law that enables a third party to get and stay on the ballot. Most states forbid this.

    Most states require a party to field a full slate of candidates for all offices (not just one) and to attract a significant number of votes in every election or they will be thrown off the ballot. In addition, many states have sore loser laws that prevent a candidate who sought one party's nomination from getting on the ballot as the candidate of another party or as an independent.

    The author seems ignorant of these facts as he engages in armchair economic theorizing under Platonic assumptions.

    Joe responds:
    Interesting article. He says:
    So the end result of the Internet revolution on companies has been exactly what Coase's theory predicted Cheap information has allowed firms to shrink. Size is now less of an advantage in organizations, and that means more competition in the global marketplace.
    Are Wal Mart, Depot, Lowes etc. shrinking yet? Cheap info can also be harnessed by the big guys to get bigger.
    Andy responds:
    I agree with John that it is unlikely a third party candidate will win the presidency in the foreseeable future. However, that becomes a moot issue when an outsider like Dean can so easily capture control of an existing mainstream party, over intense opposition by its establishment. Why start a third party when one can take over an existing party?
    That article is a joke. Complete BS from beginning to end.

    The main point of the article is that Coase's work implies that reduced communication costs will cause the rise of 3rd parties. I wonder what Coase himself thinks of such gibberish.

    Long before Coase, everyone understood that politicians need to get their messages out widely and cheaply in order to get elected. Coase added nothing to that.

    Dean's success has nothing to do with getting his message out on the net. His message is incoherent and contradictory. His success stems from the fact that he is the only candidate who has been willing to adopt the anti-war rhetoric of the hard left. This strategy may get him the support of the Bush-haters, but it is hard to see how he can win the general election.

    Andy replies:

    [Joe has a] Valid point. But Coase is not talking about horizontal growth, like duplicating retail stores in other locations the way your examples do. Coase is really talking about layers of management and corporate integration of operations.

    You interpret Coase's insight too narrowly. Coase's 1937 insight has proven true for corporations, many decades after his prediction, and it is brilliant to apply his insight to political parties also.

    Frankly, your message sounds like Dean-hating to me!

    The whole concept of "Bush-hating" is dubious and will probably fade away. All agree that Bush is personally affable. It is obviously his policies that people oppose.

    The concept of Bush-hating is not going to fade away. Among California leftists, a lot of people hate him. The reasons they give are irrational, and I question their sanity, but there are a lot of such people and they are the ones that fuel Dean's campaign.

    Here is a recent example of Dean flip-flopping. He says Bush may have been forewarned about 9/11 from the Saudis, and then denies that he ever said it.

    No, the Bush-hating it is not just obviously based on his policies. There are millions of people with a completely irrational hatred for Bush. They'll claim he was really elected president, even tho his election was a legitimate as JFK's or Carter's. They'll complain that Bush did not have sufficient UN approval for the Iraq war, even tho the UN approval was far greater than we got for Bosnia or Kosovo. They'll recite weird conspiracy theories, such as what Dean says above. They'll say that Bush is some sort of radical extremely-partisan right-winger.

    Eg, here is a Bush-hater in The New Republic. He has an irrational hatred that goes way beyond Bush's policies.

    Joe writes:

    Roger is 100% correct about this. Tom Cori recently went to a Dean rally just to get a taste of what these people are like. He was struck with the defining similarity among them all hatred of Bush. When they were asked why they hated him, they often answered "Because he's stupid." I think Bush is hated by these people more than Reagan was.
    The TNR article said that people hate Bush much more than Reagan. Stupidity is high on the list. As an example, it says that in a press conference Bush gave an inappropriate answer to an inappropriate question about Jonathan Pollard, suggesting that Bush did not know who Pollard is. But Bush's answer could also be interpreted as refusing to get sucked into an absurd comparison.

    Update: Here is a blog trashing the WashPost article.


    Friday, Dec 12, 2003
     
    Money for health care
    Another USA survey found that some Americans sometimes consider the costs when they make health care decisions! This time the survey found that 37% of disabled adults sometimes postpone care because of cost.

    Apparently most disabled Americans must have very ample resources for health care that they never have to consider cost. If you asked people if they have had to consider cost when buying a car, finding living accommodations, taking a vacation, eating out, or just about anything else, then nearly 100% of the public will say yes. The fact that only a third of disabled adults are looking at costs shows that they are getting far too much in terms of govt subsidies.

    Free markets work best if most of the consumers are very price-conscious. With so many Americans disregarding costs, there is little to stop health care providers from raising prices out of control. Somehow we need to raise out-of-pocket health care costs for Americans so that they will pay more attention to price.


    Thursday, Dec 11, 2003
     
    No gas stations in Antarctica
    The BBC reports:
    The first person to fly a home-built single-engine plane over the South Pole has got stranded in Antarctica.

    Australian Jon Johanson was forced to land his RV-4 plane at a US base when it ran short of fuel.

    But both the Americans and a nearby New Zealand base refuse to give him the fuel, saying they do not want to encourage tourism in the Antarctic.

    Mr Johanson flew over the South Pole after travelling 5,880 km in just over 24 hours from New Zealand.

    I really don't think that there is going to be a rash of Johanson imitators. Who else would fly a home-built plane over the South Pole? Even if they do, the Americans should show a little more hospitality.

    Wednesday, Dec 10, 2003
     
    Global warming
    Many scientists believe that human activities have contributed to the release of greenhouse gases, and hence to global warming. But Bill Ruddiman says that it all started about 10K years ago. And it is a good thing too, because it saved us from an ice age that would have started several thousand years ago, and it thereby stabilized the climate enough to make modern civilization possible.
     
    Ritalin
    Ritalin is very similar to cocaine in its effect on the brain, so it is natural to ask whether ADD kids on ritalin are more likely to later abuse cocaine. A recent study found data that such kids are indeed more likely to try cocaine. See also this letter. But the study author is a big ritalin advocate, and somehow manages to explain away the results, so that it got reported with the opposite result!

    Here are some more new studies showing negative long-term consequences of ritalin. Ritalin use in preteen children may lead to depression later in life, studies of rats suggest. See also this Forbes-Reuters story.


    Tuesday, Dec 09, 2003
     
    Grover Norquist
    Grover Norquist is a lobbyist for some causes that I agree with, but he is also paid to support some other causes that he may not even agree with himself. This FrontPage article says he is owned by radical Mohammedans. When he attacks the USA Patriot Act, he is doing so because he is paid to defend allies who are in jail as terrorist suspects.

    More links at InstaPundit.


    Sunday, Dec 07, 2003
     
    Bush critics
    Andy writes:
    See how the National Right to Life threatened to scorecard votes on the dreadful Medicare bill? Evidently Karl Rove controls NRTL now too. Even though Bush has been abysmal on social issues, Rove is pretending that people who oppose him aren't conservative. Ha ha ha ha.

    At least Doug Bandow of CATO has some guts. His recently published criticisms included the following

    But this president deserves to be criticized. Sharply. By anyone who believes in limited, constitutional government.

    1. First, George W. Bush, despite laudable personal and family characteristics, is remarkably incurious and ill read. Gut instincts can carry even a gifted politician only so far. And a lack of knowledge leaves him vulnerable to simplistic remedies to complex problems, especially when it comes to turning America into the globe's governess.

    Second, despite occasional exceptions, the Bush administration, backed by the Republican-controlled Congress, has been promoting larger government at almost every turn. Its spending policies have been irresponsible, and its trade strategies have been destructive. The president has been quite willing to sell out the national interest for perceived political gain, whether the votes sought are from seniors or farmers. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged the administration to push into law civil-liberties restrictions that should worry anyone, whether they are wielded by a Bush or a Clinton administration.

    The president and his aides have given imperiousness new meaning. Officials are apparently incapable of acknowledging that their pre-war assertions about Iraq's WMD capabilities were incorrect; indeed, they resent that the president is being questioned about his administration's claims before the war. They are unwilling to accept a role for Congress in deciding how much aid money to spend. ...

    Yes, Bush's spending policies have been irresponsible. But the so-called "civil-liberties restrictions" do not worry me and appear to have increased my liberties. As a result, I can now check out a book from my local library without the govt keeping permanent records. Also, only Congress can spend money, and there is nothing Bush can do about it.

    Chris writes:

    It reminds me of the Ben Franklin quote “Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security.” It is easy to believe that an incremental loss of privacy or liberty is unimportant, or even personally beneficial. The classic argument is, since I don’t have anything to hide I would be willing to allow the police to search my house unannounced if it would reduce crime in my neighborhood. The problem in this line of reasoning is that there is no control over what those who do the unannounced searches will consider a crime.

    Today an individual may be sure that nothing they do is illegal but what will the future hold. We need only look at the ‘Red Scare’ hysteria to see what peaceful activities may be in the future considered a crime. Will literature supporting Palestinian statehood be considered seditious? What about material supporting a woman’s right to choose an abortion or birth-control? The list of things that could become a crime is long and complex.

    I leave you with Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust 'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'

    It is very hard for anyone to be sure that all his actions are legal. How many Californians realize that they are violating the law when they set a simple mousetrap? I am all in favor of privacy rights.

    I do have a problem with ACLU-types, librarians, and Bush-haters who apparently think that it is fine for some govt agencies to track my book-reading habits, but it is not ok for the info to be used in a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation.

    If the county library, or any other private or govt agency maintains records on you, then it will always be possible for those records to be used against you. If the records are relevant to some criminal or civil trial, then they can be subpoenaed. If someone wants the info badly enough, he can bribe a low-level clerk to get them. That is the way it is, and how it has always been in the USA.

    If you don't want your library records to be accessible to anyone, the only solution is for the library to destroy the records. The Patriot Act does not force the libraries to keep the records. It only says that if the libraries chooses to keep the records for some purposes, then they must be available for the FBI to get a court-ordered subpoena for them, as part of a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation. What better purpose could there be for such records?

    Update: Here is a story about how records can be used against people in court, in either criminal or civil cases. The records are the electronic toll records. Forget the Patriot Act. If the records exist, then they can be used. That has been the law for a long time, and it is unlikely to change.

     
    Jimmy Carter's final solution
    Jimmy Carter is praising the (unofficial) Geneva Accord, and says:
    Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.
    We can add this to the long list of reasons for being grateful that Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

    The Geneva Accord involves forcibly removing thousands of Jews from their homes in Israel. Hitler's "final solution" was to remove Jews from Germany.

    George writes:

    That was a cheap shot. Carter is just trying to promote peace. He is not a Nazi.
    Right, Carter is not a Nazi. But it is the Israelis who want peace.

    Friday, Dec 05, 2003
     
    Physics jokes
    From PhysicsWeb.org:
    Did you hear about the restaurant NASA is starting on the Moon? Great food, no atmosphere!

    When two atoms bump into each other: "I think I've lost an electron!" says one.
    "Are you sure?" replies the other.
    "I'm positive!"

    "Do you know that Hausdorff published poems?"
    "Oh, he had another dimension!"

    "What's new?"
    "E over h."

    Heisenberg is pulled over for speeding:
    "Do you know how fast you were going?" the police officer asks, incredulously.
    "No," replies Heisenberg, "but I know exactly where I am!"

    A lawyer, an accountant and a physicist are discussing, over a beer, whether life is better with a wife or with a girlfriend.
    "A wife is better," declares the lawyer, "because of the family support and the help she'll be to your career."
    "Nonsense," says the accountant. "A girlfriend is better: you can keep your independence and go out with your friends more."
    They turn to the physicist, who says, "It's better to have both. That way, the wife thinks you're with the girlfriend, the girlfriend thinks you're with the wife, and meanwhile you can be down at the lab!"

     
    Schools
    A high school kid in Florida was expelled for a year for bringing Advil (ibuprofen) to school. This is an example of an idiotic zero tolerance policy.

    A couple of Georgia kids were charged for possession of a plastic bag of parsley. I find it hard to believe that possession of counterfeit marijuana is really a felony.

    I didn't realize that California has a form of voucher schools. There are public schools that cater to students outside their districts. The way California schools are funded, those schools can collect $6K from the state per student, regardless of the tax base within the district. These schools tend to be much more responsive to the needs and wishes of parents, and they have higher test scores. If they didn't, then the students would go back to their normal public school. The charter school movement is an attempt to extend this concept.


    Thursday, Dec 04, 2003
     
    Reagan dime
    The Ronald Reagan Dime Act would get FDR off the dime. Good. Reagan was a much greater president than FDR. FDR's economic policies were a gigantic failure, and exacerbated the Great Depression. He also lied to the American public and provoked the Japanese in order to get the USA into a war that most people wanted to avoid.

    JG writes:

    Coincidentally, a friend just e-mailed me the following commentary comparing GWB and FDR.

    I'd like to see Reagan on the dime, too. We recently named a stretch of I-25 in his honor, much to the consternation of the Dems to the north (Denver) and south (Pueblo). I've heard rumors that traffic on an alternate north-south route, state highway 83, has picked up because some Dems refuse to travel on the "Reagan Highway"!

    The link shows that FDR slashed social spending during WWII. By contrast, social spending has increased under Republican presidents such as Nixon and Bush.
     
    Trampled at Wal-Mart
    John sends this story about a woman who was trampled during a Wal-Mart sale. It says:
    Syndicated columnist George Will used it to bemoan the death of Puritanism at the hand of Christmas excess, calling department stores "cathedrals of consumption." A Portland, Ore., Web site carried the story under the headline, "Capitalism's Greatest Hits."
    It turns out that the woman has a long history of dubious accident claims.

    Wednesday, Dec 03, 2003
     
    Truman-Reagan Medal
    Pat Buchanan says Phyllis Schlafly deserves a medal for being a life-long anti-communist warrior.
     
    Public schools retaining students
    Several years ago (in 1997, I think) the California Dept. of Education issued curriculum standards for all the public schools. Apparently many California elementary schools have decided that the standards are too tough, and that the best way to cope with them is to hold everyone back a year! A 2nd grade teacher explained this to me, and said that 8 of her 20 students had already turned 8, even tho anyone who turns 8 by Dec. 2 is really supposed to be in the 3rd grade, according to California law. The law says that the schools need the parents' permission to hold a child back in this way, but the school pressures the parents to do it and the parents usually comply.

    This seems outrageous to me. I wonder of the state educators who wrote the standards realized that one of their main effects would be to change the age of high school graduation from 18 to 19.

    The local school wants to hold my child back, and has given me an assortment of goofy reasons.

  • The other kids are older, and it is better for the kids to be in a class of kids the same age. (I don't think that they really believe this, because they have 5 classes at each grade level, and they make no attempt to group students according to age within a grade level. Instead they do just the opposite, and try to mix different types of students in each classroom as much as possible.)
  • The student won't get to drive a car until age 16, and might feel left out if all her classmates are driving sooner.
  • The parents won't really want the child to go away to college at age 18, and would prefer to keep him/her at home for another year.
  • A lot of 6-year-old boys just can't sit still for an hour.
  • The schools already have students who test out at many grade levels ahead of their nominal grade, and it is easy for teachers to accommodate them.

    I think the real reason is that the public schools get bonuses based on performance on standardized tests, and the schools have figured out that they can get higher schools by holding students back.

    All the schools brag about how advanced their students are. One teacher even claimed that they have students in 1st and 2nd grade who can read at a high school level. And yet they admit that they have trouble placing foreign students from countries like Costa Rica and Singapore, because they are far ahead of American students.

  •  
    7-year-old cannot say "gay"
    The ACLU has gotten a lot of publicity about a teacher who punished a 2nd grader for explaining the word "gay" to another student, and the blogs are siding with the ACLU. Yes, the school overreacted, but I don't think that this is a gay rights issue. The teacher probably would have done the same thing if the boy used the word "heterosexual".

    Update: [Dec-12] George writes:

    The teacher had no business punishing the kid. The US Supreme Court just ruled (in the campaign finance law challenge) that children have free speech rights. The kid can express any opinion he wants.
    Remember that when some other school assigns the 2nd graders to read Heather Has Two Mommies and some kids gets up, quotes the Bible, and says that homosexuality is sinful.

    Schoolteachers do have a responsibility to limit discussions that are vulgar, inappropriate, or factually incorrect.

    Bob says that society should remove these taboo subjects, and teach kids to be open to discussing anything.


    Tuesday, Dec 02, 2003
     
    Will conservatives support Bush?
    JG writes:
    re your 11/28/03 blog entries. Plenty of people want Bush to lose--I'm one of them. Let the Dems take the White House (please!); at least there'd be some hope/potential for an impasse on several issues. Did you see Ron Paul's latest column?
    Paul complains about the Medicare bill, but there are conservatives who believe that the new medical savings accounts will save us from socialized medicine.

    I live on the Left Coast which is dominated by Bush-haters. There are people out here who complain that Bush campaigned as a uniter, and then after he won the election, he turned into a radical right-wing extremist. Actually, those people usually refuse to admit that Bush even won the election.

    As Paul explains, Bush has been spending money like a liberal Democrat.

     
    Clark and Waco
    Wesley Clark's supporters are sure trying to deny his involvement in the Branch Davidian debacle in Waco Texas. Eg, see InstaPundit. They say he was not directly involved, but that don't seem to want to say what his involvement. Apparently Clark signed off on the use of two Army tanks from his division by the FBI in the raid. Maybe more. We don't know.

    Monday, Dec 01, 2003
     
    New database copyrights
    A Phyllis Schlafly column got discussed on Slashdot. The new proposed database copyright law is not as bad as the one from about 5 years ago, because extraction is no longer an offense. But it still attempts to stop others from re-assembling public domain facts, just because it competes with someone who is already making money with the data.
     
    No gun rights
    John sends this story about the US Supreme Court refusing to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a gun control law. John notes:
    Cert. denied despite a clear circuit conflict.
    Yes, there is a clear circuit conflict over whether the 2A guarantees an individual right to citizens. But the SC is not the place to decide philosophical disputes anyway.

    The SC would probably rule that the 2A is an individual right, but that California can impose reasonable restrictions such as banning narrow and inessential classes of weapons. The various assault weapon bans are annoying, but they aren't really effective because similar guns are still legal and available. So a SC ruling is unlikely to change the lower court outcomes.

    George writes:

    So who should decide the philosophical issues, if not the supreme court?
    Under the Constitution, the SC can only decide cases and controversies. Outside the lower federal courts, we are moving towards a public consensus that the 2A guarantees an individual right, and that has been the general understanding for most of USA history. All the past SC opinions are consistent with that view, and a couple of SC opinions have even said so explicitly (in dicta).

    Sunday, Nov 30, 2003
     
    LED bulbs
    John sends this story about how LED light bulbs will obsolete the incandescent bulb.

    It sounds great, and it will probably eventually happen, but LED bulbs are still to expensive and may be for another 10 years. In the meantime, it is the compact fluorescent bulbs that are gaining market. In California they are cheap because they are subsidized by the power companies. They use ordinary bulb sockets and come on instantly.

     
    The Reagans
    CBS is finally broadcasting The Reagans on Showtime, and the NY Times complains that CBS is not showing it more widely. Its TV reviewer seems to think that conservatives overreacted to the script, and then CBS overreacted to the criticism.

    The script had Reagan declaring, "I am the Anti-Christ". That sounds fair to the average NY Times Reagan-hater, I guess. That line was probably dropped from the Showtime version, but the show is still a hatchet job.

    The reviewer tries to defend the show by saying things like, "Mr. Reagan did not grasp the scale of the [AIDS] epidemic." I think that this is very unlikely. Nearly all 1980s estimates of the future AIDS death toll were grossly exaggerated. It is virtually certain that Reagan was briefed on AIDS and was told that the AIDS epidemic would be much greater than it actually turned out to be. If Reagan was skeptical about the magnitude of those estimates, then he is smarter than a lot of scientists.


    Friday, Nov 28, 2003
     
    Presidential vote
    I keep running across people who think that Al Gore lost the presidential election while winning the popular vote, and was the only one in modern times to do that.

    Gore needed more than 50% of the popular vote to win it; he got 48%. Clinton won the 1992 and 1996 elections without winning the popular vote. J. F. Kennedy won the 1960 election without even getting a plurality of the popular vote. (It is widely misreported that Kennedy got more popular votes than Nixon in 1960. The only way to do a count and have Kennedy ahead, is to count all the Harry F. Byrd votes as votes for Kennedy. But they were not votes for Kennedy, and Byrd got his own electoral votes. For some explanation, see this.)

     
    Bush votes
    Andy writes:
    Rove's antics get goofier and goofier, this time with a surprise Bush visit to Baghdad. What's next skydiving into Jerusalem? The last PR stunt of Bush flying a jet is now being used in Democratic ads against him.

    It's silly reading all the Republican boasts that the Democratic candidates are weak. Presidential elections are not about the challenger. They are almost entirely about the incumbent. It doesn't matter who is running against Bush when wondering whether he will be reelected.

    I'd like to know where you think Bush's extra votes are going to come from. People who voted against him in 2000 are unlikely to vote for him in 2004. Most people don't reverse themselves like that.

    ISTM that the only way an incumbent president can improve his vote total the second time is by (1) picking up third party votes (e.g., Nixon in 1972 picking up Wallace votes, and Reagan in 1984 picking up Anderson votes) or (2) increasing voter turnout (e.g., Reagan in 1984). Bush can't do (1), so his only hope is to increase his vote by method (2). But I don't see any progress on that front.

    Bush lost 4 states in 2000 by margins smaller than Buchanan's votes. Bush can certainly hope to win those 4 states.

    Andy responds:

    I think you mean "dream" rather than "hope". Wisconsin is a state that Bush lost by less than Buchanan's votes. But Nader won 4% there! Bush doesn't have any chance of winning Wisconsin in 2004.

    Bush won New Hampshire, Ohio, Arizona and West Virginia in 2000. But I doubt Bush will win more than one of them in 2004. In New Hampshire, Bush only won because Nader did quite well (4%). Nader drew 2-3% in the others. If Dean is the nominee, Nader won't pull much votes away from him.

    I do think Bush will win Florida again, however, by increasing turnout.

    John responds:
    I don't know what planet Andy is coming from with his rants against Bush and predictions of defeat. I say you can put a fork in it as things look now, Bush's reelection by a comfortable margin is virtually assured.

    In 2000, most people outside Texas didn't know Bush. There were millions of potential Bush voters who perhaps weren't willing to take a chance on an unknown quantity.

    Now people do know him, like him, and have confidence in his leadership, even if they disagree with him on some specific issues.

    Bush is assured of getting several million more votes in 2004 than he got in 2000. That means he will carry all the states that were close last time, pushing his electoral total to the high 300s.

    The trip to Baghdad was masterful. He probably picked up a couple more states right there. It was a perfect demonstration of what most Americans want in their president.

    Andy mentions the deficit as a potential threat to America's future, but he doesn't explain how it's a threat to Bush's reelection. The Democrat solution to the deficit is to raise taxes - a sure loser for them.

    Recently Howard Dean complained that too many Americans vote on the issues of God, gays, guns, and the Confederate flag. To which Pat Buchanan observed, "What other issues are there?"

    On May 16, 2004, the Massachusetts decision on gay marriage will become final. Around the same time, 8 justices of the Supreme Court (minus Scalia) will issue a decision on the Pledge of Allegiance. These events will attract huge attention and show the Dems in the minority.

    2004 will be a "values" election, like 1988 rather than 1992.

    Andy responds:
    I'd like to see John describe which new states he thinks Bush will win, and how many people who voted for Gore or Nader in 2000 will admit they were wrong and vote for Bush this time. Also, how does John explain the lastest poll that I saw, which said 47% favored Bush's reelection but 48% did not?

    John wrote, "2004 will be a 'values' election, like 1988 rather than 1992."

    Bush hasn't done anything substantive on "values". He didn't appoint a single Supreme Court justice (and probably talked Rehnquist out of retiring); didn't file briefs on our side in the important cases; didn't limit Court jurisdiction; and so on.

    Moreover, I don't agree that 1988 was a "values" election. Bush won that election because he benefited from California and other large states still voting Republican in national elections. That's no longer true. Also, Dukakis had an obvious ethnic disadvantage in predominantly English America. Howard Dean, in contrast, is as English as Bush is.

    When a prominent Republican Senator like John McCain can attack the leadership of his own party like he did this morning, with criticisms that ring true, you know the president is in deep political trouble.

     
    Anti-semitism
    Here is another stupid anti-semitism charge. This time the offensive term is rich Jew.
     
    Illegal to trap a mouse
    I didn't realize that California (under Gray Davis) passed a law banning use of a mousetrap, unless one has a license. A license costs $78.50 and requires meeting a "complex test".

    The Dept. of Food and Game says:

    "We're not enforcing this for personal use," said Paulson, who then added that, because of the force of law, the statute must be enforced for commercial use.

    That means if you hire a neighbor to set mousetraps at your house, or perhaps hire your gardener or a pest control service, that they must have a trapping permit -- or face being arrested.


    Wednesday, Nov 26, 2003
     
    Google rank problems
    Google is manipulating its search results again. Google's claim to superior searching has always been its Page Rank algorithm. But it doesn't work because vendors are able to boost their rankings by creating artificial links. See NY Times, or SearchEngineGuide.com.

    Also, SCO may sue Google for using Linux without a Unix license.

    Everyone in Silicon Valley is hoping that the Google IPO will energize venture capital investment, as the Netscape IPO did in the mid-1990s.

    Fortune magazine says:

    Google's foes have a much firmer hold on customers, argues Seth Godin, a well-known Internet consultant and editor of last summer's widely distributed online book What Should Google Do? Competitors have troves of personal information about users that they draw on to customize products, ads, and services­consider the way My Yahoo brings you information on everything from your portfolio to fixing your house.
     
    Bernie Goetz has gone soft
    He doesn't carry a gun anymore, and promotes vegetarianism instead! (I don't think that this interview is a joke, but it is hard to tell with PETA enthusiasts.)

    Tuesday, Nov 25, 2003
     
    Chinese drivers
    The WSJ had a Nov. 20 article on how Chinese automobile drivers are the worst in the world. The "highly motorized countries" have 60% of the world's vehicles but only 14% of the deaths from car accidents. Asian countries have 44% of the world's traffic accident deaths with only 16% of the vehicles. No data on Chinese drivers in the USA.

    This Australian survey claims that blondes have the fewest accidents. It was based on "who described themselves as blonde", so it is not clear if they just had blonde hair, or if they were blonde according to my dictionary definition, which is "Being or having light colored skin and hair and usually blue or gray eyes".


    Monday, Nov 24, 2003
     
    Stem cell research
    Bob recommends this Weissman interview promoting US support for stem cell research.

    I find the attitudes of scientists like Weissman annoying. He makes a trip to Washington and lobbies for research grants to support his pet projects. If the politicians do not buy his pitch, he derisively puts them down as either ignorant or playing politics.

    Bob writes:

    Did you read it? Here is a guy who isn't a Bush hater, whose science is impeccable, and has a clear explanation of the immediate benefits of nuclear transplantation.

    Do you doubt Weissman's claim that Frist was ignorant until he explained the immediate benefits of nuclear transplantation to him?

    Yes, I doubt that Frist was ignorant of any relevant facts. Weissman said:
    I talked to Senator Bill Frist, a trained scientist physician, who was in the field of transplantation and as I went through three of the four arguments, the ones that I told you, like my biomedical colleagues, he had not heard previously or understood the kinds of concrete and important medical research opportunities that would be lost.
    So Weissman told Frist his speculations about future research opportunities, and Frist did not already share those speculations. For that, Frist is ignorant?!

    Bob responds:

    Weissman argues that in supporting those who want to ban all nuclear transplantation Bush is either ignorant of the scientific facts about nuclear transplantation as Frist was or "that the President is going to make a purely politically decision". Weissman is giving Bush the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he is ignorant.
    The interested parties include scientists who want to do stem cell research, taxpayers being asked to pay for it, religious groups who have moral and ethical problems with cloning, people who may potentially benefit from the research, drug companies who want to develop commercial products, and others. Bush's job, as an elected official, is to make a political decision that balances those interests, as well as the law, the budget, and other factors. Why would anyone complain that Bush is making a political decision?
    It is his job to make political decisions all day long! Those politicians who support stem cell research are also making a political decision in favor of certain constituencies.

    Only an arrogant scientist like Weissman would present such stupid arguments.

    Bob responds:

    It is indeed the job of President Bush to make political decisions. In addition to political decisions it is Bush's job to make decisions which we all hope are beyond politics. The issues that the consensus places above politics are often life and death decisions such as war, but include issues of justice and the common good. Mr. Clinton was rightly criticized for politicizing Presidential pardons because we all believe that the Presidential pardon power is reserved for insuring that justice is done. Similar criticism is due Mr. Clinton for not allowing stem cell research and his lack of action against terrorism and Saddam Hussein both for political reasons.

    Apart from the above moralizing, there is a practical political issue. Weissman correctly points out that cancer is a disease of stem cells. One of the experiments he believes will be crucial in understanding cancer is transplantation of the nucleus from a cancer cell into a human egg from which the nucleus has been removed and development a stem cell line which can be used to study the development of cancer. I understand that benefits of the transplant experiment I described must be balanced against the belief by some that it entails killing a human being. If it turns out that Weissman is correct about this, the Republican party will be justly tarred as the party which stood in the way of curing cancer. That will not be a good political balance.

     
    Patenting a number
    This news article is satire:
    In a move that has surprised naïve observers, the US Patent Office has announced that from now on it will consider ‘serious’ applications to patent specific integer numbers.

    "It was the logical next step," grey-haired and twinkling Patent Laureate Mr J Dall Swanhuffer twinkled to a shocked press conference today.

    The author obviously didn't realize that the Patent Office has already allowed patents on specific integer numbers. As reported in Scientific American in 1995:
    Roger Schlafly has just succeeded in doing something no other mathematician has ever done: he has patented a number.
    Here is another joke article about Microsoft patenting zeros and ones.

    Sunday, Nov 23, 2003
     
    Quantum computation may be impossible
    A lot of people seem to think that quantum computers will eventually be built, and they execute super-polynomial algorithms in polynomial time. This paper explains how such computers depend on features of quantum mechanics that have never been tested, and we really don't know whether quantum computation is possible or not.

    Saturday, Nov 22, 2003
     
    British accent
    Science has finally explained the British accent -- it is caused by brain damage! An American woman who had never been to Britain suffered brain damage, and now talks with a strong British accent.

    Friday, Nov 21, 2003
     
    Dinosaurs in the Ice Age?
    I am trying to figure out this headline in today's San Jose paper:
    Meteor hit Earth ages ago, study says
    EVEN BIGGER IMPACT THAN ICE AGE'S BLAST

    A massive asteroid may have collided with the Earth 251 million years ago and killed 90 percent of all life, an extinction even more severe than the meteorite impact that snuffed out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

    There have been many ice ages. The vast majority of the known ice ages occurred in the last 4 million years, after N. America became connected with S. America. (It is thought that blocking the Central American ocean currents made the Earth's climate unstable.) When people refer to the Ice Age, they usually mean the last one that peaked 20,000 years ago.

    But the headline writer seems to think that the dinosaurs were wiped out during the last ice age. The woolly mammoths and the saber tooth tigers did go extinct then, but the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, and there was probably no permanent ice on Earth at that time. I think that he is a little mixed up.

    BTW, just because a meteor impact coincided with a mass extinction, it doesn't necessarily follow that the meteor was the cause. There have been three great mass extinctions in Earth history, and each is believed to have been accompanied by a giant meteor impact. But each is also thought to have been accompanied by a range of volcanic blasts that may have been as violent as the meteor impact. Maybe the volcanoes causes the mass extinctions. (The obvious hypothesis that the meteors causes the volcanis eruptions has been rejected by geologists.)

     
    Foreigners taking US jobs
    John sends this LA Times story on a National Science Foundation study on how science and engineering jobs are shifting to foreigners:
    The percentage of college-educated scientists and engineers who are working in the U.S. but were born elsewhere jumped from 14% in 1990 to 22% in 2000, a foundation study of workforce trends reported.

    The study also found that among professionals with doctorates in science or engineering who were working in the United States, almost 40% were foreign-born in 2000, compared with 24% in 1990.

    Furthermore, women, African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans are less likely than white men to obtain undergraduate degrees in science and engineering, according to the study, which was issued by the National Science Board, the foundation's governing body.

    This much should be obvious. We have had a national policy of importing foreign scientists and engineers in order to replace white men and depress wages. Unemployment of American scientists and engineers is consequently higher than it has ever been. "Young people simply aren't being attracted by these careers."

    So what does this committee of academics recommend? Continue to import more foreign workers and pay more federal subsidies to US college students to pursue science and engineering careers!

    This is crazy. People who opt out of science and engineering are rationally responding to the market. The jobs are mostly going to low-paid immigrants. Trying to trick students into ignoring the market pressures will only increase the unemployment rate (if successful). The study authors are nearly all employed by universities, and what they really want is an excuse for the feds to grant additional subsidies to universities.

     
    Socialized medicine
    John writes that he is convinced by this argument that the current Medicare bill is actually good for conservatives who don't want a complete federal takeover of the medical sector.

    Thursday, Nov 20, 2003
     
    Gays
    Most of the commonly-given arguments for and against gay marriage are pretty weak. But people ought to at least get some terminology and facts straight.

    A new Pew poll says Religious Beliefs Underpin Opposition to Homosexuality. But the poll questions don't really involve opposition to homosexuality. My dictionary defines:

    homosexuality -- A sexual attraction to (or sexual relations with) persons of the same sex
    But of course none of the questions really asked whether anyone was opposed to anyone having same-sex attractions. Instead, it asked questions like these:
    Q.17 Do you strongly favor, favor, oppose, or strongly oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally?

    Q.42 [if opposed] What would you say is the MAIN reason you object to allowing gays and lesbians to marry?

    These questions are loaded for several reasons. First, there is considerable public doubt about whether the term "gay" means someone with a particular inborn sexual orientation, or describes a behavior choice. Other poll questions show that the public is sharply divided on the question.

    Second, whatever your definition of "gay", it is a fact that gays are allowed to marry. Gay men marry women all the time, and no one objects. Well, maybe the wife objects, if she doesn't know he is gay, but no one objects to their legal right to marry. It seems theoretically possible that a "gay gene" might be discovered, and the state might force a gay gene test to get a marriage license for the purpose of forbidding gays from marrying, but no one is advocating that.

    Third, marriage is defined by both religion and government. Many people get married only within their church, and only bother to satisfy the requirements of the church. They never get an official govt marriage license, and the state recognizes their marriage anyway. If you ask them about gays being allowed to marry, their first thoughts would be about whether their church permits it.

    The poll could have asked the question in a more straightforward and neutral way with, "Should the state recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex?".


    Tuesday, Nov 18, 2003
     
    Anti-ERA forces proved prescient
    Volokh says on his blog says that ERA foes in the 1970s were widely accused of using emotional scare tactics about the legal effects of ERA, and have been proven correct by later court actions.

    Then he says:

    I don't think the coalition that supported the ERA knew that it would be helping resolve the gay marriage question; had they known this, they should presumably have carved out an exception for this. It may also have been worthwhile to carve out exemptions, perhaps to specifically protect certain privacy rights, protect girls-only sports teams, and possibly allow the exclusion of women from combat, though that's a very tough question.
    I think that Volokh is wrong about this; the ERA promoters would not have agreed to any such exceptions. They would say that there can be no compromise on equal rights, and that the courts would not mandate homosexual marriage until the public was ready for it. They wanted to achieve social change thru the courts, and did not want to pass separate laws for putting women in combat and authorizing homosexual marriage.

    As Volokh points out, Mass. passed a state ERA in 1976 with promises that it would not approve homosexual marriage. But the court said that it was ignoring the intent of the law, and believes that the constitution must be adapted to "changing circumstances and new societal phenomena".


    Sunday, Nov 16, 2003
     
    More faulty sex science
    It is standard dogma that the criminal recidivism rate is highest, by far, among sex offenders. Such factoids are commonly used to justify long sentences, creating new punishments for released offenders, maintaining permanent registries of convicted sex offenders, etc. But I have never seen any scientific justification for the claim.

    Now a study shows that just the opposite is true:

    The Justice Department study of 9,691 men convicted of rape, sexual assault and child molestation who were released in 1994 found 43 percent were arrested for any type of crime within three years, compared with 68 percent for all other former inmates.
    If the convicted sex offenders are not such a threat, then laws like Megan's Law need to be rethought. Many people on those lists have only been convicted of very minor offenses, and they deserve a chance to lead normal lives. I'd rather find out about the serious violent criminals in the neighborhood.

    I also don't agree with locking up sex offenders beyond their sentences because of what they might do, as they do in NY and elsewhere. The secret opinion of a govt psychiatrist should not be enough to keep someone in jail who would otherwise be free.


    Saturday, Nov 15, 2003
     
    Paris Hilton
    I just turned on Kazaa Lite, and all anyone wants is my copy of the Paris Hilton video.

    Thursday, Nov 13, 2003
     
    Make your own machine gun
    The liberal 9C appellate court decided that the feds cannot punish homemade noncommercial child porn, because it has no jurisdiction under the interstate commerce clause. So, following the same logic, it just decided homemade machine guns are legal also.
     
    No foreign language
    San Diego State Univ is dropping the word foreign because:
    The term 'foreign' has been used to designate something alien and is as ethnocentric and inappropriate as using 'oriental' to designate a person of Asian descent.
    I agree with that statement, but what's the problem?
     
    Costa Rica schools are better?
    I just talked to my local school district about how they place incoming students in elementary school. Apparently they often place kids by age, but it is sometimes difficult when students come in from overseas. She said Costa Rican students are far ahead of American students!

    Wednesday, Nov 12, 2003
     
    No free speech in England
    A bishop faces criminal prosecution for saying:
    Some people who are primarily homosexual can reorientate themselves. I would encourage them to consider that as an option, but I would not set myself up as a medical specialist on the subject - that's in the area of psychiatric health.
    The politically correct view is to say that no such reorientation is possible. But Columbia Univ. psychiatrist Robert L. Spitzer has studied this question, and found 200 such successful reorientations. Here are his slides.

    Indeed, I am not sure that there is any scientific proof that there is such a thing as homosexual orientation. It has never been observed in the animal world.

    George writes:

    Homosexuality has been observed in animals. Since it is genetic, it is completely hopeless to change. It is offensive to even suggest that it can be changed, because that implies that gays should change their very nature in order to conform to the straight society.
    Homosexual behavior has been observed in animals, but never in preference to heterosexual behavior, and never as a sexual orientation.

    The politically correct dogma is to say that it is a scientific fact that homosexuality is an orientation and not a preference, that homosexuality is inborn and normal, and that homosexuality cannot be changed. There is no scientific proof of any of these things. Attempts to prove them, such as by looking for a "gay gene", have all failed.

    The extent to which people should conform to the straight society is a political question. If you hear someone claim that it is a scientific fact that homosexuality is inborn and unchangeable, then ask to see the scientific paper which proved it. It doesn't exist.

     
    Best guy movies
    Men's Journal has a list of the best guy movies. The Deer Hunter was eliminated because it had Meryl Streep in it. No movie with Meryl Streep can be on a guy movie list.
     
    Rev. Banana dies
    This Reuters/NYTimes story sounds like a joke. The Rev. Banana suffered a damaged image when he was convicted of committing sodomy while he was president of Zimbabwe, which is euphemistically called "post-independence".

    Before 1980, Zimbabwe was ostracized for its white minority govt. But today it is under black tyrannical rule, and people are starving.

     
    Spot the fakes
    I thought that this Playboy quiz was performing a valuable public service. But the Playboy.com server just returns random results! Very annoying.

    Tuesday, Nov 11, 2003
     
    Mexifornia cartoon
    John says you can't joke about illegal aliens, and sends this LA Times story about employees of a Monterey County government department having to receive racial sensitivity training. It says they circulated an anti-immigrant cartoon, that you can view here.

    As you can see, it is not a cartoon, and it is not anti-immigrant either. It is a parody of the new California drivers license for illegal aliens. Lawful immigrants were already able to get drivers licenses.

    Part of the humor of thee Mexifornia drivers license is that it shows a picture of a Mexican actor in the 1948 western movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He impersonates a policeman, but when asked for ID, he says, "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!". Listen to it here. It has become the battle cry of people who resent having to show ID.

     
    Overpaid workers
    Here is a good list of the ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S.

    Sunday, Nov 09, 2003
     
    Dirty needles
    Most of the American hepatitis (HBV) comes from Asian immigrants, and it is then spread to others with unsafe sexual practices. But how are all those Chinese people getting it, as China is not known for high promiscuity? From this WHO study, they may be getting it from vaccines!
    Forty per cent of all the health injections given globally in 2000 were performed with reused needles, according to a World Health Organization study. In some countries, three out of four injections were unsafe.

    The researchers say that reusing needles contributes to the spread of numerous blood borne infections, including hepatitis B and C, HIV, malaria, septicaemia and viral haemorrhagic fevers. [New Scientist]


    Friday, Nov 07, 2003
     
    Bill Lockyer
    Calif. Atty Gen. Lockyer says he voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger, but now he wants to run against Arnold in 2006 and in the meantime he is going to do his best to smear Arnold with hearsay about criminal allegations. Lockyer claims to have personal knowledge of Arnold's groping, but he doesn't know who the alleged victim is or whether there is any way to contact her. I've never heard a state attorney general make such an irresponsible set of allegations.
     
    Reagan simplistic?
    Slate continues to build the case against Reagan by quoting someone who said:
    Unquestionably, Reagan's political and economic ideas were in some respects simplistic: I once heard him say that one million Sears Roebuck catalogues distributed in the Soviet Union would bring the regime down.
    I don't think that anyone would have objected if the CBS miniseries had stuff like this. The complaint is that the show was false and malicious, and painted a seriously inaccurate view of history.

    Update: The TV show script is here.


    Wednesday, Nov 05, 2003
     
    Great ideas
    Here are the 14 cognitive breakthroughs since 800 B.C.
    Artistic realism; Linear perspective; Artistic abstraction; Polyphony; Drama; the Novel; Meditation; Logic; Ethics; Arabic numerals; the Mathematical proof; the Calibration of uncertainty; the Secular observation of nature; and the Scientific method.
     
    Change red lights
    For $500, you can buy a simple gadget that will change traffic lights at will. For responsible motorists only. You can order one here.
     
    Buffet's property taxes
    Warren Buffet finally details his property tax complaint. He pays $14,401 per year on his over-assessed Omaha home, and $14,266 per year on his under-assessed Laguna Beach California property (which actually includes 2 adjoining houses).

    So where's the inequity? The Omaha taxes are higher, as a percentage of market value. That is another way of saying that California property values are higher than Omaha's, as compared to the costs of maintaining schools and fire depts. That sounds reasonable to me.

    Buffet's Laguna Beach taxes would be higher, but he bought one of his houses before property values skyrocketed. Sure, Buffet could afford to pay more. But most people in his situation could not afford to pay skyrocketing property taxes. People who bought houses back in the early 1970s are, for the most part, retired, living on fixed incomes, and not using significant local govt services. Property taxes support the schools, and Buffet's kids have been out of school for a long time. I doubt that they ever did goto school in California.


    Tuesday, Nov 04, 2003
     
    Cat research
    Cat owners can behave strangely because their are infected with cat parasites. Read the FoxNews story.
     
    Patent agents
    I occasionally get gripes about my Patent Agent FAQ. My critics (such as those on usenet) seem to have the following in common:
  • They are lawyers who say that only lawyers can practice law and give legal advice. (In spite of the fact that the US Supreme Court has already ruled that patent agents can also do that.)
  • They have their own license shortcomings, such as trying to practice law in an area where they don't have a license, or trying to practice patent law without being registered before the Patent Office.
  • They attack the credentials of patent agents, as compared to lawyers, even tho most patent agents have much more formal training than most lawyers.
  • They cannot find any statute, regulation, or case that disputes anything I say, and yet they adamantly assert their own pet theories that are completely unsupported and illogical.
  • They end up threatening legal action against me for expressing my opinions!

    I think that the core of the problem is that patent agents are licensed directly by the US federal govt, and therefore they do not have to pay attention to state bar assn rules. Some of those rules benefit the legal profession, and some are just nuisances, but either way they don't like the fact that some people can ignore them and still dispense legal advice. (For some of the worst complainers, search for Steve Marcus, Paul Tauger, and Ernest Schaal.)


  • Sunday, Nov 02, 2003
     
    Teller Labs
    John sends this story about an effort to rename the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after Edward Teller. The article repeats the silly rumor that a character in the Dr. Strangelove movie was modeled after Teller. The character appeared to be a ex German Nazi turned American general, not a Hungarian-American Jew like Teller. Teller deserves some sort of official recognition, and the Lab was associated with Teller throughout its existence.
     

    Nielsen ratings say that 9.4 million women in the USA visited porn web sites, and that nearly one in three visitors to adult web sites is a woman. I think that if you look at total porn consumption, including books, magazines, TV, etc, you'll find that women consume more than men. Men consume most of the hard-core porn, but women consume most of the soft-core porn.
     
    Slate's whoppers
    Isn't anyone lying anymore? Slate has a feature called Whopper of the Week which would have an example of a public figure lying. But lately, they seem to be just political attacks, without anyone really being caught in a lie. Sometimes it is difficult to even understand why the Slate editors even think that the statement is a lie.

    Slate also has a Bushism feature that consists of finding G. W. Bush quotes that sound silly when quoted out of context. It usually doesn't even give the context, so you can see for yourself what Bush meant.

     
    Outsourcing
    Former Sec. of Labor Reich says that trends towards more engineering outsourcing overseas are just fine with him, but that it would help to have more govt subsidies to universities. That's right, he currently works at a university and not in engineering. I think that those subsidies should be cut, so that universities will outsource their policy professors instead of hiring bozos like Reich.
     
    Reagan miniseries
    If the stories about the CBS miniseries are accurate, then I hope that there is a public boycott of CBS and the miniseries sponsors. It is a malicious distortion of the facts.

    Update: CBS has now dropped the program. It had tried to edit it to remove some of the more offensive and libelous lines, but the program was hopeless. CBS was going to broadcast it during November ratings sweeps, but it probably couldn't find advertizers to absorb the negative publicity.

    The show waw produced by a homosexual pair who previously did a show on Judy Garland. The whole show is an attempt to smear the Reagans. They invented quotes and events that never happened, and which are inconsistent with what is known about the Reagans. It is amazing that CBS could spend $9M on this. I hope people boycott Showtime, if CBS shows it on Showtime. CBS has gone right to the edge of what they can get away with under US libel law, and they shouldn't get away with it.

    Update: There is a lot of leftist grumbling about the cancellation. The Si Valley paper says that it could set a dangerous precedent. I guess they think that expecting TV networks to tell the truth is dangerous. Slate says that it is troubling that CBS would bow to criticism, and that it would have been possible for factual criticism of Reagan. Yeah sure, factual criticism is fine. But this show was false, and maliciously false.

    Bob says that CBS only dropped the show because of an internal review that concluded that it was inaccurate. He said he knows this because an industry insider said so on a PBS news show. What self-serving propaganda! A CBS press release said that the decision had nothing to do with the protest.

    CBS reviewed the script, and knew about the inaccuracies all along. After Drudge and the NY Times exposed some the malicious errors, CBS adamantly said that they would stick with the show, and implied that they thought that the controversy would be good for ratings. Then, 2 weeks later, CBS discovered that opposition to the show was so deep that no one wanted to sponsor the show. At that point, canceling it was a simple business decision. The show was going to lose money.


    Saturday, Nov 01, 2003
     
    Global warming debunked
    John writes that a major global warming study has been debunked.

    Friday, Oct 31, 2003
     
    Google going public
    There is a lot of buzz in Si Valley about Google going public at 100x earnings. It is reminiscent of the Netscape IPO that helped generate the dot-com investment boom.

    The analogy is worth pursuing. Both Netscape and Google had large market share based on offering free software and services to a loyal and grateful user base. Both were hyped based on the premise that their market position could be leveraged into dominance of other lucrative markets that never really materialized. Neither had any significant intellectual property or any way to fend off competitors.

    I don't have hard numbers, but I suspect that AOL, MSN, and Yahoo each carry more searches than Google. Google has a slightly superior product, but that may not last for long. Good search technology is available elsewhere. Yahoo has bought some excellent search engines, and AOL and MSN can do the same or develop it themselves.

     
    Amnesty and free money for teenage illegal aliens
    Andy sends this Miami Herald story about a "dream" bill for students `stuck in immigration hell'. It says:
    ''These youngsters find themselves caught in a Catch-22 situation,'' Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the Dream Act's sponsor, said in a statement e-mailed to The Herald. ``As illegal immigrants, they cannot work legally. Moreover, they are effectively barred from developing academically beyond high school because of the high cost of pursuing higher education.''
    The Catch-22 is that an illegal alien, upon becoming an 18-year-old adult, cannot do very much legally in the USA and sometimes has to go back to his home country. Hatch's solution is to give them green cards and college subsidies.
     
    FDR didn't have polio
    Some scientists now say President FDR probably had Guillain-Barre syndrome, and not polio. Guillain-Barre syndrome is an autoimmune disease that is sometimes triggered by vaccines.

    Vaccine risks are often concealed in academic papers. Eg, this 1998 NEJM study concludes:

    There was no increase in the risk of [flu] vaccine-associated Guillain–Barré syndrome from 1992–1993 to 1993–1994.
    But the studies own numbers say that those getting flu vaccines in 1992-1993 were twice as likely to get Guillain–Barré syndrome. In 1993-1994, the risk increase was a factor of 1.5 (instead of 2.0).

    I don't know how the NEJM can justify such a wrong conclusion. Apparently the rationale is that by breaking the data down into 2 seasons, there is less confidence in the results. For 1992-1993, they can be 95% certain that the relative risk is between 1.0 and 4.3. A risk factor of 1.0 would mean that those getting the flu vaccine and those who didn't got GB syndrome at the same rate. A risk factor of 4.3 would mean that those getting the flu vaccine would be over 4 times as likely to get GB syndrome. Only outcomes within the 95% confidence interval are considered. In other words, the likely risk increase is a factor of 2.0, but if there are statistical flukes in the data, the risk increase might be anything from 1.0 to 4.3.

    So I guess it would be acceptable for the NEJM to say that the risk factor might be 1.0. But that is not what the NEJM says. It says that "there was no increase in the risk". Either it is saying that the risk factor is 1.0, or it is saying that the risk factor in 1993-1994 is no greater than the risk factor in 1992-1993. Either way, the conclusion is not supported by the data, and seems to be a tricky statement designed to mislead the reader into thinking that there is no extra risk associated with the vaccine.


    Thursday, Oct 30, 2003
     
    Diebold memos
    The leading electronic voting machine vendor, Diebold, is trying to use copyright law to keep embarrassing internal memos off the web. The links are here. The memos refer to bugs and sloppy programming that could possibly affect election outcomes. It seems to me that election equipment should use open source software, so that anyone can verify what it is really doing.

    Wednesday, Oct 29, 2003
     
    String theory
    I just watched the big-budget PBS Nova on String Theory. It was hosted by an expert in the field, but I found it disappointing.

    The physics was so watered down as to be almost useless. I understand that they want to reach a wide audience, but when they just speak in vague generalities I think that it narrows the audience who understands what is said. When it did say something specific, such as saying that the universe is 10-dimensional, it was confusing because sometimes it would say that the universe is 10-dimensional, and sometimes 11-dimensional.

    The idolizing of Albert Einstein was annoying. The program kept talking about Einstein throughout, even tho Einstein has almost nothing to do with string theory. The only connection was that string theory tries to be a unified field theory, or theory of everything (TOE), and Einstein looked for such a theory (without success). But the program also said that such a theory is considered a holy grail, so 1000s of other physicists have worked on it as well.

    Actually, I don't think that it is even correct to say that Einstein looked for a TOE in the sense of the Nova program. The main point of unification is to merge gravity with quantum mechanics. I could be wrong, but I don't think that Einstein was trying to do that at all.

    The program was overwhelmingly positive about string theory, but it did have a couple of physicists who said that the theory should be regarded as philosophy because of its lack of observable consequences. I agree with that. String theory has many fascinating aspects, but I am not sure it should even be called a "theory" until it actually explains something.

    The program never mentioned gauge theories, supersymmetry, or renormalization. I don't think that it did a good job of explaining why some physicists find the theory appealing.

     
    Top-heavy chickens
    This sounds like a joke, but it is in an AP story. Actress Pamela Anderson wants to meet KFC heads concerning this complaint:
    I must admit from the outset that I can't understand why a company that claims to care about animal welfare would continue to allow chickens to be bred and drugged to be so top-heavy that they can barely walk ...
    Meanwhile, who's breeding those top-heavy actresses, and what is Hollywood doing about it?
     
    Cisco
    Don't turn your Cisco router off! Some of their devices fail if you turn them off for too long.

    Tuesday, Oct 28, 2003
     
    NY Times lies
    The NY Times got a Pulitzer Prize for being a Stalin apologist, and now says it would be Stalinist and set a bad precedent to revoke the prize. See also these letters.

    I guess it would set a dangerous precedent if a major American newspaper were to admit that they were commie stooges. Don't airbrush history -- expose them for what there were, and what they still are.


    Friday, Oct 24, 2003
     
    Trusted Computing
    Intel is plugging its new motherboard with a Trusted Platform Module, and says:
    Atkinson was keen to point out that this has nothing to do with digital rights management (DRM), which is a controversial technology designed to protect copyrighted material, but should be seen only as an electronic safe.
    Of course it has everything to do with DRM. Once you have a electronic safe, the Windows Media Player can store credentials that allow a user to play a given piece of music or video. The WMP can check the credential, and the user cannot learn it or modify it. The credential can have a key for decrypting the music, and be tied to a particular machine or set to expire on a particular date. Intel needs to persuade people to buy the TPM, but people may not want to if they see the main use as a DRM scheme that offers features to big media distributors, and not to end users.

    Thursday, Oct 23, 2003
     
    National ID card
    This NY Times story tells of a private plan for a national ID card. It is let by Steven Brill, better known for CourtTV and a couple of magazines.

    The idea could work. Everyone assumes that the feds would have to take charge of any national ID card, but some other forces are at work:

  • The available technology is far better than what is currently used in drivers licenses and other common ID cards.
  • There is enormous political, bureaucratic, and legal resistance to an effective national ID card.
  • There is enormous private demand for reliable ID cards.

    There are a lot of private companies (like hotels) that want to see a picture ID (ie, drivers license) and a major credit card (ie, MasterCard or Visa card). A new private ID, selectively distributed according to stringent criteria, could be more effective than both put together. Keep an eye on this idea.


  • Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003
     
    Spyware
    Gator, a maker of spyware, sued PCPitstop for having a web page that said this:
    Dump Your Spyware!

    Spyware, adware, and other unwanted programs are growing threats to PC security and stability. Although programs from companies like Gator and WhenU promise to provide useful functions such as form management or weather forecasts, their main goal is to deliver more advertising to your desktop. In the process, some of these programs cause system instability or compromise your privacy.

    There is more info here. Apparently Gator would rather be called adware, than spyware. I think that spyware is a more accurate description.
     
    Why junk food is bad
    John sends this article:
    Junk food is fooling people into overeating

    FAST FOOD restaurants are feeding the obesity epidemic by tricking people into eating many more calories than they mean to, an important study has shown. Typical menus at McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King contain 65 per cent more calories per bite than standard British meals, making it far too easy for customers to overindulge without realising it.

    It also says that 30% of British physicians would advise their obese patients that it is better to stay obese than to try the Atkins diet.

    Of course fast food is high-calorie. It is supposed to be. People eat fast food to consume calories. If you don't need the calories, it is even faster to skip the meal.

    Physicians are terribly misinformed about nutrition. Studies have shown that the Atkins diet is a healthy diet.


    Tuesday, Oct 21, 2003
     
    Intervals
    Brian Hayes wrote an American Scientist magazine column in the current issue about interval arithmetic. It mentions some research I did.

    Saturday, Oct 18, 2003
     
    World's tallest building
    The news is reporting that the new Taipei 101 has taken the title of the world's tallest building from the Malaysian Petrona Towers. Here is a scale drawing of the 10 highest skyscrapers. As you can see, the Chicago Sears Tower is still the building with the highest point, and still has the highest substantial occupied floor. The Taiwan 101 has an observation deck that is slightly higher than the Sears Tower top floor, but that's about all.

    The NY World Trade Center towers were taller, but they don't exist anymore.

    The Si Valley paper reports this story, but had to insert a fake graphic in order to make the Taipei 101 look the tallest. I sent this letter to the editor:

    The graphic in your front-page article on the new Taiwan skyscraper is not drawn to scale. If it were, then the Sears Tower in Chicago would appear to be still the tallest building in the world (although the Taipei 101 is higher according to certain obscure technical measures).
    Amazing, a newspaper editor called me about 2 minutes after I sent the email! He was very interested, and wanted to know exactly why I thought that the graphic was wrong. Since the paper thought that the graphic was important enough to put on page 1, I think that a corrected graphic should go into tomorrow's paper.

    Update: No correction yet, but the SJ Mercury News says that it is still researching the matter!

     
    Criminals go free in Frisco
    Andy sends this SF Chronicle story:
    San Francisco prosecutors led by District Attorney Terence Hallinan convicted less than a third of all adult felony suspects arrested in the city in 2001, according to the most recent California Department of Justice statistics available. Since 1996, the year Hallinan took office, his conviction rate annually has ranked last among county prosecutors in California, according to a Chronicle analysis of the state data.
    and comments:
    This probably helped the pain management doctor in San Francisco beat the charges against him San Francisco is the best place for defendants in California, maybe in the entire the country. Also, note that it was a mistake for the dog mauling defendants to move the case to LA (I assume the defendants insisted on the move).
    John responds:
    That was a shocking report on lawlessness in San Francisco. Just what you'd expect when the prosecutor is a red diaper baby, a child of notorious Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers, and a reputed Communist himself. Here is a bit of Google research on the Hallinans.

    TalkLeft.com sffaith.com house.gov bolerium.com

    After those stats Andy cited, even the liberal S.F. Chronicle has had enough. Hallinan must go!

    SF is seriously out of step with the rest of California. Even the Democrat Calif. attorney general announced that he voted for Arnold. SF voted 80% against the recall, while other areas on Calif voted for the recall in a landslide.

    Friday, Oct 17, 2003
     
    Kill Bill
    Funny to see the NY Times devote an article attacking a movie review in a blog.

    The movie Kill Bill has gotten rave reviews, but it really is just a silly Asian fight movie. It mainly shows a lot of killing with Japanese samurai swords. I guess I can say these things without the NY Times attacking me, because it doesn't care about Asians or Japanese. But Easterbrook made a fairly innocuous comment about Jews, and I guess the NY Times feels it has to scrutinize him. There is plenty of anti-Jewish bigotry in the Mohammedan world (eg, Malaysia, recently), but trying to find it in The New Republic seems really silly.

    Update: Now Easterbrook has been fired from ESPN, and ESPN has purged his columns from their archives. Disney owns ESPN. The real problem here is that Quentin Tarantino movies make a lot of money because the critics like his style, and others like his over-the-top violence. It is a way to market a trashy slasher movie and appear respectable. Easterbrook was criticizing that.

    I commented earlier that money was at the root of ESPN firing Rush Limbaugh. I didn't even think about ESPN being owned by Disney, and Disney being run by Eisner, and Eisner being Jewish. Businesses being run by Christians make similar decisions. But I suppose I risk being branded anti-Jewish for just saying this.

    George writes:

    Easterbrook didn't just say that Hollywood studio managers are greedy. He says that Jews in particular should learn from Nazi history, and make less violent movies.
    So? It is annoying when people invoke the Nazis to make some point that really has nothing to do with Nazis. I don't agree with his point, but Jews, Christians, right-wingers, left-wingers, and everybody else invokes the Nazis whenever convenient. What was really offensive to Eisner is Easterbrook's suggestion that he is making money by "glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice."

    Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003
     
    ABCNews fingers Cub fan
    The Chicago Cubs appear to be cursed. The turning point last night was when Cubs fan Steve Bartman hit a foul ball just as Cubs' outfielder Moises Alou was about to catch it. The Marlins went on to score 8 runs in the inning and win the game. It appears that Cubs fans just don't really want to win.

    Monday, Oct 13, 2003
     
    H-1B
    John send this Oregon story about how Intel lobbies for increased imported labor, while it lays off American engineers. Often the American has to train a lesser-paid Indian who replaces him.

    Friday, Oct 10, 2003
     
    Frivolous lawsuit of the day
    John sends this story about someone suing the National Football League because a drunk fan had a truck accident after a game.

    You can find more info on frivolous lawsuits at Overlawyered.com and Mlaw.org/


    Thursday, Oct 09, 2003
     
    Another ridiculous DMCA lawsuit
    SunnComm is threatening to sue a Princeton student for publishing a copyright circumvention paper.

    The copy-protection scheme is to put an "autorun" program on a music CD, and that program attaches a worm to the device driver. The circumvention is to hold down the shift key while loading the CD into a PC. A lot of people turn off the autorun feature anyway, as it often causes obnoxious programs to run.

     
    Black quarterbacks
    Rush Limbaugh got fired for saying that people hope that black quarterbacks do well in the NFL. It was a mystery as to why anyone at ESPN would be offended by the remark. Now here is a possible explanation. An economist has done a study (described in this WSJ blog) on Race, Football and Television: Explaining the black quarterback effect.

    It turns out that Monday night football TV ratings are 10% higher when there is a black quarterback playing. So that's why ESPN was upset! Black quarterbacks were increasing ESPN's football show revenues by 10%, and Rush blew their cover.


    Wednesday, Oct 08, 2003
     
    Arnold
    Amazing California election results.

    The election shows how much the San Francisco area and the big city newspapers are completely out of touch politically. Outside the SF area, the election was a huge landslide for Arnold and the Republicans.

    All the talk about how the recall was undemocratic sure turned out to be silly partisan propaganda. Arnold got far more votes than Davis ever got. What was undemocratic was:

  • the attempts by the ACLU and 9th Circuit to cancel the election.
  • Cruz Bustamante's illegal campaign fund diversion.
  • Indian Casinos and other special interests buying off Davis, Bustamante, and McClintock.
  • Slanderous puke politics on the part of Davis, Dianne Feinstein, Bustamante, and the LA Times.
  • Campaigning from out-of-state hacks like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and MoveOn.org.

    Here is a SacBee list of recall myths.

  •  
    The Manchurian Candidate
    Hollywood is remaking The Manchurian Candidate, and someone just discovered that some passages in the original book were plagiarized.

    Tuesday, Oct 07, 2003
     
    Msft Palladium
    This anonymous blog has some good criticisms of an EFF report on trusted computing. I agree that EFF's idea of putting an "owner override" into the TCG/NGSCB remote attestation is like fixing the limitations of cryptographic certificates by allowing anyone to forge them. I can see why EFF doesn't like the feature, but it wants to cripple the feature and make it useless. There are benefits to the feature, and some people may want those benefits.

    Monday, Oct 06, 2003
     
    LA County Prop 54 report
    LA County says in a pre-election report that it will cost $7M to delete objectionable racial classifications from its computer systems. My guess is that they would actually save money by not collecting the data, but they are using Prop. 54 as an excuse to get funds. If you send a memo to govt. agencies asking them if they need money to comply with a change in the law, they usually say yes.
     
    Biased news media attacks
    The relentless attacks on Arnold by Democratic Party puppets continue. In they attempts to re-elect Gray Davis, the LA Times and other big newspapers have descended to a level where even the supermarket tabloids won't go. Most of the accusations are silly. Arnold is clearly not a Nazi, even if he once said that Hitler was an excellent speaker. Everybody agrees that Hitler was an excellent speaker. And if he was guilty of sexual harassment or anything like that, then why hasn't anyone sued him?

    Gray Davis is a corrupt and incompetent governor whose policies have been a disaster for California. He only gets support by granting political favors to special interests, and by using nasty and unfair political smears on his opponents. Davis must be removed.

    Of the 7-8M voters expected, about 2M have already voted by absentee ballot. Those votes will not affected by the last-minute Democratic attack on Arnold.

    The hypocrisy of leftists is amazing. The San Jose Mercury News has been referring to Arnold as "actor" in its headlines for stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger's run for governor. It even does it when Bustamante or Huffington is in the same headline. The purpose to belittle Schwarzenegger as a serious political candidate. But when it prints stories about petty allegations about Schwarzenegger's history as an actor, then it uses his name. Here is an example. There it might have used a headline like, "Actor accused of making sexual advances", since it is a story about his activities as an actor.

    MoveOn.org was formed to persuade people to ignore Bill Clinton lying under oath to avoid making a sexual harassment payment. But now, its two biggest issues on its web site are:

  • pressure US DoJ to appoint a special prosecutor to find the source of a trivial CIA leak.
  • vote against Arnold Schwarzenegger because he is a misogynist, as evidenced by a joke about beating up a female robot in a SciFi movie.

    The WSJ reports that the LA Times sat on stories about how Gray Davis abused women working for him. The stories were not printed.

    John sends this story about activists getting ready to challenge the election based on use of punch-cards, if the election is close.

    The biggest complaints about punch-card ballots are that votes are sometimes lost when voters fail to follow instructions, and that there are difficulties in doing manual recounts. The article explains that 10% of tomorrow's voters will use the touch-screen voting machines. The machines are supposed to be better because they don't save any evidence of voter mistakes, and because they make a manual recount impossible! The machines have printers, but they have been deliberately configured not to print copies of the votes, as a manual recount would need. I think that the movement to switch from punch-card to touch-screen voting is seriously misguided.


  • Sunday, Oct 05, 2003
     
    Bad DMCA results
    The EFF has a good list of DMCA unintended consequences. The DMCA was an amendment to the copyright law that outlawed "circumvention" of a copy protection scheme.

    I agree that most of these are undesirable, but why are they "unintended"? The EFF lobbied against the DMCA, and warned that all these bad things would happen. So I think that these consequences were anticipated, and intended.


    Friday, Oct 03, 2003
     
    Medical research bias
    Most studies on the safety and effectiveness of drugs are funded by the company that profits from the drug in question. Andy sends this study showing bias.
    Studies of aspartame in the peer reviewed medical literature were surveyed for funding source and study outcome. Of the 166 studies felt to have relevance for questions of human safety, 74 had Nutrasweet® industry related funding and 92 were independently funded. One hundred percent of the industry funded research attested to aspartame's safety, whereas 92% of the independently funded research identified a problem.
     
    Spelling kluge
    A lot of people who should know better still misspell kluge as kludge. As explained in The New Hacker's Dictionary, the spelling kluge is the correct one, both etymologically and phonetically.
     
    Robert B. Reich
    Here is another Democrat attack dog, Robert B. Reich, complaining about the Clinton recall/Florida recount/California recall connection.
    Exhibit One: Impeachment. Bill Clinton’s Republican opponents sought to reverse the election of 1992 ... To be sure, Clinton’s liaison with Monica Lewinsky helped advance the Republicans’ cause ...

    Exhibit Two: Election re-engineering. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush ...

    Exhibit Three: California’s recall initiative. ...

    ... Only a minority of American voters in 2000 wanted George W. to be our president. Most Americans didn’t want Bill Clinton impeached for lying about sex.

    It is true that George W. Bush got a minority of the votes in 2000, but Clinton got smaller minorities in 1992 and 1996, and Davis was elected with a smaller minority in 2002. Most Americans did not even want Clinton in the White House in the first place. Reich is trying to imply that the Clinton presidency was somehow more legitimate that GW Bush's, because Bush only got 48% of the popular vote, but Clinton was elected in 1992 with only 43%.

    Anyone who is truly against "election re-engineering" would surely oppose the Florida supreme court's intervention in the lawful counting and certification of the 2000 ballots. All the US supreme court did was to put a stop to that re-engineering. Reich would be cheering, if he were just a stupid Democrat attack dog.


    Thursday, Oct 02, 2003
     
    Msft Palladium
    John sends this ZDnet story about EFF criticism of Trusted Computing (aka Palladium, TCPA, NGSCB). Previous criticisms have been by Ross Anderson and Richard Stallman. More technical info can be found at Msft and here.
     
    Pictures
    Good pictures here.
     
    Sacrilegious man struck dead
    This AP story says a 38-year-old man had to face secular and religious justice for having sex in NY's St. Patrick's cathedral. The NY judge was going to give him probation, when a higher power struck him dead. I don't expect any copycats.

    Wednesday, Oct 01, 2003
     
    Davis
    CBS News reports on a poll that "showed Davis' support ebbing in four key categories: Democrats, women, moderates and liberals." Funny. Where else did he have any support?
     
    Cheap pants
    I bought a cheap pair of pants with the label on the right. How can 100% cotton pants (or any other pants) be stain-free? Or wrinkle-free or hassle-free? And just what is a caring comfort engineer?

    Tuesday, Sep 30, 2003
     
    McClintock the spoiler
    Tom McClintock gets conservative support here, and John writes:
    McClintock is nothing but a spoiler. There is no plausible scenario in which he can finish better than 3rd place. Voting for McClintock in the Calif Recall is like voting voting for Buchanan in 2000.

    Calif. is overwhelmingly Democratic. Arnold cannot win unless he gets a lot of Democratic votes. That would be true even if McClintock dropped out, and it is especially true with him still stubbornly staying in. Arnold's positions have been about as conservative as possible, and still get Democratic votes. You may like McClintock better, but he will not get any Democratic votes.

    This is probably true, and would be a strong reason for supporting Arnold if - IF - the only purpose, or even if the main purpose, of the recall election is to determine who will be governor of California.

    Roger overlooks the other consequence of the election, which in the minds of many conservatives is equally important, and perhaps even more important, than who will be governor Who will control the Republican party in California?

    Arnold may not be able to do that much as governor, but he will be able to install his people - which means Pete Wilson's people - to control the party and purge conservatives.

    Apparently Roger does not appreciate how intensely and bitterly California conservatives hate Pete Wilson and all of his works and pomps. Most people remember only Pete Wilson's late endorsement of Prop 187 (a last-ditch Hail Mary play to save his otherwise losing campaign), and forget his largest tax increase in California history and his systematic effort to purge social conservatives from elective office and party positions.

    The California Republican Party was a bastion and driving force for conservatism nationwide - responsible for Goldwater and Reagan. Now the grassroots have been purged from party leadership, which is firmly controlled by Bush's money man, Gerald Parsky (who opposed the recall, BTW). The election of Arnold will probably lead to the continued exclusion of true conservatives from all positions of leadership.

    Not being a Californian, I don't really care about who is governor since, let's be honest, the state is pretty well lost anyway. For those of us in the other 49 states, it would be worse to have a liberal Republican as governor of California than a Democrat.

    Meanwhile, McClintock is now getting most of his financial support from indian casinos. The indian casinos hate Arnold because he says he wants to make them pay taxes. The Indian casinos support McClintock because he is anti-tax, and support McClintock is the best way to defeat Arnold.
    What troubles me about McClintock isn't the Indian money he is taking (which isn't all that much; it's only a fraction of what the Indians are giving Bustamonte). It's the fact that McClintock endorses and supports the Indian political and legal demands, the perpetuation of the outrageous loopholes they enjoy. Apparently McClintock has supported (and been supported by) Indian casino interests throughout his career, not just in the recall.

    For more info, see John Fund's two articles, Indian Givers and Indian Givers II.

    If so, so much the better. Those controlling the Calif. Repub. Party have been a disaster. They have turned a predominantly Republican state into a predominant Democratic state. They have lost every single statewide office, and 2/3 of the legislature. It is time to purge the losers, and bring in new blood.
    This is not the fault of conservatives.
    I think that Wilson said that tax increase was his biggest mistake. But, as Arnold says, Wilson will not be on the ballot next week.
    Since Arnold staffed his campaign with Wilson's people, one can assume those are the people he is likely to use in his administration and move them into control of the Republican party.
    Now we get to the core of your argument. You'd rather sacrifice California for the sake of some dubious national goal. That is unacceptable to us Californians, of course, but I fail to how it benefits Republicans in the other 49 states to have Gray Davis as governor. I realize that there were some pro-Bush people who thought that Bush is more likely to win California in 2004 if Davis is governor. But those people are morons. Bush stands no chance of winning California as long as Davis is governor.
    My purpose is not to help Bush carry California in 2004, which is next to impossible. Even assuming that Republicans can't win statewide for the foreseeable future, Republicans still control 20 of California's 53 seats in Congress. That is a decisive block since Republicans only control Congress by a 12-seat majority. We would hope to get conservatives elected to these 20 seats as well as the state legislature from Republican districts. Pete Wilson tried to eliminate conservatives from all such positions.
    McClintock is nothing but a spoiler. There is no plausible scenario in which he can finish better than 3rd place. Voting for McClintock in the Calif Recall is like voting voting for Buchanan in 2000.

    As this article points out, Arnold could well be hurt if McClintock drops out. The reason is that every McClintock voter is certain to vote Yes on the recall. If McClintock's supporters stay home next Tuesday, the recall could fail.

    Did you see Arianna on Larry King tonight? She is now recommending No on Recall, and then voting for whomever is most likely to cause Arnold to lose!

    Listening to her argument should persuade any conservative Republican to vote for Arnold.

     
    Moore revises Columbine
    Spinsanity likes to skewer both right and left wingers with facts. This time it points out that Michael Moore has corrected some lies in the Bowling for Columbine DVD. Or rather, changed some lies, to be more precise. The changes only show that the misrepresentations are deliberate.

    There is also a piece on some of the silly attacks on John Ashcroft. He is demonized in ways that make no sense at all. The Left really hates him for reasons that have nothing to do with the Patriot Act, or any of the other attacks on him.

     
    Bustamante dropping out?
    Besides being a racist leftist idiot, Lt. Gov. Bustamante has some wacky personal connections. His brother manages an indian casino, and her sister is a really strange performance artist.
     
    Wesley Clark's vision
    Wired magazine reports:
    Wesley Clark: Rhodes scholar, four-star general, NATO commander, time-travel fanatic? ...

    "We need a vision of how we're going to move humanity ahead, and then we need to harness science to do it," Clark told a group of about 50 people in ... New Hampshire ...

    "I still believe in e=mc², but I can't believe that in all of human history, we'll never ever be able to go beyond the speed of light to reach where we want to go," said Clark. "I happen to believe that mankind can do it."

    "I've argued with physicists about it, I've argued with best friends about it. I just have to believe it. It's my only faith-based initiative." Clark's comment prompted laughter and applause from the gathering.

    So Clark wants to be president in order to implement his vision of doing things that science has shown to be impossible? What a kook! This is even crazier than Jimmy Carter claiming to have seen a UFO.
     
    Bustamante ad
    Bustamante's new TV ad says:
    Arnold doesn't share our values. He won't fight for our health care, our neighborhoods, our jobs. He doesn't live in our world. He lives on Planet Hollywood. There is a long list of candidates, finding my name won't be easy, but I need you to do it, because I need your vote for governor.
    The choice of words is very curious. It doesn't make much sense, unless you assume that he is only appealing to illiterate Mexican-Americans. Who else has trouble reading the ballot? Why else would he be using code words like "share our values"?

    Bustamante appears to owned by the Indian casinos. He is spending millions of dollars of casino money on pro-Bustamante ads, in defiance of a court order. His brother is an Indian casino manager. McClintock appears to be also dependent on Indian gambling money. This shows how crooked California politics has become.

    Imagine if McClintock belonged to a racist organization with the motto: For the race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing. Imagine if he ran a TV ad saying:

    Cruz doesn't share our values. He won't fight for our neighborhoods or our jobs. He doesn't live in our world. He lives in Aztlan, the fictional result of repatriating California and Texas to be part of Mexico. Please vote for me, as my supporters can actually read the ballot.

    Sunday, Sep 28, 2003
     
    LA Times backs Davis
    An LA Times editorial recommends keeping Gov. Gray Davis in office because:
    Davis is a leader of intellect but of no soul. He is a competent policy wonk who can speak at length about budget subventions (don't ask) but can't get legislators of his own Democratic Party to, as he once put it, "implement my vision." For one thing, nobody knows what that vision is. Love them or hate them, former Govs. Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan knew where they wanted to take this state. Davis' modest ideas of where he should steer the ship of state have been those of the overnight helmsman, not the captain. He has spent too much time avoiding issues: not dealing with the energy crisis and not providing relief for small businesses until it was almost too late; not cultivating legislative relationships that could have made him an effective governor.
    Do you see anything positive here? In spite of the above, it is against the recall because:
    The implications of this recall go far beyond whether the abysmally unpopular Davis stays or goes.
    It is amazing how Davis's core constituency has such a hard time saying anything positive about him, even when endorsing him. What really scares the leftist media is the possibility of direct democratic election of a populist Republican.

    Saturday, Sep 27, 2003
     
    Popular programming languages
    A source code repository lists its open source projects by programming language. C, C++, and Java are the most popular:
  • Ada (38 projects)
  • APL (3 projects)
  • ASP (26 projects)
  • Assembly (177 projects)
  • Awk (40 projects)
  • Basic (15 projects)
  • C (5517 projects)
  • C# (45 projects)
  • C++ (2481 projects)
  • Cold Fusion (10 projects)
  • Common Lisp (29 projects)
  • Delphi (50 projects)
  • Dylan (2 projects)
  • Eiffel (21 projects)
  • Emacs-Lisp (33 projects)
  • Erlang (11 projects)
  • Euler (1 project)
  • Euphoria (2 projects)
  • Forth (16 projects)
  • Fortran (45 projects)
  • Haskell (28 projects)
  • Java (2396 projects)
  • JavaScript (235 projects)
  • Lisp (66 projects)
  • Logo (2 projects)
  • ML (26 projects)
  • Modula (7 projects)
  • Object Pascal (10 projects)
  • Objective C (136 projects)
  • OCaml (22 projects)
  • Other (163 projects)
  • Other Scripting Engines (85 projects)
  • Pascal (38 projects)
  • Perl (2764 projects)
  • PHP (2060 projects)
  • Pike (3 projects)
  • PL/SQL (61 projects)
  • Pliant (1 project)
  • PROGRESS (2 projects)
  • Prolog (8 projects)
  • Python (1198 projects)
  • Rexx (7 projects)
  • Ruby (128 projects)
  • Scheme (79 projects)
  • Simula (1 project)
  • Smalltalk (21 projects)
  • SQL (293 projects)
  • Tcl (357 projects)
  • Unix Shell (554 projects)
  • Visual Basic (15 projects)
  • XBasic (1 project)
  • YACC (11 projects)
  • Zope (34 projects)
  •  
    School tracking works
    Today's NY Times Magazine says:
    And now a study published last month by the Public Policy Institute of California could well add fuel to the fires on both sides of the issue. The study concludes that students' performances are demonstrably affected by those of their peers. ''One of the more consistent findings,'' as Julian Betts, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study, put it, is that ''an individual student's rate of learning appears to be strongly, and positively, influenced by the initial achievement of students in his or her grade, and with somewhat less consistency than that of students in his or her classroom.''
     
    No conservatives allowed on campus
    David Brooks says that conservatives are not welcome in academia, and many have to keep their views in the closet.

    George writes:

    Sure, there aren't that many conservatives in academia, but there aren't really that many Marxists either.
    You act like a department is balanced if it has equal numbers of Marxists and conservatives! Marxists are extremists on the fringe, no matter how you look at it. Conservatives such as Ronald Reagan supporters are squarely in the middle of the American political mainstream.

    Thursday, Sep 25, 2003
     
    Msft is a security threat
    John sends this story about a CCIA report that claim governments are taking a risk by increasingly relying on Msft. C-Net reports that the lead author was fired from his job, apparently at the request of Msft.

    The report does make some interesting points, but I think that it overstates the threat to having a dominant OS supplier.

    Phil writes:

    There's no conceivable benefit to the authors of the so-called OS to release it littered with exploitable holes. Yet they did.
    None? Msft would very much like to reposition its OS products as services that are leased, rather than products that are bought. It would like business to just pay an annual fee for every computer running Windows, and get regular updates as part of the deal.

    The proliferation of Windows worms and viruses makes people dependent on Msft for regular updates. It convinces everyone that an OS is inherently unstable, and needs to be updated regularly.

    Msft may not have put in those holes deliberately, but it does appear to benefit from them. And the way the law works, Msft has no liability for its bugs.

     
    Rich trial lawyers
    John sends this study claiming that trial lawyers such $40B out of our economy every year. What a waste of money. If all those judgment could be divided by 10 somehow, most of us would be better off. More details here.
     
    Do-not-call list
    Congress is acting to save the Do Not Call list. 50M people signed up. The House voted 417-8. Now what can be done about the activist federal judges like the one in OK who issued an injunction against the list? His reasoning was idiotic.

    Update: I pay my phone company to block telemarketer calls, but occasionally some slip thru from Oklahoma. I guess the telemarketers own the judges there.

    Update: Now another judge has gotten into the act. Call Judge Lee R. West at +1-405-609-5140, or Judge Edward W. Nottingham at at +1-303-844-5018.

    George writes:

    Are you suggesting that people make harassing telephone calls to these judges?
    Harassing is a pejorative word. I am suggesting that people exercise what these judges regard as their 1A rights. Apparently people have already done that, as the AP reports:
    West's home and office telephone numbers were posted on the Internet, and consumers angry with the ruling were encouraged to call. Calls by The Associated Press to West's home seeking comment were blocked by busy signals.
    I also tried West's home number of 405-348-0818, but only got busy signals. Is he getting the message?

    Meanwhile, the leading vendor of electronic voting machines is trying to shut down a site that points out security problems with the high-tech voting machines. Check it out, and you'll want those punch-card ballots back.


    Wednesday, Sep 24, 2003
     
    JetBlue
    Some people sure got hysterical about a trivial little privacy violation on the part of JetBlue airlines. I agree with Slate Chatterbox that complaints by the NY Times and others were seriously overblown.

    Monday, Sep 22, 2003
     
    ACLU slip-up
    The 9th Circuit hearing on canceling the California recall election ended with the ACLU lawyer getting an extra 30 seconds at the end and saying he'll just make 3 points. He ended by saying this:
    That is, your honor, the strongest case that has ever been in this Circus. (laughter)
    The NY Times has an especially illogical editorial:
    Critics of the Ninth Circuit ruling have tried mightily to get around Bush v. Gore. Some argue, as the district court that first heard the recall case did, that it should be "limited to its unique context." But in our system, legal principles apply equally to all Americans. It cannot be that George Bush got a different level of equal protection than everyone else. Critics of the appeals court ruling have also tried to argue that the facts in California are very different from those in Florida. But if anything, those differences make the case for intervention stronger. Ruling that legal votes will not be counted, as the Supreme Court did in Florida, is a far greater intrusion on democracy than delaying an election.
    The Supreme did not rule (and could not have ruled) that legal votes would not be counted. All of the Florida 2000 votes were counted at least once, and some of them several times. Even after a one year newspaper investigation, no one found a single legal vote that was not counted.

    Nor has anyone ever argued that G. Bush is entitled to some protection that is not available to others. But that is really illogical is that the NY Times attacks the Bush v. Gore decision at the same time that it urges the 9C to apply it to this recall election!

    I don't think that this recall issue has much relation to Bush v. Gore, but if it does, then I say that Bush v. Gore should be strictly applied. The federal courts should stop any lower appellate court meddling with statutory election procedures unless, at the very least, it has been proven that it won't unequally disenfranchise others in the process. But a delay will disenfranchise the 500k voters who have already voted, and the rest of the voters who wanted a recall this year.

    Gov. Davis has announced that he now favors having an election without delay, so I assume that the Democrats on the 9C will rule that way this morning. They were strangely silent during the hearing.

    Update: The 9C just ruled that the recall election can proceed as scheduled. The vote was 11-0.

     
    Rhodes scholars
    Andrew Sullivan says:
    To my mind, the most important thing about [Wesley] Clark is that he was a Rhodes Scholar. Almost to a man and woman, they are mega-losers, curriculum-vitae fetishists, with huge ambition and no concept of what to do with it.
    Josh Chavetz says that Sullivan is a jerk for saying that, and then lists a bunch of famous and accomplished Rhodes scholars.

    Check the list yourself. I say that every single one of them is vastly overrated, if not a mega-loser.

     
    EBay spying
    In case you thought that you had any privacy on eBay, read this report on how it cooperates with govt investigations.

    Saturday, Sep 20, 2003
     
    Hitler's home
    Found this:
    In November 1938 the English fashion magazine Homes & Gardens profiled on page 193-195 the home of Adolf Hitler ...
    The magazine publisher has tried to suppress putting this on the net, but there is no stopping it now.

    George writes:

    Why are you linking to a neo-nazi holocaust denier who glorifies Hitler?
    David Irving is none of those things. He is a respected historian who has written some WWII-related books. He has had some obscure disputes with some other historians, but they are uninteresting to most people.

    Besides, I sometimes have links to commie sympathizers, so why should anyone care if I had a link to a nazi sympathizer? This particular link is to an uncontroversial and non-ideological article.

     
    Copyrighted code
    ISO wants to collect money for use of some standard codes, like US=USA, CA=Canada, FR=France, etc.

    Here is a lawsuit from some company that claims to own the Dewey Decimal system for classifying books.

     
    First cancelled election
    500k absentee votes are already in, and it would be a radical move to cancel the Calif. recall election and throw out those votes. The Si Valley paper reports:
    California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and recall advocates welcomed the decision to rehear the case with the 11-judge, or en banc, panel. Shelley again warned that a delay would be ``devastating'' because it would force some 500,000 absentee ballots already cast to be discarded and require officials to reopen the filing period for candidates.

    ``Never in the history of this country has an election been halted after the electoral process, specifically voting, has begun,'' Shelley said.

    Very persuasive point, but not true. New York City was holding a primary to elect a new mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, when the WTC collapsed. According to this article, NY Gov. Pataki issued an executive order cancelling the election, and at least one judge issued an oral order.

    But that exception will be of no comfort to the 9C. It only shows what sort of emergency it takes to justify cancelling an election. If Mexico cancelled an election because some partisan 3-judge panel declared that they didn't like punchcards, then everyone would conclude that the Mexican govt is corrupt and the system lacks respect for basic democratic functions.

    The 9C is sure to reverse the 3-judge panel, and let the recall election proceed. Look for a vote of at least 9-2. They want to avoid another SC reversal.

    Conventional wisdom says that the US SC won't want to hear the case. The ACLU lawyer says:

    it's clear that a court could not rule against us without effectively reversing Bush versus Gore. That's the principle of Bush versus Gore that all voters are to have an equal opportunity to have their votes counted.
    I think that all 9 judges on the SC would happily make the point that Bush v. Gore stands for the principle that judge should not interfere with elections.

    George write:

    What do you mean? It was the Supreme Court that stopped the 2000 Florida recount, and meddled in the election.
    No, all the statutory recounts took place as required. All the US SC did was to block the FL SC from canceling the election certification and doing a blatantly partisan recount of its own choosing.

    Friday, Sep 19, 2003
     
    Unanswered 9/11 questions
    John sends this list of unanswered 9/11 questions. Yes, we need answers.
     
    Mail-bombing attack
    The email address on this page is rapidly becoming useless because of relentless mail-bombing. I have no idea who is doing it. If it doesn't stop soon, I'll close the account and open a new one.

    Thursday, Sep 18, 2003
     
    Microsoft
    John sends this story about Microsoft wanting to improve its search engine to compete with Google. I expect Msft to do this, as most of what Google does is known technology that Msft can imitate. Google is the king now, but another strong competitor will be Yahoo, which has bought Overture, Inktomi, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb. Those each have some advantages over Google, and if Yahoo can put them together, they will be competitive.

    Meanwhile, people are complaining about the huge $521M Eolas patent judgment against Msft. I agree that the patent is dubious, but Msft should have never copied it anyway. The patent only covers using a web browser to load and run a multimedia file automatically (like Flash), without the user being able to do anything about it. I never liked web pages that did that, and I hope Eolas forces Msft to eliminate that feature. It is an obnoxious feature, and we'd all be better off without it.

     
    Gov. Davis bought votes
    John sends this LA Times column. It rebuts MoveOn.org's argument that Issa spent $1 per signature on the recall petitions, by pointing out that Davis spent $20 per vote in last year's election.

    The SF paper quotes Gov. Davis as admitting that he has lost touch with voters, and saying, in response to a query about his vision for the state:

    My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state.
    Next he'll want to give drivers licenses to space aliens.

    Meanwhile, law prof. Larry Tribe shows that he is just a partisan hack by defending the crooked 9th Circuit decision cancelling the Calif recall election. He concedes that Republicans are being consistent by advocating that elections follow statutory schedules, but argues that using punchcards discriminates against urban minorities.

    George writes:

    How can you call the 9th Circuit "crooked" when L. Tribe and others came to the same conclusion? They could sue you for libel.
    I am not calling the whole 9th Circuit crooked. Just judges PREGERSON, THOMAS, and PAEZ. They could not possibly honestly believe what they say in their opinion unless there were total morons. They appear to be driven by some partisan political agenda.

    Tribe says what he says because he is a paid lobbyist for certain left-wing political interests that happen to like the decision. He is just another idiot lawyer writing a goofy legal brief, because his client paid him to do that. The 9C judges have lifetime tenure, and are blatantly corrupt and partisan. They should be impeached, and Bush should appoint right-wingers to replace them. There are no examples of right-wing judges issuing such partisan, activist, and extreme decisions.

    George writes:

    Now you are slandering Tribe. How do you know he has been paid to take his positions?
    His WSJ column today says:
    Mr. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, is co-counsel for the parties challenging California's procedure and represented Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore.
    Update: The 11-judge panel will include 1 Carter appointee, 2 Reagan appointees, 1 GHW Bush appointee, and 7 Clinton appointees. It does not include ACLU goofball Reinhardt or any of the 3 judges who wrote the wacky opinion. I can only hope that Kozinski will keep them honest (although it seems pathetic that I have to hope that a Romanian will explain fair elections to a bunch of Americans).
     
    California recall delay
    I am glad to see most commentators recognize the foolishness of the 9th Circuit decision to cancel the recall election, but Slate's idiot legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick says:
    The logic of the panel (and of the original Bush decision) would hold that any election with differing voting apparatus is inherently unconstitutional. And that renders every election, past and future, illegal.
    Of course Bush v. Gore said nothing of the kind, and all 9 SC judges would disagree. The majority said:
    The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied.
    The whole point of Bush v. Gore was to limit judicial intervention in an election. There is no way it can be read to encourage such intervention. And especially not to say a state election in progress cannot follow state election law.

    Tuesday, Sep 16, 2003
     
    Beef consumption is up
    Slate's lead article says that people are eating more beef and eggs and other foods on the Atkins diet, while sales of products recommended by competing diets are down. But it tries to debunk the popular explanation that the Atkins diet is the cause. Why? Because there are not enough people on the Atkins diet to account for the large shifts.

    But there is a simpler explanation. For years, everyone has been subjected to propaganda from the Amer. Med. Assn. and others that beef and eggs are unhealthy. So millions of people cut back on beef and eggs, whether they were dieting or not. But now Atkins has proved the AMA wrong, and people are free to eat beef and eggs again. So Atkins could be responsible for a huge shift, far beyond the people who actually stick to a strict Atkins diet.

    Another Slate column label this John Ashcroft statement Whopper of the Week:

    No one believes in our First Amendment civil liberties more than this administration.
    Why is this wrong? For it to be wrong, then someone must believe in our First Amendment civil liberties more. But whom?

    The only support is a reference to Bill Maher being fired from ABC, and Rumsfeld saying that a healthy debate won't interfere with the war on terrorism.

    Remember that it was the Clinton administration that wanted to radically expand wiretapping, and to prohibit the private use of encryption. That was an attack on First Amendment civil liberties far beyond anything currently contemplated. I prefer the Bush administration.

     
    Mexifornia drivers license
    Here is a sample of the new license.
     
    Watson on DNA
    I just finished the audio version of James D. Watson's new book on DNA. It has good layman explanations of genetic research of the last 50 years or so. It works fairly well on audio, except that the reader has an annoying accent. Surely they could have found someone who doesn't talk funny.

    Watson have various dubious opinions sprinkled among his explanations. He is against NIH applying for patents on genes. He complains about a private company (Celera) doing private genetic research, and holding up some info for 3 months before publication. He complains about universities having to pay to use patents. He once favored tight restrictions on genetic research, but now wants no restrictions on genetically modified food and other controversial gene uses. And most controversially, he wants everybody to submit DNA samples for a national or worldwide database that would be used for police work and maybe insurance fee adjustment as well.

    The book also presents an exaggerated view of his own accomplishments. He keeps referring to his double helix paper as if it were one of the greatest discoveries of all time. In reality, his contribution (with Crick) was minor. Avery had already shown that the genetic info was carried by DNA, although not everyone believed it. Linus Pauling had worked out the theory for figuring out the molecular structure of dozens of biological compounds, and had conjectured a specific helical structure for DNA that was close but not quite right. Others had figured out the constituents of DNA. Rosalind Franklin had done the crucial x-ray crystallography experiments that showed the helical structure more precisely. All Crick and Watson did was to use Franklin's data to publish an improvement to Pauling's model. It might have been done by others, but Franklin's pictures were unpublished and Crick and Watson managed to steal them from her lab. Later scientists figured out the significance of the base pairs in the Pauling-Franklin-Watson-Crick model.


    Monday, Sep 15, 2003
     
    Leftist activist court intervenes in recall election
    The 9th Circuit decision to postpone the California recall election is an abomination. It is nothing but a partisan political attempt to subvert a democratic election process.

    The opinion says:

    In this case, Plaintiffs allege that the fundamental right to have votes counted in the special recall election is infringed because the pre-scored punchcard voting systems used in some California counties are intractably afflicted with technologic dyscalculia.
    Huhh? Technologic dyscalculia! That's a new one to me. Until now, there hasn't even been one web page in Google with that phrase.

    It gets worse.

    Plaintiffs’ claim presents almost precisely the same issue as the Court considered in Bush, that is, whether unequal methods of counting votes among counties constitutes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In Bush, the Supreme Court held that using different standards for counting votes in different counties across Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause. 531 U.S. at 104-07.
    I bet you didn't realize the Bush v. Gore 2000 election case was all about an intractable technologic dyscalculia affliction!

    The main lesson from the Bush v. Gore election dispute is that it is absolutely essential that elections are run according to pre-election rules. The Supreme Court did not hold that using different standards for counting votes in different counties across Florida violated the Equal Protection Clause. It said that a judicially-ordered recount that departs from the pre-election rules must satisfy minimal equal protection standards. Eg, see this WSJ essay.

    It is virtually undisputed that pre-scored punchcard voting systems are significantly more prone to errors that result in a voter’s ballot not being counted than the other voting systems used in California.
    I dispute that. The reason that punchcard voting was thought to be error-prone was that some voters leave hanging chads, and the machines don't always read a hanging chad as a vote. But after the 2000 controversy, voters now know that they need to check their chads, and I would expect punchcard voting to be as accurate as other methods.

    OTOH, putting in some new voting technology, that will be used for the first time in an area, creates its own problems. Voters and poll personel will be unfamiliar with it, and errors are apt to happen.

    Then the court denies that the public even has an interest in having the election follow the rules!

    We agree that the Secretary of State has an interest in complying with state election law, and that this interest must be accounted for in the balance of hardships. However, the district court erred in treating this state interest as if it were a large part of the public interest. ...

    The appropriate examination of the public interest in this context will instead place heavy weight on the principles underlying state law. Those principles of fair and efficient self governance belong in a court’s assessment of the public interest regardless of the presence of state election laws motivated by them. ...

    In sum, in assessing the public interest, the balance falls heavily in favor of postponing the election for a few months.

    So we have unelected judges rewriting our democratic election procedures because of their own personal political opinions about the "public interest"? It is clear that they are politically partisan, and they view keeping Gov. Gray Davis in the public interest. I say that the public interest requires getting rid of Davis as soon as possible.

    I almost vomited when I got to this:

    In addition to the public interest factors we have discussed, we would be remiss if we did not observe that this is a critical time in our nation’s history when we are attempting to persuade the people of other nations of the value of free and open elections. Thus, we are especially mindful of the need to demonstrate our commitment to elections held fairly, free of chaos, with each citizen assured that his or her vote will be counted, and with each vote entitled to equal weight.
    Do these (liberal Democrat) judges really think that the California recall election is so chaotic that it is setting a bad example for Afghanistan and Iraq? If anything, the 9th Circuit has set the bad example by showing that corrupt judges can derail an election at the last minute, and make the March 2004 election much more chaotic.

    If the punchcard ballot is really racist and illegal and unconstitutional, as the court maintains, then what is the justification for Gov. Davis using punchcard ballots to re-elect himself last year? That would be another reason to have a recall election as soon as possible.

    Other problems with the decision: The plaintiffs didn't even have standing, because they already litigated and settled the case. There are other elections scheduled for November, including an LA recall election, and it is not clear why they should be allowed to use punchcards. The Sec'y of State is misquoted in the second sentence. The absentee voting has already started, and the chaos will be much greater if the election is postponed.

    Update: Some of these points are made in Ted Costa's brief.

    Update: This report says:

    the core logic behind the ruling was indeed based on the Berkeley study, but added that the study was funded by Sequoia Voting Systems, a major provider of touch-screen voting machines, now actively seeking additional contracts to install its equipment in California counties.
    So the judges were snowed by a sales pitch for a more expensive product!
     
    Jonathan Pollard's remorse
    Bill Clinton refused to grant a pardon to convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, despite immense pressure from Israel and Jews, because he said Pollard was an "unrepentant spy".

    Pollard has a web site in he claims to have expressed remorse many times. However, he doesn't really express remorse. I get the impression from his web site that he only regrets getting caught, and that he would betray the USA again if he thought that he could help Israel and get away with it. (And if someone offers him $350k again, I guess.)


    Sunday, Sep 14, 2003
     
    Overpriced music CDs
    The Denver Post says:
    The best-selling "Chicago" movie soundtrack is available on CD starting at $13.86.

    The actual movie, with the soundtrack songs included, of course, plus additional goodies ranging from deleted musical numbers to the director's interview and a "making-of" feature, can be had for precisely $2.12 more.

    Therein lies the problem for a critically wounded music recording industry: The "Chicago" CD looks like a rip-off, and the DVD looks like a steal.

    Yes. Music is grossly overpriced. The fact that the big labels are still able to sell music CDs at such high prices shows that they are still making way too much money.

    Making a major Hollywood movie costs millions of dollars, and requires the creative input of dozens of people. Making a music CD just requires a couple of musicians and a few thousand dollars in equipment. Music should be selling for about 10 cents a song.

    George writes:

    Are you opposed to the law of supply and demand? Apparently people are willing to pay $18 for a music CD, so that must be a good price.
    Yes, some people are willing to pay. Enough to make a lot of rich music executives. But I prefer to get my music online. Maybe the music labels are maximizing their revenue by selling $18 CDs and refusing to accept money for online music, I don't know. I don't care. If the music labels don't want my business for online music, then I am happy not to pay them.

    Saturday, Sep 13, 2003
     
    Fewer engineers
    I just ran across this factoid:
    In 1986 college students earned about 24,000 degrees in electrical engineering and about 5,000 degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness. In 1996, they earned nearly 14,000 degrees in each of these fields. Only two years later 4,000 more students were earning degrees in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness than in electrical engineering.
    I guess we don't need American engineers anyway, since we are importing so many from India, China, and elsewhere.
     
    Bustamante is dumb
    The LA Weekly reports:
    Bustamante, a former Assembly speaker, does not know what caused the state’s record budget crisis. In his speech, he claimed that the power crisis caused the budget crisis.

    “We had a $10 billion budget surplus and they [power generators] stole it from us,” Bustamante declared. “Now 50,000 kids can’t afford the higher college tuition we have to charge.” That is simply flat wrong. The budget crisis was caused by the state spending more money than it was taking in, not by money being “stolen” from the state’s general fund by power generators. Thanks to the deregulation scheme that Bustamante co-authored, the generators made off with a lot of money from consumers. But not from the state budget.

    Gov. Davis and Bustamante pretend to be allies, but they actually hate each other. Bustamante clearly wants to recall Davis, but he wouldn't have a clue about running the state.

    Friday, Sep 12, 2003
     

    I just heard a child psychologist plugging his book: Mom, Jason's Breathing on Me: The Solution to Sibling Bickering. He says to just forget about trying to resolve some petty dispute between siblings, and don't even listen to their arguments. I agree. If one kid is beating the other one up, I just tell her that she should learn some self-defense.
     
    Eudora 6.0
    I just upgraded to Eudora 6.0, an email program for Msft Windows. The main new feature is a spam filter that works pretty well. It works like a filter that puts messages in a Junk mailbox. The program is still free if you use it in Light mode, where you are limited to one account, or you use it in Sponsored mode, where it calls home to put ads in the corner of the Eudora window.

    Now here are my gripes.

  • The spam filter doesn't co-exist with the existing filters very well. It is as if they licensed the filter from some other company, and just slapped it in.
  • It still forgets passwords occasionally. If the programs fails to connect with the mail server for some reason, it decides that maybe the password might be at fault, so it erases the password and asks me to type it in again!
  • It has some new icons that are really ugly.
  • If the Sponsored mode fails to call home at get new ads, after 24 hours or so the software cripples itself and switches to Light mode. If you have more than one email account, the program is fairly useless at that point.

    The ads never get thru to my machine because I am behind a firewall that blocks ads.eudora.com. It is a regular http connection thru MSIE. If ads.eudora.com is blocked, then the Sponsored mode doesn't show any ads.

    The good news is that I still had a copy of Eudora 6.0 Beta 10. It doesn't have the ugly icons, and if ads.eudora.com is blocked, then it happily runs in Sponsored mode without showing any ads.

    George writes:

    How do I get Eudora 6.0 Beta 10? And how do I block ads.eudora.com?
    You can block any site by putting a line into your HOSTS file. The HOSTS file is an ordinary text file that keeps a cache of IP addresses.
    On my machine, it is at C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS, but it might be somewhere else. Eg, you can add "127.0.0.1 ads.eudora.com". That will tell the OS to look for ads.eudora.com at 127.0.0.1, the so-called loopback address. This will just look on your own machine, and won't find any Eudora ads.

    If you are running a firewall or similar program, you can sometimes block ads.*.com to block any site of that form. Those are usually pop-up or other undesirable ads.

    I don't know where you can get the Eudora beta. It used to be a freebie on Eudora.com, but it is not there anymore.


  • Tuesday, Sep 09, 2003
     
    Iron-based life
    This science story says several new discoveries about life in improbably places on Earth. It says life can exist in water hotter than 212F; life can be independent of the Sun's energy; life can have an iron metabolism; and magnetite on ocean floor has biological origin.
     
    Ed Teller
    Obituaries of Edward Teller in NY Times and AP variously blame him for Hiroshima, the H-bomb, the Cold War, McCarthyism, revoking Oppenheimer's clearance, and SDI. The strongest criticism is usually his testimony against J.R.Oppenheimer. But the JRO docs are online, and the evidence against him is overwhelming. Teller's testimony was relatively innocuous, and it doesn't look to me like it played a major role at all.

    Since then, there has been much more evidence that JRO was a commie, and in contact with spies, and lied about it. The obituaries don't mention that.

    The Si Valley paper obituary says:

    In 1954, when Oppenheimer's patriotism was called to question by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, Teller testified. Oppenheimer was not disloyal, Teller said, but ``I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more.''
    No, it was the US Atomic Energy Commission that decided that Oppenheimer was a security risk. Senator McCarthy did not have a House committee, and did not have hearings on the subject.
     
    360 degree change
    Michelle Pfeiffer said in Parade Magazine:
    I spent alot of timefumbling around, not trusting my feelings, but when I decided to stop needing the approval of other people and just move forward and trust my heart, my life changed 360 degrees for the better.

    Sunday, Sep 07, 2003
     
    Gray Davis attacks Arnold with anti-immigrant slur
    The Sac. Bee reports:
    Whipped into an anti-Schwarzenegger frenzy at the picnic, one crowd member screamed, "He's a foreigner!" as Davis criticized Schwarzenegger, who hopes to succeed him as governor in the Oct. 7 recall election.

    The man later approached Davis and apologized several times for making the remark. Davis told him not to worry, and added with a smile, "You shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state," in an apparent reference to Schwarzenegger's Austrian accent.

    Meanwhile, businesses are moving out of state because workers compensation in California has soared to $29 billion in 2003 from $9 billion in 1995, and other anti-business policies. Davis's response was to force businesses to offer paid family leave (effective in 2004, I think).

    An SJMN columnist is perplexed that conservative Republicans would support Arnold.

    The record, such as it is, shows that Schwarzenegger is no conservative -- at least not as conventionally measured by positions on the usual array of social issues. Schwarzenegger says he is pro-choice, pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights and in favor of reasonable environmental regulations.
    Schwarzenegger is also against partial-birth abortion and against gay marriage. His gun-control position position is similar to G W Bush's. All conservatives are in favor of reasonable environmental regulations. But these issues are all just smoke-screens, and not politically significant. Davis is being recalled because of disastrous economic policies, and we need a fiscal conservative to save the state. Arnold promises to be exactly that, and he can win.

    So why didn't conservative rally behind Riordan last year, because he was considered more likely to win than Simon?

    I am not sure Riordan was more likely to win. He had donated substantial amounts of money to Gray Davis, and appeared unwilling or unable to confront Davis on the major issues. He was 73 years old, and according to rumors, was no longer able to run a vigorous campaign. I think that he would have done worse than Simon.

     
    Santa Cruz wackos
    John sends this story about the lunatics who dominate Santa Cruz politics. Now they want to impeach Bush for lying to us about the Iraq war.

    Update: Another story.


    Friday, Sep 05, 2003
     
    Direct electronic voting
    Politicians are rushing to electronic voting machines because they would supposed solve problems like hanging chads. Academics complain that the electronic machines are subject to worse frauds.

    This article suggests that the leading vendor of electronic voting machines may have already allowed remote fraud to occur.

    Simson Garfinkel writes this article saying that electronic voting could be a big improvement, but the USA is going about it in the wrong way.

    I happen to believe that it is possible to build secure and reliable electronic voting machines with today's technology. But I doubt that any exist today. Even if they did, there would still be the problem of convincing the public to have confidence in them.

     
    More evidence that California schools have too much money
    A California high school teacher has collected six criminal misdemeanor charges in the last five years, and is currently sitting in jail for one of them. Besides those problems, he is on probation for inappropriate behavior with his female students, and a judge requires him to have an adult chaperon in his classroom when he teaches girls.

    This SJMN story says that he is still collecting his $74,516 a year salary! He is on paid leave while he sits in jail. He also continues to collect benefits, and the taxpayers will probably pay for his alcohol treatment program when he gets out of jail.

    George writes:

    He hasn't been convicted of some of those charges. Doesn't he have some due process rights?
    He is entitled to his day in court, but the school shouldn't pay him unless he is able to show up at work and do his job. And he should be able to do it without a chaperon, also. If the school is paying this guy in jail, then it must have money to burn.

    Thursday, Sep 04, 2003
     
    Handedness may be genetic
    John sends this Nature article saying that being right-handed is correlated with hair whorling clockwise on the scalp. If so, maybe there is a genetic explanation for both.

    Wednesday, Sep 03, 2003
     
    Bustamante is a moron
    It is hard to believe that a moron like Cruz Bustamante could be Lt. Gov. in California, and be considered a serious candidate for governor. I just listened to his prepared closing statement in the debate today. First he says that twice (ie, in 1998 and 2002), 5 million people voted for him. But he only got 3.5M votes in 2002.

    Then he advocated price controls on gasoline by complaining that it is refined in California and shipped to Nevada where it costs more. He meant to complain that gasoline is cheaper in Nevada, but he said it backwards. The audience laughed at him, and there was an embarrassing pause. Then he said it again, and said it wrong again! He was puzzled as to why the audience was laughing at him again.


    Tuesday, Sep 02, 2003
     
    Why save Davis?
    The arguments for retaining Gov. Gray Davis are amusingly pathetic. Consider this SJMN letter:
    Californians might want to think about this recall election for Gov. Davis. During his first term, Davis spent, as we all know, very little time being governor and most of his time raising money for his re-election campaign. He did, however, get a little experience on how to be a governor.

    I think that in the three years he has left on his second term he might be a fairly decent governor because he will not need to spend any time fundraising for another public office. I think everyone knows that he can never be elected to another public office. Ever.

    I am afraid that if Davis devotes more time to being governor, then he'll do even more damage to the state. He is not learning from his mistakes.

    Monday, Sep 01, 2003
     
    Feinstein like Helmsley
    I knew that Gray Davis always ran nasty negative campaigns, but I had forgotten this 1992 ad against fellow Democrat Feinstein:
    Flashing side-by-side photos of the two women, the TV spot's off-camera announcer intoned:

    "Leona Helmsley and Dianne Feinstein? Hotel queen Helmsley misreported $1 million to the IRS. Feinstein misreported $8 million to the Fair Political Practices Commission. Helmsley blames her servants for the felony. Feinstein blames her staff for the lawsuit. Helmsley is in jail. Feinstein wants to be a senator? Truth for a change. Gray Davis, Democrat for U.S. Senate."

    It is hard to believe that guy is governor of California.
     
    Dead astronauts
    Dave Stafford's blog says we need more dead astronauts.
     
    J Robert Oppenheimer
    A NY Times obituary says:
    In the mid-1950's, at the height of American anti-Communist fervor, ... Dr. Oppenheimer was accused of being a Communist and branded a security risk by the government, and his security clearance was revoked.
    This is misleading. First, Oppenheimer did not have his security clearance revoked because of accusations that he was a commie. Here is the testimony against him, and no one accused him of being a commie or a spy. The complete 1954 decision is here. Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked because of at least 6 serious documented lies, including lies about contacts with commies. Normally any one of these lies would be sufficient to withdraw a security clearance. He was also shown to be a commie "fellow traveler" who even donated money to the Communist Party.

    Second, there is now convincing evidence that Oppenheimer was indeed a commie. Last year, the NY Times reported:

    Adding a startling chapter to the long historical debate over the secret laboratory that developed the atom bomb in World War II, a new book concludes that its leader, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, belonged to the American Communist Party in the late 1930's and early 40's.

    Contrary to his repeated denials, Oppenheimer belonged to a cell of the party that discouraged members from disclosing their membership, says the book, "Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller," by Gregg Herken, a senior historian at the Smithsonian Institution. It is being published today by Henry Holt.

    The book rests its case on a cache of newly discovered letters, Oppenheimer's reaction to work on an accusatory memoir and the discovery of Communist literature the author links to Oppenheimer. Most of the letters are from Haakon Chevalier, a colleague of Oppenheimer at the University of California at Berkeley.

    There is also evidence that Oppenheimer was a commie spy, from a 1994 book by KGB agent Pavel A. Sudoplatov and from the NSA Venona Project. Most historians think that the evidence of betrayal is inconclusive. However there is no doubt that he was close friends with Chevalier, that Chevalier was a commie spy, and that Oppenheimer covered up and lied about the connection for most of his life.

    Sunday, Aug 31, 2003
     
    The Great Revolutions
    The science historian and popularizer Stephen Jay Gould used to love to quote Freud, and his favorite was this:
    Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal world’; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind.
    Gould cited this Freudian argument many times in his life, in books, articles, lectures, and interviews. It is idiotic on several levels.

    Gould frequently praised Freud, but showed no recognition of the fact that Freud was a scientific fraud. Gould was a Marxist, and had a Marxist view of history that exaggerates the importance of revolutions. The Copernican revolution was just the revolution of the Earth around the Sun, and not an intellectual revolution. Most scientific revolutions have nothing to do with man on a pedestal. Freud's theory of the unconscious is all nonsense.

    Now I started James D. Watson's new DNA book. Watson starts by giving his version of the 3 great revolutions. He says that they were the Copernican revolution, Darwin showing that man is a modified monkey, and the Watson-Crick discovery of the molecular structure of DNA!

    I thought that only a phony like Freud could be so full of himself to make such an egotistical and silly argument, and only a kook like Gould would say it today. The Watson-Crick discovery was not a revolution, but merely a minor technical advance. Watson-Crick managed to publish first because they had some stolen unpublished results from a competing lab. Watson even admits that others would have gotten the molecular structure of DNA within months.


    Saturday, Aug 30, 2003
     
    School spending
    In a NY Times article complaining about school finances, a prof says that school spend is up by 4X!
    Public school spending has risen constantly over recent decades, Professor Guthrie said, from a national yearly average of about $1,000 per pupil in 1970 to an average of about $4,000 today, expressed in 1970 dollars. "This is just a slowdown," Professor Guthrie said. "School spending has reached a plateau, but in a year or two the trajectory will continue upward."
    Kids were getting decent educations in 1970. Now the schools are getting 4 times as much. That is even after adjusting for inflation. I say that we should cut spending to 1970 levels, and tell the schools to teach in the way they taught in 1970. Then we ought to have better schools.
     
    Arnold for president?
    I just watched the 1993 movie Demolition Man, which is set in the year 2026. As Sandra Bullock attempts to bring Sylvester Stallone up to speed on what has happened in the world in the last 30 years, she refers to the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library, and this dialog follows:
    Stallone: "Hold it! The Schwarzenegger Library?"
    Bullock: "Yes, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Wasn't he an actor?"
    Stallone: "Stop! He was President?"
    Bullock: "Yes. Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment…"

    Friday, Aug 29, 2003
     
    Emergency calls
    If MacDonalds doesn't give you free bbq sauce with your order, then call 911!
     
    Patriot Act
    Andy writes:
    The conservatives I know are disgusted with Bush. Nevada Eagle Forum is protesting the Patriot Act. AAPS members disagree with most of what Bush has done.

    We may soon be hearing a conservative case for Dean over Bush. First, it gets us out of Iraq and our economy begin growing again. Second, it gives us back a conservative Congress. Third, Dean is as good, maybe better, than Bush on guns. Fourth, Dean is better than Bush on limiting federal law enforcement power.

    Dean may also be better for the Supreme Court. Rehnquist will probably not resign under Dean, and we won't get Gonzales picked for the high Court.

    Pundits keep claiming that Bush v. Dean would be a replay of Nixon v. McGovern. The 1972 Nixon landslide is worth discussing. My guess is that Nixon picked up Wallace's supporters, McGovern was unattractive and inept, Nixon marginalized McGovern by refusing to debate, and media worship of the presidency was more powerful then.

    2004 isn't 1972. There's no one else like Wallace for Bush to pick up supporters from. He's stuck with the 48% he received in 2000 minus 5-10% of unemployed defectors. Also, Bush won't be able to marginalize Dean by not debating him.

    Human Events has had a couple of issues trashing Arnold. He some ideological litmus test, I guess. The HE arguments are idiotic. Arnold can win and win big. Simon is a proven loser, and cannot win. McClintock would have a chance if no other Repubs were in the race. As it is, he and Ueberroth are just spoilers.

    The Patriot Act has become a left-wing propaganda campaign that consistently misleads the public. Eg, the current Newsweek says:

    The Bush administration is playing fast and loose with our rights. We are only beginning to understand the full impact of the Patriot Act­which was shoved through Congress in the aftermath of September 11­on our civil liberties. Federal agents can now search your home and office without your knowledge, and force your bank, your doctor and even your library to turn over their records about you.
    Yeah, the author is just beginning to understand the Patriot Act. When he studies it a little more, he will learn that the search has to be part of a foreign intelligence or terrorism investigation, and a court order is required. The paragraph is deceptive.

    I am waiting for Dean to praise Scalia and Thomas.

    I hope the unemployed vote against the politicians who put them out of work. We have maybe 100k such people in Si Valley. I don't think that they are politically mobilized yet.


    Thursday, Aug 28, 2003
     
    Mars
    Pictures here.

    Wednesday, Aug 27, 2003
     
    Teachers are well-paid
    Arianna Huffington complains that California prison guards get paid more than teachers, as a result of sleazy deals between Gov. Gray Davis and the govt unions.

    But California teachers are still pretty well paid. According to an AFT survey, California teachers average $54,348 a year, and have the highest teacher salaries in the nation. But that understates the case, because:

  • The figures are for 2 years ago, and should be about 5% higher now.
  • The pay is for a 9-month school year, and teachers can earn 33% more by working over the summer.
  • Teachers get numerous other benefits:
    In California, teachers can get discounted mortgages and car loans, and tuition reimbursement. In Missouri, they can retire at age 55 with a pension paying 84 percent of the last year's income, plus benefits and cost-of-living adjustments.

    The average public-school teacher receives fringe benefits equaling 26 percent of his or her salary, according to Vedder, versus about 17 percent in the private sector.

    Add that up, and it means that average California teachers are making about the same hourly rate as someone making $100k per year. (See Richard Vedder's article.)
  •  
    Zoloft for kids
    A new medical study says:
    Zoloft is effective way to treat depression in kids
    Antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft are increasingly given to kids, even without studies to back up the practice. This supposedly supplies the study. But study, financed by the Zoloft drug company Pfizer, really only found a marginal benefit. Improvement was reported in 69% of the subjects on Zoloft, compared to 59% of those on placebos. The benefit was actually negligible. Here is the JAMA article.

    People say these drugs are miracles, but the scientific evidence for them is marginal, at best.

     
    Judge Ginsburg v. the Lone Ranger
    Phyllis writes:
    I had some interesting and favorable email about my column describing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's triple entendre in her reference to the Lone Ranger (attack on Bush's Texas Rangers and fundraising Rangers, attack on Bush's "cowboy" foreign policy, and attack on masculine men). But the most interesting email was from a guy who said there is a fourth subtext a backhanded criticism of Rehnquist because the Chief Justice keeps a small figurine of the Lone Ranger on the mantle in his office. Most regard it as a throwback to his earlier years on the court when he often cast the lone dissenting vote. Ginsburg could have intended her remark as a subtle criticism of Rehnquist 's viewpoints. The guy didn't explain how he knows what is in Rehnquist's office, but his message sure sounds authentic. What do you think of this?
    Andy confirms that Rehnquist has a Lone Ranger doll on his mantelpiece with this CNN link.
     
    Homeschooling services
    Andy writes:
    Public school denial of access to homeschoolers in activities is another great issue. School board elections can be swung by a hundred families, and homeschoolers can reach that many in a school district. In NJ (and presumably many states), the school boards are excluding homeschoolers from activities despite the fact they pay the same taxes. Logically, the exclusion is indefensible.

    Nothing gets people angrier than being excluded, and homeschoolers could elect many good school board members over this single issue. I don't think it matters that most homeschoolers probably don't want to be in the school activities. Some do, and that's enough. Just as the tax issue has aided social conservatives at the national level, this issue could aid conservatives at the local level.

    John responds:
    "Logically"! There Andy goes again, using what he calls "logic" to predict the solution to questions that are better resolved by empirical research in the real world.

    And nothing gets people angrier than being told they must change their organization to accommodate the demands of a small minority.

    Homeschoolers who want to participate in selected public school activities are a small minority within another small minority. Andy exaggerates the political power of harnessing their anger, and he overlooks the inevitable resentment and opposition of the much larger group of people who participate fully in public schools.

    As Roger correctly observed, the instinctive reaction of public school people (including not just teachers and administrators, but students and parents as well) to homeschoolers is "if you don't like the schools, then don't attend them and don't bug us!"

    A similar reaction is to be expected among ordinary Catholics toward those who refuse to accept the Mass established by Vatican II. It is only normal and natural to resent those who, like Mel Gibson, claim to be "more Catholic than the Pope."


    Monday, Aug 25, 2003
     
    DeCSS not free speech
    The Calif Supreme Court ruled against posting DeCSS. I don't see how DeCSS could be a trade secret if it was lawfully reverse engineered and distributed throughout the world.

    Andy sends this news link and says:

    I think the author of this opinion is the allegedly conservative candidate for the US Sup. Ct.
     
    Bustamante is a hateful racist bigot
    Michelle explains Cruz Bustamante's ties to the racist group MEChA. Bustamante also got heat a year or so ago when he called black people "niggers" in a speech.

    John sends this story about dubious Bustamante fundraising and says "Cruz is worse than Davis."

    I had earlier assumed that Davis could resign between now and election day, and void the recall. But actually, the acting gov. Bustamante would be recalled, and arguably he would not be able to be the replacement governor either, because the law says that the governor cannot even be on the ballot.


    Sunday, Aug 24, 2003
     
    L. Summers quote
    The Harvard president once said:
    'I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.
    He is a famous economist.

    The SOBIG.F virus has clogged my email server. Most of my email is not getting thru.

     
    USA Patriot Act
    John sends this Wash Post defense of the USA Patriot Act. The ACLU has a propaganda campaign against section 215 because it lets the FBI spy on people based on the library books they read, and turns the USA into a police state.

    John questions whether the column is correct about the FBI needed a court order.

    The ACLU's alarmism focuses on libraries as its best argument. But section 215 has resulted in greater privacy for me, because it has encouraged my local Santa Cruz libraries to destroy obsolete records about books I have checked out.

    The column does seem to be correct in that section 215 just codified existing case, and did not give the FBI any broad new powers (as the ACLU says). See Orin Kerr's blog for explanation and cases. (He also has an article on the implications for surveillence here. An ACLU letter acknowledges these court precedents. A copy is also here.) The FBI is supposed to get a court order, but it can also do a "sneak-and-peak" before it gets the order. The USA Patriot Act did not change that.

    I think that the ACLU is trying to co-opt the privacy movement, and use it for anti-Bush and anti-Ashcroft propaganda purposes. If it were really concerned about privacy, it would try to get the govt libraries to delete the obsolete computer records.

    The current Newsweek says:

    The anxiety at Justice is intensified by the fact that the anti Patriot Act campaign is being driven by a coalition that includes such diverse groups as the ACLU and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.
    Eagle Forum needs to get off that bus. If there were bad court precedents, they were probably made by activist liberal judges. Congress passed the Patriot Act. Local govt libraries are the ones who are spying on citizens. The DoJ is just following the law.

    Robert Bork gives a history of the legality of some of these surveillance laws.

    Andy writes:

    Roger pointed me to Bork's WSJ editorial, but a quick perusal of it disappointed me. Amazing, he said Poindexter was convicted without noting it was overturned on appeal. He also avoided the most promising Administration initiative, the terrorism market.

    Bork accepted the moderate's mantra of balancing rights against public interest, something most conservatives reject. His subtitle accuses Bush critics of endangering us, which is baseless ("Alarmism puts Americans' safety at risk.").

    I find it particularly illogical for Bush apologists to argue that (1) DOJ has had these powers all along and (2) DOJ couldn't prevent 9/11 because it lacked these powers.

    On another topic, I want to ask you Latin scholars for your best English translation of "Hoc est enim corpus meum." It follows a colon in the Tridentine Mass, and thus should read like a complete sentence. Obviously a precise English translation should not dilute the Latin meaning.

    The WSJ should publish a correction. Other news media have made the same mistake, but it is inexcusable. Poindexter has no conviction on his record.

    My sources say the translation is: For this is my body. Also, allegedly, it is the origin of the phrase hocus pocus.

     
    Calif recall
    Here is another wacky NT TImes opinion article saying that the Republicans are taking a big risk with the recall. But, as the article also explains, the Republicans have very little power in California, and have poor prospects of winning any elections, except for the recall. The new governor will face some tough challenges, but that is all the more reason why we need a great leader to fix the problems.

    Saturday, Aug 23, 2003
     
    SCO Unix lawsuit
    SCO has finally disclosed some examples where Linux copied Unix code, and one is simple code fragment copied out of Kernighan and Richie C, a popular 1980s textbook! Links here.

    I just realized that Niger and Nigeria are two different countries! They are both in sub-saharan Africa, right next to each other. Niger has been in the news, and I thought that it was just a politically correct way of saying Nigeria, just as PC announcers now say "cutter" when pronouncing the name of the country Qatar. (To me, the former pronunciation sounds closer to the arab pronunciation than cutter.)


    Friday, Aug 22, 2003
     
    Depleted uranium
    If you think that depleted uranium has ruined the environment of Iraq or Kosovo, then you've been reading leftist propaganda. See this blog. I would use DU bullets myself, if I could buy them. They are safer than lead bullets.
     
    Feinstein is now against muscles
    The Si Valley paper reports:
    [US Senator Dianne ]Feinstein launched her attack on Schwarzenegger in response to reporters' questions.

    ``Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn't look like a 98-pound weakling. And you add his physique, you add his voice, you add some of the most powerful military weapons on earth you have an extraordinarily intimidating figure in movies,'' she said. ... Feinstein challenged Schwarzenegger ``to renounce these weapons, absolutely.

    Does she want him to renounce his muscles, also? Does she think that action movie heroes should be 98-pound weaklings?

    Only an idiot would renounce those military weapons (like ordinary battle rifles) absolutely. Those guns are essential for maintaining world peace. And for making action movies and other worthwhile purposes.

    It sounds like Feinstein is attacking Arnold's candidacy for governor, but the same article said that she was going abstain, and not vote for Bustamante either. Good.

    Meanwhile, actress Cybill Shepherd says that the recall is worst tragedy in the history of California, and that Arnold has a scandalous past. As for Gray Davis's past, she says that he molested her when he was 24 years old and she was 16. Davis has admitted it.

    The betting line currently favors Arnold.

     
    Censored phone calls
    A telephone company calls Vonage sells ordinary phone service over internet connections, but customers have to agree not to say or listen to anything offensive! No dirty jokes, racist comments, etc. The contract says:
    You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any illegal, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, obscene, sexually explicit, profane, racially or ethnically disparaging remarks or otherwise objectionable material of any kind, including but not limited to any material that encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law.

    Thursday, Aug 21, 2003
     
    RogBlog
    Here is a new blog using my blogging software. It is a free download. I wrote it because of BlogSpot bugs, and because most blogging software places unusual configuration demands on the server. Mine just uses static web pages, and will work on any ISP.
     
    Silencing the courts
    Right-wingers are outraged over aggressively atheistic court decisions over the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and other matters. I say that the simplest way to stop these rulings would be for Congress to pass the following law:
    Congress hereby withdraws the federal courts from jurisdiction over the issue of whether an acknowledgement of God violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

    Wednesday, Aug 20, 2003
     
    Msft is spying on you
    John sends this BBC article about Msft Word documents you put online could reveal more about you than you think.

    Wednesday, Aug 13, 2003
     
    Free software
    There are free software advocates who claim that legal way to make open-source software available to the public is to use a GPL or BSD type license, and that there is no legal way for an author to put a work into the public domain. Eg, lawyer Lawrence Rosen on his web site. (But Rosen is just completely wrong about being able to revoke a gift, and wrong about some of his copyright opinions.)

    The first thing to understand is that much of the free software movement is ideologically opposed to both proprietary software and public domain software. They want copylefted software, and explain that "free" in free software is more like free speech, not free beer. The explanation is subtle -- see R. Stallman's rants for details.

    But legally, the theory doesn't make much sense. An author can put a work into the public domain. This web page shows one way to do it. For legal support, see Dan Bernstein.

    The author who wants to give his source code away has this choice:

  • He can unilaterally and irrevocably dedicate his work to the public domain, with no strings attached.
  • He can unilaterally and irrevocably dedicate his work to the public, subject to a complicated set of conditions in an attached license.

    It seems obvious to me that the first alternative is safer for everyone involved. It is not clear that someone can even irrevocably grant a license, because the author can revoke the license after 35 years.

    It may well be that BSD unix is in the public domain. It has a State of California copyright notice, but the state didn't write it and has never enforced the copyright.


  • Tuesday, Aug 12, 2003
     
    Gray Davis insult
    Gov. Gray Davis says that his recall is "an insult to the 8 million people who went to the polls last November and decided I should be governor." He only got 3.5M of those votes, and many of them now realize that they made a mistake. It is perfectly reasonable for those voters to acknowledge that they made a mistake, and seek to mitigate the damages. People who say it is undemocratic must also think that it is undemocratic every time a European parliament has a vote of no confidence.

    John sends this HE story about why Californians want to recall Davis.

    The arguments against the recall are getting nuttier and nuttier. Even the Democrats concede that Davis has done a terrible job. But they'll say things like claiming that this is yet another attempt by the vast right-wing conspiracy to undo an election, like the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 Florida recounts.

    Here is another:

    If Republicans are truly the uniters that they often say they are, why can't they work with the current governor?
    They've worked with Davis for 5 years, and he has bankrupted the state.
     
    Galileo
    Two new books are sympathetic to the Roman Church's inquisition of Galileo. The review says:
    Faced with conflicting theories that both account for the facts, scientists lean toward the one that is the more elegant and economical. But here, Koestler showed, Galileo was on thin ice. To preserve the illusion that the planets move in perfect circles, Copernicus also had to resort to a convoluted arrangement of epicycles.

    It was Galileo's contemporary, Kepler, who made the crucial breakthrough, replacing the circles with ellipses and dispensing with the Ptolemaic curlicues. Galileo, obsessed as any ancient with what Koestler called the "circular dogma," would barely give Kepler the time of day. He also dismissed Kepler's notion that the tides were caused by the pull of the Moon as mere astrological superstition. The rhythmic sloshing, Galileo wrongly insisted, was a natural result of the combined motions of Earth's daily revolution and its orbit around the Sun. He considered that to be the real clincher to the Copernican argument, proof that Earth did not stand still.

    For all his virtues, Galileo, mind firmly shut, was using an incorrect argument to promote a cosmology that has turned out to be wrong. The folly of the inquisitors was treating this bullheaded fumbling — the essence of the scientific search — as a crime.

    One thing to keep in mind is that there was not sufficient scientific evidence to abandon the established Ptolemaic theory. There was not a better heliocentric model until Kepler. By comparison to modern physics, this Scientific American article argues for a supersymmetric string theory to replace the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, based on the following arguments:

    Other reasons for extending the Standard Model arise from phenomena it cannot explain or cannot even accommodate:

    1. All our theories today seem to imply that the universe should contain a tremendous concentration of energy, even in the emptiest regions of space. The gravitational effects of this so-called vacuum energy would have either quickly curled up the universe long ago or expanded it to much greater size. The Standard Model cannot help us understand this puzzle, called the cosmological constant problem.

    2. The expansion of the universe was long believed to be slowing down because of the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter in the universe. We now know that the expansion is accelerating and that whatever causes the acceleration (dubbed "dark energy") cannot be Standard Model physics.

    3. There is very good evidence that in the first fraction of a second of the big bang the universe went through a stage of extremely rapid expansion called inflation. The fields responsible for inflation cannot be Standard Model ones.

    4. If the universe began in the big bang as a huge burst of energy, it should have evolved into equal parts matter and antimatter (CP symmetry). But instead the stars and nebulae are made of protons, neutrons and electrons and not their antiparticles (their antimatter equivalents). This matter asymmetry cannot be explaindid by the Standard Model. About a quarter of the universe is invisible cold dark matter that cannot be particles of the Standard Model.

    6. In the Standard Model, interactions with the Higgs field (which is associated with the Higgs boson) cause particles to have mass. The Standard Model cannot explain the very special forms that the Higgs interactions must take.

    7. Quantum corrections apparently make the calculated Higgs boson mass huge, which in turn would make all particle masses huge. That result cannot be avoided in the Standard Model and thus causes a serious conceptual problem.

    8. The Standard Model cannot include gravity, because it does not have the same structure as the other three forces.

    9. The values of the masses of the quarks and leptons (such as the electron and neutrinos) cannot be explained by the Standard Model.

    10. The Standard Model has three "generations" of particles. The everyday world is made up entirely of first-generation particles, and that generation appears to form a consistent theory on its own. The Standard Model describes all three generations, but it cannot explain why more than one exists.

    Maybe some day, the public will think that the supersymmetric string theory is so obviously correct that anyone who clung to the Standard Model in the year 2003 should be ridiculed like a backward medieval cleric. I think that anyone today who says that the supersymmetric string model has been proven correct based on the above arguments is as wrong as Galileo was when he said that the heliocentric model was proven correct.
     
    Bogus physics paper published
    A crackpot physics paper got published in a reputable journal, and it is getting publicity in the popular press. This says:
    A bold paper which has highly impressed some of the world's top physicists and been published in the August issue of Foundations of Physics Letters, seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics. Much to the science world's astonishment, the work also appears to provide solutions to Zeno of Elea's famous motion paradoxes, almost 2500 years after they were originally conceived by the ancient Greek philosopher.
    Physics journals commonly get crackpot submissions like this, but editors don't usually publish them. In the 2nd sentence, he writes "1.99999..." as that is some number different from 2.0.

    Sunday, Aug 10, 2003
     
    Homeschooling
    Andy writes:
    I'm discovering that many Catholic homeschoolers actually insist on putting their kids in high school. Perhaps it's the pro-institution bias of the religion. St. Thomas Aquinas brags about having a high percentage of homeschooled Catholics, but I wonder how many were really homeschooled through high school.

    I think much of the benefits of homeschooling are lost by forcing the kid back into the system during the key formative years of 7-11 grades.

    Roger replied, "So where are your kids?"

    We'll likely homeschool Phyllis through high school, to continue and preserve the benefits. I question the value of homeschooling in lower grades only to enroll them into a high school.

    Joe wrote, "Why don't you ask Jeanne for her opinion? I think many parents realize that they aren't competent to teach math and science (and maybe writing, literature and composition as well) beyond gradeschool."

    I'm not competent to fly an airplane or build a car either, but that doesn't stop me from traveling. Plenty of people are available to be hired to teach these high school subjects to homeschoolers. Internet courses are now available. In fact, MIT is placing all its course online for free.

    Joe writes:
    Well, sure, you can hire a teacher. And there are advantages to one-on-one tutoring. There are also disadvantages. I learned a lot from fellow students. The Internet is a fine tool, but, again, there are disadvantages to screen time over traditinal classroom give and take.

    It will be interesting to get Maria's perspective in a couple of months, since about 30% of TAC students will have been substantially homeschooled.

    Andy writes:
    The biggest difference I see that is that homeschoolers don't form narrow cliches the way most formal schoolers do. Homeschoolers welcome others better. I'd expect Maria to find it easier to form friendships with the homeschoolers.

    However, one cannot always go by the "homeschool" label. Sometimes "homeschooled" means they take courses at the local community college with liberal teachers and college-age students there, and I'm not supportive of that.

    Gumma writes:
    I'm not expressing myself about homeschooling, but I'm intrigued by Joe's statement that he learned a lot from fellow students. As I look back over grade school, high school, college, and grad school, I can't think of one single thing of any significance that I ever learned from any fellow student. As far as I was concerned, they were just pieces of furniture filling up the room.
     
    Fat Cat Democrats
    A Republican writes in the SJ Mercury News:
    Celebrity, like personal wealth, gets you to the starting gate, but it is surely no guarantee of success. If it were, you'd be writing letters to California Sen. Michael Huffington rather than Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein.
    What does he mean? The 5 richest US Senators are all Democrats, and Feinstein is one of them. Her continued political success is directly related to her husband's $40M net worth. It is true that she won reelection against Huffington and Huffington was rich, but Feinstein is just as rich.
     
    No free speech at Cal Poly
    A student at Cal Poly Univ. was posting a notice about a campus lecture on a bulletin board in an open campus lounge, and some other students complained that they were offended by the notice. (The lecture involved some racially sensitive matters.) The student was charged and disciplined for violating campus policy! The lecture and the notice seemed to conform to all the rules, but the student was held responsible for the fact that a couple of students who happened to be sitting in the lounge were offended. Details at theFire.org.

    Friday, Aug 08, 2003
     
    Defending Poindexter
    This article defends DARPA's Terrorism Information Awareness system.
    The fact is that TIA data was supposed to focus on foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information gathered--not whether you rented "Debbie Does Dallas" on your last trip to Blockbuster. It's not hard to build in safeguards that protect against potential abuses of the system. The Defense Department set up internal and external oversight boards to make sure that constitutional rights and privacy protection are not compromised.

    Painting a worst-case scenario of mission-creep, TIA critics say this is an open invitation to an Orwellian future. Really? I haven't seen any proof of that, though I did see the smoking hole that used to be the World Trade Tower complex in my hometown of New York City.

    A similar outcry greeted disclosure of FutureMAP, a DARPA program that would have allowed up to 10,000 participants to buy and sell future contracts as they wagered on events in the Middle East.

     
    Police trickery
    John sends this funny story to illustrate the little known fact that it is perfectly legal for the police to use lies, deception and trickery to catch criminals.
     
    Coulter's book
    Bob says he found an error in Coulter's book, Treason. On page 151, she says that MacArthur crossed the Yalu River in the Korean War. He says that MacArthur's forces went up to the river, but never crossed it. A map is here. Ok, but what about her larger point that Truman was soft on commies? Here is Bob's message:
    I hoped, despite the poor reviews, that "Treason" by Ann Coulter would be a useful compilation of information about the history of communist subversion in the US. Unfortunately, Coulter is laughably unreliable. For example, on p 151 she repeatedly states that MacArthur crossed the Yalu river during the Korean war. I wonder whether she knows that the Yalu river forms the border between North Korea and China.

    The reader is warned against quoting Coulter. The reader is also warned to check sources before quoting anything mentioned in Coulter's book. The right wing has no need for their own Jason Blair.

    Reliable information on Soviet subversion in the US may be found here and here.

    Jayson Blair's offense was that he claimed to be doing on-the-scene interviews when he was actually sitting at home. Coulter did not claim that she was on the Yalu River.

    Coulter does exaggerate a bit in this column where she accuses the critics of AG John Ashcroft of being traitors. But look at all the press given to Ashcroft in just today's papers. The NY Times says:

    ... a move that critics see as an effort to limit judicial independence by creating a ``blacklist'' of jurists. ...

    Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused Ashcroft of requiring prosecutors ``to participate in the establishment of a blacklist of judges,'' and he described the policy as ``the latest salvo in the Ashcroft Justice Department's ongoing attack on judicial independence and fairness'' in sentencing.

    And what was the evil act triggering this? Ashcroft wants to tabulate some statistics on when judges deviate from the federal sentencing guidelines. Of couse the DoJ should keep such statistics. This ought to be one of the least controversial things the DoJ could possibly do. I guess Kennedy wants judges to let terrorists off easy without anyone knowing about it. Maybe Kennedy is not a traitor, but as Coulter says, what else do you call him?

    Wednesday, Aug 06, 2003
     
    Arnie for governor
    Arnold is running. Good news. He has my vote. The Republicans who ran for governor last year, Riordan and Simon, were such wimps that I don't want to vote for them again. They were pathetic in response to vicious campaign attacks from Gray Davis. Also, Arnold has a nice long name so it should be easy to find him on a list of 30 or so candidates.

    The California situation is desperate, and someone needs to shake things up. John sends this LA Times story that for the first time, the Census Bureau finds that more people have moved to other states from here than the other way around.

     
    Justice Ginsburg
    US SC judge Ginsburg has given a speech justifying looking to other countries to support a more global view of judicial decision making. John writes:
    For proof that Ginsburg's comments have "angered some conservatives," see comments posted here (for 48 hours) and here and of course here (next week).
     
    Bad court ruling
    A Florida judge has banned release of a movie called The Profit, because the movie is about a fictional religious cult similar to the Church of Scientology, and it might influence a future juror in a Scientology court case. This is an amazing abridgement of free speech.

    Tuesday, Aug 05, 2003
     
    Gray Davis
    Calif. Gov. Gray Davis is busy making deals to line up support to fight his recall. He agreed to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens, without verifying Social Security numbers. The Calif DMV won't give a license to an American citizen unless the Social Security number is verified. So Davis is giving more rights to illegal aliens than to citizens in order to try to win Mexican-American and pro-immigrant support.

    He has also annoyed some consumer advocates with a pro-insurance company law. I am not sure why it is unfair for an insurance company to give a price break to a repeat customer, but apparently it violates Prop. 103.

    Davis is also filing some very silly and obstructionist lawsuits. These attempts to use the courts to change election law should be reason enough to recall him. He is apparently taking a page from the Al Gore playbook, and trying to throw the election into chaos by persuading judges to change the election rules.

    The blog Alex's Outlook has a funny "Governmentium" satire, and some interesting political analysis, but he seems to think that Davis can win the recall by having the opposition split between 3 Republicans. Not so (unless Davis wins one of his unlikely lawsuits). There will be one ballot question to recall Davis, and Davis needs 50% on that or he is out. His replacement might well win with only 20% of the ballot.

    Update:

    Andy's feeble attempt to compare Bush to Gray Davis shows that he fails to grasp the deep political crisis in California, which is unlike anywhere else in the country.

    Davis is not being recalled because he ran up a $38 billion deficit, or because he grossly mismanaged the electricity contracts, or because he presides over an education system that ranks 50th in the nation. Those are all true but they are just symptoms and symbols which only the intellectual elite can understand.

    What is really going on in California is an emotional roller-coaster in which a critical mass of Californians have suddenly realized that the "idea" of the Golden State is fast disappearing and, with it, the hopes and dreams that brought people there in the first place. People have a strong sense that the state is in a free-fall, and that only a radical change of direction can save it.

    This theme was beautifully developed by Tom McClintock in his eloquent speech to the recall rally two weeks ago in Sacramento. Arnold speaks to the same theme when he talks about the factors that drew him to California in the 1970s, compared to today.


    Monday, Aug 04, 2003
     
    Weird pediatric recommendations
    I don't trust advice from pediatricians. This study claims that pediatricians should be showing parents how to put a bike helmet on a kid, because 0% of parents can do it and 100% of pediatricians can. I say it is more likely that the average parent can put on a helmet better than the average pediatrician.

    Here in California, the hospitals do stomach-shrinking surgery on fat kids. Sometimes even "irreversible stomach stapling".

     
    CD sales decline
    This BBC article lists several reasons for the recent decline in CD sales. The labels are producing fewer titles, people are no longer replacing vinyl LP record collections with CDs, economic recession, etc. Also, the great rock music fad has peaked, and rock music is no longer even the most popular music.

    Another change is that the technology is record and distribute music is now cheap, and musicians are no longer dependent on big music labels.


    Friday, Aug 01, 2003
     
    Misreported poll
    An AP story on a new poll from the Pew Internet Project says:
    A survey finds two-thirds of Internet users who download music don't care whether they're violating copyright laws.
    But the actual poll question was:
    Do you care whether or not the music you download onto your computer is copyrighted, or isn’t that something you care much about?
    That is entirely different question. If I were polled, I would certainly say that I don't care whether the downloaded music is copyrighted. That is because all recorded music is copyrighted. Even the music that is authorized for free distribution is still copyrighted. I once downloaded some patriotic songs from the US Air Force marching band thinking that it would be in the public domain, but it even had a copyright notice.

    But if you ask me whether I care about violating copyright laws, I would say that I certainly do. I care enough that I have taken measures to avoid detection, to stay within legal safe harbors, to prepare arguments for the legality of my activities, and to lobby for changes in the copyright laws. See the message below for tips on avoiding lawsuits.

    At least the Pew poll had the honesty to post its poll questions. The polls at the Pew Charitable Trusts does not post its questions.


    Tuesday, Jul 29, 2003
     
    LA aliens
    Gumma sends this LA Times story about illegal aliens depressing wages in California.
     
    Avoiding RIAA legal attacks
    John sends this article on strategies for avoiding legal problems with P2P file sharing. It refers to advice such as this from EFF.

    This advice could be better. I would suggest taking advantage of some safe harbors in the existing law. In particular:

  • List a DMCA agent for copyright complaints under 17 USC 512.
  • Use a digital audio recording device for ripping, and/or a digital audio recording medium for storage, as sheltered by 17 USC 1008 (AHRA).
  • Date your copying, so you can take advantage of the 3-year statute of limitations.
  • Be able to explain why your usage might qualify as fair use.

    The advantage of listing a DMCA agent is that a copyright owner would have to serve notice before suing, and there is no liability if you comply with the notice.

    The definition of a qualifying device or medium under the AHRA is a little tricky. The AHRA requirements are on manufacturers, not consumers. A court has held that the typical home computer that mixes programs with MP3 files on the same hard disk is not an AHRA device. But a CD-RW, extra hard disk drive, ripper software, etc. might be. Also, there are music CD-Rs that are commonly sold, and music royalties have already been paid so you can legally copy music onto those disks.

    It has now been 3 years since Napster was first shut down, and no Napster users were ever sued, so most music obtained with Napster should now be legal. (But the music may not be legal to sell under 17 USC 109.)

    Determining fair use is complicated and uncertain. Some indicators are: Did you download the music as a substitute for buying it? Did you use it for commercial purposes? Most people were downloading for personal use only, and they only did it because there was no way to pay for a similar service.

    Users can also use small private networks, as described in this CNN story.

  •  
    Adm. Poindexter
    Another idea for Adm. John Poindexter and Darpa has generated more controversy: monetary bets on possible terrorist attacks as a means for risk assessment. See comments here. If you wanted a good opinion on who was going to win the Super Bowl, would you ask a player or a sportswriter? No, the best predictions come from the Las Vegas betting lines.

    Update: This Slate article lists all sorts of interesting things that you can bet on.

    Liza writes:

    Is anyone else in the group as nonplussed as I about this ridiculous idea? What were they thinking of? Somebody in the Pentagon (probably Poindexter) should get fired.
    Joe says that there is a good discussion at http://www.chicagoboyz.net/. That blog has links to some good articles.

    I think that Poindexter had a great idea. A futures market is an efficient way of assimilating info, and would probably be a lot more reliable than CIA predictions.

    I see lots of criticism, but very little on precisely what is bad about it. Some say that it is morally repugnant to bet on disasters, but there are all sorts of ways that people can bet on disasters already, and some of them help our economy run more smoothly. Eg, see Slate article.

    Some say it is difficult to explain it to Arab diplomats, but so are 1000s of other things. Some say that terrorists might trade, but that would be foolish because they would expose themselves and they could more easily make more money by shorting stocks or other securities.

    So what precisely is your objection? Does it also bother you when a farmer buys a future that only pays off in the event of bad weather?

    Poindexter is running a research agency. You don't fire researchers just because you don't like their ideas. It is his job to come up with new ideas, and someone else's job to decide whether to fund it.

    Liza writes:

    It is a terrible idea. None of the examples of futures markets listed by the sites recommended by Roger and Joe is analogous. For the government to set up a mechanism that enables some people to profit from other people being deliberately blown up is reprehensible. You cannot currently bet on murder. The other existing futures markets cited relate to natural disasters or general market risk, not murders in particular.
    Do you have a problem with life insurance? It is common for employers to buy life insurance on employees. Liza, your firm could have bought a policy in your name, without telling you, and the firm would be paid off if someone murdered you. Is that reprehensible? If so, why doesn't anyone object?

    Joe writes, "Well, you do have to have an insurable interest."

    John writes:

    Actually, people have objected to employers buying life insurance on low-level employees (a.k.a. janitor's insurance), often without even telling them, then collecting the proceeds when the employees die for any reason.

    The Wall Street Journal publicized the little-known practice with a series of articles, which were predictably followed by efforts in Congress to eliminate it.

    Companies have no legitimate insurable interest in this type of insurance, which is purchased solely to gain the federal tax benefits for life insurance. (Unlike key-man insurance on top executives or split-dollar insurance which is provided as an employee benefit.)

    Now, Poindexter has just resigned.

    Andy writes:

    Poindexter is a conservative genius. He's the guy the liberals are determined to get, and the latest flap is yet another example. It's disappointing that Roger is the only person here supporting Poindexter.

    Like Poindexter's Star Wars idea (it's debatable how big a role Poindexter had), his terrorism market idea harnesses the power of free enterprise. It would add a much-needed reality check to the ridiculous overhype of terrorism. The real risk of dying in an airplane crash from terrorism is essentially zero, yet the media and politicians kill our economy by inflating that risk to absurd proportions. Let people buy and sell options on terrorism attacks, and then we can see how unlikely they really are. The entire economy could be lifted by this exercise.

    As I told Roger tonight, there is still no evidence that (1) the 9/11 attacks, (2) the sniper attacks, and (3) the anthrax killings had anything to do with terrorism. The anthrax was obviously by a rogue government researcher obsessed with his power. Roger guaranteed us a year ago there would be arrests, but of course there have not. I think Liza claimed bin Laden was behind the anthrax, but that doesn't stand up. It's too embarrassing for govt to get to arrest its own. As to the sniper attacks, there were by a deranged male couple with no apparent connection to any terrorist groups.

    9/11? As I've said for two years, it has the look and feel of the Columbine killer mentality. A handful of misfits, young males obsessed with evil. A leader in his 30s with a Satanic vision, he conspired with and led a half dozen or so others, and they carried their comrades along unwittingly for the ride. After all the investigations and time, there is still nothing tracking this gang to backing by a foreign terrorist network. If there was real evidence, we'd be hearing about it. There isn't. We're still waiting for that promised "white paper" by Bush/Powell, and you can bet it will never be released.

    One aspect of 9/11 that intrigues me is this how could a plane going 500-600 miles per hour turn into and hit a relatively narrow target like a bullseye? Imagine if you were driving a car at that speed. Could you swerve into and hit a specific telephone poll head-on? Difficult to imagine how.

    Back to Poindexter. I think free enterprise is what we need to combat the devastation of terrorism-hype on our economy. Let's allow trading on an option for airplane crashes caused by terrorism and watch its value fall to zero -- and then see some restoration of sanity to our economy.

    I'd like to see conservatives defend Poindexter against the liberal witchhunt. The latest prediction that he'd resign appears to be by a Bush insider, and it should be criticized. Bush needs more bright conservatives like Poindexter.

    Here is liberal Republican Warner's view the program is "a rather egregious error of judgment.'' Barbara Boxer leads the charge there was "something very sick about it'' and whoever was behind it should be dismissed. Of course, she knows Poindexter is behind it and liberals want his scalp -- again.

    The system is explained "DARPA and two private partners would have set up an Internet futures trading market on events in the Middle East. Traders could have bought and sold futures contracts based on their predictions about what would happen in the region. Examples given on the market's Web site included the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and a biological weapons attack on Israel."

    It only takes one sentence to justify it, as reported by AP News "The idea was that investors' choices could reveal information unavailable elsewhere."

    Exactly. Free enterprise at its best providing high quality information based on the unbiased view of millions, rather than having to rely on distorted information by a few dishonest governments.

    Apis writes, sarcastically:
    Yeah, that'll teach those idiotic bureaucrats at DARPA to think outside the box.

    In accordance with Senator Feinstein's edict, the next person at DARPA who comes up with some wacky idea will also be fired...

    Good thing Feinstein wasn't around in '67 when Vint Cerf proposed the internet. I can just imagine her comments. "What? An uncontrollable, decentralized computer network run by the government, with a computer in every home? Why, it would be Orwellian. A statist nightmare. I demand that DARPA fire the fiend in human form who came up with this horrible idea..."

    Update: Pat Buchanan has a good column on the subject. He says:
    The principle on which DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was improvising and building is an undeniable one: Markets are far superior to bureaucracies in predicting the future. Markets will ferret out secrets before keepers want them known.
    He's right. Poindexter was attacked because his scheme was a threat to out-of-touch govt bureaucrats in the CIA and elsewhere.

    Monday, Jul 28, 2003
     
    Immigration and labor shortages
    Liza writes:
    Yesterday Roger and I had a discussion about some of the abuses going on in immigration and guest worker programs. Roger argued that there can never be any such thing as a "labor shortage" that needs to be addressed by immigration or guest workers (as opposed to paying higher wages to Americans). I subsequently checked out a couple of immigration procedure web sites.

    I think Roger does not sufficiently appreciate how longstanding and well-established in our immigration law is the idea that immigration may be used to address labor shortages. It's not just the guest worker programs that has Roger so exercised. Those programs may well be bad because no one is enforcing the law about showing a labor shortage in the specific case of computer programming (although I noticed there are contrary web sites dating from about 1999 decrying a big shortage in that industry). However, in attacking the notion that there can ever be a labor shortage, Roger is attacking the basis of a large category of legal immigration that has traditionally been considered positive.

    There are only a few categories of legal immigration (i.e., for those who wish to stay and become American citizens), and while the details are tweaked every so often the general categories have been around a long time. These categories mostly relate to the immigration lottery, family relationships with Americans, refugee status, and employment. The employment subcategories vary (often requiring advanced degrees and the like), but in general they also require a showing that a labor shortage exists. Roger argues that any labor shortage can be immediately solved by raising the wage rate. If his argument had prevailed (and unions have always made that argument to oppose immigration), we would have lost out on most of the best-educated, hardest-working, non-welfare-receiving immigrants who came in during the last several decades. I think Roger needs to be careful about arguing against the whole basis of this type of immigration. In saying that a labor shortage is economically impossible, in the context of the guest worker visas, you are implying that it is impossible in the context of legal immigration as well.

    I can remember doing one immigration application for a client about 15 years ago. A rich client brought in a horse trainer from Ireland on a temporary basis, to deal with his expensive horses, and wanted to find a way to keep the trainer (who, though uneducated, really was knowledgeable about a certain fancy horse breed) in this country. Not only did the INS make us advertise to determine if the position could be filled locally; it then rejected the application even after nobody responded to the ad, on the basis that the ad was too restrictive and the employer wasn't trying hard enough to find a local. The INS agent implied that the employer just wanted to have cheap foreign labor he could exploit. At least at that time, the INS was trying (too hard, I thought) to enforce the labor shortage standard of the law.

    Lots of economic factors can produce labor shortages in a particular locality. For example, the credentials required may take a number of years to achieve and the profession may consciously restrict the output of the professional schools (this certainly happens in medicine). The locality may be a rural area that is undesirable to people with a professional degree. The work may be work that Americans just won't do (e.g., manual labor outdoors in the sun all day - which is why California has always had to bring in Mexican farm laborers and antebellum Southern plantation owners brought in African slaves). A burst of demand in a particular sector (such as programming and web site design) may not be solvable in two months because you need people with technical degrees to do the work. While America permits labor mobility, most people don't want to move. Sure, doubling the wage might solve the problem, but that would wreak havoc on the employer's organization and bottom line. It is not a viable solution.

    If we want to have any "good immigration", we should not throw out the employment categories of legal immigration, as would be the logical consequence of Roger's argument.

    John responds:
    Liza's argument would be well taken if the U.S. immigration was limited to a reasonable number, so that we could exercise a high degree of selectivity to fill a few available slots.

    The problem is that U.S. immigration is totally out of control. The numbers of people coming in are far, far in excess of any reasonable or tolerable number - far greater than ever before in U.S. history.

    So the first step is to get a grip on the numbers. Once that is done, then we can discuss *who* should be allowed in.

    First things first the overall number has to be cut by at least 80%.

    Sure, you can find complaints about all sorts of people -- nurses, farmworkers, construction workers, eligible people of the opposite sex, etc.

    The impossibility of a labor shortage is a basic fact of economics. Saying there is a labor shortage is about like saying that there is a shortage of good programs on TV, or an oil shortage. There is plenty of supply and demand, and minor fluctuations only affect the price a little bit.

    We can debate what the optimum levels of immigration and guest workers should be. Maybe it is in US interests to bring in cheap labor in order to depress the wage levels in a certain market. That is the effect. But if you say that the workers are filling a labor shortage, then you sound like someone who flunked Econ 101.

    The stated purpose of the H-1B program is to fill a labor shortage. It is a 100% lie. There is no labor shortage. The true purpose of the program is to depress wages. Gumma is quite correct to explain this.

    INS cannot cope with determining whether someone has good horse-training skills. So they look at credentials like college degrees. I am sure that is why the trainer was rejected. But do you really think that we don't have any American horse trainers who can do that job? I don't.

    So Liza wants to artificially restrict the number of Americans who can become physicians, and then make up the difference with foreigners? That makes no sense to me.

    The foreigners with professional degrees are not moving to rural areas.

    Maybe people in St. Louis don't want to move, but here in California people move all the time. A large reason for the success of Si Valley is that people very readily move from job to job and from one area to another. 100s of 1000s of foreign workers have been brought into Si Valley precisely because the local workforce is too mobile. Employers like the H-1B workers because they are like indentured servants who cannot quit. If they quit or get fired, then they get deported. (Or they are supposed to be, anyway.)

    I am not in favor of abolishing immigration. I favor abolishing the H-1B and L-1 programs, and reducing legal and illegal immigration to manageable levels.

    I agree with John. No one is advocating unlimited immigration, except for a few Libertarian kooks who think that foreigners should have as much right to live in the USA as American citizens. No one is against all immigration. The debate is about the numbers.

    Current US policy results in about 2M immigrants a year. Cutting that by 80% would still allow 400k a year. That is plenty, and would be enough to fill any labor shortage, if indeed there were one.

    So what is the argument for more than 400k per year? Liza's main argument seems to be that additional foreign workers would serve to further depress wages. The next question is How many workers do you want to bring in, in order to achieve your wage depression goals?

     
    Legal challenges to the Recall
    Gray Davis and his allies are trying to use the courts to fight the recall vote. One challenge was based on the fact that a handful of signatures were collected by a convicted felon with a record of previous election problems in another state. I think that it was a setup. It later turned out that the felon was being paid by Davis's organization. The recall forces collected 1.6M signatures, with 1.3M verified, so minor irregularities about a few signatures are meaningless. They only needed 900k signatures.

    Here is another wacky challenge from a couple of idiot law profs. They think that it is unfair that voters have to vote on the recall before they can vote on a replacement for the governor. They say:

    Absent some compelling interest, the state cannot force voters to either speak up or lose their voice.
    Who is going to take the trouble to vote in a special recall election, and then abstain on the recall? It would be easier to argue that the Davis supporters should not be allowed to vote on a replacement. In a way, they get to vote for 2 governors, Davis and another. Others just get to vote for 1.

    Update: A judge was just persuaded by this wacky challenge:

    U.S. District Judge Barry Moskowitz said voters will be allowed to cast a ballot for a potential successor to Davis even if they do not vote on whether he should be recalled. Under the state law, voters could choose "yes" or "no" on whether Davis should be recalled. Only voters who cast a "yes" or a "no" could choose a potential successor from a list on the same ballot.
    The Davis-controlled California lawyers did not really defend the law, and may derail any appeal. This is an example of a leftist activist judge trying to help the Democratic party.

    Sunday, Jul 27, 2003
     
    Job losses
    John sends this article about San Jose bay area job losses. The numbers are huge, but they about match the number of foreign workers brought in under H-1B and L-1 visas, supposedly to remedy a labor shortage. There was no labor shortage. All of the San Jose bay area congressmen should be voted out of office.

    George writes:

    You mean the San Francisco Bay Area? That article is not just about San Jose, and it doesn't even mention foreign workers.
    Yes, funny it doesn't mention foreign workers. The topic is too sensitive for that newspaper reporter, I guess. How can he write a whole article about the unemployment situation, without even mentioning the cause? There was an extraordinarily large influx of foreign workers several years ago, as a result of a special govt program to bring in cheap labor. But for that, we'd have no unemployment.

    The US Census bureau calls it the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area. I just call it the San Jose Bay Area. San Jose is the city that dominates the area in terms of population, business, money, and culture. San Francisco is now a distant second.

     
    Modern-day Kinsey
    J. Michael Bailey is trying to be sex expert like Kinsey, and has published his own theories, studies, and experiments. They are provocative and controversial. Here is a summary.
     
    Recovered Memories
    A NY Times Magazine article about psychology researcher Susan Clancy. She did a clever experiment that show that people who claim to have recovered memories were more likely to have faulty memory processes. She got similar results with those claiming to be alien abductees. Now she hated by an assortment of academic goofballs, ranging from Freudian to UFO trackers, who think that she has attacked their credibility.

    Saturday, Jul 26, 2003
     
    Michigan Affirmative Action
    John responds to Andy:
    The Fourteenth Amendment, passed to eradicate racial discrimination, mandates that "No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This straightforward command is the flashpoint in racial disputes over hiring, firing, electing, granting admissions, sentencing, and most other institutional decisions.
    I don't agree that the quoted phrase from the 14th Amendment is "straightforward." OTC, it is among the most debatable provisions of the Constitution.

    You say the 14th was "passed to eradicate racial discrimination," but offer no authority for that statement. It certainly is not the plain meaning of the words. The definitive interpretation by the Supreme Court (Civil Rights Cases, 1883) was that 14th does *not* authorize Congress to eradicate racial discrimination.

    Contrast the vague and debatable 14th Amendment with the clear and unambiguous Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

    "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

    It's a mystery to me why this statute was not dispositive of both Michigan cases. Title VI is not based on the 14th Amendment, but on Congress's spending power of Article I, Section 8.

    Liberals argue that this Amendment allows or even requires the use of racial preferences to increase ethnic diversity in classrooms, legislatures and boardrooms. Conservatives counter that it protects every individual ("any person") against race-based selection, regardless of the purpose.

    Enter the University of Michigan into this conflict. Their undergraduate school assigned an automatic 20-point bonus to minority applicants based solely on race, without any consideration of background or skills of the applicant.

    That constituted a hefty 20% of the total of 100 needed to guarantee admission. Rejected students not benefitting from this windfall sued, and the Supreme Court recently invalidated this preference. Gratz v. Bollinger, 156 L. Ed. 2d 257 (June 23, 2003).

    Chief Justice Rehnquist penned the opinion for the Court, joined by Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas. Many of them also wrote separately, and Justice Breyer also concurred, extending the majority's margin to 6-3.

    The "automatic distribution of 20 points has the effect of making ˜the factor of race ... decisive,'" and thereby unconstitutional. Id. *48 - *49. The Chief Justice was quoting Justice Powell's concurrence in the famous case of Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, which invalidated quotas but allowed the use of race as a non-decisive factor in admissions. 438 U.S. 265, 317 (1978).

    Yet this was a bittersweet victory for those opposing affirmative action, because it allows less overt racial preferences in admissions and, by extension, in business. Then the other shoe fell at the Court when it embraced a quota-like system in the related case of Grutter v. Bollinger, 156 L. Ed. 2d 304 (June 23, 2003).

    Justice O'Connor switched sides to write the Grutter decision, joined by liberal Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. The Court affirmed the admissions process at the University of Michigan Law School against a challenge by Barbara Grutter, a white Michigan resident rejected despite having a 3.8 grade point average and an LSAT test score of 161 (high 80s in percentile).

    The law school is highly competitive, accepting only 10% of applicants. Ms. Grutter was apparently not in the top 10% in her LSAT score, and with grade inflation her average was not as stellar as it appears.

    I object to the faint put-down of Barbara Grutter because her scores were less than "stellar." That conclusion is reached only by comparing her to other white applicants - precisely the point at issue here. Her record would indeed be "stellar" when compared to minority applicants.

    Furthermore, disparaging Grutter's scores encourages the erroneous (though widely held) notion that the Michigan plaintiffs and their conservative supporters want applicants to be solely on the basis of the scores.

    In fact, opponents of affirmative action fully support the use of a variety of factors in admission - just that race can't be one of them.

    The Michigan plaintiffs fully support the goal of classroom diversity on factors other than race. That's why Grutter was seen as an ideal plaintiff her entire record had other factors that should have helped her admission if the school was honestly seeking non-racial diversity. Those factors were disregarded because she had the wrong skin color.

    But some minority applicants were admitted with lower grades and LSAT scores than Ms. Grutter's, and the school insisted this was necessary to attain racial diversity in the classroom.
    "some"?? Didn't all or nearly all the admitted blacks have lower scores than Grutter's?
    In contrast to the undergraduate program, the law school feigned a highly individualized consideration of students allowing race as only one of many factors.

    In dissent, the conservative Justices decried both the factual and legal premises of this ruling. Factually, the data showed that the law school was using a quota-like system between 1995 and 1998, the percent enrollment by minority students was 13.5%, 13.6%, 13.8% and 13.8%, and it is struthious to pretend this was not a quota.

    Never before has racial diversity been an acceptable justification for a discriminatory process. One wonders now if there are any remaining legal protections against outcome-based racial balancing.

    I read the SC as saying that racial discrimination is ok as long as (1) you use euphemisms like "critical mass" instead of "quota"; and (2) you obscure the precise discrimination mechanisms, so that it is hard for any individual to be sure that he has been discriminated against. Then it's legal, according to the SC plurality.

    Andy responds:

    John wrote, "I don't agree that the quoted phrase from the 14th Amendment is 'straightforward.' OTC, it is among the most debatable provisions of the Constitution."

    Not in the view of conservatives. It's difficult to imagine a simpler and clearer mandate than the one quoted above.

    John wrote, "You say the 14th was "passed to eradicate racial discrimination," but offer no authority for that statement. It certainly is not the plain meaning of the words. The definitive interpretation by the Supreme Court (Civil Rights Cases, 1883) was that 14th does *not* authorize Congress to eradicate racial discrimination."

    The 14th Am plainly was passed to eradication discrimination from state laws. The case you cite merely refused to apply it to private life, but that's not an issue here.

    John added, "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." It's a mystery to me why this statute was not dispositive of both Michigan cases. Title VI is not based on the 14th Amendment, but on Congress's spending power of Article I, Section 8.

    This civil rights language is too broad to be helpful. Both a white and a black applicant for a single spot could cite it. Federal regulations under Title VI interpret this to include disparate impact, for example.

    John wrote, "I object to the faint put-down of Barbara Grutter because her scores were less than "stellar." That conclusion is reached only by comparing her to other white applicants - precisely the point at issue here. Her record would indeed be "stellar" when compared to minority applicants."

    Grutter was below the top 10% of all applicants, combining the races. To be objective, this needs to be disclosed. After all, aren't we talking about merit?

    John adds, "Furthermore, disparaging Grutter's scores encourages the erroneous (though widely held) notion that the Michigan plaintiffs and their conservative supporters want applicants to be solely on the basis of the scores. In fact, opponents of affirmative action fully support the use of a variety of factors in admission - just that race can't be one of them."

    No, I disagree. Many conservatives oppose, and should oppose, basing admissions on other liberal criteria like social work or politically correct activities. Preferring female athletes or male athletes in obscure sports is worth criticizing.

    John adds, "The Michigan plaintiffs fully support the goal of classroom diversity on factors other than race. That's why Grutter was seen as an ideal plaintiff her entire record had other factors that should have helped her admission if the school was honestly seeking non-racial diversity. Those factors were disregarded because she had the wrong skin color."

    Ah, perhaps Grutter wants affirmative action for females, but not for blacks??? Maybe affirmative action for social workers?

    John asks, "'some'?? Didn't all or nearly all the admitted blacks have lower scores than Grutter's?"

    I don't know. You can check the opinion if you think it says (I doubt it). I'm sure many minorities, the term I used, beat her on the scores.

    John replies:
    Not in the view of conservatives. It's difficult to imagine a simpler and clearer mandate than the one quoted above.
    Difficult to imagine? I quoted a far simpler, clearer, and unambiguous mandate Title VI. Andy, you're just blowing smoke here. There is no plain meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment. Also, there is no generally accepted conservative view of the amendment. I challenge you to state what you think is the plain meaning.
    The 14th Am plainly was passed to eradication discrimination from state laws. The case you cite merely refused to apply it to private life, but that's not an issue here.
    You now say the 14th was passed to eradicate discrimination FROM STATE LAWS. But that's not what the column says! Even your revised statement isn't "plainly" the purpose of the 14th, and you still offer no supporting authority.

    Nor do you show how the purpose of eradicating discrimination "from state laws" has anything relevance to this case. No Michigan law was at issue here. No one claimed any Michigan law is discriminatory.

    This civil rights language is too broad to be helpful. Both a white and a black applicant for a single spot could cite it. Federal regulations under Title VI interpret this to include disparate impact, for example.
    I can't make sense of this. Too broad to be helpful - what does that mean? On what basis could a black applicant sue the University of Michigan? Why is it relevant that the regs under Title VI allow disparate impact? The Michigan cases alleged intentional discrimination, not disparate impact.
    Grutter was below the top 10% of all applicants, combining the races. To be objective, this needs to be disclosed. After all, aren't we talking about merit?
    Actually, no, we're not talking about merit. We're talking about racial discrimination. Conservatives never claimed - and the lawsuit did not allege - that Grutter's admission was required by a pure "merit" standard. Neither the Constitution nor federal civil rights law requires state or federally funded colleges to use a pure merit standard of admissions.

    Hence, I repeat, to disparage Grutter's grades or scores as less than stellar is harmful, hurtful, inflammatory, and entirely irrelevant to this case.

    No, I disagree. Many conservatives oppose, and should oppose, basing admissions on other liberal criteria like social work or politically correct activities. Preferring female athletes or male athletes in obscure sports is worth criticizing.
    Conservatives may or may not oppose such criteria, but they are clearly permitted by the 14th Amendment or federal civil rights law. Hence, they are irrelevant to this case.
    Ah, perhaps Grutter wants affirmative action for females, but not for blacks??? Maybe affirmative action for social workers?
    How dare you suggest that Barbara Grutter was asking for some kind of affirmative action? That is an insulting lie. All she asked was that her race not be held against her in the admissions process.

    If the school's policy was to admit students solely on the basis of "merit" (LSAT and GPA), she would have had no case. But that isn't the school's policy. Grutter had the right to be considered, under the school's admissions standards, the same as persons of other races.

    The Rehnquist dissent makes it clear that in the period 1995-2000, a black applicant with scores (LSAT and GPA) comparable to Grutter's was virtually guaranteed to be admitted.

    The precise answer requires more research, but I think you again disparage Barbara Grutter by saying only that "some" minority applicants were admitted with lower scores.

    Andy responds:
    John makes two substantive arguments. First, that he likes Title VI more than the 14th Amendment, and thinks Title VI should have been applied in the Grutter case. Second, John objects to the mere disclosure of how Grutter's own GPA and LSAT scores were below the top 10% of law school wannabees.

    I disagree on both these points.

    Conservatives opposed Title VI in 1964 and oppose its use for racial balancing today. Its federal regulations require avoiding disparate impact. I don't know why John would want to rely on it rather than the 14th Amendment.

    As to John's second point, Grutter apologists cannot censor disclosure of her own grades and scores. Her case puts that directly in issue, and it's senseless to try to keep that out of the discussion.

    Grutter points to a minority with lower scores who was admitted, but you need to concede and rebut the issue of why Grutter should be considered over nerdy white male with higher scores.

    John is referring the clarity of the text. The 14A is hopelessly ambiguous, as shown by the long court confusion about whether it incorporates the Bill of Rights.

    Andy is trying to bring in irrelevant side issues, like whether conservatives wanted that 1964 Act then or now. The fact is that it is the law, and the courts should apply its plain meaning (unless that law is unconstitutional for some reason).

    I agree with John that Andy is misdirecting the issues here. Michigan does not rely solely on scores for admission, and nobody says that the law requires strict adherence to scores. Under the law, U. Michigan can give precedence to state residents, alumni kids, football players, or anyone else, as long as it does not apply discrimination based on race (or sex, religion, etc). It does not have to admits students with perfect LSAT scores.

    Michigan's main argument was that it needs to apply racial quotas (which it prefers to call "critical mass") in order for the law school to maintain high status among liberal elites. Those liberal elites will only give the law school a high ranking if the student body has high average scores and an ethnic makeup that reflects the larger population. The only way the law school has figured out how to do that is to admit high-scoring whites and numerical quotas for other groups.

    U. Michigan could presumably admit people based on good looks, if it were possible to do that without race or sex discrimination. The clothing chain Abercrombie And Fitch has admitted that it hires clerks based on looks!

    John responds to Andy:

    I challenge Andy to name the "conservatives" who opposed Title VI in 1964. Certainly not Goldwater, who said "With the exception of Titles II and VII, I could wholeheartedly support this bill..."

    With a strong civil rights record himself, Goldwater had no problem with the provisions that applied to government or recipients of federal funds. He objected to Titles II (public accommodations) and VII (employment) because their validity rested on Roosevelt's revolutionary reinterpretation of the commerce clause. That is what gave Congress the power to regulate not just interstate commerce itself, but anything that can be said to indirectly "affect" commerce.

    I strongly disagree that a comparison between Grutter and a hypothetical "nerdy white male with higher scores" is relevant. Neither the Constitution nor conservative policies require schools to admit students on scores alone.

    Although Grutter's scores were slightly less than "stellar," you can't stop there without unfairly prejudicing her case. You have to also mention that her record included the kind of additional facts which would have gained her admission according to the school's own stated goals of (non-racial) classroom diversity.

    Grutter's rejection proves that the school's pretended goal of seeking a class of diverse experience is just a pretext for racial discrimination. The facts were so stark that Michigan knew they could not survive in court. That is why they had to come up with a new theory called "critical mass" to justify what they had done.

    Andy responds:
    Conservatives did oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though I cannot parse that opposition title by title.

    The Supreme Court has reiterated that Title VI is coterminous with the Equal Protection Clause so John's point is moot anyway. See Bakke at 287 (opinion of Powell, J.) ("Title VI . . . proscribes only those racial classifications that would violate the Equal Protection Clause or the Fifth Amendment") (reaffirmed in Grutter). If John is invoking Title VI to help Grutter, then he must think Title VI goes further than the Equal Protection Clause, which is illogical and not something I'd support.

    John wrote, "I strongly disagree that a comparison between Grutter and a hypothetical "nerdy white male with higher scores" is relevant. Neither the Constitution nor conservative policies require schools to admit students on scores alone. Although Grutter's scores were slightly less than "stellar," you can't stop there without unfairly prejudicing her case. You have to also mention that her record included the kind of additional facts which would have gained her admission according to the school's own stated goals of (non-racial) classroom diversity."

    Grutter's scores are relevant. Surely Roger and John will concede that. In fact, her entire case depends on a comparison between her scores and those of other applicants.

    But why should we let Grutter choose whom to compare her scores against? Any objective observer should be free to make their own comparisons.

    John keeps referring to "additional facts" that would justify Grutter's tepid scores. Perhaps she was an outstanding synchronized swimmer? Winner of a Sanskrit poetry contest?

    Roger writes, "U. Michigan could presumably admit people based on good looks, if it were possible to do that without race or sex discrimination."

    But that's exactly the point -- was Grutter the beneficiary of affirmative action for women? Would she and her backers object to that pervasive form of affirmative action? Would others here object to it? Disclosure of her scores is essential to allow these valid inquiries.

    John responds to Andy:
    Conservatives did oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though I cannot parse that opposition title by title.
    Why bother? I already did it for you.
    The Supreme Court has reiterated that Title VI is coterminous with the Equal Protection Clause so John's point is moot anyway. See Bakke at 287 (opinion of Powell, J.) ("Title VI . . . proscribes only those racial classifications that would violate the Equal Protection Clause or the Fifth Amendment") (reaffirmed in Grutter). If John is invoking Title VI to help Grutter, then he must think Title VI goes further than the Equal Protection Clause, which is illogical and not something I'd support.
    Title VI gives clarity and specificity to the EP clause, whose meaning is otherwise ambiguous and opaque. That is hardly illogical, and Andy does not explain why he would oppose it. As Andy says, the Powell opinion in Bakke (where Powell spoke only for himself) has now been adopted by the 5-justice majority in Grutter (in which O'Connor's ridiculous opinion was joined by the 4 liberal justices). Such is Andy's dubious authority for declaring that Title VI is "coterminous with the EP clause"!
    Andy responds:
    I disagree with John's view that "Title VI gives clarity and specificity to the EP clause." Legislation cannot and should not "give clarity" to the Constitution. Moreover, Title VI has been interpreted to support disparate impact tests, and is not something conservatives support. Also, Title VI was not a factor in the decision, nor should it be. Congress shouldn't be telling Michigan how to run its admissions.

    John and Roger ducked the issue of affirmative action based on gender. This is of far greater concern to Eagle Forum than racial discrimination. Apparently no one else in this group (other than me) is willing to speak out against affirmative action based on gender. Grutter's case is based on her scores, and the column should disclose those scores (as the Supreme Court did). I oppose censoring that pivotal information from the column.


    Friday, Jul 25, 2003
     
    Electronic voting is insecure
    Some computer security researchers have exposed a number of gross insecurities in electronic voting equipment used in Georgia and elsewhere. Here is the paper. The technology is available to handle voting fairly securely, but it is not in use, and official elections should not use electronic voting yet. It is just too easy to fake the results.

    Update: John sends this WashPost story about a lot of election officials now getting worried about electronic voting machines.

     
    Kobe Bryant's accuser
    Radio talk show host Tom Leykis has named the Kobe Bryant accuser as 19-year-old Katelyn Faber. Some web sites had pictures of the wrong girl.

    Faber has made an accusation that could send Bryant to prison for life. There is no evidence, except for her testimony and credibility. Because of the rules of evidence, stories about her promiscuity and suicide attempts may not be admissible in court.

    Joan writes:

    There's more than her testimony and credibility, Roger. There's circumstantial evidence, e.g., the fact that (apparently) the young woman was summoned to Bryant's suite (it will be interesting to find out whether Bryant specifically requested that she come or whether the request was simply that *someone*, i.e., anyone, come), the complaints of those who summoned hotel security because of the noise emanating from Bryant's suite, and the testimony of those who saw the woman as she left the suite. There's also, apparently, a fair amount of physical evidence to corroborate her story. (Okay, so her injuries could have been self-inflicted. If so, she has some profound mental problems which she might eventually overcome. I think it's less likely Bryant's stupidity can be.)

    I doubt Hurlburt (the D.A.) would have filed charges if he didn't think he had a strong case--if he had determined it was too much of a "he said/she said" situation.

    Let a jury decide. As for Leykis... [see this criticism]

    BTW, where have you run across *any* allegation that the alleged victim was promiscuous? (Leykis? An internet forum?)

    Maybe I jumped to conclusions. I assumed that she was some sort of basketball groupie who was there voluntarily. I hope there is enough evidence for the jury to sort it out.

    Bob writes:

    Leykis interviewed someone who sang in the choir with Kate Farber on his show last week. The information came from the LA Times. The woman he interviewed claimed to have attended a party at which MS Farber striped. You should have a link to the right picture. I googled kate farber and hit some great pictures of the "wrong" girl. Metable.
    Maybe you are misspelling her name.

    Bob writes:

    The Kobe Bryant defense team should look into whether the alleged victim saw "The Life of David Gale" last February and whether she commented on the movie to her friends. The plot of the movie hinged on a young woman who set up and accused a man of rape.
     
    Oct. 7 recall vote
    There is life at the end of the tunnel. On Oct. 7, we Californians will have a chance to out Gov. Gray Davis.

    Davis is about to hold a news conference. He has made his whole career on negative campaigning, and has only ever won anything based on lesser-of-2-evils arguments. Bill Simon was way too nice in the last campaign. Davis is finally going to get what he deserves.

    Charlie writes:

    The problem with this recall, IMHO, is that recalling a govenor for anything less than being caught shooting up heroin/raping widows and orphans, etc., is that it sets a precedent. What's to stop the Democrats from recalling every Reb. govenor elected in the next 50 years? It only takes 1,000,000 signatures, right? The dems can get 1,000,000 signatures in the Bay Area alone at the drop of a hat.
    That precedent has been set. There have already been attempts to Gov. Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, etc. They didn't get enough signatures.

    Similar arguments were made during the campaign to kick Calif. chief justice Rose Bird out. What if every judge has to worry about being recalled after a controversial decision? That was about 20 years ago, and there has been no big rush to oust judges. Bird was just particularly bad.


    Tuesday, Jul 22, 2003
     
    Gun rights appeal
    John sends this Wash Times story about disagreements among gun-rights advocates. As I read it, some libertarian ideologues want an unconstitutional gun control law so they can take a test case to the US Supreme Court (SC) and have it declared once and for all that we all have inalienable gun rights under the 2nd Amendment (2A). The NRA is not cooperating.

    I agree with the NRA. The responsibility to abide by the 2A lies with all levels of govt, and Congress should repeal any laws that it believes to be unconstitutional. The SC rulings that mention the 2A are already very favorable to the individual gun rights view. We currently have a left-wing SC, and it is wishful thinking to hope that it is just looking for a chance to make a radical libertarian statement about guns that will resolve all of the gun debates. I am sure the NRA thinks that it has been much more effective with its programs of educating people about guns, and about gun rights.

     
    Berkeley research on political conservatism
    A Univ of California Berkeley press release says "Researchers help define what makes a political conservative". It is so silly, it sounds like a parody. (Thanks to The Angry Clam.)

    Update: After some complaints, UCB apparently yanked and then updated its press release. It still says:

    Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form.
    I wonder what the original version said. Hitler was not a conservative in any sense of the word. He was a socialist and a radical. The Nazi party was the National Socialist party.
     
    O'Reilly on Joe McCarthy
    Fox News's O'Reilly inviewed Ann Coulter, and he doesn't like her defending Sen. McCarthy. Add O'Reilly to the list of people who have been brainwashed by the anti-McCarthy propaganda. He insists that McCarthy was a bad person, even tho he is clueless about what McCarthy did. In this exchange, O'Reilly doesn't even know that McCarthy was a Senator! From his show today:

    Coulter: I am responding to 50 years of the liberal creation of a myth turning an honorable American, a great American patriot Joe McCarthy into a virtual nazi.

    O'Reilly: I'm not going with "great American patriot". I'm not going with it. I'm going with a guy who used his power to do some good, but a lot of bad ...

    Coulter: Like what?

    O'Reilly: Well, he demonized people who didn't deserve to be ...

    Coulter: That's not true -- name one. There is not one.

    O'Reilly: I'll name one: Dalton Trumbo.

    Coulter: He had nothing to do with Dalton Trumbo.

    O'Reilly: Sure he did. He was the House Unamerican Activities Committee. All right. And he was overseeing it.

    Coulter: He is known as Senator McCarthy. He was in the Senate, not the House. Everyone confuses him with the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

    O'Reilly: He was overseeing it. C'mon, you know the clubhouse rules.

    Coulter: He had nothing to do with HUAC. You see, this is part of the myth. It's not everyone says this. Everyone says HUAC.

    O'Reilly: Ok, I don't want to debate McCarthy. He's dead.

    Dalton Trumbo was a Hollywood scriptwriter and member of the Communist Party who refused to testify about his commie activities, and had to write some scripts under assumed names.

    Bob sends this Coulter criticism by David Horowitz. Actually the article is about 95% in agreement with Coulter. His biggest gripe is her lack of support for JFK on CNBC Hardball (TV):

    When somebody as smart and as gutsy as Ann Coulter equivocates over so direct a question - Was Jack Kennedy a traitor? -- you know (and they know) - that something is very wrong
    But she doesn't equivocate. The transcript says:
    Chris Matthews: Was Jack Kennedy a traitor?

    Ann Coulter: No, he was not a traitor.


    Sunday, Jul 20, 2003
     
    White House lies again
    Bush is giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Roberto Clemente, and says his lifetime batting average was .371. No, it was .317. (Clemente died in 1972 near the end of his career.)
     
    Lawyer Boies in ethics trouble
    John sends this story, and says that champerty is punishable in Florida.

    Andy writes:

    [John's] comment to the story [] is not supported by the text. Boies is being charged with giving money to a client and supervising attorneys in a state in which he is not licensed, according to the story.

    Champerty is paying someone to sue in exchange for a portion of the winnings. It is anachronistic and without significance today.

    John replies:
    Read the last sentence of the article. Champerty (and the related offenses of barratry and maintenance) mean improperly funding someone else's lawsuit. That is exactly what Boies is accused of doing.

    It has nothing to do with whether Boies was practicing law without a required Florida license. Not directly, anyway. Perhaps indirectly it does if he had taken and passed the tough ethics section of the Florida Bar exam (as I did), he would have known that champerty is prohibited.

    Many people think, as you do, that champerty "is anachronistic and without significance today." The reason I sent you this news item was to demonstrate that such a widely held notion is quite incorrect.

    Andy replies:
    It's not champerty unless Boies sought to profit, and there is no accusation in the article that he did.

    You now suggest, for the first time, that it is barratry and maintenance. It's not barratry because, again, Boies did not seek to profit.

    Is it maintenance? Only if the litigation is frivolous, and even then the state might have to show intent by Boies to harass the other side. That doesn't seem to exist.

    I suspect your real point here is to justify the adamant opinion of you and Roger that the Jones v. Clinton litigation was improper because Jones didn't advance legal fees in the case. Clinton and his liberal allies tried every ridiculous defense tactic possible to fend off that suit, but I never heard your and Roger's groundless argument even attempted. The lawsuit was perhaps the most significant legal/political event of the decade.

    I think that Boies is overrated as a lawyer. He has been involved in a number of high-profile cases, but it seems like he has lost just about all of them.

    John replies to Andy:

    John wrote, "I never said teachers can't spend their own money. Of course they can. Nobody is stopping teachers from creating and funding a truly voluntary organization to promote their goals." No one is making teachers join the NEA. There are rival organizations, and there should be a conservative alternative. If the NEA signs up more members than groups we like or need, then we need to ask why and remedy that.
    Andy, did you not study labor law at Harvard? Didn't you recently give a course in American history? How could you be so uninformed about a basic feature of American life? Have you ever heard the term "collective bargaining"? It means that a union is designated as the sole and exclusive representative of all workers in a given workplace. It means that the employer (in this case a government agency, a public school district) is required to deduct union dues from every employee's paycheck and pay them directly to the union. Yes indeed, teachers *are* required to join the NEA. That is my whole point! Individual teachers have no choice in the matter. It is a job requirement that they cannot escape. (Technically, it's true that teachers can opt not to be members of the NEA, but they still have to pay the same dues anyway. My point is the money, not the abstraction of membership. Most of the NEA's budget comes from such compulsory dues, which are collected and paid directly to them by public school districts.)
    There is much to criticize the NEA for. But lamenting their exercise of their freedoms of association and speech is way down the list.
    The NEA has no legitimate right to freedom of association or speech. It is a corrupt, taxpayer-funded, Democratic party slush fund that should be busted up.
    On champerty, John cites a disciplinary action against Boies as vindication of his theory that champerty is a valid defense in litigation. But there is no evidence that champerty is being used as a defense, even in the action involving Boies!

    I said the action against Boies proves that champerty is punishable in Florida. It's not an archaic concept, as you claimed. In addition to the bar discipline mentioned in the article, I believe it would be properly raised as a defense in the underlying lawsuit.

    Moreover, the disciplinary proceeding concerns more than claims of maintenance (not champerty) -- it complains about Boies supervising attorneys in Florida, where he lacks a license.

    So Boies committed more than one offense. Why are you trying to defend him?

    There is a common theme to these ostensibly disparate points by John. In both cases, he is seeking to censor people he disagrees with. I don't find this to be a >productive approach, even if it were possible (and it isn't).

    What a ridiculous charge. Nobody's speech is being censored. It's all about money - the diversion or conversion or use of money for unlawful or improper purposes.

    Nobody has a right to speak with somebody else's money, and it's not censorship to cut off the ill-gotten funds. "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." --Thomas Jefferson.

    John responds to Andy and me:
    John, do you know this for a fact? Presumably teachers can opt out of paying the dues in right-to-work states, and also elsewhere if the NEA has not been designated the exclusive bargaining agent.
    I question whether RTW laws apply to the public sector. Right-to-work laws were designed for private employment, pursuant to section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley law, passed in 1947, which applies only to private employment in interstate commerce. At that time, union activity was completely illegal throughout the public sector.

    Collective bargaining between public school districts and teacher unions swept the nation in the 1960s-70s. State laws were changed to accommodate public-sector unions.

    I never heard there was a legal obstacle to teacher unions in the 22 RTW states. There, as elsewhere, collective bargaining contracts require school districts to deduct union dues from teacher paychecks and pay the money directly to unions.

    Teachers can opt out of being a union member. But they still have to pay the same money (which in the case of a non-member is called "agency fees" instead of "dues").

    It takes a rare and determined teacher to resign from the union, since the teacher does not save any money by doing so, yet she loses certain benefits the union provides (such as liability insurance).

    My opinion -- I don't think that govt agencies should ever recognize a union for public employees. > I don't even think that it has a legitimate right to represent teachers in employee bargaining. The teachers are already represented by electing all the public officials who control the tax money.
    I completely agree. Unionism in the public sector is inherently corrupt. Public sector unions are not entitled to first amendment protection. They should be barred from engaging in politics, lobbying, and all forms of public advocacy.
    [From Andy] John then concludes, "Yes indeed, teachers *are* required to join the NEA. That is my whole point! Individual teachers have no choice in the matter. It is a job requirement that they cannot escape."

    No, I don't think that's correct. Teachers choose between the NEA and rival organizations in selecting their bargaining agent. Individual teachers, as John concedes, can then opt out.

    Collective bargaining means a single union is selected for the entire school district. Individual teachers have no choice. Opting out of membership in the union is pointless because a teacher loses substantial benefits without saving any money.
    In Washington and presumably many other areas, individual teachers can even block individual dues from going to the bargaining agent that they selected. If only taxpayers had that right!
    If only Washington teachers actually had such a right! A statewide referendum (I-134) passed way back in 1992 would have put a modest limit on the power of teacher unions to spend mandatory teacher dues, but even that limited restriction is still not enforced because of union defiance. here, here
    On champerty, John cites a disciplinary action against Boies as vindication of his theory that champerty is a valid defense in litigation. But there is no evidence that champerty is being used as a defense, even in the action involving Boies!
    Here's another case where I strongly suspect illegal champerty was involved the NAACP suit against the gun industry, which was reluctantly dismissed (on other grounds) by the nation's most extreme anti-2nd Amendment Judge, Jack Weinstein, in a 175-page opinion today. here here here

    Saturday, Jul 19, 2003
     
    Sodomy compared to slavery

    The San Jose Mercury News, in a section 1 news story, compares the recent US Supreme Court decision to the pre-Civil War Dred Scott decision. That was the one that tried to resolve some slavery-related issues by creating a new constitutional doctrine expanding the rights of slave-owners. It said that negroes have no legal rights that a white man must respect.

    So where is the similarity? Both Scalia and Taney used historical arguments, both cited the US Constitution, and both expressed opinions that get other people upset. You have to read it yourself to see how idiotic it is.

    So why is this news? Because the Left is worried that Bush might appoint someone like Scalia to the Supreme Court, so they want to slander Scalia by associating him with slavery. Too bad Bush doesn't have the guts to appoint someone like Scalia.


    Friday, Jul 18, 2003
     
    Dantz Retrospect
    I just got a really brain-damaged software backup product called Dantz Retrospect.
  • It lets me define scripts, but stores them in an incomprehensible binary format in the Program Files directory. I would think that a company that is in the backup business would understand the need to separate programs from data. On some machines, administrator privileges are needed to store configuration data with the programs.
  • It loses track of volume names, and gets mixed up about which drives are which.
  • It has a "One Touch" feature to automate backups, but that can only do a simple backup from one volume.
  • No matter what I do, it peppers me with annoying little dialog boxes asking me if I really want to do it. Sometimes several times. And not just for operations that involve potential data loss, either.
  • The documentation and tech support are pathetic and useless.
  • It can backup from one disc to another, but by default it erases all data on the target disc!

    I would have scrapped the whole thing, but it is triggered by a button on my disc drive. I think I would have rather had the button trigger a simple VB script or something like that. I do not recommend this product for inexperienced users.

  •  
    Move On
    The leftist web site MoveOn.org got its start from its campaign to get the public to forget about Clinton's lies in connection with the Lewinsky affair. Now its main issue is to "investigate whether the Bush Administration manipulated and distorted evidence to take the country to war in Iraq."

    Meanwhile, the tables are turned:

    "The President has moved on," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said to reporters at a news conference on Saturday when asked about the continuing attention being given to false intelligence information used in President George W. Bush's January State of the Union Address. [source]
     
    Gray Davis recall
    John sends this Sacramento Bee article about a loophole in the California recall law.

    I don't buy it. There is a loophole in that the gov. could resign the day before the recall election, and then the lt. gov. would become gov. and the recall election would be moot. The article says that the lt. gov. becomes gov. in case of a vacancy, but only a resignation would lead to a vacancy. A recall election would substitute a new gov. for the old one, without any vacancy.

    The article also suggests that the lt. gov. might declare that it is inappropriate to put the names of replacement candidates on the recall ballot. That makes no sense to me. The law provides for putting candidates on the ballot if they pay the fee and submit the signatures. Surely several candidates will do that.


    Thursday, Jul 17, 2003
     
    Baseball All-Star Game
    Last year the baseball all-star game was called a tie because the commissioner got bored and wanted to go home. This year, the game had the worse TV ratings in history.

    Wednesday, Jul 16, 2003
     
    Sen. Joe McCarthy
    Bob attacks Joe McCarthy, and cites "Fixing Intelligence For a More Secure America" by William E. Odom. It says:
    Effective FBI counterintelligence might have secured indictments of scores of Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, the FBI contributed to the Senate hearings conducted by Joseph McCarthy, whose unconscionable tactics were exploited as a screen for the activities of well-placed Soviet operatives and the American Communist Party.
    There is no doubt now that the US govt was infiltrated by Soviet agents during the 1940s and 1950s, just as McCarthy claimed. It is funny how no one wants to admit that McCarthy was right, and instead vilify him for "unconscionable tactics" and similar vague slurs without ever detailing just what he did wrong.

    I think Bob is saying that if McCarthy were really an effective anti-communist, he would have found out about the Venona project, rooted out the whole commie spy network, unearthed enough evidence to prosecute a couple of hundred of them in court, gotten rid of all the commie sympathizers in the FBI and DoJ, and whipped up enough public pressure to ensure that the commie spies would be tried, convicted, and imprisoned. I wonder what he thinks about the other 99 Senators.

    Bob responds:

    Actually it would have been the other 95 Senators.

    The other 95 Senators weren't tools of the FBI in spreading their Richard Jewel like disinformation to cover their incompetence.

    I guess he thinks that the FBI was incompetent in its failure to build a case against the commie agents. There are other possible explanations. Maybe the FBI was infiltrated by commies. Maybe the FBI was intimidated by leftist media criticism of the Alger Hiss and Rosenbergs prosecution. Maybe the FBI was overruled by the Justice Dept.

    Bob responds:

    Of the 200 names of probable communist agents given to the FBI as described by Odom, only the Rosenbergs were prosecuted. This is evidence of incompetence. Given the behavior of the FBI in leaking information to the media, the proposition that the FBI was overruled by the DOJ and failed to bring this to the attention of McCarthy and the press is difficult to believe. As to intimidation by leftist media criticism, the best defense would have been convictions and cooperation of more communist agents. If the FBI was infiltrated by communist agents other than Hansen, it would be interesting news. The FBI has enough enemies such as the CIA, to expect that information of FBI infiltration to have been leaked by now. See "See No Evil" by Robert Baer. I would expect such information to have been available after the disintegration of the USSR.
    There was surely enough evidence to prosecute Ted Hall. Apparently someone decided that it would be better not to reveal the Venona project to the American people.

    Here are some Venona facts from PBS.

    Bob responds:

    I agree. A competent FBI would have found sufficient evidence to prosecute Ted Hall. Since revelation of the Venona project would not have aided in prosecution this is a separate issue. I would like to hear a defense of the decision to keep Venona classified.
    Bob sends reviews by Andrew Sullivan and Dorothy Rabinowitz trashing Ann Coulter's new book. I guess he thinks that Coulter must really be bad if right-wingers denounce him. But they aren't right-wingers, and their criticisms are weak. Sullivan's strongest point is that someone named Ron Radosh wrote a book about McCarthy, and he doesn't like anyone else's book on the subject, including Coulter. He doesn't say why, except to call it "crap".

    Rabinowitz's complaints are not much better. She says:

    In Ms. Coulter's version of this history, of course, the blacklisted are only the rich and resourceful--a history that doesn't include the countless people destroyed because their names had popped up on some list of alleged Communists or fellow travelers, or sounded like a name on one of those lists. People like the actor Phillip Loeb, for example, unemployable and ultimately driven to suicide because he could no longer pay the bills for the care of a mentally ill son.
    I do not believe that anyone committed suicide because his name sounded like the name of a commie. My sources say that Philip Loeb was a commie fellow traveller, signed a petition supporting Stalin's Moscow show trials, was dropped from a TV show because no sponsor wanted to be identified with an unrepentant Stalinist, and was offered $85k in 1951 as a settlement. He refused, but later accepted $40k. He killed himself in 1955 because he was unable to pay a $1k tax bill. Rabinowitz does not even get the spelling of his name right.

    If this is Rabinowitz's best evidence of the evils of McCarthyism, it is pathetic. It didn't even have anything to do with McCarthy. Why should a private commercial sponsor pay to put a Stalinist on TV? Nobody would pay to put a neo-Nazi Hitler supporter on TV, and there is no reason to sponsor a Stalinist either.

     
    Vince Foster
    Andy writes:
    The plaintiff in the Vince Foster case forwarded me this link. It's a new audio discussion by the government attorney who quit in protest over the cover-up of Vince Foster.

    The government's refusal to release the postmortem photos, which may show a gunshot wound to the neck, is pending before the Supreme Court. Also note from the audiotape that the White House knew of Foster's death before the 911 call reporting it, and that the FBI intimidated this government attorney. I particularly enjoyed his description of how the government quickly re-landscaped the park.

    One of the prosecutors, who excoriated a key witness complaining about the cover-up, is being nominated by Bush to the DC Circuit.

    I am convinced that the authorities were covering up something in connection with Vince Foster's death. Too many details are fishy. The obvious suspicion is that Foster was murdered. If he committed suicide, there must have been something very embarrassing about it.

    Monday, Jul 14, 2003
     
    A fool for a lawyer
    Conventional wisdom says that no criminal defendant should ever defend himself in court. He should just shut up and let his lawyer do all the talking. Certainly OJ Simpson was better off that way.

    But maybe not everyone. When the Unabomber threatened to defend himself, the feds got scared and offered to drop the dead penalty if he pleads guilty. The so-call 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui has been causing headaches for the federal prosecutors by defending himself. It had looked like he was sure to get the death penalty, but now it looks like the feds may want to offer him a deal.

     
    Outsourcing
    John sends some columns in support of outsourcing, such as this one. It suggests that outsourcing is synonymous with economic activity, and anyone who doesn't recognize that is looney.

    The columnist quotes an economist who outsources his dirty shirts to a laundry. Well, I happen to find it more economical and convenient to wash my own shirts. If I learned that the govt was subsidizing professional cleaners in order to promote outsourcing, I'd be annoyed.

    These columnists pretend to be free traders, but they are really the modern equivalent of slave traders. 300 years ago, negro slaves were imported with similar arguments about how the slave trade was just another form of economic activity. Now they want to import hundreds of thousands of indentured servants from India, China, and other Third World countries as cheap labor. I call them indentured servants because they are paid less than the going rate, and because they will be deported if they quit their jobs. They all want to stay in America, so employers get low-paid and compliant workers who will put up with whatever the employer requires.

    Joe writes:

    Do you have a problem with workers in India sitting over there doing programming by broadband linkup?
    No. I do have a problem with special govt programs to bring in Indian progammers to the USA on a theory that there is a labor shortage here, when there is actually a surplus, not a shortage.

    Sunday, Jul 13, 2003
     
    Title IX Quotas
    Andy explains that Bush has endorsed Clinton's interpretation of Title IX, and that implies sex quotas in college athletics. Title IX is an innocuous federal law promising nondiscrimination in education programs, but radical feminists have used it to wipe out college sports like men's wrestling. Andy writes:
    The "proportionality" test is in the reported decisions.  In looking at them I realized something for the first time: even if the quota is no longer required, it is still permissible under Bush's new guidance.  And that is highly objectionable, because feminists are running these colleges!
    For example, wrestlers recently lost in challenging a university's use of quotas to eliminate their team.  The court held (Chalenor v. Univ. of N.D., 291 F.3d 1042 (8th Cir. 2002)):

    "[A]s the Ninth Circuit noted in Neal v. Bd. of Trs. of Cal. State Univs., 198 F.3d 763 (9th Cir. 1999), "every court, in construing the Policy Interpretation and the text of Title IX, has held that a university may bring itself into Title IX compliance by increasing athletic opportunities for the underrepresented gender (women in this case) or by decreasing athletic opportunities for the overrepresented gender (men in this case)."  Id. at 769-70. The cases from other circuits include: Neal, 198 F.3d at 771 (allowing university to make gender-conscious decisions and noting that "the plain meaning of the nondiscrimination principle set forth in 20 U.S.C. § 1681(a) does not bar remedial actions designed to achieve substantial proportionality between athletic rosters and student bodies"); Boulahanis v. Bd. of Regents, 198 F.3d 633, 638 (7th Cir. 1999) (holding that university's elimination of men's soccer and men's wrestling teams "is not a violation of Title IX as long as men's participation in athletics continues to be 'substantially proportionate' to their enrollment") (citation omitted), cert. denied, 523 U.S. 1284 (2000); Horner v. Ky. High Sch. Athletic Ass'n, 43 F.3d 265, 275 (6th Cir. 1994) (noting that "an institution need not pour ever-increasing sums into its athletic programs in order to bring itself into compliance, but has the option of reducing opportunities for the overrepresented gender while keeping opportunities for the underrepresented gender stable") (citation omitted); Kelley v. Bd. of Trs., 35 F.3d 265, 270 (7th Cir. 1994) (allowing university to eliminate men's swimming team while retaining women's swimming team because male athletes on the whole "would continue to be more than substantially proportionate to their presence in the University's student body"), cert. denied, 513 U.S. 1128 (1995); Roberts v. Colo. State Bd. of Agric., 998 F.2d 824, 830 (10th Cir.) ("Financially strapped institutions may still comply with Title IX by cutting athletic programs such that men's and women's athletic participation rates become substantially proportionate to their representation in the undergraduate population."), cert. denied, 510 U.S. 1004 (1993); Cohen, 991 F.2d at 898 n.15 (noting that university can "bring itself into compliance" with Title IX "by reducing opportunities for the overrepresented gender while keeping opportunities stable for the underrepresented gender (or reducing them to a much lesser extent)")."

    What's interesting about this list is that it shows how meaningless the second and third prongs of the guidance are, even with Bush's imprimatur on Friday.  The second prong implicitly requires pouring "ever-increasing sums into its athletic programs," an obvious impracticality.  The third prong requires proof that the university is "fully and effectively" accommodating everyone.  Well, if someone sues, obviously her needs are not being met!  So this prong is not meaningful either.  The proportionality test remains the entire ballgame.

    I skimmed the massive Title IX litigation against Brown University. The proportionality test was central to plaintiffs' victory.

    After winning, plaintiffs then demanded attorneys fees. This is the cash cow sought by the feminist law groups. The magistrate awarded plaintiffs $1,059,473.05 in attorneys fees and $21,385.20 in costs. It was slightly modified on appeal to the district court judge.

    Then, to add insult to injury, the court subsequently rendered another award of "fees on fees" -- e.g. attorneys fees incurred in fighting over fees. Brown was stuck with another bill for $228,285.90 for that. This occurred just two weeks ago, for litigation initiated over ten years ago.

    You can bet no university wants to go down that road. In addition to being ordered to pay $1.2M in attorneys fees of plaintiffs, Brown probably had several million dollars in legal expenses of its own.

    Phyllis writes:
    We're not asking to change the law. We're not even asking to change the regs. We're just asking to abolish Clinton's outrageous manufactured guidelines for enforcement.
    I think that it should be criminal to claim $1M in legal fees, when the crux of the case is a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation that should take about 5 minutes to explain.

    Andy send gripes from wrestlers here and here.

     
    Safe driving
    A lot of Californians are trying to ban cellphone use while driving, unless the phone has a "hands-free" attachment. Fortunately, the proposed ban just lost a vote.

    This sort of safety micromanaging by state law is really a bad idea. For years we were told that the 55 mph speed limit saves lives. Today's NY Times Magazine says:

    according to a recent academic study, raising speed limits to 70 miles per hour, and even higher, has no effect whatsoever on the death rates of young and middle-aged male drivers. That's right, guys: if you're under 65 and you find yourself cruising the great wasteland somewhere between Denver and Portland, say, you can rev things up with a clear conscience -- soon maybe even in Oregon, whose Legislature is considering upping its maximum speed limit from a poky, painful 65 to a brisk and wholesome 70.
    Currently, California law says that driving with headphones in both ears is illegal. Presumably this dates back to when headphones commonly covered the entire ear and blocked out other sounds, so there could be a safety hazard if the driver could not hear someone honking. And yet deaf people are allowed to drive, and you can roll up all your windows and turn up the car stero full blast. With a hands-free phone, you can plug an earphone into one ear.

    I drive a convertible (with the top always down) and listen to an mp3 player. Because of this law, I use ear buds. They actually block more outside noise that my regular headphones. Either way, I hear plenty of outside noise in my convertible. If I want to minimize the outside noise, I put earplugs in my ears and crank up the car stereo full blast. Then I can hear the music quite comfortably and nothing else. That is quite legal. So these laws make no sense to me, and I just try to avoid tickets.

    As I understand it, there are 2 theories for thinking that driving with a cellphone is hazardous. One is that the phone is distracting, and the other is that it takes a hand off the steering wheel. The hands-free phone does nothing about the distraction of the phone call, and may even make it worse, has to talk on the phone as well as fiddle with an extra gadget. So the proposed California law must be based on a theory that the driver should have 2 hands on the steering wheel. But I always drive with only 1 hand on the wheel anyway, and that is completely safe and legal. It leaves the other hand free for shifting gears, adjusting the radio, eating french fries, talking on the cellphone, or anthing else. I realize that some people have trouble driving with one hand, and some don't even know how to shift gears, but the rest of us should not be punished for shortcomings of a few lousy drivers.

     
    Xbox hacks
    The Xbox/Linux community is making progress towards turning the Msft Xbox into a general purpose computer. You can buy an underground modchip and solder it onto the Xbox motherboard, and run Linux. The modchips depend on Msft using a flawed hash function, and finding a collision that is useful.

    Now people have figured out a scheme that does not modify any hardware. The Xbox only loads games that Msft signs. They wanted Msft to sign a Linux kernel, but Msft refused. Now they have a hack that involves saving a game's state to disk, modifying the (signed) game state, forcing a buffer overflow when reloading the game, changing the last 4 bytes of Msft's RSA key so that it is easily factorable, and using that private key to sign a Linux image. Or at least that's the way it looks to me. For more info, see the links at Slashdot and a technical explanation here. There is also a new book on hacking the Xbox.

    Once you do the hack, it boots Linux every time and you cannot run your Xbox games anymore. Perhaps they'll soon figure out how to go back and forth harmlessly, and then the Xbox will be the best $180 computer you can buy.

    George writes:

    Are you encouraging piracy but putting up those links?
    It is debatable. Hacking the Xbox might make it easy to pirate games by copying the dvd to the hard disk, and maybe then to a network. Msft would presumably say that Xbox hacking tools violate the DMCA. But most of the Xbox hackers just want to be able to run Linux and get the most out of the hardware they bought. No one would complain if you bought a toaster, dissembled the components, and then modified them to do some other task. That is what the Xbox hackers are doing. Msft doesn't like it because it sells the Xbox for a loss on the assumption that it will make the money back in games. It doesn't want you to run Linux because if you find some other use for the Xbox, you might not buy any games. But isn't that Msft's risk? You could also buy an Xbox and discard it, and Msft would lose money on the deal.

    Actually, Msft doesn't even make the money back on the games, and its Xbox division has no hope of making money in the near future. So why does Msft even pursue the market? That is more complicated to understand, and the publicly available info may not tell the whole story. It appears that it is a strategic move for Msft in order slow down Sony and keep it from encroaching on Msft's main markets. So it is difficult to tell whether hacking an Xbox to run Linux is interfering with Msft's goals or not.


    Saturday, Jul 12, 2003
     
    Galileo's Mistake
    John sends this NY Times book review about the trial of Galileo. The book takes the unpopular position of defending the Pope. The reviewer is writing his own book on the Protestant Reformation, and is not persuaded. He says:
    The gripping story of Galileo's trial before the Roman Inquisition is one of the defining narratives of Western civilization. The spectacle of the aging astronomer being forced, under the threat of torture, to recant his belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun has seemed to many to mark the moment when the Age of Faith gave way to the Age of Reason and to embody the Catholic Church's enduring hostility to unfettered inquiry and expression.
    Somebody should write a book rebutting these silly ideas, but Galileo's Mistake is not it.

    Friday, Jul 11, 2003
     
    Nevada judges suspend the constitution
    The Nevada legislature cannot get the 2/3 votes to rais taxes, as its constitution requires, so the Nevada supreme court issued a writ that a simple majority is sufficient! Volokh's blog criticizes it.

    Now some Californians are excited by this, according to this story. California Democrats are similarly desperate to raise taxes, but cannot get the 2/3 majority to do it. Those Nevada judges ought to be impeached or recalled.


    Thursday, Jul 10, 2003
     
    Dave Stafford
    My picture is on Dave Stafford's blog. He just went on a motorcycle trip around the world.

    Monday, Jul 07, 2003
     
    Death of the French language
    John sends this Reuters article about how the French language has dropped to being one of only marginal significance in the world. Even in the EU and UN, where French used to be favored, no one wants to speak French anymore. I think that it is time to quit teaching French in schools. The language is useless.

    Liza, who speaks many languages, writes:

    I agree that French is not the international language anymore. But learning it is not a waste of time. English is 50% derived from Latin/French (probably mainly the Norman French brought in by the conquerors in 1066, which I suspect was about halfway between Latin and modern French). Studying French, like studying Latin, is helpful for understanding the roots of the English language. Also, France produced a very impressive heritage of literature, art, music, math, science, philosophy, fine cuisine, fashion, film, etc., and knowing the language aids in the appreciation of many of those cultural accomplishments.
    Bob writes:
    Those Norman conquerors of 1066 mentioned in your blog may have spoken something like French, but their recent ancestors were vikings.
    John sends this story saying that the French authorities want to use the obscure Quebec word courriel to describe email. I don't think that it will catch on, even in France. The French often prefer English words to these silly artificial words.

    Saturday, Jul 05, 2003
     
    Ann Coulter's new book
    Andy writes:
    According to Amazon's list of bestsellers (updated hourly), Ann Coulter has beaten Hillary Clinton:

    Ann Coulter's book about McCarthyism -- not an easy sell, though it has the patriotic title Treason -- is #3 overall (fiction and non-fiction). Hillary's liberal banter has dropped to #11.

    Amazon.com has 319 online reviews already, mostly positive. Here is the latest negative one:
    Nobody believes Ann Coulter’s extraordinary accusations. Do not blame it on her baby doll looks.

    The Encyclopedia of World History, Sixth Edition (Peter N. Stearns, General Editor): “The charges made by Sen. Joseph McCarthy of large-scale Communist infiltration into the State Department were found to be untrue by a Senate committee. The senator's careless accusations brought great hardship to many people.”

    Professor of History (Rutgers University) David Oshinsky wrote in United State History (Oxford, University Press, 2001): ”McCarthy’s hearings did not uncover any communists. They did, however, ruin numerous careers, undermine government morale, and make America look ridiculous in the eyes of the world… The Senate censured McCarthy for bringing that body “into dishonor and disrepute.”

    U.S. government funded “Radio Liberty” broadcasted (06/19/03): “Atmosphere of McCarthy’s hysteria and anti-Semitism played the major role in the Rosenberg’s conviction.” To whom you will believe? US government and History Professors or the ambition blond.

    Communist infiltration of the State Dept. is an established historical fact, whether McCarthy's fellow senators believed it or not. McCarthy was not censured for his hearing or his allegations; only for failing to cooperate with one of the many investigations of himself.

    If McCarthy undermined the morale of a bunch of commies in the govt, so much the better. Everyone now agrees that Julius Rosenberg was a commie spy, and that he gave the Soviets info related to the Manhattan Project. The only dispute about Rosenberg is that he was executed while other spies betrayed the USA more and were not executed.

    How antisemitism might have played a part, I don't know. It is true that a lot of the commies and fellow travelers in the USA were jewish. But so was Roy Cohn, the top lawyer for McCarthy's committee. I think that most Americans would favor executing any spy who gives atom bomb secrets to a foreign enemy, regardless of religion.

    Meanwhile, here is a more modern effort to undermine govt morale. An MIT group has created a Government Information Awareness (GIA) website to track govt officials, as reported in the Boston Globe.

    John writes that my rebuttal of the Amazon review is lame.

    A much stronger rebuttal can be made. It is hardly relevant that Roy Cohn was "the top lawyer for McCarthy's committee," since McCarthy had nothing to do with the Rosenberg case. Cohn joined McCarthy's staff after the Rosenbergs were convicted. However, Cohn had previously played an essential role in convicting them.

    In fact, the following Jewish individuals were responsible for sending the Rosenbergs to the chair:

  • Irving Saypol, the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY who prosecuted the Rosenbergs (fresh from his successful prosecution of Alger Hiss);
  • Roy Cohn, the assistant U.S. Attorney who second-chaired the trial and played a key behind the scenes role involving allegedly improper ex parte communications with the judge;
  • Irving Kaufman, the judge who presided over the trial, sentenced the Rosenbergs to death and described their crime as "worse than murder";
  • Jerome Frank, the eminent judge of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals who wrote the opinion upholding their conviction and sentence;
  • Felix Frankfurter, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who refused the Rosenbergs' final appeals to stop the execution.
  • With my tax money supporting such commie propaganda, it sounds like the govt is still infiltrated with commies. I thought that Radio Liberty was supposed to be pro-American, and anti-Communist.
     
    Gadget watch
    I just got a Prismiq media player, based on this rave review in PC Magazine. It is one of many new devices on the market that attempt to bridge a home computer network with a home theater (ie, TV and audio equipment).

    I am surprised that the Prismiq got such a rave review. I like the feature set, but I just got a new one and it has a lot of problems. I could only get it to recognize media on 1 of my 2 computers. I could not get the image (JPEG) viewer to work at all. (Strangely, the demo samples do not even include any pictures.) The web interface is horribly slow, and it takes about 10 minutes to download a Yahoo page that usually takes 2 seconds on my computer. I am still working with tech support to try to resolve these problems, so maybe I'll have a better report later.

    Update: I finally got the Prismiq working. Among the problems was that requires internet port 8080. It is hardwired and undocumented. Bad choice. A lot of programs default to that port. Fortunately, most of them document it and let you change the port number. Prismiq does not.

    The product does some things well, but has some rough edges. Eg, user interfaces typically have one button that means Select or Enter, and another that means Cancel or Escape. The Prismiq remote has a "select" and an "enter" button, but no "cancel" button. Its main category buttons are "home movies music photos web chat" while the onscreen descriptions for the same choices are "home video audio images web chat". Not consistent.

     
    Gray Davis recall
    An LA Times poll favors a Gov. Davis recall by 51% to 42%, and increasing. But then they asked again after saying that the recall election would cost $25 million. Support dropped to 39%.

    This sounds like a desperate attempt to favor Davis. Davis's main argument against the recall is the cost of the election. The election won't cost anything if it is scheduled with the primary next spring. And if a special election is scheduled, then it will cost money regardless of who wins.

    But more importantly, the $25M is a drop in the bucket compared to the stakes. I figure that Davis's mismanagement has cost the state about $100B in deficits and energy losses during his 4.5 years in office. That's about $60M for every day he has been in office. At that rate, if Davis is recalled, the recall will pay for itself the very first day.


    Friday, Jul 04, 2003
     
    Google searches
    Try searching Google (and clicking I'm Feeling Lucky) for french military victories or weapons of mass destruction. I guess bloggers like myself are keeping those page rankings high.
     
    Legal codes are in the public domain
    In all the US Supreme Court excitment last week, hardly anyone noticed that it let stand a 5C ruling that legally binding codes are in the public domain. You can find the Veeck vs. SBCCI links here.

    This is great. There are still organizations like the AMA who make a lot of money selling legal codes. You can find the AMA codes here.


    Wednesday, Jul 02, 2003
     
    Life in prison for spitting
    John sends this story about an Oklahoma man who got a life sentence for spitting. Pretty absurd. I assume that some appellate court will reduce it.
     
    Milk and asthma
    There are some common myths that milk is bad for anyone but a baby, and one of the more common ones is that milk is bad for asthma. I think it is only based on the idea that some mucus looks milky.

    John sends this research study that says milk and butter protect kids against asthma.


    Tuesday, Jul 01, 2003
     
    Blaming Bush for Gray Davis
    John sends this LA Times op-ed by Robert Scheer that says:
    The other day a woman asked me to sign a petition calling for the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. Why, I asked. Because he bankrupted the state, she said. When I begged to differ that it was the Bush administration and its buddies at companies like Enron that had put the state into an economic tailspin ...
    John wants my answer, but the article doesn't even make much sense. The California economic and energy crisis started in 2000, before GW Bush even took office. Then I read on, and learned that Scheer is referring to the first Bush administration! Actions by G Bush in 1992 supposed helped Enron and eventually wrecked California in 2000.

    I would like to blame Enron, and send all the Enron executives to jail for fraud, but it is really a stretch to think that they hurt California's economy. The point of the California energy deregulation was to bring efficiencies by allowing traders to buy energy where it is cheap, and to sell it where it is needed most. So Scheer complains that Enron bought electricity in one state and sold it in another, and complains that the feds let Enron do it.

    There is nothing wrong with reselling energy where demand is greater, and no such reselling contributed to California's problems. Enron's trading was just what California wanted it to do.

    California's energy deregulation plan was only a partial deregulation and re-regulation, giving the energy companies a strange and unworkable set of rules to operate under. By the year 2000, it was clear to everyone that the rules were not working, and they should have been repealed or fixed. Many proposals were made. If Gray Davis had followed any of them, we would have been better off. Instead he followed his own controversial plan that consisted of blaming the feds for not rescuing California, and barring long-term energy contracts in the hopes that prices will come down. Then, when energy prices reached an artificial peak, he forced the energy companies to sign long-term contracts that he negotiated. In the process he locked in those high prices and we Californians will have to pay it for years.

    Scheer complains:

    FERC at the same time said California must honor $12 billion in long-term contracts written under duress with the same companies that were gaming the market.
    The term "gaming the market" is a euphemism for following the energy trading rules that California defined. Most of those contracts are with energy producers who built new capacity in order to meet California demand. They are not with Enron. If we are going to have an energy market at all, then we have to pay the producers who are meeting demand. Isn't the whole idea of deregulation to create incentives to companies to build power plants? If they build the plants and sign contracts, what would be the basis for reneging? And who is going to build more power plants, now that everyone sees that the state does not want to honor its contracts?
     
    Bloggers have libel protection
    John sends this Wired story about a 9C federal ruling that bloggers can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish. Good.
     
    Reason for vaccinating newborns
    The USA vaccinates all newborn babies for HBV, a venereal disease. This policy puzzles many parents, and several different explanations are given. The NY Times quotes a vaccine policy expert with this explanation:
    Hepatitis B is the one vaccine now given to American infants solely because the health care system is so poorly equipped to handle teenagers, Mr. Salmon of Johns Hopkins said.

    The infection, which leads to cirrhosis and liver cancer in adults, is transmitted from mother to child at birth, or later by sex or intravenous drug use. Children can transmit it by biting, but that is very rare.

    If all expectant mothers could be screened, Mr. Salmon said, there would be no need to give children the shot, which is the first given at birth.

    "But we don't do a good job of screening, so the rationale is to vaccinate everyone at birth," Mr. Salmon said. "It's a tough situation. We're asking a vaccine to make up the deficiencies in the health care system."

    Daniel A. Salmon was a coauthor of some papers like this one, attacking personal exemptions to childhood vaccine mandates.

    Monday, Jun 30, 2003
     
    Defending filesharing
    Glad to see the EFF is defending filesharing. They are right that copyright law is broken, and the P2P services have done a wonderful thing for music. I am getting tired of music label propaganda that treats people like criminals just because they want to use computer technology to enjoy music.

    Sunday, Jun 29, 2003
     
    Microsoft Palladium
    The NY Times has a story about Msft Palladium, with various ominous threats from critics about how evil it was. It gets compared to the Intel serial number debacle, but the Intel serial number was part of a poorly thought out scheme that would not have worked. Palladium has the potential to secure certain types of operations that no other technology can do. Steve Jobs of Apple seems to think that Palladium will not work.
    He's wrong. It will work, and I'd like to buy one as soon as it is available.

    Saturday, Jun 28, 2003
     
    Forced Vaccination
    A Colorado newborn baby was forcibly given the HBV vaccine because the mother had a false positive test. Here is the story.
     
    Virgin Mary in window
    See the Virgin Mary in this hospital window.

    Friday, Jun 27, 2003
     
    Our left-wing Supreme Court
    Who says we have a conservative US supreme court? The recent decisions on family medical leave, sodomy, affirmative action, and death penalty cases are home runs for the progressives. These are all activist, left-wing opinions. I don't think that there are any comparable right-wing opinions that are so clearly driven by ideology, so contrary to precedent, and such deliberate attempts to set public policy.

    George writes:

    These decisions are not extreme. Polls show that most people are against sodomy laws.
    I agree with Clarence Thomas's dissent that the Texas sodomy was silly and ought to be repealed. But we've had laws against sodomy for 100s of years, and as recently as 1960 all 50 states had laws against sodomy. Most states have since repealed. This is a political matter, for elected politicians.

    As Scalia points out, the same ones who overruled precedent and found a constitutional right for anal sex are the same ones who upheld Roe v. Wade, even though it might have been wrongly decided, because:

    " Where, in the performance of its judicial duties, the Court decides a case in such a way as to resolve the sort of intensely divisive controversy reflected in Roe[,] ... its decision has a dimension that the resolution of the normal case does not carry... . [T]o overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason ... would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question." 505 U. S., at 866-867.
    Then the Court has subverted its own legitimacy.

    Wednesday, Jun 25, 2003
     
    H-1B Jobs
    The InstaPundit writes about outsourcing to India and elsewhere, and he seems sympathetic to libertarian views about jobs. But then he gets sucked in by pro-immigration myths from readers.

    One reader says that that a "large laser printer company" found it impossible to hire engineers in the USA, so it outsourced to India. I don't know where it looked, but here in Silicon Valley there are thousands of engineers available with just about any qualifications you could want. You just have to pay the going rate, and the printer company didn't want to pay it.

    Another reader says that he had an H-1B visa and his "job could not be filled by a US Citizen". There are about 463k H-1B workers in the USA, and I'd be surprised if more than 100 of them could not be filled by US citizens. The H-1Bs are hired for lower pay, and lower job mobility. That reader was not really a temporary worker at all, and just used the program to get a green card. Most of the H-1B workers do not have any special skills at all.

    Here is a good source on H-1B visas and US jobs.

     
    Affirmative Action
    The muddled and incoherent Supreme Court decisions on U. Michigan racist admissions policies are a disgrace. What does this mean?
    It has been 25 years since Justice Powell first approved the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity in the context of public higher education. .... We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
    Apparently O'Connor thinks that the US Constitution of 140 years ago created a 50-year second Reconstruction that is temporarily in operation today.

    If I had to choose between the two U. Michigan admissions programs, I would have allowed the undergraduate program as that was more honest. It gave points to preferred minorities. The law school won with a disguised quota system that was justified with terms like "critical mass". If it really needed critical mass of, say, 20 black students, then it would need 20 blacks, 20 mexicans, 20 indians, 20 Puerto Ricans, 20 mohammedans, etc. But that's not the way it works at all. Each preferred ethnic group has a quota that is related to its concentration in the total applicant pool.

     
    Bad work by Ted Olson
    Andy sends this list of cases that had Ted Olson on the wrong side.
    1. Eldred v. Ashcroft (copyright case, Olson sided with Disney's interests)

    2. Owasso Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Falvo (FERPA case -- undermined good position of Dept of Ed., and had misleading cite to undisclosed documents)

    3. Nevada Dept of Human Resourses v. Hibbs (Family Leave case -- dreadful feminist language in Olson's brief).

    4. United States v. Sell (wanted federal power to drug peaceful prisoners pretrial)

    5. Lawrence v. Texas (failed to file a brief in this important sodomy case, leaving conservative Justices out on a limb)

    6. Favish v. Office of Independ. Counsel (opposes FOIA request for Vincent Foster photos)

    7. Stogner v. California (Olson even obtained leave for his attorney to orally argue for power to eliminate statute of limitations after the fact).

    8. NOW v. Scheidler (Olson sought application of RICO laws against abortion protesters)

    9. Nuremberg Files case (Olson opposed Supreme Court cert sought by pro-lifers)


    Monday, Jun 23, 2003
     
    Library free speech
    The US Supreme Court ruled that federal support for libraries can be contingent on installing filtering software. Only Souter and Ginsburg agreed with the ACLU and lower court that it was unconstitutional for libraries to install filtering software. That latter position was really wacky considering that it is hard to use the internet without some sort of filtering. For example, firewalls, spam blockers, and pop-up blockers are all filters. A big complaint about some commercial filtering programs was that the filtering methods are usually not documented, but there are open-source alternatives like SquidGuard that are free and fully configurable. Also, the filters don't really restrict any adults because the library can turn off the filtering on request.

    Bob doesn't believe that the lower court found that voluntary filtering on the part of the public library was unconstitional. But not only did they say that, but Souter and Ginsburg agreed:

    I would hold in accordance with conventional strict scrutiny that a library's practice of blocking would violate an adult patron's First and Fourteenth Amendment right to be free of Internet censorship
    The third dissenter, Stevens, refuses to go that far:
    I agree with the plurality that it is neither inappropriate nor unconstitutional for a local library to experiment with filtering software as a means of curtailing children's access to Internet Web sites displaying sexually explicit images. I also agree with the plurality that the 7% of public libraries that decided to use such software on all of their Internet terminals in 2000 did not act unlawfully.
     
    Avatar sex discrimination
    Some economists look at virtual reality avatars for data, and one found that female avatars trade for 10% less than male avatars. Puzzling, since the avatars have the same capabilities.

    Sunday, Jun 22, 2003
     
    3 years for bogus student votes
    A U. Calif. student cast some phony votes for a fictitious candidate to exercise a loophole in the online election, and now he faces 3 years in prison. Seems excessive to me. What's the crime?

    The student apparently tried to get anonymous legal advice by posting a confession here.

    Update: The UC Riverside paper identified the student as 21-year-old Shawn Nematbakhsh. (Annoying free reg. reqd.) It says the university lost $2,400 because it had to repeat the election. I am not sure why he should be responsible for the $2,400. The election was no good whether he cast votes for a comic book character or not. It had a server that would easily let anyone vote as many times as he wanted.

     
    Gov. Gray Davis
    Andy writes:
    Gray Davis' meteoric crash is remarkable. Not too long ago he was considered perhaps the most powerful and invincible politician in the country. He was by far the most prodigious gubernatorial fundraiser. Economic problems have hurt him, but many politicians have survived that without being recalled. I can only infer that his humiliation by his own church has a played a key role discrediting him.

    From Novak column yesterday:

    Prominent California Democrats are pressing to get Gov. Gray Davis to resign rather than face a recall that may replace him with a Republican governor in a special October election.

    Oakland Mayor (and former California governor) Jerry Brown, in Washington this past week, speculated that Davis could instantly destroy the recall movement by resigning. That would elevate Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to the governorship. Sen. Barbara Boxer has sketched the same scenario in private conversations with fellow Democrats.

    These Democrats express skepticism that Gray would voluntarily surrender the prize that he sought his entire political life. Nevertheless, he could derail the recall at any time prior to the actual balloting by just quitting.

    Yes, Davis could resign at any time, and leave the Democratic Party in control of the governorship, but I doubt that will happen. When Calif. Chief Justice Rose Bird faces a movement that would surely oust her from office, she chose not to resign and two of her colleagues ended up being ousted on her coattails.

    I cannot think of any politician who has created greater economic problems for himself than Gray Davis.

    Even Davis supporters don't have much positive to say about him The Si Valley paper has steadily supported Davis, but its chief editorial writer only has this lame defense. He complains about the ads from the campaign to recall Davis, but concedes that Davis lied about the budget before the last election, and ruined our electric utilities.

    He says the ads are inconsistent because they complain about spending increases as well as complain about inappropriate cuts and failures to render needed services. There is no inconsistency -- Davis is spending the money on the wrong stuff.

    He also says this is misleading: ``That's why more and more Democrats and Green Party leaders are saying enough is enough.'' I didn't hear that ad, so it could be misleading because Republicans are leading the recall effort. But there is no doubt that Davis is widely hated among Democrats and Greens, and many of them will vote to recall him. Current polls say 33% of Democrats favor recalling Davis.

     
    Adobe PDF
    I didn't know that Acrobat was Adobe's biggest moneymaker. I thought that PhotoShop and some of its other products would have been bigger.

    Acrobat is an annoying program. PDF files are great if you want a document to print out correctly. As long as you avoid using extra fonts, that works. But Acrobat doesn't work with MSIE very well. Acrobat version 5 is a lot better than version 4, and version 4 was a lot better than version 3, but still I often have to download a PDF file to disk, and then load it from disk.


    Thursday, Jun 19, 2003
     
    Gray Davis recall
    The San Jose paper has a history of the California recall, but it curiously fails to mention the most famous recall of them all -- the 1986 recall of Chief Justice Rose Bird of the California Supreme Court.

    Meanwhile, bloggers and other web sites are credited with putting life into the Gov. Gray Davis recall. See this LA Times story. Davis is likely to be ousted, at this point.

    The San Jose Mercury News reporter responds:

    Roger,
    Thanks for your message. In fact, Rose Bird was not recalled. It's a popular misconception. She did face recall attempts, which were unsuccessful. Her defeat in 1986 along with two other judges came during a periodic re-election that Supreme Court justices have to face. It's a yes or no retention vote, but not a recall, which is initiated by petition. I hope that explains it.

    Sincerely,
    Jim Puzzanghera
    Washington Bureau Chief
    San Jose Mercury News

    Slate describes Davis and his current dilemma well:
    Gray Davis has made a career out of being the incarnation of None of the Above, a ballot option made flesh. He's not popular, he's not inspiring, he's not likable, but he's also not the other candidate. Davis doesn't have supporters, really. Rather, he receives support from those who don't like his opponents. Which is what makes the attempt by California Republicans to petition for his recall so fascinating and so dangerous for the California governor: What happens when the None of the Above candidate actually squares off against None of the Above?

    Wednesday, Jun 18, 2003
     
    Is Vaccine Dissent Dangerous?
    My article just appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (formerly, Medical Sentinel). My article is not online yet, but an expanded version is here.

    Update: The article is now online in this issue.

     
    O'Reilly
    Fox's Bill O'Reilly is on the warpath against the internet. First he attacks blogs because they repeated a story from the SF Calif. newspaper. Then he sides with Orrin Hatch in favoring computer sabotage against suspected copyright infringers.

    An excerpt from Hatch's comments are here, and Hatch backpedals here.

    This blog suggests that Hatch is a software pirate himself.

    Update: Wired confirms that Hatch is a software pirate. His web site uses unlicensed software.


    Tuesday, Jun 17, 2003
     
    New bogus gun study in medical journal
    John sends this Eugene Volokh article in NRO which criticizes a gun study in this issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

    The study purports to show that those who are in danger of dying in a gun homicide are more likely to have a gun at home. From this it concludes:

    In summary, on the basis of national samples drawn in the early 1990s, adults who have a gun or guns in their home appear at risk to be shot fatally (gun homicide) or to take their own life with a firearm. Physicians should continue to discuss these implications with patients who own guns or have guns at home and to consider how patients might make their environment safer.
    Just what are those physicians going to say?
    Do you have a gun in your home? ... Why? ... Because you live next door to drug dealers? ... You've got to get rid of the gun. Some drug dealer or crazed junkie could shoot and kill you, and medical studies show that you are safer if you are defenseless.
    This makes no sense to me. Physicians should stick to practicing medicine.

    On his blog, Volokh also points to evidence that most homicide victims are criminals, that criminals are more likely to have guns, and that the study failed to control for criminal records. (It was a case-control study that controlled for age and sex and other factors.)

    In other gun news, many Minnesota stores are now letting customer carry guns on the premises, in accordance with new concealed carry laws. A policeman is in hot water for shooting a pit bull dog that was attacking him in his own yard. I think that it should be permissible to shoot any unconfined and unleashed pit bull, whether it is attacking anyone or not.


    Monday, Jun 16, 2003
     
    Demographic changes
    Andy writes:
    What's the biggest demographic change of the last decade? More moms staying at home to raise kids. That probably means more homeschooling also, though that statistic is hard to nail down.
     
    European Fairness Doctrine
    Europe is considering a law that would require bloggers to offer links to replies from those who are criticized. Hmmm, I'll give it a try. Send me your side of the story.
     
    Greedy lawyer shakedown
    Alex tells a story about Anne getting falsely sued, and then the lawyer wanting money to correct his own mistake. I'd file a complaint with the California Bar Assn, if I had any confidence in them.
     
    Environmentalism and prosperity
    Jared Diamond has a new LA Times column on the correlation between countries with political problems and countries with environmental problems. Diamond is famous for the critically acclaimed 1998 book Gun, Germs, and Steel.

    Diamond sounds plausible until he jumps from correlation to cause and effect. He conclude that the environmental problems cause the political problems, and that the USA should go around the world cleaning up environmental problems in order to head off political problems.

    I think that it is more likely to be the other way around. Countries that preserve the environment are countries that have well-functioning economic incentives to do so. And that usually requires a decent political system. Once a countries gets a commie govt or a corrupt dictator, the environmental incentives are not there, and then they get ecological problems.

    Diamond's book is filled with fascinating stories, but it also has illogical cause-and-effect analyses whenever he tries to draw any conclusions.

    There are geneticists who think that genes explain everything, education profs who think education explains everything, nutritionists who think that nutrition explains everything, economists who think that money explains everything, etc. Diamond is a professor of geography and environmental health sciences at UCLA, and he thinks that geography explains everything in the last 13k years of human history. It is entertaining to see how far he can push his theories, but none of them are really very convincing.

     
    Court cannot drug defendant
    The US Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that prosecutors cannot drug St. Louis dentist C.T. Sell. He has been in prison about 5 years awaiting trial for some Medicare overbilling, even tho the maximum sentence would have been 3 years, because the feds say he is not competent to stand trial. There is more info here.

    Update: Good coverage in the NY Times and St. Louis paper. The latter quotes Andy:

    One such group is the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons. Andy Schlafly, general counsel for the association, said from his office in New Jersey that federal prosecutors had used the threat of forced medication as a tool to get defendants to comply and plead guilty to crimes.

    In Sell's case, the government offered to drop nearly 60 counts of Medicaid and mail fraud and money laundering against him in exchange for a guilty plea of two counts. Not long after Sell refused, the government began trying to medicate Sell.

    "The defendants are all terrified of being drugged," Schlafly said. "That was a huge piece of leverage that the federal prosecutors had over prisoners and the Supreme Court has called a halt to that."

    Liza writes:
    The Sell decision seemed like a reasonable outcome based on a confused record. There was a lot of conflicting information on whether Sell is dangerous and whether he is psychotic. And it was odd that the charge that he attempted murder or conspired to murder (I forget exactly what it was) wasn't technically before the court for the drugging issue. I don't know why it happened that way.
     
    Nursing shortage
    The so-called nursing shortage has gotten a lot of press, as if it is some sort of national crisis. I don't believe it.

    We actually have plenty of nurses, but many of them are dissatisfied and are leaving the profession. A nursing organization has some data, saying:

    The study indicates that 1 out of every 3 hospital nurses under the age of 30 are planning to leave their current job in the next year. ... currently 1 out of every 5 nurses currently working is considering leaving the patient care field for reasons other than retirement within the next five years.
    So why are the nurses unhappy? I don't know, but complaints include low pay, mandatory overtime, overwork, inadequate patient care, little whistle-blower protection, etc.

    I don't see how there could be a nursing shortage. Anyone can goto school and become a nurse. If some hospitals have unfilled nursing positions at the same time that nurses are leaving the profession, then those hospitals are just not offering sufficiently attractive pay and working conditions. I suspect that it is a simple matter of cost-conscious HMOs driving out all the good nurses, and replacing them with lower-skilled alternatives.

    This essay suggests that the nursing shortage was fabricated to justify importing a lot of H-1B nurses. If there were really a nursing shortage, then we'd see sharp increases in nursing wages. But we don't. Registered nurses average about $45k/year, according to this survey.


    Saturday, Jun 14, 2003
     
    J Lo
    Ben Affleck says this about Jennifer Lopez:
    There aren't many virgins in their thirties and Jen's about as close as you're likely to find, certainly in Hollywood.
    Hmmm. She's been married and divorced twice. And Affleck says that there have been a couple of other lovers as well.
     
    Microsoft
    Microsoft says that it is dropped its Apple Macintosh browser, because it cannot compete with Apple. C-Net reports:
    Microsoft Product Manager Jessica Sommer ... said that, with the emergence of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple's browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.
    Msft used to argue that its control over the DOS/Windows OS did not give it any monopoly power over application software because the API was made available to everyone. I guess no one believes that argument anyway, after it was shown that Msft had secret undocumented calls for its own products.

    Meanwhile, Msft's takeover of the browser market is nearly complete:

    Overall, Internet Explorer has more than 95 percent of the browser market, according to market researcher WebSideStory, followed by Netscape with somewhere above 3 percent, and all others hovering below 1 percent.
    Even AOL, which owns Netscape and had a rock-solid antitrust case against Msft, has settled with Msft and agreed to use Msft IE, not Netscape, for all its customers.

    Friday, Jun 13, 2003
     
    Ashcroft's job
    US AG Ashcoft refused to use govt money to pay for a party for US DoJ employees, and a NY Times editorial says:
    The decision is wrong, and it calls into question whether John Ashcroft understands his duties as head of the Justice Department.
    It also suggests that the cancellation might have been illegal, and maybe there was a cover-up as well.

    Ashcroft's job includes making decisions about spending DoJ money. I think the NY Times does not understand his job. I guess the NY Times figures that Ashcroft should not be discriminating against an organization that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. What would it say about a DoJ-funded party for the Boy Scouts?


    Wednesday, Jun 11, 2003
     
    Microsoft hassles ex-employees
    John sends this story about how Microsoft uses non-compete agreements and laws to interfere with ex-employees doing startup companies. I am glad I live in California, where such contracts are not enforceable.
     
    Rovoke prize for Stalin's apologist?
    A Pulitzer Prize committee is considering revoking its 1932 prize to the NY Times for reporting on Stalin. Apparently the NY Times reporter was a commie who covered up Stalin's crimes.

    Stalin's crimes have been known since the 1940s. Is the Pulitzer committee just now finding out? My guess is that now that the USSR has been gone for over 10 years, the American Left no longer needs to defend it.

    Update: This UPI article says that the Ukraine famine was reported in 1933, but the reporter was denounced by Soviet propagandists and murdered.


    Monday, Jun 09, 2003
     
    Advice of Counsel
    I just read a company's annual report that said:
    the receipt of a notice alleging [patent] infringement may require in some situations that a costly opinion of counsel be obtained to prevent an allegation of intentional infringement.
    It goes on the explain that a finding of willful infringement could mean paying treble damages. The company also reported assets of $433 million.

    It is true that a company can usually avoid triple damages by an appropriate patent counsel opinion, but I am surprised to see such an official document phrase it in this way. I write those opinions for a few thousand dollars apiece, depending on the complexity. The expense is peanuts for a company of this size. The exception is that a crooked opinion costs extra. I don't do crooked opinions, but those who risk their reputations on wrong opinions want extra money. Enron paid as much as $1 million for lawyer opinions that certain tax strategies were legal.

     
    Liars in the news
    A lot of liars are in the news. It seems clear that Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and Sammy Sosa are lying. G.W. Bush and Colin Powell were probably also lying about the WMDs, but I am willing to give them a little more time to prove their case.

    Sunday, Jun 08, 2003
     
    ADA Lawsuits
    John sends this story about how disability lawyers abuse the system, and extort thousands of dollars from innocent businesses.

    Oppositional Defiant Disorder

    If you live near San Diego and have a bratty child, then you can sign up for this UCSD study and put the kid on mind-altering drugs.

    Saturday, Jun 07, 2003
     
    Quantum Crypto
    The UK Register says:
    Much of the interest in quantum cryptography stems from the fact that it is fundamentally secure. This contrasts with today's code-based systems which rely on the assumed difficulty of certain mathematical operations. Ultimately, quantum cryptography seeks to deliver a method of communication whose secrecy does not depend upon any assumptions.
    These quantum crypto people are charlatans. There is no such thing as a method of communication whose secrecy does not depend upon any assumptions. Quantum crypto depends on some subtle properties of quantum mechanics that have never been directly tested, as well as an assortment of more mundane assumptions. I wouldn't trust it for anything.
     
    Annex Canada?
    John sends this story about how a couple of Canadian provinces might become US states. It wouldn't surprise me.

    Friday, Jun 06, 2003
     
    Louisiana purchase
    John responds to Andy:
    If Martha had only told the truth about her stock sale when she was asked about it, the incident would have blown over quickly without any criminal investigation. At most, she would have had to pay back the $45,000 profit she made on the sale, with no harm to her billion-dollar business.

    Instead of telling the truth, she concocted a cock-and-bull story and made a failed effort to hoodwink federal investigators. She and her broker conspired after the fact to tell authorities that they had a pre-arranged agreement to sell the ImClone stock, which of course was totally untrue. Then she made a series of false statements to the public in an effort to bolster the falling price of her own company's stock.

    What Martha Stewart did from January to June, 2002, is remarkably similar to what Bill Clinton did from January to August, 1998: She lied; she got others to lie; she doctored evidence to conceal the truth; and when given further opportunities to fess up and correct the record, she kept repeating her false and unbelievable story.

    Andy complains that one of the criminal counts against Martha is for publicly proclaiming her innocence. Do you also think it was unfair to blame Clinton for proclaiming his innocence to the grand jury on August 17, 1998? OTC, that false statement was a new lie that compounded all his previous lies.

    Likewise with Martha: when she told her own investors that she had done nothing wrong, that she was cooperating with federal authorities, that she had sold the ImClone stock based on a prearrangement with her broker and without benefit of any nonpublic information, those statements were new lies that were made with corrupt motive of hoodwinking investors into buying or holding stock in her own company.

    This pattern of conduct should be no surprise from someone who was a big supporter of the Clintons and helped Hillary get elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000. And I would add the anecdotal evidence that just about everyone who has ever dealt with Martha Stewart on either a business or personal level reports that she is the most horrible, unpleasant, vulgar, obnoxious person they have ever met in their entire life. What is surprising is the level of sympathy shown to Martha Stewart here. I frankly don't get it.

    Turning to the Louisiana Purchase, whose 200th anniversary we have just observed, Andy has now ratcheted up the issue to a new level. Not only does he think Jefferson exceeded his presidential power in making the deal (which I concede, but that was cured by Congress's subsequent ratification); not only does he think Congress itself lacked the power to make the deal (which I previously rebutted); now he says the purchase was unwise in any event, and should not have been done even if we solved the constitutional problem.

    Yes, eventually the Louisiana territory would have broken away from France. Maybe one day they would have asked to join the U.S., as Texas did. It would present a situation analogous to Puerto Rico, if it ever asked for statehood (it hasn't yet). The Louisiana territory would have civilized itself first, without dividing the U.S. in the process.
    Louisiana would never have civilized itself! Has Mexico civilized itself? Civilizing the West required the protection of the U.S. government and the U.S. Army.
    Such scenario is far more preferable than what Jefferson did, which was to foist the divisive issue of governing new land on us at great expense.
    If the point was avoid the fight over slavery in the territory, which led up to the Civil War, your own example of Texas proves that would not have happened. Indeed, what you propose would probably have made the situation worse.
    If John still adheres to Jefferson's view that the president can buy foreign land, then how does he reconcile that with his opposition to immigration? Whatta think -- would it be constitutional for Bush to buy a chunk of Mexico?
    I would support the U.S. buying Baja California, which is as thinly populated today as the territory we acquired from Mexico in 1848. We should have demanded Baja in exchange for bailing out Mexico's financial crisis in 1994-95. Baja has the potential to be as great a real estate opportunity for the next 100 years as Florida was for the past 100 years.
    I still don't see how there could be any constitutional objection to the Louisiana Purchase. And I don't understand Andy's objection either.

    John continues to respond to Andy:

    John's piling on Martha illustrates how little he cares about growing federal power. Federal prosecutors love to lock up people for insider trading. Defendants can get 3 years in jail without even profiting from it. I'm baffled by Roger and John's views that little or no punishment was initially sought here.
    Feds can only prosecute when they have evidence. While Martha's good friend Sam Waksal is definitely going to jail for insider trading. See evidence here and here.

    Martha herself has not been criminally charged with insider trading because there is no evidence she was tipped by Waksal. Martha apparently sold her stock simply based on the *fact* that the Waksals were selling, without knowing *why* they were selling.

    John wrote, "What Martha Stewart did from January to June, 2002, is remarkably similar to what Bill Clinton did from January to August, 1998 ... Andy complains that one of the criminal counts against Martha is for publicly proclaiming her innocence. Do you also think it was unfair to blame Clinton for proclaiming his innocence to the grand jury on August 17, 1998?"

    Grand jury testimony is under oath. Taking an oath can and should make a difference. I'm astounded that John supports the federal criminalization of declaring one's innocence. Clinton was never prosecuted, nor should he have been, for declaring his innocence in his famous White House statement to the public. Yet Martha Stewart is.

    Surely you don't think that everyone is free to lie when not under oath? That no one can ever be held accountable for unsworn statements? Clinton was never prosecuted for anything he did or said, whether he was under oath or not. But his "famous White House statement to the public" (Jan. 26, 1998) was undoubtedly a key factor in his impeachment. Many people thought that categorical denial was worse than his cagey equivocations under oath.

    Taking an oath is one, but certainly not the only basis for liability for making false statements. As CEO of a publicly held company, Martha was legally obligated to speak truthfully to her own shareholders, whether she was under oath or not.

    Likewise, when the government questioned her about her ImClone stock sale, Martha had the right to remain silent. Instead she chose to give a false account of events, in an effort to mislead federal officials.

    Also, in contrast to Clinton's subordinates, Martha has no power over the Merrill Lynch stockbroker who collaborates her claim of a sell agreement.
    You could say that Vernon Jordan was not Clinton's subordinate, so Clinton had no power over him. But Jordan had his own reasons and motives for conspiring with Clinton to obstruct justice in the Lewinsky matter. Likewise with Martha's stockbroker.
    The Martha Stewart defense is historic in another respect. She is using the internet to fight in the court of public opinion.
    The web site is pathetic. Martha makes no effort to respond to the specific charges against her, or to defend her indefensible conduct. The parallels between Martha Stewart and Bill Clinton are extremely strong. Just as many liberals defended Clinton to the bitter end because "it's all about sex," so now many libertarians defend Martha in order to vindicate their belief that insider trading should be perfectly legal.

    Again, Martha didn't just say "I've done nothing wrong" and leave it at that. She lied about key details and disseminated a bogus story to mislead the government and her own investors. That is why she is going to jail.

    John wrote, "Turning to the Louisiana Purchase, whose 200th anniversary we have just observed, Andy has now ratcheted up the issue to a new level. Not only does he think Jefferson exceeded his presidential power in making the deal (which I concede, but that was cured by Congress's subsequent ratification)" What makes you think Congress ratified it? As I said, I think only the Senate approved it. Surely the House had to raise and appropriate the $15 million. John continued, " ...now he says the purchase was unwise in any event, and should not have been done even if we solved the constitutional problem." Right. Jefferson overpaid for land that would have come for free to us later.
    Overpaid? Most people thought it was the biggest bargain in history, or at least since we bought Manhattan for $22.
    Jefferson also created a hugely and unnecessarily divisive problem. John added, "Louisiana would never have civilized itself! Has Mexico civilized itself? Civilizing the West required the protection of the U.S. government and the U.S. Army." John really does love that federal power. Can't even obtain civilization without it! Texas, of course, proves John wrong. John added, "If the point was avoid the fight over slavery in the territory, which led up to the Civil War, your own example of Texas proves that would not have happened. Indeed, what you propose would probably have made the situation worse." Explanation, please? Texas civilized itself and was annexed without cost or Civil War.
    Are you trying to make the argument that the U.S. could have acquired the Louisiana territory the same way we acquired Texas, and that would have somehow avoided the "unnecessarily divisive problem" of slavery? That's ridiculous for two reasons: (1) Slavery expanded in the independent Republic of Texas just as it did in the southern Louisiana territory, pursuant to the Missouri Compromise; after entering the Union Texas contributed to the Civil War by joining the Confederacy. (2) The U.S. ended up paying for Texas anyway; the $15 million we paid Mexico at the end of the war was in large part to settle claims over Texas.
    John concludes, "I would support the U.S. buying Baja California" to facilitate building of new resorts. I wouldn't. The federal government should not be spending our money on purchasing foreign land for new resorts. I thought you believed in free enterprise?
    I thought you believed in the Rule of Law? Acquisition by the U.S. is a necessary precondition for free enterprise to flourish in Baja California. Of course I am not suggesting the U.S. government build and operate resorts, only that the territory be part of the United States and subject to our laws.
    John refers to when Clinton said: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." The statement was true. People observed at the time that it was a carefully worded denial, and Clinton was only denying having sexual intercourse with Lewinsky, and the denial was accurate.

    Colin Powell says: "It's the media that invents words such as bogus."

    Andy responds:

    John wrote, "Feds can only prosecute when they have evidence."

    Prosecutors falsely convict individuals constantly. Christianity is based on the false conviction of someone.

    John wrote, "Surely you don't think that everyone is free to lie when not under oath? That no one can ever be held accountable for unsworn statements?"

    John's second rhetorical question is a non sequitur. Accountability exists in many forms without federal prosecution. Instead of asking questions, perhaps John will state his position on whether it should be a federal crime to lie while NOT under oath.

    John wrote, "Clinton was never prosecuted for anything he did or said, whether he was under oath or not."

    Clinton WAS impeached and subsequently tried for lying under oath.

    John wrote, "The web site is pathetic. Martha makes no effort to respond to the specific charges against her, or to defend her indefensible conduct."

    John's comments are not substantive. The website demonstrates, for starters, that Martha's alleged lies were statements irrelevant to the main investigation of her, and were prepared by her attorney. The charges amount to little more than prosecuting someone for maintaining their innocence.

    John wrote, "She lied about key details and disseminated a bogus story to mislead the government and her own investors. That is why she is going to jail."

    Looks like John has already convicted Martha, without hearing a word of testimony.

    John wrote, "Surely the House had to raise and appropriate the $15 million."

    Only after Jefferson declared it a done deal.

    Right. Jefferson overpaid for land that would have come for free to us later.

    John replied, "Overpaid? Most people thought it was the biggest bargain in history, or at least since we bought Manhattan for $22."

    "Most people"? Citation, please -- and why you feel that what most people thought is relevant.

    John offers nothing to dispute the fact that Texas civilized itself without help from the federal government, and then joined the US without causing a Civil War. The $15M that Polk paid to Mexico was mostly for California (where gold had been discovered worth $55M annually by 1951) and parts of 6 other western states.

    John wrote, "Acquisition by the U.S. is a necessary precondition for free enterprise to flourish in Baja, California."

    Such a purchase would be an expense of taxpayer dollars for the benefit of those seeking to develop Baja. I oppose it.

    Roger wrote, "Yes, Bush has said that he likes Scalia and Thomas. ..."

    Bush said far more than that. He campaigned by declaring them to be model judges, and that he supports strict construction of the Constitution. This was a campaign promise, and Bush should be held to it. He violates that promise when he files briefs with the Supreme Court that contradict strict construction and disagree with Scalia and Thomas.

    Denying that the La Purchase was legal and a good deal just seems wacky. Everyone I've ever heard thought it was a good deal. The burden is on Andy to show otherwise, and his reasons don't make any sense to me.

    Scalia and Thomas are the only justices on the US SC that have any respect as having a coherent judicial philosophy. They are respected from both the Left and the Right. To say that Scalia and Thomas are the best on the SC is just belaboring the obvious. That's all Bush said. He did not promise that every DoJ brief would be worded in such a way that Scalia and Thomas would endorse it 100%.


    Thursday, Jun 05, 2003
     
    Flying toaster
    John writes:
    Did you know the guy who invented the screen saver was such a Lefty?
    He has started a trendy left-wing web site called MoveOn.org. I wouldn't say he invented the screen saver. Maybe he was the first one to make significant money from the idea. He made a bunch of money on it, mainly with a screen saver that showed a flying toaster. That image was stolen from a Jefferson Airplane album cover.
     
    FBI Lab
    Andy sends this Wash Post story on how FBI misconduct may have sent innocent people to jail. Including possibly an federal judge.
     
    What is an immigrant?
    John writes:
    Here's a good test of your definition of immigrant. Although these aliens have lived illegally in L.A. for "years," they think of a Mexican village as "home" and plan to return there someday.
    He also sends these articles:
  • Overseas tech jobs proliferate/More Silicon Valley companies find cheaper labor in other countries
  • Techies see jobs go overseas/Opposition to offshore outsourcing beginning to grow
  • (VDARE) Joe Guzzardi on NY Times immigration bias

    I said that an immigrant is someone who was an alien, and who came to the USA intending to stay. I argued that it does not depend on legality, allegiance, or politics. John responds:

    I believe that dictionaries back me up. Perhaps it would have been more precise to say an immigrant is someone who was an alien, and who came to the USA intending to stay. The point is that it does not depend on legality, allegiance, or politics. A good test of Roger's proposed definition of "immigrant" is yesterday's report of the Inspector General of the Justice Department concerning the alleged mistreatment of the "detainees" after 9/11. This report was front-page, top of the news throughout the liberal media for the last 24 hours.

    Every news article about this report called the detainees "immigrants" - all of them. After paraphrasing the report about the 762 so-called "immigrants" - using the word many times (and no other word) - the news media then went on to quote people described as "advocates for immigrants" and people who support the "immigrants' rights."

    A search of the actual 239-page report, however, reveals that the word "immigrant" does not appear even once! (although "nonimmigrant" is used several times).

    Does Roger think these alien detainees intended to stay here - ALL of them?

    I could not determine how many, if any, of the detainees had green cards or other evidence of intent to stay. The vast majority entered the U.S. on tourist, business, education, or employment visas. Such visas constitute a formal, public declaration that they do *not* intend to stay! Many overstayed their visas (perhaps they changed their mind after they got here?) and many entered illegally in the first place.

    Suppose there is a conflict between some someone's secret intention and a public declaration to a government official - which intent is binding?

    One principle you learn in first-year contracts is that what binds a contract is not secret agreement or disagreement (a "meeting of minds"), but public manifestation of your intent to be bound.

    Hence, my definition of immigrant is someone who publicly, formally, officially and legally declares his intent to abandon his former home and reside permanently in the United States.


  • Wednesday, Jun 04, 2003
     
    Copernicus
    Here is an example of an annoying Copernicus statement that comes from someone who should know better.
    In "The Extravagant Universe," published last fall by Princeton University Press, Dr. Kirshner wrote "We are not made of the type of particles that make up most of the matter in the universe, and we have no idea yet how to sense directly the dark energy that determines the fate of the universe. If Copernicus taught us the lesson that we are not at the center of things, our present picture of the universe rubs it in."
    Copernicus did not teach us that lesson.

    George writes:

    Sure he did. Copernicus proved that the Earth went around the Sun, instead of the Earth being at the center of the solar system.
    No, Copernicus proposed a model in which the Earth went around the Sun. He was not the first, as ancient Greeks like Aristarchus and the Pythagoreans had similar beliefs. He did not prove it either, and there was no convincing scientific argument for a heliocentric model until the work of Kepler and Galileo about 100 years later. The Copernican model was no more accurate than the Ptolemaic model, and each model had various pros and cons that existing science could not resolve.
     
    Global warming
    John says this article has a good summary of the latest science on Kyoto/Climate Change.
     
    Sammy Sosa
    Cubs star Sammy Sosa got caught with a corked bat. He says it was a mixup, but I don't believe it. Nobody uses a corked bat by mistake.
     
    Lessig's copyright plan
    Law prof Larry Lessig is pushing his $1 copyright renewal plan. Here is the Slashdot discussion.

    I still don't think it makes much sense. It violates Berne, and biases the big companies.

    How about this. Suppose that after 20 years, a copyright owner must:

  • put a copy on the web for scholarly fair use.
  • post notice of license terms.
  • post evidence of recent sales.

    If the copyright owner fails to do so, then the public can presume that the work is in the public domain. The copyright owner could still sue, but there would be an innocent infringer defense that makes it impossible for the owner to collect damages unless he can prove that the alleged infringer knew that the owner was still enforcing the copyright.

    If there is no evidence of recent sales, or a license offer at reasonable terms, then an expanded fair use doctrine would allow a lot of usage that is not allowed today.

    Update: Lessig now complains about the US Supreme Court's Dastar opinion. He says:

    Justice Scalia writes, “To hold otherwise would be akin to finding that §43(a) created a species of perpetual patent and copyright, which Congress may not do. See Eldred v. Ashcroft.” But this line show why it would have paid for the Court to pay more attention to the originalism in Eldred. For this line betrays a confusion about what “copyright law” was — at least — originally. And under an originalist reading of the copyright power, there would be no Copyright Clause problem with Congress requiring attribution for public domain works.
    So Lessig thinks that it would be perfectly ok for Congress to require perpetual attribution rights under the Commerce Clause!

    I thought that Lessig was a clerk for Scalia. I would think that Lessig would understand Scalia a little better.


  • Sunday, Jun 01, 2003
     
    One-handed driving
    The Si Valley paper failed to print my letter today.

    One silly editorial says:

    It looks like there might be a law. The California Assembly on Thursday passed a bill to require drivers to use a hands-free device when talking on the phone while driving. ...

    The penalty for one-handed driving would be modest -- $20 for the first violation, no more than $50 for subsequent ones.

    I hope it does really penalize one-handed driving. I always drive with one hand, and I believe that it is a safer and more convenient way to drive, whether I am talking on the phone or not. Some people have trouble driving with one hand, but maybe those people shouldn't even have drivers licenses.

    Another silly editorial says:

    The best line of defense for Davis is that recall proponents are acting out of political opportunism. The more that Republican officeholders jump aboard the recall train, the easier that line is to sell.
    If that is California Gov. Gray Davis's best line of defense against being recalled, then he is in serious trouble. Of course politicians are opportunistic. If that helps remove Davis, so much the better. Davis has been a terrible governor, and needs to be removed. When he took office 4 years ago, the state had a surplus. Since then, tax revenue has been up 25% and we have a $36B deficit. And that doesn't even include the tens of billions of dollars he wasted on energy regulation and MTBE.

    Saturday, May 31, 2003
     
    Barbra Streisand
    Barbra Streisand filed a $50M lawsuit because a web site includes her coastal mansion in a aerial view of the California coast. Or maybe it is $90M. Her web site says she loves free speech. That woman is nuts.

    The web site shows views of the entire coast, and the pictures were taken in order to document development. It is a fascinating site if you are familiar with the California coast. The site owner is rich, and I don't think that there is any chance he will give in.


    Thursday, May 29, 2003
     
    Netscape v. Microsoft
    John writes that the court should reject this collusive Microsoft-Netscape settlement. It appears to be making the browser market less competitive, and antitrust law should be trying to make it more competitive.
     
    Tort reform
    John reports that Shell Oil is being sued for the RI night club fire, along with the club owners, Anheuser-Busch, Inc., the town of West Warwick, and American Foam Corp. The formula is: accident happens, find deep pockets, sue them all.

    At least there are some efforts for tort reform, and some efforts to limit contingency fees. Good.

     
    Spelling bee
    John sends the ridiculous words being used to eliminate spelling bee contestants. The only one I recognize is kurtosis, and that is very obscure. Apparently these kids know all the words in the dictionary, so the only way to get a winner is to ask non-dictionary words.
     
    IQ and race
    Alex complains about this "racist" article. But it is mostly a rehash of conventional wisdom. The most controversial part is probably the reference to the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. The article says the book is unreviewed, but you can find some pro and con reviews at the above Amazon.com link. Some of the IQ data does seem surprising, but that just means that it doesn't always match my prejudices. I wonder if the IQ critics have any explanation for the correlation for the correlations in the book.
     
    Philip Morris targets gays
    The SJ Mercury News claims to have a big expose' with a story that Philip Morris targeted gays in 1990s. So how did they carry out this insidious plot? All they did was to advertize in a couple of homosexual magazines, and donate to HIV/AIDS groups.

    For a followup story, the paper should buy a couple of homosexual magazine, print a list of all the advertizers, and point out that all those advertizers are targeting gays.

    George writes:

    That's different. Most of those products are commodities like cars, clothes, beverages, etc. Philip Morris sells cigarettes and cigarettes kill people.

    Wednesday, May 28, 2003
     
    Unix copyright
    The Unix copyright dispute took an odd twist, as Novell denied that it sold Unix to SCO! SCO was sure enough of its ownership that it sued IBM for shipping Linux that infringes Unix. Strange. Something is fishy here. IBM and Microsoft are paying SCO a lot of money for Unix licenses, and I am sure they wouldn't do it unless they had to. Linux users have also been threatened with patent infringement. My hunch is that SCO has a case that parts of Linux are derived from Unix by people who had privileged access to Unix sources. I say the open source community should play it safe, and use BSD unix. We know it is in the clear, because that has already been litigated.
     
    School news
    Now homeschoolers can take online courses, according to this. And kids can just play video games to acquire visual skills. New Yorkers pay $1k just to get advice on finding a school for a 4-year-old.
     
    USA Patriot Act and libraries
    SJ Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor has another rant about library privacy. I sent this letter to the editor:
    Dan Gillmor (May 28 Business section column) wants to repeal the section of the USA Patriot Act pertaining to libraries, so that the FBI will need a court-order search warrant to get library records. In fact, libraries are not even mentioned in the Act, and the FBI will continue to be able to get those library records even if the entire Act is repealed.

    The USA Patriot Act has actually improved my privacy. The Santa Cruz libraries no longer maintain privacy-invading records on me anymore. I am more concerned about nosy County workers who think that they have the right to keep tabs on me, than about FBI agents doing a foreign intelligence investigation.

    The paper says they will publish it in the Sunday Business section.

    Monday, May 26, 2003
     
    EU Constitution
    A draft constitution for the United States of Europe is in the works. The word federal is out. The language is peculiarly vague and weird. Eg:
    Article I-9: Fundamental principles

    1. The limits of Union competences are governed by the principle of conferral. The use of Union competences is governed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.

     
    Astronomy picture
    This story has a Hubble space telescope picture of a young planetary nebula with a bizarre jet. Other good astronomy pictures are posted at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

    A cool picture from the top of the world is here. You can pan a complete 360 degrees, at the peak of Mt. Everest. Apple QuickTime 5 required.

    Here is a picture of the Earth from Mars.


    Saturday, May 24, 2003
     
    Licensing of patent practitioners
    I just participated in a misc.int-property usenet thread (see also these messages) on the licensing of patent attorneys and agents. Here is a summary.

    Patent pracititioners are licensed by the feds (at the US PTO). Those who also have state law licenses are called patent attorneys, and others are called patent agents. As I explained last month, patent law is federal law and it is settled law that patent agents do not need a state law license to practice patent law.

    Various patent attorneys in the thread concocted idiotic hair- splitting distinctions for patent agents -- that work-for-hire is ok only if it is part of an employee relationship; that a patentability opinion is ok but an infringement opinion is not; that advice to inventors is ok but only if they agent is hired before an on-sale bar; that validity opinions are ok but only if related to a reexamination proceeding; that ghostwriting infringement opinions is ok if they are signed by a patent lawyer; that recording an assignment is ok but only if a standard form is used; etc.

    But none of these distinctions has any basis in statute, regulation, precedent, or common sense. When pressed for details on these distinctions, all anyone can come up with is that some future and hypothetical set of changes to the US statutes, state statutes, regulations, supreme court appointments, etc, might possibly cause a change in the law, and maybe I ought to warn my clients about that. I happen to think that those changes are extremely unlikely.

    All states regulate the unauthorized practice of law (UPL). Some states, like Utah, only regulate those who represent others in court. Other states, like Texas, are more aggressive and have even tried to snuff sellers of self-help legal books. No state has attempted to regulate patent agents since a 9-0 US Supreme Court decision forbade it in 1963. California law says that UPL is a crime, but only for people who do not have a state bar license or any other license to practice law. So if California wanted to prosecute a patent agent for UPL, it would have to persuade the feds to disbar the agent, and then prosecute him for what he does after being disbarred.

    Lee asked:

    So, Roger, do you advise your clients that there is the possibility that the court might give less weight to your infringement opinion than it would to one from a patent attorney? Seems like that's something they should consider, and that you should warn them about.
    I don't really play the game of giving opinions just to avoid willful infringement. The times clients have asked me, they were mainly concerned about just getting sued, or getting an injunction against them. I guess if I wanted to give the full set of disclaimers, I'd have to warn that there are others with greater expertise in the technical field, others who went to more prestiguous colleges, others with more court experience, others who have read more CAFC opinions, others with a better track record of predicting judicial outcomes, others with higher IQ or LSAT scores, etc, and those might possibly be able to give opinions that have greater weight with the judge. (I have more disclaimers here.)

    Even if some state wanted to regulate some aspect of patent law practice, it would be nearly impossible under existing federal law and precedent. Let's say that a state wanted to regulate writing patent validity legal opinions. A conversation between a client and a patent agent might go as follows:

    Client: I need help. I just discovered that my competitor has a potentially troublesome patent, and I need to know whether I have a problem.

    Agent: I am just licensed to practice before the USPTO. I could look into the possibility of doing a reexamination for you.

    Client: What's that? What does it cost? How does it work?

    Agent: First, I'd have to study the patent, the file history, and the prior art, and look for grounds for invalidating the patent. Then I'd write a report on the validity of the patent, as the claims pertain to you and your products. That will cost $1-5k, depending on the complexity. If I conclude that there are grounds for finding the patent to be invalid, you may or may not want to order a USPTO reexamination, depending on various factors that I will explain to you. If you want that, it will cost another $5k.

    Client: Sounds good. Go ahead. I'll decide on the next step after I get your report.

    This practice is unquestionably legal under federal law, and outside the scope of any possible state regulation. If some state tried to regulate patent agents, then the agents in that state would just market their services in a way that made clear that those services were incident to practice before the USPTO, and cite Sperry v. Florida.

    A couple of patent attorneys argued that patent practice before the US PTO would never involve giving an infringement opinion, so it is outside the patent agent's license. There is just no reason that a patent agent would even have to know the Doctrine of Equivalents (DOE), they argue, whereas a DOE analysis is often essential to an infringement opinion.

    But that patent attorney argument is clearly false and disingenuous. When an inventor comes to me with an invention, the most important thing is to claim it in such a way that blocks out potential competitors using the same idea. The inventor will ask, "If I get a patent claiming A-B-C, will that stop a competitor from selling X-Y-Z." To answer that question, I have to do an infringement analysis. And yes, it may involve the DOE.

    Andy cites this law review article by Shashank Upadhye that points out that under MPEP 708.02, a patent agent sometimes even has to submit an infringement opinion to the US PTO. A patent agent can petition to have a patent application expedited if he provides a detailed analysis showing that there is an infringing product on the market.

    This article is another example of arcane and crazy distinctions that patent attorneys sometimes try to draw in order to place obstacles for patent agents. This one says that patent agents can give infringement opinions about pending patents, but not about issued patents! The article has 203 footnotes, but none supporting his theory of limits on patent agents. (It only cites Sperry v. Florida which vacated a state attempt to put limits on patent agents.) The idea that a patent agent would be considered competent to do an infringement analysis of a pending patent for a client, and competent to submit it to a quasi-judicial proceeding at the US PTO, but not competent to do the exact same analysis on an issued patent, is just plain weird. Note that he does not even mention state UPL laws, but is only concerned with competency of the opinion. The guy is an idiot.

    George writes:

    But that article says, "But it must be very clear, a patent agent cannot opine whether a product infringes an issued patent."
    Yeah, I noticed that. The columnist for the business section of the local newspaper opines about issued patents, but trained professionals who are licensed by the US Patent Office cannot?

    Such an opinion might easily be reasonably necessary for a patent office prosecution. Eg, an inventor might want to get his own patent and avoid a competitor's patent at the same time. Or patent agent might need to determine whether a reexamination will satisfy the client's needs. Even if I accepted the argument that state regulation is relevant, then the answer would vary from state to state. At any rate, the author gives no support for the statement. Always be suspicious when an author says "clearly" or something similar, because that means that he thinks something ought to be true, but cannot substantiate it.


    Friday, May 23, 2003
     
    H-1B scandal
    Phyllis reports that Norman Matloff has done an excellent piece of work documenting how the H-1B immigration program has cost many thousands of American jobs. Computer programmers have been particularly hard hit.

    In particular, he documents how it was just a myth that there was ever a shortage of computer programmers. Microsoft promoted the myth and lobbied for H-1B increases, but it only hires 2% of the programmers who apply for jobs there, and only 25% of those who are interviewed. If there were really a shortage, then Microsoft would be hiring all qualified applicants. And we'd see large spikes in programmer salaries also. But programmer wages are not high, and programmers are easily hired.

    Bob says that foreigners sometimes have rare expertise, and when they immigrate it helps our economy. For example, Enrico Fermi was one of the world's experts in stimulated radioactive decay, and his assistance was crucial in the WWII Manhattan Project.

    Sure, we should let in all the Enrico Fermis. But I doubt that even 1% of the H-1B workers have any unique skill or talent. The vast majority just have the ordinary skill of a college graduate who majored in a desirable subject.


    Thursday, May 22, 2003
     
    Bad behavior on the net
    A spammer testified before the US Senate that AOL sold him their entire email list.

    This WSJ story tells about people retaliating on spammers.

    A researcher has documented the obnoxious spyware program Gator.

    The US Army has a free online video game, but cheaters get a lot of the kills.


    Tuesday, May 20, 2003
     
    Lost Clarence Thomas opinion?
    I got a strange email. It could be a hoax. It purports to be a draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the Gore v. Bush case in 2000.

    The opinion seems to be missing some citations, but I cannot find any fault with it.

    George writes:

    Thomas says election recounts are illegal. How wacky is that?
    He is exactly right. In a close election, repeated recounts are apt to get random errors that can result in the winner changing randomly. Maybe ballots get damages, chads fall off, misconduct occurs, minor rules are debated and changed, etc. If the statute calls for a recount, then it is reasonable. But if the loser asks a judge for a recount just because it might give a different result, then only a mathematically innumerate judge would grant the recount.

    I really doubt that Bush will promote Clarence Thomas to Chief Justice when Rehnquist retires, but he really is the best man for the job. He is one of the clearest thinkers on the Court, he has proven wisdom and legal analysis, he has administrative experience, he is well liked, and he is on the Supreme Court now.


    Sunday, May 18, 2003
     
    Economist magazine on Bush
    Andy sends this Economist article that mentions Phyllis:
    GEORGE BUSH's relationship with his business supporters could hardly be more straightforward. Business people give him huge piles of money. In return he cuts their taxes and shreds red tape. But there is nothing straightforward about his dealings with another big part of the Republican Party: its social conservatives. ...

    Mr Santorum got a predictable roasting in what conservatives call the liberal media. In fact his remarks merely reflect Republican orthodoxy: the party platform, for example, goes out of its way to define marriage in a way that rules out gay unions. Yet Mr Bush's people hardly rushed to defend their senator. Phyllis Schlafly, who brought down the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, describes the establishment's defence as “limp”. Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, characterises it as “tepid”. ...

    The most important decision will involve the Supreme Court. At least one Supreme Court justice may retire in the next year or so. Conservatives see the selection of a new justice as an issue on which they are prepared to break with the president. “We will not put up with another [David] Souter,” says Ms Schlafly, referring to a judge appointed by George Bush senior who has since voted in a liberal manner.

    Andy also suggests Phyllis is the woman in the cartoon who is screaming at GW Bush while holding a Bible. I don't know, I've never seen her scream while holding a Bible.

    Saturday, May 17, 2003
     
    Immigration site
    Andy writes:
    I found a superb source of immigration information on the internet, apparently financed by an immigration law firm.

    Here is an example of something I had not heard anywhere else, found in the most recent newsletter on the site:

    "The Department of Justice announced last week that a federal grand jury in Sacramento has returned an 18-count indictment charging nine persons, including two former employees of the State Department, in connection with a scheme to sell entry visas into the United States. Eight of the nine defendants were arrested at locations in three states. The State Department employees charged are Long N. Lee, 51, and Acey R. Johnson, 32, and the two are married. According to the 130-page complaint, the visa scheme involved the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the State Department employees in exchange for the issuing of visas to various foreign nationals, primarily from Vietnam and India. All nine defendants are charged with conspiring to defraud the United States and to bribe public officials and to commit visa fraud. ..."
    There was a similar bust in Si Valley about a year ago. Afterwards, the paper printed sob stories about illegal immigrants who were going to be deported even tho they paid the bribes in good faith. There was heavy political pressure to let the aliens stay. I am not sure what happened.
     
    California nanny state laws
    John sends this story about California threatening to pass a law requiring kids to sit in the back seat of a car. I believe that these laws do a lot more harm than good.

    Thursday, May 15, 2003
     
    Autism increasing
    A new report says that California autism rates are radically increasing. It denies that the increase is caused by immigration, changes in diagnostic procedures, or other obvious explanations.

    Wednesday, May 14, 2003
     
    Assisted suicide
    Here is a typical idiotic lawyer rant on the subject:
    Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Atty. Gen. Ashcroft's attempt to effectively end the practice of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the Oregon, which has been approved by voters of that state on two occasions: once in 1994, and again in 1997. ...

    As a matter of politics, Ashcroft's continued crusade against PAS demonstrates the hypocrisy of a group of far-right ideologues who vigorously claim to support states rights, but apparently only when state voters or legislators agree with their world view. ...

    There is no "states rights" issue here. Ashcroft is not trying to end PAS. The federal Controlled Substances Act licenses physicians to prescribe drugs like morphine and cocaine for "legitimate medical purposes" only. Killing people via "assisted suicide" has never been considered a legitimate medical purpose. For thousands of years, physicians have taken the Hippocratic Oath , including a promise not to give lethal drugs. Even today, the major physician organizations oppose PAS. All Ashcroft is threatening to do is to revoke the license to proscribe drugs like morphine, if a physician uses the license to kill someone. Ashcroft is being Hippocratic, not hypocritical.
     
    PSAT grammar error
    This Wash Post article says the ETS had to revise some PSAT scores because it said that this statement was grammatically correct:
    Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.
    The tricky part is whether the pronoun "her" is correct.

    Liza writes:

    I think the complaining teacher is being pedantic.
    John writes:
    Who here is proud to be a pedant?

    In current usage, pedantry (pedant, pedantic) is always negative. It means giving excessive or undue attention to formal rules.

    Pedant is to scholar as cult is to church.

    Webster's gives this usage example: "One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge. --Addison."

    More definitions:

    Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules

    Marked by a narrow, often tiresome focus on or display of learning and especially its trivial aspects

    An ostentatious and inappropriate display of learning

    Under these definitions, I disagree with Liza that the grammar teacher who brought down the PSAT was being merely pedantic. I think the criticism is correct.

    I think correct grammar requires that pronouns (he, she, it, etc) and subordinating conjunctions (who, which, that) must unambiguously refer to a single antecedent. The antecedent must be clear from the structure of the sentence; the reader must not be expected to guess from the context which of several possible antecedents is correct.

    The grammatical error in the PSAT example is that the sentence structure makes "her" refers to "genius" not "Toni Morrison"

    Some amusing comments to this news item were posted here. One poster mentioned that the worst error in the sentence was the omission of "overrated" between "Toni Morrison's" and "genius". Other posters claimed that the following perfectly grammatical sentences disproved the rule asserted by the Maryland teacher and justified the original PSAT sentence:

    'A woman's hair is her glory,' says the Bible, and Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, quoted the phrase approvingly...

    A man's home is his castle.

    A man's word is his bond.

    IMO, those posters are clearly incorrect. The "her" in "A woman's hair is her glory" is the possessive "her" which unambiguously refers to "woman's". But the "her" in the PSAT sentence is the pronoun "her" which can only have a noun as an antecedent, and the only available noun is "genius" not "Toni Morrison."
    When I was teaching, yes, I was a pedant.

    My dictionary says that "schoolteacher" is the origin of the word, and then gives this definition:

    2 a : one who makes a show of knowledge b : one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge c : a formalist or precisionist in teaching
    In most situations, people don't like being lectured on formal rules. But in math or grammar class, it is appropriate!

    John uses the word "pedantic" to mean that someone who is pedantic is also incorrect. (I'm not sure if Liza also intended this.) None of the definitions support this meaning, and I think that John is incorrect here.

    Yes, I am being pedantic here.

    John responds:

    Bravo to Roger for his efforts to rehabilitate the original meaning of word pedant, which was at least neutral if not positive.

    (Notice I violated my own rules of grammar by allowing "which" to have an ambiguous antecedent in the preceding sentence. Perhaps Liza would say that the only purpose of grammar is to promote clarity and it is clear enough from the context what I meant. IMO, however, the sentence structure itself should unambiguously point to one and only one antecedent.)

    Now that we have agreed on the side issue that pedantry can be a good thing, will Roger opine on the main issue? Do you think the correct answer was "E" or "A" - or do you agree with the PSAT's decision to pull the question and raise everybody's score?

    Gumma writes:
    HOW DUMB TO TELL STUDENTS TO WRITE "E" FOR NOT AN ERROR.
    Liza writes:
    You engineers seem fixated on the idea that there can be only one correct answer. Things are not always black and white. I believe ETS should have stuck to its guns - i.e., that "no error" was the correct answer - but since their outside panel of expert grammarians disagreed about the correct answer, it would not have been an improvement to treat "no error" as the wrong answer. ETS's response was more reasonable than to do what Roger suggests. I don't fully understand how they handled the rescoring, but I think justice was done under the circumstances.
    Neither article said that there was any disagreement among ETS's outside panel.

    If a newspaper article said 1/3=.33, I say that is acceptable and only a pedant would object. But if a math test said:

    1. Does this have an error: 1/3=.33 ?
    A. rounding error
    B. sign error
    C. algebra error
    D. subtraction error
    E. no error

    I would say that only (A) is the correct answer.

    Likewise, the PSAT sentence had a grammar error, at least according to the rules in some textbooks.

    If there is a legitimate academic dispute about whether it is a grammar error, then the only reasonable thing to do would be to give full credit to those who answered either A or E, and mark other answers wrong. This would only change the raw scores of those who answered A. (But might change the percentiles slightly for everyone.)

    What ETS did was to effectively penalize those who answered A or E, with A being penalized the most, and give points to those who gave the completely wrong answers of B, C, or D. I think that ETS compounded its error with its bizarre rescoring formula.

    John responds:

    Who would have guessed or predicted that Liza would be the most lenient member of the family on a fine point of grammar?

    Liza objects to the "engineers" trait of seeing the world in "black and white" (i.e., digital) terms, of being "fixated on the idea that there can be only one correct answer."

    In her very next sentence, however, Liza insists that there is, indeed, only one correct answer to the PSAT question, namely (E) - no error. Liza says the testmaker should have "stuck to its guns" by insisting that (E) was the only correct answer. (Which strikes me as a very "black and white" attitude!)

    In a multiple-choice test, every question should have one and only one correct answer. If the subject matter is such that there is no correct or "best" answer, then it does not belong on a multiple choice test.

    No doubt, many old grammar rules are no longer necessary in modern usage. There is a proper time and place for arguing that split infinitives are permissible or that subjunctive verbs are obsolete.

    But I agree 100% with Roger and Andy that (1) if the test is on grammar and (2) if the test question squarely raises a well established grammatical rule, however obscure it may be, then fundamental fairness demands giving more points to the student who recognizes the rule than to the student who fails to recognize it.

    IMO, the rule at issue here is just as valid as ever. Pronouns (he, she, him, her, it), adjectives (his, her, its) and conjunctions (who, whom, which, that) should always refer unambiguously to a single antecedent.

    Ambiguous antecedents are like dangling participles, whose meaning can also be guessed from the context. Would Liza give full credit to a student who failed to recognize a dangling participle? I should hope not!

    In a sense, ETS did stick to its guns, because (E) was the only answer that received credit under the rescoring formula. Those who recognized the grammar rule and correctly applied it to the sentence were treated as if they skipped the question.

    Liza writes:

    Yes, there seems to have been a slight scoring advantage given to those who responded "no error" (still the best answer in the opinion of the ETS staff as well as yours truly), but in view of the diversity of expert opinion some positive adjustment was made for those who responded A (although the newspaper articles have been inconsistent on the exact nature of that adjustment). That is why I say that justice was done under the circumstances.

    Of course a multiple-choice test should have one clear right answer. I never argued otherwise. No doubt the ETS will drop the controversial question from future tests. In complaining about the engineer's black-and-white mindset, I was making the point that where through inadvertence a question winds up having more than one arguably correct answer, the ETS should not be duty-bound to treat only one answer as right and all others as equally wrong, as at least one of you seemed to argue earlier.

    I ran this PSAT question by all members of my household, 3 of whom received 800s on their verbal SAT I as well as 80s on their verbal and/or writing PSAT. All agreed with me that "no error" was the best answer.

    By the way, I don't accept that there is any absolute prohibition on split infinitives, either.

    Move on, guys.

    The ETS original scoring, and the revised scoring, does treat only one answer as right and all others as equally wrong. Liza is the only one defending ETS.

    Andy writes:

    Roger and John criticize Liza's position, but they do not defend the original rule itself. Nor do they recognize and criticize the degradation in language reflected in the position of ETS and Liza.

    John insists that "Pronouns (he, she, him, her, it), adjectives (his, her, its) and conjunctions (who, whom, which, that) should always refer unambiguously to a single antecedent." But that is ETS' and Liza's position: if unambiguous (and the question was), then it must be correct.

    The very point of the challenge to the ETS position is that clarity is a necessary but not sufficient test of grammar. In addition to clarity, logical linguistic consistency is also required for good grammar. But I don't expect John to agree to that! Nor does ETS.

    Roger wrote, "What ETS did was to effectively penalize those who answered A or E, with A being penalized the most, and give points to those who gave the completely wrong answers of B, C, or D. I think that ETS compounded its error with its bizarre rescoring formula."

    That's not the best description of ETS' ultimate scoring. ETS' revised scoring gives full credit to "E", but does not deduct points for any non-E answer. Accordingly, ETS remains adamant that "E" is the best choice, and that a sentence has proper grammar if unambiguous even though structurally illogical.

    I believe the PSAT is used for various honors on a strict percentile basis. So if someone answered A, you might say he did not get points deducted, but that is misleading. He will drop into a lower percentile behind those who answered E, and could lose a scholarship as a result.
     
    Jayson Blair
    The NY Times sure doesn't have any credibility on the diversity issue anymore. Jayson Blair was hired and promoted just because he was black, and would have been fired a long time ago if he were white. This same paper editorializes for various laws forcing affirmative action, as if there is no downside to hiring inadequate workers. See this column.
     
    Msft admits iLoo hoax hoax
    Msft has admitted that it the iLoo really was a plan, and then it tried to claim that it was a hoax when everyone made fun of it.

    Tuesday, May 13, 2003
     
    Chickenpox vaccine
    Andy testifies against the chickenpox vaccine in New Jersey.
     
    RogBlog bug
    John writes:
    Did you really post 10 items (some of them suspiciously outdated) on your blog at exactly 11:27:25 today?
    Good catch. Glad someone is reading. No, I had a dating bug which I have now corrected.

    I use my own blogging software. The way it works is that I write my messages in source files, and the software automatically generates the dates, times, HTML, etc. The correspondence between the messages and the date tags are kept in an external index file. I've been travelling for the last week, and posted from my laptop. But when I returned, I neglected to copy the index file back to my destop computer. So the software thought that those messages were all new.

    I am experimenting with a new hit counter. You might notice some minor irregularities until I get it the way I want it.

     
    Msft Palladium
    John sends this article with comments by Bill Gates. The objections to Palladium are a little strange:
    Some critics and competitors have raised concerns that the technology could be used to reinforce Microsoft's dominance.
    The same could be said of just about any computer technology.
     
    Bad 9C opinion on 2A
    John sends this Wash Times article on the 9th Circuit federal court of appeals dissenting over the meaning of the 2nd Amendment. Now there is a split in the circuits over the 2A that the Supreme Court will eventually have to resolve. But there are better cases to consider. The various assault weapon bans ought to be unconstitutional, but the issue is muddied by the fact that the ban was primarily directed at mean-looking guns in order to prove that some guns could be banned, and they still allow people to buy guns with similar effectiveness.

    A better case for the court might be the DC handgun ban, as it leaves citizens defenseless and there are no distracting federalism issues.

    (Note that I do not say "states rights". No conservatives think that the states have a right to keep its citizens unarmed.)

    A John Lott op-ed in the same paper says that the main effect of the federal assault weapon ban has been to cut gun show business by about 25%. Gun collectors used to buy a lot of items like bayonnets at gun shows. The gun-banners really want to shut down the gun shows, because (in part) the gun shows sell pro-gun political literature.

    George writes:

    Gun control advocates want to stop illegal gun sales to criminals at gun shows. They are not trying to stop free speech.
    In California, several counties and cities have banned gun shows even tho guns are not sold at those gun shows. They sell holsters, tools, knives, books, survivalism gear, t-shirts, and other gun-related paraphenalia. A number of guns are on display, but usually just demos from local gun stores. The shows are just not that interesting to criminals. Maybe they could buy some ammo there, but ammo is also widely and easily available elsewhere. There is currently a federal case on whether the gun show bans violate the 1A.

    John sends this NRO article discussing different strategies for challenging gun laws.


    Sunday, May 11, 2003
     
    Do school vouchers work?
    This article discusses a dubious study that claimed that voucher work because they raised the test scores of the black students. When the study data was made available to other researchers, serious problems were found.

    No big surprise there. A lot of social science studies are proved worthless after independent evaluation of the data. Honest researcher make their data public.

    The study is not even measuring whether voucher programs work or not very well. The goal of vouchers is not to have voucher students having higher test scores than non-voucher public school kids.

    School vouchers should save money, give parents more freedom of choice, make schools more competitive, and force schools to become more responsive to the needs of their consumers, like other businesses. If vouchers are working right and making the schools competitive, then there should be no obvious difference in test scores between voucher and non-voucher students.

    A letter says:

    Regarding the revised findings showing negligible effects of school vouchers ("What Some Much-Noted Data Really Showed About Vouchers," On Education column, May 7), it is sobering, for both conservatives and liberals, to see once again that revolutionary educational programs almost never make a significant difference.
    It is true that educational reforms rarely improve test scores, but a revolutionary voucher program has not been tried anywhere yet. Somewhere it ought to be tried on a large enough scale that the public schools have to change their policies or face losing students and laying off employees. Then it should be judged as successful if it saves taxpayer money and if the vouchers are sufficiently attractive that people take advantage of the program. Consumers are better judges what they want and need that social scientists.
     
    Hospital seeks Klingon speaker
    Oregon nees a Klingon intepreter for the crazy people there. I think that is the lawmakers who want to bother with anything but English who are crazy. Klingon is a fictitious language that was invented for Star Trek fans.

    Update: John sends this announcement that public ridicule has forced Oregon to drop its attempts to hire a Klingon.

    Update: This article says it was all a joke. Duhh.


    Saturday, May 10, 2003
     
    Abolish corporations
    Here is a dumb idea from a NY Times op-ed. Abolish limited liability for corporations. It is not enough that fine businesses have been bankrupted by frivolous litigation like asbestos lawsuits, the lawyer lobby wants to bankrupt the stockholders also.

    Friday, May 09, 2003
     
    Microsoft Passport
    The new Msft Passport bug is an amazing screw-up for Msft. Msft had already agreed to pay big fines for any violation of user privacy. There is more info here.

    David Wagner writes:

    It's typical. No one should be all that surprised, because it happens all the time. That doesn't excuse it, of course.

    And whatever you do, don't think Microsoft is unusual in this respect. The problem is endemic, and many companies are far worse. Though Microsoft has often given the impression that they treat security as a PR problem rather than a technical problem, they've also recently taken some concrete steps to improve code quality that go way beyond what most other companies in this area are doing.

    To give another example that comes to mind, do you remember Hotmail's woes back in 1999? They had a major security breach when one of their development machines (which was connected to the Internet) exported a testing interface that allowed anyone to access any account, without needing to know the password. Needless to say, the testing interface was eventually discovered by outsiders, who were then able to read the email of any and all Hotmail users.

    Apparently, Hotmail hadn't even bothered to firewall off their development machines from the rest of the world. I'm usually pretty sympathetic when someone's servers gets hacked for no fault of their own, but it's hard to believe a site as high-profile as Hotmail wasn't even using a firewall to seal off access to their internal nets.

    For all the fans of privacy certification programs, it's also instructive to note what happened to Hotmail's TRUSTe certification. (Nothing.)

    The point is, the state of practice at many sites is often lamentably low. There are also many sites with truly professional and competent security, but the variance is very high, and so we shouldn't be surprised if we continue to hear more stories of major security breaches.

    http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9908/30/hotmail.06/ http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/13/hotmail.audit.idg/ http://www.truste.com/news/padvisories/users_adv.html http://www.truste.com/news/padvisories/users_findings.html


    Thursday, May 08, 2003
     
    Eclipse
    John sends this lunar eclipse news. It is a Thursday evening next week. Separately, Mercury and Venus will pass in front of the Sun.

    Wednesday, May 07, 2003
     
    NRO attacks P2P networks
    John sends this idiotic NRO article comparing P2P computer networks to digital communism. It says:
    By legalizing Internet file-trading tools, a California court handed a major victory to communism. ...

    Some might argue that copyright holders should fend for themselves in the marketplace. Imagine, however, the fate of stores if there were no effective laws against shoplifting: Theft would drive them to bankruptcy.

    All the court did was too declare that the USA has no law against generic file-copying tools that have legitimate purposes. It would be communistic for the gubmnt to enforce heavy-handed restrictions on how individuals can commnunicate files.

    Furthermore, stores do fend for themselves in stopping shoplifting. Nearly all shoplifting arrests are made by private store personnel, and nearly all anti-shoplifting measures are undertaken by the stores at their own expense. The city police doesn't stand at the entrance keeping out potential shoplifters. The cops only get called in after the store has caught a suspect and detained him. Likewise, the copyright holders shouldn't expect the gubmnt to act as some sort of gatekeeper on the internet preventing all use of P2P networks.

     
    Exposing Bill Bennett
    John sends this Slate article that confirms that the casinos exposed Bill Bennett for some ideological purpose. John thinks that it was probably 1 or 2 low-level casino employees making an unauthorized leak. I think that the casinos run a pretty tight operation, and anyone making an unauthorized leak like that might be risking his life. I think that the casinos did it deliberately.

    One argument is that the casino's were offended by Bennett's attacks on the spread of legalized gambling. But that doesn't make much sense to me. I would think that the Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos would be all in favor of halting the spread of gambling. Gambling laws are not going to be changed there; but they might lose customers if more casinos open in New York and California.

    So why would the casinos rat out a good customer? I don't know. There must be other celebrities who are now nervous about being exposed or blackmailed. I don't see how it could be in the interests of the casinos to destroy their reputation for maintaining customer confidentiality in this way. But I have to assume that the casinos had some business reasons for exposing Bennett.

    I don't know why this was a big story. Bennett was a nicotine addict at the time that he was the USA drug czar and argued that using drugs was immoral. Bennett made most of his money off of his Virtues book, but it was rumored to be ghost-written. If the liberal press wanted to make the case that Bennett was a hypocrite, it seems like better evidence was already available.

    Update: John sends this article that identifies the 2 casino companies (MGM Mirage and Park Place Entertainment) responsible for the leaks. Company spokesmen were curiously evasive about how the leaks happened.

     

    I am related to the President

    According to this geneology page, I share an ancestor with G.W. Bush about 9 generations ago.

    Monday, May 05, 2003
     
    Germany protects ants
    I have heard of areas in the USA where animal lovers have put in regulations requiring that pests like raccoons be moved to the wilderness instead of killed. This story says Germany has extended the concept to ants!
    "People with an ant hill in their garden must under no circumstances resort to the use of poison," said Ant Officer Dieter Kraemer in an interview.

    This was a violation of federal nature protection laws and punishable with hefty fines, Kraemer warned.

    Instead, those who want to get rid of pesky ants should call the state forestry office and apply to have ant hills dug up and moved to a local forest, he said.

     
    Who was Deep Throat
    A Slate columnist speculates again about who was the Deep Throat of Watergate fame. The most obvious explanation was that there was no such person. The story I read somewhere is that Woodward and Bernstein wrote a Watergate book; the publisher rejected it as too dull; and then they invented the Deep Throat character in order to spice up the book.
     
    McCarthy files
    The Senator Joe McCarthy haters are out again, saying that newly-released files show how evil he was. Voice of America says that one of its employees committed suicide because he was afraid that McCarthy would ask him to testify about why VoA was not transmitting to the USSR as was the plan. Some others refused to testify, but no one was prosecuted.

    The NY Times reveals that McCarthy sometimes dropped witnesses after they proved to be uncooperative or confused in preliminary questioning. This supposedly proves that McCarthy was a bully on a witch hunt.

    The BBC says that the documents prove that McCarthy tried to intimidate witnesses by threatening them with jail if they lied under oath. Yes, perjury is a crime.

    None of these articles mentions that McCarthy was right about commies working for the government. The articles all make a big point out of saying that he was censured by the Senate, but none say what he was censured for.

    Update: M. Stanton Evans reports that he cannot find anyone who can name someone whose life was ruined by a false charge of communism. He says that the VoA suicide was probably unrelated to McCarthy, as that guy would have been a friendly witness.

     
    Lasik failures
    John sends this story about how 1 in 10 laser eye surgeries fail and have to be redone. For some horror stories, see http://www.surgicaleyes.org/.

    Lasik surgery has a very high success rate in the sense that nearly everyone gets 20/40 vision or better in the daytime. However, a lot of people are unhappy about it for various reasons.


    Sunday, May 04, 2003
     
    Calif law mandates encryption
    John points to this article saying that a new California law puts some burdens on businesses unless they use encryption to secure confidential customer data. This is good, because businesses have a responsibility to safeguard such data.

    One of the complaints about the so-called (proposed) Patriot II Act was that it was going to be a felony to use encryption to commit terrorism. Supposedly that was going to be a disincentive for legitimate businesses who just want to use encryption to protect customer data.

     
    Java is the most popular
    This article claims that Java is the most popular programming language, based on indicators like Help Wanted ads. My guess is that there is a lot more code written in C, C++, Basic, and COBOL.

    Friday, May 02, 2003
     
    RIAA wins settlement
    The students who were sued for running a search engine have settled with the music labels. The poor students had to shut it down and pay up. Too bad. I don't think that the students were doing anything wrong, but couldn't face the legal fight. I guess we need more anonymous search engines. Here is the LA Times story.

    Now the NY Times says that the RIAA is planning a covert sabotage campaign. One can only hope that music lovers will resist the tactics of the music label thugs.


    Thursday, May 01, 2003
     
    Predicting earthquakes
    Some Caltech geophysicists claim that they can predict earthquakes 15 seconds in advance -- except that they need to do 40 seconds of computation on seismic data. But if they can get the epicenter calculation down to 5 seconds, and they can distribute the info in another 5 seconds, then they might be able to give people a 5 second warning.
     
    Real mob hit
    NY mafia business can be as wacky as the Sopranos. See this CBS News story.
     
    Bettina Aptheker
    John sends this story and comments:
    As if Angela Davis wasn't enough -- UCSC has Bettina Aptheker too? This is diversity??
    I don't know anything about her. She seems to be some sort of jewish commie lesbian. Here is a 1970 letter that she wrote in support of a bombing of a telephone company. Her main complaint is that the bomb was not sufficient effective to promote the commie revolution that she wants. I don't know how these kooks get to be university professors.

    George writes:

    Are you suggesting that she is unfit to teach because of her personal religion, politics, or sexual preference?
    No, but she teaches a class on Feminism, and I really don't think she separates her personal politics from her teaching. She was also a member of the CPUSA's national committee when she wrote a propaganda book for the KGB about Angela Davis. I am suggesting that anyone who would write the above letter is probably unfit to be a Univ of Calif. prof.

    Wednesday, Apr 30, 2003
     
    New Mexico resolution
    Andy writes:
    New Mexico leads the way in state nullification of the PATRIOT law. The resolution passed the House by a remarkable 53-11 vote. Though the resolution is pro-immigration, it has other provisions that are well-written and impressive, such as the way it address the encroachments on education privacy (FERPA), medical privacy (AAPS is suing over this), and sneak and peek.

    Presumably other states will soon follow. Is true federalism returning?

    It is not just pro-immigration -- it says that NM will not cooperate in expelling illegal aliens; that NM will not use profiling; that NM will treat citizens the same as non-citizens in criminal investigations; and that NM will blame Ashcroft for its own privacy invasions by its libraries.
     
    Patriot Act helps privacy
    John writes:
    Another public library admits it has been violating citizen privacy by keeping records of patrons' reading habits. Without the USA PATRIOT Act, we would never have learned about this.
    It is amazing how these public libraries think that they have right to keep nosy records on citizens, but share them with federal terrorism investigators.

    Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003
     
    Court appointment
    John responds to Andy:
    John says that the expected confirmation of Jeffrey Sutton is "big". Big what? Sutton, the former Ohio state attorney, is famous for defending govt against lawsuits. That's not even particularly conservative. I haven't seen anything to suggest he is pro-life.

    Even wackier is the National Review article suggesting that Bush make recess appointments to the judiciary, with conservative people like Richard Epstein. One problem: Epstein is not conservative (he's libertarian), and judges need months to decide cases (during which time Congress could simply refuse to confirm).

    Yes, Sutton's confirmation to the 6th Circuit today is a big victory. He is only the 4th of Bush's "controversial" appellate nominations to be confirmed (the others were McConnell-10th, Shedd-4th, and Smith-3rd). Sutton is famous for defending state and local govt against suits by individuals claiming rights under federal laws passed by Congress under the Commerce clause. Yes, I think this is a "particularly conservative" objective.

    In two such cases (Morrison and Sandoval), Eagle Forum filed a amicus brief on the same side as Sutton. Both were close 5-4 victories in the Supreme Court. Sutton has had other 5-4 victories in this area, and other such suits are pending in the lower courts.

    Sutton's remarkable string of victories in this "federalism" area is a good example of how appellate lawyering makes a real difference.

    It is analogous to the dramatic turnaround in NOW v. Joe Scheidler, about the application of federal RICO law to nonviolent abortion protesters. In his first trip to the Supreme Court (1994), Scheidler lost 9-0, despite the assistance of Notre Dame professor G. Robert Blakey, who wrote the RICO law in 1970. Undeterred, Scheidler came back with a slightly different legal theory and the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in his favor (without overruling its previous 9-0 decision).

    Similarly, the turnaround on federalism has been equally dramatic. When Garcia v. San Antonio MTA (1985) overruled National League of Cities v. Usery (1976), primarily because Blackmun switched from the conservative to the liberal side, Rehnquist famously warned in dissent that the conservative or state's rights view "will, I am confident, in time again command the support of a majority of this Court."

    It was the theories and arguments developed by Jeffrey Sutton that made Rehnquist's prophecy come true, without requiring the court to directly overrule the unwanted precedent. The key insight was that even if we accept in principle that Congress's economic legislation applies to state and local government activities that arguably "affect" interstate commerce, nevertheless the way is clear to argue that state and local entities can't be sued by individuals because of the states' sovereign immunity as recognized in the 11th Amendment. Hence, 99% of the same objective is achieved.

    [Making recess appointments] was such a brilliant idea, I wish I thought of it myself. The idea is for Bush to make (or threaten to make) recess appointments - not of Bush's current nominees for permanent judgeships (Estrada, Pickering, Owen, etc.), but of the liberals' worst nightmare, conservative lightning-rods who for various reasons (such as age) are not seeking permanent judgeships, such as Robert Bork or Lino Graglia.

    It was Epstein's book that Chairman Joe Biden waved in Clarence Thomas's face and demanded to know if Thomas had read it, implying that anyone who had read the book was too dangerous to be a judge. For that reason alone, Epstein would be perfect for a recess appointment.

     
    The Language Police
    A new book The Language Police is a devastating criticism of how political correctness has ruined the school textbooks and tests.
    A typical publisher’s guideline advises that

    • Women cannot be depicted as caregivers or doing
    household chores.
    • Men cannot be lawyers or doctors or plumbers.
    They must be nurturing helpmates.
    • Old people cannot be feeble or dependent; they
    must jog or repair the roof.
    • A story that is set in the mountains discriminates
    against students from flatlands.
    • Children cannot be shown as disobedient or in
    conflict with adults.
    • Cake cannot appear in a story because it is not
    nutritious.

    The result of these revisions are—no surprise!—boring, inane texts about a cotton-candy world bearing no resemblance to what children can access with the click of a remote control or a computer mouse.
    It is not just an American disease -- British teachers are being told to avoid the term "brainstorming" because it might offend epileptics. No, the epileptics are not even complaining, just the political correctness police.
     
    The Origin of Dragons
    UFO scholars like to cite the fact that many reports of UFOs and space aliens look similar, and to argue that the similarity add credence to the reports. I think they are just all watching the same movies.

    Now this NY Times article tackles the older question of why ancient cultures all over the Earth seem to have the same dragon images and stories.

     
    New S&W handgun
    My revolver is now obsolete. The Dirty Harry movies say that the .44 Magnum is the most powerful handgun made, but it has been passed up. This blog says:
    The ol' reliable 9mm Glock fires a 124 grain bullet.

    The even older, reliable .45 Colt Automatic fires a 230 grain bullet and hits with around 350 foot/pounds of energy. Remember, this gun was designed to be a manstopper.

    The .357 Magnum, like the Colt Python or the .357 varient of the Desert Eagle fires a 125 grain bullet and hits it's target with 500 foot/pounds of energy.

    The classic "Hand Cannon", the .44 Magnum (Dirty Harry's gun, or the .44 varient of the Desert Eagle) fires a 250 grain bullet, and hits it's target with 900 foot/pounds of energy.

    The .50 AE Desert Eagle, that autoloader most desired by gamer gun-fondlers worldwide, fires a 325 grain bullet and hits with 1414 foot/pounds of energy. Note, that we're delivering roughly 4 times the energy of the .45 ACP (remember, the weapon designed to be a manstopper). And we're not done yet.

    For several years, the "most powerful handgun in the world" was a custom revolver known as the .454 Casull. It was a custom-built gun used for hunting (hunting what, I don't know. Mabye Dinosaurs?). but the .454 Casull fired a 260 grain bullet, but struck with 1,900 foot pounds of energy.

    This new gun, the Smith & Wesson Model 500 fires a 440 grain bullet, and strikes with 2600 foot/pounds of energy. The bullet itself is half again as long as the .44 Magnum. It has advanced shock-absorbing materials incorporated into the grip to help control recoil.

    The new Model 500 costs $1000, and each round is about $3. Maybe I can use my .454 Casull as a backup gun.

    Update: I've changed my mind -- a .454 Casull pistol is a better choice. It uses standard ammo, while the S&W 500 uses peculiar ammo that is only available from one maker and is very expensive. Furthermore, the regular ammo isn't really any better than the S&W 500 ammo. For reviews of both, see Chuck Hawks.

     
    Music CD profits
    Orin Kerr says:
    However, Professor Fisher estimates that for a typical $18 compact disc, about $7 goes to the retail store that sold you the disc; $3.75 goes back to the artists, performers, and composers; $1.50 goes into manufacturing the disc; $1.50 goes into the distribution of the disk from the manufacturer to the retailer; $1.50 pays for marketing the disc; $2.50 pays for the record company's overhead, and a whopping 19 cents is record company profit.

    ... Am I missing something, or does downloading hurt local retailers the most-- with artists, record companies, and manufacturers all taking their share of the hit as well?

    He's missing something. First of all, "profit" just means shareholder profit, and does not include things like executive salaries. The profits are expected to be small compared to retail prices. If they were larger, then the label would sign more bands. It doesn't mean much, except just a reflection of ordinary capitalist economics.

    Second, the royalties are often prepaid in advances and signing bonuses, with no additional payments coming from sales. Sometimes the artists even have to pay back money to cover record label marketing costs. So even if those average figures are correct, buying a CD does not necessarily put any money in the artist's pocket.

    Third, retail sales of shrink-wrapped jewel cases with music CDs are going to continue to decline because of changing technology. Horse-and-buggy sales decline when cheap automobiles hit the market. So yes, retailers are taking a hit, just like any other technology that booms, peaks, and declines.

    It is the music labels who are trying to keep the artists, retailers, and consumers from moving to better distribution technology. I happen to think that the artists will be in a better position if music downloading drives all the label bankrupt. Time will tell.


    Monday, Apr 28, 2003
     
    More on Santorum
    If an animal rights advocate wants a ban on fur, then it is fair to ask if he also objects to leather shoes. If a gun nut wants the right to own an assault rifle, then it is fair to ask if he also want a tank or a bazooka. If a tax protester wants a radical tax cut, then it is fair to ask if he is willing to pay any taxes at all. You don't really know what someone is advocating unless you know some limits on it.

    Likewise, those who advocate a constitutional right to sodomy need to explain whether that right would include other practices like adultery, incest, and zoophilia. That is the issue that Santorum raised, and the Santorum critics are being completely dishonest in refusing to address it.

    I live in California which has fairly liberal sex laws, and I have no complaints about it. Sodomy laws are not really enforced anywhere, so why does anybody care? Apparently they care because they want the courts to come out with a dictatorial ruling that will be useful in promoting a social change in attitudes. That's what I resent. I'll make up my own mind. Judges are the last people I'd want to listen to about social change.

     
    Great American publications
    Andy sends this list of the most influential American publications. He feels that publications have been more influential than presidents.

    PublicationAuthor(s)DateImportance
    Sinners in the Hands of an Angry GodJonathan Edwards1741Launched Great Awakening, greatest sermon of all-time
    Common SenseThomas Paine1776Solidified public opinion in support of the Revolution
    Federalist PapersHamilton, Madison, Jay1787Puts us into the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution
    LiberatorWilliam Lloyd Garrison1831Slavery was a sin, abonlitionist newspaper
    Democracy in AmericaAlexis de Toqueville1840Frenchman's insightful analysis of American life
    Self RelianceRalph Waldo Emerson1841transcendentalism: perfect world by relying on higher instincts
    The Life of Frederick DouglassFrederick Douglass1845Reveals life pior to the Civil War and the life of slaves
    North StarFrederick Douglass1847Abolitionist newspaper
    On Civil DisobedienceHenry David Thoreau1849Advocated passive resistance, for not paying tax during Mexican War
    Scarlet LetterNathaniel Hawthorne1850About Puritan mores set in 17th century Mass.
    Uncle Tom's CabinHarriet Beecher Stowe1851Showed cruelties of slavery, and abolition as a great cause
    Moby DickHerman Melville1851Individual's struggle with nature and fate and evil
    WaldenHenry David Thoreau1854Call for return to simple life, criticism of materialism of the time
    Leaves of GrassWalt Whitman1855Free verse explosion of democratic self-expression
    History of Plymouth PlantationWilliam Bradford1856History of one of the first American colonies
    Harper's WeeklyFletcher Harper1857leading weekly illustrated newspaper for families
    Ragged DickHoratio Alger1868Wealth is within the reach of everyone
    A Century of DishonorHelen Hunt Jackson1881The Plight of Native Americans
    Ladies Home JournalEdward Bok1883Offered advice to middle-class women
    Adventures of Huckleberry FinnMark Twain1884Mississippi River adventure observing man's inhumanity to man
    A Hazard of New FortunesWilliam Dean Howells1885The Plight of factory workers
    The BostoniansHenry James1885described life of the upper class
    Looking BackwardEdward Bellamy1888Utopian socialist novel w/ someone looking back from the future
    How the Other Half LivesJacob Riis1890photographer publishes illustrated book about poor in NYC
    The Red Badge of CourageStephen Crane1895Depicted horrors of the Civil War; published when Crane was 24
    The de Lome LetterEnrique Dubuy de Lome1898Spanish minister criticized President McKinley, publication fueled war
    The OctopusFrank Norris1901Described the power of railroads in the West
    The History of the Standard Oil CompanyIda Tarbell1904Techniques of John D. Rockefeller exposed
    The House of MirthEdith Wharton1905Exposed the foibles of upper-class New York
    The JungleUpton Sinclair1906Depicts factory life in Chicago (specifically meat-packing)
    O PioneersWilla Cather1913recollections of pioneers stressing the moral and spiritual
    Zimmermann NoteArthur Zimmermann1917Germany encourages an alliance w/ Mexico, publication fueled WWI
    The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald1925depicts disillusion about quickly acquired riches
    The Sound and the FuryWilliam Faulkner1929family plantation decadence as seen through eyes of idiot son
    Gone With the WindMargaret Mitchell1936recounted Civil War and Reconstruction from South's view
    Grapes of WrathJohn Steinbeck1939recreation of tragedy of Okies and Dust Bowl
    WitnessWhittaker Chambers1952tale of his Communist activism before converting to Christianity
    Atlas ShruggedAyn Rand1957praises self-determination (libertarian) rather than collectivism
    A Choice Not an EchoPhyllis Schlafly1964estab. modern conservative influence over Republican Party

    John writes:

    Isn't it funny that Andy cites his class as if it were an independent authority?

    How many of those publications has your class actually read? Few if any, I'll bet.

    Why have you omitted official documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the U.S. and the various states, Washington's Farewell Address, etc.? Apparently because you have been seized with another of your Platonic ideas - that non-presidential publications are inherently more influential than state papers. So you construct a list with that in mind, and sure enough - not a single president made the list! Imagine that!

    I notice you list William Bradford's History of the Plymouth Plantation with a date of 1856. That's only about 200 years off.

    Too many of your selections consist of anti-conservative oppression studies focusing on the "plight" of slaves, Indians, factory workers, etc.

    Meanwhile, there is one huge omission: Booker T. Washington's great Atlanta speech of 1895, which was reprinted in newspapers all over the country.

    Joe writes:
    Capitalism and Freedom - Friedman
    Road to Serfdom - Hayek (American?)
    The Lonely Crowd - Riesman
    Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media?)
    TS Eliot - several
    A Theory of Justice - Rawls
    Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
    Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    Pragmatism - William James
    John Dewey - several
    Charles Sanders Pierce - several
    George Boole - Laws of Thought
    Galbraith - Affluent Society

    The legal realists who dominated Harvard in early 1900's and created the modern case study system.

    Andy will not like many of the above. Of course, it goes without saying that there are tons of scientific works that have had much more influence than most of the works Andy lists. I agree that presidents are not typically deep thinkers, but an exception is Grant for his memoirs, justifiably considered a classic, though perhaps not particularly "influential."

    Andy writes:
    John wrote, "So you construct a list with that in mind, and sure enough - not a single president made the list! Imagine that!"

    Presidents aren't thinkers, and almost nothing written by any president is comparable to the work on the list. In fact, I cannot think of a work written solely by a president that is worth anything. John cites Washington's Farewell Address, which he didn't write; John cites the Constitution, but it was based on Montesquieu's work; John cites the Declaration of Independence, but it was a collective effort. At least John omits the Gettysburg Address, which was rightly ignored in its day.

    John wrote, "I notice you list William Bradford's History of the Plymouth Plantation with a date of 1856. That's only about 200 years off."

    Nope. It was first published in its complete form in 1856.

    John wrote, "Too many of your selections consist of anti-conservative oppression studies focusing on the "plight" of slaves, Indians, factory workers, etc."

    The list has many conservative works also -- "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"; "Common Sense"; "Federalist Papers"; "Atlas Shrugged"; "A Choice Not an Echo"; "Gone With the Wind"; "Witness"; "Huckleberry Finn". But the liberal works were very influential, and conservatives need to publish more and compete intellectually.

    I will post Andy's revised list.

    Sunday, Apr 27, 2003
     
    Revoke the Oscar
    There is a campaign to revoke the Oscar for the movie Bowling For Columbine. The movie was supposed to be a documentary, but include many dishonest distortions of the facts. Surely, Winged Migration was a better picture.

    Update: John sends this FoxNews article.


    Saturday, Apr 26, 2003
     
    Implanted ID chips
    This NY Times story wonders why more people don't have ID chips implanted in their pets. Several states are considering laws requiring the chips. The main purpose is for govt agencies to track dogs, cats, and owners in a big database, and to return wandering pets to their owners. Apparently owners only get the chips when they have to:
    Virtually every shelter in the country implants chips in captured strays or in pets put up for adoption. But private veterinarians say that requests from pet owners are still relatively rare. Most requests, they say, are made to comply with international regulations when taking animals abroad: all pets traveling to Britain and France, for example, must have both a blood test to check for disease and a microchip.
    This shouldn't be so surprising. The program is sold to the public based on benefit to the pet owners; but the benefit to owners is minimal. It is really a privacy-invading pet licensing scheme.
     
    Andy on Bush
    Andy writes:
    The Bushies have succeeded in removing all conservative advocacy from top official positions. Frist and Hastert advocate little to nothing. Bush and Cheney don't touch social issues. The outspoken conservatives Senators, Smith and Fitzgerald, have been pushed out of their seats. Every Republican in power is now just trying to hang on. Liberals are making their arguments and winning by default, as in the battle for the judiciary.

    This week there was the very odd announcement by a bigwig Republican that Bush's poll numbers will drop, probably even below Democratic rivals, but not to worry. What was the point of that? I wonder if Bush fears a challenge by McCain, who could probably beat Bush in open primary states again.

    A bit of history: no president who won the office while losing the popular vote, as Bush did, had any chance at reelection. Two were trounced in reelection (John Quincy Adams and Benjamin Harrison) and the third didn't run (Rutherford Hayes, also known as "Rutherfraud"). I bet in six months we'll be seeing polls indicating that McCain has a better chance of holding the White House for Republicans than Bush does. Will Bush then apply the same standard used for Smith and Fitzgerald to himself, so that the Party can nominate the candidate with the best chance of winning?

    Here's an interesting question about American history: why have the presidential terms been evenly split between Republicans and Democrats (since Andrew Jackson), and the Senate evenly split today? The odds of this happening by chance are infinitesimal. What causes it?

    Woody Allen has a joke in Annie Hall: Two old ladies are vacationing. One says, "The food here is so bad." The other says, "Yes, and the portions are so small."

    19th century history is irrelevant. More recently, Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), Clinton (1992), and Clinton (1996) all lost the popular vote. (Their opponents got more than 50% of the vote.) Election results are here and here.

    Andy disputes my definition of winning the popular vote, and argues that one can win the popular vote with a plurality of the votes.

    You can make any definition you want, I guess, but you should define your terms if you are using a peculiar definition. In my book, winning the electoral vote means getting a majority of the electoral vote, and winning the popular vote means getting a majority of the popular vote. If you want to count presidents who failed to win a plurality of the popular vote, then say so.

    If the election rules were such that the winner is decided by a plurality, then I guess that would be it. But otherwise, ordinary usage requires a majority, IMHO. If party A elects 48 senators, party B 47 senators, and party C 5 senators, then has party A won the election? I say no, because it didn't elect a majority. Parties B and C could form a coalition to take the majority and control the senate.

    In the 20th century, GW Bush (2000) and Kennedy (1960) failed to win a plurality of the popular vote.

     
    Scott Peterson
    Scott Peterson has been charged with murdering his pregnant wife Laci and their 8-month old fetus. The prosecutor wants the death penalty, but the death penalty depends on being able to prove both murders.

    Scott's motive was apparently that he wanted to abort the fetus, and she did not. If it had been the other way around, then Laci would have been acting entirely within her constitutional rights to kill the 8-month-old fetus without her husband's permission.

    A few anti-abortion activists are unhappy about this. If Scott can be executed for doing a late-term abortion, then it will start us down the slippery slope of suppressing female sexual freedom. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.


    Friday, Apr 25, 2003
     
    Judge rules in favor of Napster clone
    A federal district judge just dismissed an RIAA/MPAA lawsuit against Morpheus and Grokster. Meanwhile, Verizon is being forced to ID P2P users by another federal judge. Here is the Wash Post story.

    The RIAA will probably try to spin their Morpheus loss by saying that the judge found the users to be infringing copyrights. But he really didn't say that. He merely said that Morpheus was not responsible for possible user infringement.

    I still think that the music labels would have been better off cutting a deal with Napster. Napster was willing to pay a royalty on downloads. The legal theory for shutting down Napster was that if a P2P service monitors downloads, then it should enforce copyrights. So the gnutella P2P services were designed so that no one could monitor downloads. The music labels are just getting what they asked for!

     
    News
    A Forbes article says the Baby Bells are cheating consumers out of billions of dollars.

    A Univ. of Chicago student agreed to plead guilty to violating the rarely used 1996 Economic Espionage Act. I don't think that what he did should be prosecuted severely as economic espionage. He did not benefit financially, and it is not clear that anyone else did either. He just released some info that may allow some Canadians to watch American TV. Canada doesn't let the American satellite TV companies sell to Canadian customers, so I don't know what is so bad about Canadians watching American TV on their own.

    It's not enough to send missiles into Baghdad, we are planning to bomb the moon! Not for oil -- just water.


    Thursday, Apr 24, 2003
     
    The Double Helix
    Until this PBS Nova special on Photo 51, I didn't know how Watson and Crick dishonestly and maliciously stole the work of Rosalind Elsie Franklin. The importance of DNA was already known, and Linus Pauling and others had published models of it. The critical breakthru was some excellent x-ray crystallography photos taken by Franklin. Here is a neutral account in Physics Today. It says:
    In their 1953 paper, Watson and Crick state that they had been "stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King's College, London." That oblique acknowledgment misrepresented Franklin's role and, whatever its intention, left most people with the impression that her work mainly served to confirm that of Watson and Crick. It has to be one of the greatest understatements in the history of scientific writing.

    Franklin died before the Nobel Prize was awarded.

    I was expecting a story about how Franklin was a lowly grad student or lab technician carrying out Watson & Crick's instructions, or a poor brilliant woman who suffered from sex discrimination. In fact, she was an accomplished and respected scientist who was studying DNA on her own, and she had other significant accomplishments before she died at age 37.

    It was Watson's famous book, The Double Helix, that revealed how crucial it was to get Franklin's results, stab her in the back, and publish before anyone else gets her photos. The book became one of the big-selling science books of all time, but the first publisher rejected it because of the inaccurate and nasty comments about Franklin and others. (Franklin was dead at the time, and probably never knew how she was cheated out of a Nobel Prize.) Because of people outraged by Watson's book, a couple of other books were written to tell the true story of the discovery of the helical structure of DNA, and Franklin's role in it.

    If Watson and Crick had missed the boat, then Linus Pauling would have solved it as soon as he saw Franklin's work. But if Watson and Crick did not have Franklin's work, they never would have gotten to first base. It might have been several years before anyone solved it.

    Watson and Crick used Franklin's unpublished work without her knowledge or permission. Watson admits to that. Maybe you think that's ok in Watson's culture, whatever that means. But Watson and Crick dishonestly misrepresented her work and their dependence on it back in 1953, and have refused to give her proper credit ever since. They were worse than naive and arrogant; they were dishonest back-stabbers.

    Bob says that Watson honestly explained the whole story in his 1968 book. To ameliorate criticism over the nasty and belittling comments about Franklin in his book, Watson wrote an epilogue that said:

    "In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book), were often wrong. I want to say something here about her achievements. The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb. The sorting out of the A and B forms, by itself, would have made her reputation; even better was her 1952 demonstration using Patterson superposition methods, that the phosphate groups must be on the outside of the DNA molecule. ....

    Because I was then teaching in the States, I did not see her as often as did Francis, to whom she frequently came to for advice or when she had done something very pretty, to be sure he agreed with her reasoning. By then all traces of our early bickering were forgotten, and we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing that she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death." (p. 226)

    Sorry, but this epilogue doesn't cut it. Her unpublished work was essential to the Watson-Crick research. She showed them what they were doing wrong, and they got her photos. Watson and Crick were so excited by her photos that they immediately dropped what they were doing to publish a DNA model, as they were sure that the molecular structure of DNA would be obvious to Linus Pauling as soon as he got the photos. They should have made Franklin a co-author to their famous paper, and properly acknowledged her contribution.

    The above passage consists of self-serving back-handed compliments. Watson is happy to credit Franklin for unrelated work, and miserly when it was work on which he depended. The closest he comes is "The X-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb." That is academic-speak for "she was merely a technician".

    Here is an online account of the race for DNA.

    It is disillusioning that 2 of the heros of 20th century science turned out to be such jerks and liars. I am not even sure that they should get most of the credit for DNA. It was Oswald Avery who showed that was was the DNA that contained the genetic material, Linus Pauling who figured out how to model the molecular structure of such compounds, and who first proposed a helical structure for DNA, and it was Rosalind Franklin who did the experiments that showed precisely what was wrong with Pauling's model. Watson and Crick just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and put the pieces together after others had done all the brilliant work.

    George writes:

    This sounds like another one of those politically correct attempts to rewrite history in favor of some oppressed group. If Franklin were really so smart, why didn't she prove herself by doing later work and earning a Nobel Prize for that?
    Actually, there was another Nobel Prize awarded for later work that she collaborated on. She was not eligible, because the prizes are not awarded to dead people.

    It doesn't appear that her scientific career suffered from sex discrimination. The only discrimination story I saw was that she was that the college had some sort of men-only faculty dining room. But that really doesn't explain Wilkins and Watson mistreating her.

    There is also a story about Linus Pauling missing out because he was a commie and the US revoked his passport. But that story is also exaggerated. Pauling has visa problems once, but traveled to England at other times. This seems to be mainly a story a professional jealousy, egotism, and backstabbing.


    Wednesday, Apr 23, 2003
     
    Asbestos settlement
    A $100B settlement is in the works. 70 companies have already been bankrupted. All because our incompetent court cannot handle junk science claims.
     
    Santorum's remarks
    The bloggers and pundits are on the warpath against Penn. Sen. Rick Santorum for his remarks about sodomy laws. He said that he thinks that the US Supreme Court should uphold the Texas sodomy law because if it finds an unrestricted constitutional right to private consensual sexual acts, then it would also legalize incest, bigamy, polygamy, adultery, and bestiality. He thinks that such laws should be up to the political wishes of the people in each state, and not dictated by the US SC. Here is the transcript.

    Those on a PC witchhunt are saying he is bigoted, ignorant, unfit for office, etc, but none explain what the SC rationale would be for saying that there is constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, but not those other sexual acts. I don't see it.

    Maybe there ought to be a constitutional amendment legalizing whatever people do in the privacy of their own property. Such an amendment would legalize drug abuse, prostitution, and all sorts of other unpopular practices. Very few politicians would support it.

    I agree with Santorum that our political system puts these issues before the state legislatures, and the US SC should stay out of it. I hope he sticks to his guns, and refuses to apologize.

    George writes:

    Santorum's comments were offensive because he equated homosexuality with incest. Homosexuality is an innate orientation. Incest is a crime. He and his ultra-right-wing Republican allies want to police the bedroom, and he shouldn't be allowed to stay in office if he says such prejudiced things. He sounds like Trent Lott.
    Santorum was careful to distinguish between orientation and acts. Sure, incest is a crime. That's the point. It is a crime even if it is between consenting adults. Likewise with bestiality. In some states, at least. Santorum is not trying to impose his personal views. He wants laws defined by the usual political process, instead of getting social engineering changes dictated by unelected SC judges. He finishes the interview with:
    I would put it back to where it is, the democratic process. If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right. But I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in.
    I don't agree with the Supreme Court coming in either. Most of the states have now gotten rid of their anti-sodomy laws, and the SC does not need to cook up some phony constitutional principle to expedite the process.

    This Slate column supports Santorum's legal argument, and ridicules the gay rights lobby for sidestepping the issue. (Update: He has more comments here. He notes that some people are hung up on the distinction between child molesting and incest, but that just obscures the main issue. He gives an example of an 18-year-old girl who went to jail for seducing an uncle.)

    This NY Times op-ed has the usual idiotic attack on GOP hypocrisy. But the main complaint is that Santorum meant exactly what he said:

    Unlike the former majority leader, Mr. Santorum didn't slip up and say something in plain English that every good Republican knows must only be said in code. Unlike Republican appeals to racist voters, Republican appeals to homophobic voters are overt.
    So how is it hypocrisy? Somebody needs a dictionary. It would be hypocrisy if Santorum said something that he didn't believe.

    When liberals disagree with someone, and don't want to articulate why, their favorite epithets are intolerance, ignorance, and hypocrisy. But it is a good bet that the people using these terms are prime examples of intolerance, ignorance, and hypocrisy. This op-ed, like all the other attacks on Santorum, takes quotes out of context to misrepresent what he said. Eg, Santorum said:

    And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. ... It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold ...
    The op-ed quotes this as:
    A right to privacy, he said, "doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution" — for gays, straights, anybody.
    The 4A protects against unreasonable searches. That is surely a right to privacy in the Constitution that Santorum would not dispute. What Santorum said was "this right to privacy", in reference to a hypothetical SC ruling. The op-ed dishonestly misquotes Santorum because it refuses to address the ramifications of such a ruling, and the possibility of those ramifications was really Santorum's main point.

    George writes:

    You are missing the point. Gay people are deeply offended at the suggestion that they should be locked up just because they are gay. Just read the Andrew Sullivan or Jacob Levy blogs if you want their point of view.
    I guess Jacob Levy is saying he is gay on the Volokh blog. Levy says he agrees with someone who says he is gay and against sodomy laws, and in the same sentence says he disagrees with someone else who says he is not gay and against sodomy laws. But it is a little hard to tell. Both Sullivan and Levy stubbornly refuse to address Santorum's main points, and misleadingly twist his words into something else.

    Sure, the laws on sodomy and adultery are silly and archaic and so little prosecuted that they aren't worth debating. These laws could not be prosecuted without gross invasions of privacy. Everyone understands that. But none of these Santorum critics can explain how the US SC could read into the US Constitution the distinctions on private sexual practices that they want.

    Update: I see Sullivan and Levy and accusing Santorum defenders like Stanley Kurtz of ignoring the main issue. Sullivan says:

    Stanley simply ignores the implications of Santorum's full comments, which clearly place Santorum in the position of believing that homosexual relationships should be criminalized, as well as equating homosexuality with child abuse and bestiality.
    Santorum did say that the definition of marriage has never included homosexuality, bestiality, or child abuse. He doesn't include bigamy or polygamy in this list because those have been included in the definition in many countries (and even in Utah). He is not equating homosexuality, bestiality, and child abuse. I guess you could say he is associating them, but so what? It is Sullivan and his friends who are lobbying to redefine marriage. To debate the subject you have to be willing to say what it is and what it is not. I suspect that Sullivan doesn't want to do that, because he doesn't want to reveal the radical extent of his agenda.
     
    Chilling effect of RIAA lawsuits
    This NY Times story tells about students who were intimidated into shutting down academically useful computer networks. And this C-Net story says the Napster investors are being sued by the record labels. And this AP story says students have been cut off the internet just because the university got a copyright complaint.

    We are losing our free speech rights just because of greedy corporations trying to control people listening to music.


    Tuesday, Apr 22, 2003
     
    XML sucks
    I have an xml rss feed for this blog, but not everyone likes xml. Eg, see http://www.xmlsucks.org/.

    A Slashdot critic says:

    There is a point with critics: Unlike Latex or HTML which
    can be written easily by hand, XML can become too bloated to
    be authored directly by humans.

    Similar problem with MathML:

    Latex:    $x^5+3x-9=0$

    MathML:

    <mrow>
      <mrow>
        <msup>
          <mi>x</mi>
          <mn>5</mn>
        </msup>
        <mo>+</mo>
        <mrow>
          <mn>3</mn>
          <mo>&InvisibleTimes;</mo>
          <mi>x</mi>
        </mrow>
        <mo>-</mo>
        <mn>9</mn>
      </mrow>
      <mo>=</mo>
      <mn>0</mn>
    </mrow>

    You can write complicated formulas in Latex directly but it is
    almost impossible to do so in MathML, where one has to rely
    on tools to generate it (i.e. export it with Mathematica or
    TeX -> MathML converters).
    No one is going to want to edit that by hand. And if no one edits by hand, then why the ascii? It would have been better to have a simple binary format.

    XML is like the Windows registry -- it seems like a good idea until you see how people abuse it.

     
    Dog stories
    John sends stories about man bites dog and man arrested for barking at dog.
     
    Patent agents
    I am a patent agent. People sometimes ask how that differs from being a patent attorney.

    The federal govt licenses people to practice law before the US Patent Office (USPTO). Those with current licenses are called patent practitioners. If a patent practitioner is also licensed to practice state law in some state, then he is also called a patent attorney; otherwise he is called a patent agent.

    Because federal law expressly provides that patent agents can practice patent law without a state license, and because state regulations are preempted by the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Florida law restricting patent agents. See Sperry v. Florida, 373 U.S. 379 (1963). This opinion makes it clear that patent agents can draft and prosecute patents before the USPTO, advise clients on patents, draft patentability opinions, record patent assignments, and otherwise practice patent law as it relates to USPTO actions.

    Patent attorneys sometimes jealously argue that patent agents are narrowly limited in what they can do, and that patent agents cannot draft license agreements, write infringement opinions, or assert attorney-client privileges. However, there is no controlling legal authority for any of these positions. The USPTO allows patent agents to record licenses and assignments, so giving appropriate advice to clients should be covered by the Sperry decision.

    It seems possible that some state like Texas, that aggressively restricts the unauthorized practice of law, could try to prohibit patent agents from negotiating licenses or writing infringement opinions. But none has, too my knowledge. Here in California, prosecution for the unauthorized practice of law is targeted mainly at those who lie about their credentials.

    The rules about what can be kept confidential under a privilege are trickier, and widely misunderstood. The attorney-client privilege is only supposed to protect the confidentiality of communications made by a client to an attorney, for the purpose of obtaining legal advice or a legal opinion. The privilege belongs to the client, not the attorney. (There is a related work-product privilege that arises in litigation.) At one time, there was no patent attorney privilege. United States v. United Shoe Machinery Corporation, 89 F.Supp. 357 (D. Mass. 1950). In American Standard Inc. v. Pfizer Inc., 828 F.2d 734, 3 U.S.P.Q.2d 1817 (Fed. Cir. 1987), an opinion letter which was not signed, not on letterhead and recommended no legal action was found not to be privileged because it "did not reveal, directly or indirectly, the substance of any confidential communication."

    Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be any rationale or precedent for treating the privilege differently for patent attorneys and agents. If it were really true that an inventor could only fully protect the rights to his invention by consulting a patent attorney instead of a patent agent, then it would frustrate the intent of Congress in licensing non-attorneys to prosecute patents before the USPTO. See In Re Ampicillin Antitrust Litigation, 81 F.R.D. 377 (D.D.C. 1978).

    So I occasionally write a patent opinion letter.


    Monday, Apr 21, 2003
     
    Online bill paying
    This NY Times article tells how banks are promoting online bill paying. I think that they still have a ways to go, before it is more reliable and convenient than ordinary paper bill paying. I looked that Bank of America and Yahoo, and they are more trouble than they are worth for me. Mailing paper checks is still a lot easier and faster.
     
    Town opposes Patriot Act
    This WashPost story about how the Arcata California town council opposes global warming, the Iraq war, and cooperating with govt subpoenas for the records of terrorists. I think they'd change their minds if they ever saw any terrorists in their little town.
     
    Edgar F. Codd died
    Edgar F. Codd, the IBM SQL inventor, died. The Si Valley story says:
    In 1953, Codd moved to Canada, frustrated that no one insisted that Sen. Joseph McCarthy produce proof of his charges that Communists were embedded in the U.S. government.
    Sounds a little kooky. At least he later moved back to the USA and became a citizen, so I guess he eventually read about the proof.

    Sunday, Apr 20, 2003
     
    Matrix sequels
    The movie sequel The Matrix Reloaded will be out soon, so check out this explanation of some of the dubious science in the movie.
     
    Deconstructionism
    Phyllis writes:
    Roger's definition of deconstructionism may be the what the deconstructionists would like us to believe. But as it is taught and practiced in college English departments (probably the most corrupt of all academic departments, well, anyway just as corrupt as Women's Studies), deconstructionism means that we don't have to consider what the author may have meant when he wrote the text; that's irrelevant! All that matters is what the reader would like to think it means. Ergo, there is no such thing as a classic.

    This would parallel the feminist legal theory on sexual harassment: it doesn't matter what the man did; he should be punished for what the woman thinks about what he did. As I explain in one of my chapters in Feminist Fantasies, they have converted the reasonable man rule to the unreasonable woman rule.

     
    Rape statistics
    Joe writes:
    I heard Schumer castigating some hapless Bush judicial nominee for a comment he made about rape victims getting pregnant. What are the real stats on how many "rape pregnancies" there are - Schumer said something like 36,000 per year. I'm suspicious that a lot of these encounters get "re-characterized " after the fact.
    Joe writes:
    You're right to be suspicious [about rape stats]. There are no "real stats" on this because there is no independent third-party review of such claims. Wherever and whenever abortion has been allowed on the ground of rape or incest, the uncorroborated say-so of the woman is accepted without question.
    Rape pregnancies are extremely rare. The number would be closer to 36 cases a year, not 36k cases a year. I've never even heard of any cases. When a woman reports a rape, she is given a morning-after pill (or equivalent) and pregnancy does not occur.
     
    TiVo evangelists
    Here is a NY Times article about how PVR users are so happy about their PVRs that they tell all their friends to buy one, and PVR market share is very small.

    It is an odd phenomenon. Having a PVR is like having a color TV while everyone else has black-and-white. Actually, I think the difference is bigger. It makes the difference between TV being watchable and unwatchable. It is easy to understand why PVR users are happy with the product. It is harder to explain why market share is so small. The article doesn't try to explain that, except to note that TiVo hasn't advertised since 2000.


    Saturday, Apr 19, 2003
     
    Biased polls
    This blog complains about a biased WashPost poll. Meanwhile, NPR just had one on taxes that has lots of problems. The poll tested tax knowledge by asking some questions like whether the respondent understood the difference between the federal income tax and the payroll tax. I understand that they are collected and accounted somewhat differently, but the Social Security tax is a federal tax on income. Both taxes are collected primarily from employee salary withholding, and both just put money into the federal treasury. I don't think there is much difference.

    The poll gets on thinner ice when it tries to summarize policy arguments, such as:

    There is a proposal in Washington now to do away with personal income taxes on corporate dividends. Dividends are what many companies pay to owners of their stock. ...

    Here are arguments on both sides. (People who want to do away with the tax say that the corporations have already paid tax on the money, so it’s unfair double taxation to have individuals pay income tax on it, too). (Opponents of the proposal say almost all the benefits of eliminating the dividends tax would go to wealthy people, and doing away with it would cost too much). Having heard both arguments, would you say you favor or oppose eliminating the tax on dividends?

    I don't think that is a very good statement of the arguments. The double taxation argument is a lousy argument, as lots of money is double taxed. People want to do away with the tax in order to encourage investment in dividend-paying corporations by making the taxation more similar to other types of investments, and thereby create jobs and stimulate the economy.

    John writes:

    The difference is that paying the SS tax entitles the payer to receive valuable benefits in return - a pension, annuity, disability and survivor benefits. The benefits are roughly proportional to the amount paid in. As a class, payroll (SS and Medicare) taxpayers get all their money back, and then some.

    Paying income tax, OTOH, does not give the payer any benefit in return, other than the intangible benefit of living in the U.S. Only the income tax pays for the cost of running the U.S. govt. People who pay only payroll taxes are freeloaders who pay nothing toward the cost of running our government. That's the huge difference between the two taxes.

    No, I don't see a huge difference there. Retired people are not getting their money back -- they are getting mostly getting money from the SS taxes of current workers. The SS trust fund is an accounting fiction.

    But even if I accept that there is a difference between how the SS tax is spent and how the rest of the federal income tax is spent, the SS tax is certainly a federal income tax. It is federal, it is a tax, and it is a tax on income. You pay it to IRS just like the rest of the federal income tax.

    Joe writes:

    If you look at the mismatch in future workers v. benefits, it's hard to believe that evil rich people will get all of the promised benefits. If future benefits are cut, it will be at the top end. So I don't buy the argument that the SS tax (when the benefit side is considered) is regressive - that only makes sense if the benefits are ultimately paid out. So SS tax looks a lot like the income tax to me.
    John writes:
    I did not say that retired people get "their" money back. But (1) they do get money back and (2) the money they get back is in exchange for the money they put in and (3) the amount of money they get back is a function of the amount of money they put in.

    All this is true but beside the point. The key difference between the two taxes is that the FICA (SS & Medicare) tax entitles the payer to an earned benefit - an entitlement - the value of which, for most people, exceeds what they pay in.

    Of course SS/Med is not regressive when the benefit side is considered - and my whole point is, the benefit side has to be considered. It is wrong to consider the tax side alone and then call it a regressive tax when compared to the income tax.

    The FICA tax purchases an individual benefit; the income tax does not.

    Ok, there is some relationship between SS taxes and future benefits. I am not sure that the relationship will still be there when I retire. But anyway, so what? Gasoline taxes are used for road maintenance. Property taxes are used for schools. Sales taxes are used for police. Income taxes are used to fund foreign wars. Cigarette taxes are used for anti-smoking campaigns. Some of these things may seem like benefits to you and some may not. There are all taxes.

    How do you answer this question, which is designed to test your knowledge of taxes:

    13. When you think of the federal taxes that you pay, do you think the amount deducted from your paycheck for Social Security and Medicare is part of the federal income tax, or isn’t it part of the federal income tax, or don’t you know enough to say?
    I say Yes, the SS tax is absolutely part of the federal income tax. But the later questions seem to imply that the pollster thinks that the answer should be No.

    John writes:

    The fundamental difference is that SS and Medicare benefits are placed in individual accounts, and paid out of those accounts to beneficiaries. All the other so-called "benefits" you cite are just general social improvements that no individual taxpayer has any particular claim to and may never benefit from.

    Another way to look at it is that no one can draw SS or Medicare benefits unless they (or their spouse or parent) paid tax into the system and that tax was credited to their individual account. In the case of those other general social improvements you listed, many people benefit who never paid any taxes into the system.

    If you say SS is part of the federal income tax, you would be wrong. The federal income tax is contained in Title 26, Subtitle A, Chapter 1, Sections 1-1563 of the U.S. Code. The FICA tax is contained in Title 26, Subtitle C, Chapter 21, Sections 3101-3128 of the U.S. Code.

     
    Google maps
    John points out that Google now has links to maps. Eg, you can search on my phone number, and it gives my address and maps to my house. The Yahoo and MapQuest maps have the same error, so I guess that they are both derived from the same database.

    Another useful and little-known feature is the Google Glossary.

     
    Bible does not translate
    Andy writes:
    A fundamental reason for opposing a multilingual America is the impossibility of precisely translating our Rule of Law into another language. To translate the Constitution, for example, is to revise it. As languages degrade -- which no one else here recognizes -- the problem magnifies.

    Since this is Good Friday, it is worth noting that the translations of the passing of Jesus obstruct understanding it. Jesus did not "die" in the original Greek. He delivered over his "pneuma" from betrayal ("paradidomi").

    Thinking is shaped by language, and the incorrect concept of Jesus "dying on the cross" is the result of translation imprecision.

    Even "spirit" is an inadequate translation of "pneuma". "Ghost" is better, and was used in the King James Version. Liberals won a victory in substituting "spirit" for "ghost" in modern times.

    John replies:
    For this reason, according to Bernard Lewis, there is no authorized translation of the Koran. Only the original Arabic will do. Thus, the Saudi-funded madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan train illiterate boys to memorize the Koran in a language they do not understand. Under similar reasoning, the Catholic Church for centuries opposed any translation of the Bible (except the Latin Vulgate, which the Church believed was more authentic than the original Greek).

    Greek: paredwken to pneuma
    Latin: tradidit spiritum
    King James: he gave up the ghost
    Modern English: he gave up his spirit

    You do not explain what is wrong with these translations. The verb means to give up, transmit, deliver, hand over, etc. According to Bible scholars, this phrase is meant to suggest two meanings. One meaning is clearly to die or expire, and the phrase is sometimes translated "he expired." A second meaning is to hand over or deliver his spirit to God the Father (which of course is just a poetic way of saying he died).

    Spirit and ghost are synonymous. You haven't explained what is the problem.

    That's the beauty of his argument -- if Andy's right, then it cannot be explained in english.

    Andy writes:

    This debate will only be of interest to those who agree that translation does change meaning. Frankly, I'm not sure who else here accepts this basic premise.

    John wrote, "For this reason, according to Bernard Lewis, there is no authorized translation of the Koran. Only the original Arabic will do. Thus, the Saudi-funded madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan train illiterate boys to memorize the Koran in a language they do not understand."

    This may explain why Islam is growing so fast -- it preserves the origin meaning of the Koran. This is exactly what conservatives argue for about the Constitution.

    John wrote, "Under similar reasoning, the Catholic Church for centuries opposed any translation of the Bible (except the Latin Vulgate, which the Church believed was more authentic than the original Greek)."

    The Catholic Church thrived in adhering to Latin, up until 1965. It's atrophied since abandoning Latin.

    My response [to John's translations]: Each successive translation diluted and changed the meaning. In another thousand years, it will be incorrectly translated as "he died."

    The Greek conceptually means he "delivered over, due to betrayal, his wind." It does not mean that Jesus died. Nor does it describe Jesus' soul as a stationary or collectivist spirit.

    John wrote, "Spirit and ghost are synonymous. You haven't explained what is the problem."

    Spirit and ghost are not identical in meaning. John defaults on this issue by pretending there is no difference. Spirit is defective for two reasons. First, it has a collective connotation, as in "school spirit." Second, it lacks the active connotation of "ghost".

    Roger wrote, "How exactly does it promote some liberal agenda?"

    "Spirit" is a liberal favorite. E.g., let's apply the spirit of the Constitution rather than its text.

    John writes:
    No one doubts that translation *can* change meaning. But it is also true that even within a single language, the meaning or common understanding attached to words can change drastically over time. Even today, hundreds of English words have a different meaning in the UK than in the USA.

    How do you preserve original meaning by teaching illiterate boys to mouth words in a language they don't understand? And how do you decide what is the original meaning of jihad when Muslims themselves do not agree? Does it mean a holy war against the infidels, or does it mean peaceful personal striving and self-purification?

    The Church has (reluctantly) permitted the laity to read translations of the Bible in their own language since the 1600s. The real controversy was a century earlier, when the first English Bible was translated by William Tyndale from the Greek (instead of the Latin). Tyndale was persecuted by the Church and finally burned at the stake for heresy.

    To say that he died is not incorrect, just less poetic.

    This is too Platonic for me -- I don't know what you mean.

    And what is the connotation of "wind", which is how you translated the Greek word pneuma? Clearly, in this sentence, he gave up his ghost, spirit, wind, soul, life - i.e., he died.

    "Spirit" is a liberal favorite. E.g., let's apply the spirit of the Constitution rather than its text.
    That is a different meaning of the word spirit. But since you brought it up, on what grounds do you attack the USA PATRIOT Act if not the spirit of the 4th Amendment? It certainly does not violate the text.
    Those differences in Engligh are declining, and English is becoming more standardized as a result of TV, movies, internet, etc.

    You cannot teach someone by using word he doesn't understand. If you cannot explain a concept in your own words, then you do not understand it. Period. There is no such thing as a concept that can only be described in one way.

    Andy, what makes you think that the Greek was accurate? It was written many years after the fact, and after the stories had been retold and translated many times. It is about like someone today writing an account of the US Civil War in Swahili using an oral tradition of a few people.

    Did he die, or not? Unless you can explain the sense in which he died, you cannot possibly understand it.

    Andy writes:

    John replied "No one doubts that translation *can* change meaning. ..."

    Obviously that's not what I said, which was that "translation *does* change meaning." There's little point in discussing the distortions caused by translation with someone who pretends that translations don't change meaning.

    Also, it's contradictory to oppose translating American laws into another language, and yet maintain that translations of Islam, the Mass, Church documents, Bible, etc., are harmless.

    Math can be translated without changing meaning. Other things also.

    Laws can be translated and explained. Eg, your law school textbooks. But:

  • English is the world's standard language, so translating into English makes a lot more sense than translating out of English.
  • Laws are peculiar in that politicians, courts, and others need a reference document, and explanations and translations cannot be a complete substitute for the original.
  • It would be very expensive to translate all our laws to another language.
  • We want to encourage people to learn English, as those who do not are at a big disadvantage in the 21st century.

    John writes:

    Andy seems to be saying that translation always and necessarily changes, distorts, and degrades the original text. That is an astounding claim which illustrates once again how Andy has internalized the philosophy of Plato rather than Aristotle.

    Andy is essentially saying that translation is impossible, that we can never fully know or understand anything written in another language. But why stop there? The same Platonic approach dictates that we can never fully know or understand anything written or said in our own language, either. Language is constantly changing. It is like the ancient Greek paradox that you can't step into the same river twice. Which is another way of saying we can never know anything, period.

    Contrary to Andy, many language experts think the King James Bible improved on the original. Which is not to say it doesn't contain errors; of course it does - but so did the original. But now, after 400 years of language evolution, the KJB needs to be translated into modern English.

    You don't solve the problem by banning translation. Even maintaining concepts in our own language requires a constant process of study, refinement, and revision.

    Thus, for example, conservatives oppose bilingualism in part because Spanish-speaking people have no concept of "limited government" or "less government." The point is not that there are no Spanish words for a literal translation (not knowing Spanish, I have no idea), but that Spanish speaking people don't have the shared history and cultural references to make those terms meaningful.

    But millions of English speaking Americans - perhaps a majority - have no real understanding of those terms either, and even people who think they support limited government strongly disagree about how to apply the concept to current problems.

    "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Towne v. Eisner, 245 U.S. 418 (1918)

    Joe writes:

    Andy is sounding like a deconstructionist to me.
    Andy's approach is similar to literary deconstructionism:
    Deconstructionism - An approach to literature which suggests that literary works do not yield fixed, single meanings, because language can never say exactly what we intend it to mean. Deconstructionism seeks to destabilize meaning by examining the gaps and ambiguities of the language of a text. Deconstructionists pay close attention to language in order to discover and describe how a variety of possible readings are generated by the elements of a text.

    Andy writes:

    Folks, you're arguing against the position I took for Eagle Forum in our Supreme Court brief: "An idea does not pass from one language to another without change." Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, Author's Preface, xxxiii (J.E. Crawford Flitch transl. 1921) (quoted in the brief).

    This argument, in fact, was central to the brief. "See Gregory Rabassa, "No Two Snowflakes are Alike: Translation as Metaphor" at 1, reprinted in John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, The Craft of Translation 1 (1989) ("[W]e should certainly not expect that a word in one language will find its equal in another."). ... Translating key terms of the Constitution would modify them without complying with the amendment process. Moreover, translating the 200-plus years of judicial interpretations into a different language would change their meaning. Creating an official language other than English would require translating the Constitution - and would effectively modify it without complying with its requirements for amendment."

    There is nothing "deconstructionist" or even seriously debatable about this. In denying this, you give away the main defense against the translation of American laws into languages other than English.

    Translating laws is usually no problem as long as the meaning is clear. The difficulty is that the meaning is often not clear. Eg, just look at the laws on student privacy and terrorism. They are hopelessly ambiguous, and deliberately so. They would be hard to translate only because people won't agree about the english meaning of the text.

  • Friday, Apr 18, 2003
     
    Zoophilia
    The Philadelphia newspaper says:
    Zoosexuality is described in the "Zoo" community as a sexual orientation, in the same category as hetero-, homo- and bisexuality. The profound emotional and/or physical attraction to animals can be manifested in many ways, including sex. Not everyone has an emotional attachment to his or her animal lover; some just do it for the sexual release.
    Soon, people will call me a bigot if I object to man/dog marriages.
     
    SARS alarm
    People are getting very agitated over SARS. The CDC now says that there are only 35 probably cases in the USA, and only 1 confirmed transmission in the USA. All the other cases are imported from Asia. Reason magazine says the problem is that info now spreads faster than a disease.
     
    Iraq oil for food
    I didn't know that the UN "oil for food" program in Iraq was just a big corrupt scam. See the NY Times op-ed.

    Thursday, Apr 17, 2003
     
    Atkins diet guru died
    Dr. Robert Atkins died of injuries related to a fall. For 30 years, his diet was attacked by the AMA and others as dangerous and no good. Actually, there is good science behind his diet.

    Here is the NY Times obituary.

     
    Registry cleaners
    A lot of programs leave unused junk in your Msft Window registry. Some of this can be automatically removed -- namely references to files that don't exist. There are lots of utilities to do this, and I always assumed that they did more or less the same thing. But actually, most of these are sloppy, and sometimes even remove good entries. Here is a comparison.
     
    Does the Patriot Act violate student rights?
    Some people claim that the Patriot Act seriously limits student rights that were granted by FERPA.

    Andy writes:

    Are you familiar with the PATRIOT Act's modifications of FERPA? The PATRIOT Act eliminated the notice requirement, allowing DOJ to obtain ex parte orders to examine student records without opposition or real accountability.

    A Resolution in the New Mexico legislatures attempts to nullify aspects of the PATRIOT Act (House Joint Memorial 40). It also calls for accountability, demanding "(5) the number of times education records have been obtained from public schools and institutions of higher learning in New Mexico pursuant to Section 507 of the USA Patriot Act."

    John responds:

    What do you mean by saying "The PATRIOT Act eliminated the notice requirement" of FERPA? I am unaware of any notice requirement.

    In general, FERPA requires consent for disclosure of education records to third parties. But even before PATRIOT, there was a list of exceptions where consent is not required. Where does it say that the student is entitled to notice whenever disclosure is made pursuant to one of these lawfully recognized exceptions?

    Section 507 of the PATRIOT Act added one more exception, for student records relevant to investigation of terrorism, provided a court order is first obtained. However, FERPA already authorized the release of education records pursuant to a court order without the student's consent. How, precisely, did PATRIOT change FERPA?

    Since the privacy of education records is granted by FERPA in the first place, it would seem that students have no grounds to complain about any exceptions that FERPA may contain. It is a straightforward application of the famous Rehnquist dictum:

    "[W]here the grant of a substantive right is inextricably intertwined with the limitations on the procedures which are to be employed in determining that right, a litigant in the position of appellee must take the bitter with the sweet." Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U.S. 134, 152-154 (1974).

    I found the New Mexico resolution here. The resolution deceptively and dishonestly uses the incorrect word "immigrants" instead of the correct word "aliens." The resolution comes out of the leftist mindset that demands open borders and no distinction on the basis of citizenship. In any event, New Mexico can do nothing to "nullify" the PATRIOT Act.

    Let's not lose sight of the fact that we do want the U.S. government to keep close tabs on foreign students in this country. That implies giving the govt access to their education records as a condition of their student visa.

    I haven't followed this issue closely. It just seems to me that, with all the leftist whining about the Patriot Act, they'd be able to point to some specific way in which it infringes our liberties. Mainly, I've heard:

    1. some foreign terrorists are being held as enemy combatants in Guantanamo under conditions that are worse that what a citizen criminal defendant or POW would get.

    2. the FBI can get library records of foreign terrorists, with some potential for abuse.

    No. 1, I agree with. No. 2, I think there should be some better safeguards, but overall I think the effect will be positive. The FBI may abuse my privacy, but I know that the Santa Cruz libraries were abusing my privacy until this law was passed, so the net benefit is favorable.

    I agree with John that if the Patriot Act gives the feds the power to determine whether a foreigner on a student visa is complying with his visa requirements, then it is a good law. Some of the opposition to the Patriot Act comes from people who think, for ideological reasons, that aliens should be able to immigrate to the USA on student visas, and no one should be able to check up on them. I don't agree with those folks.

    Andy writes:

    As to the substance of Section 507 of the PATRIOT Act, you can read it here.

    It enables federal employees to obtain access to student records without a warrant, without showing cause, and without giving the student any means to object. All three are an outrage.

    The govt need only certify that it has reason to see the records, in an ex parte application to a court.

    Fortunately, states are rising to the task and passing legislation of their own to restore some accountability here. Institutions are being told to notify students.

    John wrote, "But even before PATRIOT, there was a list of exceptions where [student] consent is not required. Where does it say that the student is entitled to notice whenever disclosure is made pursuant to one of these lawfully recognized exceptions?"

    Most of those exceptions are inconsequential, as in forwarding records when a student transfers to a new school. The ability to disclose records pursuant to subpoenas entails notice to the student per the subpoena.

    John wrote, "However, FERPA already authorized the release of education records pursuant to a court order without the student's consent. How, precisely, did PATRIOT change FERPA?"

    This is explained above. It's the difference between an ex parte court order and one with notice, and between a court order based on cause and one without.

    John concludes, "Let's not lose sight of the fact that we do want the U.S. government to keep close tabs on foreign students in this country. That implies giving the govt access to their education records as a condition of their student visa."

    The PATRIOT Act applies to law-abiding American citizens, not just aliens.

    Roger wrote, "I agree with John that if the Patriot Act gives the feds the power to determine whether a foreigner on a student visa is complying with his visa requirements, then it is a good law."

    Repealing the Fourth Amendment would confer such power. Would that make it "a good law"?

    John writes:

    Andy, the above link summarizes all the FERPA exceptions, most of which predated PATRIOT. Hence, it does not explain how (or if) Sec. 507 of the PATRIOT Act changed existing law. Section 507 of PATRIOT can be found here.

    It creates a new exception to FERPA, but requires a court order. So I don't know what you mean when you say "It [PATRIOT] enables federal employees to obtain access to student records without a warrant, without showing cause." Seems to me the feds do need a warrant and they would have to show cause to get the warrant.

    Suppose the Feds are surveilling a foreign student who they suspect is involved in terrorism. You want to tip off the student so he can disappear into the population of 11 million illegal aliens? Why?

    I don't understand what "per the subpoena" means. My question remains: Does the student has a right to be notified when his education records are disclosed to a third party?

    John wrote, "However, FERPA already authorized the release of education records pursuant to a court order without the student's consent. How, precisely, did PATRIOT change FERPA?" This is explained above. It's the difference between an ex parte court order and one with notice, and between a court order based on cause and one without.
    Sorry, I still don't get it.
    The PATRIOT Act applies to law-abiding American citizens, not just aliens.
    That is not the issue. My question is how did PATRIOT change the FERPA rights of law-abiding American citiznes?

    It is a leftwing myth that PATRIOT violates the 4th Amendment. In fact, the 4th Amendment expressly permits searches and seizures if they are EITHER (1) reasonable OR (2) authorized by warrant (court order).

    Andy writes:
    The tip-off is the phrase it "seems to me." You cite the link, and it expressly states that the only requirement is a certification by a federal official: "An application ... shall certify that there are specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that the education records are likely to contain information described in paragraph (1)(A)." In other words, a federal agent makes his (biased) determination and submits a certification for rubber stamping by the court. Contrast that with the requirement for a search warrant, which requires a neutral magistrate himself to determine if a fair probability exists that contraband will be found in the place to be searched.

    Moreover, search warrants must be served on the suspects so they can object and ensure conformance with its terms. (Limits on search warrants are routinely exceeded.) Roger, of all people, should recognize the need for this: he was unlawfully arrested in violation of his neighbor's TRO!

    John wrote, "Suppose the Feds are surveilling a foreign student who they suspect is involved in terrorism. You want to tip off the student so he can disappear into the population of 11 million illegal aliens? Why?"

    I want illegal aliens to be arrested, not surreptitiously surveilled in an inept manner. More importantly, I don't want education records of American citizens invaded under the PATRIOT Act, which it allows.

    John wrote, "Does the student has a right to be notified when his education records are disclosed to a third party?"

    The answer is "yes", unless it is a true emergency or the access is unobjectionable.

    I wrote, This is explained above. It's the difference between an ex parte court order and one with notice, and between a court order based on cause and one without.

    John replied, "Sorry, I still don't get it."

    I don't know how to explain this any better. Is all the power going to reside with a federal official, or will there be the checks and balances of due process?

    John concluded, "It is a leftwing myth that PATRIOT violates the 4th Amendment. In fact, the 4th Amendment expressly permits searches and seizures if they are EITHER (1) reasonable OR (2) authorized by warrant (court order)."

    No, that's not what the Fourth Amendment allows. It expressly requires "probable cause." Allowing a partisan to decide does not qualify.

    Roger wrote, the "is only for a terrorism investigation."

    The PATRIOT Act defines "terrorism" far more broadly than the real meaning of the term.

    John sends this story:
    Washington - House Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. said Thursday that he would fight any effort now to make permanent many of the expanded police powers enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of the USA Patriot Act.

    "That will be done over my dead body," said Sensenbrenner in an interview.


    Wednesday, Apr 16, 2003
     
    Blog software
    By popular request, I am posting the software I use for this blog. See the RogBlog link on the left margin. I'd appreciate any feedback. It is just alpha software, and is only suitable for a simple blog like mine, running on a simple server.

    Tuesday, Apr 15, 2003
     
    Illinois Senator Quits
    Andy writes:
    Last night, the brilliant email service of the "Illinois Leader" had the scoop: Peter Fitzgerald will not run for reelection. It's a devastating blow to the Republican Party's power in the Senate, because the Democrats will likely pick up the seat. It could even strengthen the Democratic resolve to filibuster Bush's appointment to replace Rehnquist.

    So what's the reason for the surprise departure of the young conservative, who fought so hard to get there? As best I can tell, the Republican Party abandoned Fitzgerald, not the other way around. I didn't follow the O'Hare expansion fight closely, but my impression is that the Republican bigwigs pushed it despite Fitzgerald's conservative position against it. That left Fitzgerald vulnerable to challenge in both the primary and general election, with little power awaiting him even if he funded the efforts and won.

    John responds:
    Fitzgerald's retirement is not that surprising given that he was almost sure to be defeated for reelection. But in other states, Republicans are likely to pick up at least 4 Democrat Senate seats in 2004: GA, SC, NC, FL. See: Newsday

    Fitzgerald spent $l2.6 million of his own money to get elected in l998 against an extremely damaged opponent, Carol Moseley Braun. He would have been expected to spend a similar amount next time. Fitzgerald is not rich enough to throw away $12.6 million on a hopeless cause. After George Ryan, it will be years before any Republican can win a statewide election in Illinois. Fitzgerald tried valiantly to position himself as a clean and independent politician who was willing to go to the mat against the money interests (e.g. on O'Hare expansion and the selection of U.S. attorneys), but it was not enough to get him reelected.

    Phyllis writes:
    Fitzgerald is a wealthy independent man, and he didn't see any reason why he should spend his fortune on the Republican Party. He doesn't need a job. The party treated him badly. He was one of our great victories. I am proud of what I did to nominate him in his primary against the entire Republican establishment, including Bob Dole's endorsement of his opponent (Lolita). It was an outrage when LaHood said he was looking for someone to run against Peter in the 2004 primary.
    Andy writes:
    John's excuses for Fitzgerald's ouster range from (1) Republicans will win Democratic seats anyway, (2) Fitzgerald can't personally afford to spend another $12M, and (3) Republicans can't hold the Illinois seat anyway. Even if these claims were true (which I doubt), they are irrelevant.

    As the incumbent, Fitzgerald presumptively has the best chances of winning the seat for Republicans. So why did the Party oppose him? There's no logic to it. But, after all, liberals (including liberal Republicans) don't try to be logical.

    Bit by bit, the Bush Administration has been purging the Party of conservatives. First it was incumbent Bob Smith, then Trent Lott, and now Fitzgerald. Even if the Republicans can win another state to offset losing Illinois, it won't be with a politician as conservative as Fitzgerald.

    Unless and until conservatives vocally oppose this, it will surely continue.

    Joe writes:
    Should conservatives have vocally opposed the "ouster" of Trent Lott?
     
    Doomsday Scientist
    Here is another doomsday scientist who thinks that new research may cause the end of the world.

    Update: Here's more in a Wired article.

     
    EE unemployment
    John sends this story about how electrical engineering unemployment is at an all-time high because of American workers being displaced by cheaper foreign labor under the H-1B program. Some congressmen want to increase the H-1B quota on the theory that we have jobs that can only be filled by foreign workers. But that is plainly false, as the EE unemployment figures show.
     
    Naval students disciplined
    The Naval Academy students who got caught listening to music on their computers finally got disciplined. The Baltimore Sun story quoted an academy official saying:
    "They had enormous drives - multigigabite drives - and they were on all the time. They became little Web sites."
    Of course they had multigigabyte drives. You can't even buy a disk drive any more that has less than about 20 gigabytes. Millions of people have web sites, and yes, they are usually on all the time.

    Monday, Apr 14, 2003
     
    Poincare conjecture
    A Russian claims to use the Ricci flow to solve the 3-dimensional Poincare conjecture, according to this NY Times story. I had heard about this, but there have been a lot of alleged proofs before.
     
    Arming pilots
    John Lott complains in the LA Times that federal rules are still keeping our commercial pilots unarmed. This is more evidence that (Dept. of Transportation Secretary) Mineta is not doing his job.
     
    Turing Award
    The ACM is giving its Turing award to the inventors of RSA cryptography. Here are the past winners. This was the first award to cryptographers.

    A lot of people think that RSA invented public-key cryptography. They did not. It had previously been invented by Merkle, Diffie, and Hellman at Stanford and Berkeley, and by some British spooks (in unpublished papers). Rabin also invented a signature scheme similar to RSA. The RSA folks were directly inspired by the Stanford research, and their method is really just a minor variation of the Stanford ideas.

    I wrote a Crypto Mini-FAQ. Comments welcome.

     
    Everyday economics
    Steven E. Landsburg is back with his Slate columns. He argues that the Iraq war will be worse than expected, because almost everything in life goes worse than expected. And he makes a contrarian argument for looting.
     
    Medical privacy
    John sends this USA Today op-ed about how new federal privacy rules give the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) access to your medical records. So why aren't the Bush-Aschcroft haters complaining about this? Why is it ok for the feds to get my private medical records, but not ok for the feds to get the public library records of a suspected international terrorist?

    Update: JG sends a link to the Medical Privacy Coalition.


    Sunday, Apr 13, 2003
     
    The Reagan Salute
    A NY Times Op-ed attacks Ronald Reagan's military salute as "puerile", and says:
    But about 20 years ago the militarization of the image of the presidency began. It started with Mr. Reagan, who had no record of military service and who spent World War II in Hollywood (something that he tried on occasion to obscure).
    It is hard to see how the NY Times could make such an egregious mistake about one of our greatest presidents. From Grolier's encyclopedia:
    Reagan interrupted his acting career in 1942 and served for three years in the U.S. Army, for which he made training films. After he was discharged, with the rank of captain, he began turning toward a political career.
    Even worse, the op-ed continues about Reagan:
    There was, too, his easy and self-satisfying willingness to employ the armed forces of the United States in rapid and spectacular military operations against minuscule targets and "enemies" like Grenada, Nicaragua and Libya.
    Reagan also directly and boldly challenged the Soviet Union by doing things like putting nuclear Pershing missiles in Europe, and ultimately won the Cold War with his military strategy. He demonstrated that he was willing to use our armed forces in a way that his predecessors were not.

    Update: Volokh's blog also remarks on another idiotic comment in the op-ed column. Actually, several remarks.

    Update: The NY Times has now published this correction:

    An article on Monday mischaracterized Ronald Reagan's history of military service. Although he was disqualified from combat duty because of poor eyesight, he was a captain in the motion picture unit of the Army Air Corps.
    This is the minimal sort of correction I expected. Fix what was blatantly and outrageously wrong; but ignore all the other distortions in the column. I should say that Reagan served for 3 years in the Army during WWII (something the NY Times has tried on occasion to obscure).
     
    Bush backs gun ban
    This article says Bush is endorsing a continuation of the federal assault weapon look-alike ban that is scheduled to expire next year.

    I never thought that the ban would expire. The significance of the ban is almost entirely symbolic. The banned weapons are mainly the scary-looking guns that have militaristic looking features like bayonnets. The ban has had no impact on crime. The anti-gun folks just wanted to prove that a class of guns could be banned, and the guns look nasty enough that hardly anyone wants to defend them.

    Update: Joan sends this BBC story about Wal-Mart getting into trouble for selling toy guns. The toy guns were painted orange according to federal law, but not NY state law.

     
    Did polio vaccine cause AIDS?
    Joe sends this Edward Hooper article with new evidence that the oral polio vaccine caused AIDS. The theory is plausible, and no one has a better one.

    According to the article, it turns out that some of the oral polio vaccines were made in Congo from chimp tissues in the late 1950s. HIV is widely thought to have come from chimps. The earliest known case of HIV is from the same part of Congo in 1959. A million experimental doses of oral polio vaccine were given in Congo during 1957-1960. Maybe it is all coincidence, but I haven't heard a better theory.

    Bob sends this story about how the debate over AIDS transmission in Africa still rages. Some research indicates that it is mostly dirty needles, but a UN agency insists that it is unsafe sexual practices. Bob also says:

    I think you are on shaky ground endorsing the Polio vaccine theory of the origin of AIDS. This has been looked at seriously and I believe impartially and nothing was found.
    The polio-HIV theory may be wrong. All they have to do is to find one AIDS case before 1957, and the theory will be shot.

    Bob says that if someone could show that a simian virus could mutate into HIV during polio virus attenuation in chimp kidneys, then he'd get a Nobel prize.

    They did give a Nobel prize for growing polio virus in animal tissue, but they never gave a Nobel prize for development of the polio vaccine, and never gave one for finding that HIV causes AIDS, so I don't think that they'll give one for showing that the polio vaccine caused AIDS.

    This polio-HIV theory is upsetting to some major sacred cows. Vaccine and AIDS research are extremely politicized, compared to other scientific areas. The medical establishment does not want to admit the possibility that a vaccine could have done so much harm.

     
    Patriot Act and libraries
    John sends this WashPost article about how libraries have been enlisted for anti-Bush scaremongering. One librarian says, "The government has never had this kind of power before. It feels like Big Brother."

    Yes, the govt has always had this power because nosy librarians who work for the govt have unnecessarily kept records on patrons. If the libraries really want to push for privacy, all they have to do is to avoid keeping the invasive records in the first place.

    In Santa Cruz, Calif., all 10 branches of the library are destroying records daily ...
     
    Do not call
    I just submitted my phone number to the California do not call registry. Now that the FTC is doing a national registry, California will just forward the number to the feds.

    I don't expect it to do much. There are exemptions for charities, political groups, small businesses with five employees or less, and companies that have an established relationship with a consumer. It should block the telemarketing companies, but they almost always block caller ID and I don't accept those calls anyway.

    The FTC says the new law is supposed to require telemarketers to transmit Caller ID information. Hmmm. I might have to change my screening procedures. The telemarketers hate to transmit caller ID info because they like to mislead the consumer about who is really making the call. Eg, Bank of America might hire a sleazy telemarketing firm which calls and describes an offer from Bank of America, giving the impression that the Bank of America is calling. If caller ID says something else, then the consumer knows that someone is lying. I even get calls claiming to be from the phone company (SBC in my area), and the caller ID says something else.


    Saturday, Apr 12, 2003
     
    Gun turncoat
    PBS had a just had a Bill Moyers special on Bob Ricker, the former gun industry lobbyist who is now a paid witness for the groups suing the gun industry. Ricker is being hailed as a whistleblower.

    The gist of the gripe is that the BATF tracks guns that are used in crimes, and has lists of gun dealers who sold those guns. Apparently a relatively small number of dealers is responsible for many of those sales. Rickers thinks that the gun makers should refuse to sell to those dealers.

    I'm not sure I get the point here. If GM discovers that a few dozen car dealers account for a disproportionate number of drunk drivers, then should GM stop selling cars to those dealers?

    Bob Ricker's testimony is supposed to be a smoking gun, because he claims to have inside info that the gun companies became concerned that their knowledge of the bad dealer problem would be a liability in the anti-gun industry lawsuits, so they made a deliberate attempt to ignore the problem.

    But the question still remains: If the BATF has evidence that a few bad gun dealers are violating the law by selling guns to criminals, then why doesn't the BATF prosecute them? And if the BATF evidence is insufficient for the BATF to take any action, then why is it sufficient for the gun makers to take action? And what good would that do?

    My guess is that the so-called bad gun dealers are just the big urban sporting goods stores. There are in high-crime areas, and most of their customers are law-abiding citizens who need the guns to protect themselves. But some guns get in the hands of criminals anyway.

    There may indeed be a problem with a few crooked gun dealers. But if so, then it seems like a law enforcement problem for the BATF. A private lawsuit is not likely to solve anything.

     
    More on Patriot Act
    Andy writes:
    Roger writes, and John concurs, "Yes, they'll wonder, but the war is popular. Give it up."

    Yes, Vietnam was immensely popular too ... at the beginning. When the casualties and costs pile up, the sentiment shifts. As long as we're in Iraq, we'll have ongoing costs and casualties to terrorism there, with only debatable benefits.

    And yes, it is a real problem if Cheney cronies are the main beneficiaries of the rebuilding. Bush better prove a real benefit to the American people first.

    John now says that he supports logical arguments, but laments that they can have faulty premises uninformed by experience. But the attacks on logical argument here have not identified any flaws in premise, or any contrary experience. Rather, John's responses have been a wholesale attack on logic, deriding it as "Platonic".

    John and Roger defend the PATRIOT Act, John more strongly than Roger. John says all laws can be misused, so what's the fuss? The fuss, of course, is that the PATRIOT Act authorizes abuse beyond its stated purpose of terrorism, and contrary to 4th Amendment standards. John says it allows nothing that courts have not previously ordered in specific cases. But that's exactly the point the federal govt should have to obtain a court order before it searches and seizes.

    BTW, I don't buy the P.R. campaign that a professor in Florida is a dangerous terrorist would could only be arrested through application of the PATRIOT Act.

    People like results. The Iraq war has accomplished more in 3 weeks than the Vietnam war did in 8 years.

    Nobody cares about Cheney cronies. I've heard these leftist arguments about how we only went to war so rich buddies of Bush and Cheney can profit. It doesn't make any sense to me. Bush and Cheney have gambled their entire careers and reputations on this war, in one of the riskiest moves a US president has ever done. Both are sufficiently rich that they don't need any more money. If the war is a failure, then no profits to their buddies could possibly compensate them for the bad consequences.

    I'll defend Platonic logic. Mathematics is Platonic logic, in my view.

    There are a lot of bad federal laws. Eg, I don't agree with jailing the guy who just got busted for selling Xbox mod chips. But where is the abuse? So far, the effect has been positive. It sunsets in 2005 anyway, you know.

    Suppose it is true that he was supporting terrorism, but that the only evidence was found in the course of foreign intelligence investigations. Should that evidence be usable in a criminal case against him? That is the core issue with the Patriot Act. I say yes.


    Friday, Apr 11, 2003
     
    Anti-war vandals hit SUVs
    John sends this article about Santa Cruz anti-war anti-SUV vandals.
    The graffiti also included references to ELF, or Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group that has previously taken credit for torching and vandalizing dozens of SUVs in Pennsylvania and Virginia -- presumably to protest the gas-guzzling vehicles' environmental costs.

    "It may have been ELF, but then, I sometimes get them confused with ALF, the Animal Liberation Front," [Santa Cruz Police Lt. Joe] Haebe said. "And then there's Earth First! and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). There's a lot of cross- pollination between them, and some people here are probably members of two of those groups, or more."

    I don't think these people breed; they just cross-pollinate.
     
    The science behind The Core
    The producer of the new movie The Core is upset by a review, and wrote a letter to the editor:
    When I read that "The Core" suffers from "a preposterous plot, cliched characters, and silly special effects," I realized Pack didn't do his homework. ...

    Two Ph.D.s from Cal Tech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one Ph.D. from the University of California, and one Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia laid out the science for us so that it would be real. If Pack thinks our plot is preposterous, then our team of geophysicists are all wrong, which I seriously believe is not the case. ...

    We also had three astronauts as technical advisors work with the rest of our cast. One was Col. Susan Helms, of the Air Force and NASA who guided Hilary Swank. In other words, we took great pains to be accurate in our technology, science, and behavior. So, I guess real scientists and real astronauts are cliched, according to Pack.

    Pack should be more professional than his review. All he had to do was look at the credits supplied to him by Paramount and then take a half-hour to research who did what on "The Core" instead of being so dismissive, mean-spirited, and nasty. He still might not like the movie and he¹s entitled to his opinion, but when people take great pains to be professionally accurate, the least a reviewer can do is research the plot and the characters before being so blatantly uninformed.

    I can't tell whether this guy is joking or not. The movie does have a preposterous plot, cliched characters, and silly special effects. There is an amusing sort of silliness to it, like Independence Day, Ghostbusters, or one of those 1950s sci-fi B movies that are ridiculed in Mystery Science Theater. This is not necessarily a criticism -- I enjoy those movies myself. But they are really spoofs, and there is hardly a line in The Core that anyone would take seriously.
     
    Dilbert Newsletter
    For a free and funny newsletter, subscribe here. It has quotes like these:
    "He's not the brightest cookie in the lamp."

    "Predicting is difficult, especially when it involves the future."

    "That thing was jumping up and down like a sieve."

    "We will be downsizing, and hopefully people will be leaving through nutrition."

    "Hold on; the roller coaster is just leaving the dock."

    "I have a photogenic memory and a near-genius IQ!"

     
    Schlafly beer
    John gives thumbs up to Schlafly beer. A new brewery opened. It was also mentioned in USA Today.

    Tom sent a link to another story. The new brewery was open with a "blessing of the beer" from a minister: "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to have a happy life." Congratulations to Tom for creating a successful beer niche right across town from the biggest beer company in the world. I thought that he was doing the impossible.

     
    Decoding Iraqi symbols
    Here is a dictionary for decoding Iraqi symbols, such as beating a statue with shoes.

    Thursday, Apr 10, 2003
     
    Wellesley College invites a conservative to speak
    This story says:
    WELLESLEY -- Women belong in the home, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said at Wellesley College last night, and feminism is a fraud. ... Past Wellesley College speakers have included prominent liberals Hilary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Angela Davis.
    The invitation was from campus Republicans, but nevertheless the college president met with students objecting to the invitation, and issued a letter attacking the speech in advance. The letter (not online at Wellesley.edu, unfortunately, said:
    Office of the President
    Wellesley College

    To The Wellesley College Community
    From Diana Chapman Walsh
    Date April 5, 2003

    I write to comment on the anticipated appearance on campus this Tuesday of Phyllis Schlafly. I want to reiterate some of what I said in my statement at the time of Amiri Baraka's appearance here last fall. While I am loathe to enter into discussions of the merits of particular constituencies inviting individuals to speak, I believe it is vitally important, especially in the face of controversy, to reaffirm the fundamental value of free speech at Wellesley College.

    Regardless of our individual opinions of Ms. Schlafly's political and social views and the content of her writings, all of us have a stake in upholding her right to speak, and the right of her college sponsors to bring her here. If we restrict those freedoms today, then tomorrow, or next week, we may be tempted to silence someone else, and soon we will be asked to make distinctions that could abrogate the freedom of any of us to expose our beliefs to scrutiny. Colleges and universities have a special obligation to resist pressures to erode freedom of expression because our educational goals require the free and open exchange of ideas.

    As I have said before, I affirm the right of the sponsoring groups to bring a speaker of their choice to campus. And I want to stress that the motivations behind sponsoring an event such as this can be complex. We should not assume that the sponsors of a controversial speaker necessarily endorse all the views that speaker espouses, in this case, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-feminism among other antediluvian notions. Rather, it is often the sponsors' intent to provoke the campus community to address important, polarizing issues that they feel we tend to ignore. Inviting a highly-controversial speaker is effective in arousing attention, but not without cost to our sense of community. Even as the groups targeted by a controversial speaker's views work to challenge them with arguments from both conviction and curiosity, it is difficult to avoid feeling attacked, personally, by words that are contemptuous of values we hold, and by another group's decision to host the author of such words.

    Inevitably, in a community such as ours with countless different perspectives, there will be times when some will express ideas that others will find objectionable, even repugnant. Nonetheless, it is only through upholding the ideal of academic freedom that we can bring all ideas out into the open and engage and discuss them fully. And it is only thus that we can make and continually refine our own nuanced judgments about what is important, what is valuable, what is beautiful, what is true. That is the educational imperative for protecting academic freedom.

    As we have witnessed this year, it can be excruciating to advocate for free speech when that speech seems reckless, hateful, and intended to hurt and divide. And, yet, academic freedom is only as strong as its ability to withstand even the most frontal challenges. In that connection, I want to commend the students -- representing a number of concerned groups -- with whom I met on Friday to discuss this impending event. A number of specific grievances were expressed at that meeting, as was the desire to counter the negativity in Ms. Schlafly's writings with positive messages affirming the virtues of multiculturalism, tolerance, and mutual respect. I am grateful for that response from the coalition of students being organized by leaders from Instead. Everyone at Friday's meeting acknowledged the importance of recognizing Ms. Schlafly's freedom to speak.

    Students who felt attacked and marginalized earlier this year for having brought Amiri Baraka to campus were particularly adamant that we attend to noteworthy differences in the official responses to these two controversial speakers. In particular, they pointed to inconsistencies in decisions about funding, and asked for clarification from the Committee on Lectures and Cultural Events of its policies governing whether to fund a proposed event. We ought to examine whether those policies need revision in light of what we have learned this year.

    Underlying this policy question are philosophical ones for us all How can we take advantage of the opportunity to learn from these two parallel incidents involving two very different speakers both of whom ignite profound feelings of alienation and bitterness among some groups and not others? What do we make of those differences and can we explore them without taking personal offense? How can we heal the divisions that perpetuate these repeating cycles of one group giving offense to another, consciously or unconsciously? Why is it so often the case, tragically, when these incidents occur, that one group that feels marginalized finds itself pitted against another group that feels equally so? Can't we find more fulfilling ways for groups to assert themselves?

    How can we catalyze more meaningful dialogue - among wider circles of people -- about institutionalized forms of oppression, about power, and about our many differences? How can we sustain a discourse of mutual care and mutual respect, especially now with so much chaos in the world? I'm hopeful that the conversations being organized now will open spaces in which these increasingly urgent questions can be addressed. I invite your ideas, and your participation. Thank you.

    Nothing Phyllis Schlafly has said could approach the negativity of Angela Davis. Davis is mainly famous for:
  • being charged with murder in connection with her gun being used by her boyfriend to kill a judge.
  • running for Vice President of the USA on the Commmunist Party ticket, with loyalties to American enemies in Moscow.

    I would expect a college president to be able to write a better letter. All she had to say was that there is educational value in having speakers with a diversity of opinion, and drop the biased and inaccurate accusations.

    Here is another account of the speech:

    WELLESLEY IS STILL BUZZING ABOUT PHYLLIS. When homeschooler Rae Adams, daughter of New Jersey Eagle Forum State President Carolee Adams, was admitted on scholarship to Wellesley College, she promised that she would bring Phyllis Schlafly to the campus. Now a sophomore, Rae rallied the campus Republicans and achieved her goal on April 8 when Phyllis came to lecture on "Feminism v. Conservatism The Great Debate." Although Wellesley has had a succession of feminist speakers, including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, Barney Frank, and Whoopi Goldberg, the feminists were loud in their protests against the invitation to Phyllis. They demonstrated for 3 hours in front of the lecture hall, waving nasty signs and chanting. When they came into the lecture hall, a half dozen had their faces painted with the feminist sign exactly as shown in the picture of a French feminist on the cover of Phyllis's new book Feminist Fantasies. The lecture hall was standing room only, and so many students wanted to attend that it was televised and shown to another crowd in an adjacent hall and beamed into all the dormitories. The students heard a view of feminism they had never heard before. Most of the students were polite during the speech, but the level of the questions was below what one would expect from such a prestigious college. One student said she wasn't sure whether there is any biological difference between men and women. The most hostile questioners were a couple of male professors. Anticipating emotional trauma from hearing Phyllis' pro-family speech, the feminists prearranged counseling sessions after the lecture to help them recover.

  • Wednesday, Apr 09, 2003
     
    Princeton women
    Andy sends this Princeton story about how Princeton University's new female president has recently been appointing a lot of women:
    Janet Lavin Rapelye, currently Wellesley's dean of admission, was recently appointed to serve as dean of admission at Princeton. She is the fourth woman President Tilghman has appointed to a highly visible position in the administration. "Rapelye really was the standout candidate," Tilghman said. "I can only presume that there is essentially an unintended bias on the part of people who cannot believe that the best candidates for these jobs turned out to be women."
    The alumni magazine seems to be entirely staffed by women. I am annoyed that she is not providing a legal defense for the poor student who is the target of a music label lawsuit. His computer project was a straightforward academic pursuit, and the music labels want to make an example out of him.
     
    Gun control debate
    Harvard had a law prof debate on gun control. Notice how it is only the anti-gun people who are always complaining about the wording of the 2A, and concocting theories for why the Founders did not really mean what they said.
    Dershowitz, however, called the Second Amendement an “anachronism” because if America had the choice today it would not choose to be an “armed society.” “The Second Amendment has no place in modern society,” he said.

    Dershowitz said that ideally he would like a gun ban, but would settle for significant restrictions. At the same time, he voiced his opposition to “constitutionalizing” the gun control debate by leaving it for the Supreme Court to decide.

    I wonder what Dershowitz thinks about constitutionalizing sodomy, or prayer in schools.
     
    Amusing news
    Rodney Dangerfield is getting brain bypass surgery. Smirking is now banned in the Palo Alto city council. Voodoo is now a recognized religion in Haiti. CBS made a new mini-series on Hitler, because some producers think Bush is similarly denying civil rights and starting wars.
     
    The Republican war president
    John sends this Seattle Times story about how most of the 20th century wars were led by US Democratic presidents, and that leading a war does not necessarily lead to popularity. Liza responds:
    John - This is wishful thinking. This columnist talks of the Nov. 2004 elections handing Democrats a big victory just as our troops roll triumphantly into Baghdad. But they are already rolling triumphantly into Baghdad today!

    Yes, war is ugly, and there is a price to be paid on the domestic agenda and on the health of the economy. But Bush didn't invite international Islamist terrorism; he reacted to it. It has replaced Communism as the biggest threat to our security. Where are you paleo-hawks when we need you? You/they were all in favor of containing Communists who had nukes; why not now contain crazy dictators and terrorists who have, or are trying to acquire, nukes, bio/chemical weapons, suitcase bombs, etc.?

    Bush bet his presidency on this war, and the war has been a tremendous success. It exceeded all expectations. There is no doubt that Bush's popularity has been vastly increased by his gutsy and skillful handling of the Afghan and Iraq wars.

    Joe responds:

    Yep. Bush I lost in 92 because of the economy. That will be extremely important in '04, but Bush has even more prestige now than his father did. Economy will have to be really bad for him to lose, because most people don't trust the Democrats in military matters, and we are going to be on some kind of a military footing for a while.
    John sends this funny Rumsfield quote:
    As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know.

    We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.

    But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    —Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing, Feb. 12, 2002

    Andy responds:
    Liza wrote, "You/they were all in favor of containing Communists who had nukes; why notnow contain crazy dictators and terrorists who have, or are trying toacquire, nukes, bio/chemical weapons, suitcase bombs, etc.?" (Liza, please update your address book to use my email address here at aol.com)

    Bush is political toast if he doesn't provide proof of his claims that Iraq was a threat to us, such as weapons of mass destruction. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to replace one Iraqi dictator with another isn't going to cut it with voters. The media is going to have a field day with all the Republican cronies enriched by the "rebuilding" effort. Voters will surely be wondering, "What's Bush doing for me?"

    John continues his assault on logic, perhaps, in circulating Rumsfield's comments. The other day, a conservative friend noted that many liberals don't accept logic as a valid form of argument.

    FYI, I don't think the PATRIOT Act should be endorsed. Ron Paul voted against it, and describes it as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Act's definition of terrorism is overly broad. John's argument that it hasn't been misused yet proves nothing. The point is whether it can be misused.

    John responds:
    Andy continues his Platonic assault on the real world of observation and experiment. The question is not whether logic is a valid form of argument - of course it is - but whether, as Plato believed, logic alone can produce knowledge about the universe. As Aristotle showed, logical conclusions depend on their premises, which logic alone cannot validate.

    I like Ron Paul, but to say that the USA PATRIOT Act violates the Fourth Amendment is just not correct. The PATRIOT Act merely codifies powers and procedures, like the sneak-and-peak warrant, that were previously approved by courts in special circumstances.

    Sure it can be misused - but no more so than thousands of government powers conferred by thousands of other statutes. It is a basic libertarian fallacy to say that we can't delegate or authorize government powers that might be misused. That logic leads to anarchy. There is no government power that can't be misused.

    Contrary to Andy, the point is not whether the PATRIOT Act can be MISused, but whether it can be properly used - that is, whether the Act confers powers that can be useful, helpful, and beneficial to us as Americans without violating or jeopardizing our existing rights and freedoms.

    We already have at least one tangible benefit of the Act the indictment of Sami al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor, for helping to finance Palestinian terrorism. That indictment was possible only because the PATRIOT Act permits the DOJ to receive information gathered by foreign intelligence. Such sharing had previously been prohibited.

     
    Bureaucracy is no cure for SARS
    Jane Orient says in USA Today that we don't need new laws to deal with a crisis like SARS.
     
    Sell a chip, goto jail
    A man was sentenced to 5 months in prison for selling Xbox mod chips. The chips let Xbox owners run unlicensed software, and therefore circumvent Msft's rights in controlling the Xbox. Another unfortunate consequence of the DMCA.

    Update: John sends this link.

     
    Ramsey Clark
    I don't know Ramsey Clark ever got to be US Attorney General. His views and actions are wacky and anti-American. Now he paid $45 to place a newspaper ad to impeach GW Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and Ashcroft.

    Tuesday, Apr 08, 2003
     
    Global warming
    If global warming continues, then the world might get to be as warm as it was in the Middle Ages, according to a recent study. A mini ice age started around the year 1400, and it looks like we a just getting over it.
     
    Military food innovation
    This SF Chronicle article says M&Ms, Velveeta, and Spam were WWII innovations.
    "Thirty percent of the products you and I would find at the grocery store are a direct result of military innovation," said Gerald Darsch, a food scientist in the DOD test kitchens at the U.S. Army Soldier Center in Natick, Mass.
     
    Result is better privacy
    Slashdot had a discussion about librarian complaints about the Patriot Act. I posted this:

    This law only lets one govt agency (the FBI) access records from another govt agency (the Santa Cruz library system) in the case of a foreign terrorist investigation. The libraries should not have been keeping long-term records on what books I check out in the first place. When I check out a book, it only needs to keep a record of that until I return the book. Then the record should be deleted from the library database. There is no law requiring the library to keep the records. The law just says that if they keep the records and they are subpoenaed, then the library has to turn them over.

    I live in Santa Cruz, and I am glad that this controversy has resulted in the libraries destroying old records. I am more concerned about Santa Cruz misusing the old data than about the FBI misusing its subpoenas. The best solution to privacy invading databases is to purge the unnecessary info from the database, and not to rely on controls on who can access the database. If the data is there, then it can be had by low-level workers who can be persuaded, bribed, or coerced.


    Monday, Apr 07, 2003
     
    Norman Mineta racist?
    While looking up something else, I found this page saying that Norman Mineta (now Secy. of Transportation) pushed for a law in 1988 that gave $20k tax-free to Japanese Americans and aliens who were detained by FDR in WWII. In response to complaints that German and Italian residents were not being similarly compensated, then Congressman Norman Mineta said "The Germans and Italians were interned for 'cause', whereas the Japanese were interned for racist reasons."

    Hmmm. Mineta was born in San Jose and relocated to a camp during WWII. I assume that his parents were either illegal aliens or disloyal to the USA, as was the case in most of the Japanese relocations. Does anyone know?

     
    Cross-burning law is unconstitutional
    The US Supreme Court just overturned that a Virginia law against cross burning with the intent to intimidate. The law, as interpreted by the courts, was found to be unconstitutional. The decision is here. Thomas dissented, and voted to uphold the law.

    This decision is being reported as the SC upholding a cross burning ban with a 5-4 vote, and Thomas dissenting. Eg, see this CNN/AP story. I guess it is another confusing O'Connor opinion with no clear majority. It looks to me like Thomas is really the only one who said that the law (as construed in Virginia) is constitutional. At least 7 others say that it is unconstitutional on free speech grounds. Am I misreading something?

    Update: Here is the NY Times article. It says:

    The Supreme Court ruled today that states may make it a crime to burn a cross with a purpose to intimidate, as long as the law clearly gives prosecutors the burden of proving that the act was intended as a threat and not as a form of symbolic expression.
    My problem with this is that any statement about what laws the states might hypothetically pass is just dicta. The controversy before the SC was the fate of 3 defendants who burned crosses. A 7-2 majority said that all should go free immediately because of the unconstitutionality of the Virginia law. Anything else is just dicta (ie, just non-binding opinion that had no bearing on the case).
     
    Libraries using shredders
    The NY Times reports that Santa Cruz libraries are destroying records, in order to comply with the Patriot Act. The Santa Cruz libraries are posting warnings about it.

    The Patriot Act doesn't mention libraries. The controversial clause (now 50 USC 1861) lets the FBI subpoena records relating to foreign intelligence investigations. The target should be either an alien or an international terrorist, and not someone just exercising his free speech rights. A separate part of the law was challenged on constitutional grounds, and upheld. (That other part allows foreign intelligence evidence to be used in a criminal case against foreign terrorists.) The law sunsets in 2005.

    The question I have is why the Santa Cruz library wanted to keep the privacy invading info in the first place. There is no law obligating it to keep long-term records on what books I check out. Once I return the book, it can delete the record. I am offended by Big Brother laws as much as anyone, but the FBI having my records is only marginally worse than the County having my records.

    Why were the libraries keeping those records, if they weren't even going to let it be used to stop al-Qaeda terrorists planting bombs in this country? If that is not a good enough use for the records, then what is?


    Sunday, Apr 06, 2003
     
    Disk drive capacity predictions
    Bob sends this Brian Hayes prediction:
    Extrapolating the steep trend line of the past five years predicts a thousandfold increase in capacity by about 2012; in other words, todays 120-gigabyte drive becomes a 120-terabyte unit. If the annual growth rate falls back to 60 percent, the same factor-of-1,000 increase would take 15 years.
    (The article is from last year; today's hot drive is a 200Gb firewire or USB2 drive.)

    He then explains how difficult it would ever be to fill up such a disk. Ok, but before the IBM breakthru on magnetoresistive heads in 1991, the growth was 25%:

    Throughout the 1970s and '80s, bit density increased at a compounded rate of about 25 percent per year (which implies a doubling time of roughly three years).
    25% growth over the next 10 years only gives us 10x growth. So then we'll have terabyte drives in 2012. That is a more reasonable prediction. Also, his video estimate is based on DVD. A terabyte might only hold 100 hours of HDTV, and we would easily be able to fill that up.

    Saturday, Apr 05, 2003
     
    Mercury News anti-patent article
    The Si Valley Mercury News published this anti-patent column and the founder of WebTV now going into the anti-spam business with a patent. He is trying to use his patent to exclude competitors. The article says:
    ``He's not helping the cause of stopping unsolicited commercial e-mail,'' said Derek A. Newman, a Seattle lawyer representing Spam Arrest. ``He's just looking to make a buck.'' ...

    The patent system was created to reward individual inventors for their inspiration, not to give Silicon Valley millionaires a club to pound on small competitors. Goldman is within his legal rights to do what he's doing, but that doesn't make his actions ethical or appropriate.

    I don't really think that the Patent Office should be granting patents like this. But given that they do, why shouldn't Goldman do what he is doing? He invented an idea for a new product, teamed with another inventor who got a patent on the same idea, and now they are trying to make a buck off of the idea. Patent law says that the inventor has exclusive rights for 20 years. The competition entered the business after the patent issued, so they were on notice. Why does this business section columnist think that it is unethical for an entrepreneur to exercise his legal rights?
     
    Did CNN know when the war would start?
    To Roger Schlafly Subject Re CNN knew war date Here is evidence that CNN was briefed about when the war would start.

    Bob writes:

    I am skeptical. It is possible that CNN was advised of the date the ultimatum ran out, but not the date of the air strike aimed at Saddam. It is possible that the entire bunker busting mission was intended to cause Saddam to purge his close associates or it may have been real. Either way anyone who leaked it to CNN would be strung up. CENTCOM claims that ground attack was scheduled for the next night and it happened the next night. Jim Hoagland claimed on the Charlie Rose show that the date of the war was set when Franks flew to Washington which may correspond to the 4 Mar date in the Comical piece. I don't think it is a big deal if CNN was informed of the ultimatum date. The idea that anything except disinformation was leaked from the Bush I administration to CNN to Arnett is ridiculous.

    Friday, Apr 04, 2003
     
    Bowling for Columbine
    John sends this NRO article deconstructing Bowling for Columbine. It is not really a documentary (too many facts are wrong) and doesn't even have a coherent message.
     
    Euro patents
    Here is an article on how Europe has not extended patents to software and business methods to the extent that the US has. I think the heart of the problem is that a bunch of clueless judges on the Federal Circuit have seized control of our patent system, and done a lot of harm to it. People assume that since it is a patent court, that the judge are patent experts. Most of the judges have no patent background at all. And those that do, like Judge Rich, are not helping. See the article for the story of how Judge Rich concealed a huge conflict of interest in a crucial case. He helped draft the 1952 patent law, said that it makes inventions like the diaper service unpatentable, and later wrote the ruling that made business methods like the diaper service patentable, based on a argument about the intent of the 1952 law! He didn't even acknowledge his role in the 1952 law, how he has inside info about its intent, and how he own previous remarks were contradictory.

    The article quotes another Federal Circuit judge as admitting that they have no empirical evidence at all for any of their patent policy decisions.

     
    States rights
    This NY Times article says that gun control advocates also support states' rights:
    Granting immunity would be a serious setback for advocates of gun control, who have turned to state courts increasingly in recent years after meeting resistance in legislatures. They have denounced the proposed legislation as an unfair favor to an industry and a federal usurpation of states' rights.
    I've wondered who supports states' rights. Conservatives rarely support states' rights. I don't think many conservatives would think that the cities should be filing lawsuits to deprive citizens of their 2nd Amendment rights.

    Jonathan writes:

    Maybe I'm all wet, but all through law school whenever we talked about "states' rights" it always seemed like a conservative notion, and was always seemingly supported by "conservatives." So I was surprised at your comment that "Conservatives rarely support states' rights."

    Overall, the 10th Amendment (securing states' rights) was a direct response to perceived overgrowth of federal power. See e.g. this article on the Civil War Secession Crisis. And since conservatives are "against big government", isn't "states' rights" part of the Conservative bailiwick?

    The 10A does not mention states' rights. The 9A mentions rights retained by the people, and the 10A mentions powers retained by the states. Conservatives believe that people have rights; states have powers, not rights.

    There are some Southern pro-Confederates or pro-segregationists who use the term states' rights. At least there were some many years ago. I don't think that those people are really conservatives. Conservatives do not want to re-fight the Civil War. At the Supreme Court this week, it was the liberals who were arguing that the state of Michigan should not have to comply with federal civil rights laws.

    The US Constitution is based on a notion of dual sovereignty, in which the federal and state govts have separate roles. Conservatives do support that traditional concept, and reject attempts by the federal govt to exceed the powers defined in the US Constitution. It is not because they believe that states have any rights, but because they believe in limited govt and constitutional govt.

    Jonathan responds with this Columbia Encyclopedia quote:

    In the 1980s and 90s, states’ rights proponents, under the banner of “federalism” or “the New Federalism,” attacked the great increase in federal government powers that had occurred since the New Deal. On taking power of both houses of Congress in the 1994 elections, conservative Republicans proclaimed the beginning of a process of “devolution,” with much power reverting to the states [ . . . ]
    Note that the quote refers to powers, not rights. The 1994 Congress did not oppose the New Deal or have anything to do with states' rights. It wanted to slow the federal expansion of powers.

    The next sentence after the quote is:

    State sovereignty has been affirmed and expanded, however, by recent, often narrowly decided, decisions of the Supreme Court.
    A typical such decision is the SC ruling against a federal law banning guns within 1000 feet of a school. The rationale for that decision is that such laws are outside the enumerated powers of the Congress that are listed in the Constitution. It has almost nothing to do with states' rights. It had no bearing on states passing laws like that.

    Preceding the quote, the article says that "the doctrine of states’ rights is usually associated with the Southern wing of the Democratic party". IOW, the term states' rights has become a liberal smear term that is used to paint conservatives as racists and segregationists. It is an attempt to imply that anyone is a racist if he believes that the federal govt has limited powers. But it is a central tenet of American political philosophy that the federal govt powers are limited, and that states have no rights.


    Thursday, Apr 03, 2003
     
    Sales of old books
    John sends this Slate story about how well old books sell. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice sold 110,000 copies last year.

    This would seem to deflate arguments by the copyright lobby that copyrights are needed to provide incentives for publishers of old works.

    This C-Net column argues that we'll soon see car-makers and others selling bundling music content in bulk. Why spend $250 a year on CD music when the same player could get an MP3 player capable of holding many 1000s of hours of music?

    Charlie writes:

    I agree with this guy. It may not make sense to get 100 GB of free music with a new car, but one of these days, the music industry is going to realize that it's better to sell 100 GB of music for $250 or $50 or $10 than to get nothing for it.
    John sends this C-Net story about the RIAA suing some students connected to internal campus computer networks. It wants damages of $100k per song, for songs that are on the network. The colleges were not named, and they will probably throw their students to the dogs and not defend them. The advocates of academic freedom should support these students. All they did was to put some network services on a campus network. Without, students have a harder time sharing files.

    The RIAA says it wants to set an example out of the students. I hope the public makes an example of the RIAA and stops buying CDs. The best thing that could happen for modern music would be to bankrupt the big music labels.

    Meanwhile, there is a reported settlement between big webcasters and big record labels over royalties. The record labels do not get any royalties when music is played over the radio (airwaves), but are seeking to get much more power over internet radio.

    Update: According to the Princeton newspaper, the university is not defending the student. I went to Princeton, but my opinion of the administration goes down all the time. According to reports, Daniel Peng, the Princeton student, managed a site that merely indexed files that were already on the network, and maintained a program that allowed searching the index on campus. Maybe he wrote the program, I don't know. This might be analogous to someone who made a better card catalog for the university library, because the existing card catalog was hard to use. Because the defendant is a student, and the web site has legitimate scholarly utility, and it was being run for the benefit soley of the Princeton University community, and because the administration was not given an opportunity to resolve the complaint outside of court, I think that the University should defend Peng.

    George writes:

    Princeton doesn't defend criminals just because they happen to be students. No doubt Peng was in flagrant violation of university policy. Princeton is more likely to kick him out of school for violating the honor code.
    Peng did not violate the honor code, and is not being criminally charged. He has been sued in an unusual civil lawsuit that threatens to interfere with how Princeton can run its own networks. The RIAA legal theory underlying the lawsuit is dubious and untested. What if the RIAA and Peng reach a settlement in which Peng's program only allows file transfers that meet clear a RIAA filter? Would Princeton put up with that? Probably so, but it shouldn't.

    Update: One of Peng's fellow Princeton students has posted the RIAA complaint, along with a detailed itemized rebuttal. I hope that this is a sign Peng will fight the case. Too bad our legal system doesn't allow him to defend himself that simply. The way lawyers work, it would cost him a lot of money to hire a lawyer to just recite what he already knows.

    Update: Here is another analysis. The music labels ask for $97B, but I think that the students have a good case. If our legal system worked, they'd be able to just submit the arguments on these web sites, and skip the lawyers.

     
    Nobel Prize in Mathematics
    There is now a Nobel Prize in Math. Not a real Nobel Prize, but one intended to have similar award amounts and prestige, like the imitation Nobel Prize that is now given in Economics. It is called the Abel Prize, and is given in Norway. Abel was a great Norwegian mathematician, and his name sounds like Nobel.

    The first Abel Prize has just been given to J-P Serre. The major media have not reported it yet. It may take a few years to get Nobel Prize prestige. A similar prize called the Wolf Prize has been given in Israel since 1978,

    Serre is a genius, with many deep mathematical accomplishments, so I have no argument with the choice. But this citation is a little strange:

    The practical issues of finding efficient error-correcting codes and of public-key cryptography, both make use of solutions of polynomial equations (specifically over finite fields) and Serre´s work has substantially deepened our understanding of this topic.
    I am not aware of any practical application of Serre's work to efficient error-correcting codes or public-key cryptography.
     
    DVD Copying
    A battle rages over whether consumers have the right to make backup copies of DVD disks. Here is a SJMN article about an ongoing court case against a copy program.

    One aspect of this issue that I haven't seen discussed is that federal copyright law provides for making backups of a "computer program". See 17 USC 117. Note that this laws allows for backups of programs, like Msft Office, but not data, like an Eminem CD.

    When Hollywood standardized on the DVD, they had a choice of making it contain just data or data with programs. They decided to put programs on regular movie disks, so that they could have greater control over the user movie-watching experience. Eg, they wanted to be able to put on FBI warnings and commercials that you could not skip with the fast-forward button. By doing so, they must have made a deliberate decision to let users make backup copies under 17 USC 117, and they did it anyway. It was a business decision, and not driven by any technical necessity. I say that they should face the consequences of that decision, and let consumers make backups.


    Wednesday, Apr 02, 2003
     
    Faked war picture
    An LA Times photographer was fired for doctoring a pictures. The originals and published photos are here. Remarkably, some LA Times readers apparently noticed the fake. Can you see anything phony about the published picture?

    In the left original, there is a man in white with a red bandana around his neck squatting to the left of the soldier. There are also 2 head behind his back and also to the left of the soldier. In the right original, the perspective is shifted, and all 3 men are to the right of the soldier. The bandana man's face is behind the soldier, but you can see most of him squatting there. The other 2 heads are still behind him, with a 3rd head in between. In the altered picture, those 3 men are duplicated on both sides of the soldier.

    In the 1st picture, the soldier looks like he is in charge and doing something, but it also looks like no one is paying much attention to him. In the 2nd, the soldier is relaxed. The doctored picture makes it look like there is a confrontation between the soldier and the man with a child.

    Here is another example of a doctored picture. This shows a tank in an urban area, and this is the same one with a boy standing in front. It is hard to tell which is the fake. They may both be fake.

     
    Nude cyberbabes
    John sends this amusing story about video game makers being upset about players disrobing the characters with software patches. One game maker even won a Japanese court case to stop it.

    My kids take the clothes of their Barbie dolls, and Mattel doesn't get upset. Why should the makers of newer technology toys have any more power than the old toy makers?


    Tuesday, Apr 01, 2003
     
    April Fools
    If you like hoaxes, check out this list of 100 April Fool hoaxes. Topping the list is the BBC story about the spaghetti harvest. Also, here are the MIT hacks.
     
    U. Michigan discrimination
    C-SPAN2 just broadcast the audio to the Supreme Court arguments on colleges using affirmative action. John says the links are here and here.

    The Michigan lawyers were really squirming. They kept denying using quotas, and sometimes even denying discriminating, but adamantly claimed that they could use goals for a "critical mass" of black student so that those students could express their individuality with confidence and so the white students would benefit from the diversity. In other words, they just wanted to set they their own racist quotas without justification. They could never explain precisely how those critical mass percentages were determined, or show any tangible benefits to the policy, or reconcile it with the constitution ban on states practicing racial discrimination.

    Some of the silly Michigan arguments were:

  • Fixed quotas are illegal but flexible quotas are ok. (Anyone with a fixed quota could then just claim that it was a flexible quota.)
  • Exclusive discrimination is illegal but inclusive discrimination is ok. (But in Calif, nearly all of the state racial discrimination is against minorities.)
  • Michigan is a naturally segregated state (with most of the blacks living in Detroit and the rest of the state being overwhelmingly white), so university bureaucrats need to force blacks and whites to be exposed to each other. (This is just racist social engineering. What if Alabama decided that it was over-integrated, and it needed to expose students to segregated life?)
  • The (admitted) students were surveyed, and most of them were happy with the admissions policy. (Sure, but what do the rejected students think?)

    Scalia made the point that Michigan's problem is entirely of its own making because it chooses to maintain such an elite law school. If diversity were really so important, it would have a more egalitarian system.

    One annoying thing about this is that schools and the judges attach great importance to the motives behind the admissions policy. But it is very unlikely that any admissions officer ever testified candidly about his motives.

    George writes:

    Are you suggesting that college deans committed perjury? I am sure that they were deposed about their intents and policies.
    College deans are so well-practiced in political-correctness-speak, that there is no telling what they really think. They are like politicians who say whatever generates the least criticism. If they really believed in that diversity, then they'd do some experiments that showed that diversity led to a better education somehow, or otherwise show the benefits. They don't. They recite the diversity babble because the academic left will accuse them of racism otherwise, and they hate that.

    Here was an odd exchange:

    U.Mich lawyer: ... That was the Department of Education's interpretation.

    Scalia: Certainly they don't interpret the Constitution?

    U.Mich. lawyer: No, they don't Your Honor, but that is what Bakke held. ...

    I guess Scalia thinks that he is the only one who is allowed to interpret the US Constitution.

    George writes:

    What is your point? Do you really want the US Dept. of Education interpreting the Constitution? Only the Supreme Court is allowed to do that. The Supremacy Clause says so.
    No, the supremacy clause of the US Constitution says that the Constitution is the supreme law of the law. It does not say that Scalia's or the SC's interpretation is the supreme law of the land. When the Secretary of Education is sworn in, he takes an oath to defend the Constitution, and to the SC's interpretation of it. Of course, the Secretary of Education has a duty to interpret and uphold the Constitution.
  •  
    White flight
    In connection with the college affirmative action debate, Julian Bond of the NAACP says:
    Housing studies demonstrate a "tipping point" causing whites to flee as the number of African-Americans reaches 25 percent. Other studies describe whites on college campuses becoming an apprehensive "psychological minority," even as they remain a majority.
    I wonder how those studies explain it. The obvious explanation is that the whites are acting out of racist bigotry, or black stereotyping, or something like that. But that wouldn't explain why 25% would be critical. Surely such racial attitudes would have a lot of regional and community variance. Can anyone explain it?

    Monday, Mar 31, 2003
     
    Right to bark
    John sends this amusing story about a man who barked back at a police dog, and arrested for it. An Ohio appeals court said that he was acting within his free speech rights. Glad to hear we have as much rights as a dog in this matter.
     
    Movie stereotypes
    John sends this article about racial stereotype in the new Steve Martin comedy. He says Eleanor thought that the movie was hilarious. A critic says that one black character "started talking like a slave during the movie."

    I don't have much sympathy, because a lot of movies break racial stereotypes out of political correctness, and use the most offensive stereotypes about us computer geeks. In The Core, nearly all the characters are white, but the real genius scientist is a black man. Meanwhile, the computer wizard is an ugly and immature kid who has never had a girlfriend and isn't likely to anytime soon.

     
    Motorcycle health insurance
    John sends this Chicago Tribune story (reg reqd) about how the Clinton administration subverted the will of Congress in order to deny health benefits to motorcyclists.
     
    Arnett, Rivera disloyal
    NBC just fired Peter Arnett, and Fox may soon fire Geraldo Rivera for their un-American activities in Iraq. Arnett only half-apologized for going on an Iraqi gubmnt TV program with anti-American propaganda. Even now he claims that he just said "what we all know about the war" when he said the American-led coalition's initial plan for the war had failed because of Iraq's resistance.

    The US anti-war liberals will probably complain that his free speech rights were infringed. But Arnett's statement is false. We don't all know that the US initial plan has failed, and I don't think that it has. I suspect that US military planners deliberately exaggerated the "shock and awe" of the initial attack in order to intimidate the Iraqi military, and convince them that we are serious. Some people thought that the entire Iraqi army would fold and surrender immediately, but I doubt that our generals thought that. The war has made enormous and rapid progress. The 1991 Gulf War was considered fast, and this is faster. For Arnett to say that the US initial plan has failed is to imply that he has some sort of inside info of US weakness, and that he wanted to use that info to give encouragement and support to enemy propaganda efforts.

    George writes:

    The initial war plan was a failure. The Gulf War was won in 5 days. Rumsfield thought that we'd kill Saddam Hussein the first day, and then the Iraq Republican Guard would surrender.
    We bombed Iraq for 44 days before that 5-day ground war. Most pro-war officials have avoided specific predictions about the length of the war.

    Sunday, Mar 30, 2003
     
    Programmers are not engineers
    Computer programmers in Texas cannot call themselves software engineers unless they get an engineering license, according to this Houston Chronicle story. Texas once investigated a publisher of self-help legal books for violating the laws against non-lawyers practicing laws. It seems ridiculous when applied to programmers, but Texas is just doing what all the states do when they protect various professions from competition.
     
    Biased poll
    Volokh objects to this poll question, because it gives an argument for one side without also giving an argument for the other:
    15. As you may know, Bush has proposed a 726 billion dollar tax cut over the next 10 years. The Senate has voted to reduce that to 350 billion dollars in order to help pay for the war, reduce the deficit and shore up the Social Security fund. Do you support or oppose this reduction in Bush's proposed tax cut?
    I have a different objection. I think that it is confusing because of double negatives. Having taught and made up exam questions, I've noticed that people have a lot of trouble with double-negative questions. In this question, the reduction is one negative, and the tax cut is another. Opposing it is another negative. You could even argue that taxation is a negative, because it is a depletion of the amount of money you get to keep. Just try asking someone a question like, "If you successfully oppose a reduction in your tax cut, will you have more money are less?", and see if you get an instant answer. Most people will hesitate because they are unsure.

    Volokh is writing a book on academic legal writing. I wonder if he will have a section on double negatives, as academic legal writing is filled with it. I get the impression that lawyers would much rather say "it is not illegal to ..." than "it is legal to ...".

     
    Cookies
    John sends this NY Times article about privacy aspects of web cookies. I use a program called CookieCop to help control my cookies. It is free, and has some nice side-effects, such as blocking ads and pop-ups.

    Saturday, Mar 29, 2003
     
    Review of The Hours
    Andy writes:
    Gumma recommended this column about the latest feminist movie, "The Hours".

    The column is written for those who saw the movie. However, the column does yield this general insight "It's superficial to think that happiness comes easy; some people have everything, and yet are still estranged from themselves. It's even more superficial, though, to think the point of life is to find personal happiness. Most people outgrow that egotistical worldview after their teenage years, and come to understand that the task is to live a meaningful life, if not a happy one."

    About ten years ago Roger insisted that cryptography had advanced to where its codes could never be broken. He wrote a column [] making that claim, which I questioned. The Economist has an article this week about an Indian mathematician who has found a faster way to test whether a number is prime. A conference was recently held on this in Palo Alto. Here's the main point:

    "Last August, Manindra Agrawal, of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, and two of his undergraduate students, proved another, less famous, conjecture—that there is a fast way to show whether a number is prime. Since prime numbers lie at the heart of cryptography, that might, eventually, make codes easier to break." (may need to subscribe to see this).
    Note that this advance occurred outside of the United States. Our universities have become shockingly unproductive. The only notable advances in the U.S. in the past 60 years have been experimental, and have largely occurred at industrial labs (e.g., transistor). But those labs are now essentially gone.
    Joe responds:
    Deju vu all over again. Maybe we can all just quietly read all our deleted email so as to save the strain on our keyboards.
    I happened to catch about 10 minutes in the middle of The Hours. It appeared to be unbearably boring, with people staring off into space and turning pages in a book. Not on my list of movies to see. The review ends with:
    It's no surprise that this heartless movie is a favorite of the American cultural elite, but for everybody else, The Hours isn't worth five minutes of one's time.
    My 10 minutes were wasted.

    Meanwhile, I just saw The Core, along with the 10 minute short, The Animatrix. The latter was entertaining for fans of The Matrix, and won't make any sense to anyone else. I guess it is suppose to whet our appetites for the upcoming Matrix sequels.

    The Core was a silly disaster movie, like Armageddon (with Bruce Willis). Scientists play the big roles, and they just blabber gibberish. Nothing they say makes any sense. Supposedly the earth's core quit rotating, and electromagnetic radiation is about to kill all life on earth. A crew makes a journey to the center of the earth to plant nuclear bombs to kick-start the core and get it rotating again.

    It used to be thought that the earth's magnetic field was crucial for deflecting radiation, and permitting life. But now it is known that the earth's magnetic field has flipped direction many times, even in the last million years, so apparently life can survive the temporary loss of the magnetic field just fine.

    Some animals use the magnetic field for navigation and migration. Nobody knows how they survived the flips, but they did.

    The Core did have some interesting special effects, such as a microwave beam that destroys the SF Golden Gate bridge.

    The theorem about prime numbers is old news. It was announced and verified in August 2002. Even the NY Times decribed it in Dec. 2002. Here is more significant new theorem about prime numbers that was just announced. The SJ Mercury News story failed to state the theorem, and had to run a correction about what little info it did give. The theorem says that there are arbitrarily large primes p such that the difference between the next largest prime and p is less than (ln p)8/9. This is not as strong as the widely believed conjecture that there are infinitely many twin primes, but it is much stronger than previous results in this direction.

    I don't agree with the Economist's suggestion that the new Indian prime algorithm of last year has any bearing on cryptography. Modern cryptography have use for prime finding algorithms, but the previously known algorithms are more suitable for cryptography than the new one.

    I don't remember the column Andy mentions, but I would still maintain that advances in cryptography have made it essentially unbreakable. A faster prime finding algorithm would actually make codes more secure, not less.

     
    Mothers going to war
    Andy writes:
    Here is the Washington Post editorial that [claims] that "Johnson's child is one of tens of thousands who have been left behind while their mothers -- or their mothers and their fathers -- go off to war." The claim is vague about whether it refers to this war, all Amercan wars, or even all wars worldwide in history.

    I wouldn't repeat the number. The article itself says that women constitute less than one-sixth of the armed forces, and probably a much lower percentage of the forces in Iraq. How many do we have in Iraq now? If the total number is less than 500,000 or even a million, then it's unlikely there are tens of thousands of children of mothers fighting there.


    Friday, Mar 28, 2003
     
    C.T. Sell case
    John sends this jewish magazine article about C.T. Sell, the dentist who is ordered to be drugged so that he can face trial for insurance overbilling.
    Charles Sell is a prisoner of conscience. ... We're writing about him and his case because his treatment by the federal government has been - and continues to be - unconscionable. ... Due to legal expenses, he's already lost his practice, his office, his home and his savings. What more does the government want? His mind?

    When I read columnists like this, I assume that they are not telling the whole story. I became convinced that Sell is being unjustly abused when I read the judge's order against him. The feds' case is very weak, and it appears to me that the judge has some sort of personal grudge against Sell. Regardless, it is outrageous that a nonviolent defendant (who should get a presumption of innocence) would be forcibly drugged with experimental psychotropic drugs just so he'll sit quietly in his trial.

     
    XML problems
    I found this in an anti-XML rant:
    Adam Bosworth, a programming titan (his resumé includes Quattro Pro, Access, and IE4) recently wrote convincingly about the undue hardship programmers face in dealing with XML.
    Sounds like his resume is padded. Bosworth managed a predecessor to Quattro Pro, but Quattro Pro was a complete rewrite.

    I actually agree that XML is a bad idea. It is over-hyped, and over-complicated, and really doesn't do much that is useful. It was supposed to be concise, easy to create, editable by humans, easy for programs to parse, and be a standardized format for different applications to exchange data. But it really isn't any of those things.

    Charlie writes:

    Adam's right, IMHO--the official parsing XML parsing tools are a pain in the ass. Nothing beats good old string search code....In an hour or two you can code up your own parser that sucks out fields 100 times faster and has a more convenient API.
    The XML gurus say that you are not supposed to parse XML unless you also validate that it is syntactically correct. That way, sloppy and non-conforming XML won't catch on the way that it did for HTML.

    XML was also supposed to be concise, easy to create, editable by humans, easy for programs to parse, and be a standardized format for different applications to exchange data.

    I hate to admit that Adam might be right about something, but I'm not a big XML fan either. With all the XML hype, I don't think its goals were realized very well.

    Bob writes:

    Not to mention that unless you parse it according to the syntax you might extract something incorrectly, such as from a comment. BTW, at Callidus we use XML extensively as a substitute for binary BLOBS. We have customers that like it as a messaging/web services approach to application integration, although that latter is mostly all talk. No customer yet has actually been ready to do anything with XML in that way.

    Like RISC, client/server, object oriented programming and all the rest of the magic bullets, there isn't a magic bullet here. But, it is nice to have a standard rather than just inventing yet another little language. I recall QP-DOS had about 6 different interpreters in it with associated little scanner/parsers.

     
    Ironic names
    The Microsoft Palladium product manager is named Juarez. Add that to the list of ironic names. I also enjoyed this parody:
    Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

    Neo: The Nexus?

    Morpheus: Do you want to know what IT is? The Nexus is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

    Neo: What truth?

    Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Nexus. is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance.
    George writes:
    What is going on? That last post makes no sense! I don't get it.
    Palladium is a Msft code name for a future product that is supposed to be called "'Next-Generation Secure Computing Base". It was designed to help control piracy. The word warez is a hacker word for pirate software, and Juarez sounds like a Mexican equivalent. The nexus is the trusted root of Palladium that will control what secrets are available to software applications. The dialog is a parody of a scene in the popular 1999 movie The Matrix, where Morpheus tries to explain that Neo's body is in a jar somewhere, and his mental activity is stimulated by a massive computer simulation that is controlled by machines that have taken over the world. Is it funny now? Ok, maybe it is geek humor. I happen to think that it is funny. The movie has a sequel that is about to be released, and I am looking forward to it.
     
    Iraqi opposition
    A US general says:
    "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed against," Wallace, commander of V Corps, said during a visit to the 101st Airborne Division headquarters here in central Iraq.
    Huhh? Surely they had war games that varied from an immediate Iraqi military surrender, to massive retaliation with the weapons of mass destruction that Bush claims Iraq has. The war has been something in between. I hope that our generals are not too surprised by anything they've seen.

    Update: Jonathan send these friendly fire figures. 21% of US WWII casualties, and 39% of US Vietnam casualties. Seems high to me, but the site says the figures are conservative.

    Update: Here is a Slate column that says the US may have cheated in the war games.

     
    Friendly fire casualties
    I found this on a mailing list:
    NBC on 24 Mar 2003 had an item on self-inflicted damage, noting that in the Vietnam War, 24% of U.S. fatalities were due to friendly fire.
    Is this a realiable figure? It seems very high to me. I could only find this statement in USA Today:
    Of the 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War, 81% were killed in combat, the Department of Veterans Affairs says. The comparable figure is 91% in the Korean War and 72% in World War II.
    The article is written as if the remainder is friendly fire, but I am not sure how this really relates.

    Thursday, Mar 27, 2003
     
    Illegal poop
    I didn't know the feds were shutting down sick web sites. The Smoking Gun has the scoop on the arrest of the operators of GirlsPooping.com.
     
    Zimbabwe
    The entire world pressured the white govt of Rhodesia to turn over political power to black folks in 1980. The NY Review of Books describes what happened. Now the people are starving. Bottom line: the blacks were much better off under white rule.
     
    Supreme Court sodomy
    The US Supreme Court is threatening to reverse its infamous 1986 5-4 decision upholding a Georgia sodomy law. Homosexuals were enraged by its finding:
    Blackstone described "the infamous crime against nature" as an offense of "deeper malignity" than rape, a heinous act "the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature," and "a crime not fit to be named." ...

    To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

    Here is a Slate article claiming that the above statement is factually incorrect. But having read the argument, I don't see what is factually correct. There have been anti-sodomy laws that go back 100s of years. The Slate columnist seems to think it is false just because there have been some variations in the definition of sodomy over the years.

    The article also claims that the word homosexual has only been in use for about 100 years. Before that, people referred only to the acts performed. It is more recent that it has been common to assume that the acts are related to some sort of persistent psychological orientation. But still, I don't see how this is relevant. It is the acts that are illegal in Texas, that is the way it has always been. If psychologists convince us that being a murderers have a different psychological orientation, murder will still be illegal.

    In 1960, all 50 states had anti-sodomy laws; now it is only 13, and the laws are rarely enforced. That is evidence that the political process is responding to changes in public opinion. It is not much of an argument for the SC to seize upon this trend, and claim that it is implicit in a constitution that was written 200 years ago.

     
    SF charges dropped
    San Francisco has dropped all the felony charges against the war protesters. This is the same city that indicted the police chief because his assistant's son got into a minor scuffle with another drunk coming out of a bar at 2am.

    BTW, why are the protesters called "peace protesters" or "anti-war protesters"? They are not protesting the peace, they are protesting the war. So wouldn't war protester be more correct?

     
    Funny errata
    From the errata to Ross Anderson's book:
    The most embarrassing socially was the reference to Bruce Schneier as Prince Schneier on page 113.
    Schneier is the author of a popular cryptography book. Calling him Prince Schneier is almost as good as calling him the BS man!

    I have the 2nd printing of Anderson's excellent book. The error has been corrected.


    Wednesday, Mar 26, 2003
     
    FERC finds price gouging
    The Wash Post reports that FERC found that power companies overcharged California for energy. Well duhh.

    The whole point of the power deregulation was to let private companies profit by trading energy, and thereby insure that Californians pay a market price for energy. As it turns out, the so-called deregulation scheme was broken, and rigged by California lawmakers so that Californian ended up paying above-market prices for energy. But I don't quite get the point of blaming companies like Enron for taking advantage of the system. Isn't that what California was asking them to do?

    I also don't quite get the Californians who blame FERC for not rescuing California from its own flawed energy regulatory scheme. Granted, California is governed by incompetent morons like Gray Davis, whose decisions made the California energy crisis worse and wasted billions of dollars. It was the California energy-market rules that allowed power companies to profit by shutting down power plants and creating short-term price squeezes. And it was Calif. Gov. Gray Davis who prevent California utilities from buying long-term power contracts, until the spot price reached a peak, and then forced them to lock in those peak prices with 10-year contracts.

    The real problem was that California had a stupid energy deregulation scheme that only partially deregulated energy, and the California politicians were either unable or unwilling to fix it when it went bad.


    Tuesday, Mar 25, 2003
     
    Press committing war crimes
    I am amazed at the USA news media showing pictures of Iraqis being held as prisoners of war, after it was claimed to be a violation of the Geneva Convention. The 1949 Geneva Convention on treatment of war prisoners says that prisoners must be protected from public curiosity. TV reality shows routinely obscure the faces of bystanders who haven't signed waivers. The news media also makes an effort to protect the identity of minors when privacy considerations warrant. So why don't TV news shows and newspapers obscure the faces of Iraqi prisoners of war?

    Monday, Mar 24, 2003
     
    Sloppy quotes
    One of my pet peeves is people who use quote marks for emphasis or some other purpose while criticizing someone else, leaving the reader with the false impression that it is a legitimate quote. The WSJ blog today says:
    It's been a couple of weeks since Pat Buchanan's exposé of the "Zionist cabal" that has taken over American foreign policy ...
    But Buchanan does not use the phrase "Zionist cabal". Meanwhile Buchanan says:
    The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.
    and the quote appears to be of Max Boot, a former WSJ editor. But Boot did not say it, and it is presumably an obscure reference to George Washington's farewell address that only his fellow conservatives would understand. These folks should learn to use italics or something else for emphasis, and not quote marks.
     
    Paying for spam
    A new $10/year email service called Mailblocks claims to block spam for you, and has gotten a lot of publicity. But Politech points out that its terms of service announces that it will bombard its subscribers with 3rd party spam, and there is no way to opt-out! Somebody is not too clear about the concept.
     
    Qatar
    The TV news is now pronouncing Qatar as "cutter". This explanation say cutter is more correct. But this seems like foolish political correctness to me. Listen to how the arabs say it, and it sounds more like KUH-tar to me. It sounds like those who want to call mohammedans muslims, instead of mohammedans or moslems, and call their bible the Qur'an instead of the Koran.

    George writes:

    The word Mohammadanism is offensive to muslims because it implies that Mohammed was a god, just as Christian implies that Christ was a god. Allah is their only god. The religion is Islam, and the followers are muslims, not mohammedans.
    I don't think that you are correct. The word Mohammadanism was used to describe the religion for 100s of years. Confucianism and Buddism are religions, and yet their followers do not consider Confucius or Buddha gods. The first pillar of Mohammedanism requires accepting that Mohammed was Allah's most important prophet, and the leader of the religion and the revealer of all the beliefs. The word Mohammedanism is an accurate and non-derogatory term. The word Islam is fine also, altho it is usually used to mean something broader than just the religion.
     
    Minnesota database on imperfect kids
    Andy sends this story
    Every newborn child in Minnesota will be required to submit to medical testing for congenital disorders and defects -- unless parents make an objection in writing that is based on a conflict with religious tenets and practice. No other objections are allowed.

    The Minnesota House Health and Human Services Policy Committee will vote tomorrow on the HHS budget bill, which includes the requirement for medical testing of children, and the requirement that a state birth defects registry be created.


    Sunday, Mar 23, 2003
     
    Oscars
    Glad I skipped them. Sure enough, they gave a documentary award to charlatan Michael Moore, who then griped about Al Gore losing the 2000 election, and another Oscar to fugitive child molester Roman Polanski. Moore had the nerve to say he believes in "nonfiction". Too bad he doesn't believe in facts. His movie is a silly and incoherent polemic for some of his favorite leftist causes. I guess it is nonfiction because of its polemical nature, but I wouldn't call it a documentary.

    Joan writes:

    I think you might have enjoyed parts of the show, Roger. The boos/jeers were actually louder, to my ears at least, than the applause/cheers for Moore. Most of the audience, though, remained silent (shocked? cowed?); maybe the nominees had been asked not to launch into a political philippic should they win (or, in Academy Award-speak, should "the Oscar go to" them ). Adrien Brody's (best actor award for his performance in "The Pianist," a "Holocaust saga," according to MSNBC) acceptance speech was a hoot. Talk about sniveling! (I'd never heard of him.) I was rather disappointed that Susan Sarandon and Barbra Striesand, both presenters, didn't launch into anti-Bush, anti-war diatribes; I only watched to see the Hollywoodenheads make asses of themselves...

    Here's a site you might enjoy: www.francestinks.com

    Drudge says the Oscar show was the lowest rated in history. So I guess I wasn't the only one who skipped it.

    For more on Michael Moore's idiotic rants, see MooreWatch.com. Even the NY Times review of Bowling for Columbine says:

    This exchange is followed by a montage, accompanied by Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World," of American foreign policy misdeeds from the 1950's to the present. Their relevance is, again, arguable, but by now it should be clear that Mr. Moore is less interested in argument than in provocation. The last image is of the airplanes smashing into the World Trade Center, accompanied by this text: "Sept. 11, 2001: Osama bin Laden uses his expert C.I.A. training to murder 3,000 people." The idiocy of this statement is hardly worth engaging; it is exactly the kind of glib distortion of history that can be taken as a warrant to dismiss everything Mr. Moore has to say.
     
    Biological loyalty test
    I just heard a left-wing radio program called CounterSpin describe the military anthrax vaccine as a "biological loyalty test". The vaccine is controversial, but so are a lot of other vaccines. Why didn't they complain about the vaccine before the war, when others were complaining about it?
     
    The think-tank war
    One of the criticisms of the Iraq war is that it is a think-tank war that was planned out by a bunch of NWO neocon intellectuals long before 09/11 or the recent Iraq weapons inspections. Here is the New American Century site. It is a little spooky to see how many of those folks are not close advisors to G.W. Bush.

    Saturday, Mar 22, 2003
     
    Ranking the early USA presidents
    Andy writes:
    I rank the first 15 presidents in terms of how conservative they were as follows
    1. James Monroe - Anti-Federalist, issued Monroe Doctrine, gave us Era of Good Feelings, successful Missouri Compromise
    2. George Washington - did the ultimate conservative act giving up government power; also issued Farewell Address
    3. Thomas Jefferson -- strict constructionist who ended the slave trade and proposed the first balanced budget
    4. John Tyler - stood up against Jackson, also favored state power & vetoed fed bank; settled land disputes w/ Britain
    5. James Madison -- Father of Constitution, but ineptly allowed war & DC burning; his wife saved Washington's portrait
    6. John Quincy Adams - wrote part of Monroe Doctrine, devoted his life to ending slavery; but had Federalist leanings
    7. James Polk -- expansionist, but kept his promises, reduced tariffs, and popularized the Monroe Doctrine
    8. Zachary Taylor -- opposed Compromise of 1850 until he died, but he hadn't even bothered voting in elections
    9. Martin Van Buren - opposed slavery, but used federal deficits and mishandled the economy
    10. William Henry Harrison - captured the White House for an alternative party (Whig), but died almost immediately
    11. Andrew Jackson - opposed fed. power, but flouted Sup. Ct. & Congress and was brutal to Indians. Appointed Taney
    12. Millard Fillmore -- pro-slavery, signed Compromise of 1850 which allowed expansion of slavery
    13. Franklin Pierce -- pro-slavery, even tried to make Kansas a slave state
    14. James Buchanan -- pro-slavery, did nothing to prevent Civil War
    15. John Adams - Federalist, appointed John Marshall to lead Supreme Court, also signed Alien & Sedition Acts
    John responds to Andy:
    So, let's see the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was good but the Compromise of 1850 was bad? (You attack the Compromise of 1850 because it "allowed" the expansion of slavery - i.e., it preserved the status quo. However, slavery was not in fact extended to any new state after 1850. OTOH, you praise the "successful" Missouri Compromise under which slavery was extended to MO, AR, FL, and TX.)

    You attack Madison because he "ineptly allowed" war with Britain in 1812, but fail to credit Adams for skillfully avoiding war with France in 1800.

    You attack Polk for being expansionist and praise Jefferson for being a strict constructionist, but Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was the greatest single act of expansion in U.S. history. Also, if expansionism is bad, why do you give top honors to Monroe, who (aided by his secretary of state John Quincy Adams and the military exploits of Andrew Jackson) presided over the acquisition of Florida?

    You praise Jackson because he "opposed federal power," but in most respects Jackson was a vigorous supporter of the Union and of national power; he fought and defeated Calhoun's attempt to assert the right of states to nullify acts of Congress.

    You praise Washington for "the ultimate conservative act giving up government power" (presumably referring to his retirement after 2 terms); but while in office, Washington vigorously interpreted the power of the new federal government and of the presidency, as illustrated by his suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion.

    You praise Jefferson for proposing the first balanced budget, but it was Jackson who actually paid off the entire national debt (which, however, caused a severe depression).

    You attack Adams for appointing Marshall to the Supreme Court, but then you attack Jackson because he "flouted" Marshall's decision (presumably referring to Worcester v. Georgia (1832) in favor of the Cherokee Indians).

    Your most important criterion for ranking the presidents appears to be the degree of their opposition to slavery, but don't explain why that makes them "conservative" in today's sense. Also, most of today's conservatives would be Federalists (i.e., we support the perpetual union of states under the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution) and expansionists (i.e., we support the expansion from the original 13 states across the continent).

    I don't know how to make sense out of Andy's list, unless he defines conservative and explains how the term applies to the American politics of 200 years ago. It is not obvious. Eg, Washington was a revolutionary soldier who killed people in order to upset the existing order and install a radical new kind of gubmnt. I don't see how that was "conservative".

    It reminds me of some news reporters who refer to some ultra-radical Islamicist or Communist like Osama bin Laden as a "conservative". Whatever they are, they are not conservatives in any sense of the word. They are not trying to maintain the status quo, and have very little in common with American political movements that use the term "conservative".

    Andy responds to John:

    By "conservative" I mean what it means today -- adherence to moral and logical principles. Look at the views of the attendees of Eagle Council if you're unsure.

    John wrote "So, let's see the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was good but the Compromise of 1850 was bad? (You attack the Compromise of 1850 because it "allowed" the expansion of slavery - i.e., it preserved the status quo. However, slavery was not in fact extended to any new state after 1850. OTOH, you praise the "successful" Missouri Compromise under which slavery was extended to MO, AR, FL, and TX.)"

    The Missouri Compromise did not affect FL or TX, and I don't think it even affected AR. It excluded slavery for nearly all of the unorganized Louisiana Purchase, and it solved the slavery crisis for 30 years. The Compromise of 1850, which only lasted 4 years, opened up vast territory to slavery and included a despised federal Fugitive Slave Act.

    John wrote, "You attack Polk for being expansionist and praise Jefferson for being a strict constructionist, but Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was the greatest single act of expansion in U.S. history. Also, if expansionism is bad, why do you give top honors to Monroe, who (aided by his secretary of state John Quincy Adams and the military exploits of Andrew Jackson) presided over the acquisition of Florida?"

    Jefferson and Monroe bought their land. Polk conquered his with loss of life. Huge difference.

    John wrote, "You praise Jackson because he "opposed federal power," but in most respects Jackson was a vigorous supporter of the Union and of national power; he fought and defeated Calhoun's attempt to assert the right of states to nullify acts of Congress."

    Jackson vetoed the federal bank and internal improvements. But he did strengthen the federal presidency.

    John wrote, "You attack Adams for appointing Marshall to the Supreme Court, but then you attack Jackson because he "flouted" Marshall's decision (presumably referring to Worcester v. Georgia (1832) in favor of the Cherokee Indians)."

    Nothing inconsistent about this. Conservatives believe in Rule of Law.

    John wrote, "Your most important criterion for ranking the presidents appears to be the degree of their opposition to slavery, but don't explain why that makes them "conservative" in today's sense."

    Conservatives frequently compare abortion to slavery. Conservatism is based in morality.

    John wrote, "Also, most of today's conservatives would be Federalists (i.e., we support the perpetual union of states under the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution) and expansionists (i.e., we support the expansion from the original 13 states across the continent)."

    No, I don't think there is any consensus among conservatives about either of these issues. Conservatives are not fans of the Supremacy Clause or expansionism. Conservatives don't cite Lincoln, the leading proponent of a "perpetual union," as a hero on par with Washington.

    John responds to Andy:
    So does your ranking of the first 15 presidents reflect their relative "adherence to moral and logical principles"? Obviously not!
    The Missouri Compromise did not affect FL or TX, and I don't think it even affected AR. It excluded slavery for nearly all of the unorganized Louisiana Purchase, and it solved the slavery crisis for 30 years.
    By prohibiting slavery *only* in that portion of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36-30 (the southern boundary of Missouri) (except for Missouri itself), the Missouri Compromise in effect legalized slavery in all other federal territories. So it did indeed directly "affect" the territories that became the slave states of AR (1836) and FL (1845).

    Technically you are right that it did not affect TX because TX was never a federal territory. However, that is a mere technicality because TX is south of 36-30 and did allow slavery from its independence in 1836 until it entered the Union in 1845. As such, TX played a key role in the Missouri Compromise by insuring the equal North-South division of the Senate from 1790 until 1850.

    The Compromise of 1850, which only lasted 4 years, opened up vast territory to slavery and included a despised federal Fugitive Slave Act.
    It opened up the possibility of slavery in territory north of 36-30, but the slavery forces were defeated and not a single slave state was created in that additional territory or anywhere else after 1850.

    The federal Fugitive Slave Act (which, BTW, was "despised" only by abolitionists) merely implemented Article IV, section 2 of the original U.S. Constitution. BTW, the Missouri Compromise also contained a fugitive slave provision applicable to the territory north of 36-30.

    Jefferson and Monroe bought their land. Polk conquered his with loss of life. Huge difference.
    Polk also bought "his" land. It's true there was a war, but even though we won the war, we paid Mexico for the land we wanted instead of forcing them to pay us reparations. Some conquest! Our peace terms were extraordinarily generous. Mexico could not govern the vast territory anyway and they were more than happy to take the money instead. (Monroe's purchase of Florida was likewise accelerated by Andrew Jackson's military adventures there.)
    John wrote, "You attack Adams for appointing Marshall to the Supreme Court, but then you attack Jackson because he "flouted" Marshall's decision (presumably referring to Worcester v. Georgia (1832) in favor of the Cherokee Indians)." Nothing inconsistent about this. Conservatives believe in Rule of Law.
    If Marshall was right in that case - as he was in so many other cases - then why criticize Adams for appointing him? What Marshall decision would you overrule?
    John wrote, "Your most important criterion for ranking the presidents appears to be the degree of their opposition to slavery, but don't explain why that makes them "conservative" in today's sense." Conservatives frequently compare abortion to slavery. Conservatism is based in morality.
    Liberalism is also based in morality! And while some conservatives today compare abortion to slavery, nobody in the 19th century ever once compared slavery to abortion! So you have not articulated any coherent way to apply these labels.

    Incidentally, if opposition to slavery is your most important criterion, how come you rank John Adams last? Adams was the only early president who was lifelong outspoken opponent of slavery and who never owned slaves himself.

    No, I don't think there is any consensus among conservatives about either of these issues. Conservatives are not fans of the Supremacy Clause or expansionism. Conservatives don't cite Lincoln, the leading proponent of a "perpetual union," as a hero on par with Washington.
    Washington certainly believed in the Supremacy Clause; he presided over the convention that wrote it, and he vigorously enforced federal supremacy during his term as president.

    Except for a handful of neo-Confederates, all conservatives support the supremacy of the U.S Constitution. And I think everyone, even the cult of Southern agrarians, support U.S. territorial expansion up until 1898.

    Andy's definition of "conservative" is incoherent. Mentioning "morality", "Rule of Law", or "logical principles" tells us nothing about how to distinguish conservativism from other philosophies.

    Pres. Jackson had a legal dispute with Marshall about whether the Cherokee Nation was a sovereignty not subject to USA laws. I don't know who was right, but both sides would say they believed in Rule of Law. Saying that conservatives believe in Rule of Law tells us nothing. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Jackson was more likely to be right.

    Andy reponds:

    John and Roger seem to object to the very notion of rating presidents by how conservative they were. Both seem to think that liberals have principles too, and perhaps it's all relative. In fact, only conservatives think principles should trump personal desire. And yes, presidents should be held accountable for their lack of conservatism.

    The Missouri Compromise was successful for 34 years, and overruling it in the Nebraska-Kansas Act and Dred Scott decision was the major cause of the Civil War. It banned the spread of slavery above 36-30 (except for Missouri), which was most of the territory at the time. I'm not aware of a meaningful fugitive slave provision in it. (The Compromise of 1850 had a tough federal fugitive slave provision.)

    John wrote, "If Marshall was right in that case - as he was in so many other cases - then why criticize Adams for appointing him? What Marshall decision would you overrule?"

    Dartmouth College v. Woodward, McCulloch v. Maryland, Cohens v. Virginia, to name a few. Marshall was the antithesis of conservatism.

    John writes, "Liberalism is also based in morality!"

    Certainly not today. It's the view that personal whim and desire can trump principles of morality and reason.

    John wrote, "if opposition to slavery is your most important criterion, how come you rank John Adams last"

    I never said opposition to slavery was my most important criterion. It isn't. Also, Adams didn't do anything about slavery. His personal views were inconsequential.

    John wrote, "Except for a handful of neo-Confederates, all conservatives support the supremacy of the U.S Constitution."

    No, not as construed and applied by the Supreme Court. Conservatives oppose applying the Establishment Clause against the states, for example.

    John wrote, "And I think everyone, even the cult of Southern agrarians, support U.S. territorial expansion up until 1898."

    Wrong again. Many, including Lincoln, opposed Polk's war on Mexico. Opposition to the Ostend Manifesto was also intense.

    Roger wrote, "Saying that conservatives believe in Rule of Law tells us nothing"

    It tells us a great deal. It's the main difference between the U.S. and most countries.

    I object to calling George Washington a conservative. He was a radical. What could be more radical than leading a revolution? If he were really so faithful to Rule of Law, he would not have led a revolution.

    I don't see the USA being so different. When judges are nominated for promotion, the debate is almost entirely political, and not over who can best carry out Rule of Law.

    John responds to Andy:

    John and Roger seem to object to the very notion of rating presidents by how conservative they were. Both seem to think that liberals have principles too, and perhaps it's all relative. In fact, only conservatives think principles should trump personal desire. And yes, presidents should be held accountable for their lack of conservatism.
    But your rating of the first 15 presidents is obviously not based on your stated criterion - whether principles should trump personal desire.
    The Missouri Compromise was successful for 34 years, and overruling it in the Nebraska-Kansas Act and Dred Scott decision was the major cause of the Civil War. It banned the spread of slavery above 36-30 (except for Missouri), which was most of the territory at the time. I'm not aware of a meaningful fugitive slave provision in it. (The Compromise of 1850 had a tough federal fugitive slave provision.)
    But if your stated definition of conservatism is adherence to principles of morality, how can you cite the 1820 Missouri Compromise as a major achievement? A compromise, by definition, is a (partial) surrender of principle.

    You say the Missouri Compromise was "successful" - but successful at what? It certainly did not limit slavery, as I previously showed. That was not its purpose.

    The purpose of the Missouri Compromise was to preserve the Union with an equal division of the U.S. Senate between pro- and anti-slavery states. It did succeed at that purpose for 30 years.

    Hence, to call the Missouri Compromise a "conservative" achievement (under your definition of conservatism) necessarily assumes that preserving the Union was higher "principle" than ending slavery. (The compromise did indeed include a fugitive slave provision that, while not as "tough" as the 1850 law, was nevertheless more "meaningful" than what existed before.)

    The reason the Missouri Compromise collapsed in 1850 is that California upset the balance between free and slave states in the Senate. In exchange for agreeing to admit California, pro-slavery states demanded and got other concessions.

    I see no coherent basis to cite the 1820 compromise as conservative and the 1850 compromise as anti-conservative, and even less reason to use that as the main reason to rank the men who were president in 1820 and 1850.

    John wrote, "If Marshall was right in that case - as he was in so many other cases - then why criticize Adams for appointing him? What Marshall decision would you overrule?" Dartmouth College v. Woodward, McCulloch v. Maryland, Cohens v. Virginia, to name a few. Marshall was the antithesis of conservatism.
    I see nothing in modern conservatism that requires the reversal of any of those landmark decisions. What is wrong with them? How do they violate your definition of conservatism?
    John writes, "Liberalism is also based in morality!" Certainly not today. It's the view that personal whim and desire can trump principles of morality and reason.
    Liberals appeal to abstract moral principles much more often than conservatives, who rely more on history and culture. Clinton, for example, regularly justified his decisions because "it is right" or "it's the right thing to do" - phrases he used hundreds of times.
    John wrote, "if opposition to slavery is your most important criterion, how come you rank John Adams last" I never said opposition to slavery was my most important criterion. It isn't. Also, Adams didn't do anything about slavery. His personal views were inconsequential.
    In your ranking of 15 presidents, you referred to support of or opposition to slavery far more often than any other factor, and most of them didn't do anything "consequential" about it one way or the other.
    John wrote, "Except for a handful of neo-Confederates, all conservatives support the supremacy of the U.S Constitution." No, not as construed and applied by the Supreme Court. Conservatives oppose applying the Establishment Clause against the states, for example.
    Some conservatives think the First Amendment should not be enforced against the states, but that does not question the fundamental role of the Supremacy Clause.
    John wrote, "And I think everyone, even the cult of Southern agrarians, support U.S. territorial expansion up until 1898." Wrong again. Many, including Lincoln, opposed Polk's war on Mexico. Opposition to the Ostend Manifesto was also intense.
    Those who opposed the Mexican war, including Lincoln, nevertheless supported U.S. Westward expansion to that territory so long as slavery was prohibited there. Lincoln as president gave a tremendous impetus to expansion by supporting the railroad and the homestead act.
    Roger wrote, "Saying that conservatives believe in Rule of Law tells us nothing" It tells us a great deal. It's the main difference between the U.S. and most countries.
    But how is it useful to rank presidents?
    Andy responds to John:
    John wrote, "Liberals appeal to abstract moral principles much more often than conservatives, who rely more on history and culture."

    Liberals do not appeal to "moral principles." They do appeal to terms like "rights" and "equality", but these are not moral principles. "Rights", for example, can simply be a demand to do as one desires, without any logic to it.

    There are pseudo-conservatives who will invoke history and culture rather than making a logical or moral argument that might offend someone. But that approach doesn't speak for the conservative movement.

    John writes, "I see no coherent basis to cite the 1820 compromise as conservative and the 1850 compromise as anti-conservative ..."

    There are several reasons why the 1820 compromise was conservative, but the 1850 one was liberal. The sharp difference in the federal fugitive slave provisions is one. Yes, conservatives oppose a federal police, particularly when used to enforce something morally objectionable. See the recent case over RICO and abortion protestors. Another key difference is that the 1820 compromise mostly banned slavery from unorganized territory, while the 1850 compromise mostly allowed it. In other words, slavery lost the future in the 1820 compromise, but won it in the 1850 compromise. That's a huge difference, because politics (like the stock market) is about the future, not the past. A third key difference is that the 1850 compromise spent lots of federal money, unlike the 1820 compromise. Overall, the conservative compromise proved to be successful, while the liberal one proved to be a failure.

    I said that conservatives oppose Marshall's decision in "Dartmouth College v. Woodward, McCulloch v. Maryland, Cohens v. Virginia, to name a few. Marshall was the antithesis of conservatism."

    John replied, "I see nothing in modern conservatism that requires the reversal of any of those landmark decisions. What is wrong with them? How do they violate your definition of conservatism?"

    Let's take Dartmouth College. The US Supreme Court intervened and prevented the State of New Hampshire from altering its own charter within its own boundaries. Conservatives oppose that kind of federal intervention in state affairs.

    John wrote, "But how is it useful to rank presidents?"

    Accountability is good, and ranking promotes that. Liberals dislike political accountability. They would like to be able to flout moral and logical principles and not have anyone notice.

    John responds to Andy:
    John wrote, "Liberals appeal to abstract moral principles much more often than conservatives, who rely more on history and culture." Liberals do not appeal to "moral principles." They do appeal to terms like "rights" and "equality", but these are not moral principles.
    Not moral principles? They are the foundation of morality!
    "Rights", for example, can simply be a demand to do as one desires, without any logic to it.
    Yes, that's a good definition of rights doing as one desires, without regard to logic. Another name for that is freedom. Another name is moral agency (aka free will). (Andy is really showing his Platonic colors here!)
    There are pseudo-conservatives who will invoke history and culture rather than making a logical or moral argument that might offend someone. But that approach doesn't speak for the conservative movement.
    OTC, I the pseudo-conservatives are those who ignore history and culture to make purely logical or moral arguments. That is the liberal or libertarian approach.
    There are several reasons why the 1820 compromise was conservative, but the 1850 one was liberal. ...
    Your first and third reasons are basically the same point the 1850 Compromise made it a federal responsibility to enforce the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) of the original Constitution.

    Previously the enforcement of that clause had been left to the states or private litigants, which proved ineffective in hotbeds of abolitionism where people were openly defying the Rule of Law. I thought you supported the Rule of Law? I see no conservative basis for declaring that the U.S. government cannot enforce the U.S. Constitution.

    Your second reason is not well founded, as I previously explained. The 1820 Compromise did allow slavery in those territories where it was feasible and likely to spread and did in fact spread; it banned slavery only in those territories where it was unlikely to spread anyway (that's why the pro-slavery forces worked to acquire additional territory from Mexico and Cuba).

    While the 1850 Compromise did open those unlikely territories to the possibility of slavery, in fact slavery forces were defeated in Kansas and never gained a single additional state after 1850. Meanwhile, the admission of California permanently gave the upper hand to free-state forces in the U.S. govt and made possible the election of Lincoln in 1860.

    But aside from all that, your fundamental mistake is to test these two laws under some abstract Platonic logic and then attribute them entirely to the presidents who signed them. In fact, they were compromises between two bitterly opposing forces, each of which got only half of what they wanted.

    Let's take Dartmouth College. The US Supreme Court intervened and prevented the State of New Hampshire from altering its own charter within its own boundaries. Conservatives oppose that kind of federal intervention in state affairs.
    OTC, conservatives have always supported the Contract Clause (Article I, Section 10) of the Constitution, on which the Dartmouth decision was based, as a bulwark of our liberty.
    John wrote, "But how is it useful to rank presidents?" Accountability is good, and ranking promotes that. Liberals dislike political accountability. They would like to be able to flout moral and logical principles and not have anyone notice.
    My question was how your definition of conservatism is useful - that is, how it can be used - to rank the presidents. I still have no clue.
    Andy doesn't make much sense to me either. Andy acts like conservatives can be identified based on arguments of morality, and Rule of Law. But often these 2 factors are at opposite sides of an issue. Eg, in the fugitive slave law debate, one side had Rule of Law squarely on its side, and the other had the moral high ground.

    Andy responds:

    Liberals do not appeal to "moral principles." They do appeal to terms like "rights" and "equality", but these are not moral principles.

    John replied, "Not moral principles? They are the foundation of morality! ... Yes, that's a good definition of rights doing as one desires, without regard to logic. Another name for that is freedom."

    This is where we differ -- at the very root. I doubt a single person in the Moral Majority would have agreed with John's description of morality. Or freedom, for that matter. Nor would anyone in the traditional wing of the Catholic Church agree with John's description.

    Roger writes, "Andy acts like conservatives can be identified based on arguments of morality, and Rule of Law. But often these 2 factors are at opposite sides of an issue."

    Rarely, if ever. When they are, as in the case of the immoral Fugitive Slave Act in the Compromise of 1850, conservatives work to overturn the law.

    John writes, "OTC, the pseudo-conservatives are those who ignore history and culture to make purely logical or moral arguments. That is the liberal or libertarian approach."

    There is nothing wrong with purely logical or moral arguments. Conservatives can and should make such arguments all the time. Prayer in the classroom, for example, is better argued based on morality and logic than on history and culture.

    John wrote about the two slavery compromises, "your fundamental mistake is to test these two laws under some abstract Platonic logic and then attribute them entirely to the presidents who signed them. In fact, they were compromises between two bitterly opposing forces, each of which got only half of what they wanted."

    John pretends that a compromise must be a halfway split. Not so, of course. The Missouri Compromise gave the future to the abolitionists in almost all of the relevant territory. The Compromise of 1850 gave the future to slavery in almost all of the relevant territory, plus a heinous federal Fugitive Slave Act. John is incorrect in pretending the two compromises were similar. They were very different, reflecting in part the different politics of who was in charge.

    John wrote, "OTC, conservatives have always supported the Contract Clause (Article I, Section 10) of the Constitution, on which the Dartmouth decision was based, as a bulwark of our liberty."

    Conservatives typically oppose federal interference with internal state issues, like chartering.

    I've never heard anyone give an argument for prayer in the classroom based on morality and logic. And I don't know what is conservative about the state of New Hamshire dismantling the private Dartmouth College, and making it a state-run school. (Judge Marshall's decision let Dartmouth continue as a private college, based on a theory about upholding contracts.)
     
    Oscar parties
    Why do people have Oscar parties? I'd much rather watch the invasion of Baghdad on TV. I last watched the Oscar show about 20 years ago, and it was painfully boring and offensive.

    This year, there will probably be dumb actors giving anti-war speeches. Michael Moore may get an Oscar for best documentary, even tho Bowling For Columbine will filled with lies and distortions, and was terrible as a documentary. Roman Polanski could win one, but he won't show up because he is a fugitive for a statutory rape charge. Apparently he has redeemed himself in Hollywood because he made a move about Holocaust survivors. His co-producer won't show up either, because he is facing corruption charges in Poland. If you want to know which movies were good, just look at the box office figures. It is a more reliable indicator.


    Friday, Mar 21, 2003
     
    French statement
    Bob sent this:
    PARIS, FRANCE - President Jacques Chirac announced today that France would be deploying two elite units of French troops to Iraq in the event of war. Five hundred crack troops from the 2nd Groupement d'Instruction en Abandonment are mobilizing to assist the Iraqi Army in the finer points of military surrender.

    "The immediate capitulation of an armed force is a delicate and intricate tactic in which we French have much experience." said Defense Ministry spokesperson General de Armee Francois-Phillippe Hommes de Petit-Pommes. "There is a certain protocol in laying down your arms or fleeing the battlefield. To wave the white flag while remaining arrogant, pompous and insufferable requires experience and training. The French Army believes it is second to none in the fine art of surrendering quickly. The record of our armed forces in that area speaks for itself. The Iraqi performance in giving up without a fight during the last Gulf War was commendable but slip-shod. We hope to improve their level of surrender execution for the next war."

    General Hommes de Petit-Pommes further announced that 1000 advisors from The Regiment de Collaborateurs Francais will also be dispatched to Iraq to assist the Iraqi people in collaborating effectively with any occupation force. "It is more important to protect their art treasures than to defend their honor," the General pointed out.

    The General also expressed the hope that Baghdad has some tree-lined boulevards. "It was our experience that the Germans liked to march in the shade, and we feel the Americans and the British might like that same measure of comfort in Iraq-especially as warm weather settles in this spring."

    He also sends this picture:
     
    ReplayTV bankrupt
    Sonicblue announced bankruptcy. It was a pioneer, and made the popular Rio mp3 music players, and the ReplayTV PVR (similar to TiVo).

    It is amazing that the PVR has been such a flop in the marketplace. I think that TV is unwatchable without one. If I had to choose between a PVR, VCR, DVD player, HDTV, or big screen TV, I would take a PVR.


    Thursday, Mar 20, 2003
     
    Msft bug
    For years, Msft email has had a problem with messages that have "begin " at the beginning of a line. I was amused by the official workaround:
    To workaround this problem:
  • Do not start messages with the word "begin" followed by two spaces.
  • Use only one space between the word "begin" and the following data.
  • Capitalize the word "begin" so that it is reads "Begin."
  • Use a different word such as "start" or "commence."
  •  
    Cellphone rights
    Here's another thing that ought to be on Chuck Schumer's bill of rights for cellphone users: 411 listings. The AP story says 5% of US households have gone wireless, and use a cellphone instead of a land line. My kids call a cellphone a cell-o-phone, because that sounds more like telephone.
     
    Diversity may not benefit education
    This study says no. I don't have any confidence in these results, but at least it appears to look at the matter as a serious empirical question. Too many others just assume they know an answer, without any analysis.

    One of the authors is S.M. Lipset. An earlier survey of his was discredited by mathematician Serge Lang.

     
    USA code tariffs
    This ExtremeTech article suggest that the USA should have protective tariffs for American programmers, or else the jobs will move to India and elsewhere.

    It makes as much sense to me as having tariffs to protect steel workers, sugar growers, and peanut farmers. We also have special laws protecting the jobs of physicians, lawyers, and other professions. I say we should abolish all these laws, unless people are willing to also protect programmers.

     
    Colorado gun laws
    Colorado passed some pro-gun laws, and repealed some anti-gun laws. Good for them. I guess the post-Columbine anti-gun hysteria has now passed in Colorado.

    Wednesday, Mar 19, 2003
     
    Poor FBI lab work
    John sends this AP story about 3k criminal cases tainted by bad FBI lab work.

    If the USA alert level goes up to red, then Andy might have to stay home:

    Caspersen, a former FBI agent, was briefing reporters, alongside Gov. James E. McGreevey, on Thursday, when for the first time he disclosed the realities of how a red alert would shut the state down. A red alert would also tear away virtually all personal freedoms to move about and associate. "Red means all noncritical functions cease," Caspersen said. "Noncritical would be almost all businesses, except health-related." ...

    "You literally are staying home, is what happens, unless you are required to be out. No different than if you had a state of emergency with a snowstorm."

     
    Right-wing awards
    John wants to nominate Andy for a conservative genius award. He also recommends this article:
    Seven of every 10 Silicon Valley companies that Wall Street first sold to the public during the technology boom -- a group that generated some of the biggest first-day gains in stock market history -- are now dead or valued at less than half their initial price. The grim toll raises the question of how much investment bankers, who arranged the stock deals for billions of dollars in fees, were to blame for the carnage. ...

    ``It was a unique period of time when it was unclear which business models were going to pan out,'' said Stuart Francis, head of technology investment banking for Lehman Brothers in Menlo Park. ``It's hard to `due-diligence' the future.''

    It is spouting meaningless buzzwords that comes easily to those guys.

    Tuesday, Mar 18, 2003
     
    More on Monroe
    Andy writes:
    James Monroe was a great conservative, and the Monroe Doctrine was his speech. JQA deserves credit, but he was a presidential wannabee trying to appeal to Monroe's constituency. The Doctrine declares our non-interference with respect to the Eastern Hemisphere:
    "It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. ... The political system of the allied [European] powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments.... Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none."
    This principle is general, applying to the Middle East as well as Europe.

    John writes, "Conservative goals now depend upon the success of the Bush presidency."

    This is the "only leaders define history" view. If that were true, America would have moved left during Clinton's presidency. In fact, it moved right.

    Conservatives shouldn't peg their future to a particularly politician like Bush. Rather, Bush has to constantly earn conservative support, or inevitably lose regardless of what anyone says. The first President Bush proved that convincingly enough.

    First Roger denied regression to the mean, and now Liza denies that older languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin) are more sophisticated than modern ones. In fact, it is indisputable that these older languages were far more precise, rich and complex than modern ones. Liza cites the Navajo language, but I doubt it has the precision and richness of these cited older languages.

    Neither Roger, Liza nor Joe have given any reason or evidence to think that human intelligence is increasing or is constant. Yet they are adamant that human intelligence cannot decreasing, despite the logic and overwhelming evidence of language.

    It is a revelation to realize that smart children are virtually never as smart as their smartest parent. What percentage of elite college students realize this? 0%? They would surely resist even the possibility as adamantly as possible. This simple insight deflates much liberal indoctrination.

    This is more nonsense from Andy. Note that Monroe only refers to European powers, and has no bearing on Iraq.

    I never denied regression to the mean. Regression to the mean is a perfectly valid concept. The problem is that Andy misunderstands it.

    I dispute Andy's claim that dead languages are any more precise, or better in any way. None of those languages are as precise as English. There is a reason that they are dead languages -- they were lousy languages.

    I cited 2 facts IQ scores are increasing, and human intellectual accomplishments in the 20th century exceed all other centuries. Maybe intelligence could decrease, but Andy's arguments are all fallacious.

    Andy replies:

    It's interesting how John, Joe, Liza and Roger are all stridently opposed to this simple proposition that human intelligence has declined. They even seem to be opposed to having a substantive debate about it.

    I sifted through all their replies but could only find this substantive comment

    I wrote "In fact, it is indisputable that these older languages [Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin] were far more precise, rich and complex than modern ones."

    Roger replied, "I dispute that. None of those languages are as precise as English."

    For ideological rather than linguistic reasons, I expect John, Joe and Liza to agree with Roger. Do they?

    It is hard to see what Andy means. Does he mean that average intelligence is declining? Or peak intelligence among geniuses? How does he want to measure? Innate intelligence (like an IQ test)? Or learned intelligence, as measured by tests or accomplishments?

    Also, what is the time period? Is he claiming that intelligence has declined over the last 20 years, 100 years, 1000 years, million years, or what?

    And where is the evidence? I mention several facts in opposition higher IQ test scores, greater accomplishments in the 20th century, higher literacy rates, etc. The trend over the very long term (100 kyrs) is surely towards increasing intelligence.

    English is more precise than those other languages, because of the richer vocabulary and functional syntax. Those dead languages existed before the invention of zero -- they couldn't even express zero!

    Liza responds:

    I agree with Roger.

    Andy cites no evidence for declining intelligence.

    English is far more precise and rich than those ancient languages, because of its much larger vocabulary among other things. It is also a lot easier to learn at a basic level.

    Russian has at least the complexity of Latin (6 cases, 3 genders, difficult verbs, much irregularity). Is that proof that Russians are smarter than Americans?

    John sent this NY Times story about S. African bushmen who using clicking sounds in their language, even tho the clicks are difficult and awkward. Are they the smartest of all?

    Andy writes:

    Roger and Liza deny that Latin and Greek have a greater precision than modern languages. I can't imagine any objective student of those languages agreeing. For example, this Latin phrase cannot be precisely translated into English "dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux." (Genesis 13). Translations into modern languages introduce a spatial or causative separation between God and light that does not exist in the Latin.

    If objective, Roger, Liza, Joe and John would admit and discuss the possibility that human intelligence has declined. But I doubt they will, because their views are skewered by their ideology.

    They seem unwilling even to admit that language precision is correlated to intelligence. Roger, with his long string of rhetorical questions, seems unwilling even to entertain the question of whether human intelligence has decreased.

    You can deny logic, but you can't stop it

    (1) Every child has two parents of unequal intelligence.

    (2) The child's intelligence will on average be less than that of the smarter parent. In fact, due to the harmful nature of mutations, the child's intelligence will on average be less than the average intelligence of the parents.

    (3) Ergo, intelligence has declined from generation to generation.

    My bible says:
    God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
    If anything, this only shows that Latin is less precise. The original Genesis was not written in Latin.

    I admit that language precision is correlated to intelligence. The world's smartest people speak English, and English is the most precise language.

    Andy has fallen for the "regression to the mean" fallacy. The same argument would show that people have been getting shorter for the last million years. We'd all be midgets by now!

    Liza responds:

    One of the many fallacies underlying Andy's completely unsupported thesis about the decline of intelligence is his implicit assumption that intelligence is 100% inherited. Experts such as Charles Murray think it is about 60% inherited. People of extraordinary intelligence emerge from nowhere all the time. I doubt that either of Albert Einstein's parents was anywhere nearly as smart as he was.

    The citation from Genesis proves nothing. The translation cited by Roger is perfectly adequate. In any case, Genesis was not written in Latin, so we don't know that the Latin version is any more authentic than the English version.

    Joe writes:
    It's just patently ridiculous to say that Latin is more "precise" than English. I happened to study Latin for four years under excellent teachers who wrote the SAT and AP tests. Certainly you can achieve a wonderful economy of expression in Latin, but my experience is that Latin is, if anything, more ambiguous than English. Many constructions such as the Ablative Absolute are inherently subject to several different translations. We spent many hours in class bickering over alternative interpretations that gave completely different shades of meaning. I am mystified at Andy's confident tone about this - as I recall, he never studied Latin at all.
    Not only that, but Andy is also confident about just what precisely God meant when he said, "Let there be light"!

    Andy responds:

    John, Joe, Roger and Liza all adhere to humanism in this intelligence debate. None will allow even the possibility that human intelligence has declined.

    It does surprise me how they insist that modern languages are as precise as Latin and Greek, but I guess humanism necessitates that view. I'm still waiting for a precise translation of "fiat lux" into a modern language. "Let" distorts the cause, and "there" distorts the location.

    It's also interesting how they resist the biological fact that smart children are rarely, if ever, smarter than their brightest parent. But, again, humanism requires that fiction. It's remarkable how many liberal college students (and even many parents) fall for that fiction.

    Note the implications of this discussion on the Latin controversy in the Catholic Church. If intelligence and language degrade, then the Catholic traditionalists are right in wanting only Latin. Otherwise, the Church inevitably degrades as language does. Of course the humanists are fine with that.

     
    french military defeats
    Bob suggests googling french military victories. Better yet, type it in manually, and hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button. It even works on the French versions of Google. Here is the Newsday story about it. And here is a Geoff Metcalf column about it from over a month ago, so I guess this isn't hot news.
     
    Andy says dead languages are best
    Andy writes:
    The Monroe Doctrine, one of the greatest conservative works by one of the greatest conservative Presidents, does prohibit what we're doing in Iraq. The Monroe Doctrine is based on the fact that our economic and political system is different from the Eastern Hemisphere. We can't install our system in Iraq. It's not possible, so don't kill people trying.

    John says GWB could become a hero, but there may be a price in moral credibility -- which could hurt conservative goals.

    On intelligence, Roger and Joe are denying basic statistics as applied to the Bell Curve. Roger even attempts to deny "regression to the mean," but there's no disputing it. It's logic, folks the percentage of smart people declines over time. Smart children are rarely, if ever, as smart as their smartest parent. Insisting otherwise is ideologically motivated.

    Overwhelming evidence for this is in language, which has sharply degraded over time. The further back in time one goes, the more sophisticated the language is. Hebrew, then Greek, then Aramaic, then Latin -- all of which were at a much higher intellectual level than modern languages. This proves that people were smarter in the past.

    My sources say:
    The Monroe Doctrine was a statement of foreign policy which proclaimed that Europe should not interfere in affairs within the United States or in the development of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and that the United States would not interfere in European affairs.
    See also the Columbia encyclopedia. Invading Iraq does not interfere with European affairs. I don't think that our intention is to install our system in Iraq. We have never installed our system in any other country, and I doubt we'll try in Iraq. Bush loses moral credibility if he fails to act.

    The smartest people are nearly always smarter than either their parents or their kids. Andy needs to understand regression to the mean. Does he think that Riemann's father was smarter than Riemann?

    All of those languages are grossly inferior to English.

    John responds:

    The Monroe Doctrine (Dec. 2, 1823) says that the U.S. will not permit European powers (including Russia) to plant their systems in the Western Hemisphere.

    I don't think it necessarily prohibits us from planting our system over there.

    However, the man who actually wrote the Monroe Doctrine - Monroe's brilliant secretary of state, John Quincy Adams - delivered a famous speech on July 4, 1821 that included the following eloquent words:

    "America ... goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
    This is the doctrine that a determined, decade-long campaign by the neocons has succeeded in overturning.

    Conservative goals now depend upon the success of the Bush presidency. I don't like it any more than you do, but we must all face that unhappy fact.

    And the success of the Bush presidency hinges on disarming Iraq and expelling Saddam Hussein.
     
    Jewish war support
    Here is a US News column on whether this statement is true:
    If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. [Congressman Jim Moran]
    Pat Buchanan risks being called an anti-semite again, and addresses the issue in this essay.

    I don't think that the statement is true. The war does not benefit Israel very much. It may benefit Saudi Arabia more. But the issue should be openly analyzed. If we were going to war in N.Ireland, it would be fair to ask whether the war was being promoted by Irish-Americans.


    Monday, Mar 17, 2003
     
    More war debate
    John continues the war debate:
    As a ratified treaty, the UN Charter is part of the "supreme law of the land" as defined in the Constitution. Article 51 of the Charter recognizes the "inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs on a member of the United Nations." All other use of military force must be authorized by the Security Council.
    Iraq's attack on Kuwait should satisfy that condition.
    This is the argument that (1) the first Gulf War never ended, (2) a new invasion of Iraq is authorized by the 1990 UN Resolution 678, (3) which is still operative even though (4) its purpose has been fulfilled because Iraq has been completely expelled from Kuwait and (5) the 16 subsequent UN resolutions concerning Iraq (6) have nothing to do with the invasion of Kuwait or any other UN member country and (7) lack the essential words "all necessary means" authorizing military action.

    I think the argument is far-fetched.

    Nonsense. We've lost our sovereignty if the USA is no longer able to make decisions like that without UN approval.
    That was the price of ratifying the UN treaty. Yes, we lost part of our sovereignty. That's why Ron Paul and the Birchers want to withdraw from the UN. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the ABM treaty, unsigned the ICC treaty and opted not to join the Kyoto treaty. He can take steps to withdraw from the UN, but until he does, the U.S. is legally bound by its procedures.
    So both sides had very weak claims to the land. Then they fought a war in 1948. The jews won. The arabs had numerous opportunities to get their own state on the West Bank -- in 1948, 1967, Camp David, Oslo, etc. Every single time they choose to fight instead, and lost. All national borders are defined by wars. Israel won the war. It is as simple as that, as far as I am concerned. Mexico accepted defeat. The arabs did not. Unless and until the arabs accept defeat, they have no rights whatsoever under traditional international law. They are like the enemy combatants that we hold in Guantanamo Bay.
    So in your view, it's fair for Israel to deal with an entire population of 3 million mostly women and children in the same way that the U.S. treats 500 armed young male terrorists. That is the essence of our disagreement.

    Unlike the Arab countries, Israel claims to be a democracy. That claim is based on the "fiction" that the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza is just a temporary situation pending a final peace agreement.

    Israel has to decide either withdraw from the West Bank (including Jewish settlements), or annex the West Bank (and ethnically cleanse it by expelling the Arabs). The status quo is not an option because if the status quo is permanent then Israel is not a democracy - it's no better than the Arab tyrannies next door.

     
    Supreme Court a source of rights
    Andy writes:
    Federal courts do not create new rights. I've read that the US Supreme Court has not created a bona fide new right in 30 years -- going back to Roe v. Wade.

    I've been involved in two other cases before the Supreme Court this term. In each case, the petitioner obtained certiorari, but then argued for the Court to create a new right. In the first case (Eldred v. Ashcroft), the petitioner implicitly argued for a new public property right. Petitioner went from having four votes to obtain cert. to having only two votes when the decision was rendered. In the second case (Sell v. U.S.), the petitioner argued for a new right to refuse medical treatment. The Court responded by telling him to brief a jurisdictional issue, suggesting that Court would use that ground to dismiss the petition.

    In my opinion, this is where the Eldred case was lost.

    Justice Rehnquist: You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?

    Mr. Lessig (for Petitioner): We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause. [transcript]

    It's almost hopeless arguing for new rights before the Supreme Court.
    Warren Court activism is dead. The Rehnquist Court is too timid to take a stand on anything that will have any significant effect. Some decisions might be interpreted as creating a right. Eg, last year the SC said that low IQ folks have a right not to be executed.

    So why did the court agree to hear a sodomy case?

     
    Cheap ISP
    Looking for a cheap dialup ISP? This site seems to have a good directory of ISPs.
     
    War is possible UN Charter violation
    I am trying to understand when war violates the UN Charter. Is a Security Council resolution needed to endorse the war? Yes, except in self-defense, according to some.

    Here is what the UN Charter says:

    Article 1: The Purposes of the United Nations are:

    To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

    To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

    To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

    To be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

    Article 2:3. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

    2:4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

    Article 33:1. The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.

    Article 51. Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

    The UN Security Council has only endorsed war 3 times.

    I think that Bush would say that the upcoming Iraq war is completely consistent with the purposes of the UN.

     
    See No Evil
    Bob raves about a new book called, See No Evil, The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, By Robert Baer. Here is the Preface. Baer states: "The CIA was systematically destroyed by political correctness, by petty Beltway wars, by careerism, and much more. At a time when terrorist threats were compounding globally, the agency that should have been monitoring them was being scrubbed clean instead."
     
    Vaccination
    John sends this story that says:
    Nationally, groups like the conservative Eagle Forum, headed by Phyllis Schlafly, have come out in opposition to mandated immunizations, particularly for hepatitis B, although its objections seem to be based on political, rather than religious or medical, grounds. She fears immunization information will be used to create a "Big Brother-like" medical database.

    "Has America become a nation where bureaucrats can force controversial medical procedures on children without informed choice by parent or child?" Schlafly wrote in a 1998 column.

    If the Eagle Forum objection were purely political, then it wouldn't single out hepatitis B. That 1998 column cited medical reasons for objecting to that HBV vaccine. Eight months later, the official US recommendation to give HBV vaccine to all newborn infants was cancelled for medical reasons, as this later column explains.

    Those fears about a Big Brother-like medical database were not just idle concerns either. It is in place now, and you can read about it on the CDC website, and an audio excerpt.

     
    David Boies
    John sends this story about high-profile lawyer David Boies getting into his own ethics problems. I don't know why people think that Boies is so smart. He is famous for losing the Westmoreland/CBS libel case, losing the Microsoft antitrust case, losing the Napster case, and losing the Bush v. Gore 2000 recount case. He is now suing IBM over Linux infringing Unix, and will probably botch that case also.

    Sunday, Mar 16, 2003
     
    More war debate
    John responds to Roger:
    >Bush and Blair will certainly be accused of international war crimes. >They may have to spend the rest of their lives defending themselves in >court. They are apparently willing to take that chance.
    Not sure Bush appreciates the risk. There is a whole infrastructure of lawyers and legal precedents standing by to prosecute those involved in a war. Here are a few illustrations: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/2850043.stm http://nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3200493 http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030312/COBLAIR/TPComment http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030315.coibbi0315/BNStory/International http://www.WorldNetDaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31535 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27790-2003Mar14.html
    >The act of Congress, P.L. 102-1, merely authorized the president to use >force to implement UN resolutions.
    Yes, and that is what Bush is going to do, even if it means bombing Iraq.
    Provided he can prove it is authorized by existing UN resolutions. He has to make the case. It's not obvious.

    Interesting that Sen. John F. Kohn, I mean Kerry, says his vote for the war last October "wasn’t all that significant since Bush already had the authority to use military force without it" (but he doesn't say why). http://msnbc.com/news/885688.asp?0cv=CB10&cp1=1

    Neither Congress nor the President >claimed any authority or justification for that war except the UN.
    They do not get their war-making authority from the UN. You are losing me here.
    Oh, yes indeed they do! Otherwise, the war would be illegal and U.S. leaders and soldiers would be war criminals. Everything the U.S. has done in Iraq since 1991 has been pursuant to UN authority. Any new war likewise has to be authorized by the UN. If there is not going to be a new resolution, then it has to be proved that the old resolutions authorize a new war. That will not be easy. It is not obvious.

    On Meet the Press this morning, Dick Cheney was asked how the U.S. could justify attacking a country that had not attacked us first. He waffled, meandered and filibustered for about 5 minutes, never giving a cogent answer to that question.

    No >one has ever claimed or made the case that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was >tantamount to a direct attack on the United States.
    No, it was an attack on our oil supply, and a friendly country.
    "Our" oil supply? We buy about 10% of Kuwait's oil, which supplies 1% of our consumption. That relationship alone does not justify war under historical principles of international law, the laws of war or just war theory.

    Otherwise, it would prove too much. We get most of our cocoa and chocolate from Africa. Does that justify sending U.S. troops whenever there is inter-tribal conflict in Africa?

    Since the U.S. had no treaty with Kuwait guaranteeing Kuwait's borders, the UN Treaty was the only basis for armed intervention. Once Iraq was expelled from Kuwait, that authority lapsed.

    The president said >the war proved we were in a "new world order" which implies that the >traditional historical justifications for war no longer apply.
    I do not think that is what NWO means.
    It meant that all countries, including the U.S., have lost part of their sovereignty to institutions of world government like the UN.
    The West Bank certainly is a part of Israel. Just as much as N.Ireland is a part of U.K., and Puerto Rico is a part of the USA. You might not agree with their electoral procedures, but the same is probably true of most of the countries of the world.
    All residents of Northern Ireland are U.K. citizens. They are represented in the British House of Commons. All residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Puerto Rico had a referendum in which the majority voted to support the status quo and only 2.5 percent wanted independence.

    OTOH, Arab residents of the West Bank are not citizens of Israel. They do not have Israeli passports. They have no civil rights whatsoever in Israel, which means they have fewer rights in their own land than American Jews have.

    Israel has never annexed the West Bank (except Jerusalem) because doing so would mean expelling the Arabs who live there - i.e., ethnic cleansing.

    How would you treat terrorists and suicide bombers?
    Bury them.
    I assume you mean a Palestinian jew-free state. There is a Palestinian state -- but the arabs there have, as their biggest complaint -- that jews are allowed to live there! There is nothing wrong with those settlements, unless you believe in some sort of Islamic jihad.
    You're saying Israel is the "Palestinian state"? It is a state in Palestine, but one in which Arabs whose ancestors have lived there for 1,500 years have no citizenship and no civil rights.
    In California, we have settlements of Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, and many other groups. Having an ethnic settlement across town does not justify planting bombs.
    Nothing wrong with settlements of U.S. citizens whose ancestors came from those countries. But what about settlements in California by Mexicans who retain their Mexican citizenship?

    What if the Mexican government asserts responsibility for their welfare? What if the Mexican army polices and patrols those settlements and all the roads that connect them with Mexico? What if the Mexican army arrests, imprisons and executes without trial Americans who it believes commit crimes against Mexican settlements?

    The decision to give Iraq an ultimatum was made many months ago. The invasion decision has not yet been made, and depends on Iraq's response.
    We are long past the point of no return. To abandon the war now would mean the collapse of the Bush presidency and the destruction of the Republican party.
    Andy responds:
    John's right about the war, but fails to explain why conservatives have allowed themselves to be led down this path. Note that Bush's plans for an unprovoked invasion are unprecedented in US history, and violate the Monroe Doctrine. There's no predicting how bad the political fallout could be.

    Roger and Joe are adamant that human intelligence cannot be declining, for one reason they cling to evolution. They care little that the laws of entropy predict a decline; the Bell Curve predicts a decline; the nature of mutations predicts a decline; and the evidence shows a decline.

    All systems increase entropy over time in the absence of intelligent intervention. Adding energy does not cause a decrease in entropy without intervention. Like everything else in the universe, the expectation is that human intelligence should be declining.

    The Bell Curve predicts a decrease in variation over time -- i.e., a decline in human intelligence at the high end. And because mutations cause genetic problems, the overall mean must decline over time.

    SAT scores and every other indication of intelligence have been declining. The greatest intellectuals in virtually every field were hundreds or more years ago. The greatest English novel -- 150 years ago. The greatest playwright -- 400 years ago. The greatest mathematician -- at least 150 years ago. The greatest philosopher -- over 2000 years ago. The only achievements of the 20th century were experimental (e.g. Quantum Mechanics), not intellectual.

    I thought that the Monroe Doctrine only pertained to the Western Hemisphere.

    Does Andy's theory predict that the size of the universe is declining?

    Andy doesn't even believe most of 20th century science. In math, I guess he believes that Gauss or Riemann was the greatest ever. Maybe so, but the amount of great, original, important, brilliant, etc math coming from the 20th century exceeds the 19th by a factor of about 10 to 1. At least. The same is true in theoretical physics.

    John responds to Roger:

    I thought that Bush backed the USA out of the ICC. Regardless, I am glad that we have a president with the guts to act without being paralyzed with fear about his own personal retirement.
    The ICC claims "universal jurisdiction."
    Note that Congress was authorizing the use of force, and Congress did not make it contingent on the UN agreeing that the use of force was necessary. All Bush needs is authorization from Congress to enforce a UN resolution.
    P.L. 102-1 was contingent on the UN specifically authorizing the use of force. 102-1 says "The President is authorized, subject to subsection (b), to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990)." UN Resolution 678 "authorizes Member States cooperating with the government of Kuwait ... to use all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660."

    Subsequent UN resolutions, passed after Iraq was ejected from Kuwait, lack the key phrase "all necessary means."

    Clinton bombed Iraq as recently as 1998. Are you saying that makes Clinton a war criminal?
    Depends on whether it was authorized by UN resolutions.
    On Meet the Press this morning, Dick Cheney was asked how the U.S. could justify attacking a country that had not attacked us first. He waffled, meandered and filibustered for about 5 minutes, never giving a cogent answer to that question.
    It will have to be explained to the satisfaction of the public. I think that is likely.
    So you agree that a satisfactory rationale has not yet been formulated? How likely we'll get one at this late date? This morning's MTP transcript has been posted. See what you think of Cheney's lame response.
    Yes, our oil supply. We found it in the desert there, developed it, made a market for it, and depend on it. Oil from Kuwait is significant enough that world prices were significantly disrupted.
    You could make the same argument about China's manufacturing. Should we intervene to protect the independence of Tibet?
    Otherwise, it would prove too much. We get most of our cocoa and chocolate from Africa. Does that justify sending U.S. troops whenever there is inter-tribal conflict in Africa?
    Under historical principles of war? That is debatable. We can do without cocoa more easily that without oil.
    Not sure Anne would agree that we can do without 80% of our cocoa and chocolate more easily than 1% of our oil.
    Where did you get the crazy idea that all wars have to be authorized by treaty or UN resolution?
    As a ratified treaty, the UN Charter is part of the "supreme law of the land" as defined in the Constitution. Article 51 of the Charter recognizes the "inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs on a member of the United Nations." All other use of military force must be authorized by the Security Council.

    Therefore, a new attack on Iraq either has to be authorized by the Security Council or it has to qualify as self defense under Article 51. The argument has to be made. Here is the argument of a conservative English writer defending Blair, but there are strong arguments on the other side.

    Iraq was expelled from Kuwait, but only under terms that Iraq has violated. We have every right to enforce those terms.
    Only if the UN approves.
    The West Bank certainly is a part of Israel. Just as much as N.Ireland is a part of U.K., and Puerto Rico is a part of the USA. You might not agree with their electoral procedures, but the same is probably true of most of the countries of the world.
    All residents of Northern Ireland are U.K. citizens. They are represented in the British House of Commons.
    Is this new? Last I heard, several years ago, they were denied voting for direct representatives.
    Since 1972, Northern Ireland has had 18 seats in the British House of Commons, which is roughly proportional to its population.
    All residents of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens. Puerto Rico had a referendum in which the majority voted to support the status quo and only 2.5 percent wanted independence.
    But no representatives in Congress.
    P.R. elects its own Governor, Senate and House of Representatives.
    The PLO does not hold free elections, and for all we know, only 2% of palestinian arabs support independence.
    I think we do know The Palestinian Arabs want independence for all of Palestine in a single state comprising what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Then they would outvote the Jews and control the government.
    At any rate, it seems ridiculous to use democracy as an argument for a PLO state because the PLO is opposed to democracy and is not likely to create a democratic state. The current situation is more democratic than is likely under a PLO state.
    Democracy is a red herring. Maybe the Arabs prefer to have a monarchy or dictatorship - provided it's an Arab Muslim. But they don't want to be ruled by the Jews.
    No civil rights? They might have more civil rights now, than they would under arab rule. What arab countries has citizens with full civil rights?
    They have whatever civil rights are accorded to all citizens of those countries. By contrast, the Arabs of Palestine are allowed fewer rights than the Jews.
    This is like saying that the USA never annexed Puerto Rico. It is a meaningless legalism, at best. The West Bank is part of Israel and has been since 1967.
    The U.S. did annex P.R. and its residents are U.S. citizens. Israel refuses to annex the West Bank and denies any claim to that territory (except for Jerusalem and Jewish settlements) because it cannot risk making the Arabs Israeli citizens.
    Certainly Israel is a Palestinian state. So is Jordan. They cover the area historically known as Palestine, and they are populated by Palestinian arabs and Palestinian jews. What else would it be?
    But only Jews are full citizens.
    What nonsense. Most of those arabs in Israel came there from elsewhere to take advantage of the prosperity that the jews created. There is no such thing as civil rights as we know it in the arab world. The arabs on the West Bank are treated better by Israel than they would be by any country in the arab world.
    Most of the Jews also came there from elsewhere. To the extent that Arabs came to Palestine from elsewhere, they were coming to the land where their fathers lived. Jews, OTOH, came to an area where there were no Jews for about 1,900 years.
    What if the Mexican government asserts responsibility for their welfare? What if the Mexican army polices and patrols those settlements and all the roads that connect them with Mexico? What if the Mexican army arrests, imprisons and executes without trial Americans who it believes commit crimes against Mexican settlements?
    That would be war. If the USA and Mexico were to fight a war, then the winner would be able to dictate the outcome. If Mexico defeated the USA, then Mexico could put all the settlements in California that they wanted. They do anyway!
    And if Mexico defeated the USA, what would happen to the American residents of California? Which country would they be citizens of? You keep avoiding that key question.

    When the U.S. defeated Mexico in 1848, the treaty provided that residents of the territory we acquired would have one year to choose which country they wanted to be citizens of. If they wanted to be Mexicans, they were free to remove their property or sell their property and take the proceeds to Mexico. If they wanted to be Americans, they would be U.S. citizens on an equal basis with all other U.S. citizens. Compare and contrast that generous settlement with what Israel has done in Palestine.

    If war were abandoned without disarming Iraq, then the public would probably turn against Bush. That is because the public wants Iraq disarmed.
    The public wants it over and done with. If it's all over in short order with minimum bloodshed, Bush will be a hero.
     
    Is intelligence declining
    Andy writes:
    The media and academia love to hype intelligence, pretending that the elite is getting smarter and smarter. In fact, human intelligence is surely declining from generation to generation. Entropy is increasing and mutations are always harmful. The collective IQ of the human population must therefore be declining. There is no way around it people are getting dumber. You can debate how quick the decline is, but not the inevitability of a decline.

    I commented that human intelligence must be declining. Roger wrote, "What convinces you of this?"

    Entropy is increasing and mutations are harmful. Everything in the universe is decaying. Intelligence cannot be an exception.

    Anecdotal evidence tends to support this. Older writings tend to be at a higher intellectual level than modern ones. Scores on basic aptitude tests are declining. Of course, there are additional reasons for this, but the basic law of entropy predicts the same trend.

    Joe, I read your cited Discovery article. It showed how elite physicists ridicule ideas having obvious plausibility, like the change in physical laws and constants over time. Note that this breakthrough is occurring in England, where speech is more free than in the U.S. I passed the article out to several of my science students, whom I taught last semester that relativity is based on the unproven (and implausible) assumption that the speed of light is invariant.

    Joe responds:
    Intelligence must be declining? OK, so cavemen had higher IQ's than we do? When did IQ peak? With the first person? Let me guess Adam and Eve were the smartest people ever. Andy doesn't believe in evolution, so he doesn't worry about our being smarter than earlier life forms.

    Every component of a system does not have to become more disordered. Overall entropy can increase while subparts become more ordered. Andy is totally wrong on this.

    Actually, it is the rise in IQ scores that is puzzling, and needs to be explained.

    When was the last time you read an older writing? In most cases, I've found the ideas disappointingly poorly expressed. It doesn't mean that people are smarter now. We now have the advantage of greater knowledge.

    Yes, Andy is totally wrong. If intelligence has been declining for millions of years, then it is tough to explain why there has been more intellectual progress in the 20th century than any other in history.

    On the subject of evolution, AMC just broadcast the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. It is amazing how people think that the movie is factual and then wonder why all the names were changed. Instead it is faithful to a stage play that was supposed to be a anti-McCarthyism propaganda. So it is the movie, not Tennessee law, that suppresses the truth. Here are some links that explain the numerous factual distortions.

    George writes:

    Most of those links are to creationist sites that don't believe in evolution. Those creationists are laughingstocks as much as the movie portrayed William Jennings Bryan.
    Maybe so, and I am not endorsing what they say about their own beliefs about religion or science. But the sites demonstrate that the movie gets the facts wrong from beginning to end. Eg, the movie starts with Bryan being a phony honorary "Colonel" and Darrow objecting. In reality, Bryan was a real Colonel in the army.

    The scientific evidence that Darrow submitted did indeed involve bogus and offensive stuff about Piltdown Man and Eugenics. Bryan was not an idiot, and had good reasons for objecting to it.


    Saturday, Mar 15, 2003
     
    Felony emotional impairment
    JG sends this Denver Post story about a Colorado proposal to create a new felony: the impairment of a child's emotional or psychological development. This is an amazing bad idea, because there is no consensus about what impairs emotional or psychological development, among other reasons.
     
    Medical malpractice
    Andy writes:
    John circulated an article about House passage of a malpractice reform bill (HR 5).

    Here is the analysis I did for AAPS, which has not endorsed the bill

    The House malpractice bill (HR 5) has problems. I'm all for capping non-economic damages at $250k. which it does. I'd prefer the states to do it (as about a half-dozen have), but I'm fine if the Congress does it too. I'm also fine with trying against all odds in the US Senate, where the chances for malpractice reform are bleak. FYI, you can view HR 5 at thomas.loc.gov.

    But Congressman Greenwood's HR 5 has many other provisions that are indefensible. There are many new federal statutes of limitations, for example. This helps enrich insurance companies on a statistical basis, but will have unjust application. There is a new federal limitation on freedom of contract between client and attorney for any health care contingency case. There is a new federal immunity for companies that comply with FDA regulations. There is a new federal immunity for vaccine manufacturers in certain circumstances.

    Interesting, there is a large section devoted to punitive damages. I suggested this in Pennsylvania, but was told it is not an issue. Evidently it is.

    There is another disturbing flaw in HR 5. It would establish, by federal law, that the jury NOT be informed of the $250k cap in non-economic and punitive damages. While I strongly favor malpractice caps, I oppose concealing information from a jury.

     
    Iraqi citizens have guns
    John sends this Slate article about how Iraqi citizens have guns. Supposedly it is a counterexample to the notion that people have guns in free societies, and they don't in police states.

    I'd like to see some more analysis of this point. Have Iraqi citizens always been armed? It has been a very long time since anyone successfully invaded Iraq. Was gun ownership a factor? Is gun ownership undermining allied support for an invasion today? Iraq seems like a police state to us, but are the people there any less free than other Mohammedan countries in the area?


    Friday, Mar 14, 2003
     
    Disbar lawyers for filing lawsuits
    John sends this story and this LA Times story about the state of California wanting to disbar some lawyers for filing a large number of harassing lawsuits.

    Thursday, Mar 13, 2003
     
    Andy against the war
    Andy writes:
    I'm trying to make some sense of the positions here, but cannot find anything coherent.

    John, Liza, and Joe are outraged about civil lawsuits over the RI inferno, but couldn't care less about the criminal witchhunt.

    Roger seems to oppose the criminal witchhunt in RI and the 5-year incarceration/forced medication of Dr. Sell, but couldn't care less how many people we kill in Iraq.

    Of the positions, John seems to be most consistently skeptical of govt representations, Liza most consistently accepting of them, and Roger all over the map depending on how he feels. Bottom line everyone cancels each other like, just like the "middle" of the political spectrum.

    I do object to the claims that invading Iraq is to help Israel rather than, say, Saudi Arabia. There is no apparent connection between Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A crusade to free Jerusalem from terror may be worth considering, but that is not what an invasion of Iraq would do. Rather, it will kill innocent people, expand the federal government even further, wreck our economy even more, entangle us for years in an occupation, make us a target for terrorism there, and engender enmity for the U.S. worldwide. Is this what we want?

    War involves killing people. Better them than us. Failing to act might get more people killed.

    John responds to me:

    Bush's position is that Iraq is in serious violation of UN resolutions. France apparently thinks that the violations are not serious enough for war yet, but that is just France's (and Russia's and Germany's) opinion.
    It's not just their opinion. Like it or not, France has the power to veto UN resolutions. That's the deal the U.S. agreed to in 1945. Some say the U.S. doesn't need another UN resolution to start the war because the existing resolutions concerning Iraq already provide enough authority. However, that case has to be made. We can't just ignore or disregard the UN, as some members of the War Party are now saying. To do so would expose participants to prosecution under the new ICC.
    >By legality I meant international law. That requires more than >authority from Congress. It means the existence of facts and >circumstances that historically have justified resort to war, as well as >compliance with international agreements like the UN Charter.
    Those conditions clearly exist. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened our oil supply. We have been in a state of war ever since, as Iraq has never fully complied with our demands.
    The legitimacy of the 1991 Gulf War depended entirely on the UN resolution that authorized it. The U.S. never justified the war by claiming that Iraq threatened our oil supply.
    In S. Africa, there was an international consensus that the govt should abolish apartheid. There is no consensus about Israel, except perhaps that Israel should offer the PLO a homeland that leaves Israel with safe and secure borders. Israel has done that. It is not what the arabs want, so there is really no consensus.
    How many people does it take to make a consensus? Why does it matter how many people agree? The question is whether it is true.
    I don't have any solution for Israel's problems, but it is at war with people dedicated to its destruction and that justifies everything that it is doing.
    >That last sentence is incoherent and self-contradictory. If you don't >have a solution, that means you must agree that the status quo is not >acceptable or justifiable. Otherwise you are saying the status quo is >the solution.
    Yes, the status is the solution unless somebody finds a better one. No one has.
    The status quo is not the solution.
    Why? Because bigoted arabs don't want to live next to jews. It is the arabs who seem to want some sort of apartheid, and kick out all the jews. Those jews have every right to live there, and if a hypothetical arab state cannot tolerate that, then it is appropriate for Israel to defend them.
    Yes, the Jews have the right to live in the West Bank or any Arab country - provided they are willing to live under the same laws that apply to Arabs. There is no evidence the Arabs refuse to live next to Jews as individuals or want to kick them out. They just don't want the Israeli army rampaging through their country.
    >Yes, Israel is at war with its Arab neighbors who have never recognized >its existence. That is Israel's problem, not ours.
    Yes, it is Israel. Helping Israel is a lousy reason for bombing Iraq. I realize that there are some pro-Israel folks who are gung-ho for an Iraq war. But I don't think that they have much influence on GW Bush or Tony Blair. They want war for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Israel.
    And what are those reasons? Their failure to articulate a clear, overriding reason for war invites speculation about what the true reason may be.
    John responds to me again:
    >It's not just their opinion. Like it or not, France has the power to >veto UN resolutions. That's the deal the U.S. agreed to in 1945.
    Yes, and how many wars have taken place since then without France's approval?
    For the first 55 years there was no enforcement mechanism. But on July 1, 2002 the International Criminal Court went into force. It's a whole new ball game now. The ICC claims jurisdiction over any alleged war crimes in Iraq.

    Last month, the highest court in Belgium ruled that Sharon can be tried for a 1982 war crime committed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The trial can begin as soon as he leaves office. In 1998, the highest court in Britain ruled that Pinochet could be arrested and extradited to Spain to be tried for crimes committed in Argentina in the 1970s. He was released only because doctors said he was unable to stand trial. And Milosevic is locked up indefinitely in The Hague (although the man responsible for sending him there was assassinated yesterday).

    The UN passes a resolution requiring Iraq to disarm, fails to enforce, and then someone is going to prosecute those who do enforce the UN resolution? I don't think so.
    Bush and Blair will certainly be accused of international war crimes. They may have to spend the rest of their lives defending themselves in court.
    >The legitimacy of the 1991 Gulf War depended entirely on the UN >resolution that authorized it. The U.S. never justified the war by >claiming that Iraq threatened our oil supply.
    Nonsense. It was also legitimized by those historical justifications, as you call it, and by an act of Congress.
    The act of Congress, P.L. 102-1, merely authorized the president to use force to implement UN resolutions. Neither Congress nor the President claimed any authority or justification for that war except the UN. No one has ever claimed or made the case that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was tantamount to a direct attack on the United States. The president said the war proved we were in a "new world order" which implies that the traditional historical justifications for war no longer apply.
    My opinion is that Israel has been extremely lenient to the arabs. You can form your own opinion.
    Some people had the same opinion of the white government of South Africa. Israel's army does not rampage thru their country. The West Bank is part of Israel. Lots of palestinians live in Jordan, Jordan has ended its war with Israel, and Israel doesn't bother anyone in Jordan. The West Bank is not part of Israel. If it were, Israel, which claims to be a democracy, would have to let the Arabs vote. After the first election, that would be the end of the Jewish state.

    But while Israel does not claim the West Bank is part of Israel, it does claim the right to rule the Arabs living there with harsh brutality, like the ancient Romans treated a conquered province. Israel further claims the right to build Jewish settlements (i.e. suburbs) throughout the West Bank, build roads connecting them, and use the Israeli army to patrol them - thereby preventing a potential Palestinian state there.

    They have not made a war decision yet. Iraq can still avoid war by complying. If and when a war decision is made, I hope they articulate their case better than they have so far.
    The decision to move against Iraq was made many months ago. That's why 250,000 U.S. troops are massing on Iraq's border. The "case" (such as it is) was made by Bush in 3 high-profile speeches - 1 2 3

    You may not be satisfied with the case they have articulated so far, but it seems a little late in the day to come up with a new one.

     
    Schlafly Beer inspected!
    This PDF report says that "Busch, U.N. Order Schlafly To Submit To Bottling Plant Inspections – Demand Full Compliance".
     
    Abortion inconsistency
    The US Senate voted 52-46 to endorse Roe v. Wade, and then voted 64-33 to outlaw partial birth abortion. Somebody's mixed up there. The net effect of Roe v. Wade was to declare that a pregnant woman has an unqualified constitutional right to any abortion procedure that any physician wants to do, including partial birth abortion. The only way to ban partial birth abortion is to overturn Roe v. Wade. At least 16 Senators are contradicting themselves.

    Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003
     
    Elizabeth Smart
    I am surprised that the Smart girl was found alive. The next question is whether she was a runaway. Most of the time, a missing 15-year-old is a runaway. Surely, she had many chances to escape, if she wanted to.

    A number of things are fishy. The sister observed the kidnapping, at 1am, but did not report it until 3am. Why would anyone keep such a secret for 2 hours? I cannot imagine a 9-year-old sitting on such information from 1am until 3am. Months later, the sister announces that Emmanuel was the kidnapper. How would she know, and why didn't she say earlier? According to some reports, Elizabeth Smart had been found by police a couple of times, but she evaded detection by using a false name.

    The only explanation I see is that Elizabeth was really a runaway, that she voluntarily ran off with Emmanuel, and she told her sister to say it was a kidnapping. She told her to wait 2 hours to give them a chance to get out of range.

    Update: Now Drudge reports that Elizabeth Smart told a cop, "You think I am the girl who ran away." More evidence that she ran away.

     
    Does this ring false
    Katha Pollitt writes in The Nation:
    Violence is no longer the sacred preserve of men: The NRA does everything short of painting guns pink to sell them to women. For progressive women, in 2003, to fall back on the ideology of woman-as-peaceful-outsider rings as false as Phyllis Schlafly pretending to be a housewife.
     
    Is this a warblog?
    Joe asks:
    To change the subject, what is Roger's position on the war at this stage. Now that we have come this far, if the UN is dithering in two weeks, does he believe we should go?
    As I see it, Iraq caused us a lot of grief by invading Kuwait in 1990. We backed off when Iraq signed a conditional surrender. Iraq has not complied with those terms. We have given them an ultimatum to comply. If they don't, then I think that we should start dropping bombs until they do, or a new govt is in place.

    I am a little concerned that a war will be a big waste of money and resources, without much improvement in American interests in the area. But assuming that the military can achieve its objectives, I think we have to go thru with it now. Otherwise, no one will ever take our threats seriously.

    Listening to the anti-war crowd makes me pro-war. They are mostly commie stooges, anti-Israel bigots, anti-Bush leftists, environmentalist wackos who don't think we should be using oil, pacifists, and other nuts.

    John responds:

    The trouble with blowing off the UN at this point is that the whole purpose of the war - as stated by the president and as authorized by Congress - is to enforce UN resolutions against Iraq. (The same was true of the first Gulf War.) The stated pretext for both wars is Saddam's violation of UN resolutions.

    Since we drove Iraq out of Kuwait in February 1991, Iraq has not invaded Kuwait or any other country. While it may be true that Saddam has violated *other* terms of the 1991 cease fire, it's not clear that such violations would justify invasion by the United States - unless you think it is our duty and obligation to enforce all UN resolutions.

    This [2nd] paragraph is incoherent. You say we have to go thru with the war if the military can achieve its objectives. But in the previous sentence you state that, in your opinion, the war will not achieve its objectives. So where does that leave us?

    There is nothing bigoted about being anti-Israel. That is a slur used by supporters of Israel against their opponents.

    There is good reason why many people are searching for the real reason behind the push for war (Israel, oil, etc.) How many times have we heard Bush supporters justify the war because Saddam gassed his own people? Since that 21-year-old incident clearly could not possibly be a true reason for the current war, it is an insult to Americans to keep repeating it. It is an invitation to look for alternative theories, no matter how wacky.

    Yes, a lot of lousy pro-war reasons are given as well. We wouldn't goto war to save the Kurds, or bring democracy to Iraq, or to enforce obscure UN resolutions.

    I don't object to people theorizing that the real purpose for the war is to support Israel, or to get cheap oil, or to settle a score for Bush Sr. That's not bigoted. But a lot of the anti-war crowd will rant about how Israel has no right to exist, how Israel is terrorist, how Israel is illegally occupying arab land, how the suicide bombers are just doing what they have to do under Israeli oppression, etc. Those anti-Israel positions have no merit. When people express views like that, then I disregard everything else they say.

    John responds:

    Then what is a good reason, in your opinion? Or (not necessarily the same thing), what is the true reason that motivates the War Party?

    If enforcing UN resolutions is not a valid reason, then what is the basis for the legality or constitutionality of this war and the first Gulf War?

    You did not answer my challenge about the likelihood that military action will achieve its objectives and produce a substantial "improvement in American interests in the area," or whether it is just as likely to make things worse.

    Leftist critics of Israel point out the strong parallels between Israel/Palestine and the former South Africa. Israel may have a right to exist, but does it have a right to rule over 3 million Arabs?

    Israel won't allow the Arabs to be citizens of Israel, won't allow them to have their own state, and doesn't dare to ethnically-cleanse them to some third country. So what is left? The Arabs are not going away; their population is growing much faster than Israel's.

    What is the War Party? The Repubs and Demos seem more or less equally war-like to me. Clinton also bombed Iraq when he didn't approve of what Hussein was doing, and he also led wars in Yugoslavia.

    The legality is based on getting a declaration from Congress. That was done in the Gulf War, and has been done to support all actions so far.

    Well, I hope it improves American interests. We may not know for sure for years, if ever.

    I don't see the parallel between Israel and S. Africa. The arabs are in a state of war against Israel. Unless and until the arabs either win the war or surrender, Israel has a right to rule them. That is how the world has worked for thousands of years, and I don't know how else it could work.

    Israel offered them their own state, and they turned it down, because they prefer to be in a state of war. They are not going away, but they don't seem to be capable of civilized self-government either.

    I don't have any solution for Israel's problems, but it is at war with people dedicated to its destruction and that justifies everything that it is doing.

    John responds:

    The term War Party doesn't refer to Democrats or Republicans. It means the party (in the generic sense) or faction pushing, promoting, and supporting the war against Iraq. It means the people named here and here.

    The constitutionality of presidential warmaking depends on authority from Congress. But the congressional authorizations, both for this war and the first Gulf War, specifically cite and rely upon UN resolutions. If we disavow and disregard the UN, that would undercut and perhaps revoke the congressional authorizations.

    By legality I meant international law. That requires more than authority from Congress. It means the existence of facts and circumstances that historically have justified resort to war, as well as compliance with international agreements like the UN Charter.

    Well, I hope it improves American interests. We may not know for sure for years, if ever.
    This is not encouraging! One of the requirements of a "just war," in addition to compliance with all relevant legal processes, is a reasonable likelihood of success.

    How is that different from the white government of South Africa?

    I don't have any solution for Israel's problems, but it is at war with people dedicated to its destruction and that justifies everything that it is doing.
    That last sentence is incoherent and self-contradictory. If you don't have a solution, that means you must agree that the status quo is not acceptable or justifiable. Otherwise you are saying the status quo is the solution.

    Israel did not offer the Arabs a viable state. Under the 2000 proposal, the West Bank would remain honeycombed with a network of Jewish settlements connected by roads patrolled by the Israeli army - a ridiculous and impossible situation.

    Yes, Israel is at war with its Arab neighbors who have never recognized its existence. That is Israel's problem, not ours.

    Liza writes:
    I completely agree with Roger about the whole Mideast-Iraq situation.
    Bush's position is that Iraq is in serious violation of UN resolutions. France apparently thinks that the violations are not serious enough for war yet, but that is just France's (and Russia's and Germany's) opinion.

    Those conditions justifying war clearly exist. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened our oil supply. We have been in a state of war ever since, as Iraq has never fully complied with our demands.

    In S. Africa, there was an international consensus that the govt should abolish apartheid. There is no consensus about Israel, except perhaps that Israel should offer the PLO a homeland that leaves Israel with safe and secure borders. Israel has done that. It is not what the arabs want, so there is really no consensus.

    Yes, the status is the solution unless somebody finds a better one. No one has.

    Why is it impossible for jews to live on the West Bank? Because bigoted arabs don't want to live next to jews. It is the arabs who seem to want some sort of apartheid, and kick out all the jews. Those jews have every right to live there, and if a hypothetical arab state cannot tolerate that, then it is appropriate for Israel to defend them.

    Yes, Israel war is Israel's problem. Helping Israel is a lousy reason for bombing Iraq. I realize that there are some pro-Israel folks who are gung-ho for an Iraq war. But I don't think that they have much influence on GW Bush or Tony Blair. They want war for reasons that have little or nothing to do with Israel.

     
    MOAB
    MOAB is supposed to stand for Massive Ordinance Air Blast. That is surely a contrived acronym, with the real one being the Mother Of All Bombs. Like the USA PATRIOT Act that supposedly stands for United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.
     
    Radio spectrum is unlimited
    This Salon article explains David P. Reed's campaign to use the radio spectrum in new ways.
     
    No illegal alien left behind
    Andy points out that illegal alien kids get federal funds for learning English:
    GRANT AVAILABILITY: School districts with a concentration of immigrant students can apply for federal funds to help pay for activities that will help immigrant students attain English proficiency, meet academic standards, and acclimate themselves to American society. The funds are available under Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act.
     

    VDARE John sends a link to VDARE.com. I'm not sure why, but there are a number of good articles there by Peter Brimelow, Paul Craig Roberts, and others.

    John explains:

    Nice NASA pic of North America. Here's a great pic of sunset over Europe, taken from the space shuttle.

    Regarding VDARE, what I intended to send you was not the home page, but this article with supporting hyperlinks to various sources including BusinessWeek about how multinationals are replacing U.S. high tech workers with aliens brought into the U.S. on L-1 visas.

    A separate but related issue is how multinationals are establishing centers in Third World countries like India, where they employ English-speaking natives to do high-tech, tech support and customer-service work. Wired story

    Here's an interesting article about free WiFi.

    I didn't know that about big companies importing cheap foreign labor with L-1 visas. The L-1 visa programs seems to have even more loopholes than the H-1B program.

    The picture is from RushLimbaugh.com. The boundary line for the sunlight looks like it is cutting right thru Paris. Was Rush trying to make a political statement about how the Sun is setting on France?


    Tuesday, Mar 11, 2003
     
    NASA picture
    Here is a nice picture of N. America. From NASA.
     

    Unabomber This was reported before, but now there is a book about it. The Unabomber was the subject of a bizarre psychological experiment when he was a student at Harvard, and it may have influenced his worldview.
     
    Suing the deep pockets
    John sends this Boston Globe story, confirming predictions that a beer-maker would be sued over the RI nightclub fire. Here is an RI story.
     
    Great Lakes frozen
    90% of the Great Lakes are frozen. The article says Lake Superior froze completely in 1979. I didn't think that ever happened. Shipping could be serious interrupted. Where is global warming when we need it?
     
    Public key crypto
    I ran across this, from Rick:
    is it possible to give a real-life explanation of the public/private key cryptography without using any complex math? for example, taking a safe and locking valuables with keys and sending to the other side etc.
    Yes. The traditional example goes as follows. This is closer to an example of Diffie-Hellman key exchange than it is normal public key cryptography, but it is informative none-the-less.

    I have a chest that has a spot for two padlocks. I put a secret in it and put my padlock on the chest and lock it. I send you the chest. You take your padlock and put it on the chest also. (now it has two padlocks on it). You send the chest back to me. I unlock my padlock and remove it. The chest now only has your padlock on it. I send it to you, you unlock your lock and open the chest. Now you can get the secret.

    That is a good explanation. The method is subject to some attacks, such as the wrong person putting his padlock on, but DH and other public key methods have similar problems. It does illustrate how a secret can be conveyed by passing locks, and not keys.
     
    Jews for the war
    Virginia Democratic (Irish-American) Congressman Jim Moran is so anti-semitic that some of his jewish constituents voted for his Republican opponent in the last election! And what did he say? He said that the Iraq war depends on the support of the American Jewish community. His statement is probably false, but not anti-semitic.

    Update: Slate's Kinsley lists some others who have commented on jewish influence, without being branded anti-semitic.

     
    Santa Cruz protesters
    Santa Cruz peace protesters and homeless activists have been blocking the sidewalk in front of the surf shop for 4 days now. Here is the local story. Do they think that surfers are pro-war? Santa Cruz seems to draw these wackos like a magnet:
    T.J., 21, a homeless man who moved to Santa Cruz from Los Angeles in December, had been staying up 40 hours straight as part of the protest, without the benefit of coffee.
    Is coffee pro-war? Or maybe no one will give him the money for a cup of coffee?

    Others want to stop paying taxes because:

    Protesters say their action, in part, is a response to then-U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s 1982 statements that protesters can march all they want as long as they continue to pay taxes.
    I think they missed Haig's point. They have to pay taxes to maintain their protest rights, under Haig's logic. They seem to be inspired by the Vice Major, who is a tax protestor himself!
    Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Scott Kennedy ... has been withholding a portion of his taxes, and facing the consequences, since 1971. "In the end they charge you interest and penalties," he said. "We’ve had our bank account seized. My wife and I have had our salary seized."
    Only Santa Cruzans would elect a politician who doesn't even pay his own taxes. Why would anyone want someone managing city tax money, when he refuses to pay himself?

    Also in Santa Cruz news, the libraries now have anti-Ashcroft signs:

    The signs, posted in the 10 county branches last week and on the library's Web site, also inform the reader that the USA Patriot Act "prohibits library workers from informing you if federal agents have obtained records about you." "Questions about this policy," patrons are told, "should be directed to Attorney General John Ashcroft, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. 20530."
    It is not Ashcroft's policy. It is a law that allows the feds to subpoena tangible records records related to foreign terrorists. Volokh's blog says:
    It is a general law that allows the FBI to collect evidence in cases involving "foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or . . . international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."
    It was passed by Congress, signed by Bush, and sunsets in 2005.
     
    New California taxes
    This site lists the new taxes that have been proposed to help pay for Gov. Gray Davis's mismanagement of the state.

    George writes:

    The whole country is in recession. You can't blame Davis for the recession, and you can't blame him for 9/11.
    California tax revenues are up about 50% since 1996. The state was running a big surplus when Davis was elected in 1998. His party dominates state politics. The state gubmnt has plenty of money. The problem is Davis's runaway spending that has increased much more rapidly than revenues.

    George Will has a new column on this recall effort, and says state revenues have risen 28 percent since 1998.

     
    Ritchie on unix lawsuit
    Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of the original Bell Labs Unix, has put up a web page with USL vs. BSDI documents. That was the case where the Unix owners sued BSD, a unix clone, and lost. The current case against IBM Linux seems similar, and conventional wisdom is that it will fail similarly.

    Ritchie suggests that this case might be different, and he might be right. HP and Sun paid millions of dollars for broad Unix licenses that would allow shipping unix clones. IBM only pays for AIX. IBM has been quoted in the press saying that their whole business strategy is to cannibalize AIX (where it pays unix royalties) in favor of Linux (which is royalty-free). IBM's Linux strategy may just be a plan to take over unix, and not pay for it.

     
    Bill to weaken the DMCA
    Zoe Lofgren introduced a pro-consumer modification of the DMCA. Hollywood is unhappy:
    ``As drafted, this legislation essentially legalizes hacking. It puts a dagger in the heart of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,'' said MPAA Chairman Jack Valenti in a prepared statement. ``It would deny content owners the ability to protect their works by technological means.''
    No law is going to do that. The content owners can use either legal or technological means to protect their works, or both. The legal debate is only over the legal means of protection.
     
    Bad reporting
    Here is a Mercury News story that is ruined because the editors don't want to include info that is too technical. It complains that a Msft email product puts cryptic characters on the subject line, but fails to give an example, so the reader has no idea if this is a problem or not.

    Update: Kristine Heim, the SJMN reporter, responded with 2 examples:

    Good suggestion. Here are two examples for you.

    Subjecttomorrow you can be without bills d60f60360e20f60f60860160970040760e60960a60560 (from spam in my very own inbox)

    does CRM{12128E53-3B6F-4F0C-8802-925C93139EF1}MRC (from Promarketing's customer e-mail)

    Yes, these are obnoxious for a subject line.
     
    New book on gun control
    Gumma reports that John Lott has a new book titled The Bias against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard about Gun Control Is Wrong. His blurb says:
    In his bestselling classic, More Guns, Less Crime, John R. Lott, Jr., proved that guns make us safer. Now, in his stunning new book, The Bias against Guns, Lott shows how liberals bury pro-gun facts out of sheer bias against the truth. With irrefutable evidence, Lott shoots gun critics down and gives you the information you need to win arguments with those who want to ban guns.
    He promises to post his raw data online.

    Lott has been getting some heat from bloggers (eg, see Slate's Noah) because he has used pseudonyms for online discussions. Evidence of dishonsty, they say. If he could lie about his name online, then he might have been lying when he said, "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack." Then they compare him to Bellesiles, who was fired from his tenured professorship for faking data in his anti-gun book.

    The analogy is wacky. In the case of Bellesiles, the main thesis of his book was wrong, and nearly all of his supporting evidence was fraudulently manufactured. In the case of Lott, the "98 percent" figure is almost certainly in the ball park. It is hard to know exactly, because such incidents are not usually reported, and it is hard to get numbers on crimes being prevented. If not 98%, then what? As for using a pseudonym on the net, that's the norm.

     
    Big Sur hiking accident
    A hiker survived a serious fall on the Pine Ridge Trail, near Big Sur on the central coast of California. It is my favorite backpacking trail.

    Monday, Mar 10, 2003
     
    Did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs?
    Conventional wisdom is now that a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs 65 myrs ago. They found the meteor crater. The extinction was the same time. It couldn't be just coincidence. Except that much of India was erupting in volcanoes at the same time also. So which is the coincidence?

    The obvious theory is that a meteor cause those volcanic eruptions. But geologists say that is impossible.

    Now here is where the science gets weird. The previous major extinctions were also accompanied by big meteor hits and huge volcanic activity. More coincidences?

    Now the NY Times reports that people are now taking seriously the idea that the meteors and volcanoes could be related. Most scientists still say it is impossible, but keep a watch on this. A coincidence like this has got to mean something.

    Today's NY Times science section also has articles on a couple of other continuing debates, whether humans interbred with Neanderthals, and whether the universe is spatially finite (like a torus).

     
    Illegal alien truck crash
    Andy sends this story about a stolen truck full of illegal aliens that crashed while resisting arrest. A "migrant-rights group" says that it is all the fault of the police for chasing a stolen truck!
     
    TV violence
    The psychology journal Developmental Psychology has a well-publicized article about how children watching violent TV shows leads to more agressive adult behavior. I am skeptical, but it claims to control for the obvious correlations.
     
    Oscar night
    I'll be skipping the Oscars again. I haven't watched in years, as the show is boring, annoying, and offensive. No doubt there will be some idiotic anti-war speeches this time.
     
    Calif tax on solar power
    Gov Gray Davis's power regulators bought electric power at the peak of the market, so we'll be paying artificially high prices for electric power for the next 10 years. Now he wants to tax people who have their own power generators, either from solar or otherwise.

    Add this to the reasons to recall Gray Davis.


    Sunday, Mar 09, 2003
     
    New copyright book
    Lee Hollaar has written a pretty good book "Legal Protection of Digital Information". It costs $155 for the paperback, but it is online free. The online version is more useful because it has links to laws, cases, and other supporting documents. Hollaar's perspective is a little different from the typical lawyer. He is not a lawyer, but he has special expertise in the subject and understands copyright and patent law as well as anyone. Certainly better than the judges writing opinions in the area.
     
    Calif Gov Gray Davis polls only 27%
    Andy writes:
    John and Joe complain about the civil lawsuits over the RI inferno, but those suits are not as bad as the criminal witchhunt. I don't hear them complaining about that. I guess that's not a Republican pocketbook concern!

    Good news is that Gov. Gray Davis' approval rating has dropped to an astounding 27% (per today's LA Times). I've never seen a rating so low! Bad news is that this tide of discontent will inevitably hit Bush hard too. Would McCain have a better chance of winning the presidency for Republicans in 2004?

    The internet is probably causing this collapse in respect for public officials. It is like the effect of the printing press on the Catholic Church. I sense a feeling of panic even by the Supreme Court. The internet just chews up their opinions and spits 'em out. When a Ninth Circuit judge like Reinhardt is changing his opinion after publication due to internet criticism (removing Bellesiles reference), it's clear we're entering a whole new era.

    The LA Times poll always showed that a narrow majority opposes the Davis recall effort. That is to be expected. The real question is how those people will vote, once the Davis recall is on the ballot.

    I don't think that anyone has been criminally charged in connection with the RI fire yet.

     
    NY Times gripes about conservative court
    The NY Times has a long essay griping about how conservatives now control most of the nation's federal appeals courts, especially the 4C (including Virginia). But I found the examples unconvincing. The biggest example was a woman who sued a small production shop for sexual harassment. It sounds to me like the mannequins there were being sexually harassed, but not the woman.

    Another case had to do with whether it is unconstitutional for a cop to abuse a suspect in a way that had no law enforcement purpose. The article is written in a way as to imply that it should be obvious to anyone but a right-wing nut that the abuse would be unconstitutional if there is no law enforcement purpose. But it really just the opposite. The Constitution forbids certain punishments and other actions that are meted out as part of govt policy towards criminals; but if some cop murders someone on his own authority, then the Constitution is silent. It is just an ordinary crime like any other murder.

    The article fails to find any conservative activism on the 4C that compares to liberal activism (like last week's Pledge ruling) that is common on the other circuits. Just biased liberal reporting from the NY Times.

     
    Bogus RI fire lawsuit
    John sends this story about lawyers looking for deep pockets to pay damage claims related to the RI nightclub fire. The deepest pocket appears to be the radio network that advertised the concert. Suing them is defended by a law prof named Carl T. Bogus, who also wrote a book titled Why Lawsuits are Good for America. Yes, that is his real name.

    Joe says that Anheuser Busch will be sued 98 times, because AB's logo was prominently displayed in the bar.

    You can get the latest news on bogus lawsuits at Overlawyered.com. That is bogus with a lowercase b.

    Liza responds:

    Maybe this is how we'll finally get tort reform - when the media start being bankrupted by bogus claims, they will want some protection.

    Saturday, Mar 08, 2003
     
    More RI scapegoats
    Andy writes:
    Teeny weeny flame causes an historic eatery to be shut down. Fire exit that led to a fenced-in lot is another HUGE problem, suddenly.

    Governor of Rhode Island is pointing the finger at everyone but his own regulatory codes, which was the real cause of the nightclub inferno. The witchhunt continues.

     
    Pep pills
    You can take stimulants like caffeine or amphetamines to increase alertness when you are low on sleep, but now there is another way to go. A modafinil pill (aka Provigil) lets you feel as peppy after six hours sleep as you would after nine. It is prescribed for narcolepsy. If it is as good as it sounds, then getting a prescription should be like getting a Viagra prescription.
     
    Pledge OK in Virginia
    John sends this WashPost article about a federal judge who says it is OK for the schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Some US Supreme Court decisions have said so as well. Only a couple of kooky Californa federal judges say otherwise.

    That article explains that the original 9C opinion was that the Pledge itself was unconstitutional, because the 1954 Congress resolution supporting the modified Pledge wording was an unconstitutional act for Congress. The latest 9C ruling is ambiguous on the point.

     
    Get college credit for being anti-Bush
    UPI says:
    The president of a California college is sending a letter to President Bush apologizing for an instructor who gave students extra credit for writing anti-war missives to the White House.

    Citrus College President Louis E. Zellers wrote that Professor Rosalyn Kahn "did abuse her authority" in assigning students in her Speech 106 class to write letters to Bush protesting the possible war with Iraq.

    "Students were clear in their understanding that they would only receive credit if they wrote 'protest' letters," Zellers said in a letter of thanks to FIRE -- the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education -- a Philadelphia-based campus watchdog group.

    Does anybody ever get college credit for supporting a Republican?
     
    Population decline
    Wattenberg describes the coming population decline. The world needs a total fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population. Europe's rate has dropped to 1.4, Japan to 1.3, and the Third World to 2.9. World population is expected to peak at 9B in 2050, and then decline. The USA rate is 2.1, and is only increasing population because it takes more immigrants than the rest of the world combined, and those immigrants are reproducing rapidly.
     
    Linux under legal cloud
    SCO, the current owner of Unix, has sued IBM for stealing Unix secrets and putting them in the open-source Linux. Apparently IBM's AIX includes confidential Unix source code under license from SCO, and IBM has a publicly announced policy of migrating code and features from AIX to Linux.

    I am not sure this lawsuit is significant. IBM could just buy SCO if SCO became a problem. For you legal buffs, the above site has the complete complaint against IBM, including the ATT-IBM license and lots of legal details. You can find rants from the open source community here. HP and Sun are not worried, because they have fully paid-up Unix licenses, and can ship Linux or other Unix clones without paying additional royalties.

    The popularity of Linux over other unix alternatives is partially because of the GNU culture, and partially because of IBM's endorsement. If Linux becomes tainted, remember that BSD unix is more free, more solid, and now maybe even cleaner legally.

    Meanwhile, SSL/TLS came out of a legal cloud, as Stambler lost a patent lawsuit against RSAS and Verisign.


    Friday, Mar 07, 2003
     
    War for oil
    Some anti-war activists are saying that Iraq war is all about oil, and that it is immoral to goto war to protect economic interests.

    Going to war to protect economic interests seems like a pretty good reason to me. Are these people also against jailing bank robbers? Our whole way of life depends on international trade, and that depends on American warships keeping shipping lanes open. You might think that those lanes are kept open by law, or by treaty, or by diplomacy; but ultimately any enforcement has to be by military power. If we renounced the use of force to protect economic interests, then it is hard to see how modern civilization would even be possible. Guns make it all possible.

    (I am not entirely convinced that there is an economic justification for an Iraq war. But if there is, that that is a big plus.)

     
    Banned books
    I found this ALA list of banned books. These are books in schools or libraries that drew complaints for various reasons, such as offensive language or unsuitability to the age group. I wondered why the Bible was not on the list. It that because no one ever objects to the Bible? Or that schools and libraries have already removed all their bibles? The Koran was not on the list either.

    The page does say that they get objections to materials promoting a religious viewpoint, but I didn't see any religious books on the lists.


    Thursday, Mar 06, 2003
     
    Euro patents
    The European Union seems to have finally decided to have EU patents that will be good for all of Europe. With declines in the US Patent Office and improvements to the european system, I think it now makes sense for the US and Europe to respect each others patents. Every other country in the world should just abolish its patent office, and pass a law respecting US and Euro patents.
     
    Estrada memos
    John responds to Andy:
    As I predicted, the Dems just won in filibustering the Estrada nomination. Bush/Gonzales were wrong in pushing Estrada first, who is not even known to be pro-life. The Dems won with their issue that Bush withheld relevant memos written by Estrada. Let's hope this deters Bush from picking a Souter for the Supreme Court.
    Surely you don't support the Democrats' demand for those memos? It is purely a means of delaying and defeating the nomination. Such memos have never been disclosed for any other nominee. All living former Solicitors General (four Democrats and three Republicans) have opposed releasing the memos. All of Estrada's superiors - the people who received and reviewed the memos - gave Estrada the highest possible commendation.

    Andy is right that the battle over Estrada is a practice exercise for the mother of all battles over the next Supreme Court vacancy. But he has it backwards when he says he hopes the failure (so far) to get Estrada confirmed deters Bush from picking a Souter for the Supreme Court.

    In fact, Bush is more likely to pick a Souter if he can't even get an Estrada on the Court of Appeals. That is why we have to win Estrada - to make it possible for Bush to pick a better choice for the Supreme Court.

    Remind me again, why is it so crucial to support Bush? Bruce just put it best Bush is combination of Jimmy Carter's piety and Lyndon Johnson's arrogance.
    Bush is the president. He won fair and square. There is no reasonable alternative before 2008. Deal with it.
    John and Liza perpetuate the liberal myth that Jefferson and Madison were great conservative thinkers. They weren't. Hamilton was head and shoulders above them. His Farewell Address for Washington is much better than anything Jefferson and Madison wrote. Hamilton's Federalist Papers were more frequent and better also.
    It is impossible to continue this discussion when Andy will not present facts, evidence or rational argument to support his conclusory assertions.
    Jefferson and Madison were hostile to religion, and not representative of the country then or now. The book Liza describes is probably Jefferson's wacky effort to rewrite the Gospels, 1800 after the fact. Madison pushed a wall of separation between church and state that liberals like to cite. As to the Constitution, Madison's ideas were mostly rejected and he missed the boat on the bicameral legislature. Neither Jefferson nor Madison were conservative presidents.
    Nonsense. TJ and JM were not in any way hostile to religion. They were respectful of religion in all their public statements and actions. TJ's famous collection of excerpts from the Gospels was not an "effort to rewrite" them, but to study them. The "wall of separation" was conceived for the purpose of protecting churches, not inhibiting them. You cannot find any statement or action of TJ or JM that indicates hostility to religion or that supports the kind of anti-religious secularism that is common today in public schools and the media.

    The Constitution was a collaborative effort. Of course JM did not write it by himself and some of his proposals were rejected, but he was the most active participant in those deliberations and, along with Hamilton, the most vigorous exponent of the final product. I don't know what you mean by saying he missed the boat on the bicameral legislature. JM is generally credited with primary responsibility for adoption of the "Virginia plan" whereby one house represents the states and the other house represents the people.

    I support the Demos' demand. We the taxpayers paid Estrada to write those memos. They are not confidential and ought to be public anyway. A FOIA request should get them. In Estrada's case, they are the best evidence of his competence and suitability for the court.

    The former Solicitor General opposition is all the more reason to release them. DoJ types was prosecutors to be promoted to judgeships without any scrutiny. Estrada is a Souter stealth candidate. No one knows where he stands on anything.

    John responds:

    Evidently Roger doesn't want Estrada to be confirmed or, at best, is indifferent to his fate. I think that is a big mistake.

    What Roger proposes is to reopen Estrada's qualifications and fitness for the court, hold new hearings, and take new evidence - a process that would consume months. That would be like asking U.S. soldiers now assembling in the Persian Gulf to question why they are there.

    It would be as if some 2nd Lieutenant asked Gen. Tommy Franks, "Tell me once again, sir, why are we here? Why do we have to disarm Saddam Hussein? Won't that destabilize the Middle East, inflame the Muslim world and create more recruits for al Qaeda? Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden, anyway?"

    There was plenty of time when Democrats controlled the Senate to review the people Bush nominated in May of 2001. That time is long passed. The only thing left to do is vote. Any Senator who feels he doesn't have enough information is free to vote against the nominee.

    All pending nominations should be brought to a floor voted in the Senate before the end of June, when a Supreme Court vacancy is expected.

    Yes, I am ambivalent about Estrada. The hearings have told us essentially nothing about his competence or philosophy.

    Andy responds:

    I agree with Roger that the government should release legal memos written by judicial nominees. Bush simply overplayed his secrecy-in-government shtick. Conservatives should be outraged that Bush/Gonzales tried and failed to confirm a nominee based on Souter-like tactics.

    Re Founders, John wrote, "TJ and JM were not in any way hostile to religion. They were respectful of religion in all their public statements and actions. TJ's famous collection of excerpts from the Gospels was not an "effort to rewrite" them, but to study them. The "wall of separation" was conceived for the purpose of protecting churches, not inhibiting them. You cannot find any statement or action of TJ or JM that indicates hostility to religion or that supports the kind of anti-religious secularism that is common today in public schools and the media."

    Jefferson and Madison were the secularists of their day. Jefferson thought he could do a better job with the Gospels than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did. Jefferson was not particularly conservative as president; neither was Madison. Madison gave us the dreadful "wall of separation."

    But politics aside, an objective observer must conclude that Hamilton was far more productive and insightful in his writings than Jefferson or Madison were. Did either Jefferson or Madison write anything notable by themselves? Madison was outdone by Hamilton in the Federalist Papers; Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was a group effort (featuring grammatical errors in key places, like "all men are created equal" and "unalienable rights," though some blame Adams for the latter error). Neither had anything remotely approaching Hamilton's brilliant Farewell Address.

    John is right in noting that Madison proposed two chambers of Congress, but the numbers in each chamber were in proportion to population. My objection was inartfully worded. I should have said that Madison missed the boat on the equal representation of the states, the linchpin of the Constitution and our history.

    Also, note that Hamilton fought well in the Revolutionary War, and gave his life in stopping the demonic Burr. Jefferson ran with Burr on his ticket! Madison did not fight in the War.

    John responds:
    So Andy sides with Chuck Schumer, who leads this unprecedented filibuster because he is convinced that Estrada would be a Hispanic Clarence Thomas. Shame on you!

    Secularist? That's just empty name calling. Read the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom that is not a secularist document. You do support that law, don't you?

    There was nothing wrong with the "wall of separation" metaphor as Jefferson (not Madison) originally expressed it, or for 150 years thereafter. Its meaning was reinvented by Justice Hugo Black, beginning in the 1947 Everson case. It is grossly unfair to attribute Black's views to Jefferson or Madison.

    Andy keeps repeating the same assertions, but never supports them with evidence or argument. Madison's Federalist papers are just as important as Hamilton's. There are no grammatical errors in the Declaration of Independence.

    It is not true that Hamilton wrote Washington's Farewell Address all by himself. In addition to Hamilton, Madison and Washington made major contributions to that document, which went through many drafts as it was passed back and forth among those three men.

    I agree that Hamilton's writings are important and historic, but they lack the timeless elegance and eloquence of Jefferson's Declaration.

    Like so many provisions of the Constitution, that [state representation issue] was the product of compromise between conflicting interests in a legislative assembly. To say that Madison "missed the boat" merely because he didn't design the whole Constitution all by himself is completely absurd. Neither Madison nor Hamilton got their way entirely, but both supported the result.

    The "demonic Burr" also "fought well in the Revolutionary War." We didn't really have political tickets until after the 12th Amendment was passed in 1804. The Jefferson-Burr race in 1800 wasn't much of a ticket Burr conspired with the opposing party to deprive Jefferson of victory in the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House.

    Jefferson distrusted Burr even more than JFK distrusted LBJ. Jefferson dropped Burr when he ran for re-election in 1804, the year Burr shot Hamilton. In 1807, Jefferson had Burr arrested and charged with treason. The trial was conducted by Chief Justice Marshall, a political opponent of Jefferson who issued rulings favorable to Burr, resulting in Burr's acquittal.

    I wouldn't mind seeing a real debate on whether a Hispanic Clarence Thomas would be good or bad. I don't think Schumer could hold his own in such a debate.

    Andy responds to John:

    John replied, "So Andy sides with Chuck Schumer, who leads this unprecedented filibuster because he is convinced that Estrada would be a Hispanic Clarence Thomas. Shame on you!"

    There's nothing to suggest that Estrada would be a Hispanic Clarence Thomas. Chuck Schumer is wrong about many things.

    I'm opposed to the Souter stealth nomination strategy. Conservatives should be criticizing it so that it doesn't happen again.

    John wrote, "Secularist? That's just empty name calling. Read the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom that is not a secularist document. You do support that law, don't you?"

    Certainly not as Jefferson originally wrote it. He attempted, as all opponents of religion do, to impose his own peculiar view of the world. You can see the original draft [here]. He tried to legislate his hostility to faith and free will, for example.

    John wrote, "There was nothing wrong with the 'wall of separation' metaphor as Jefferson (not Madison) originally expressed it, or for 150 years thereafter."

    The metaphor (which I think was Madison's) is inherently hostile to religion.

    John wrote, "Andy keeps repeating the same assertions, but never supports them with evidence or argument. Madison's Federalist papers are just as important as Hamilton's. There are no grammatical errors in the Declaration of Independence."

    Hamilton authored more Federalist Papers than Madison. Madison's goofy attack on factions in Federalist No. 10 is baseless. Liberals love to cite Madison and Jefferson because much of what they stood for was liberal.

    John wrote, "We didn't really have political tickets until after the 12th Amendment was passed in 1804. The Jefferson-Burr race in 1800 wasn't much of a ticket Burr conspired with the opposing party to deprive Jefferson of victory in the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House."

    Political parties began early in the Washington Administration. They were in full bloom by 1800.

    John wrote, "Jefferson distrusted Burr even more than JFK distrusted LBJ."

    Well, that isn't very comforting! JFK should be held accountable for picking LBJ, and Jefferson for running with Burr.

    All we know about Estrada is that he got good grades in college, he's friends with a right-wing columnist, and he got good recommendations from his DoJ supervisors. That's not enough.

    John responds to Andy:

    If the Dems succeed in blocking Estrada and the 13 other Court of Appeals nominees who were nominated over a year ago, until we have a Supreme Court vacancy, Bush will be forced to nominate a weaker, more Souter-like candidate for the Supreme Court. I am amazed and disappointed that Roger and Andy can't see that.
    Certainly not as Jefferson originally wrote it. He attempted, as all opponents of religion do, to impose his own peculiar view of the world. You can see the original draft at http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/enlight/religi.htm . He tried to legislate his hostility to faith and free will, for example.
    Well, there you have it Andy admits he opposes religious tolerance and freedom, a cornerstone of the American way of life. But he still doesn't explain his position, except to make baseless assertions that Jefferson was an opponent of religion who wanted to imposed his own peculiar view on the world, which is complete nonsense.

    As for Jefferson's original draft, apparently several phrases from Jefferson's preamble were struck out before the bill was passed, but I can't see that the deleted phrases make any substantive difference. Andy still won't say precisely what he objects to.

    The metaphor (which I think was Madison's) is inherently hostile to religion.
    Another assertion without evidence or argument. Clearly the metaphor was intended to protect religious practice, and did so for 150 years until Justice Hugo Black. Why don't you spend your time attacking Black instead of Jefferson?
    Hamilton authored more Federalist Papers than Madison. Madison's goofy attack on factions in Federalist No. 10 is baseless. Liberals love to cite Madison and Jefferson because much of what they stood for was liberal.
    More baseless assertions. Madison was one of 3 authors and he wrote approximately 1/3rd of the papers. Madison's discussion of factions, far from being goofy or baseless, is an absolute cornerstone of our entire structure of government. Andy persistently tries to pigeonhole various Framers as liberal or conservative, terms which Andy never defines and the Framers never used.
    John wrote, "Jefferson distrusted Burr even more than JFK distrusted LBJ." Well, that isn't very comforting! JFK should be held accountable for picking LBJ, and Jefferson for running with Burr.
    And Reagan for picking Bush? Before Carter-Mondale, the VP had no role in governing the country and his sole role was to hold a lottery ticket redeemable in the event of the president's death. VPs were selected solely for political purposes. Of all Jefferson's good and bad qualities, to impugn him by reason of his arm's-length association with his first VP, Aaron Burr, whom Jefferson later prosecuted for treason, seems exceedingly weak.
    Andy responds:
    John wrote, "If the Dems succeed in blocking Estrada and the 13 other Court of Appeals nominees who were nominated over a year ago, until we have a Supreme Court vacancy, Bush will be forced to nominate a weaker, more Souter-like candidate for the Supreme Court. I am amazed and disappointed that Roger and Andy can't see that."

    It was the Bush/Gonzales stealth strategy that led to the Estrada debacle. The only moral here is the same as in the Souter fiasco don't go the stealth route. The filibuster only succeeded because the Dems could make the Republicans look like they were hiding something. If Bush does picker a Souter-like candidate for the Supreme Court, then he renders himself unelectable in 2004.

    John wrote," Well, there you have it Andy admits he opposes religious tolerance and freedom, a cornerstone of the American way of life."

    John's conclusion is a non sequitur. I said nothing of the kind.

    John wrote, "As for Jefferson's original draft, apparently several phrases from Jefferson's preamble were struck out before the bill was passed, but I can't see that the deleted phrases make any substantive difference. Andy still won't say precisely what he objects to."

    The stricken language makes enormous difference -- which was why it had to be deleted. Jefferson wanted the legislature to deny free will and deny the role of faith. Jefferson's view was the opposite of Hamilton, who wrote in the Farewell Address that religion and morality are the foundation of government.

    John wrote, "Clearly the metaphor [wall of separation] was intended to protect religious practice ..."

    Not clear at all. Madison and Jefferson wanted religion out of government. Period. They were wrong.

    John wrote, "Madison's discussion of factions, far from being goofy or baseless, is an absolute cornerstone of our entire structure of government."

    You really have to show your work there. Third parties are factions; abolitionists constituted a faction; single issue groups like pro-lifers are factions; religious movements are factions. Factions are essential and good. To oppose factions, as Madison did, is to oppose principles in politics.

    John wrote, "Of all Jefferson's good and bad qualities, to impugn him by reason of his arm's-length association with his first VP, Aaron Burr, whom Jefferson later prosecuted for treason, seems exceedingly weak."

    1807 is a bit late in the game. Hamilton should not have had to shoulder the entire burden of stopping Burr in 1804.

    My sources say that Jefferson and Burr were political enemies. What do you think Jefferson should have done -- challenge Burr to a duel?

    The stealth strategy is justified by the notion that the best judge is someone who is smart, as evidenced by resume credentials, and unbiased, as evidenced by a lack of public opinions. The strategy is foolish and contradictory. Smart people tend to have opinions. Not very much intelligence is really required to be a judge. Judges make rulings based on their own personal political views. That's why these judicial nominations are controversial. So shouldn't we know what those political views are, insofar as they relate to potential decisions?

    John responds to Andy:

    It was the Bush/Gonzales stealth strategy that led to the Estrada debacle. The only moral here is the same as in the Souter fiasco don't go the stealth route. The filibuster only succeeded because the Dems could make the Republicans look like they were hiding something. If Bush does picker a Souter-like candidate for the Supreme Court, then he renders himself unelectable in 2004.
    But Estrada was named to the Court of Appeals, not the Supreme Court. You have to start somewhere! He can't develop the necessary record until he gets on the court and starts judging cases. If he had been given a fair hearing and confirmed promptly, we would already have a 1-2-year track record and paper trail to know whether or not he is fit for the Supreme Court. Following your advice, we will never know.
    The stricken language makes enormous difference -- which was why it had to be deleted. Jefferson wanted the legislature to deny free will and deny the role of faith. Jefferson's view was the opposite of Hamilton, who wrote in the Farewell Address that religion and morality are the foundation of government.
    The phrases Andy objects to were deleted with Jefferson's and Madison's approval. It was the amended bill which Madison got passed in the Virginia legislature, and which Jefferson engraved on his tombstone as his proudest achievement. Andy still has not stated whether he unreservedly supports that revised bill - the bill that actually passed. Contrary to Andy, the Farewell Address does not say that religion and morality are the foundation of government. It says that good government depends on respect for religion and morality among the people, giving as an example the fact that courts of justice rely upon witnesses who attach a sense of religious obligation to the oaths they swear. The distinction is subtle, but essential. There is no evidence that Madison or Jefferson disagreed with this.
    John wrote, "Clearly the metaphor [wall of separation] was intended to protect religious practice ..." Not clear at all. Madison and Jefferson wanted religion out of government. Period. They were wrong.
    No, they only wanted the government not to privilege or subsidize one Christian denomination over another. They never objected to nondenominational prayer in public institutions. There is no evidence Madison or Jefferson would have supported the modern concept of religion-free government which originated with Justice Hugo Black. Despite a bitter, 20-year political rivalry between the party of Jefferson and Madison versus the Federalist party of Hamilton and Adams, I know of no evidence of any disagreement between the two parties on this issue. They all agreed on religious toleration, which was passed in every state soon after it was passed in Virginia.
    John wrote, "Madison's discussion of factions, far from being goofy or baseless, is an absolute cornerstone of our entire structure of government." You really have to show your work there. Third parties are factions; abolitionists constituted a faction; single issue groups like pro-lifers are factions; religious movements are factions. Factions are essential and good. To oppose factions, as Madison did, is to oppose principles in politics.
    By factions Madison meant economic interests. Ideological factions were unknown then. Madison did not oppose factions; he simply recognized that they are inevitable.

    The challenge of preventing a small but cohesive and determined faction from gaining control of the machinery of government, and using that machinery to oppress the large majority whose interests are more diffuse, is one of Madison's brilliant contributions to political thought. It is a problem that is still with us today.

    John wrote, "Of all Jefferson's good and bad qualities, to impugn him by reason of his arm's-length association with his first VP, Aaron Burr, whom Jefferson later prosecuted for treason, seems exceedingly weak." 1807 is a bit late in the game. Hamilton should not have had to shoulder the entire burden of stopping Burr in 1804.
    As Roger says, perhaps Jefferson should have challenged Burr to a duel!
    Andy responds:
    Madison's Federalist No. 10 is here.

    He's more concerned about religious factions than economic ones. He clearly says that "By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

    He shows a tempered view of religion "If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control." And later, "A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source."

    On Estrada, John said, "But Estrada ... can't develop the necessary record until he gets on the court and starts judging cases. If he had been given a fair hearing and confirmed promptly, we would already have a 1-2-year track record and paper trail to know whether or not he is fit for the Supreme Court."

    That's the Souter nomination approach, and it must be abandoned by conservatives. Thomas was not the Souter approach; Thomas was a longtime favorite of Reagan, ran the EEOC, was quoted as criticizing Roe, and had other conservative credentials. 1-2 years on the DC Circuit wouldn't tell us anything about what someone will do on the Supreme Court.

    As to Washington's Farewell Address, John reading is biased. Here is the relevant passage, showing that Hamilton's view is the antithesis of Jefferson/Madison's hostility to religion:

    "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

    'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government. Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened…."

     
    Drug the crazies
    Liza writes:
    Yeah, and just in this morning's Post there was an article about a schizophrenic man who had paranoid delusions that various government agencies were out to get him. He killed his girlfriend during one of his delusions. I have no idea whether Sell truly is dangerous, but he has done plenty to tick off the judges, including spitting on a female magistrate, intimidating a witness, and allegedly paying someone to murder an FBI agent. I know not all of that is at issue in the Supreme Court case, but the guy isn't exactly a choir boy. People who obstruct the justice system are usually dealt with harshly. The female magistrate is an intelligent, sensible, older woman whom I used know when she worked as an associate in my firm. She is not a wacko. None of you Sell advocates has explained how to comply with the justice system's need to eventually try a person who is accused of a felony but is currently incompetent to stand trial. To say that there is no need ever to try him is not a viable solution. It may well be debatable whether Sell is incompetent (since he has done well on the competency tests) and whether he should be allowed out on bail. But there still has to be a way to ensure that he stands trial eventually.
    Are you referring to this story about a killer who was found not guilty for reasons of insanity 10 years ago, and is now being let out?

    If Sell is a killer, then he deserves whatever he gets. But I base my opinion on the judge's order that Sell be drugged. That order was based solely a dubious psychiatric evaluation and on accusations that he overbilled dental insurance. For that, he is to be doped up with experimental anti-psychotic drugs that are not even FDA-approved.

    Now Liza suggests that the real reason for the drugging is that Sell disrespected a judge. If so, that is even worse! That means that a judge is ordering the drugging of a nonviolent defendant because of personal animosities on the part of the judge, and covering it up by lying in the official order. No matter how you slice it, these St. Louis magistrates seem corrupt in their abuse of power, and much worse than what Sell is accused of.

    John responds:

    Perhaps Sell should be charged and punished for contempt of court for spitting on the magistrate, but that is entirely separate from the Medicaid fraud allegation for which he has been imprisoned the last 5 years. It is shocking and unacceptable that the court would use the spitting incident to affect the disposition of the Medicaid charges.

    I agree with Roger that the judge presiding over the Sell case is evidently not impartial and should be removed from the case. The judge's anger at Sell may be understandable, but it has nevertheless corrupted the process. Yesterday Liza lectured us about the administration of justice; surely it is equally important for the court to maintain impartiality at all times, both in fact and in appearance.

    Liza responds:
    I am not suggesting that the real reason for the drugging is that Sell "disrespected" a judge. But his actions tend to confirm judicial conclusions that he is incompetent to stand trial and/or is a threat to the orderly administration of justice.

    John asserts in a separate e-mail that the magistrate who was spat upon is unfairly using that incident to affect her handling of the Medicaid fraud charges. What is the evidence of that? The current posture of the case is that the everyone involved other than Sell himself thinks that Sell is incompetent to stand trial. The prosecution wants to get the trial over with, using drugs if needed to render Sell competent. No one has ever reached the merits of the case. I don't know whether the magistrate is the judge who would preside over the fraud trial. Moreover, the lower-court decision about drugging was upheld by the court of appeals, so this is not a case of one judge running amok based on personal prejudice.

    Liza, the trial judge, and appellate judges all mention the spitting incident, and then claim that it has nothing to do with the drugging order. So why do they all keep mentioning it? The only reason I can see is that judges like to stick up for each other, and like to punish anyone who disses a judge.

    Sure, it is not just one judge run amok. It is one judge, one magistrate judge, a 2-1 appellate majority, at least one federal prosecutor, two federal shrinks, a prison warden, and probably a few others. Then there are those who tried to use Sell's case to derail the Ashcroft nomination. It is enough to give someone paranoid delusions of the persecutory type.

    If this happened in China, we'd all agree that would be a human rights violation. If Sell is crazy, then he shouldn't be treated like a criminal. If he's not crazy, then he shouldn't be drugged.

     
    RI fire investigation
    John sends R.I. Club Fire Puts Heat on Inspectors and Tour Manager Pyro Documents Destroyed. I think some of these people are lying to try to avoid jail. We'll soon see.

    Dividing blame between the band and the nightclub may be like dividing blame when someone going the wrong way on a one-way street hits a drunk driver. Both are sufficiently at fault to get plenty of blame.

     
    Boycott Delta
    Liza sends this Boycott Delta site about Delta airlines doing credit checks on passengers. She also says San Jose Airport has been identified as one of the 3 airports where Delta will require background checks on its passengers.
     
    Copyright clause not like 2A
    John sent this article drawing an analogy between the 2 constitutional provisions with a prefatory clause -- the copyright clause and the gun amendment (2A). The US SC ignored the prefatory clause in the Eldred copyright case, so it might ignore it in the 2A.

    I don't buy it. The provisions are not similar at all. One describes a power of Congress, and the other a right of the people. In the copyright clause, the preface is not just stating the purpose, it is stating the power that is the essence of the matter ("The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress ..."). In the 2A, the preface is just stating a fact that helps explain the gun rights that people have and that are stated in the rest of the 2A.

    The article says:

    those who challenged the 1998 law relied heavily on its prefatory clause - "to promote the progress of science and useful arts."
    But that's not even true. Lessig and the plaintiff did not introduce any evidence about the promotion of progress, and took the peculiar (and self-defeating) position that the prefatory clause does not bind Congress.
     
    Is Sell crazy?
    Joe writes:
    Is there anybody who knows Sell who doesn't think he's crazy?
    John responds:
    Lots of crazy people are walking around, driving, working, supporting themselves, voting. We don't lock them up.

    Where is the evidence that Sell is a danger to himself or others?

    The court did not claim that Sell was a danger to anyone. The forced drugging theory was based purely on making him competent for trial. Presumably he could go off the drugs at the end of the trial. Not sure if he has to stay drugged for the appeal.

    I agree with John that a lot of the population is crazy, and that is not reason enough to lock them up or drug them.

    The whole Sell case is a farce. if the magistrate judge were really concerned about Sell being able to competently direct his defense, then he'd check to see if Sell's lawyer is current doing what Sell wants. Currently Sell's lawyer is acting contrary to Sell's wishes, according to the St. Louis paper. So I can only conclude that the judge and lawyers want Sell drugged for their own purposes.

    George writes:

    The state should force crazy people to take their medication, whether they are on trial or not. Those people are suffering from a chemical brain imbalance, and they are not thinking clearly enough to realize that they need the drugs. I personally know someone who says his life was saved by Prozac. It is a miracle drug.
    The evidence that prozac and similar drugs are helpful is actually very weak. Here is an American Psychological Association analysis of the benefits, based on the data that was submitted to the FDA by the drugmakers. The researchers had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the FDA data. They found that the effect of the drugs was only marginally better than that of placebos. And that is according to the drugmakers' own studies. Your friend on prozac might be doing just as well on placebos. There just aren't any convincing studies that prozac is any better.
     
    Scapegoats and France
    John responds:
    [Andy's "scapegoat culture" post] is a lot of pontificating, but I still have no idea where you stand on the dog case I presented. How about answering the question?

    I agree that the neocon-orchestrated frenzy of France-bashing has gotten way out of hand. The quotes Roger posted are cheap shots and most of them are not funny anyway.

    With regard to the pending crusade against Iraq, I doubt there is any place for gratitude on the part of either France or the U.S. Every country must pursue its own interests. France and Russia, which are threatening to veto a new U.N. resolution, are the two countries with the largest financial stake in the current Iraqi regime. So be it.

    [Andy's Hamilton post] is a mish-mash of ill-founded prejudices. Every sentence above is either patently absurd or relies on questionable assumptions. How can one even attempt to reply to such bare assertions made without any factual evidence or rational analysis.

    Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton were all world-class geniuses. They were all essential and critical to the founding of our nation and to what we call conservatism. Andy takes armchair pontificating to a ridiculous extreme when he claims that Hamilton was brighter, more productive, or more conservative than the others. It is complete nonsense.

    Equally far-fetched is the claim that Jefferson and Madison had "non-conservative views of religion." The best evidence of Jefferson's and Madison's views of religion is the Virginia statute of religious freedom which they drafted and which their leadership got passed. Within a decade, similar laws were passed in all the other colonies/states. Surely you are not suggesting that anything in that law is inconsistent with modern American conservativism. That law, the precursor of the First Amendment, is a bulwark of our freedom.

    Those guys led a revolution. That makes them radicals, not conservatives.

    Liza writes:

    I agree with John. I note that Jefferson and Madison (as well as Washington) came from Virginia, which Andy recently pooh-poohed as a source of intellectual leadership in the revolutionary period. As to Jefferson's views on religion, I have a copy of a book he put together for the specific purpose of compiling the moral teachings of Jesus. He thought it important to assemble Jesus's moral statements in the Gospels in one slim, easy-to-use volume. So Jefferson was hardly anti-Christian.
    Andy responds:
    As I predicted, the Dems just won in filibustering the Estrada nomination. Bush/Gonzales were wrong in pushing Estrada first, who is not even known to be pro-life. The Dems won with their issue that Bush withheld relevant memos written by Estrada. Let's hope this deters Bush from picking a Souter for the Supreme Court.

    Remind me again, why is it so crucial to support Bush? Bruce just put it best Bush is combination of Jimmy Carter's piety and Lyndon Johnson's arrogance.

    John and Liza perpetuate the liberal myth that Jefferson and Madison were great conservative thinkers. They weren't. Hamilton was head and shoulders above them. His Farewell Address for Washington is much better than anything Jefferson and Madison wrote. Hamilton's Federalist Papers were more frequent and better also.

    Jefferson and Madison were hostile to religion, and not representative of the country then or now. The book Liza describes is probably Jefferson's wacky effort to rewrite the Gospels, 1800 after the fact. Madison pushed a wall of separation between church and state that liberals like to cite. As to the Constitution, Madison's ideas were mostly rejected and he missed the boat on the bicameral legislature. Neither Jefferson nor Madison were conservative presidents.

    There is still no vote on Estrada. Today, Bush complained about a possible filibuster. I agree with the Democrats that Bush should reveal Estrada's memos (that the taxpayers paid him to write), and that Estrada should answer questions about his legal philosophies. I want to know where he stands on antitrust law. He would sit on the DC Circuit where unorthodox legal personal philosophies of the judge derailed the Microsoft case. What would Estrada have done? If Estrada is unable to articulate a legal philosophy about such matters, then he is unfit for the court.

    The Jefferson Bible was an attempt to separate the ethical teachings of Jesus from the religious dogma. Nothing anti-religious about that. The wall of separation protects religious freedom.

     
    Interstate wine sales legal?
    John sends this story about Ken Starr being hired to get the courts to forbid states from certain wine sales regulations. John says: "I disagree with Starr's position. The 21st Amendment gives states the power to regulate the sale of wine."

    Wednesday, Mar 05, 2003
     
    Jefferson v. Hamilton
    Andy writes:
    Conservatives like to idolize Jefferson and Madison, but they were not particularly conservative or competent presidents. Both had non-conservative views of religion, which are often used against conservatives today. Moreover, Madison's role in authoring the Constitution is exaggerated, as is Jefferson's insight for the Declaration of Independence.

    Alexander Hamilton was brighter and more productive than both of them. His Farewell Address, which he wrote for Washington, is more conservative and outshines anything Jefferson and Madison did. Hamilton was also far more important than Jefferson and Madison in arguing for ratification of the Constitution.

     
    C. T. Sell
    Liza writes:
    I read in the Post-Dispatch this week that Sell's lawyer considers Sell incompetent to stand trial. Sell disputes this, but nobody else involved in the case takes him seriously on this point.

    As for John's traffic misdemeanor analogy, I presume that in cases of minor offenses there could be a plea bargain to minimize detention.

    I don't know enough about the history of Sell's case to know why he isn't out on bond pending trial.

    Yes, the St. Louis paper said:
    Sell continues to plead for a trial. He argues that he is competent to stand trial. Sell has passed a course and got a perfect score on a test to determine whether he is competent to stand trial, prison records show. Yet, Sell's own lawyer, Short, along with Dreeben continue to argue that Sell is mentally unfit for trial.
    Saying that there could be a plea bargain is begging the question. All plea bargains are based on expectations about what is likely to happen at trial. Unless you figure out what a trial might do, then there can be no reasonable plea bargain.

    Sell's bond was revoked because he was accused of intimidating a witness by pointing his finger.

    The problem here is that there is a vindictive and abusive magistrate judge. Sell has even been sold out by his own lawyer, as his lawyer refuses to carry out Sell's wishes.

     
    Dogs v. Pyro
    John sends this story about a dog mauling a second-grader at a school playground, and writes:
    "It was an accident," he said.

    Under the rules Andy has adopted for the Rhode Island nightclub fire, who should or should not be civilly or criminally responsible for this, and why?

    Liza says:
    Andy, if I were you I'd be a little nervous about what your dog might do if it escaped.

    For those of you who haven't visited Andy, he has a dangerous dog chained in his backyard.

    Andy responds:
    John describes someone's pit bull trespassing a school playground and severely injuring a student. He asks "Under the rules Andy has adopted for the Rhode Island nightclub fire, who should or should not be civilly or criminally responsible for this, and why?"

    The situations are not analogous. If the student had been attending a pit bull convention, and this happened, then an analogy could be drawn.

    I generally oppose the scapegoat culture bred by our media. That someone is injured does not automatically mean someone else should go to jail. Wall Street has been greatly harmed by the notion that if a public company plummets in value, then someone should go to jail.

    Roger's site piles on ridicule of France concerning issues of war. But how many of those mocking France realize that it is the main reason for our own independence? Maybe the French should be ridiculing us for lack of gratitude.

    The reality is that Islam has taken over France as its most devout religion. It's unlikely France will ever support any invasion of another Islamic country. Will Islam eventually capture England too?

    Dog law is strict liability. The dog owner is responsible, regardless of intent.

    No, I don't think that France is the main reason for our independence. We would have gotten indendepence with or without France's help. France has been thru 5 republics since then.

     
    US Supreme Court
    The US Supreme Court has been in the news with some flawed laws: Megan's Law, 3 Strikes, Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). I usually side with the free speech advocates who are attacking the CIPA, but I can't agree with the lower court decision. The CIPA says that libraries must use internet porn filtering if they accept federal money for the computers. The lower court said that it is unconstitutional for the libraries to use filtering. How can filtering be unconstitutional? It is almost impossible to manage a network without doing some filtering. On my personal computer, I have filters set up for spam, ads, pop-ups, worm attacks, etc. They are useful. Millions of people do Google searches with a porn filter turned on (voluntarily). The people who are fighting CIPA are like the people who argue that telemarketers and spammers have a free speech right to waste my time. Filtering is a good thing, and libraries should be allowed to use it.

    Update: Even Dalia Lithwick, the idiotic Slate legal columnist, has a hard time siding with her ACLU friends. She mocks Ted Olson for saying that filtering enhances free speech, but in the end she almost agrees with it.

     
    French quotes
    Bob sends these:
    "France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. France has usually been governed by prostitutes." ---Mark Twain

    "I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me." --- General George S. Patton

    "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." --Norman Schwartzkopf

    "We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it." ---- Marge Simpson

    "As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure" ---Jacques Chirac, President of France "As far as France is concerned, you're right." ---Rush Limbaugh,

    "The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee." --- Regis Philbin

    "The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know." --- P.J O'Rourke (1989)

    "You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it." ---John McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona

    "You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because he hates America, he loves mistresses and wears a beret. He is French, people." --Conan O'Brien

    "I don't know why people are surprised that France won't help us get Saddam out of Iraq. After all, France wouldn't help us get the Germans out of France!" ---Jay Leno

    "The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching into Paris under a German flag." --David Letterman

    How many Frenchmen does it take to change a light bulb? One. He holds the bulb and all of Europe revolves around him.

    Next time there's a war in Europe, the loser has to keep France.

     
    ACLU invades privacy
    John sends this story about the ACLU making some email gaffes. It just paid a $10k fine for some related privacy violations.

    Tuesday, Mar 04, 2003
     
    Andy on Sell
    Andy writes:
    Now the conservatives on the Supreme Court are trying to duck the Sell case on jurisdictional grounds. It's 50/50 whether the pro-Sell coalition of 4 liberals plus Kennedy can hold it together to win. The coalition has an outside shot of attracting Thomas in case it loses Kennedy or Breyer.

    It's amazing to me how unsympathetic the St. Louis community is to Dr. Sell. Even if Sell wins before the Supreme Court, the legal strategy of his St. Louis attorney may lead to permanent confinement at a prison hospital. That's a brutal punishment for someone who seems intelligent and sane to many who know or have corresponded with him.

    Liza wrote, "The length of Sell's pre-trial detention relative to his maximum possible sentence is really not relevant. Detention can't be used to avoid trial."

    John used to say the same thing, until I asked him "why not?" The State has no interest in trying someone who has already been punished more than his maximum sentence.

    Re inferno, John writes, "OK, so you are retracting your support for bankrupting the town, the manufacturer and the dealer of the soundproofing material?"

    I never supported such bankruptcy. I was only observing the obvious, while noting that many of the finger-pointers will be sued for stating their connection.

    John writes, "Of course, the band did not intend to burn down the club, but they did intend to start the fire. That was an inherently dangerous activity for which the law imposes a duty of care - a duty the band clearly breached. There is no requirement for 'clear statutory notice.'"

    Well, if we're going to apply tort concepts of "duty" here, then John should include how the participants "assumed the risk" under standard tort principles.

    The reality is that pyrotechnics has been proven to be safe in hundreds or thousands of performances. It was the highly flammable fire-proofing that caused the RI inferno, and culprit is the copyrighted regulations that caused everyone (including fire inspectors) to miss it. The blame is in the law, not the people acting with lawful intentions.

    I thought that the Sell article in the St. Louis paper was more favorable to Sell than the articles I saw elsewhere. So I don't know why Andy thinks the St. Louis community is unsympathetic to Sell. Maybe just a couple of St. Louis judges who appear to have some sort of personal grudge against Sell.

    All you know is that Scalia is interested in ducking the issue. I don't think that will happen. Scalia is not going to get a majority to say that Sell has to be drugged before he can complain about it.

    The state does sometimes try someone who is already serving a life sentence. Why does it have an interest in doing that? My guess is that it doesn't bother, in most cases.

    Sell has a right to a speedy trial. If the feds imprison him longer than his maximum sentence while awaiting trial, then I say that they've blown their chance to punish him properly. The more compelling argument is that the feds should really have an extremely strong reason for forcibly drugging a defendant. Even if the feds have some interest in convicting him of a crime for which no additional punishment is possible, then that interest is surely not enough to justify forced drugging.

    Andy responds:

    Roger wrote, "I thought that the Sell article in the St. Louis paper was more favorable to Sell than the articles I saw elsewhere. So I don't know why Andy thinks the St. Louis community is unsympathetic to Sell. Maybe justa couple of St. Louis judges who appear to have some sort of personal grudge against Sell."

    There is one reporter on the Post-Dispatch who has written good stories about Sell. But that is hardly indicative of the community sentiment. Sell has been locked up and brutally treated in a prison hospital without a trial for over 5 years, yet essentially no support or outrage by the St. Louis bourgeois or elite.

    Roger wrote, "All you know is that Scalia is interested in ducking the issue. ..."

    Not true. Rehnquist and O'Connor requested supplemental briefing on jurisdiction, I think. Breyer asked questions suggesting he wants to duck the issue too. My guess is that Sell needs the 3 other liberals, plus Kennedy and Thomas to win. But Rehnquist and Scalia are going to pull them hard.

    Liza is unsympathetic to Sell. Does she represent the St. Louis bourgeois/elite?

    Gumma writes: "Linda Greenhouse thinks the SC will duck deciding on jurisdiction."

    Liza responds:

    Many legal rules seem harsh until you consider the negative consequences for the judicial system of a contrary rule.

    When there is enough evidence to try someone, there has to be a way to make that person stand trial - or else remain in detention until the trial occurs. If the person is not competent to stand trial, he must be detained until he is competent. The judicial system cannot tolerate a situation where someone avoids trial and conviction merely by sitting in jail for the length of his maximum possible sentence. Orderly administration of justice demands that if the person is guilty, a conviction appear on his record. Otherwise the guilty will emerge eventually with a clean criminal record.

    Other legal rules are similarly harsh but generally necessary, e.g., ignorance of the law is no excuse, no estoppel of government by its agents, etc.

    It is not that I am unsympathetic to Sell. But apparently he really is mentally ill. His lawyer and his mother both think so. Admittedly, there are other indications that he is sane, such as his test scores and his behavior in certain interviews, but I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to his mother and his lawyer, plus the prosecution. Drugs are currently the best available treatment for the mentally ill. I am uncomfortable with allowing the government to forcibly drug anyone, but it seems to be the only alternative to indefinite incarceration. I don't know, but it is entirely possible his family thinks taking the drugs would be the best thing he could do.

    Whether the government should be able to force the drugs on him in lieu of indefinite detention is an interesting question. But if he won't voluntarily take the steps necessary to become competent to stand trial, he had better be willing to endure indefinite detention. Release is not an option.

    John responds:
    I am surprised at Liza's uncritical acceptance of the notion that Dr. Sell is not competent to stand trial. What is the basis for that assumption?

    I thought Dr. Sell was eager to go to trial. Did his former lawyer actually plead - contrary to his client's wishes, instructions, and best interests - that Sell was incompetent to stand trial? If so, that would have been 4 or 5 years ago. How can Liza think that Dr. Sell would still be bound by such a damaging concession?

    It is no answer to say that his former lawyer and his mother think he is mentally ill. The term mental illness, if it means anything, does not necessarily preclude competence to stand trial, any more than it precludes competence to make a will or competence to drive a car.

    How many people out there driving to work every day are mentally ill? Suppose one of them has a fender-bender and is cited for a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 30 days to 1 year in county jail. Does Liza really think the administration of justice requires that he be confined for the rest of his life in the Springfield mental prison on the theory that he is incompetent to stand trial on the evidence against him?

    If not, what's the difference with Dr. Sell? I don't see it.

    I reject the claim that Sell's lawyer believes that Sell is crazy or unfit for trial. We don't know that. All we know is that his lawyer has adopted mental illness as a legal strategy.

    I also question whether anyone has ever been made competent for trial by taking anti-psychotic drugs. The evidence for the effectiveness of those drugs is very weak.

    The obvious thing to do is to just let Sell go, because he has already been punished enough, his crimes were minor, and the feds failed to give him a speedy trial. But let's look at the contrary rule, as Liza suggests. That would mean the feds would maintain a Soviet-style gulag for political dissidents. Political dissidents would be rounded up on petty charges, held without trial, declared mentally unfit, and forcibly given psychotropic drugs. Remember, Sell's only mental illness is that he belongs to a fringe political group and he is paranoid that the feds are out to get him.

     
    Avoiding patent infringement
    A discussion in misc.int-property concerned whether the principals of a start-up company can be found personally liable for the company's patent infringement. Lee found this:
    The cases are legion holding corporate officers and directors personally liable for "participating in, inducing, and approving acts of patent infringement" by a corporation. Federal Circuit Chief Judge Markey, writing in _Fromson v. Citiplate_, 886 F.2d 1300, 1304, 12 USPQ2d 1299, 1303 (1989).
    No one could find any of these cases. Here is a later one, where the same court found no personal liability. This 1996 Fed. Cir. case says that it is a matter of piercing the corporate veil. The CEO (who was also the principal shareholder) of the corporation avoided liability.
    In Manville Sales the court stated that "to be personally liable for Paramount's infringement under section 271(a), there must be evidence to justify piercing the corporate veil." Id. at 552, 16 USPQ2d at 1593. ... In sum, unless the corporate structure is a sham, as is not here asserted, personal liability for inducement to infringe is not automatic but must be supported by personal culpability. The district court did not find bad faith or fraud or culpable intent on the part of Mr. Holden. The court erred in imposing liability although the corporate veil was not pierced. The ruling that Mr. Holden is personally liable for Custom's infringement is reversed. Hoover v. Custom Metalcraft & Holden, 1996
    The consensus seems to be that if an entrepreneur wants to go into business making and marketing his potentially patent-infringing product idea, he needs to:
  • Keep his mouth shut about patent infringement.
  • Realize that his lay opinions about infringement are probably wrong.
  • Get a competent opinion that his product does not infringe.
  • Incorporate.
  • Make sure the corporation is fully funded.
  • Get insurance covering infringement (expensive, but in this case well the cost.
  • When notified of infringement concerning a patent that you knew nothing about take appropriate action in response. Don't "let the lawyers work it out".

    Anne wants to know if a retailer has any liability for selling a product that is later found to be patent-infringing. The answer is yes, but the manufacturer is responsible for paying any damages. The retailer should be able to get an indemnification from the supplier.

  •  
    No DMCA repeal
    The big computer companies do not want to repeal the obnoxious and anti-consumer aspects of the DMCA. See BSA press release.
     
    Sendmail bug
    The popular unix mailer Sendmail has a buffer-overflow bug, C-Net says. A piece of email passing thru a server could conceivably take over the server. Maybe it is time to retire that monster. The manual for using it is 1000 pages long, and all it does is send and receive email.
     
    Feminist Fantasies
    Here is a review of Feminist Fantasies.
     
    Medical malpractice or statistical malpractice
    A NY Times op-ed gives various statistics that purport to show that the medical malpractice problem is really a failure of state medical boards to discipline physicians. Eg, Pennsylvania has a high rate of physicians with several malpractice payments. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of PA physicians are incompetent. Maybe state law makes it easier to sue physicians there. Maybe insurance practice is to settle claims with payments more often. Maybe the state has more HMOs or does riskier procedures. There could be a lot of explanations.

    More importantly, maybe most malpractice payments are not for malpractice at all, but for honest mistakes being made by competent physicians. Everyone makes mistakes. No matter how strict the state medical boards are, 50% of the physicians will make an above average number of mistakes.

    I do agree that the malpractice payment info should be public, but the public should also understand that a payment by an insurance company is not proof of incompetence.


    Monday, Mar 03, 2003
     
    RI inferno
    John responds to Andy:
    Liza's response to (John re RI inferno) is correct. Prosser says nothing about crime, which does require mens rea. We shouldn't be jailing people for accidents, unless there is clear statutory notice (like drunk driving). Pyrotechnic entertainment has been used successfully hundreds, or thousands, of times without anyone complaining or passing any laws against it. That's probably why the audience was at the nightclub! Case closed. People should be speaking out against this RI witchhunt, and focus their ire on the politicians and regulatory scheme.
    OK, so you are retracting your support for bankrupting the town, the manufacturer and the dealer of the soundproofing material?

    Never mind the difference between civil and criminal liability. That is a red herring. The question is who is most responsible? I say the person who intentionally started the fire - the band.

    Of course, the band did not intend to burn down the club, but they did intend to start the fire. That was an inherently dangerous activity for which the law imposes a duty of care - a duty the band clearly breached. There is no requirement for "clear statutory notice."

    I don't think that Andy ever favored bankrupting the city. I think that he was just lamenting that fact that a lot of big lawsuits against all the deep pockets will be the likely outcome.

    The band did not intend to start any fire -- they just wanted some pyrotechnics. I don't agree that the band is any more liable. Lining the ceiling with exposed flammable styrofoam seems inherently dangerous to me. Sooner or later, that was probably going to burn, whether anyone used pyrotechnics or not.

    The band was just trying to put on a show. The nightclub was trying to save money. I agree with Andy that we should not be jailing people for accidents. Accidents happen.

     
    Forced drugging of Tom Sell
    The St. Louis paper reports on today's US Supreme Court hearing on the forced drugging of C.T. Sell. It says:
    Justice Antonin Scalia hammered away at Sell's lawyer, Barry A. Short, over whether Sell's case would cause a dilemma for the courts: The federal prosecutors can't bring Sell to trial because of his mental condition. And, Sell refuses to take the medicine, so he's not fit for trial. "I'm truly concerned to the extent that this … could disrupt trials," Scalia said. "It's just a crazy situation. What can be done about it?" ...

    By ordering that the government has the right to forcibly medicate defendants such as Sell, [Deputy Solicitor General Michael R.] Dreeben said, it will "maintain social order and peace."

    Dreeben said: "It is the government's position that any felony is serious enough" to warrant forcibly medicating defendants.

    Scary stuff. The feds have a problem with trying defendants who are unfit for trial, regardless of today's case. The question is whether the prosecutors' problem can be slight reduced by forced drugging. The drugging will only make the defendants fit for trial in some cases, if any.

    Some facts favoring Sell are that (1) his alleged crime is just insurance overbilling, not a violent crime, (2) he has already served more than his maximum sentence, and (3) his alleged mental problem is paranoia that the feds are out to get him, and it appears that the feds really are out to get him.

    The St. Louis paper says:

    Sell, 53, has been in a federal prison hospital for more than five years awaiting his trial. Prison psychiatrists insist Sell is too mentally ill, suffering from a delusional disorder of the prosecutorial type. Sell has said repeatedly that he already knows, as a doctor, that the drugs will alter his brain and he is terrified of that prospect.

    Sell had worked for decades as a dentist when in 1997 federal agents raided his Town and Country dental office and charged him with Medicaid and insurance fraud.

    After Sell posted bond and was freed, federal prosecutors charged Sell with attempting to kill a witness by pointing his finger at her while he was out on bond. Later, the government added a charge that Sell offered less than $300 for someone to kill an FBI agent.

    Sell often told a story about how he was called to active duty in the Army Reserves to Waco just days before the Branch Davidian compound burned while under siege by the federal government. Prison doctors use that story to prove that Sell is delusional.

    Yet, Sell's job for the army as a major is to identify human remains through dental records. And, government records show that Sell was called to active duty to Texas days before the Branch Davidian compound went up in flames.

    A year ago, a federal court gave prosecutors the right to forcibly medicate Sell with any drug that the prison doctors see fit, even experimental ones. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed up that decision. Then Sell appealed to the Supreme Court.

    Prosecutors concede that the government has tried no other treatment to make Sell fit for trial.

    Instead, officials at the federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo., admit that prison guards have subjected Sell to solitary confinement, sprayed him with scalding water and chained him to a concrete slab for 19 hours in a row – all things that Sell's lawyer argues have made his condition worse.

    Sell continues to plead for a trial. He argues that he is competent to stand trial. Sell has passed a course and got a perfect score on a test to determine whether he is competent to stand trial, prison records show.

    The NY Times account of today's argument says:
    Mr. Dreeben said that medication had the proven ability to restore mentally ill defendants "to a point of rationality where they can decide what they want to do with their life."
    Sell's irrationality is his anti-govt paranoia. So the feds have drugs that can eliminate anti-govt paranoia? And that is a good thing?

    Scalia says Sell can only appeal after the fact:

    Under the ordinary rules of appellate procedure, pre-trial orders lack finality and are not appealable. So shouldn't Dr. Sell be required to proceed to trial and to challenge any unwanted medication after the fact, Justice Antonin Scalia wanted to know.
    Here is the AP story. It says:
    Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked if the government can require children to be vaccinated against smallpox. Justice Anthony Kennedy evoked an image of defendants and witnesses being injected before a trial with drugs that control their behavior. If the government can medicate the dentist, why not a person charged with a traffic violation, Justice Stephen Breyer asked.
    Here is the Wash Post story, the docket info, and the feds' brief.

    Andy sends an update also:

    Here we go again liberal arguments alienate the conservative side of the Supreme Court and may lose a winnable case. This time it's in Sell v. U.S.

    Sell's legal brief argued for a new constitutional right to refuse medication. Meet Justice Scalia, who effectively said today that if Sell is sane enough to refuse treatment, then he's sane enough go on trial. Which means, logically, that if Sell is not sane enough to go to trial, then he is not sane enough to refuse treatment. So Sell immediately loses 3 votes on the Court, who will then exert a strong pull on Kennedy and O'Connor.

    Kennedy seemed to bite on what we saying -- that the government simply lacks authority to drug Sell. We'll see by June

    Real problem is that Sell is from the wrong town St. Louis. No other city in the U.S. has such an inhospitable climate for civil disobedients. What would the folks at the Country Club think?!

    Liza's response to (John re RI inferno) is correct. Prosser says nothing about crime, which does require mens rea. We shouldn't be jailing people for accidents, unless there is clear statutory notice (like drunk driving). Pyrotechnic entertainment has been used successfully hundreds, or thousands, of times without anyone complaining or passing any laws against it. That's probably why the audience was at the nightclub! Case closed. People should be speaking out against this RI witchhunt, and focus their ire on the politicians and regulatory scheme.

    Roger writes that every juror has the right to nullification, but omits a citation for that authority. In fact, the jurors who engaged in nullification to protect William Penn's religious freedom were themselves then prosecuted for it! Moreover, Roger misses the crucial issue of whether a defendant has the right to inform the jury of its power to nullify. In Maryland state court, yes; in many other states, no. What's the federal rule?

    I wrote "And how about this one Aaron Burr was Jonathan Edwards' grandson?!"

    John replied, "Why is that significant?"

    It illustrates how far the apple can fall from the tree, something Burr's supporters probably failed to appreciate.

    Yes, Penn's jurors were prosecuted. That was in 1670. Since then, only one other juror was prosecuted. That was a Colorado woman named Laura Kriho a few years ago. In spite of that, there is general agreement about the jury powers. Eg, the DC Circuit said, "[The jury has an] unreviewable and irreversible power...to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge ..." (1972). There are more quotes here and here. The only dispute is about whether the jury should be fully informed of their rights and powers. What is unusual about Maryland is that the jurors are explicitly told:
    "Members of the Jury, this is a criminal case and under the Constitution and the laws of the State of Maryland in a criminal case the jury are the judges of the law as well as of the facts in the case. So that whatever I tell you about the law while it is intended to be helpful to you in reaching a just and proper verdict in the case, it is not binding upon you as members of the jury and you may accept or reject it. And you may apply the law as you apprehend it to be in the case."
    In 1895 (Sparf v U.S. 156 U.S. 51, 1895), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that although juries have the right to ignore a judge's instructions on the law, the jury shouldn't be aware of it.

    The US Constitution 6A cites this right to a jury trial. If the OJ Simpson and Marion Barry jurors understood it, what excuse does anyone else have?

     
    RI inferno
    John responds to Andy:
    John essentially argues for strict liability in a criminal sense for the band in doing pyrotechnics in the club. He doesn't care about intent.
    What about the "intent" of the club owner, the manufacturer of the polyurethane soundproofing, the dealer who sold it, the city that licensed the club, and the fire official who inspected it? None of these people had any intent to cause a holocaust. All were less culpable than the band, yet you were ready to consign all these people to bankruptcy.
    Most crimes require mens rea (intent), and rightly so. Statutes can supplement that for activities like drunk driving, where notice exists but specific intent to harm is lacking. I'm not aware of any pyrotechnics statute, and I oppose ex post facto laws. Besides, pyrotechnics apparently is safe in the absence of highly flammable soundproofing.
    Check your Prosser. To ignite a large open flame inside a small, crowded nightclub with a low ceiling is inherently dangerous. Hence, the law properly imposes a special duty of care on the person doing it. You don't need a special "pyrotechnics statute." Mens does not require "specific intent to harm"; it just requires specific intent to do the act that caused the harm. Clearly, the band intended to ignite the pyro. It did not go off by accident.
    Liza responds to John:
    This discussion is getting confused as to criminal vs. tort liability. Criminal liability normally requires mens rea (criminal intent). Tort liability does not. Prosser's treatise concerns torts. Intent is not an element of the non-intentional torts, which include negligence and torts of strict liability. The RI inferno will surely lead to tort liability on the part of someone. Criminal liability is not obvious in this case.
    Yes, tort liability to someone, but whom? I don't see why the band is necessarily any more liable than the nightclub owner, the building contractor, or the fire inspector. None wanted a holocaust, but they may have all been irresponsible.
     
    Movie reviews
    Bob writes:
    Your blog got cut off at 25 Feb.

    Your mother questioned the wisdom of relying on movie reviewers for information on movies. The sources of movie information I can think of are reviewers, friends (amateur reviewers), trailers, advertisements, IMDB, other collaborative filters. I'll look into collaborative filters for movies, since this is the only source which seems better than reviewers.

    The blog software was set to show the last 30 posts. All of the posts are in the archives -- use the links on the left. I just increased it to 50.

    Movie reviews can certainly be unreliable.

     
    Involuntary psychotropic drugging
    John sends this NY Times article about the US Supreme Court hearing the issue of whether Charles T. Sell should be forcibly given psychiatric drugs while facing trial for Medicare overbilling. The article is by a psychiatrist who favors forced drugging.
    Although well-intended, these depictions of serious mental illness as a free expression of thought, and of pharmacotherapy as censorship, are grievously naïve.

    The freedom to remain straitjacketed by psychosis is no freedom. Psychiatrists say Mr. Sell has delusional disorder. ...

    The more general question is whether Mr. Sell really has a "right" to refuse. To say that he has that right presumes that he has the rational ability to weigh the pros and cons of being medicated. Not only do his actions call this assumption into question, but the fact is that half the people with illnesses like schizophrenia or mania do not even recognize that they are ill.

    Should the court side with Mr. Sell, the case will be applauded as a victory for patients' rights and civil liberties. But this simplistic view ignores the bigger question: is there not a duty to treat a person who is obviously suffering?

    A Christian Science Monitor article is more sympathetic to Sell:
    Some people see more fundamental issues in the case. "Government action that seeks to change a person's thinking, against his will, is deeply at odds with longstanding conceptions of constitutional liberty," says David Goldberg in a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Drug Policy Alliance.
    I wonder whether Sell is even in control of the legal arguments being made in his behalf. I doubt that he approved his Supreme Court brief. Sell claims that he is sane, but his lawyer is telling the court that he is not. Shouldn't Sell have a lawyer that truly represents him?
     
    More on RI fire
    Andy writes:
    John essentially argues for strict liability in a criminal sense for the band in doing pyrotechnics in the club. He doesn't care about intent.

    Most crimes require mens rea (intent), and rightly so. Statutes can supplement that for activities like drunk driving, where notice exists but specific intent to harm is lacking. I'm not aware of any pyrotechnics statute, and I oppose ex post facto laws. Besides, pyrotechnics apparently is safe in the absence of highly flammable soundproofing.

    I'm fascinated by the history I'm reviewing. Did you know the trials of Peter Zenger (establishing freedom of the press) and William Penn (establishing freedom of religion) required jury nullification? That Maryland requires an instruction giving their juries this power to this day? And how about this one Aaron Burr was Jonathan Edwards' grandson?!

    Joe writes, "check out latest Discover magazine for a big article about a physicist who is trying to construct alternatives to GR based on a variable speed of light."

    I'd be happy to read it, if I can find it.

    GR has obstructed physics for 100 years. But it has been conferred a Nobel Prize (an astounding 85 years after it was proposed), so no establishment physicist is going to criticize it. Quote an example if you doubt this.

    The easiest way to see the bankruptcy of GR is the lack of anything productive resulting from it. Its adherents will claim GPS, the atom bomb, the solar system, and all sorts of wacky stuff. But if any of that were true, then a Nobel Prize would reflect it. It doesn't. In contrast, Quantum Mechanics has yielded numerous Nobel Prizes and countless marvelous predictions and devices.

    It is not the jury instruction that gives the MD jury the power. All juries have the power, and anyone who knows anything about jury trials understands that. MD is just a little more explicit about informing the jury of their power.

    I had to look up Jonathan Edwards. He was an obscure early American preacher.

    I don't know why Andy is fixated on using Nobel prizes to evaluate General Relativity (GR). You have to realize that GR was a breakthru in theoretical physics and astrophysics, but normally Nobel prizes are not given in either theoretical physics or astrophysics.

    Next, you have to realize that a number of prizes have been given which were directly or indirectly related to GR. Einstein got a prize in 1921 largely as a result of publicity about experimental verification of GR. Theoretical considerations involving relativity led to the prediction of anti-matter, but the prizes went to those who did the experimental work to find the positron and antiproton.

    The influence of GR on 20th century physics has been huge. I don't know why Andy wants to deny this. GR explains atom bombs, black holes, expansion of the universe, red-shifts, GPS, anti-matter, etc.


    Sunday, Mar 02, 2003
     
    Get rid of stupidity genes
    James Watson, of DNA fame, wants to improve human intelligence by using genetic technology, according to this story. Sensitive subject.
     
    Recycling is bad
    Some Swedes say that recycling is bad for the environment.
     
    Sen. Feinstein wants to violate gun laws
    John sends Friday and Saturday SF stories about how Sen. Feinstein and other Democrats want Ashcroft to violate federal law and Clinton administration regulations in order to spy on gun owners.

    Saturday, Mar 01, 2003
     
    More on the RI fire
    Joe writes:
    I haven't followed this too closely, but are we talking about using polyurethane indoors without covering it with fire-rated drywall? A building owner or inspector is a complete idiot if he doesn't know that any sort of insulation of this type must be covered with taped, fire-rated sheetrock. This is about as basic as it gets. Any insurance company safety inspector would know this as well.
    Andy writes:
    Joe, the flammable polyurethane was the soundproofing. I don't see how it could be covered with fire-resistant drywall.

    There were 97 young people cut down in the prime of their life through negligence. The town, which inspected and approved the club, will surely be bankrupted. I would expect the manufacturer to be bankrupted also. The dealer who mouthed off in the press in piling blame on the club owner will probably get sued also. The only thing that will save the insurance companies will be the limits on their policies.

    John writes:
    I don't understand Andy's eagerness to bankrupt anyone who was tangentially involved in this disaster. What is the justice in that? What is the legal basis?

    To sue the dealer or manufacturer of the soundproofing material - a fine product with many legal uses - is like suing the gun dealer or manufacturer when somebody misuses a firearm. Why should the rest of us be deprived of the benefits of that material just because idiot misused it?

    Why would you condone bankrupting the town? Who do you think pays for the town - the same families who suffered death or injury in the fire! Such a lawsuit would merely enrich an attorney at the expense of the same people who were injured in the tragedy.

    So what if the club was recently inspected by some city employee? Inspectors do not guarantee that anything is fireproof. Inspectors do not assume liability on behalf the of the city. If an inspection made the city legally liable for damages, the building owner wouldn't have to carry fire insurance; he could simply sue the city in the event of a fire.

    In his eagerness to enrich the trial bar, Andy overlooks the fault of the patrons. At any public gathering place, the first thing everyone should do is take a moment to check out the location of the exits. The patrons failed to take that elementary precaution. As a result, when the fire started, they failed to head for the nearest exit. That is the main reason why so many of them were burned.

    You cannot avoid the conclusion that the patrons' own negligence contributed to the tragedy. As we all learned from Prosser, contributory negligence was a bar to any tort recovery until a wave of activist judicial legislation swept the nation about 40 years ago.

    The only person who is clearly liable for damages is the person who started the fire without proper authorization.

    Joe writes:
    John is right on the money, as usual. I don't know much about this particular sound insulation, but fiberglass sound batting is often used in buildings to suppress sound. We have it some of our buildings. It is designed to be covered with drywall.
    Andy writes:
    John's email constructs a strawman that I somehow want to bankrupt the town, manufacturer of polyurethane, dealer, etc. No one here supports the trial attorneys in ruining entire industries based on politicized science, least of all me.

    But I don't buy into the witchhunt against the club owners and performing band either. My comment was that the piling on of blame against these hapless scapegoats is only going to cause the finger-pointers to be sued themselves.

    John blames the victims by saying that they should have known where the exits were, and found them quicker. But they only had 30 seconds!

    John concludes, "The only person who is clearly liable for damages is the person who started the fire without proper authorization."

    This begs for elaboration. Does John refer to the single band member who launched the pyrotechnics? Or does John refer to the club owners, who would be the ones to apply for "proper authorization"?

    The real failure here is obviously in the regulation. Had the regulation been clear and widely available, no one would have allowed such flammable material to remain in the club for over 2 years.

    Joe writes:
    What is the big mystery here? A landlord stupidly put flammable foam where it should't have been. Any fire inspector or insurance inspector would know this.

    Twenty years ago, my dad insulated the roof of our warehouse with this stuff, and left it exposed. The first time the insurance inspector came through, he told us to take it down because it was highly flammable and put off dangerous vapors. The property owner is going to get creamed for creating a dangerous situation, and if he approved the use of fireworks, he's going to get creamed some more.

    John responds to Andy:
    I mean the band as a (presumably corporate) entity. A band employee must have purchased the pyro and brought it to the club. The band must have rehearsed using it.

    A band spokesman claims the club owner verbally authorized use of pyro. However, the club owner says his written contract with the band does not mention pyro, althouth it specifies the precise color of M&M's to be furnished to band members.

    I believe the band should bear the ultimate responsibility for obtaining approval for use of fire.

    The real failure here is obviously in the regulation. Had the regulation been clear and widely available, no one would have allowed such flammable material to remain in the club for over 2 years.
    That may be true, but the most glaring act of criminal negligence was to start a fire in a small, crowded room with a low ceiling.
    Andy writes:
    Joe cites a foam dealer who pointed his finger of blame at the club owner, and concluded "What is the big mystery here? A landlord stupidly put flammable foam where it should't have been. Any fire inspector or insurance inspector would know this. ..."

    But the fire inspector didn't know this, and apparently repeatedly approved the club over a 2.5 year period. Can you really expect a club owner to know more about fire regulations than the fire department itself?

    The reason no one realized the hazard is because the applicable regulations are copyrighted, and thereby withheld from the general public. To this day no one can cite anything in the publicly available regulations that prohibits what the owners did.

    I wrote, John blames the victims by saying that they should have known where the exits were, and found them quicker. But they only had 30 seconds!

    John replied, "Blaming the victim? How about assuming personal responsibility for your own reckless behavior?"

    What is so reckless about going to a nightclub? No one could remotely anticipate the danger given the lack of information.

    John wrote, "I believe the band should bear the ultimate responsibility for obtaining approval for use of fire. ... [T]he most glaring act of criminal negligence was to start a fire in a small, crowded room with a low ceiling."

    But the victims presumably packed the nightclub to see such entertainment. Moreover, they could have left at the first sign of the pyro even if they didn't know beforehand.

    There should not be strict liability for this form of entertainment. No, the real crime here is the secrecy about the regulations in furtherance of misguided copyright interests.

    John writes:
    I agree with your point about the harm of copyrighting building codes so they are not widely available to the public. But that does not get the band off the hook.

    Starting a fire in a small, crowded room with a low ceiling is an inherently dangerous, criminally reckless act. You don't have to know about building codes or polyurethane to know that.

    If fire is a part of the band's performance, it is their responsiblity to insure that fire safety is observed, and to get the written approval of the club owner and the local fire inspector.

    As for the patrons' culpability, it is a fact that most would have escaped injury if they had gone to the nearest exit instead of stampeding the front door. Just as we rehearse emergency procedures every time we board a plane, we should notice the exits every time we enter a crowded venue.

    It is also reckless and irresponsible for a nightclub owner to put in a flammable ceiling that violates fire codes.
     
    Cell-phone rights
    Sen. Schumer wants a cell-phone users bill of rights. His list is not what I expected. I want:
  • Right to use cell-phone while driving.
  • Right to real-time billing info.
  • Right to be billed under the least expensive advertised billing plan.
  •  
    Copyright prosecution
    John send this story about the Norwegian "DVD Jon" going back to court. and this one about Lexmark getting an injunction against competing ink cartridge makers. They are both example of copyright enforcement going too far.
     
    Language translator problems
    Andy sends this:
    STUDY BILINGUAL INTERPRETERS MAKE ABOUT 31 MISTAKES PER VISIT

    Even professional interpreters aren't fail-safe when it comes to communicating between patients and clinicians, a recent study found.

    Study researchers analyzed transcripts from 13 doctor-patient visits involving Spanish-English interpreters--about half of whom were employed by the hospital. The other half included untrained family members, friends, or other people at the hospital. They found that the interpreters made an average of 31 mistakes per visit. Nineteen of those mistakes could have had a negative impact on the patient, according to Reuters. The visits all occurred in a Massachusetts hospital's urban outpatient clinic.

    Though non-professional interpreters were more likely to make serious mistakes than professional interpreters, researchers still found that more than half the professional interpreters' errors could have caused harm.

    Medical insurers should cover the cost of an interpreter because errors increase medical bills, Dr. Glenn Flores of the Milwaukee-based Medical College and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, the lead author, told Reuters. He cited a case in which one misinterpreted word in the emergency room ended in a court award of $71 million to the patient.

    The study was published in the January 2003 issue of Pediatrics.

     
    Microsoft perjury
    Lawmeme says:
    In May, under oath at the antitrust hearing Jim Allchin, group vice president for platforms at Microsoft, stated that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort. Now in February, Microsoft signed a pact with Chinese officials to reveal the Windows operating system source code. Bill Gates even hinted that China will be privy to all, not just part, of the source code its government wished to inspect.Either Jim Allchin lied under oath, to prevent code revelation being any part of the settlement, OR the Microsoft corporation is behaving traitorously, by exposing national security issues to foreign governments.
    As someone responded:
    Microsoft was caught lying under oath during the antitrust case, when they presented the obviously doctored video of a browser download. Fabricated evidence.

    They threw the judge out, not the lawyer.

    John also sends this story about it.
     
    Ashcroft defends gun rights
    Calif AG Lockyer is apparently violating federal law by misusing gun databases and invading the privacy of gun owners. His spokesman says:
    "We understood it as a potential criminal action," said Randy Rossi, firearms chief for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer, "and our response back to them was we understand what you are saying and we think public safety is paramount and you take whatever step is necessary."
    In other words, he is violating the law, he is committing criminal acts, and he knows it, but he does it anyway because he disagrees with the law. That is a lousy attitude for an AG.

    Lockyer is the same guy who just tried to get a federal appeals removed from death penalty cases because he visited a death row prison! More judges should get out and see the consequences of what they do.

     
    Nutty SF politics
    San Francisco's latest nutty controversy relates to a minor incident in which a couple of rookie off-duty cops got into a fist-fight with a couple of others after leaving a bar late one night several months ago. The SF news media kept this story in the news, and now the SF police chief and his top assistants have been indicted for the cover-up. I think that the police chief is black -- not sure about the others.

    Friday, Feb 28, 2003
     
    RI fire
    Andy writes:
    The facts are slowly emerging concering the RI nightclub inferno.

    Rhode Island prohibits use of internal material that has a high "flamespread rating" under a private standard that is copyrighted and unavailable on the internet. The governor claims that polyurethane is illegal, but cannot cite a single statute or regulation saying so. The fire inspector approved it two months ago, and probably on prior inspections also. Anyone think the club owners and band should know more about fire hazards than the fire inspector? I don't.

    If the standard for "flamespread rating" were not copyrighted and thereby available on the internet, then it is likely that word would get out about how dangerous polyurethane is. Reporters, do-gooders, retired firefighters, consultants, newsletter writers, or just bored citizens could catch this. At a minimum, the fire department would likely become aware of it. During the two years or so that the hazard existed in the club, someone could then have spotted it.

    As a sidelight, it is astounding how other bands, clubs, and even the seller of the polyurethine are piling blame on the main defendants. They evidently don't realize that they could easily be prosecuted or sued also, despite their attempt to blame someone else. The town will be bankrupted by litigation, as will manufacturers and dealers and anyone else even remotely related to this tragedy. Few human instincts are as powerful as the need to find a scapegoat.

    Joe responds:
    I haven't followed this too closely, but are we talking about using polyurethane indoors without covering it with fire-rated drywall? A building owner or inspector is a complete idiot if he doesn't know that any sort of insulation of this type must be covered with taped, fire-rated sheetrock. This is about as basic as it gets. Any insurance company safety inspector would know this as well.

    Andy, I don't think the manufacturers or dealers of this insulation are going to be bankrupted. It's a perfectly good product if used and installed properly.

    Andy responds:
    Joe, the flammable polyurethane was the soundproofing. I don't see how it could be covered with fire-resistant drywall.

    There were 97 young people cut down in the prime of their life through negligence. The town, which inspected and approved the club, will surely be bankrupted. I would expect the manufacturer to be bankrupted also. The dealer who mouthed off in the press in piling blame on the club owner will probably get sued also. The only thing that will save the insurance companies will be the limits on their policies.

     
    Pledge
    The 9th Circuit is digging in its heals, and sticking to its opinion that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. AP story here. The ruling says that it was a violation of the 1A for Congress to pass a resolution adding the phrase "under God" to the Pledge. I guess they want the US Supreme Court to clarify some earlier opinions. Look for a 9-0 reversal.

    I still say that Michael Newdow wants to get God out of his life, he should change his name. Michael is a biblical name meaning "he who is like God". (From BabyNames.com)

     
    RI fire
    John sends this ABC News story saying that the RI nightclub bought cheap foam packing materials, not acoustic insulation. The seller had fire retardant foam at twice the price.
     
    Free college for illegal aliens
    A PR campaign is publicizing the California law that lets illegal aliens avoid the tuition fees that out-of-state citizens pay. The SJMN says:
    California was one of the first states in the United States to adopt such a law, along with Utah and New York. Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Wisconsin are considering similar proposals. Texas has a more generous law: It allows undocumented students to also apply for state financial aid.
    I thought that NYC had quit giving a free pass to illegal aliens, but I guess not. I think the argument is that the illegal aliens are more likely to stay and live in the state than out-of-state citizens, so it is better to have them educated. I think that illegal aliens should be deported.

    An Eagle Forum newsletter says:

    SHOULD ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS RECEIVE IN-STATE TUITION BREAKS? Most state systems of higher education charge a much higher tuition rate to out-of-state students, on the theory that while it is beneficial to have students from other states and nations on campus, the schools are largely supported by the taxpayers of the state, and should primarily benefit the state's citizens..

    However, in the wake of 9-11 terrorism, it has come to light that some state-supported colleges and universities have been granting the lower in-state rate to illegal aliens who reside in their state. The difference in tuition per year can be as much as $10,700 at the University of Washington. Incredibly, the Washington State House voted 75-20 to expand the definition of a resident student to those who have "achieved academically in Washington's high schools," regardless of whether they are in this country legally. In Virginia, it was learned that some state -supported schools, particularly community colleges, were granting such favors as well. Del. Thelma Drake's bill to prohibit the practice passed the House and Senate with veto-proof margins.


    Thursday, Feb 27, 2003
     
    Intel CPU
    Why do CPUs need so many pins? The Intel Tejas is going to have 775 contacts.
     
    RI fire
    Andy writes:
    I'm still wondering about the building code violations at the nightclub "The Station," which tragically burned down in only three minutes in Rhode Island. Newspaper reports say that its use of the highly inflammable polyurethane soundproofing predates the fire inspection and approval last December. The governor's spokesman was quoted as saying that "If it was (polyurethane), then the governor's going to want an answer to the question, 'Why was it there?'"

    That's pretty smart of the governor to know polyurethane is illegal under state law. I did a search of all Rhode Island statutes, regulations, cases, legal opinions, etc., and could not find anything prohibiting the use of polyurethane.

    Is the prohibition buried in a copyrighted standard and withheld from the internet? Too bad there is censorship of restatement of these building safety codes, and that Rhode Island didn't have someone courageous like Mr. Veeck to raise awareness.

    I doubt that the building code lists all the things that not allowed. It probably says that the ceiling or sound insulation has to have a certain fire resistance rating, and the inspectors didn't check the actual material in use. Maybe he should have, but inspectors don't check everything.

    It is a good point that all these regulations should be online and readily available. It shouldn't be so difficult for the news media to find out.

    Andy responds:

    I checked the Rhode Island statutes and rules some more, and found that it does limit interior materials based on their "flamespread rating." And how is that defined? As follows:
    "(40) Flamespread rating. The term "flamespread rating" shall mean the classification of materials in accordance with the method of testing the surface burning characteristics of building materials as described in N.F.P.A. pamphlet 255, A.S.T.M.E.-84, and U.L. 723, in which asbestos cement board rates zero (0) on the scale, and red oak lumber, one hundred (100). "
    Two for the price of one! First, asbestos is so perfectly fire resistance that the scale for flamespread is defined by using it as 0. Yet it is banned based on junk science.

    Second, it is an obscure, likely copyrighted pamphlet that determines what is lawful and what isn't. No chance it's on the internet. I found only one site back to the Rhode Island statute referencing it.

    I guess Andy is suggesting that 96 people died because some fire code was copyrighted. But I'm still having trouble connecting the dots. NFPA is National Fire Prevention Association, ASTME is American Society of Tool & Manufacturing Engineers, and UL is Underwriters Laboratories. No doubt these organizations take what should be public domain standards, and claim bogus copyrights on them. And yes, asbestos is out of favor because of junk science, primarily. But the nightclub wanted soundproofing material on its ceiling, not insulation, so it wouldn't be using asbestos anyway. And did the copyright really keep the inspector from knowing that polyurethane is highly combustible?

    Andy refers to an ongoing legal battle over who owns the law. The latest is Veeck v. SBCCI, which said that laws like building and fire codes cannot be copyrighted. The US Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case.

    According to this site,

    In the Station fire, for example, while the band and the nightclub’s owners argue over whether permission to use pyrotechnics was given, neither side considered safety measures like those suggested by National Fire Protection Association 1126, Standard for the Use of Pyrotechnics before a Proximate Audience.
    As a result of the RI fire, the NFPA has agreed to post its publication 1126. It says:
    This document is copyrighted by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). By making this document available for use and adoption by public authorities and others, the NFPA does not waive any rights in copyright to this document.

    1. Adoption by Reference—Public authorities and others are urged to reference this document in laws, ordinances, regulations, administrative orders, or similar instruments. ...

    It goes on to say that lawmakers can copy the code royalty-free to the extent that they need copies to pass the laws, but that everyone else has to pay. It was first published in 1992, with minor revisions in 1996.

    So normally it has not been readily available on the internet. Some states, including Oklahoma and Texas, have apparently adopted it into law (with NFPA's encouragement). In Texas, the controlling legal authority says that laws and codes can be put on the internet. This wasn't. I don't know whether RI had adopted it.

    It seems theoretically possible that if Veeck v. SBCCI had been respected nationally and legally binding fire codes were put on the web, then either the RI nightclub or the band would have downloaded and read NFPA 1126, and 96 lives would have been saved. A similar statement might also be true about the soundproofing material.

    If the US Supreme Court agrees to hear Veeck v. SBCCI, then it will be swamped with amicus briefs by NFPA who will argue that restrict access with copyright is somehow in the public interest. That's what they did in the 5th Circuit, and the argument convinced some of the judges.

    The argument is that the codes would not exist, or have lower quality, if there were no copyright. But I think that this is false. According to this NFPA article, the pyrotechnic codes are enthusiastically endorsed by Disney and other amusement parks. I wouldn't be surprised if the codes were written by Disney safety officials. These companies have a strong interest in safety procedures, and in having a public consensus in what those safety procedures are. They want their customers to be safe, and if anything does go wrong, they want a paper trail that shows that they did everything properly and according to industry norms. Disney has no interest in the copyright to the codes. It lets NPFA have the copyright because it wants NPFA adoption. NPFA in turn makes money off of the copyright as states enact the codes into law, but that money probably does not go into writing better codes.

     
    Banned words from textbooks
    John sends this SacBee article:
    See if you can guess what these 12 seemingly disparate words and phrases have in common: Lumberjack, one-man band, junk bonds, heroine, hut, extremist, fraternize, dialect, busybody, senile, fanatic, minority group.

    Stumped? Believe it or not, they are among a growing group of words that test and textbook publishers, and the state agencies that approve their offerings, don't want students in the K-12 public schools to see.

    It is censorship from the Left.
     
    McCarthism
    InstaPundit has this link to a Jonah Goldberg piece on McCarthyism, and this response.

    The American Left pretends that the greatest abuses of govt power in world history are the 1940s Japanese internment and the 1950s McCarthyism. And yet it is difficult to find any harm that came from McCarthy's activities. The above response can only mention the Fred Fisher episode. That was a Senate hearing in which McCarthy had been asked repeatedly to name someone who belonged to a Communist organization, and he named Fisher. Another senator denounced McCarthy for smearing Fisher, but McCarthy was completely correct. He was not betraying confidential info either, as the NY Times has said the same thing 2 months earlier. You find more details in this McCarthy article. I've seen the TV footage of that Fischer episode, and I couldn't see anything wrong with what McCarthy did. Articles praising McCarthy can be found here and here.

    In looking this up, I found a story that McCarthy had made a deal with his adversary, Sen. Welch, that Welch wouldn't mention Roy Cohn's homosexuality if McCarthy didn't mention Fisher's commie past. (Cohn worked for McCarthy and Fisher worked for Welch.) Welch first broke the deal by referring to Cohn on national TV as a "fairy".

    George writes:

    McCarthy was censured by a bipartisan vote of the US Senate for making reckless accusations. How do you explain that?
    The resolution to condemn McCarty is here. It passed 67-22. It really only concerned McCarthy's dealings with committees that had been set up to investigate McCarthy himself. It said that he failed to cooperate with one of them, and that he publicly called the other one a "lynch party". All other charges were dropped. It sounds like it was a lynch party to me.

    InstaPundit gets flak on this, such as:

    What McCarthy did do was accuse everyone under the sun of being a communist. If you had belonged to the communist party as a student in the 30s, you were a communist. If you belonged to the ACLU, you were a communist.
    No. McCarthy didn't want commies in the State Dept deciding foreign policy. His main accusation was that there many commies in the govt, and that commies are traitors, and he was right.
     
    Affirmative action bake sale
    John sends this story about Cal and Stanford U. students having bake sales with different prices for whites, orientals, and blacks.
     
    Man shoots dogs
    John sends another wacky California dog story. A man shot a couple of pit bulls that climbed into his apartment window and killed his extremely rare purebred dog. The sheriff said the shooting was justified because the dogs kept attacking him and he was in fear of his life. I would think that it should always be justified to shoot pit bulls on your property.
     
    Europe speaks English
    John sends this Economist article about how the European Union has switched from French to English as the standard language for euro communications.
    FROM his desk at the European Commission's office in Warsaw, Bruno Dethomas has been gloomily monitoring the decline of his native French within the European Union. “When I left Brussels in 1995,” he remarks (in perfect English), “70% of the documents crossing my desk were written in French. Nowadays 70% are in English.” ...

    The shift towards English within EU institutions reflects what is happening in the wider world. A recent study by the EU's statistical arm showed that over 92% of secondary-school students in the EU's non-English-speaking countries are studying English, compared with 33% learning French and 13% studying German. ... English is also increasingly Europe's language of business.

    There has been a world-wide trend towards English as well. The French language has become almost completely useless. (The French people too, for that matter.)

    Wednesday, Feb 26, 2003
     
    Bush war
    Andy writes:
    Things are looking bleak. GWB has mortgaged everything -- the economy, govt spending, foreign relations, domestic credibility -- on taking over Iraq. Worse, many conservatives are following GWB down this rathole. Human Events may never recover from this. How much is this fiasco costing us in secret deals with Mexico, Turkey and others to buy their support?

    Now it looks like the Senate Democrats may actually beat the Estrada nomination through a filibuster. It still is baffling why Estrada, who is not even known to be pro-life, was pushed by Bush/Gonzales ahead of stronger conservatives. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just repudiated by 8-1 the one prominent position Estrada did take (he argued for applying RICO to abortion protesters).

    Some long-term rebuilding of the conservative movement is needed.

     
    Product compatibility is a crime
    It had been considered settled law that a game company could legally sell games that plug into a game console and evade whatever technology it might have to limit the game playing to licensed games. Eg, see Sega v. Accolade or Sony v. Connectix. Isaac says:
    I think it's settled law that copyright law does not prevent writing games for a game console without permission from the console manufacturer, and that game emulators do not infringe unless the emulator contains infringing code.

    Those cases were before the DMCA. Now the feds have shut down a site that sold Msft Xbox and Sony PlayStation mod chips that allowed users to play unlicensed games. The feds have seized the domain name. John sends this MSNBC story.

    This is unfortunate, and unnecessary. The only reason those Xbox mod chips work at all is because of Msft bugs. Msft shouldn't need criminal to protect its revenue stream from customers taking advantage of bugs to play additional games.

     
    Racist dogs
    I didn't know that dogs could be racist.
     
    Right to protest
    Andy criticized M. Estrada because he wrote a brief supporting applying RICO laws to abortion protesters. He was working for Clinton's US DoJ at the time.

    Today, the US Supreme Court just decided not to apply RICO to abortion protesters. Abortion protesters have rights that other political protesters have. The vote was 8-1, with only Stevens dissenting. A critical point is that the RICO charge required proving extortion, but that is impossible because the protesters never asked for any money or property from the abortion clinics.

    So Estrada wrote a brief for what must be considered a radical pro-abortion position. It doesn't really prove anything, because he was following Clinton's orders.

     
    How to smoke scallops
    You can learn to smoke scallops at the Kitchen Conservatory in St. Louis. Anne sells gadgets online, and they are all top-quality.
     
    Poindexter
    Stuart Taylor has a defense of Poindexter's TIA. He says:
    Poindexter's job is limited to developing software. And even without the Wyden amendment, TIA would give investigators access only to databases and records -- government and nongovernment -- that they already have a right to access. Its most basic function would be simply to expedite the kinds of intelligence-sharing that might have thwarted the Sept. 11 attacks, by linking the government's own databases with one another and with any legally accessible private databases. The goal is to enable investigators to amass in minutes clues that now could take weeks or months to collect.
    This Florida column sides with the "sharply conservative Eagle Forum".

    Tuesday, Feb 25, 2003
     
    Lie detector info
    A Politech/Farber/Jim Warren article says that someone wants to ban info on beating a lie detector test.

    The cat is out of the bag. The lie detector test is mainly a sham, and many good sites on the web expose the details. Eg, the FAS has a good site on the subject. The results are unreliable, and hence not usable in court, but the test is still sometimes useful as an intimidation tool.

     
    Illegal alien transplant
    Fox's O'Reilly takes up the case of the illegal alien transplant case that wasted millions of dollars of American medical care. O'Reilly says that it would be immoral for the mom to sue the medicos for making the blood type error.

    I say that such lawsuits should be illegal as well. Why should criminals abusing the system be paid millions of dollars just because some physician made an honest mistake? The patient could buy insurance against a bad outcome, if the patient really wanted to do that, and had the money. This patient was essentially a thief who was stealing medical care in the first place. She didn't want to pay for insurance, just as she didn't want to pay for the operation.

    I guess I am supposed to sympathize with the mom because her daughter just died, but that mom didn't allow her daughter's organs be used to save anyone else, and her lawsuit is going to cut off funds that would otherwise be used to save lives. She has caused a lot of harm, and never should have been let into this country.

     
    ABA biased
    I just listened to left-wing SF talk show host Bernie Ward go into one of his anti-Bush monologues. He complains that:
  • Bush doesn't trust ABA ratings of judges, because of political bias.
  • The ABA gave a high rating to Estrada, a Bush nominee.
  • A Newsday article suggests that one of the ABA voters for Estrada was biased.

    No doubt most of the ABA voters are biased. Ward seems to be unhappy that someone with a pro-Bush bias might have slipped in.


  • Monday, Feb 24, 2003
     
    Music decline
    Matt complains about some copyright issues. My response:
    You made several points. You said that album sales are down for the first time in history. Where I live, all sorts of businesses are suffering declines. Is the music industry supposed to be immune from business cycles?

    I am not convinced that the decline is caused by file-sharing. Sales were up during the entire time Napster was in operation, and only declined after Napster was shut down. Meanwhile, the supply of good new music is down. With better music, people would buy more.

    I do not agree that PressPlay is any more legitimate than Napster. Last I heard, there was a US DoJ investigation of the legality of PressPlay. It sounds like a completely crooked operation to me.

    I do not believe that 60% of internet bandwidth is for file-sharing. That might be true in a few college dorms, but elsewhere it is probably more like 5 or 10%.

    Sure, a lot of people have music on their computers. The music industry doesn't even approve of moving music from your own personal CD to your own personal computer. People want music on their computers. If the music labels aren't going to sell it, then people are going to get it some other way. I think that they ought to set up some sort of system in which the artists get a royalty, but the music labels are dead-set against that.

    George writes:
    Of course PressPlay and MusicNet are more legitimate services. They are pay-for-music services. Napster users did not pay anything.
    PressPlay and MusicNet have fees, but the money goes to the music labels, not the artists. Why should the labels get the money? They don't get money when music is played on the radio.

    My objection to PressPlay and MusicNet is that they involve conspiracies among monopolistic music labels to control the distribution of music. There are 5 big labels that dominate the music market, and they have colluded to restrict online music. It might be ok if each label had its own exclusive online music seller, or if the labels offered music to any online seller according to a set schedule, but I object to them conspiring to offer joint deals to a preferred seller and then refusing to offer the same deal to other online sellers. Napster was not allowed to distribute music at any price.

     
    Trashing the IA-64
    Linus Torvalds trashes the Intel Itanium. It does look Intel has completely blown the shift to 64-bit processors. The Itanium cannot keep up with the Pentium, and unless Intel does a 64-bit Pentium soon, AMD will get the 64-bit x86 market.
     
    RI fire
    Andy is still suspicious that regulatory problems are at the root of the RI nightclub fire:
    Roger writes, " I don't know if some RI fire dept signed off on a death trap. We'll see."

    Looks to me like the RI fire dept approved highly flammable soundproofing, perhaps inadvertently. Town may have even required the soundproofing. It surely prohibited asbestos fire-proofing.

    Roger adds, "In building my house, I had to get various permits from govt agencies, and the fire dept. was the most powerful and rigid. They get their way. I ended up with a sprinkler system in my house. I'm not complaining, just describing how it is here in California."

    In other words, California made sure you didn't use effective fire resistants, like asbestos, and instead forced you to install a costly sprinkler system. The only question is ... why aren't you complaining?

    Here's my letter to DOJ, which is considering supporting SBCCI in the Veeck case. Note my reference to the RI nightclub inferno

    Mark Pennak
    United States Department of Justice
    Civil Division, Appellate Staff
    601 D Street, NW
    Washington, DC 20530

    Re SBCCI v. Veeck, No. 02-355

    Dear Mr. Pennak

    The Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, Inc. ("AAPS") urges the Department of Justice (DOJ) to oppose a grant of certiorari in SBCCI v. Veeck. AAPS, founded in 1943, is a non-profit organization of thousands of physicians in all specialties. We have a strong interest in protecting free speech in connection with the regulation of health and safety. We urged the Fifth Circuit to hear this case en banc, and then argued for and prevailed in favor of the free speech right to recite the law.

    Judge Edith Jones, writing for the majority, was absolutely correct in upholding Veeck's free speech rights. Her logic is unassailable

    Citizens may reproduce copies of the law for many purposes, not only to guide their actions but to influence future legislation, educate their neighborhood association, or simply to amuse. If a citizen wanted to place an advertisement in a newspaper quoting the Anna, Texas building code in order to indicate his dissatisfaction with its complexities, it would seem that he could do so.

    Veeck v. SBCCI, 293 F.3d 791, 799 (5th Cir. 2002) (en banc). Regulatory complexity needs to be exposed rather than concealed. The Department of Justice (DOJ) should not be siding with narrow special interests like that of Petitioner SBCCI and the American Medical Association, at the expense of a citizen's right to disseminate the law.

    We support an unfettered right of free speech to communicate legal requirements. The DOJ, of all entities, should protect the dissemination of the law in order to boost compliance. In the area of safety, such as the building codes at issue here, the need for high public awareness of regulations is particularly acute. Many thousands of victims of fires - including the 97 who recently died at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, RI - are unaware of hazardous building code violations around them. It would be a bitter irony if an entity in charge of enforcing the law files a brief to suppress the dissemination of legal requirements. Law enforcement should be on the side of Veeck and others who faithfully post the law.

    Please consider this letter in recommending a position before the Supreme Court.

     
    Is Google too powerful?
    A BBC article tells about Google taking over the blogosphere, and suggest that Google now has such monopoly power that it should be regulated. You can find other criticisms at Google-Watch.

    Google's takeover of the internet has been phenomenal, and their power over popular searches makes them seem to have greater control than AOL, MSN, or Yahoo.

    I don't think that Google's monopoly power is so great. It has a number of competent competitors. Google is the best, but others would fill the need if Google were unavailable. Besides Yahoo and the big ISP, here are some:

    Alexa | Alta Vista | Ask Jeeves | Daypop | Dogpile | Fast Search | Kartoo | My Way | Northern Light | Surf Fast | Surfable Books | Teoma | Vivisimo | WiseNut

    Update: Overture has just acquired Fast Search and Transfer, an excellent Finnish seach engine. Last week it bought AltaVista, which used to be the king of search. Overture was already huge, as it supplies search ads to AOL and MSN. So Overture should be a strong and worthy competitor to Google. Others, like Northern Light, are good, but not making money and may not last.

     
    Bad copy laws
    McCullagh argues that Congress should not pass any law on copy protection. Whether it passes pro-industry or pro-consumer laws, they are apt to do more harm than good. He still wants to repeal some bad laws, like the DMCA.
     
    Cancer research
    Andy sends this article about abortion politics interfering with cancer research.
     
    Civil war movie
    I usually watch Ebert-Roeper movie reviews and find them useful, but this time Ebert has completely trashed two movies for reasons that are almost entirely political. I haven't see the movies, Gods and Generals, and The Life Of David Gale. I may not see these movies, but Ebert's reasoning is absurd. His big gripe with David Gale is that it fails to make an anti-death penalty statement:
    I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.
    He trashes Gods And Generals as movie that would appeal to Civil War buffs who think historical accuracy is a virtue, but less enlightened than "Gone With the Wind," and too impartial. He gives it a poor score of 1.5 stars -- David Gale only got 0 stars!

    Bob says he is going to write a letter to the SJ Mercury News for its political review of David Gale. It was similar to Ebert.

    Gumma writes: "So you get your movie advice from the critics?"

    Update: Bob sent this letter to the SJMN editor:

    I congratulate Glenn Lovell's forthrightness in his review of "The Life of David Gale" on February 20. Mr. Lovell makes clear what he is attempting to do in his reviews. I had always suspected that he reviewed movies on political correctness rather than entertainment value or whether the movie had something interesting to say. The core of Mr. Lovell's review is contained in "Instead of mounting a fierce argument against socially sanctioned killing, Parker gives the other side ammunition and allows those predisposed to executions to exit feeling smug and reassured in their beliefs". I wonder how would Mr. Lovell have reviewed an excellent film that took a solid pro capital punishment point of view. I suspect that Mr. Lovell would have been compelled to attempt to invent the negative star. The hypocrisy of this position is astonishing. The majority of Hollywood action movies, which Mr. Lovell sometimes sprinkles with stars, kill off the bad guys without even the benefit of a trial.

    Although I am personally mildly against capital punishment, I am not willing to pay $9.50 to be preached at by a Hollywood lefty on the topic, and I believe a large percentage of Mercury News readers agree with this proposition. Ideally Mr. Lovell would find an institution in need of a commissar of ideological and political correctness of film to employ him. In case the Mercury News is such an institution, I suggest you move Mr. Lovell's writings to the page with Doonesbury and allow Mr. Lovell to pursue his true interests unfettered by the need to pretend to be interested in whether people would enjoy or be edified by a film. The movie review pages would then be free to do their job.

     
    What is scent?
    A new book, 'The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses' by Chandler Burr, tells the story of a non-establishment scientist named Turin who has a theory that odors are based on vibrational frequencies of molecules. Here are NY Times and Wash Post reviews. His theory is 10 or 15 years old, and not (yet) accepted. His theory is outlandish, but quite testable, and we should have a resolution soon.

    Bob writes:

    I heard an interview with Turin years ago. I find his theory and evidence compelling. I agree that it is testable. Maybe now that there is a book it will get tested. There are going to be some big losers when this is settled. The other interesting point is that humans have around 1k genes for smell receptors, which amounts to many of the receptors that dogs have. Only a few hundred remain functional. Not being able to smell some things doesn't decrease fitness in humans.

    The Turin scent controversy reminds me of the controversy over human pheremones and the human pheremone receptor. The human pheremone receptor was discovered in human embryos in the 1930s. The consensus view was that it didn't exist in adult humans until it was pointed out in the 1980s or 1990s. This is a small but visible pit in the nostril, not at all hard to test since it was known exactly where to look because it had been observed in embryos! I remember hearing a biologist say that "Humans are more complicated than moths" in denying the existence of human pheremones.

     
    Gov. Davis recall
    The SJ Mercury news found a letter writer who defends Gov. Davis against the recall effort. He says, "it will not work ... Recalling him will not make a difference." In between, he has a scathing attack on Davis. No one likes him. No one thinks he is doing a good job. His only support comes from folks who worry that an alternative might be as bad or worse. It is hard to see how anyone could be as bad.

    Sunday, Feb 23, 2003
     
    Nightclub fires
    Andy likes the News And Notes rewrite, and says:
    Re witchhunt over RI nightclub fire, Roger writes "There is probably a permit needed for indoor pyrotechnic displays. If the regulators did not give the permit, what's the problem?"

    In other words, Roger sees regulations as the solution to the problem, not the cause. So who does Roger think is guilty for not having a permit? Three choices (a) rock band, (b) night-club tenant, (c) building owner. What's Roger's penalty for not having a permit? Presumably it is limited by statute. The permit issue is just paperwork anyway, and doesn't explain why the building was such a firetrap.

    The real crime here was the approval and licensing of this firetrap on Dec. 23rd. Foam soundproofing that was highly inflammable, maybe required by some ridiculous regulation, without any fire-resistant protection. Without the nutcase plaintiffs' bar and sheeplike scientists, the soundproofing could have been asbestos-coated and safe from fire. There's the real problem.

    If the nightclub or any other business willfully violated fire codes and people died as a result, then there should be some nasty penalties. I don't know what, but I expect someone to do some jail time.

    In building my house, I had to get various permits from govt agencies, and the fire dept. was the most powerful and rigid. They get their way. I ended up with a sprinkler system in my house. I'm not complaining, just describing how it is here in California. I don't know if some RI fire dept signed off on a death trap. We'll see.

    Gumma writes:

    Prior to the 2 recent fires, I think the most spectacular one was at the swank Coconut Grove night club in Boston about 1942. Your Schlafly cousins, Peggy and (I think) Charles Disbrow were in that fire and were among the few who got out. I think Charles found a window. This was a spectacular event in the Schlafly family years ago.
     
    Failed transplant
    The story of Jesica Santillan and her two failed double transplants has gotten big news, but hardly anyone mentions the fact that she was an illegal alien from Mexico who came to the USA just to freeload on American medical services. She ended up wasting 2 good hearts, 2 pairs of good lungs, and 100s of thousands of dollars in medical care. Now her family will probably file a medical malpractice lawsuit, and waste 100s of thousands of more dollars.

    Gumma writes:

    Yes, I did notice that she was an illegal alien. But what are the terrible $$$ costs of all this medical work, both operations? I understand that some local donor paid for the first, but news didn't say how much. ($150,000 ???) But even so, with the hundreds of people waiting for organs, how could the organs go to an illegal alien? Of course, Duke paid for the second. But putting that kid through a useless second operation was just face saving for Duke at the expense of useless torture and useless hope for the kid and parents. They never should have done the second.
    Now it turns out that the girl's family is refusing to donate her organs to others that might need them.
     
    Nightclub fire witchhunt
    Andy writes:
    Witchhunt begins concerning RI nightclub fire that killed 95. Some fireworks sparklers were used as part of a stage show, whereupon the building burned to a crisp in just a few minutes. Experts say the occupants had only 30 seconds to get out and survive.

    What is amazing is that, like the WTC and shuttle tragedies, no one in authority questions the fire-resistance of the building. No, no ... the regulators are never to blame. Turns out the RI nightclub had foam "soundproofing" on low ceilings; was that to satisfy a ridiculous regulation? The building was built before 1975, so it should have had asbestos. Or was it removed under another misguided regulation? We'll probably never know, because the state never allows itself to become the scapegoat.

    News & Notes was informative again this week, but I feel compelled to object to the way it parroted the NY Times in smearing Poindexter. As any educated conservative knows, Poindexter was a brilliant conservative hero who saved Reagan over Iran/Contra and deserves some credit for the Star Wars that helped bring down Communism. Yet News & Notes vilified Poindexter for an unjust prosecution that conservatives opposed, and which was completely overturned. "Adm. John Poindexter, who was convicted of 5 felony counts of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra (conviction overturned on procedural grounds)." The smear has no relevance to anything now anyway.

    The News And Notes item said:
    EAGLE FORUM CREDITED FOR STOPPING GOVERNMENT SNOOPING. In the name of combating terrorism, the Pentagon initiated Total Information Awareness (TIA), a project to collect a lifetime paper trail of bank records, medical files, credit card purchases, academic records, and other gossip on the private lives of law-abiding Americans. The lead bureaucrat on this plan for "data mining" of private information is Adm. John Poindexter, who was convicted of 5 felony counts of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra (conviction overturned on procedural grounds). The Senate stopped this plan to treat all citizens as suspects by a vote of 100 to 0, and the House has agreed. The Pentagon will be barred from any deployment of the technology against U.S. citizens without prior Congressional approval. New York Times columnist William Safire credits Eagle Forum as the lead conservative organization against TIA, as well as some leftwing civil liberties groups. New York Times, 2-13-03
    Ok, he has a point. Perhaps Andy would rewrite it as follows:
    EAGLE FORUM BLAMED FOR DERAILING PLAN TO CATCH ILLEGAL ALIEN TERRORISTS. In the name of combating terrorism, the Pentagon initiated Total Information Awareness (TIA), a research project to see if potential enemies and terrorists can be identified by combing government records. The leader of this research project for "data mining" of computer records is Adm. John Poindexter, who is mainly famous for facing vindictive Democratic prosecutors during the Reagan administration. Poindexter heroically supported anti-communist forces in Central America and was instrumental in helping Reagan win the Cold War. Leftists hated him for this, and for his refusal to save his own skin by implicating Reagan, so they prosecuted him for some obscure technicalities in his anti-communist efforts. An appellate court ultimated vindicated him on all counts. Rather than just wait to see what can be done with the technology, Congress passed a symbolic resolution to bar the Pentagon from any deployment of the technology against U.S. citizens without prior Congressional approval. New York Times columnist William Safire credits Eagle Forum as abandoning the other conservative organizations and joining a coalition of leftwing groups in a hysterical anti-Poindexter smear campaign.

    Saturday, Feb 22, 2003
     
    Marbury v. Madison
    The InstaPundit is at a Marbury v. Madison symposium. Academic law prof types are in love with the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision of the US Supreme Court, saying that it established the power of judicial review for the Supreme Court. The case is widely misinterpreted. What happened was that the SC refused to take an action that was authorized by an Act of Congress, but which the SC believed to be unconstitutional. Of anything, it only established that the SC itself had to abide by the Constitution.

    Andy writes:

    Valid point, but a distinction without a difference. If the SC denies enforcement of an Act of Congress, then it's null and void for everyone. That's what judicial review is.
    An unconstitutional act is null and void for everyone, even before the SC expresses an opinion. Law prof types are in love with Marbury v. Madison, but it was really a trivial case of no consequence. Academics like the notion of judicial review, because it suggests that unelected intellectuals can sit around and decide what laws are acceptable and what are not. But that's not what the US Constitution says, and it is not what Marbury v. Madison says.
     
    Does innovation require intellectual property rights?
    Some economists debate this. This Reason article discusses work that claims to show that our IP protection goes too far, and actually stifles innovation.
     
    Pit bulls
    John sends this story about California officials who cannot seem to figure out what to do with vicious child-mauling pit bull dogs that were abandoned. Some things ought to be obvious. They couldn't figure out how to punish the owner, either.

    Friday, Feb 21, 2003
     
    Copyright extremists
    Phyllis's column on copyright extremists got some criticism.
    I am writing to protest Ms. Schlafly's January 1, 2003 column entitled "Copyright Extremists Should Not Control Information Flow". In that column Ms. Schlafly has mischaracterized much of the entertainment industry's current efforts to combat unauthorized copying. As an author and copyright owner herself, it is astonishing that Ms. Schlafly does not exhibit a better understanding of these issues.

    As an attorney with more than 20 years experience in the entertainment industry, I take very seriously, and I know that all responsible professionals in the industry likewise take seriously, the challenges to copyright owners which are posed by recent developments in technology. It is now easier than ever before for individuals to reproduce copyrighted works without authorization from the lawful owners of those works and without compensating those owners for such use. This is the essence of the problem which confronts us today.

    In her column, Ms. Schlafly repeatedly mischaracterizes the issue as it pertains to the music business as copyright owners trying to "dictate how, where and when people listen to music". Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the efforts she describes in her article have absolutely nothing to do with limiting the ability of people to "listen" to music. Anyone with a lawfully obtained copy of a CD, for example, is free to listen to that CD without restriction. As Ms. Schlafly ought to know, the real issue has to do with the copying or reproducing of recordings, movies and other material without authorization. The Naval Academy students she refers to had their computers confiscated not for listening to music, but for downloading and copying recordings without authorization of the owners--copyright infringement.

    To label entertainment industry representatives as "copyright extremists" for seeking to provide enhanced protection for copyright owners (including Ms. Schlafly!) is simply wrong. Although, for the most part, the copyright owners of most musical recordings and of most motion pictures are large corporations, the individual creators of these works are dependent upon sales for their compensation, and thousands of other people make their livings in these businesses. Widespread, unauthorized copying hurts all creators as well as all of the workers in these industries; it is, in a word, stealing. It is absolutely shocking that Ms. Schlafly would defend such conduct. Were her column to be reproduced (and even altered) in newspapers and periodicals without permission and without compensation, I trust that she would be outraged.

    It may well be that Ms. Schlafly is unsympathetic to the music, television and film industries because she perceives them as being dominated by individuals with political views different from her own or because she disapproves of the content of many of the works produced and released by these businesses. However, that should not blind her, or her readers, to the harm done to all of us by the large-scale unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works which we are today seeing. The idea of copyright is embodied in the Constitution because our founding fathers rightly recognized that authors are entitled to be compensated for their work and, perhaps even more importantly, because they recognized that the free flow of ideas in our society requires that the expression of those ideas be subject to protection.

    The essence of your objection is that you don't like your clients being called "copyright extremists".

    Listening to music on a computer usually involves copying without authorization. You apparently oppose that. I think that the Naval students should be able to listen to music on their computers. Some of those students are about to be called in battle in the service of our country, and I think that it is terribly unfair for copyright extremists like yourself to derail their careers for merely listening to music on a computer.

    Mrs. Schlafly is well aware of the Constitutional issues. Those founding fathers creating a copyright system in which authors get protection for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years by the author if he is still alive. Those who advocate copyright protection of 120+ years, as the current law sometimes allows, are indeed copyright extremists.

    Another writer complains that album sales have dipped for the first time in history, that file-sharing is 60% of internet usage, and that online music should be acquired from PressPlay because it has the blessings of the big music labels.

    I don't agree that acquiring music from PressPlay is any more legitimate than that from the Napster clones. With PressPlay, the money goes to the big music labels, not the artists. It is a conspiracy to restrain the trade of online music. Napster was not allowed a similar deal at any price. See the US DoJ investigation of PressPlay and MusicNet.

    Music CD sales increased the entire time that Napster was in operation, and only dipped after Napster got shut down. Maybe sales dropped because Napster got shut down. Or maybe it is the economic slump. Where I live, business is down for practically everyone from what it was a couple of years ago. Why should the music industry be immune from business cycles?

    Another explanation for the sales dip is the lack of good music. There are fewer new CDs on the market, and hardly any new stars. Music quality has been much better in previous decades. When the quality is down, the sales should be down also.

    There might be some college dorms where file-sharing is 60% of internet usage, but overall it is probably more like 5%.

    The entertainment industry lawyer responds:

    I thought I had made a pretty well-reasoned criticism of Mrs. Schlafly's column. You want to trivialize it by assuming that I simply don't like my clients being called extremists.

    I don't merely oppose copying without authorization, it is also the essence of what copyright protection is all about. I am delighted that Naval Academy students listen to music on their computers; I do the same. However, this need not involve illegal copying. Most computers can play CDs. In addition, it is generally considered lawful for an owner of a legally acquired copy of a record to make a copy--on a cassette or home computer, etc.--for personal use. Further, the Naval students could acquire copies of some music lawfully over the Internet from the various legitimate music services such as PressPlay. The point is that no one is trying to prevent consumers from listening to music--only from illegally reproducing it. The Naval Academy students acquired copies of musical recordings over the Internet via "free", unauthorized illegal services, without paying the record companies, recording artists or songwriters. They might just as well have gone into their local record store and shoplifted CDs--there is neither a moral nor a legal distinction.

    Your repetition of the assertion that copyright "extremists" are trying to stop anyone from listening to music suggests that you may have missed the point of my email.

    As to the issue regarding the length of the term of copyright, there is nothing inherently "extremist" in advocating a longer period of protection. For many years in the U.S., the term was 28 years, with a right to renew (whether or not the author was alive) for an additional 28 years. Since virtually the entire rest of the world provided for protection for the life of the author plus 50 years, the U.S. some years ago amended the copyright act to conform to this term. Pretty much everyone, especially authors, felt that this was a worthy change. I personally don't have a strong feeling on this issue, but I think that labeling someone an "extremist" who has a different view than you and Mrs. Schlafly do on these issues makes the term meaningless.

    I think that the essence of your objection *is* that you don't like your clients being called "copyright extremists". You complain that she mischaracterizes the issues, but I think you you are mischaracterizing them.

    You say that you oppose all unauthorized copying. Nearly all of the music CDs that I have say that unauthorized duplication is prohibited by law, and they do not authorize copying to my personal computer for personal use.

    As you say, such personal copying is generally considered lawful. That is, people other than your copyright extremist clients consider it lawful. But the fact remains that the big majority of computer music is unauthorized.

    I don't even necessarily agree that acquiring music from PressPlay is more legitimate than from other channels. Last I heard, PressPlay was being investigated by the US DoJ for conspiring to restrain trade.

    Current US copyright protection is for life plus 70 years, not life plus 50 years. If you are not sure whether life plus 50 years is too long, can you agree that life plus 70 years is too long?


    Thursday, Feb 20, 2003
     
    Oil and water mix
    No, this is not a political statement. John sends this discovery that oil and water mix if the gases are removed from the water.
     
    PC BIOS
    Intel wants to abolish the BIOS, and replace it with a mini-OS called Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). It sounds great, if it is done right. If software companies think that it is just an opportunity to change people's configuration, it could be a mess.
     
    OOP Programming
    Bob sends this discussion of object oriented programming. One of the current programming fads is a simplistic notion called design patterns. The pattern guru is someone who is not even a programmer:
    Alexander is known for the enigmatic thesis that well-designed buildings and towns must have "the quality without a name." He explains: "The fact that this quality cannot be named does not mean that it is vague or imprecise. It is impossible to name because it is unerringly precise."
    The OOP advocates hate the goto, but praise spaghetti like this:
    Thus a five-pointed star could be a subclass both of pentagon and of self-intersecting-polygon and could inherit methods from both.
    Bob says:
    You might mention my analysis of design patterns as the astrology of computer science. It amounts to classifying problems according to something analogous to their astrological sign.
     
    Consipiracy
    This web site has a good collection of conspiracy theories.
     
    Flaw in SSL
    A significant flaw in OpenSSL has been found. OpenSSL is the most popular software for secure web transactions. Another story is here. (This is unrelated to the patent infringement lawsuit.)

    SSL is probably the most popular crypto protocol in the world. The latest version is called TLS. It is pretty good, but it does have a number of annoying problems. Some are:

  • It uses a trust model that 99% of the users don't understand.
  • It uses RSA rather than DH, and fails to achieve forward secrecy.
  • User certificates never caught on, so there is no user authentication.
  • Microsoft/Verisign bugs don't identify certificate authorities properly.
  • No one knows how to manage the root certificates.
  • This OpenSSL problem.

    There are fixes available for the Microsoft, Verisign, and OpenSSL bugs, but the bugs will be in circulation for a long time, and the other problems are not being fixed.

  •  
    Legal advice
    Paul Tauger writes that I cannot give opinions on legal matters over the internet because I am not a licensed lawyer. Tauger has some serious misunderstandings about the law.

    Free speech allows anyone to give opinions about legal subjects, or anything else. If anything, licensed lawyers are more restricted than non-lawyers in what they can say, because they must abide by the canons of the profession. And a law license doesn't really cover giving advice out over the internet, because lawyers are licensed by particular states.

    Tauger calls himself an "IP lawyer" who does trademark, copyright, and patent work. But he himself is not licensed to do work before the Patent Office, and cannot call himself a patent lawyer. So he is an odd one to criticize me.

     
    Posner
    Andy writes:
    Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit scholar extraordinaire, supposedly does more work than an army, the antithesis of academic censorship, right?

    Turns out he has single-handedly made the 7th Circuit one of the most hostile courts in the country to amicus briefs. Apparently he's much more fond of promulgating his libertarian ideas than listening to other viewpoints! See NOW, Inc. v. Scheidler, 223 F.3d 615 (7th Cir. 2000), when he insisted on barring several amicus briefs! Gee, it would be a real shame if his clerks were exposed to diverse legal arguments.

    Catholic schools and perhaps the Church itself is in a growing dilemma over pro-abortion politicians. "We're disappointed that the Cardinal won't act to remove the scandalous [Gov. Jennifer] Granholm from this Catholic school function, but we will continue to work to prevent it," declared Dr. Monica Migliorino Miller of the Stop Granholm Church and Truth Project. "Alumni, parents, and donors spontaneously are pulling their money from Mercy, and calls are flooding into Cardinal Maida's office. We encourage Catholics to withdraw support from Mercy because of the school's insensitivity to the plight of preborn children."

    In the end, only the monastic Catholic schools may be left -- just like the Dark Ages, I suppose.


    Wednesday, Feb 19, 2003
     
    RSA patent infringement
    RSA Security and Verisign are facing a patent lawsuit by someone with a patent claiming to cover SSL.

    RSAS sued me for patent infringement and lost, several years ago. In the process I learned that RSAS was infringing the seminal Stanford and MIT patents that it pretended to control, and was being run be completely dishonest crooks. I hope they lose the lawsuit.

    Looking at plaintiff Stambler's US Patent 5,267,314, I was surprise to see that it cites a Schlafly patent as prior art! It's not mine -- the inventor is Hubert Schlafly, and it is a method for ordering goods over a data terminal. Hubert is a relative, but I've never met him.

    According to this, Stambler lost a previous claim because he let an industry standard be adopted without making a patent claim.

    George writes:

    They sued you before. Aren't you worried that they'll sue you for libel? Are you sure they're crooks?
    Yes, I am sure they're crooks. I used to maintain some info online here. They made a lot of money off technology that they stole from Stanford and MIT, and then used phony legal threats to keep others from using it.
     
    UCITA
    This sends this criticism of UCITA, a proposed law to make computer software shrink-wrap licenses enforceable. Many common clauses in Msft and other licenses are non-binding without a law like this. The law completely one-sided and anti-consumer, and only the backwards states of Virginia and Maryland have been stupid enough to pass it.
     
    Bayes Theorem
    This article says that Bayes models are gaining in popularity. I am experimenting with a Bayes spam filter, and it seems to work pretty well.
     
    Recall Gov. Davis
    Joan sends this site, trying to recall Calif. Gov. Gray Davis. Davis has squandered more money than any governor in US history.
     
    Darwin wrong?
    This new research claims that aggressive lesbian japanese monkeys prove Darwin wrong. The researchers should also check out the behavior of Japanese airline passengers.
     
    Gay judge?
    A major homosexual magazine, The Advocate, has a cover story suggesting that David Souter is gay.
     
    DareDevil
    I just watched the movie DareDevil. My expectations were low, because the local Si Valley paper trashed it with a rating of half a star out of four stars. But it was actually a decent movie. Like a cross between SpiderMan and the first BatMan movie. The movie is not for everyone. It is dark, sad in parts, violent, and unrealistic. The title character is from a comic book.

    One curious detail about the movie is that it portrayed a Catholic priest in a positive light. It was a minor role, but I cannot remember seeing another such movie made in the last 40 years. Arthur mentioned a movie in which he thought that the priest was a positive character, but in his movie the priest commits perjury to cover up a murder. Not real positive. Maybe there are other movies with priest playing positive roles, but I can't think of any at the moment.

     
    Gun rights
    A 9th Circuit panel has indicated agreement that the 2nd Amendment protects and individual right. This is in contrast to Reinhardt's recent opinion, and to 9th Circuit precedent that held that “it is clear that the Second Amendment guarantees a collective rather than an individual right."

    This is one of those situations where liberal judges invented a nutty and incorrect legal doctrine, and just said it was "clear". Gun rights advocates are finally convincing everyone that the 2A protects and individual right.


    Monday, Feb 17, 2003
     
    Microsoft arrogance
    I haven't tried this myself, but someone claims that the Windows Set Program Access and Defaults feature maliciously sabotages competing browsers so they won't work anymore. This feature was put in as part of the Msft antitrust settlement, supposedly to make competition fairer. It looks like Msft just tricked to feds into letting it consolidate its power.
     
    Florida recounts
    Jeff writes:
    Corporate interests have a much stronger voice in the white house than the people who did not electe the president (according to the media's recount, gore won the florida vote).

    Under the new rules he would have won: LA Times story. And the media recount shows he won.

    Jeff is delusional. Bush won the FL vote, and all the recounts. Here is the first paragraph of that LA Times story:
    WASHINGTON -- If the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed Florida's courts to finish their abortive recount of last year's deadlocked presidential election, President Bush probably still would have won by several hundred votes, a comprehensive study of the uncounted ballots has found.
    The second article claims that Gore might have eked out a narrow victory under one particular scenario. It was not a scenario that would have been followed under existing law, nor was it a scenario that Gore was asking for, nor was it the scenario preferred by the 4-3 majority on the Florida supreme court.

    In just about any close election, there are recount scenarios that could change the outcome. The only count that matters is the one specified by Florida statutes.

     
    Affirmative action and religious tolerance
    Andy writes:
    I wrote:
    John and Roger apparently argue the following no Catholic school that accepts federal assistance (perhaps through a loan or voucher program) should be allowed to guarantee admission to Irish or Italian applicants.

    Roger replied "I am only arguing that the schools should obey the law. The law prohibits certain forms of discrimination. If that's the law, then the courts should respect it, and not try to devise some policy on their own."

    But Roger and John are promoting a particular view of the law (a libertarian one), and demanding that it be enforced by the Supreme Court and presumably federal agencies. Roger and John are also giving this a higher priority than the numerous cases that are denied cert.

    I wrote:

    Roger's hypothetical advertisement is not what the Univ of Michigan is doing. All the Univ. of Michigan is doing is to limit admissions to candidates who score in the highest percentiles of their respective ethnic groups. Title IV does not prohibit this. A mediocre white applicant fails to gain admissions because of her mediocrity, not due to racial discrimination.

    Roger replied, "Andy's rationale for racial quotas doesn't make much sense to me. Suppose U.Michigan said that it would give 80% of its athletic scholarships to whites, and 15% to blacks, because that reflects the racial balance of the state. The white scholarships would goto the best whites, and the black scholarships would goto the best blacks. When a black athlete got locked out of a scholarship because the quota was filled, Andy would tell him that it wasn't race, but his mediocrity compared to other blacks, that caused his rejection. That argument would never fly."

    Sports is not analogous for several reasons. First, the black in your hypothetical would be excluded even though he was better than most applicants. The same is not true for the white who sued the Univ. of Michigan. Second, sports performance does not correlate to professional commitment the way that scholastics do. For example, black medical students tend to serve black communities, in far higher numbers than white medical students do. In sports, college competition is the end itself, while in academics, it is only a means to an end.

    My main problem with the libertarian approach to affirmative action and other issues is where it leads. What do libertarians really think will be accomplished by invalidating the Univ. of Michigan program? I can't see anything positive coming out of the case in terms of results.

    Andy has been brainwashed by Harvard law profs who think that the courts are supposed to set policy. He devised contorted rationales for distinguishing academics from sports, and whites from blacks. But John and I are just arguing the meaning of the text of the law. The law does not make the distinctions that Andy imagines.

    I have no idea what libertarians think about invalidating the Michigan racial quotas. If there is enough popular support for state colleges using racial quotas, then maybe Congress will change the law. Meanwhile, what happened to Andy's support for Rule Of Law? He seems to be just saying that the court should let some govt bureaucrats disobey the law for some fuzzy and obscure policy reasons.

     
    College internet police
    More and more, colleges are monitoring their computer networks to make sure students aren't trading MP3 files. Eg, see this Mercury News story.

    This is a bad trend. You might think that internet music should be banned because the students should only be using the computer network for education purposes. But no one says that they can only use their dorm telephone for educational purposes. No one stops them from watching TV in the dorm. They are allowed to check out library books that are not course-related. A college education is more than just coursework anyway, and it is nearly impossible to determine what is educational and what is not. The colleges shouldn't be spying on the students.

     
    What Roe v. Wade says
    Bob asks for proof that Roe v. Wade allows third trimester abortions. The majority opinion states:
    To summarize and to repeat: ... (c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion ...
    This sounds like third trimester abortions can be banned, but read the exception:
    except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.
    This hinges on the definition of medical judgment, and health of the mother. For those definitions, it refers to its preceding (and companion) decision:
    In Doe v. Bolton, post, p. 179, procedural requirements contained in one of the modern abortion statutes are considered. That opinion and this one, of course, are to be read together.
    So we look at Doe v. Bolton for those definitions. It says:
    We agree with the District Court, 319 F. Supp., at 1058, that the medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age - relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment.
    So a woman can get an abortion if the pregnancy is merely detrimental to her psychological or emotional health. And who decides? It is just the physician who does the abortion, and it is unconstitutional to even require that a second physician confirm the judgment. The Doe majority says:
    The statute's emphasis, as has been repetitively noted, the attending physician's "best clinical judgment that an abortion is necessary." That should be sufficient. The reasons for the presence of the confirmation step in the statute are perhaps apparent, but they are insufficient to withstand constitutional challenge. Again, no other voluntary medical or surgical procedure for which Georgia requires confirmation by two other physicians has been cited to us. If a physician is licensed by the State, he is recognized by the State as capable of exercising acceptable clinical judgment.
    Burger's concurrence confirms that the entire medical judgment rests solely on the opinion of the abortionist:
    For my part, I would be inclined to allow a State to require the certification of two physicians to support an abortion, but the Court holds otherwise.
    Thus if a pregnant woman (at any stage) tells a physician that giving birth would be very upsetting to her and the physician is willing to do the abortion, then she has a constitutional right to that abortion under Roe v. Wade.
     
    Electronic money
    John sends this story about micropayments.

    I doubt that this Peppercoin system will catch on, as I think that there are better alternatives. More on this later.


    Sunday, Feb 16, 2003
     
    Liberal radio
    Some rich left-wingers are starting a radio network for liberal Democrats, says this NY Times story. Good. I live in an area that is completely dominated by leftists, and yet the radio station cannot find any leftist radio talk-show hosts, except for a couple of morons. The right-wing hosts have better programs and better ratings. I'd like to hear some leftists who are actually capable of making a coherent argument. We have a few who can babble about how Bush stole the 2000 election so he can bomb poor Iraqi innocents to the benefit of his oil industry buddies.
     

    Google has just bought Blogger. Maybe Google will fix the bugs, and I'll go back to using them for this blog. (They seem trivial, but very annoying.) It was announced in a Mercury News blog.
     
    Affirmative action and religious tolerance
    John and Andy continue the debate. John responds to Andy:
    John wrote, "Here is the text of Title VI 'No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.' ... What possible interpretation of those words can justify racial preferences in admissions to federally-assisted schools?" The wording does not prohibit, and should not be construed as prohibiting, extending affirmative benefits to someone because of race or national origin.
    If the program or activity has selective admissions, as all elite colleges do, then extending affirmative benefits to someone because of race necessarily implies that someone else is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subject to discrimination under the program on account of race. I am astounded that you would refuse to see that.
    If Bishop O'Doul Catholic High School wants to create 30 spots just for Irish students, that's great and should be legal. Catholics who care about the future of their schools should be advocating this.
    They are free to do this if they don't take federal funds.
    The white plaintiff in the U. of Michigan didn't get in because she was weaker than 80% of the entering class, and may have been weaker than 100% of the entering slots (because many admitted students choose not to attend). Race is just a scapegoat.
    She was stronger than any of the candidates admitted to slots reserved for selected minorities. She was excluded from consideration for those slots on account of her race. It is an open-and-shut violation of Title VI.
    John writes, "my construction of the statute does not permit federal regulations to do anything about college preferences for athletes and legacies." Your construction is that extending benefits must be race-neutral and, via Title IX, sex-neutral. Legacies are not race-neutral in effect - they overwhelmingly benefit whites rather than minorities. Football recruitment and scholarships are not sex-neutral, because they cannot be extended to women. The next liberal administration could terminate one or both under your construction, and courts would not overturn such regs.
    You have not addressed many of my earlier points. Title IX has many exceptions to the general sex-neutral rule written into the statute; Title VI has no exceptions. Scalia's opinion in the Sandoval case, speaking for 5 justices, emphatically states that Title VI prohibits only policies that directly and intentionally classify people according to race or national origin, not policies that have a "disparate impact" on particular groups. Indeed, that is the whole basis of our victory in the Sandoval case requiring the English language does not constitute discrimination on the basis of national origin, regardless of whether or not, as Sandoval claimed, English rules "overwhelmingly benefit whites rather than minorities."

    Also, you know better than to assert that Presidents can change the law simply by publishing a new regulation or revoking an old one, "and courts would not overturn such regs." That is simply not true, as you well know. All executive regulation must be in accord with the law as passed by Congress. All regulations are subject to judicial review and many have been overturned.

    Fine, but the fact remains that slavery was first introduced and heavily promoted in Virginia, with its religious toleration, while the people of Massachusetts rejected slavery in their state, with its intolerance of religious dissent. Massachusetts was a place of very high moral standards, and they excluded and (if they returned) killed people who disagreed. It was the least valuable land, and yet the most productive society intellectually and economically. It was probably right to oppose the War of 1812, which the Virginian Presidents ineptly caused.
    Andy has not addressed many of my points. Virginia adopted religious toleration in 1776, Massachusetts in 1780. That brief gap in time is hardly significant, and anyway, the literary and cultural period of Massachusetts came much later. Virginia was not the leading advocate of slavery; South Carolina was. Already in 1776, some Virginians were against slavery. You say Massachusetts "rejected" slavery; in fact, profiting from slavery was a cornerstone of the Massachusetts economy.

    I am astounded that you would praise Massachusetts because they "killed people who disagreed" with established religious dogmas (presumably that was prior to 1780). As I said, it's fine for a religious community (like a convent or monastery) to expel dissenters provided individuals are similarly free to resign. But that is not a model for a political community.

    And Andy responds:
    Roger illustrates the problem by objecting to Catholic schools having affirmative action for Irish students because he doesn't "think most people want their tax money supporting that sort of thing." People can try to pass a law expressly prohibiting it, though I would oppose such a law. Schools should be free to have affirmative action. It's essential to Catholic survival.

    I wrote The wording does not prohibit, and should not be construed as prohibiting, extending affirmative benefits to someone because of race or national origin. John replied, "If the program or activity has selective admissions, as all elite colleges do, then extending affirmative benefits to someone because of race necessarily implies that someone else is excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subject to discrimination under the program on account of race. I am astounded that you would refuse to see that."

    If that were the law's intent, then it could easily say that. It doesn't.

    The cause of the white student's rejection is her weak application, not her race. No one in the University of Michigan office said "let's reject her because she is white." Her entire case is built on an absurd hypothetical would she have gotten if she had been black? Hypotheticals are not causation. I wrote If Bishop O'Doul Catholic High School wants to create 30 spots just for Irish students, that's great and should be legal. Catholics who care about the future of their schools should be advocating this. John replied, "They are free to do this if they don't take federal funds."

    They would risk losing their tax exemption under the statutory interpretation John espouses, just as Bob Jones did.

    John wrote, "Title IX has many exceptions to the general sex-neutral rule written into the statute."

    Please elaborate. Under John's view of federally mandated equality, we are at the mercy of liberal Administrations in applying Title IX. All-male football recruitment and scholarships may ultimately be the casualty.

    Courts rarely overturn regulations. I can't think of a single example in the racial or sexual equality areas.

    Colonial issues will be addressed later.

    I really don't see how discrimination based on national origin can be essential to Catholic school survival. The Catholic schools don't even seem to want to do that. But even if so, they can still discriminate, if they don't take federal funds.

    UMich admissions is saying that students are being rejected because they are white. They are saying that they have a higher standard for whites, and she doesn't meet it. By the time they get to people on the waiting list, they are saying that they've met their quota of white people, and she cannot get in because she is black.

    Suppose I am advertising an apt. for rent, and I say, "1 good reference required for whites, 5 for blacks". Then I reject a black applicant who only had 1 good reference. Did I reject him because he is black or because he didn't have 5 good references?

    If you say that my ad is not discriminatory, they you would completely nullify all federal civil rights laws.

    Andy responds:

    John and Roger apparently argue the following no Catholic school that accepts federal assistance (perhaps through a loan or voucher program) should be allowed to guarantee admission to Irish or Italian applicants.

    This is the libertarian police in action, enforcing the ultimate interference with freedom in the name of equality. Under their view, the federal government can effectively require a Catholic school to be 75% Muslim, as one has become in Jersey City.

    It is unclear whether John and Roger also think a school that guarantees admissions to Irish or Italian applicants should lose its tax exemption.

    Roger's hypothetical advertisement is not what the Univ of Michigan is doing. All the Univ. of Michigan is doing is to limit admissions to candidates who score in the highest percentiles of their respective ethnic groups. Title IV does not prohibit this. A mediocre white applicant fails to gain admissions because of her mediocrity, not due to racial discrimination.

    I am only arguing that the schools should obey the law. The law prohibits certain forms of discrimination. If that's the law, then the courts should respect it, and not try to devise some policy on their own.

    If you want my opinion about what the law should be, then I would make a few changes. First, I'd abolish federal support of schools.

    Andy's rationale for racial quotas doesn't make much sense to me. Suppose U.Michigan said that it would give 80% of its athletic scholarships to whites, and 15% to blacks, because that reflects the racial balance of the state. The white scholarships would goto the best whites, and the black scholarships would goto the best blacks. When a black athlete got locked out of a scholarship because the quota was filled, Andy would tell him that it wasn't race, but his mediocrity compared to other blacks, that caused his rejection. That argument would never fly.


    Saturday, Feb 15, 2003
     
    Affirmative action and religious tolerance
    Andy responds to John:
    Good example by Joe of MIT being watered down. I think Cal Tech is still pretty solid, though that may not last.

    John wrote, "Here is the text of Title VI 'No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.' ... What possible interpretation of those words can justify racial preferences in admissions to federally-assisted schools?"

    The wording does not prohibit, and should not be construed as prohibiting, extending affirmative benefits to someone because of race or national origin. If Bishop O'Doul Catholic High School wants to create 30 spots just for Irish students, that's great and should be legal. Catholics who care about the future of their schools should be advocating this.

    The white plaintiff in the U. of Michigan didn't get in because she was weaker than 80% of the entering class, and may have been weaker than 100% of the entering slots (because many admitted students choose not to attend). Race is just a scapegoat.

    John writes, "my construction of the statute does not permit federal regulations to do anything about college preferences for athletes and legacies."

    Your construction is that extending benefits must be race-neutral and, via Title IX, sex-neutral. Legacies are not race-neutral in effect - they overwhelmingly benefit whites rather than minorities. Football recruitment and scholarships are not sex-neutral, because they cannot be extended to women. The next liberal administration could terminate one or both under your construction, and courts would not overturn such regs.

    On slavery, John wrote, "It's naive to think that the benefits and profits of legalized slavery accrued only or principally to slave owners, or even to the states where slavery was legal. They accrued to the whole United States - in fact, to the North more than the South - and no state had a greater stake in the slave system than Massachusetts. The North financed and insured the South, and purchased its output as raw materials for its factories. The South, meanwhile, was saddled with paying up to 80% of the tariffs that supported the whole federal government."

    Fine, but the fact remains that slavery was first introduced and heavily promoted in Virginia, with its religious toleration, while the people of Massachusetts rejected slavery in their state, with its intolerance of religious dissent. Massachusetts was a place of very high moral standards, and they excluded and (if they returned) killed people who disagreed. It was the least valuable land, and yet the most productive society intellectually and economically. It was probably right to oppose the War of 1812, which the Virginian Presidents ineptly caused.

    No admissions policy, except maybe for extremely rigid racial quotas, is race-neutral in effect.

    Football scholarships are available to girls who qualify. There have been a couple of female placekickers who have played in college games. Under some Title IX interpretations, colleges let girls try out for the football teams. It just happens that none are good enough.

    I don't know what is so great about a high school discriminating in favor of Irish-Americans. I don't think most people want their tax money supporting that sort of thing.

     
    Biz school admissions
    Joe sends this:
    Anybody thinking about going to the Sloan School of Management at MIT? According to the admissions director, Rod Garcia, you'd better have a bubbly personality
    Q Who are the applicants that jump off the page? A You really have to distinguish yourself from the others. Last year, I came across a person who was a medical doctor, and the thing that impressed me about him was that on the side he was also a writer. He has published novels, bestsellers in his country. This applicant really jumped out. You knew that you were dealing with a winner. I was excited to meet him for the interview, but unfortunately I wasn't as impressed He was quiet.
     
    Life explained
    Here is a funny picture from another blog. Explains men and women.
     
    Judge Estrada?
    Andy doesn't want to endorse Estrada:
    I disagree with mother's implied endorsement of Estrada in the column. As I've said, I doubt that he's really pro-life. He argued for applying RICO to abortion protesters, is being promoted by socially liberal Gonzales, and Estrada had this exchange during his hearing:
    "Please tell us what three cases from the last 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence you are most critical of ... and just give me a couple of sentences as to why for each one," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, asked Estrada.

    "I'm not even sure that I could think of three that I would be ... that I would have a sort of adverse reaction to," he replied.

    [Also], I don't see why a filibuster on Estrada would consist of debate about judicial activism by judges already on the bench. A filibuster now would not consist of "Democrats defending the activist, out-of-the-mainstream court decisions on social issues."
    We should have a real debate on the role of the courts. There have been dozens of controversial 5-4 decisions from the SC. It is inconceivable that Estrada could agree with the majority in each case. He should have to tell us something about his legal philosophy. And I agree with the Democrats that the DoJ should turn over copies of memos he has written.

    Estrada is obviously getting advice to keep his mouth shut, as any opinion is subject to ridicule. I think that he should be able to articulate and explain his views, if he is really so smart.

    John answers Andy:

    I disagree with mother's implied endorsement of Estrada in the column. As I've said, I doubt that he's really pro-life.
    The revised column correctly states that Estrada has no publicly known position on abortion. Meanwhile, we do know that (1) pro-abortion organizations have mounted a hysterical campaign against him, and (2) two hard-core, pro-life conservative lawyers, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, have strongly endorsed Estrada based on their personal knowledge of him.
    He argued for applying RICO to abortion protesters,
    He had a job working for the U.S. government agency that was obligated to defend a U.S. statute that was being challenged in court. What was he supposed to do, quit his job? There is no reason to think that the U.S. government position in that case reflects Estrada's personal views or preferences.
    is being promoted by socially liberal Gonzales,
    As are all of Bush's nominees. What are you saying, that Gonzales's support is reason to oppose a nominee? If so, we'll never get anybody on the court.
    and Estrada had this exchange during his hearing: "Please tell us what three cases from the last 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence you are most critical of ... and just give me a couple of sentences as to why for each one," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, asked Estrada. "I'm not even sure that I could think of three that I would be ... that I would have a sort of adverse reaction to," he replied.
    What is wrong with that answer? How would you have answered it? Do you really want or expect a nominee to walk into Schumer's trap?
    On another aspect of the column, I don't see why a filibuster on Estrada would consist of debate about judicial activism by judges already on the bench. A filibuster now would not consist of "Democrats defending the activist, out-of-the-mainstream court decisions on social issues."
    What are your reasons for those two sentences? Of course the purpose of a Democrat filibuster is to defend the activist liberal judiciary. What else could it be?

    See Novak on Estrada. Paradoxically, it may help Estrada get confirmed if people think the Right is lukewarm about him. (Which may be Novak's intention.)

    That is about how much we knew about Souter. A usually-reliable conservative had strongly recommended him.

    Estrada's answer is lame. I expect a nominee who is supposed to be such a smart lawyer to be able to match wits with lawyer. Does Estrada really agree with every decision? No one could.

    I might agree with you if Estrada had staked out a position of judicial restraint. But he hasn't, and we don't know where he stands. So the debate will be over whether a stealth candidate should be blindly approved. I might even agree with points being made by the filibustering Democrats -- Estrada should answer the questions.

    John's replies with a good point:

    This is all water over the dam now. The Dems had two years to hold whatever hearings and conduct whatever investigation they wanted. Two years is enough. Time's up.

    My view is, the 15 people Bush nominated to U.S. Courts of Appeals in 2001 should all be pulled out of committee and called up for a floor vote in the U.S. Senate NOW. The overriding objective is to clear the decks before a Supreme Court vacancy occurs in June.

     
    Killer asteroids
    It is estimated that you chance of dying from a killer asteroid impact is comparable to your chance of dying in a car or plane crash. But would the govt even tell us if an asteroid was heading for Earth? This article says that secrecy is the best option. A movie Deep Impact a couple of years ago had a similar conclusion.

    I think that it should be obvious that the public ought to be told the full facts as soon as they are available. Even in the movie, which tried to portray the president positively for his secrecy policy, he seems to be completely irresponsible and directly causing the deaths of millions of people.

    George writes: "What good is it to know that everyone is going to die in a couple of months?"

    For one thing, not everyone is going to die. In the movie, only those on the US east coast died right away. The rest starved over a period of about 2 years while the govt took all the supplies for an elite who are chosen to survive in underground caves. Maybe a lot of others would survive also, if they can make appropriate preparations.

     
    More on affirmative action
    Andy responds to John:
    I wrote
    John and Roger say it's OK for the feds to enforce equality in school admissions under the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
    John replied, "I say it's OK for the feds to enforce the law. Do you disagree? If you do not want the law enforced, you should openly call for repealing it." I obviously oppose your formalistic interpretation and enforcement of the law. But this is not high enough in priority to justify efforts towards repeal.

    I wrote

    because that only applies to race. Well, it also applies to national origin, raising an issue of whether Catholic schools can favor Irish and Italians in admissions (probably essential to their survival).
    John replied, "What Catholic school has ever tried (or wanted) to discriminate on the basis of national origin? I don't believe it."

    We should be advocating affirmative action by Catholic schools on the basis of national origin. I was stunned that half of Catholic high schools have closed since 1965. The lack of affirmative action at such schools may be why. Thursday I learned that the Catholic school in Jersey City is 75% Muslim. How long do you think such school can survive financially?

    John added, "If, however, some school did want to do so, there is a very simple and perfectly legal way just don't take any federal funds!"

    I doubt the impact of the Michigan affirmative action case will be limited to schools that take federal funds. The ban on classroom prayer in public schools, for example, quickly infected private schools also.

    John wrote, "The controversial quota enforcement of Title IX is not in the statute itself, passed in 1972, or any court decision. It was added by bureaucratic regulations in 1979 and 1996. The pending lawsuit filed by the wrestling coaches challenges the validity of those regulations."

    Which will probably lose. Regulations, "bureaucratic" or not, enjoy broad latitude to implement a statute.

    John wrote, "College preferences for athletes and legacies are legal under current law."

    They are at the mercy of federal regulations, under your construction of the statute.

    John wrote, "The actual decision dealt with a private cause of action, but Scalia's opinion (for the majority of 5 justices) strongly suggested that the regs are invalid and that the court would so rule in an appropriate future case."

    I doubt there are 5, or even 4, votes for invalidating a federal regulation purporting to enforce equality.

    John wrote, "I said most colonies enacted religious toleration in the late 1700s. According to this site, Massachusetts enacted such a statute in 1780.

    Interesting cite, but Massachusetts supported religious institutions through taxation well into the 1800s. Also, your site is deficient in omitting the strict intolerance of religious dissent in Massachusetts during all of its formative years.

    I wrote

    Yet Massachusetts remained the intellectual and cultural leader of the country for centuries,
    John replied, "No more so than Virginia."

    Massachusetts was at a much higher level than Virginia in intellectual and cultural achievement. Nearly all the great writers, thinkers and institutions, at least through the 1800s, were from Massachusetts.

    I wrote

    and was the only colony to eschew slavery.
    John replied, "In fact, Massachusetts probably derived more profits from slavery than any other state. Massachusetts merchants were actively bringing slaves from Africa to the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean. After the slave trade was abolished in 1808, Massachusetts continued to profit handsomely through insurance and manufacturing slave-made goods, protected by high tariffs."

    You're talking about the acts of a very small percentage of the population, which the general population could not have stopped. That's not comparable to allowing slavery within the state.

    The bottom line is that the Puritans established high morals through being intolerant, and built the most intellectually productive and legally society society on that basis. Freedom of admissions by institutions is something we should defend, not criticize.

    John responds to Andy:
    I obviously oppose your formalistic interpretation and enforcement of the law. But this is not high enough in priority to justify efforts towards repeal.
    Here is the text of Title VI "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

    How is my interpretation formalistic - and why is that wrong? What is your interpretation? What possible interpretation of those words can justify racial preferences in admissions to federally-assisted schools?

    I doubt the impact of the Michigan affirmative action case will be limited to schools that take federal funds. The ban on classroom prayer in public schools, for example, quickly infected private schools also.
    Private schools are free to have as much classroom prayer as they want.
    bureaucratic regulations in 1979 and 1996. The pending lawsuit filed by the wrestling coaches challenges the validity of those regulations." Which will probably lose. Regulations, "bureaucratic" or not, enjoy broad latitude to implement a statute.
    Fine, but do these regs "implement" the statute or do they go well beyond it? There are a number of standards that regulations have to meet to be valid. The Title IX regs have never been tested against those standards. You do support the wrestling lawsuit, don't you? If not, what is your position?
    John wrote, "College preferences for athletes and legacies are legal under current law." They are at the mercy of federal regulations, under your construction of the statute.
    No; my construction of the statute does not permit federal regulations to do anything about college preferences for athletes and legacies.
    John wrote, "The actual decision dealt with a private cause of action, but Scalia's opinion (for the majority of 5 justices) strongly suggested that the regs are invalid and that the court would so rule in an appropriate future case." I doubt there are 5, or even 4, votes for invalidating a federal regulation purporting to enforce equality.
    Only last week, Andy lectured us that the current court is a lame duck so it's a waste of time to speculate what current justices would do with a future case, because there will be new justices when the case gets there.
    Massachusetts was at a much higher level than Virginia in intellectual and cultural achievement. Nearly all the great writers, thinkers and institutions, at least through the 1800s, were from Massachusetts.
    Certainly not in the Revolutionary period. Moving to the 1800s, it is true that Massachusetts produced a number of great writers and thinkers - however, they all were born and raised when religious toleration was guaranteed by law.
    You're talking about the acts of a very small percentage of the population, which the general population could not have stopped. That's not comparable to allowing slavery within the state.
    Of course the general population could have stopped it - they did!

    It's naive to think that the benefits and profits of legalized slavery accrued only or principally to slave owners, or even to the states where slavery was legal. They accrued to the whole United States - in fact, to the North more than the South - and no state had a greater stake in the slave system than Massachusetts. The North financed and insured the South, and purchased its output as raw materials for its factories. The South, meanwhile, was saddled with paying up to 80% of the tariffs that supported the whole federal government.

    The bottom line is that the Puritans established high morals through being intolerant, and built the most intellectually productive and legally society society on that basis. Freedom of admissions by institutions is something we should defend, not criticize.
    I support freedom of admission/expulsion by "institutions" - provided that their members are equally free to join or leave. Obviously, that model does not apply to the whole society or body politic.
     
    Slavery reparations
    A NY Times op-ed support paying reparations for slavery. Some dubious economic calculations are needed to determine the amounts. But what if the calculations show that blacks benefited from slavery, and that it was a net loss for whites. Then would blacks have to pay whites reparations?

    George writes:

    That is completely wacky to think that blacks benefited from slavery. They worked for nothing. They were entitled to wages at the least, and the whites were only exploiting the blacks because they had economic value.
    Yes, the blacks had economic value and the plantation owners exploited it. But if you analyze the net effect of slavery, then a lot of other factors come into play. Maybe the slaves were economically better as slave than if the slave traders had left their ancestors in Africa. And maybe, on balance, whites suffered economically from slavery. The costs of slavery include the US Civil War and high crime rates among blacks ever since.

    The op-ed says, "it remains vital, especially during Black History Month, to explore formulas and keep the reparations debate alive." I think that the op-ed is foolish, because an open debate on reparation formulas would open a lot of uncomfortable issues. I am not defending the slave trade, and my ancestors had nothing to do with it as far as I know, but the case could be made that it was a net economic benefit to black people, and a net loss to whites.

    Update: Some letters point out the silliness of reparations. One economist says:

    Slavery does not explain the current income and wealth deficits experienced by African-Americans. Antebellum slaves experienced a material standard of living and skill development that was comparable to the Southern white yeomanry and English working classes. These deficits are due to the Jim Crow period, when African-Americans were legally excluded from employment and educational opportunities.
     
    Microsoft bugs
    Here is more evidence that Microsoft security is a joke. Windows XP password security is bypassed by just inserting a Windows 2000 disk. No special programs needed. All those people entering passwords to login are wasting their time.

    Friday, Feb 14, 2003
     
    Freedom not free
    One company is suing another with a claim that it has exclusive rights to the phrase Freedom of Speech. I say that the company should lose the trademark, since they obviously don't really believe in free speech.
     
    Microsoft sabotage
    John sends this C-Net story about Microsoft's MSN.com web site sabotaging rival browsers. MSN.com always seemed like an annoying site to me, whether I am using a Msft browser or not.
     
    Anti-semitism
    Volokh's blog is usually good, but it has now gone off the deep end with a new blogger named Jacob Levy who is ranting about jewish issues. Levy is pointing the anti-semitism finger at Gary Hart for saying:
    We must not let our role in the world be dictated by ideologues with their special biases and agendas, by militarists who long for the clarity of Cold War confrontation, by think-tank theorists who grind their academic axes, or by Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its national interests.
    This doesn't sound like a reference to Jews at all. But even if it is, it is a valid point.

    Then Levy complains that some people associate Jews to the term "dual loyalty". Since a 1967 US Supreme Court decision, Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), it has been common for US Jews to claim dual citizenship with Israel. That decision said that an American citizen could vote in an Israeli election without losing US citizenship. Now, it is common for Mexicans, Canadian, Europeans, and others to claim dual citizenship, so I really don't think that the concept is particularly associated with jews anymore. Nevertheless, it is fair game to complain about people with dual loyalties influencing US policy, whether they be Mexican, Jewish, Arab, or whatever.

     
    Valentine's Day
    Forgot to send a valentine? There are form letter valentine emails here.
     
    Miguel Estrada
    Liberals are complaining that judicial nominee Miguel Estrada refuses to take a stand on controversial issues like Roe v. Wade. Eg, see Kinsley (also in WashPost) and NY Times.

    Where were they when pro-Roe judges O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer were being confirmed? They all refused to take a stand. Not only that, but the SC liberals (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) all voted to support a law preventing judicial candidates for elected office from expressing their opinions while campaigning for office! Republican Party v. White (2002) They are also blocking cameras in the SC.

    If Estrada really said, "My view of the judicial function, Senator, does not allow me to answer that question.", then I'd agree that he should answer the questions. Kinsley implies he said that. But I doubt he really did.

     
    Junk Geography Research
    I happened to run into an academic geography journal. Some of the articles seemed worthwhile, but it a completely gibberish article on “Feminist Visualizations: Re-envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research” by some kook named Mei-Po Kwan. GIS is just a technical term for computerized maps. Here is a typical paragraph:
    At the level of practice, an urgent need exists to go beyond the conventi onal understanding of GIS as a largely quantitative practice and to recognize the potential of such realization for disrupting the rigid distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods in geographic research. As I have argued elsewhere (Kwan 2002c), GIS can be a site for deconstructing the dualist understanding of geographical methods (as either quantitative or qualitative) and for enacting feminist visualization-the material practice of critical visual methods in feminist geography. Further, as Schuurman (2002) and I (Kwan 2002c) have argued, an important element in feminist critiques of science and vision has been lost in the critical discourse on GIS in the last decade or so. Haraway (1991, 192) not only provides a trenchant critique of modern technoscience and visual technologies, but also emphasizes through her "cyborg manifesto" that feminists can reclaim the vision and power of modern technoscience (GIS technologies included) and participate in "earth-transforming challenges to the views of the masters." Perhaps much would be gained through teasing out the implications of her (1991, 4) question: "Can cyborgs, or binary oppositions, or technological vision hint at ways that the things many feminists have feared most can and must be refigured and put back to work for life and not death?"
    The work was funded by the National Science Foundation. That's right, your tax money.

    Update: Joe writes:

    The feminist geography piece is a classic. The lingo that these people use reminds me of passwords that a "secret society" or club would use - the combinations of words themselves literally have no meaning - they're just strung together (the order doesn't matter) and offered to show that the speaker is in solidarity with the group on the usual laundry list of topics. The same paragraph could be used to "discuss" any branch of science. It never goes beyond this sort of incantatory preamble, but then that's not really the intent.
     
    Affirmative Action, religious tolerance
    John responds to Andy:
    Federal supervision of school admissions policies is not desirable. Mindless equality in school admissions policies is not desirable either. Conservatives spend much of their effort debunking the simplistic calls for federally mandated equality, in many areas ranging from sex to religion to aliens.
    Needless to say, I always oppose "mindless" and "simplistic" policies. I only support "rational" and "thoughtful" policies.
    John and Roger say it's OK for the feds to enforce equality in school admissions under the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
    I say it's OK for the feds to enforce the law. Do you disagree? If you do not want the law enforced, you should openly call for repealing it.
    because that only applies to race. Well, it also applies to national origin, raising an issue of whether Catholic schools can favor Irish and Italians in admissions (probably essential to their survival).
    What Catholic school has ever tried (or wanted) to discriminate on the basis of national origin? I don't believe it. If, however, some school did want to do so, there is a very simple and perfectly legal way just don't take any federal funds!
    Moreover, DOJ applies the similar rules of equality to gender via Title IX.
    Title IX is similar to Title VI in that - as passed by Congress - it states a rule of equality, but does not authorize (or permit) quotas or preferences.

    Title IX is unlike Title VI in that the general rule of gender equality is qualified by numerous exceptions in which sex discrimination is specifically authorized by law. See DoL.gov and DoJ.gov.

    The controversial quota enforcement of Title IX is not in the statute itself, passed in 1972, or any court decision. It was added by bureaucratic regulations in 1979 and 1996. The pending lawsuit filed by the wrestling coaches challenges the validity of those regulations.

    Once affirmative action is striken, then why not invalidate all preferences for athletes in all-male sports? And why not some federal regulations to invalidate legacies, which have a disparate racial impact?
    Didn't we recently have a lecture from Andy about the fallacy of "consistency" arguments? College preferences for athletes and legacies are legal under current law. If you think there is something wrong with this, you're free to lobby Congress to pass a new law.
    John cited Sandoval, but that case only barred a private cause of action. It did not prevent intrusive federal regulations.
    The actual decision dealt with a private cause of action, but Scalia's opinion (for the majority of 5 justices) strongly suggested that the regs are invalid and that the court would so rule in an appropriate future case.
    It is essential that schools be allowed to admit whom they want, without federal interference.
    They can admit whom they want if they don't take federal funds.
    On federalism grounds alone, Congress and the Supreme Court should stay out of the University of Michigan's admissions' office, not to mention that of private schools. (Note that John argues independent of the 14th amendment, which perhaps altered federalism for race.)
    I know of no theory of "federalism" that says you can take federal money but disregard the conditions that Congress has placed on the use of that money. That would violate core Constitutional principles.
    Finally, John implied that religious toleration was accepted by the colonies by the late 1700s. Not in the leading colony of Massachusetts. It was built on Puritanism, which was very intolerant of other views.
    I said most colonies enacted religious toleration in the late 1700s. According to this site, Massachusetts enacted such a statute in 1780.
    Yet Massachusetts remained the intellectual and cultural leader of the country for centuries,
    No more so than Virginia.
    and was the only colony to eschew slavery.
    In fact, Massachusetts probably derived more profits from slavery than any other state. Massachusetts merchants were actively bringing slaves from Africa to the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean. After the slave trade was abolished in 1808, Massachusetts continued to profit handsomely through insurance and manufacturing slave-made goods, protected by high tariffs.
    What's wrong with building a religious society (or school) in the woods and kicking out dissenters? Nothing.
    Nothing - so long as people are free to enter and leave such a society (without being forced to lose their property).
    I think the problem here is that Andy has been brainwashed by law profs who believe that policy decisions should be made by judges. He refuses to deal with the text of the law that Congress passed.

    Thursday, Feb 13, 2003
     
    Duct Tape
    The duct tape advice is really silly. It is really unlikely that duct tape is going to save anyone from a bio-terrorist attack. There are a lot of survivalist tools that are a lot more important. One of the main ones is a GUN. Along with emergency food, medicines, and other supplies, every well-prepared household should have a gun, and someone in the household trained to use it.

    Mention of guns is conspicuously absent in the official advice. Read survivalist Tim May's opinion.

     
    Napster
    Joe writes:
    What is your current practice on downloading stuff that may be copyright protected? Is paranoia in order in view of the Verizon case?
    Copyright law has a 3-year statute of limitations. Soon, all the music from Napster should be safe from claims.

    I suspect that RIAA wants to prosecute an individual music sharer, and make an example out of him. It would like the feds to do a criminal prosecution, but so far the DoJ has taken the bait. So the RIAA may have to do it itself.

    The RIAA needs to choose its target carefully. If it makes a martyr out of someone, or loses the case, then it could end up much worse off. The target should be:

  • sharing at least 500 songs on a broadband connection 24/7.
  • someone who never buys CDs.
  • someone who lacks the resources to fight in court.
  • someone with porn or other materials that make him unsympathetic.

    This article claims that a company paid $1M to settle an RIAA claim.

    So I suppose you could be the unlucky person that the RIAA tries to make an example out of. But the odds are very much against it.

    I have a discussion of Napster legal issues here.

  •  
    Total Information Awareness
    Safire is dealing with piffle and flapdoodle again.
     
    Spam
    This guy thinks that spam was sent in his name. It is more likely that a spammer broke into his account, and sent the spam from his account. Something similar happened to me about a month ago.
     
    Clara Harris guilty.
    CNN story. I don't know why anyone should be surprised. It seemed like a simple case of cold-blooded premeditated murder to me.

    Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003
     
    Defending affirmative action
    Andy writes:
    Federal supervision of school admissions policies is not desirable. Mindless equality in school admissions policies is not desirable either. Conservatives spend much of their effort debunking the simplistic calls for federally mandated equality, in many areas ranging from sex to religion to aliens.

    John and Roger say it's OK for the feds to enforce equality in school admissions under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because that only applies to race. Well, it also applies to national origin, raising an issue of whether Catholic schools can favor Irish and Italians in admissions (probably essential to their survival). Moreover, DOJ applies the similar rules of equality to gender via Title IX. Once affirmative action is stricken, then why not invalidate all preferences for athletes in all-male sports? And why not some federal regulations to invalidate legacies, which have a disparate racial impact?

    John cited Sandoval, but that case only barred a private cause of action. It did not prevent intrusive federal regulations.

    It is essential that schools be allowed to admit whom they want, without federal interference. On federalism grounds alone, Congress and the Supreme Court should stay out of the University of Michigan's admissions' office, not to mention that of private schools. (Note that John argues independent of the 14th amendment, which perhaps altered federalism for race.)

    Finally, John implied that religious toleration was accepted by the colonies by the late 1700s. Not in the leading colony of Massachusetts. It was built on Puritanism, which was very intolerant of other views. Yet Massachusetts remained the intellectual and cultural leader of the country for centuries, and was the only colony to eschew slavery. What's wrong with building a religious society (or school) in the woods and kicking out dissenters? Nothing.

    Private schools can do what they want, if they refuse federal money. If they take the money, then they cannot discriminate on the basis of race. That's the law. It is not clear if Andy wants to change that law in Congress, or have some court decide what it thinks admissions policy should be, or what.

    It is amusing to see Andy defend religious intolerance.

     
    DVD Copying
    John asks about the 321 Studios legal dispute with Hollywood. Its web site says:
    In 1998, Congress passed, and the president signed, legislation to update copyright law for the digital age. The new law - known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - was widely heralded as a way to protect the rights of artists and writers. Yet the law is being interpreted in ways never intended by Congress - extinguishing your fair use rights by outlawing the sale of software or other tools that allow consumers to make back-up copies of DVDs or other emerging digital formats for personal use.
    I don't agree with this. The main purpose of the DMCA was to extinguish those fair use rights. I think that it is a bad law, and it would have been better to retain those fair use rights, but it is what Congress intended. I expect 321 Studios to lose in court.

    DVD movies come with a copy protection system that stops casual users from making copies, whether for fair use or any other purpose. The system was cracked and software to circumvent the copy protection and rip the DVDs is now readily available on the net.

    Hollywood does not just want to limit copying. It interprets copyright law to give copyright holder a lot of control over how the product is licensed. The 321 Studios product reduces that control, and is therefore an infringement of the copyright rights. Or so Hollywood will tell the judge.

    Andy wrote:

    We actively opposed the DCMA, of course, and would be sympathetic with 321 Studios. However, I'm a bit jaded right now with trying to help liberal attorneys who rely on liberal arguments (first in Eldred, then in Sell).

    321 Studios brought this lawsuit, and brought it in San Francisco! That's the venue that threw the book at Napster. 321 seeks a declaratory judgment that it has a free speech right to do what it is doing. Those are very hard to get, as courts are not in the business of giving advisory opinions.

    Again, I sympathize with 321 Studios and would be happy to talk to them. The company and its law firm would be well advised to reach out to Eagle Forum and others for amicus briefs, because help is surely needed.

     
    Owners will be forced to rent their empty homes
    John sends this story about London landlords being forced to rent out vacant property, and adds:
    This is an interesting exercise of local land use power. If it is constitutional to have compulsory leasing of real property, then "a fortiori" we should have compulsory licensing of intellectual property.
    The US already has some compulsory IP licensing laws. Eg, musicians can perform a published song, and released music can be song on the radio, all at rates fixed by the feds. Songwriters get 8 cents whenever one of their songs is distributed.
     
    More on civil rights
    John responds to Andy on civil rights:
    Activities and sports have always been considered as criteria for admission to elite colleges. There is no evidence they are used for the purpose of including or excluding any racial group. Hence, it is wrong to call them a form of affirmative action.
    John rants and raves about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which apparently prohibits only racial-type discrimination. But subsequent Civil Rights Acts prohibit all sorts of other discrimination. Once John wants the feds to police college admissions based on race, then similar policing based on religion and gender is inevitable. It's not conservative to demand a federal watchdog to police college admissions policies. Must religiously affiliated schools end all their affirmative action also?
    What "subsequent Civil Rights Acts" are relevant to this discussion? As fas as I know, the only relevant statute is Title VI of CRA'64. That statute says that programs and entities that receive federal funds may not discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin. Nothing about religion or gender.

    As Andy should know from Scalia's opinion in Alexander v. Sandoval, Title VI prohibits only acts of intentional discrimination on the prohibited bases. It has not been construed to prohibit the use of neutral criteria merely because they may have a disparate impact on a particular race.

    Many people incorrectly think that the issue of affirmative action in college admissions is based on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, whose precise boundaries are debatable. For example, yesterday the eminent Bob Bartley repeated that fallacy.

    In fact, the relevant law is a federal statute enacted under the spending power of Congress. It is the same type of law as:

  • the Solomon Amendment, which forbids schools from discriminating against U.S. military recruiters;
  • the Equal Access Act, which forbids schools from discriminating against student-run religious clubs and activities;
  • the Buckley Amendment (FERPA), which forbids schools from violating the privacy of student records;
  • the Hatch/Grassley Amendment (PPRA), which forbids schools from requiring students to reveal personal information in 7 listed categories.

    Yes, I think all such laws should be vigorously enforced. If they have unwanted side effects, the laws can be amended by Congress.

    Andy wrote:

    In my US History class today, I asked if colonial Puritans should have been able to kick out preachers from Massachusetts for espousing differing views. The majority said yes, and I agreed. Likewise, religiously affiliated schools should be able admit based on religion, through affirmative action.
    What do you [Andy] mean by "kick out"? What do you mean by "should have been able to" -- Are you referring to the law that prevailed in the colonies at that time, or some sort of higher law? Are you saying that you and your students would have opposed the Religious Toleration acts that most colonies adopted in the late 1700s?
  •  
    Discrimination under the Civil Rights Act
    Andy writes:
    John and Liza miss the point about how "activities" are used to admit white applicants at elite schools. Universities supposedly are about learning and knowledge, after all. Sports stars are those typically having doting parents who gave them the best trainers and camps. No working teenager has time to become a recruit, regardless of his potential. Moreover, schools use activities to manipulate admissions for many non-recruits as well.

    Once John and Liza agree to deviate from intellectual standards for admission, then then the argument is over. Affirmative action becomes possible for many groups. Indeed, it is already widely used for many groups, including whites.

    John rants and raves about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which apparently prohibits only racial-type discrimination. But subsequent Civil Rights Acts prohibit all sorts of other discrimination. Once John wants the feds to police college admissions based on race, then similar policing based on religion and gender is inevitable. It's not conservative to demand a federal watchdog to police college admissions policies. Must religiously affiliated schools end all their affirmative action also?

    In my US History class today, I asked if colonial Puritans should have been able to kick out preachers from Massachusetts for espousing differing views. The majority said yes, and I agreed. Likewise, religiously affiliated schools should be able admit based on religion, through affirmative action.

    There is a law about racial discrimination. There is no law requiring schools to use only "intellectual standards for admission", whatever that means. Andy, maybe what you really want is to repeal the CRA of 1964.

    Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003
     
    Astronomy news
    Important new astronomy results have just been announced based on data from the $145M WMAP satellite. It seems like a lot of money, but every shuttle launch cost $500M, and that last Columbia mission was doing trivialities in comparison. The energy of the universe consists of 4% matter as we know it, and the rest is some undiscovered particles and energy.
     
    Lousy pop-up blocker
    Cringely says that the Earthlink pop-up blocker is really a worm that is worse than the pop-up that is supposedly blocks. There are other good pop-up blockers, if you want.
     
    Even the word is banned
    In a Canadian school, zero tolerance for guns goes beyond toy guns, drawings of guns, and imaginary guns. It has banned the word gun from spelling lists!
     
    Attack of the birds
    Charlie reports that a raven attack has killed 19 sheep.
     
    Commie movie
    I just saw the movie One of the Hollywood Ten (2000), starring Jeff Goldblum. It is a boring and silly left-wing propaganda movie that was partially funded by the British govt. It was supposed to be a sympathetic portrayal of Herbert Biberman, an American movie director of the 1950s who was actually loyal to the Communist Party. He served several months in prison for refusing to testify about his allegiance to the Stalinist Soviet Union. I think that our society was way too good to him.

    George writes:

    Are you defending the Hollywood blacklist? They didn't do anything illegal. They had a right to their political views.
    Yeah, I guess that they had a right to belong to a traitorous organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the US govt. Just like goofy leftist actors today supporting Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. Supporting Stalin in 1950 is like supporting Osama bin Laden today. You might lose your job.

    Actually, the Hollywood Ten did do something illegal. They defied a Congressional subpoena. Everyone else has to answer subpoenas. If I refused, I'd goto jail also.

     

    Are you getting paid overtime, if you are a programmer? Management employees are usually exempt, but programmers are usually not in management. Calif law says that only computer software professionals who earn at least $41 per hour are exempt from California's overtime laws. The cut-off is $27.63 in other states.

    Monday, Feb 10, 2003
     

    Slate's idiot legal columnist complains about the license plates in Florida and elsewhere that say Choose Life. The legal problem is that the state is supposedly restricting debate on a controversial issue to one side. That objection might be ameliorated by a Choose Death plate.

    But the pro-abortion lobby is upset anyway, and doesn't want a contrary slogan either. I think the real problem is no much the word Life, but the word Choose. The pro-abortion has expended a lot of effort in co-opting the word choice, and they don't like someone else playing their word games.


    Sunday, Feb 09, 2003
     

    Scientia est potentia — knowledge is power. I love that Poindexter Information Awareness Office logo. I put it in the margin on the left, over my picture. Read more here, or buy products here.
     

    More on affirmative action. Liza writes:
    Harvard isn't about averages. It is about very high scorers and achievers. The 4-point advantage of Asians over whites on average doesn't tell you anything about the availability of very high scorers among whites and Asians. It certainly doesn't mean that the high end of the Bell curve is full of Asians and lacking whites.

    Moreover, Harvard et al. don't just want high test scores. They want people who will be leaders, creators, innovators, politicians, successful business executives, etc. Judging from current demographics, many more white than Asian students will wind up in those categories. Activities/sports are one way of trying to assess a student's capacity for leadership or creativity.

    My Princeton classmate who was co-captain of the football team at Princeton is now the governor of Maryland. (I didn't know him.) All the Asian students I knew were engineers and I have no idea what has become of them.

    Andy writes:
    John writes, " But there is never a legitimate reason for using racial preferences at schools that receive federal tax funds."

    John thereby subjects virtually every college in the country, public and private, to the libertarian police.

    Like most libertarian arguments, they ignore the likely result. Princeton just abolished a summer school that helped prepare minorities for the fall, in response to a complaint by a libertarian group. This is progress?? The SAT is fuzzying itself up to appease the California college system, required to become race-neutral about five years ago. Is this what you're trying to achieve?

    John writes, "Whites are the one group that never benefits from diversity."

    Not true. Many admissions criteria at top schools today help whites gain spots over Asians having better scores. Where's the libertarian outrage over that?

    Conservatives are in favor of admissions criteria that draw rational differences between gender and religion. Christian schools, for example, should be able to give preferences to Christian applicants, even though they receive federal funding under the Grove City line of precedents. Likewise for gender-based criteria. It's a tough sell arguing that unthinking equality in admissions is required for race, but not for gender or creed. Don't the Civil Rights Acts demand the same type of equality for all three categories?

    Thoughtless equality is a libertarian game, not a conservative objective.

    John writes:
    Andy wrote:
    John writes, " But there is never a legitimate reason for using racial preferences at schools that receive federal tax funds." John thereby subjects virtually every college in the country, public and private, to the libertarian police.
    It was not I or the libertarians who made this law. It was the left-liberals who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which all libertarians and most conservatives opposed at the time.
    Like most libertarian arguments, they ignore the likely result. Princeton just abolished a summer school that helped prepare minorities for the fall, in response to a complaint by a libertarian group. This is progress??
    Yes, indeed. Many white students could have benefited from that summer program. For Princeton to exclude white students on account of their race was a flagrant violation of federal law. Princeton could have decided to fix program by operating it on a race-neutral basis. Instead, they chose to abolish the program. That speaks volumes!
    The SAT is fuzzying itself up to appease the California college system, required to become race-neutral about five years ago. Is this what you're trying to achieve?
    Of course not. But as I pointed out yesterday, open or random admissions are perfectly legal under federal civil rights law.
    John writes, "Whites are the one group that never benefits from diversity." Not true. Many admissions criteria at top schools today help whites gain spots over Asians having better scores. Where's the libertarian outrage over that?
    Show us the evidence that white students have ever received illegal racial preferences at elite colleges. I don't believe it.
    Conservatives are in favor of admissions criteria that draw rational differences between gender and religion. Christian schools, for example, should be able to give preferences to Christian applicants, even though they receive federal funding under the Grove City line of precedents. Likewise for gender-based criteria.
    Fine, but so what? These criteria are perfectly legal. Religion and gender-based preferences are not prohibited.
    It's a tough sell arguing that unthinking equality in admissions is required for race, but not for gender or creed. Don't the Civil Rights Acts demand the same type of equality for all three categories?

    Thoughtless equality is a libertarian game, not a conservative objective.

    Those might have been good arguments against the CRA'64, but it's a little late to bring them up now. The law was passed, and its constitutionality has been sustained. The only question is whether elite colleges will obey the law like everyone else, or whether they will be allowed continue their 25-year practice of massive resistance.

    Andy wrote:

    Liza wrote, "My Princeton classmate who was co-captain of the football team at Princeton is now the governor of Maryland. (I didn't know him.)" This argument supports affirmative action.
    Why? Ehrlich did not receive a racial preference or any other illegal preference.
    Many prominent blacks, including many conservative ones, were beneficiaries of affirmative action.
    Of the blacks who received racial preferences, liberals outnumber conservatives by about 1,000 to 1.

    From Roger's blog in response to my last e-mail:

    I have to agree with John on this point. The 14A to the US Constitution has been reinterpreted in the courts to apply to all sorts of things that it was never intended to do. But if there is one thing that the 14A was squarely intended to stop, and that it racial discrimination by the states. For state colleges to use racial quotas is directly opposite to the text and spirit of the 14A. Likewise with federal civil rights laws.
    Actually, this issue is not controlled directly by the 14th Amendment, whose precise boundaries are highly debatable. The controlling legal authority is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. section 2000d. That statute is crystal clear, emphatic, and inescapable.
     

    John sends this LA Times story about companies bailing out of California because of the anti-business political climate.
     

    John says that fish do not feel pain.
     

    Charlie wants to know why the spam program cannot be solved. The NY Times's Gleick says spam is not a free speech right:
    Many people who hate spam believe, honorably enough, that it's protected as free speech. It is not. The Supreme Court has made clear that individuals may preserve a threshold of privacy. ''Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit,'' wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in a 1970 decision. ''We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another.''
    I say the problem is similar to the problems of unsolicited bulk postal mail and telemarketers. It ought to be possible to cut off the problem at the source, but too many people are making too much money on it.

    I agree with Gleick's basic conslusions that forged headers should be illegal, and a specific header entry should identify the email as unsolicited. Same for postal mail and telemarketers.

     

    For 100s of years, the top 10 chess players in the world have been men. Now one is a woman, and one is a computer.
     

    France is getting some new smart cards that work like cash. Similar cards have previously been available in Europe. Why not the US?
     

    Wash Post article says Msft still faces antitrust troubles in Europe.

    Saturday, Feb 08, 2003
     

    John writes:
    There is a theme that runs through Alexander's blog. Republicans are big hypocrites who violate all their principles as soon as they get elected. e.g., he says the Republican platform opposes affirmative action, but Republicans constantly practice affirmative action. The Republican party makes special efforts to recruit minority candidates and appeal to minority voters. Republican businessmen try to be "diverse" in order to attract minority customers.

    Of course, when you're 16, all adults are hypocrites. But Alex totally misunderstands the issue. Conservative Republicans don't say that affirmative action to promote racial diversity is always wrong. In the zone of private choice, where civil rights laws do not apply, it is perfectly legal and there's nothing wrong with it.

    The conservative Republican position is simply this civil rights laws should be applied and enforced neutrally for all races. They should not be applied or enforced solely to benefit "Democratic" racial groups and penalize "Republican" racial groups.

    The Republican position is that civil rights laws should be interpreted, applied and enforced according to the original understanding of what those laws meant - i.e., according to the promises liberals made when the civil rights laws were passed.

    In 1963, Martin Luther King said that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. In 1964, Senator Hubert Humphrey, chief sponsor of the civil rights bill, promised that he would eat the paper the bill was printed on if it ever led to quotas or "preferential treatment" for any particular group.

    Of course, it only took about a year for those promises to be thrown out the window, as a few brave Republicans like Barry Goldwater predicted. In 1965, the phrase "affirmative action" was coined by Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246. In 1969, Nixon adopted the Philadelphia Plan for racial quotas in federal contracting. In 1971, Nixon-appointed Chief Justice Burger wrote the Griggs v. Duke Power decision, which interpreted Title VII of the civil rights act to allow disparate impact cases, which led to racial quotas in private employment.

    Contrary to Alexander, the hypocrites are the Democrats who support racial preferences in areas where the civil rights laws apply, like college admissions. It is irrelevant whether Republicans support racial preferences in areas where civil rights laws do not apply. Republicans support the law; Democrats evade and defy the law.

    Andy responds:
    Alex is right concerning affirmative action. When done for legitimate reasons, such training minorities likely to work in minority areas, there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, whites now benefit as much from affirmative action at elite colleges as any other ethnic group, based on various preferences.

    Bush's solution is to guarantee admissions at elite public colleges, regardless of merit, to the top 10% of every public school. That is far worse than the liberal approach, because Bush's plan destroys real test-based criteria. Bush's plan also undermines the quality of high schools, since their overall standards become irrelevant.

    According to the Bell Curve and population distribution, a true merit-based international admissions process should result in an almost entirely Asian student body.

    Whites benefit from affirmative action making their percentages at elite schools much higher than the Bell Curve predicts.

    Liza writes:
    I don't believe that whites would be nearly squeezed out by Asians on merit. The white-Asian gap in test scores is not that high; there are still plenty of high-scoring whites. In addition, elite schools want good activities and/or sports, which tend not to be the strong suit of Asian students.
    Andy writes:
    Liza's argument is circular. She says the "elite schools want good activities and/or sports, which tend not to be the strong suit of Asian students."

    Elite schools want to dampen Asian admission, which is why they "want good activities and/or sports." Unless someone is a recruit, which is a small percentage, there is no legitimate reason to accept someone with weaker test scores simply because he or she had a few activities. Ditto for the geographic and legacy emphases. Why aren't the critics of affirmative action jumping up and down about these devices for manipulating class demographics?

    Roger writes, "I haven't heard of other schools" [besides UC Berkeley] giving preferences to whites over Asians.

    Well, does Roger reject the Bell Curve as liberals do? For those who accept the Bell Curve, the real outrage is why elite schools don't admit more Asians. According to the Bell Curve, Asians have an IQ of 104 compared to 100 for whites. And there are far more Asians worldwide than whites, which means Asians should be filling these elite classes under an intellectual meritocracy.

    John responds:

    I am the one who said there's nothing wrong with affirmative action when done for legitimate reasons, i.e., in zones of private choice not subject to civil rights laws. But there is never a legitimate reason for using racial preferences at schools that receive federal tax funds.

    I disagree [with Andy's criticism of Bush]. Better for state schools to have open or random admissions than to allow them to disregard and defy the law that everyone else has to obey.

    That's a red herring. Legacy admissions are not illegal.

    Andy is forgetting that non-residents pay much higher tuition, and non-resident tuition can always be raised further if a school thinks it has too many non-residents. It's perfectly legal for schools to discriminate against non-residents.

    [It is nonsense to say that whites benefit from affirmative action]. Whites are the one group that never benefits from diversity.

    Geographic and legacy preferences are not illegal. Neither are preferences for "good activities and/or sports." Just racial preferences. Why is that so hard for Andy to understand?

    The conservative position is that liberal colleges should obey the civil rights laws that liberals passed - the same laws that the rest of us are forced to obey. Why is that such a difficult concept?

    What is this "worldwide" nonsense [from Andy]? Our civil rights laws do not apply worldwide. They apply to U.S. citizens and legal residents. Among that relevant population, there are not enough high-I.Q. Asians to "fill[] these elite classes." But if Asian-Americans are over-represented at some elite colleges, then so be it.

    I have to agree with John on this point. The 14A to the US Constitution has been reinterpreted in the courts to apply to all sorts of things that it was never intended to do. But if there is one thing that the 14A was squarely intended to stop, and that it racial discrimination by the states. For state colleges to use racial quotas is directly opposite to the text and spirit of the 14A. Likewise with federal civil rights laws.

    Friday, Feb 07, 2003
     

    Some lawyers on misc.int-property doubt that incorporation can protect the officers of a startup company from patent infringement liability.

    The only liability would be to the corporation that makes or markets the products.

    To take a recent example, Shawn Fanning created a potentially infringing product, and then incorporated into Napster. Napster went bankrupt with 100s of millions of dollars in infringement liabilities. Fanning was personally protected, and only lost his stock in the corporation.

    Here in Silicon Valley, 90% of startups infringe patents. Some get sued, and some don't. They all incorporate, and the corporate veil is never pierced for patent infringement. It is just a risk of doing business.

    I am not against lawyers, but the advice from lawyers from that forum on this topic is wacky and foolish and incorrect. Silicon Valley would not exist if anyone listened to the advice here.

     

    Mike writes:
    I just got a call from a gal with a heavy southern accent who claimed to be calling from DeLay's office. She asked for me by name but I denied I was here and asked if she wished to leave a message. The message was that I had been awarded an NLA and I should call DeLay back immediately. Does this sound like me???

    Apparently, it's a well-known (but official?) Republican scam. See this or this.

    Here's where a crypto protocol has spilled over into my phone manners. If the authentication fails, then say so and terminate the call. Any other course of action is bad.

    Eg, if the caller says that she is from DeLay's office, and the Caller ID box says something else, then she is lying to you, and no further conversation will be productive.

    Occasionally I get a caller claiming to be from the phone company, the sheriff's office, the local newspaper, my credit card company, my bank etc, when they really aren't. They are telemarketers doing contract calling. Sometimes they are even calling from India or E. Europe. Caller ID gives them away. Occasionally I'll say "Put me on your Do Not Call List", but that's about all.

     

    John sends this story about a wrestling coach who subdued 4 intruders while waiting for the cops.
     

    Here is a worthwhile Stanford effort to resist the push for voting machines.
     

    Here is an effort to recall Calif. Gov. Gray Davis. He has indeed been a disaster for the state. Unfortunately, he was re-elected 3 months ago, and the damage is done.
     

    John sends this NY Times story about people refusing the smallpox vaccine.

    Thursday, Feb 06, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    There is insufficient logic in John's arguments about the Church, and Roger's arguments about the PBA. Logic will inevitably prevail in both areas.

    John argues that the Church should be silent about pro-abortion Catholics because it must clean its own house first. But personal transgressions do not justify silence. One mistake is no reason to commit another. The Church will exclude Gray Davis, and others, just as millions of Catholics who remarry are excluded each year. And, yes, pro-abortion advocates in Kansas or Nebraska were excluded about ten years ago. I remember reading about their reactions.

    Roger wastes his arguments about PBA on speculation about what the current Court would do. Even if such speculation were fruitful, the current Court is little more than a lame duck. In nine months it will have a new Chief Justice; within a few years it will have 3 new justices. It's a waste to argue about what current Justices would do.

    John gave a link purporting to show Ann Coulter's endorsement of Miguel Estrada. I checked it out, and remain unconvinced.

    I am not speculating about what the current SC will do -- they are already on record as upholding Roe v. Wade.
     

    John writes:
    Roger wrote:
    I just don't see the point of trying to establish a factual record that some medical procedure is never preferable, and then banning it. If it is really never preferable, then the law has no effect because no one would want to do it anyway. It is like banning a perpetual motion machine. And if some physician somewhere finds it preferable (with the consent of the patient), then the ban runs contrary to Roe v. Wade and is unconstitutional. So either way, the law has no effect.
    I didn't say the procedure is never "preferable." Obviously somebody considers it preferable; otherwise it wouldn't be done. But preferable for whom, and for what reason? Doctors are not allowed to do procedures that are preferable for themselves or third parties. It has to be preferable for the patient. So the question is whether it is ever "medically necessary," i.e., medically preferable for the patient.
    The abortionist is not accountable to anyone (as long as he is a physician). Nobody. Roe v. Wade. Get over it.
    I disagree. He is still bound by and accountable for all the laws and ethical rules that govern the medical profession. For example, suppose the fetus survives the abortion. In such a case, which is not unheard of, it may be "preferable" to abandon the infant and let it die. But the doctor is legally and ethically obligated to provide the same level of care for the "unwanted" infant as if it were a normal birth.
    If the fetus survives the abortion, then it is outside the scope of Roe v. Wade. Ordinary laws about murder apply.

    John must be living in a dream world to think that all physicians only choose procedures based on patient preferences. There is no law to that effect, and if there were, it would radically change medicine.

     

    George writes:
    How can you defend that medical marijuana conviction? The jurors themselves are protesting it.
    Yeah, here is one of the jurors expressing regret. She says:
    As jurors, we followed the law exactly as it was explained to us by Judge Charles Breyer. We played our part in the criminal justice system precisely as instructed. But the verdict we reached -- the only verdict those instructions allowed us to reach -- was wrong. It was cruel, inhumane and unjust.
    Now might be a good time for the marijuana lobby to educate the public about jury nullification. Jurors are supposed to think for themselves, not blindly follow instructions. Mike writes:
    I think the juror's saying they did play that role as it was explained to them by the (hanging) judge. But, yeah, it is what us old dopers want to hear.
    The judge explained that the federal statute makes no medical marijuana exception for dope peddlers. The decision on guilt or innocence was up to the jury, not the judge. These jurors sound like Florida 2000 voters who regretted voting for Ralph Nader.
     

    A Michigan student sued for a better grade. Not news? Ok, read the details. He was getting school credit for working as a paralegal in his mom's law office, and he got an A, but he wants an A+!

    I say to give him an F, for choosing work experience that is unproductive, damages society, and has probably permanently warped his attitude towards life.

     

    Should a printer maker be able to control the market for replacement ink cartridges?

    The Mercury News reports that some HP cartridges have a Y2K bug of sorts -- they will deliberately refuse to print if they are "expired", according to the system date on your PC and the scheduled lock-out date on the cartridge. The work-around is to turn back the clock on your PC!

    Lexmark is suing a cartridge maker under the DMCA in order to lock them out of the Lexmark printer market. IMO, this is an abuse of copyright law. The DMCA opponents warned that this sort of thing would happen. Felton's blog reports that the defendant has asked the Copyright Office for an exception.

    Meanwhile, Odlyzko gives an economic argument for printer makers being able to control cartridge prices for their printers. As long as there is healthy competition among printer makers, he has a point.

     

    A new theory of hiccups says that it is all because Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. Or something like that.
     

    John also responds to Andy:
    Andy wrote:

    John wrote, "So the bishops who failed to discipline their own priests are now expected to discipline politicians? I don't think so! As the bishops have woefully failed to keep their own house in order ..."

    Though this type of consistency argument is common, it is not logical. There should be no consistency with mistakes or shortcomings of the past. Indeed, many of the Gospel parables show the fallacy of this familiar consistency argument. Emerson's famous quote observed the fallacy also.

    Who said anything about consistency? I agree that bishops should not be held to the same standard as politicians. They should he held to a higher standard. That bishops are behaving no better than politicans - what kind of defense is that?
    John then calls exclusion from Communion "unprecedented in modern times." In fact, millions of divorcees face the same fate each year,
    Divorced Catholics are not excluded from Communion.
    as have others advocating abortion (e.g., in Kansas or Nebraska about ten years ago).
    The bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska threatened to do so, but there is no evidence that his threat was ever actually carried out.
    John writes, "Such an effort, at this late date, would be seen by Catholic and non-Catholic alike as a desperate effort to change the subject from their own malfeasance."

    The Church shouldn't concern herself with perceptions, which are largely unpredictable anyway.

    This attitude by the pope and bishops led to the first Protestant Reformation. If similar attitudes prevail today, we will have another reformation and/or schism.
    Given that Catholics in California voted for pro-abortion Gray Davis by a whopping 20-point margin, and that half of Catholic high schools in America have closed since 1965, there are some serious long-term problems for the Church here. It's not so much that I expect the Church to discipline her politicians, but that I don't see how the Church can avoid it and retain vitality.
    The church needs to get its own house in order first.
    Another reformation or schism?? Cool. Meanwhile, I think divorced Catholics can get Communion, but not those who remarried outside the Church.
     

    John defends his abortion opinion:
    Andy wrote
    Cleaning out my mailbag I noticed this claim by John "Contrary to Andy's predictions, Bush reiterated his call for a PBA ban in the SOTU." But that isn't contrary to my predictions. Continued lip-service by Bush to the pro-lifers is exactly what I expect. My prediction was that Bush/Frist won't pass the PBA ban. It's already February, and my prediction has held true. Lott promised to pass it ASAP, and was then immediately ousted by Bush.
    Passing a PBA ban would be just paying lip-service. Such a bill would be null and void, and of no practical consequence.
    I continue to disagree with Roger's view that a PBA ban cannot be upheld without overturning Roe v. Wade.

    According to Roger (see Jan. 30-31 e-mail and Jan. 31 blog) "And the medical judgment is solely in the hands of the physician who does the abortion, and he cannot be accountable to anyone for that decision. ... IOW, medical necessity is defined by one physician's unilateral opinion."

    This is one possible reading of Roe, but it is an extremist, absolutist interpretation which the court has not stated quite so starkly. While Roger's interpretation may be true with respect to the medical necessity of having an abortion, that does not mean it is necessarily true of the medical necessity of any or every particular means, method, or procedure that a doctor may select. Nothing in the case dealt with that.

    In the Supreme Court's PBA case, 5 of the 6 justices who support Roe v. Wade said PBA cannot be prohibited. But the reason they gave was an assumption of fact, namely, that there are or could be some circumstances when PBA is medically necessary (i.e. preferable for the woman than other methods of abortion).

    Medical testimony before Congress, however, as recited in the pending PBA ban that Congress will soon pass, establishes that PBA is NEVER medically necessary. IOW, what the SC decision assumed to be a fact is not a fact.

    I don't think even the present Supreme Court would say that a single doctor, acting unilaterally, has the constitutional right to arbitrarily choose to perform a procedure that the consensus of medical opinion says is NEVER medically appropriate. But there may well be 1, 2, or 3 new justices on the SC before a new case gets there. Perhaps one of them will be Frank Easterbrook, who has already found a way to uphold PBA laws.

    John also forwarded an NRO piece on Estrada, the first controversial judicial nomination sent to the Senate floor. Though friendly with several conservatives, Estrada himself argued for application of RICO to punish abortion protestors. He's a former prosecutor and, later, handled an appeal seeking to block the death penalty in a case. Is he conservative? One wonders why Bush/Gonzales push Estrada instead of Roberts, Pickering, Owens or a few of the other blocked nominations.
    According to the press, Estrada is being groomed to be the first hispanic on the SC.
    In the last week both Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham have vouched for Estrada based on their personal knowledge of him. Here is Coulter.

    Ingraham, on her radio show, was even more effusive in praising Estrada, based on her personal knowledge.

    Easterbrook has a lot of dicta there in which he tries hard to carve out some sort of exception to Roe, but I don't buy it. Posner doesn't either, and issued a dissent.

    About 20 states have passed PBA bans, but none are being enforced because of Roe v. Wade and supporting decisions. IMO, they will never be enforced until Roe is overturned.

    John says that my interpretation of Roe is extremist and absolutist. That is why Roe is so controversial -- it is an extremist and absolutist decision.

    I just don't see the point of trying to establish a factual record that some medical procedure is never preferable, and then banning it. If it is really never preferable, then the law has no effect because no one would want to do it anyway. It is like banning a perpetual motion machine. And if some physician somewhere finds it preferable (with the consent of the patient), then the ban runs contrary to Roe v. Wade and is unconstitutional. So either way, the law has no effect.

     

    In California, white people are in the minority. That's old news. But now Mexican-Americans have taken over the majority of births. The LA Times says the latest numbers are 51% hispanic, 30% white, 12% asian, 6% black, 1% other. The most popular name for boys is Jose.
     

    The world's highest rated chess player lost his title to a very sophisticated IBM supercomputer a few years ago. Now Kasparov is in danger of losing to a computer that is similar to a program that anyone can buy for $50.
     

    Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti gave an interview in which he denies fair use, denies that digital media need backups, claims that all his VCR predictions came true, etc. IOW, he is as goofy and extremist as ever. Still, he sounds almost reasonable compared to the music industry lobbyists.

    Wednesday, Feb 05, 2003
     

    John sends this story about Msft trying to digitize an entire life. Meanwhile, the Msft home of the future has no bathroom.
     

    The debate continues on exactly why the WTC towers collapsed. Somebody claims that better insulation might have saved them, and the US Bureau of Standards (NIST) has agreed to test the theory. The South Tower had half the insulation on the steel beams, and it fell a lot faster.
     

    Mike writes:
    You wrote:
    Yes, customers. No physicians were prosecuted, and the customers were not patients of the sellers. Just customers.
    No physicians were prosecuted for the following reason:
    Federal Court Rules Doctors Cannot Be Penalized Over Marijuana Recommendations September 14, 2000 - San Francisco, CA, USA U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled last Thursday that doctors may recommend marijuana to patients who may benefit from it without fear that federal authorities may strip them of their license to prescribe medicine, or otherwise impose sanctions. When the voter-approved medical marijuana law known as Proposition 215 passed in 1996, the Clinton administration announced that doctors who recommended marijuana faced losing their federal license to prescribe medicine. In January 1997, doctors and patients statewide filed a class action suit against the federal government alleging the government's threat violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In his decision Judge Alsup expanded a previously granted temporary injunction that prevented the government from revoking a doctor's license to prescribe medicine and made it permanent.
    He had over 1k marijuana plants. Obviously not for his own consumption. He was a big-time drug dealer.

    Starter plants for humane purposes. You have any evidence at all he sold the goods???

    Calif Prop 215 is not limited to the seriously ill. You can get it for headaches, or mild depression, or many other trivial and unverifiable conditions.

    I've got mild depression!!!! And, yes, I believe it should be regulated as is liquor. Inspected, taxed, not sold to minors.... fine. If the local wino can drown his sorrows in alcohol, I should be allowed to smoke mine away! Hurray for P215!

    Yes. You think officers of the city are immune to the law? If you want to legalize marijuana, write your Congressman. DoJ is just enforcing the law.

    The law sucks. Trying to enforce a bad federal law over a state law that seeks to set the situation right seems like bad judgement on the part of the prosecutors. Bet it gets reversed on appeal.

    Yep, sounds like another class action suite is called for.

    Frankly, I'm astounded that you, as a Republican, are taking the federal government's side -- as misguided as it is -- on this issue. What's happened to states rights? Does the Constitution put the feds in charge of patient care?

    Back to a question you carefully avoided answering do you have any evidence at all that Rosenthal *sold* any plants???

    The point of the editorial was this "The Bush administration's war on medical marijuana is not only misguided but mean-spirited."

    I say, guilty as charged!

    I am not an advocate of states rights.

    Tuesday, Feb 04, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    John wrote, "So the bishops who failed to discipline their own priests are now expected to discipline politicians? I don't think so! As the bishops have woefully failed to keep their own house in order ..."

    Though this type of consistency argument is common, it is not logical. There should be no consistency with mistakes or shortcomings of the past. Indeed, many of the Gospel parables show the fallacy of this familiar consistency argument. Emerson's famous quote observed the fallacy also.

    John then calls exclusion from Communion "unprecedented in modern times." In fact, millions of divorcees face the same fate each year, as have others advocating abortion (e.g., in Kansas or Nebraska about ten years ago).

    John writes, "Such an effort, at this late date, would be seen by Catholic and non-Catholic alike as a desperate effort to change the subject from their own malfeasance."

    The Church shouldn't concern herself with perceptions, which are largely unpredictable anyway.

    Given that Catholics in California voted for pro-abortion Gray Davis by a whopping 20-point margin, and that half of Catholic high schools in America have closed since 1965, there are some serious long-term problems for the Church here. It's not so much that I expect the Church to discipline her politicians, but that I don't see how the Church can avoid it and retain vitality.

     

    Here is a list of English words that each have the property that one mean is opposite another meaning. Words like handicap and inflammable are confusing.

    Here is one not on his list.

  • off -- meaning on and not on.

    People say:

    I was awoken when the alarm went on.

    I was awoken when the alarm went off.

    And also:
    I called the radio show, and got my answer on the air.

    I called the radio show, and got my answer off the air.

    As far as I can see, people mean exactly the same thing whether they use "on" or "off" in these sentences. I'll send this to the guy with the web page.
  •  

    OxBlog explains the Dini case, responding to someone else:
    I don't think I've ever in my life seen so many smart people completely miss the point over and over.

    Here it is: if you ask a biology professor for a personal recommendation, it's going to be based on whether he thinks you have a strong knowledge of biology and biological theory. If you don't believe in evolution, you obviously don't understand biology very well. So: no recommendation.


    Now, this is hogwash. You can understand the theory of evolution without accepting it. The professor would be perfectly right to say, "If you cannot explain the theory of evolution, then I will not write you a letter of recommendation." But that is very different than saying, "If you do not believe in the theory of evolution, then I will not write you a letter." In fact, the student himself says, "I could explain the process, maybe how some people say it happens, but I could not have said ... I believe in it." I've never seen a biology test that says, "Do you believe in evolution?" I've seen many that say, "Explain the theory of evolution." (Well, they're usually more specific than that, but you get the idea.)
     

    I missed the Michael Jackson interview, but he sounds as wacky as ever. He confirmed some of the weird accusations against him.
     

    Mike defends NY Times editorials:
    What's wacky about that??? [Referring to a NY Times editorial saying, "McDonald's is doing real harm by promoting 'extra value meals'", and supporting a lawsuit against McDonalds for selling too many calories for your money.]

    Or this?

    It should be obvious that McDonalds should be allowed to sell big hamburgers. The latter editorial complains about the conviction of a California marijuana dealer. The dealer wanted to show evidence that some of his customers were sick and were using marijuana to alleviate suffering.

    In nearly all other situations, the NY Times supports using federal law to override state law. The federal law is being enforced against dealers who distribute large quantities of marijuana for profit. California has a medical marijuana law, and just about anyone can get a approval to grow marijuana for his own consumption. The editorial promotes the myth that the feds are "tyrannizing doctors and sick people". They aren't. Just drug dealers.

    The NY Times says:

    Doctors have long recognized marijuana's value in reducing pain and aiding in the treatment of cancer and AIDS, among other diseases.
    Marijuana in pill form is already available as a prescription drug. There aren't any good studies that say that smoking marijuana has any medical advantages over the alternatives.
    If the Bush administration really believes Proposition 215 has no legal authority, it should seek to strike down the law itself.
    No, that is not how our legal system works. The Bush administration apparently has no quarrel with Proposition 215 letting sick Californians use marijuana. It is just applying trafficking laws. Only a marijuana dealer could challenge those trafficking laws. Or Congress could repeal them.

    Mike responds:

    Agreed [that McDonalds should be allowed to sell big hamburgers], but I fail to see what that has to do with the editorial. The editorial complains that McD's advertising promotes over-consumption. Are you arguing with that point??? (It may not be a legal issue, but it should be a moral issue. Somehow the tobacco folks never got that idea; perhaps the burger folks will.)

    What [marijuana] "customers?" I thought "customers" implies a sale or similar transaction. We're talking about "patients" here.

    In nearly all other situations, the NY Times supports using federal law to override state law.
    Examples?

    As I understood it, he wasn't accused of selling... just growing. He was convicted of "marijuana cultivation and conspiracy." "The plants were distributed to organizations and clubs that serve the seriously ill." Hardly the picture of a dangerous drug dealer.

    And what about the claim that he "was acting as an officer of the city?"

    You're actually defending the federal prosecutors in this???

    The NY Times says that a farmer growing wheat for his own consumption is subject to federal regulation under the interstate commerce clause.

    He had over 1k marijuana plants. Obviously not for his own consumption. He was a big-time drug dealer.

    Calif Prop 215 is not limited to the seriously ill. You can get it for headaches, or mild depression, or many other trivial and unverifiable conditions.

    You think officers of the city are immune to the law? If you want to legalize marijuana, write your Congressman. DoJ is just enforcing the law.

    Today's Wash Post says:

    A couple is suing the franchisee of a McDonald's restaurant, claiming an improperly prepared bagel damaged the husband's teeth and their marriage.
    The NY Times should chew on that. Who will be left to subscribe to the NY Times if New Yorkers can't get good chewy bagels anymore?? NY Times readers probably care more about bagels than burgers.
     

    George writes:
    Can't Prof. Dini have his own opinions? What ever happened to academic freedom? Do you really want the Dean to supervise his letter-writing?
    I actually think that tolerance and diversity should mean that it is ok for a university to have a few isolated religious bigots on the faculty. What is disturbing about the Dini case is how many scientists defend Dini, and act like it is a good thing that Dini is blackballing fundamentalist Christians and keeping them out of medical school. Apparently Dini's narrow-mindedness is quite acceptable among evolutionary biologists.

    Update: NPR had a segment on Dini this morning (Tues.). Dini is refusing to comment. A university spokesman claimed that it was academic freedom for the prof to establish any criteria he wants for writing recommendations, and that Dini says that understanding evolution is a key part of biological sciences. But that argument is really a loser. Texas Tech is a state school, and recommendations are crucial for advancing to medical school. Texas Tech cannot legally practice religious discrimination. Dini is not just asking for understanding of evolution; he asking for beliefs in an area that overlaps with religious beliefs.

    Update: There are long discussions on the Dini in talk.origins and Kuro5hin. One comment:

    The prof is baiting Christians by posting a challenge on his web site -- i.e. that he has a litmus test to check for creationists. The question he asks is NOT if the student understands the mechanics of the evolutionary theory and the current scientific communities understanding of the origins of man. I assume that if the student could not provide this material he would not be able to pass the class. Instead the queston is worded to test belief, "How do you think", "truthfully", "forthrightly", "affirm". These are all subjective words to test belief -- not knowledge. This kid probably knows his facts, but does not believe that those facts necessarily preclude the involvement of God in the process. ...

    In conclusion: The prof is being a jerk, he doesn't have to pick fights to make his point. He is already in a position of power so he should learn to be gracious. But the student is also being a jerk. If he wants to follow Jesus then he should be prepared to suffer for what he believes in. That is Jesus' way.

     

    The space shuttle naysayers are out in full force. Here is Gregg Easterbrook in 1980 and today. From the 1980 piece, titled "Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Goodbye, Columbia":
    The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. ... The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
    (Thanks to Slate Kausfiles for the links.)

    Monday, Feb 03, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    Thanks for the link to Alexander's blog. It's hilarious and dishes out much-needed criticism of Bush.

    Looks like the fate of California Gov. Gray Davis and the Catholic Church has risen to the inevitable High Noon. If Davis doesn't change his position on abortion, and no one expects him to, then the Church is going to publicly exclude him from Communion. Next stop other Democrats who support taxpayer-driven abortion, PBA, and block pro-life judges.

    Last night Maria succinctly explained to Liza and Joe why the Church can and should enforce some discipline here. Really, how can an organization teach one thing and then allow prominent members to advocate the opposite? Self-preservation alone will require the Church to publicly discipline numerous politicians over the next decade. One can debate the effect of this on public opinion, but the effect on the Church herself would be positive.

    Davis bragged about supporting and signing a bunch of pro-abortion laws. One of the more recent ones was a law to force medical residents in California to do abortions, whether they want to or not. So Davis is radically pro-abortion. But he was also re-elected 3 months ago.

    John responds:

    So the bishops who failed to discipline their own priests are now expected to discipline politicians? I don't think so!

    As the bishops have woefully failed to keep their own house in order, they are in no position to take the extraordinary action that Andy demands, which would be unprecedented in modern times.

    Such an effort, at this late date, would be seen by Catholic and non-Catholic alike as a desperate effort to change the subject from their own malfeasance.

     

    Charlie (whose blog is here) writes:
    On the shuttle...It's easy to second guess, but I wondered why they didn't space-walk someone out there during their two weeks in orbit to at least look for damage... Especially since another shuttle is essentially ready to go for a March mission...

    What was the point of all those space walks in Gemini and beyond if not to prove the value of an intelligent pair of hands in space, responding to problems and new situations in a way that machinery couldn't? NASA was claiming today that it was unlikely that a spacewalk could have done any good, and maybe even lost a guy, floating off into space... Have they ever heard of a rope? At any rate, now they lost all seven. Not very imaginative mission handling, it seems to me. If the shuttle is nothing more than a robotic can with people sealed up inside running some mediocre science experiments, who needs it? The public isn't excited by this mission any more. Go to Mars and make some footprints in that red dirt! That will psyche people up.

     

    John sends this story about worms invading New Mexico. I can't tell if it is a real story, or some kind of satire about illegal aliens.
     

    I just learned that my nephew has a blog. He has some good comments on Bush's State Of The Union.
     

    John sends this story about how FBI bullet analysis is unscientific. And also this disturbing story about how NASA knew that some tiles were damaged on Columbia's left wing at launch, but did not take measures to assess the damage and consider various actions.
     

    John sends this NY Times article about the Justice Dept investigating the Texas Tech prof who won't write letters for creationists. Here is the MSNBC story. Here is Prof. Dini's web site.

    I agree that Dini is out of line. As the complainer says, “Students are being denied recommendations not because of their competence in understanding evolution, but solely because of their personal religious beliefs.” Texas Tech's response is that it doesn't regulate recommendations. Texas Tech wouldn't be saying that if Dini refused to write recommendations for Jews.

    "johac" wrote:

    ... Still, the professor was asked to comment on the student's degree of understanding of the subject matter course that the professor taught. Perhaps the student should have asked someone else for the LOR.
    No, Dini asks: "How do you think the human species originated?"

    If Dini just wanted the degree of understanding, he could ask "What is Darwin's theory?" or something like that. He doesn't. He obviously wants to eliminate people with certain personal beliefs that are contrary to Dini's own religious and scientific views.

    Dini is just a religious bigot, and Texas Tech should reprimand him.

    Wade wrote:

    Sadly, it doesn't answer my question. Dini asserts it's not about belief but science yet he does not clear up if he would allow a student a letter if that student demonstrated a mastery of evolution but said soemthing like, "except I don't think humans just evolved like other animals. I believe the hand of God was involved with humans. My church tells me that God created ...
    The article says that Dini is a devout Catholic, and so Dini's church tells him something similar. Catholicism teaches that one should accept scientific findings about evolution but that God gave humans souls and a few other differences from lower animals.

    If a student answered as you suggest, then Dini would have to inquire further to see if the student has a Catholic or a Protestant world view. Apparently Dini has found some way to reconcile science with his faith, but any other way is unacceptable to him.

    Wilkins wrote

    ... But I do not think Dini is using *belief* as the gatekeeper criterion, so much as being able to give a good *account*, at least in the way I have seen him present it.
    No. Read Dini's web site. He says:
    If you set up an appointment to discuss the writing of a letter of recommendation, I will ask you: "How do you think the human species originated?" If you cannot truthfully ...
    Dini is asking for a belief. If he wanted what you say, he'd say:
    ... I will ask you: "How does the theory of evolution account for the human species?" If you cannot accurately ...
    He doesn't. As Wade says, Dini has chosen his words carefully and knows exactly what he is saying.

    Sunday, Feb 02, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    Regarding a discussion of public schools, their complete atheism makes unlikely they survive any longer than Communism did. A psychiatrist recently told me that his practice is now filled with depressed public school teachers just trying to hang on until retirement. Not even prisons prohibit prayer the way public schools do. The best treatment for all the depressed teachers is to prescribe daily prayer.

    Re latest space shuttle tragedy, it's the WTC collapse all over again. Heat plus an asbestos substitute equals premature collapse and loss of life. I doubt the very hot temperatures in the shuttle would have melted asbestos. Why don't the scientists admit the obvious? Unwilling to criticize the sacred cow of the asbestos lawsuit industry, as usual.

    Asbestos is still in use for some purposes. I would assume that NASA would have used it if it were really better. A lot of engineering effort went into those tiles.
     

    Another wacky NY Times editorial:
    McDonald's should ramp up its fitful efforts to make its food more nutritious. The Pelman plaintiffs have plainly identified a problem. With obesity at epidemic levels — more than 60 percent of adults are now overweight or obese — McDonald's is doing real harm by promoting "`extra value meals" that contain three-quarters of the calories an adult needs for a full day.
    What does the NY Times want -- a legal obligation to offer skimpy meals? What would be next -- telling gasoline stations that they can only sell half a tank so that people don't drive too much?
     

    I just discovered that the Internet Archive has some old public domain movies. Some are corny and amusing.
     

    John sends this article on how America is not producing enough scientists and engineers. The argument is based on there being a lot of foreigners attending US grad schools. It doesn't make much sense to me.

    Then it discusses statistics that the big majority of readers of science magazines are male. This is evidence of a crisis in the public's understanding of science. Hmmm.

     

    John sends this column about Phyllis Schlafly.
     

    John sends this Janis Ian column in the LA Times. She explains how recording artists like herself ("At Seventeen") benefit from MP3 files being traded on the internet. I think that bankrupting the major music labels would be the best thing that could happen for music.

    Curiously, both Ian and anti-MP3 leader Hilary Rosen (of the RIAA) are open lesbians. Ian's web site has lesbian info. Rosen tells Wired that she is a "separatist dyke", whatever that is. Rosen also admits to owning an Apple iPod -- a device for listening to those MP3 music files that she considers illicit.

     

    The SQL Slammer worm of last weekend should be enough to convince everyone that Microsoft is deliberately shipping insecure products. Msft obviously made a business decision to have its SQL product leave a couple of ports open, it didn't bother to check for buffer overflows on packets coming into that port. Msft does not have to pay anything when bugs in its products cause catastrophes. It is more interested in convincing the world that software is a service, and that customers should be constantly paying Msft for updates.

    The Mercury News says "the timing of last weekend's Slammer worm was particularly bad for Microsoft". On the contrary, I think that the timing was great for Msft. The attack was on a Friday night, so its impact on business was minimal. Meanwhile, Msft is about to release a supposedly-more-secure version of Windows, as the article explains, and it has to give people motives to buy it.


    Saturday, Feb 01, 2003
     

    There is a dispute about what can be labelled white chocolate. A lot of people eat it and have no idea what it is. It is really solidified vegetable oil (like Crisco) with sugar and maybe other sweeteners. Some regulators think that it should contain the vegetable oil from a cocoa plant, but it doesn't have the part of cocoa that gives chocolate its distinctive taste.
     

    The Europeans are not ready to criminalize noncommercial copyright infringement yet, according to this. Good.
     

    Title IX enforcement in college sports may get a much-needed revision. Its main effect is to limit sports opportunities for boys. It colleges were to really take the non-discrimination literally, then they would abolish all female sports that exclude males, and let the girls try out for all the sports teams. And if they took the sex quotas seriously, then they would not have let male enrollment drop to 44%, as it is in the USA.
     

    It appears that the Shuttle problems started on the left wing. I am waiting for pundits to say Bush would only spend money maintaining the right wing, and neglected the left wing.

    It is a little odd that the Israeli astronaut was also a pilot in the raid to destroy the Iraqi power plant in 1981.

     

    I didn't know that the astronauts on the International Space Station have their own Soyuz capsule for an emergency return to Earth. There are 3 astronauts there now, and future shuttle flights will probably be delayed.
     

    Space shuttle disaster is bad news for the space program. The palestinian arabs are probably celebrating the death of the first Israeli astronaut.

    I heard the announcer on FoxNews say that "7 souls were lost". Obviously their bodies were lost, but how does he know about their souls? All I can figure is that he is a Christian who believes that the Indian and Israeli astronauts are going to Hell because they weren't baptized, or he is a non-Christian who didn't understand Bush when he referred to "the seven souls we mourn today". Bush's statement is pretty clear that he believes that their souls live on.


    Friday, Jan 31, 2003
     

    John sends this story about the world's smartest person, according to an elite IQ test.
     

    Volokh's blog has discoverd the Prof. Dini, who refuses to write letters of recommendation for creationist students. It is amusing to see people defend this religious bigot with statements like this:
    Is it possible to be a good MD and a good Creationist? I would suggest that the answer is no.

    Meanwhile, Steven Pinker says the school should teach more evolutionary biology instead of foreign languages.

     

    The Slate explainer tries to describe some of the problems with software patents, and repeats a common myth:
    Until the early 1980s, the courts generally considered software to be nothing more elaborate than applied mathematics, and thus not patentable. That's why the geeks behind such pre-'80s computing wonders as the first-ever database, word processor, and spreadsheet missed the boat: ...
    I reality, there were software patents in the 1970s, and the inventor of the spreadsheet program received a patent on it. It pre-dated VisiCalc.
     

    John writes:
    Roger Schlafly wrote
    At 0159 PM 1/25/2003 -0500, Aschlafly@aol.com wrote We'll see if Bush handles this problem, of his own creation, by shirking the conservative agenda, such as the partial-birth abortion bill. John, are you still confident (as you stated on 12/25) that Bush/Frist will pass the bill?
    Contrary to Andy's predictions, Bush reiterated his call for a PBA ban in the SOTU. Frist voted for the bill in the past (Oct. 1999), and there is every reason to expect him to put it through this year.
    What is conservative about a partial-birth abortion bill? Under which of Congress's enumerated powers can Congress do this?
    The proposed bill would only apply in those areas of federal jurisdiction where Congress's constitutional authority to legislate is already recognized, such as interstate commerce, federal territories, and federally funded programs.
    Why pass a law that the SC has already found unconstitutional?
    1. The proposed federal law is not identical to the state law that the SC rejected in 2000 by a 5-4 vote.

    2. Maybe one justice can be persuaded to change his or her mind.

    3. Maybe one justice will be replaced by the time a new case reaches the Supreme Court.

    4. The SC decision was based on a dubious assertion of fact, namely that there could be some circumstances in which PBA is "medically necessary" (i.e. preferable to other types of abortion) to preserve the health of the woman undergoing the abortion. The proposed federal law (H.R. 4965 in the 107th Congress) contains a Congressional finding of fact, based on competent medical testimony, that the PBA procedure is *never* medically necessary to preserve a woman's health.

    Roger Schlafly wrote: The Violence Against Women Act was also justified based on interstate commerce. How is this any better?
    Abortion is a commercial activity, but violence against women is not.

    Under New Deal precedents, Congress can regulate activities that merely "affect" interstate commerce even if the activities being regulated are not themselves interstate commerce.

    But under the VAWA decision, activities that "affect" interstate commerce must at least be "commerce" even if they are not "interstate." Activities that are not "commerce" in the first place will not be deemed to "affect" interstate commerce.

    I don't think that makes any difference. If someone brings a case, then someone must think that the procedure is sometimes appropriate. You want the SC to agree to a ban on something no one wants to do anyway? I just don't see what that gets you.
    I didn't say no one "wants" to do it. That is not the test. Of course, some abortionists "want" to do PBAs, including Dr. Leroy Carhart of Nebraska, who brought the case involved in the SC decision.

    But one doctor cannot be allowed to decide, unilaterally and arbitrarily and without evidence, that PBA is medically necessary. The standard of medical necessity requires more than just one doctor's unsubstantiated, uncorroborated wish.

    There is no professional, peer-reviewed medical literature that supports PBA. No one has ever shown that any patient benefits from the use of that procedure. It is done for the doctor's convenience or other invalid reasons, not the patient's benefit.

    I don't agree that the 2000 5-4 decision depended on that "fact". It was a routine application of Roe v. Wade. The decision would have been the same whatever the facts showed about medical necessity.
    Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion only if and when it is medically necessary to preserve a woman's health. If the facts show that PBA is never medically necessary to preserve a woman's health, it is not within Roe.

    Read Kennedy's dissenting opinion. He supports Roe but rejects PBA.

    Maybe five justices are determined to protect PBA no matter what. But if the factual premise of Stenberg v. Carhart is untenable, they would have to come up with another argument.

    I don't think Kennedy's dissent makes much sense. Note that only Rehnquist signed onto that opinion.

    John's real gripe is with Roe v. Wade. The central holding of Roe v. Wade is that one physician can indeed be allowed to decide, unilaterally, and arbitrarily and without evidence, that late-term is medically necessary. There is no standard of medical necessity that goes beyond the abortionist's unsubstantiated, uncorroborated wish. Re-read Roe v. Wade, and don't get fooled by the dicta about trimesters.

    I can see why John would disagree with Roe v. Wade, but that's the decision, and it has been repeatedly upheld for 30 years. It just does not leave any room for banning PBA.

    George writes:

    You are not really addressing John's argument that "Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion only if and when it is medically necessary to preserve a woman's health." He says the PBA is not necessary.
    To understand that argument, you have to read the definitions. Roe defines health to include the woman's physical, emotional, and psychological health. And the medical judgment is solely in the hands of the physician who does the abortion, and he cannot be accountable to anyone for that decision. Burger's Roe concurrence says:
    For my part, I would be inclined to allow a State to require the certification of two physicians to support an abortion, but the Court holds otherwise.
    IOW, medical necessity is defined by one physician's unilateral opinion. As long as there is a woman who wants an abortion, and there is a physician willing to do it, then they have a iron-clad constitutional right to do it. There is just no way around it, unless Roe is reversed. Law attempting to regulate or restrict late-term or partial-birth abortions are just exercises in futility.

    Thursday, Jan 30, 2003
     

    Liza writes: "For those of you who deny any Iraqi link to al Qaeda, here is some evidence from William Safire."

    John responds:

    Assuming everything Safire says is true, Iraq is still a relatively minor center of al Qaeda activity. Of the major al Qaeda attacks on the United States, none originated in or were directed from Iraq, and none of the major actors were Iraqis. There's much less al Qaeda in Iraq than in Saudi Arabia or Egypt; less, perhaps, than Germany, France or Britain. Hence, the Safire column proves too much. If he is right that low-level "links" justify a U.S. war with Iraq, then, a fortiori, we should be at war with at least a dozen other countries - the entire Arab or even the entire Muslim world. A war with Iraq is estimated to cost $60 billion and absorb all U.S. military forces (including reserves and National Guard units). Winning the war means the U.S. will have to lead (and pay for) a reconstruction lasting many years in the future. I don't think we can afford it.
    Liza responds:
    The difference is that the Iraqi government, at least according to Safire, is actively encouraging, harboring, and financing the al Qaeda enclave in Iraq. The governments of Germany, France and Britain are certainly not doing likewise in their respective countries. As for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, I doubt there is evidence of government support, although there may be money going from individual princes and the like to al Qaeda.
     

    Not sure if this site is for real. It claims that a company has this mission statement:
    Create value for our customers by delivering innovative IP based services in a cost effective manner, that illustrates our commitment to a win-win solution and establishes a relationship based on mutual trust and satisfaction. Cultivate our relationships with our extended teams, strive for continuous improvement and offer an environment that encourages our team members to achieve their full potential while demonstrating our winning attitude.
     

    I installed a new 17" LCD monitor, along with my CRT monitor. I can now have a desktop twice as large. It is a good setup for people who use a lot of open windows, as I do. But there are a fair number of Msft glitches. Eg, some Msft programs like to open their main window on one monitor, and often put the dialog boxes associated to the window on the other monitor. Even worse, it sometimes tries to center the dialog box in the middle of the two screen, so half is on one and half on the other. I get the impression that no one at Msft ever tested Windows2000 on a computer with 2 monitors.
     

    John sends this Wired article about Xupiter being a malicious program. Don't get tricked into installing it.
     

    Glad to see that the Patent Office is tightening up on the silly gene patents that it has been issuing. Boston Globe story.
     

    Mike complains about Bush's pronunciation of nuclear and peninsula. He says, "After his speech I couldn't get my teenager to say the word correctly with any consistency."

    Eisenhower, Carter, and Clinton mispronounced nuclear the same way. See Slate.

     

    I think that the anonymous person who posted the recent Microsoft worm known as SQL Slammer did the world a favor. The worm does not do any damage to files, or anything particularly malicious. It was let loose on a Friday night, so businesses had all weekend to reboot and patch their servers. Disruption to business activities was minimal. The vast majority of the machines hit would probably have not installed the security patch otherwise, and would have left their servers open to much more malicious attacks.

    The history of computer security problems is such that Microsoft and others do not act based on warnings about what might happen. It is not until there is an explicit attack threatening people that appropriate measures get taken.


    Tuesday, Jan 28, 2003
     

    Michael Fumento (or someone pretending to be him) sends this article he wrote on ADHD in The New Republic. He criticizes Phyllis Schlafly and other conservatives who are skeptical about giving ritalin to kids for behavior problems.

    Fumento is one of the better journalists who tackles tough scientific issues. He attacks these so-called myths:

    • ADHD isn't a real disorder.
    • ADHD is part of a feminist conspiracy to make little boys more like little girls.
    • ADHD is part of the public school system's efforts to warehouse kids rather than to discipline and teach them.
    • Parents who give their kids anti-ADHD drugs are merely doping up problem children.
    • Ritalin is "Kiddie Cocaine."
    • Ritalin is overprescribed across the country.
    • States should pass laws that restrict schools from recommending Ritalin.

    The chemical effect of cocaine and ritalin on the brain are extremely similar. A recent Slate article explained:

    Both cocaine and methylphenidate, the generic name for Ritalin, are stimulants that target the dopamine system, which helps control the brain's functioning during pleasurable experiences. The two drugs block the ability of neurons to reabsorb dopamine, thus flooding the brain with a surplus of the joy-inducing neurotransmitter. According to animal studies, Ritalin and cocaine act so much alike that they even compete for the same binding sites on neurons.
    A JAMA article says similar things. This is nothing new -- the DEA has known it for years and classified both as Schedule II drugs.

    The question of whether ADHD is a real disorder gets bogged down into the definition of a disorder. As Fumento says, virtually all mental disorders are diagnosed without benefit of a lab test. What qualifies and doesn't qualify as a disorder to the psychiatric community would surprise the average person. But putting that question aside, it is important to understand that there is no objective test for ADHD (or ADD). Fumento mentions genes and brain scans and it sounds like hard science, but none of that is used to diagnose ADHD. According to official pediatric guidelines, the diagnosis is subjective and dependent on reports from parents and teachers on behavior during the preceding 6 months. And the symptoms are things like "Often not listening to what is being said." Even getting a second opinion may not be very useful, if the physician is relying on the same possibly-distorted reports from parents and teachers.

    If stimulants have been known to be good treatments for ADHD since 1937, as Fumento says, we still need an explanation as to why ritalin usage has been going up so dramatically in the last 15 years. A recent Eagle Forum newsletter said:

    MORE YOUTH RECEIVING PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS. A new study by Julie Zito of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, published and analyzed in the latest issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, finds that the number of American children being treated with psychiatric drugs tripled from 1987 to 1996, and shows no sign of slowing. By 1996, over 6% of American children were taking drugs such as Prozac, Ritalin and Risperdal. The researchers say the trend may partly reflect better diagnosis of mental illness in children, but they fear it indicates cost-saving techniques by insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Michael Jellinek, chief of child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, who reviewed the study, says, "The medicine may help the symptoms but not address issues of self-esteem, interpersonal relationships and family relationships ..." Ms. Zito puts it this way: "Other than zonking you, we don't know that behavioral management by drug control is the way to learn to behave properly. If we are using drugs to control behavior, that doesn't change the underlying problem if someone doesn't know how to get along with their peers." Washington Post, 1-04-03.
     

    Here is a Wired article about software code going to waste.
     

    John sends this article about official reports that a database of gun ballistics is unworkable and impractical.
     

    John sends this article on the California budget crisis, and how it is really caused by irresponsible spending increases in the last 3 years. It has some specific suggestions. Too bad we couldn't elect a governor with the will to carry out suggestions like these.
     

    Johns sends this UK science article saying that Earth-like worlds circling stars in orbital zones suitable for life may be few and far between in the cosmos, according to new research. Interpretations of Drake's formula may have to be revised.
     

    Those convicted of the NY Central Park jogger rape and beating have been released based on DNA evidence that supposedly exonerates them. Based on media reports, this is probably the biggest case of innocent people being convicted of a serious crime.

    And yet the convicts are probably not innocent. They confessed, and nearly all of the reasons for the jury thinking that they were guilty are still valid. This report concludes that they were guilty as charged, and prosecuted and convicted properly.

     

    This article explains how Title IX has been bad for men's sports, like wrestling. Title IX was intended for equal opportunities in education, but it has turned into stupid sex quotas.

    Monday, Jan 27, 2003
     

    An evolutionary theory shot down. The textbooks say that human childbirth is painful and difficult because of our large evolved brains. But apparently that theory has been shot down, and they now have goofier theories.
     

    I happened to notice my kid watching Sesame Street or some other such show on the local PBS affiliate, and instead of the regular show, it had a pitch aimed at kids to get their parents to donate money! It was also filled with lies about PBS funding.

    Sesame Street is a big moneymaker. The PBS stations got their licenses under promises of noncommercial TV. They shouldn't be showing commercials, and they shouldn't be trying to manipulate kids into pressuring their parents to send money. Do not give! Those who give are only making the problem worse.

    George writes:

    Why not give to your local PBS station? I happen to know that our local station is completely dependent on donations, and their pitches couldn't possibly be as bad as those for junk food like McDonald's. PBS is non-profit.
    McDonald's is selling nutricious meals that I can either buy or not buy. PBS is a tax-supported broadcaster that I have to pay for whether I like it or not. The only reason that it looks like they need subscriber money is because that is how they juggle the books. The Sesame Street profits are spun off into a separate entity. The stations spend whatever money they can raise.
     

    InstaPundit reports that the Ninth Circuit has gone back and removed citations to Michael Bellesiles. A very poorly reasoned anti-gun opinion had cited the disgraced historian. I guess the idiot judge realized that he had embarrassed himself.
     

    Liza sends this Safire column on Iraq links to al Qaeda.
     

    John sends this article on Why VHS was better than Betamax. I agree. VHS was better because it had essentially the same quality and twice the record time. A 2-hour tape was a whole lot more useful than a 1-hour tape. Other VHS advantages are discussed here.

    The idea that Betamax was better is one of those myths that is often used to support some dubious point. Eg, it is used to show that network efforts sometimes cause an inferior product in the marketplace. Another example might be MS-DOS or the Dvorak keyboard. But these are also myths, and don't prove anything.


    Sunday, Jan 26, 2003
     

    The EFF has good comments on how the Copyright Office should grant some DMCA exceptions. These exceptions would partially restore fair use in a couple of narrow areas.
     

    Andy writes:
    USA Today just published the most accurate story on the expected Bush nomination to the Supreme Court. It describes how Gonzales is unacceptable to conservatives, and (unlike AP and NYT) mentions Emilio Garza as a candidate.

    However, even the USA Today story misses Edith Jones, who should also be considered a leading candidate.

    Roger says that Bush is still very popular, despite his approval rating steadily declining to 58%, and falling. Well, if Bush is both conservative and popular, then why don't we have conservative legislation? Bush isn't even pushing any socially conservative legislation, despite his control of Congress.

     

    Here is a Wired article on The Race to Kill Kazaa. The principals are spread thru different countries. Even if the corporation is shut down the software and the P2P network is likely to live on.

    Saturday, Jan 25, 2003
     

    Here is a list of the year's worst science stories.
     

    Here are some radical quotes from famous environmentalists. Like: "Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
     

    eMoo points to a Wash Post article explaining that once again, we have a peace movement that has been taken over by commies.
     

    Gumma writes:
    A 3-column spread on the front page of Friday's New YorkTimes confirms what Andy told us a couple of weeks ago BUSH'S STEADY DECLINE IN PUBLIC APPROVAL.
    and John responds:
    That's pure NYT propaganda. Here's the truth about Bush's public support, from Andy's favorite newspaper, USA Today.
    Andy responds:
    Roger replied, "Of course his poll numbers have dropped. ...."

    My point was that Bush's decline has been remarkably linear, suggesting that public mood has a independent momentum all its own. The NYT headline suggests the same curious characteristic, though the article was probably stuffed with propaganda, as John says.

    John and Roger probably think of public approval merely as a sum of its individual parts. In fact, the data indicate a powerful trend component, akin to gravity with its independence of mass.

    The lesson? Play on rooftops (e.g., very high approval ratings), then expect to land on the ground with a fatal velocity. Reagan may have instinctively realized this, as he avoided very high approval ratings and yet retired with higher approval than anyone else at departure.

    We'll see if Bush handles this problem, of his own creation, by shirking the conservative agenda, such as the partial-birth abortion bill. John, are you still confident (as you stated on 12/25) that Bush/Frist will pass the bill?

    John mocks USA Today, but then quotes a story that it ran on Monday, while the NYT didn't run it until the following Friday!

    I am not sure if they are referring to this NY Times article, or another.
     

    A feminist group rates TV shows. Some of their favorites are low-rated shows about women who have figured out that they can eliminate men from their lives. As expected. But they give the lowest score (F) to Fear Factor! Fear Factor is the most sexually egalitarian show on TV. Each show is a contest to do 3 scary stunts. The last episode involved standing still while being covered with thousands of honeybees, and running on stilts on a high platform. Often they also have to eat bugs or something else. The contestants are always 3 men and 3 women. The rules are carefully designed so that the men and women have an equal shot at the prize. They often involve some athletic skill, but not just raw strength. Much more important is the ability to focus on the objective without being psyched out by the scary set-up. I suppose that they could think that it is demeaning to eat bugs or to do some physical stunt, but the men and women do them equally. (Thanks to VikingPundit's Smarter Harper's Index for the link.)
     

    A Microsoft bug is shutting down the internet this morning. The problem is:
    Microsoft SQL Worm: By sending a specially-crafted request to UDP port 1434 with the first byte set to 0x04, a remote attacker could overflow a buffer and cause the SQL Server service to crash or execute arbitrary code on the system with the same privileges as the SQL Server. In addition to email, latency, isp and site outages, VoIP systems are failing now.
    It even knocked out Bank of America ATM machines.

    Update: Good technical descriptions are here and here. Brief advice: block ports 1433 and 1434.

    Update: Some of Microsoft's own servers were down -- they didn't apply their own patches. The problem here is not that Microsoft programmers are prone to bugs, but that they have an attitude that favors insecure products.

     

    What does this sentence mean?
    This season, Rice caught 92 passes for 1,211 yards, placing him sixth in the league in receptions, ahead of scores of receivers who are almost half his age.
    Usually, "almost half" means slightly less than half. But Rice is age 40, and there are no NFL players under 20.

    The article mentions Rice's knee surgery. I had the same knee surgery, from the same surgeon. (But I am not playing pro football!)

     

    Alan Nunn May died. He was a British scientist who sold US atomic secrets to the commies. He only served 6 years in jail for it.

    Friday, Jan 24, 2003
     

    Apparently some people think that network sabotage will be a legal and profitable business. This Wired story describes a company called Overpeer and its this patent application for putting deliberately degraded music into P2P networks.
     

    Here is a wacky NY Times editorial:
    The physicist Stephen Hawking warned last year that computers are improving so rapidly there is "a real danger" they will ultimately "develop intelligence and take over." He called for urgent development of technologies to link human brains with computers, thus putting computers on our side rather than against us. Let's not forget that HAL, the evil computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey," easily bested an astronaut in chess before going on to kill him and most of his shipmates. So our hopes are pinned on Mr. Kasparov to keep the enemy at bay just a little bit longer.
    Watch out for those chess-playing computers, because next they'll be lip-reading and locking you out the pod doors!
     

    Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter has turned into a war critic, and now complains about sex arrest publicity. The charge was fairly trivial, and he was not convicted, so I can understand him being annoyed. But Ritter said: "So I'm sticking to my ethical and legal obligations not to discuss this case. I wish other people had done that." How could he possibly have an obligation not to declare his innocence? Something's fishy here.

    Thursday, Jan 23, 2003
     

    An Economist editorial favors a 28-year maximum on copyrights:
    Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. Its sole purpose was to encourage the circulation of ideas by giving creators and publishers a short-term incentive to disseminate their work. ... Starting from scratch today, no rational, disinterested lawmaker would agree to copyrights that extend to 70 years after an author's death, now the norm in the developed world. ... The 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a good place to start.
     

    I just ran across the censored chapter (a copy is also here) to Kevin Mitnick's book. Briefly, Mitnick served 5 years in prison because the NY Times demonized him, and the reporter personally profited by a million bucks on a book and movie deal. Here is the Wired story.
     

    An MIT survey says the top inventions are the toothbrush, the car, the personal computer, the cell phone, and the microwave.
     

    Matt Blaze has gotten publicity for a technique for making master keys to ordinary door locks, in the case that many locks are keyed to one master key, and someone has access to a lock and a (non-master) key.

    Matt's article is here. The article has a nice explanation of cylinder locks. His method was well-known to locksmiths and to those who know how master keys work.

    Briefly, here is the story. Master keys are typically physically the same as regular keys, except that the cuts are higher at 2 or 3 or the pin positions. You you get some blanks, and copy a regular key except that one cut is left high. You file that position down until the key unlocks the lock. Repeat for each of the 6 or so pins. Then merge the info and cut a master key. For more details, see the paper.


    Wednesday, Jan 22, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    We were all taught that American Indians are descendants of Asians, who supposedly migrated through Alaska. This theory falls under Roger and Joe's "can't think of a better (materialistic) theory" category, I suppose. Well, our textbooks omitted the fact that American Indians have uniformly different blood type than Asians! Indians are type A and O; Asians are B. Bell Curve is a problem for the migration theory, too. Funny how textbooks omit the contra-evidence for materialistic theories.

    More damage by a Bush judicial appointee district court judge John Bates just forced ISPs to turn over subscriber information. This could spell the end of the internet as we know it, and is the second bad ruling by this same judge. Earlier, he allowed the Bush administration to refuse to comply with FACA and withhold documents. I'm still awaiting any evidence that Bush's judicial appointees have been good.

    Two alarming statistics about the Catholic Church. First, Catholics in California voted for Gov. Gray Davis by 53 to 39 percent. Simon actually won the non-Catholic vote by 55 to 35 percent! Second, almost half of U.S. Catholic high schools have closed since 1965.

    I don't know about the blood type differences, except that materialist scientists do look at blood types as well as many other characteristics in order to help understand the history of migrations. Blood types of American Indians and other groups are discussed here and here.

    PBS just broadcast a show about how DNA has been used to very precisely track human migrations. Apparently an Asian tribe has been identified as the source of the American Indians.

    The oldest known human in N. American is Kennewick Man, and he was dissimilar to modern American Indians. So it may well be true that American Indians were not the first human in American, but rather they came and killed an existing population of settlers.


    Tuesday, Jan 21, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    Could the Eldred 7-2 loss have been the worst defeat in recent history for a petitioner before the Supreme Court? I searched cases last year and this year where the Supreme Court affirmed the decision below, and almost all feature four dissenting votes (presumably the four who granted cert.). One exception concerned a compelling need to resolve a blatant Circuit split, non-existent in Eldred.

    Phyllis's column on Bush and the Supreme Court contained a key paragraph holding him accountable for his campaigning in the name of Thomas and Scalia. That was featured in Washington Post story several days ago, without attribution. Now all news stories are picking it up, along with the same (inaccurate) list of contenders. It's beginning to look like a campaign pledge, like "no new taxes." Is Phyllis's column the real source for this terrific development?

    Charity case before the Supreme Court can states prohibit or regulate mail fundraisers that spend 75% or more of what they take in? A brief against this regulation is looking for co-signatories.

    You refer to State of Illinois v. Telemarketing Associates, 01-1806. The case is described here and here. This AP Story has a link to the Illinois supreme court decision being appealed. This is an attempt to reverse a bad US SC opinion: RILEY v. NATIONAL FEDERATION OF BLIND, 487 U.S. 781 (1988).

    I say Don't sign. The US SC opinion is a bad one, and ought to be reversed. It essentially says that commercial, for-profit, telemarketers can lie and defraud people at will, without any fear of state action against fraudulent business practices, provided that they claim that percentage is going to charity. I am all for free speech, but why shouldn't for-profit telemarketers be subject to the same sort of anti-fraud regulation that all the other businesses have to respect?

    The Brennan opinion says that if telemarketers have to tell the truth about where the money goes, "the disclosure will be the last words spoken as the donor closes the door or hangs up the phone." So this is a justification for the telemarketers to mislead the public?
    I favor trying to get a reversal of this wacky opinion.

     

    The RIAA is forcing Verizon to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.
     

    Evolutionists say we're all descended from aardvark-like creatures.

    Monday, Jan 20, 2003
     

    The NY Times discusses keeping convicts off the internet:
    The issue emerges just as Kevin Mitnick, the hacker once called by the government "the most-wanted computer criminal in U.S. history," is poised to start using the Internet again. Mr. Mitnick served five years for breaking into computer networks of major corporations and stealing software; he was released from prison in January 2000. As a condition of his probation, he has not been allowed to use the Internet — a restriction that expires today.
    Of course it doesn't explain that Mitnick's crimes were actually very minor, and he only became considered such a notorious computer criminal because of grossly exaggerated stories in the NY Times.

    Sunday, Jan 19, 2003
     

    eMoo has amusing item about a film by a UC Davis art prof.
     

    Lessig responds on his blog to criticism that he failed to argue the Eagle Forum position in the Eldred copyright extension case.

    In oral argument before the Supreme Court, Lessig said: "Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws."

    It sounds to me like he was abandoning the "progress" argument, and betting the farm on the "limited times" argument.

    Lessig responds, on his blog:

    Not quite. We did reject the argument made cogently by Eagle Forum that “progress” should be an independent substantive limitation on every copyright act. We believed (and again, about this we were right) that it was unlikely the Supreme Court would open every copyright statute up to the question — does this promote progress. So we appealed to “promote progress” as a way to interpret the scope of “limited times.” The “limited times” that the constitution permits are those that promote progress.

    I went on in the very next answer to say that the empirical question of whether speech/progress was promoted was relevant under the First Amendment. But just as Lopez/Morrison made clear that the constitutional limits were categorical, not empirical, we, following Eagle Forum, argued the limits on the power over terms were categorical, not empirical.

    Andy responds:
    Roger circulated Lessig's defense of diluting conservative arguments in Eldred. But Lessig and his several dozen professors avoid mentioning their fatal flaw they abandoned the conservative wing the of the Court. This case was never winnable without conservative support, as demonstrated at the Court of Appeals. Yet the law professors refused to make conservative arguments in their brief or at oral argument. They sought better government (in their personal view), not limited government. They implicitly sought recognition of communal property. They even lost the support of two justices they must have had to attain certiorari!
    And John responds:
    I agree - but to be fair, I don't think our brief adequately dealt with the points that turned out to be insuperable stumbling blocks for the conservative justices.
     

    John continues his debate with Andy:
    Andy wrote:
    John wrote, "Congress does not (and probably cannot) preclude review against a claim that a statute violates the U.S. Constitution or other federal law."

    John restates and promotes the liberal view. It doesn't hold water. Congress has direct authority under the Constitution to prohibit review by federal district courts (and hence by the Supreme Court, which lacks original jurisdiction in all relevant cases). Congress has done so in the Medicare statute. Litigants cannot sue under, say, the Due Process Clause to attain review of Medicare payment issues. Congress could surely do likewise for the military.

    I disagree. Congress has not (and probably cannot) preclude federal court review of the Medicare program under the DP clause or any other clause of the U.S. Constitution. The problem with such a suit is not that federal courts are precluded from hearing it, but that THERE IS NO VALID due process argument against a Medicare payment decision. Congress has virtually unlimited power under the spending clause. In creating the Medicare program, Congress set up an administrative procedure for resolving claims. That is all the "process" that is "due" so there is nothing left for a court to decide. Anyone who doesn't like how the Medicare program works is free to opt out, so there is no other constitutional issue.
    John's unprecedented plan of going to state court and then to the Supreme Court to circumvent such limitation is implausible. For starters, the Supreme Court would have no way to enforce its ruling and thus probably would not risk its credibility in that manner.
    John then cites a case that had nothing to do with limiting judicial review Romer v. Evans (1996). John wrote, "That lawsuit alleging that a provision in Colorado's state constitution violated the U.S. Constitution was filed in a Colorado state court and went up to the Colorado supreme court. From there it was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which did not seem to think it was risking its credibility by throwing out the Colorado constitution."

    The Supreme Court was not risking its credibility because Congress had not restricted federal review of this issue. The federal district courts remain available to enforce whatever the Supreme Court held in Romer.

    Where federal district courts lack that power due to restriction by Congress, it's implausible that the Supreme Court would risk ordering something that cannot be enforced. John cannot cite an example to support his view.

    The point of Romer v. Evans is to show that, even if the lower federal courts are abolished, all the same substantive issues will still he heard in state courts and subject to review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

    I do think Congress should enact procedural restrictions on the power of lower federal courts

  • Courts should not have power to order state/local govt to pass a tax or raise taxes
  • Any order declaring that state/local law violates U.S. law should be stayed until the case is reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court
  • All consent decrees must terminate within two years
  • Andy responds:
    So only 3/17 of those confirmed were solid conservatives? And only about 3/7 of those waiting to be confirmed are demonstrably solid conservatives? Overall, that's only 25% of Bush's appellate nominations.

    There's an entire cottage industry of conservatives claiming they were betrayed by their own judicial nominee. Earl Warren and William Brennan are two examples, as Eisenhower and many Republicans pretended to be fooled. In fact, a five minute look at the record of those nominees reveals their liberal backgrounds. Warren, for example, was the gubernatorial nominee of the Democratic Party in California in the late 1940s!

     

    Sound recordings are not supposed to be "works for hire", so the author gets the copyright. Lee posted this tale of how the law was changed, and then changed back.
    The RIAA did have its way, for a few months at least, when the definition of "work made for hire" in 17 USC 101 was changed to include sound recordings. Unless the work is created by an employee within the scope of his or her employment, only certain types of work can be works made for hire, no matter what an agreement says. And works made for hire are not subject to the termination right.

    After the House staffer responsible for the change left to become a vice president of the RIAA, the change was repealed. But it wasn't as simple as just dropping what was added. That would mean that sound recordings during the time the change was in effect would be works made for hire, while those before the change and after the repeal would not be. Not something desirable.

    Also, the repeal could be interpreted as Congress making it clear that sound recordings could not be works made for hire unless produced by an employee. And that was a little too definite for RIAA, so the strange wording at the end of the definition of works made for hire (starting with "In determining whether ...") was added as a lasting memorial to the RIAA and the House staffer who is now their vice president.


    Saturday, Jan 18, 2003
     

    Andy adds:
    Approval ratings do correlate well with electability. Torricelli was a recent example here in NJ. Likewise, Clinton's approval ratings were abysmal at the time of the Republican landslide in 1994. So I disagree with Roger's and John's pooh-poohing the significance of approval ratings. Reagan, incidentally, holds the record for the highest approval rating of a president at the time of leaving office.

    It appears that an approval rating has a momentum all its own. I.e., a rating moving in one direction is likely to continue in that direction. It was certainly true for the first President Bush, post-Iraq. His rating gradually fell, and fell, and fell, until he was routed on election day by Clinton.

    An objective view of that data is that it was the momentum of President Bush's falling approval rating that did him in. Of course, the anti-tax groups say Bush lost because of the tax issue; the pro-lifers say he lost because of that issue; the court-watchers say he lost because of Souter. But look objectively at the data Bush really lost because he didn't manage his approval rating. Reagan, in contrast, never suffered from bad approval-rating momentum because he never let his go sky-high.

    John writes, "So the better question is Will starting the war now help or hurt the goal of (1) getting a big tax cut package enacted into law and (2) getting conservative judges confirmed to the federal courts?"

    GWB's approval rating will spike at the time he starts the war. But that timing won't affect John's issues as much as GWB's electability in 2004. He's clearly better off waiting until 2004 to invade.

     

    Andy sends some political comments:
    Washington Post says conservatives now have the upper hand for the imminent GWB pick for S.Ct. Article says Bush has gotten the message that Gonzales is unacceptable

    But like the AP and NYT stories, this article completely overlooks Emilio Garza, whom I consider GWB's most likely pick. Perhaps GWB's aides are deliberately keeping quiet about Garza. Let media and liberal ire focus on persons unlikely to be picked, like the 60-year-old Wilkinson and Olson.

    I just looked at an amazing graph in the Economist. GWB's popularity has been dropping in a linear manner since 9/11, losing about 2% in approval each month. He's down to only 58% now, and at this rate would become unelectable (below 50%) by summer.

    An attack on Iraq would restart the sudden-rise-linear-fall curve. But if he attacks this winter, enjoying another approval rating spike to 90%, then by the next election in 22 months he would lose 44% (22x2) points, and thereby be unelectable, which is what happened to his father.

    Surely Karl Rove sees the same data, and realizes this. Is there any reason to attack Iraq now rather than 2004? Tough to think of one. Those who dislike GWB are fine with waiting, and those who like GWB are fine with waiting.

    I don't think that those approval ratings translate into votes very well. A lot of people answer those poll a just a request for an opinion on the last thing Bush did. There are people who approve of some specific Bush action, but would never vote for Bush.
     

    I asked for an example of a case on whether copying an entire out-of-print book was considered fair-use under copyright law. Paul supplies: Worldwide Church of God v. Philadelphia Church of God, Inc., 227 F.3d 1110 (9th Cir. 2000). The case is a dispute between two religious factions following the death of Herbert Armstrong. Armstrong's last work was supposed to be inspired. But after distributing millions of copies, one of the factions used copyright law to try to suppress the book. You can read about the case here.

    That case is instructive because it was narrowly decided. The district court judge said that it was fair-use, and a 2-1 appellate majority said that it was not. Note that the alleged infringer was not just copying one book for himself. It was republishing 1000s of copies and distributing them to the public.

    Meanwhile, the entire text of the disputed book is readily available on the internet, and that is apparently fair-use. You can find it here.

    Lee writes:

    Remember, when "It's a Wonderful Life" entered the public domain, it seemed to drive all other programming off television around Christmas time. When they figured out that the original story and the music had not entered the public domain, because their copyright had been renewed, the public was spared having to see it on every television channel.
    Now there is a novel argument. I get 150 channels on my satellite connection, and there is some duplication. It doesn't bother me a bit.
     

    California courts have redefined rape. A boy and his girlfriend were having consensual sexual relations, when the girl said, "I should be going now" and "I need to go home". The boy continued for a minute and a half before stopping. The California courts say that this meets the definition of rape, and the boy was convicted.

    Think about that next time you hear a girl complain about rape. Unless you know the details, the crime may have been a minor one.

    Update: Here is a feminist law prof essay arguing that stranger rape of a virgin should be legally just the same as a wife changing her mind about her mood during the act.

     

    Here is an example of an unenforceable shrink-wrap software license. The NY Times says:
    New York court has ruled that Network Associates, a maker of popular antivirus and computer security software, may not require people who buy the software to get permission from the company before publishing reviews of its products. ... the company's software included an unenforceable clause that effectively violated consumers' free speech. The clause, which appeared on software products and the company's Web site, read: "The customer will not publish reviews of this product without prior consent from Network Associates Inc."
    Microsoft and Oracle also use clauses like this. The copyright extremists defend the ability of software companies to make whether license restrictions they want.
     

    I just heard a leftist radio host trying to explain why the Left is protesting the coming Iraq war, but did not protest the Yugoslavian wars (in Bosnia and Kosovo). He said that the Yugoslav war had the more nobel purpose of stopping an evil tyrant who was committing genocide, and it had the backing of Europe.

    I see it as just the reverse. The Yugoslav wars only had the backing of NATO, and not the UN or the US Congress. NATO was supposed to be a defensive alliance. Yugoslavia did not attack NATO. Without a declaration of war from Congress, the war was unconstitutional. We were intervening in the internal affairs of another country that had no bearing on us. The so-called genocide was grossly exaggerated.

    On the other hand, the US is defending its (oil and other) interests in Iraq, and has the endorsement of Congress and the UN. We already fought one war with Iraq when it attacked our oil supply, and now we are enforcing the terms of the cease-fire. By punishing Iraq, we protect ourselves against future attacks, and demonstrate that we are willing to follow thru to protect our interests.


    Friday, Jan 17, 2003
     

    Andy writes:
    Joe wrote, "There are plenty of smart people in science and economics who defend Reagan, asbestos, DDT, free enterprise and so on."

    But then Joe lists a collection of gadflies and pariahs and even an attorney. Gary Becker is listed, but he's an economist rather than a scientist. Bjorn Lomborg is listed, but he's a statistician and his book was just declared to be "scientific dishonesty" by a Denmark scientific committee, which illustrates my point.

    There is no Nobel Laureate scientist who defends Reagan, asbestos, DDT, free enterprise -- or Newtonian physics. To do so would be professional suicide, risking government and university funding on which professional scientists rely.

    Nor should anyone await an alternative before scrutinizing relativity directly. Roger and Joe rely on liberals, rather than simply addressing the assumptions and evidence for relativity itself.

    Now I am missing Andy's point. Is he complaining about the opinion of scientists on nonscientific matters? Or on scientific matters?

    Go ahead and scrutinize relativity. Lots of physicists do. But if you espouse crackpot theories, then you run the risk of people thinking that you are a crackpot.

    I took a look at some recent Scientific Americans for mentions of relativity. The Sept. 2002 issue [p.93] says that advances in clock technology have been so great that GR effects cause the clocks to give different times on different floors of the building.

    The Oct. 2002 issue has a cosmology article "The Emptiest Places" [p.56] that implicity assume GR in many places.

    The Nov. 2002 issue has an article titled "Revising Relativity" [p.27] and the Dec. 2002 issue has "Throwing Einstein for a Loop" [p.40]. The careers of the researchers looking for modifications of relativity don't seem to be suffering any.

     

    Lee wrote, about the copyright extension:
    As for the various constitutional arguments made by the petitioners, the Court found that they relied on "several novel readings" of the constitution that were "unpersuasive." ...
    It is unfortunate that the plaintiff relied on those novel readings, instead of the obvious textual argument that Congress only has the power to promote progress with copyright law. Ginsburg said:
    petitioners do not argue that the Clause’s preamble is an independently enforceable limit on Congress’ power. See 239 F.3d, at 378 (Petitioners acknowledge that “the preamble of the Copyright Clause is not a substantive limit on Congress’ legislative power.”
    Lee also wrote:
    While one might not agree with this practice, as Justice Ginsberg said (quoting Justice Holmes) -- "a page of history is worth a volume of logic."
    What she meant by that was that if the Sonny Bono extension is unconstitutional, then the 1976 extension and others are probably unconstitutional for the same reasons. No precedent threw out those extensions, so she is just going to let Congress extend copyrights forever. Any work created after 1925 now has a perpetual copyright. A NY Times editorial said:
    In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity.
     

    Andy writes:
    Joe asks the rhetorical question of how "hundreds of brilliant physicists, who grapple with this stuff every day, have missed" the flaws in relativity.

    The same way they miss the benefits of Ronald Reagan, asbestos, DDT, free enterprise, and so on. How many take on the environmentalists? Zip-o. Relativity took nearly 90 years to win a Nobel Prize, perhaps the longest delay of any theory, but you can bet no professional scientist will criticize it now.

    At any rate, we need not rely on the opinion of some self-described experts in assessing relativity, or any other theory. We are all capable of understanding the assumptions and evidence for a theory. Does anyone doubt that? Yet Roger and Joe seem uninterested in addressing the substance.

    Relativity is based entirely on these two implausible assumptions that the speed of light in free space never changes, and that all inertial (non-accelerating) frames of reference are indistinguishable with respect to physical laws. There is no reason why these postulates should be true, other than academic emotion.

    I listed the many empirical contraindications last time. I also find the postulates to be logically at odds with each other. A term "relativistic mass" is invented to describe the alleged increased inertia of a fast-moving particle. But does that relativistic mass then affect its surroundings? Doesn't make sense either way, and physicists seem to disagree themselves.

    Incidentally, here's another critique of academic intellectuals. Wiles supposedly proved Fermat's Last Theorem by patching together many modern math theories. People found flaws, and then he supposedly patched the holes. An elementary proof remains undiscovered.

    It's now been over five years. If Wiles' proof was indeed as good as an elementary proof (i.e., one that uses only traditional, unquestionable techniques), then why hasn't anyone reformulated Wiles' proof in elementary form? Wiles "proof" can't be converted to elementary form, apparently.

    Joe answers:
    There are plenty of smart people in science and economics who defend Reagan, asbestos, DDT, free enterprise and so on. Environmentalism -ever hear of Bjorn Lomborg, Julian Simon, Fred Singer, Richard Linzen, Peter Huber, Gary Becker? Look, there's a leftward tilt in the media (that is being challenged successfully, by the way). What I don't see is any credible physicist offering alternatives to GR that do a better job predicting things. Sure, there a doubters. Fine. Let them formulate their own theory.
    Andy is really off in wacky territory. There was no error found in Wiles' published in proof. Only in a preliminary draft. There are no questionable techniques in it. The proof could be translated into just about any axiom system.

    Andy claims that no one can criticize relativity, but then relies on relativity critics to cast doubt on the theory. Which is it?

    Those 2 relativity postulates just represent one way of deriving the properties of special relativity. It happens to be a popular derivation for historical, pedagogical, and experimental reasons. Both postulates can be tested directly, and have passed all the tests. But there are other ways of understanding special relativity. (Special relativity just means relativity without either acceleration or gravity.)

    There might not be good abstract reasons for believing those postulates, but the experimental evidence is overwhelming. That is the ultimate test, of course -- does the theory agree with experiment?

    When Andy was questioning relativity, I thought that he was referring to subtleties of general relativity. But no -- he is questioning the basics of special relativity!

    Relativity is central to most of 20th century physics. It is basic to understanding electromagnetic waves, atom bombs, quantum field theory, nuclear fission and fusion, particle accelerators, GPS, all of the cosmological models, etc. There just is no viable alternative.


    Thursday, Jan 16, 2003
     

    Here is the whine of an SF race-baiting columnist:
    Said Shaq, "Tell Yao Ming, 'Ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so."
    Some people have no sense of humor.
     

    Juan at Volokh's blog agrees with Andy that Lessig blew the copyright extension case by eschewing the argument in the Eagle Forum amicus brief.
     

    SkyLink makes a universal remote garage door opener, and is being sued by Chamberlain. The gist of the complaint is that Chamberlain has a patented system of "rolling codes" to make it harder for an intruder to mimic and repeat a code, but SkyLink figured out a way for the remote to send a re-sync signal so that the same opener code can be used over and over.

    The problem here is that Chamberlain has an insecure garage door system, and is trying to use the DMCA to thwart competition. This is an example of how the DMCA is anti-consumer. I should be able to buy a replacement opener from another maker.

     

    I asked my 5-year-old what she learned in school yesterday. She said she learned about Martin Luther the King and how he had a dream about dark people all drinking from the same drinking fountain, and how he said the world was round while everyone else thought it was flat, and how they killed him for it, so now we have a holiday.

    The only thing I can figure is that the teacher was talking about holidays, and my kid got Columbus and King mixed up. But it is really just as silly to say that Columbus proved that the world was round to people who thought that it was flat. George writes:

    What do you mean? -- Columbus did prove that the Earth was not flat.
    No, Columbus did not prove any such thing. He did not sail around the world. All he did was to sail to some faraway island, and came back the way he went. Besides, everybody already knew the world was round.
     

    Andy writes:
    The complete failure of Lessig and dozens of top law professors in Eldred shows the futility of playing for the political "middle". Their entire brief was tailored for O'Connor. As in politics, this strategy caused losing the conservatives, and then losing the "middle" too.

    An MIT student saw my science test on Roger's website and asked if he could send me his answers for grading. I said yes, but he has not been able to do so yet.

    Roger, like any academic, defends relativity until the cows come home. It's contradicted by quantum mechanics, the expansion of the universe, the variation in physical constants, the overall flatness of the universe, binary pulsar data, the Economist article I referenced earlier, GPS data on a website Roger circulated a few months ago, and the logical incoherence of relativistic mass. But academics insist relativity is true, because they believe it must be true.

    All along, academics avoid discussing what relativity is two implausible assumptions about light and frames of reference. That's it, plus volumes of pure math.

    Meanwhile, more evidence from AP today that nature is more like art than machine "It all started in November when six newcomer Magellannic penguins, formerly of Sea World in Aurora, Ohio, were brought in. Since then the penguin pool at the San Francisco Zoo has been a daily frenzy of circle swimming by all of the 52 birds at once. The penguins start swimming in circles early in the day and rarely stop until they stagger out of the pool at dusk. The six penguins from Ohio started it all, Tollini said, apparently convincing the others to join them for the watery daily circuit. 'I can't figure out how the Aurora penguins communicated and changed the minds of the other 46,' Tollini said."

    Yes, QM contradicts GR and GR contradicts QM. Yet both theories have been experimentally verified to great accuracy. Both theories are right and wrong at the same time. No one has figured out a way to reconcile GR with QM. The situations where the theories disagree are outside the experimental domain, so we have no idea what happens there, and we may never know.

    GR is not contradicted by the variation in physical constants, the overall flatness of the universe, binary pulsar data, the Economist article I referenced earlier, GPS data on a website Roger circulated a few months ago, or the logical incoherence of relativistic mass. Andy is just spouting nonsense.

    Modifications of GR and QM get proposed all the time. But there is a set of principles and observations that are at the core of each of these theories that will be an essential part of any new theory.

    The penguin story is amusing, but not unusual. Lot's of animals travel in packs, following the leader.


    Wednesday, Jan 15, 2003
     

    John sends this story about a scientific dispute over the history of the Black Sea. 5 years ago, some scientists published a new theory that the Black Sea was fresh water until it was dramatically flooded with sea water 7.5k years ago. Their theory made a convincing case that the flood was the origin of the Biblical Noah flood. Now some other scientists dispute whether any such flood ever took place.
     

    John sends this story about a man sentenced to 3 years probation for killing a dog. The man owned the dog, and killed the dog after it bit his 2-year-old son on the nose. What's the problem? Of course the dog have been killed. If my dog bit a toddler on the nose, I'd also kill the dog. While on probation, the man cannot own a pet or drink alcohol and must complete anger management programs, undergo a mental exam and perform community service.
     

    With all the talk about how terrible it is that innocent people may have been scheduled to be executed, remember this: There is no example in modern USA history of an innocent man being executed. Sure, it could happen. When it does, the anti-death-penalty will raise that example in every debate. But so far, it hasn't happened.

    Bob thinks I am being unfair here. He says that once someone is executed, then no court will revisit the question of guilt or innocence, so we don't know. Well, people debated the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti, long after their 1927 execution.

     

    You get spam for the the Nigerian advance fee scheme? I get so much that I am inclined to block any email that has anything to do with Africa. According to this story, the spammers have cheated people out of $85M.
     

    The Slate legal columnist Lithwick has another stupid rant against conservatives. She complains that Clarence Thomas is writing a book. No, that's ok, because other Supreme Court judges have written books. She complains that the rumor is that the book "will reveal at least something of his personal and political opinions" and that his friend Rush Limbaugh is likely to quote from it on his radio program!

    Lithwick is also trashed by Volokh. He says he is a fan of Lithwick's writing, but it seems like his comments on her content are always scathingly critical, and deservedly so.

    Another blog says:

    What cheap shots. Thomas has been subjected to more unfair criticism and mudslinging than any other Justice in history (Lithwick's column, ironically, is the latest example). ... Who could blame him for wanting to avoid media venues that he knows will be highly unfriendly? One might as well sneer at someone for declining to undergo a root canal without anesthesia.
    Meanwhile, other judges write completely indefensible opinions and avoid public scrutiny altogether.
     

    Soon, we could all be wearing RFID tags that can be read by a radio-frequency scanner 15 feet away. It is somewhat like a bar-code, except that it contains more info and could be invisibly embedded into clothing.
     

    More and more kids are being put on psychoactive drugs. And it is not just ritalin -- it includes prozac and a lot of others. Here is a Pediatrics editorial and a NY Times story.
     

    I have resorted to writing some primitive blog software. There are lots of good and free blogging systems out there, but none are completely satisfactory for various reasons. Blogger would be ok if it weren't so flaky.

    Blogging alternatives include Blogger, GreyMatter, MoveableType, LiveJournal, bzero, Blosxum, GLUE, OutBlog, Radio UserLand and others.

     

    Andy writes:

    Eisenhower critics said that if we're going to have a golfer in the White House, then we might as well have a good one.  The same could now be said of GWB.  If we're going to have someone who (1) spends all his time on Iraq, (2) appoints people who think Roe v. Wade is settled law, and (3) expands government, then we might as well have a good one.  I.e., Lieberman, who outpolled GWB last time.

    Lieberman's challenge does increase the likelihood of two Supreme Court vacancies this summer:  Rehnquist and O'Connor.  That would be welcome for O'Connor to step down.  Also, I think Lieberman's challenge decreases the chances of GWB picking a lightweight crony like Gonzales, and that's also good.

    A quick follow-up on a debate I had with John over Christmas.  John said a filibuster of judicial appointments is essentially impossible in 2003, and his arguments seemed persuasive.  The renomination of Pickering tests that theory.  But apparently Priscilla Owen was not renominated!  Uh oh.  Also, no mention of the partial-birth abortion bill, which Lott promised to pass quickly.

    Other ominous signs.  Three liberal Republicans have gained enough power to force Frist/GWB to eat crow immediately on the vaccine immunity provision in the Homeland Security Bill.  GWB is now weaker due to his mistake there.  Will those liberal Republicans twist GWB's arm on judicial appointments?

    We were all told to support GWB in order to obtain conservative picks to the Supreme Court.  2 years later, there's nothing to justify that strategy.  If GWB disappoints this spring, then he becomes a lame duck president.

     

    Andy writes:

    Here's my final exam for my Constitution course given to 19 homeschoolers.  They will ace this exam, but I doubt top high school or college students could score 60% on it.

    CONSTITUTION FINAL EXAM
    Test condition: You can use any written or electronic resources, but not direct assistance by another person in answering.

    Multiple Choice and Fill in the Blank (1.5 points each, for a total of 40/100 points):

    1.  The Preamble to the Constitution does which of the following?
    (a) Grant powers.
    (b) List grievances.
    (c) State objectives.
    (d) State the procedure for the passage of bills.

    2.  Who, among the following, was NOT an author of the Federalist Papers?
    (a) John Jay
    (b) John Adams
    (c) James Madison
    (d) Alexander Hamilton

    3.  The leading opponents to ratification of the Constitution in Virginia and New York were:
    (a) William Randolph in Virginia and Aaron Burr in New York.
    (b) James Monroe in Virginia and Alexander Hamilton in New York.
    (c) Patrick Henry in Virginia and Alexander Hamilton in New York.
    (d) Patrick Henry in Virginia and George Clinton in New York.

    4.  What prominent delegate to the Constitutional Convention refused to sign it and opposed ratification because: "The augmentation of slaves weakens the States; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.  Yet by this Constitution it is continued for twenty years."
    (a) Thomas Jefferson
    (b) George Mason
    (c) Charles Pinckney
    (d) Samuel Adams

    5.  Who complained that the federal judicial power under the Constitution "will swallow up all the powers of the courts in the respective states"?
    (a) Publius, pseudonym for the authors of the Federalist Papers.
    (b) John Adams.
    (c) Thomas Paine.
    (d) "Brutus", pseudonym for the author of essays in the New York Journal in 1787-88.

    6.  Rhode Island held a referendum on the Constitution in 1788 and the outcome was:
    (a) the state ratified it by a substantial majority.
    (b) the state ratified it by a narrow majority.
    (c) the state rejected it by a narrow majority.
    (d) the state rejected it by a 10:1 margin.

    7. The cloture rule in the U.S. Senate, requiring 60 votes to limit debate, is based on which provision of the Constitution:
    (a) Article I, Section III.
    (b) Article I, Section V.
    (c) Article I, Section VIII.
    (d) Article IV.

    8.  If a Congressman wants to prevent the passage of a bill, he or she can
    (a) veto it.
    (b) filibuster.
    (c) resign, thus delaying the passage of the bill.
    (d) impeach its sponsor.

    9.  The "Virginia Plan" called for, and was principally authored by:
    (a) Virginia and the other states to have one senator apiece, by Madison and Morris.
    (b) Virginia and the other states to have two senators apiece, by Madison and Randolph.
    (c) a national legislature with representation proportional to population, by Madison and Morris.
    (d) a national legislature with representation proportional to population, by Madison and Randolph.

    10.  Which of the following provides a list of the powers granted to Congress?
    (a) Article I, Section VIII
    (b) Article IV, Section I
    (c) The 24th Amendment
    (d) the Declaration of Independence

    11.  The Cabinet was created by:
    (a) The Declaration of Independence
    (b) Article IV, Section II
    (c) The wording of Article II, Section II, clause 1
    (d) The 21st Amendent

    12.  Article III of the Constitution addresses:
    (a) the executive branch of the government
    (b) the judiciary branch of the government
    (c) the legislative branch of the government
    (d) none of the above

    13.  Federalist No. 78 was
    (a) written by Hamilton, defending the plan for the judiciary branch
    (b) written by Jay, defending the plan for the judiciary branch
    (c) written by Adams, defending the plan for the legislative branch
    (d) written by Madison, defending the Bill of Rights

    14.  The smaller states failed to ratify the Articles of Confederation at first because
    (a) they thought it didn't give the federal government enough power.
    (b) they wanted states with western land claims to give up their western land claims
    (c) they thought the Articles of Confederation should give the smaller states extra land grants
    (d) they thought no new states should ever be allowed to join the Union.

    15.  William Paterson would most likely have agreed with which of the following?
    (a) Article V
    (b) Article VI
    (c) the statement "Our federal union-it must be preserved!"
    (d) Henry Hamilton

    16.  The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment came to be used for which of the following?
    (a) Freedom of slaves.
    (b) Judicial review.
    (c) Oppose abolitionism.
    (d) The establishment of a strong federal government.

    17.  The 12 amendments added to the Constitution in the 1900s reflected
    (a) popular participation in government.
    (b) growing conservatism.
    (c) anarchism.
    (d) decreased popular participation in government.

    18.  The 23rd Amendment did which of the following?
    (a) Abolished the poll tax.
    (b) Limited the President to two terms.
    (c) Gave Presidential voting rights to the District of Columbia.
    (d) Repealed Prohibition.

    19.  All of the following are powers of the House of Representatives except
    (a) ratify a treaty by a 2/3 vote.
    (b) to present the President with charges of impeachment.
    (c) to originate bills of revenue.
    (d) to govern its own operations.

    20.  Montesquieu would have probably agreed most with which of the following statements?
    (a) "The sovereignty of the states must endure."
    (b) "The powers of the federal government must remain separate"
    (c) "A strong federal government is necessary to prevent anarchy."
    (d) "The Virginia Plan is necessary for equality amongst Americans."

    21.  The Twelfth Amendment was enacted for all of the following reasons except
    (a) The President-VP team elected in 1796.
    (b) The President-VP team elected in 1800.
    (c) The President-VP team elected in 1804.
    (d) All of the above contributed to the enactment of the 12th Amendment.

    22.  The case that established the authority of executive decisions was
    (a) Gibbons v. Ogden
    (b) United States v. Nixon
    (c) United States v. Belmont
    (d) Marbury v. Madison

    23.  Federalists based their beliefs on
    (a) The idea that tyranny must be avoided no matter what.
    (b) The fear of anarchy as exemplified by Shays' Rebellion.
    (c) The belief that a monarchy is needed to make wise decisions.
    (d) The belief that the lower classes should have no participation in government affairs.

    24.  In the decision of West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court:
    (a) reversed itself and established a right to refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
    (b) affirmed the power to include "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.
    (c) affirmed its prior decision allowing mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
    (d) established that states, not the federal government, decide who must recite the Pledge.

    25.  The War Powers Act attempts to do which of the following:
    (a) increases presidential power to manage and deploy troops abroad.
    (b) limits the presidential power to a 60-day period for deploying troops in foreign conflicts.
    (c) ensures that the President would use all means necessary when Congress declares war.
    (d) none of the above.

    26.  Who said, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
    (a) Bill Clinton.
    (b) Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address.
    (c) George Washington in his Farewell Address.
    (d) Thomas Jefferson in his dedication of the University of Virginia.

    27.  Examples of constitutional amendments passed by Congress but not ratified by the states are:
    (a) permanent protection of slavery, signed by Abraham Lincoln.
    (b) authorization for Congress to prohibit or limit child labor.
    (c) "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
    (d) all of the above.

    28.  Who declared that "if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'"?
    (a) George Washington during the American Revolution.
    (b) Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address.
    (c) Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address.
    (d) President Bush during the Gulf War in 1991.

    29.  Engel v. Vitale (1962) is one of the most significant decisions of the 20th century because it:
    (a) defended the right of free speech in public schools.
    (b) recognized that there is no "wall separating church and state" in the Constitution.
    (c) respected local control over schools.
    (d) prohibited classroom prayer in public schools nationwide.

    30.  The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted for all of the following except:
    (a) invent a right to abortion.
    (b) prohibit school prayer.
    (c) prohibit public display of religious symbols.
    (d) allow all-male or all-female schools.

    31.  Roe v. Wade (1973) contradicts which of the following:
    (a) there is no constitutional right by patients to physician-assisted suicide.
    (b) there is no constitutional right by young men to avoid the draft.
    (c) there is no constitutional right by the sick to take marijuana or other drugs.
    (d) all of the above.

    32. ____________________ proposed the addition of a bill of rights to the Constitution.

    33. Justice __________ broke with his wing of the Supreme Court to write the decision in United States v. Bajakajian (1998), requiring the government under the Excessive Fines Clause to return its seizure of $357,000.

    34. The number of the amendment that outlawed slavery is ___________________.

    35. _________________ established the power of judicial review for the Supreme Court.

    36. The man who introduced the New Jersey Plan at the Constitutional Convention was named _________________.

    37. ____________________ was the first Chief Justice of the United States.

    38. The Supreme Court decision of ___________________ invalidated an unconstitutional state law.

    39. If the President and Vice President are both killed, the ____________________ becomes President.

    40. The case United States v. Nixon ruled ___________________. (Give the general decision that can be applied in many cases.

    Essay Questions (10 points each, for a total of 40/100 points):

    Write at least 50 words each in response to the questions below:

    A.  At the Constitutional Convention there were many prominent men with diverse ideas. 
    (a) Pick any three of the delegates and describe their viewpoints.
    (b) Who do you think made the most significant contribution to the convention?  Why?  

    B.  From 1787 to 1815, most Americans were either Federalists or Anti-Federalists. 
    (a) Describe the basic viewpoints each group held.
    (b) Provide controversies that helped support each argument, and the logic of each side.
    (c) Name some key Anti-Federalists and Federalists, and the arguments and views each one held.
    (d) Describe how the basic concepts of Anti-Federalism and Federalism still influence America today.

    C.  Many consider the Marshall Court to have been crucial in defining the meaning of the Constitution.  Describe what it did, explaining at least two of its specific decisions.

    D.  The Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause represents the long-term legal impact of the Civil War.  Briefly describe the compromise on slavery in the original Constitution, the opposition by George Mason to that compromise, and the modifications achieved by the Civil War Amendments.  In retrospect, do you think this compromise make the Civil War inevitable?

    Extra Credit (5 extra points each):

    E.  Matthew 18:20 says "For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."  How does the Constitution and its amendments use the judgment of many to minimize the potential errors of a powerful individual?  Pick and explain at least two specific examples.

    F.  The Constitution occasionally requires a super-majority, such as 2/3 or 3/4, to accomplish a goal.  Provide several examples and explain why you think the Founders insisted on more than a mere majority.  Do you agree?

    G.  Prayer, flag-burning, campaign donations, advertising, use of copyrighted material, and even medical recommendations are now considered by many to be protected free speech.  Should there be any limit?  Where, if anywhere, would you draw the line?

     

    John sends this story about Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat buying a bunch of used computer hard disk drives, and finding a lot of personal info. Part of the problem is that it is really not easy to delete data from disk under Msft Windows and to be sure that it is gone.
     

    The Supreme Court upheld the copyright extension, 7-2. Bad news. Wash Post story. AP story. Lessig's blog says:
    When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, “this makes no sense,” then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not.

    So what went wrong? Lessig failed to win over the conservative camp on the SC. As I see it, the problems were that Lessig:

  • Failed to explain why the Sonny Bono extension should be invalid, but the 1976 extension allowed.
  • Failed to rebut the argument that invalidating the 1976 extension would be chaos.
  • Relied on a quid pro quo interpretation of the Copyright Clause.
  • Made unnecessary consessions. The majority opinion said: Petitioners acknowledge that "the preamble of the Copyright Clause is not a substantive limit on Congress' legislative power."

    The conservatives have voted to find a number of laws to be constitutional, but only the net impact is negligible.

    This page acknowledges that it was the Eagle Forum brief that persuaded the only lower court judge who voted against the copyright extension.

    The Tennessean quotes Phyllis Schlafly.

  •  

    The story of Phillip M. Adams shows how the courts are susceptible to crooked expert witnesses. First he makes $9.5M as a plaintiff's witness in a class action lawsuit against a computer maker claiming that floppy drives occasionally lost data. Then he flipped sides, and collected $27.5M as a consultant and witness for HP.
     

    The RIAA says that it has agreed not to seek mandatory DRM laws. It didn't want to face the computer companies teaming up with consumer organizations standing up for traditional consumer rights with regard to the use of recordings.
     

    Blogger has been buggy lately. If this page has had problems for you, it is because of software and servers outside my control. I am currently investigating switching to other blogging systems, but all the ones I've looked at so far have other problems.

    Meanwhile, I am having to replace my Microsoft mouse. Maybe I've had bad luck, but I've had problems with every Microsoft mouse I've ever used. I've never had trouble with mice made by Logitech and others.