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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." ...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. ...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. ...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.” ...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 consequencesThis 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 environmentI 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.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. ...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.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 taleHis 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. ...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".''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. ...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.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.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. ...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. ...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.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 2004tells 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. ...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.”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. ...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. ...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.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).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’. ...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.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.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]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.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. ..." ...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.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. ...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.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." ...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.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. ...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.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.254Einstein'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." -unknownThat 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.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]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.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. ...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 gravitonsOnly 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.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 leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne agrees, and adds: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. And, indeed, this is what I teach—that natural selection, and evolution in general, are material processes, blind, mindless, and purposeless. ...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]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): ...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.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."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.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. ...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 …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.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.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 evolutionSo 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 ClassroomThe 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 ...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. ...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.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. ...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.) ...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. ...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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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. ...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.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 turnSo 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.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.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.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 storyWeird. 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 wroteI do not agree that this quote implies that Lorentz did not accept special relativity.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. 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.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 religionThese 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]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.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 scrutinyI 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: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 scepticsThe 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?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?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.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.) ...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.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 CaiThis 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. ...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.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). ...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.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. ...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. ...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 OFFHe 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. ...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.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.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? 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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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. ...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."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. ...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.
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.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.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 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.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.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.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.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?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. ...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?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.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: 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.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.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. 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.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 thugsI have omitted the evidence because the article gets it backwards. Your article has a mistake in it.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!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.”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 starsYou 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]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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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?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. ...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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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?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. ...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?"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.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. ...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.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? ...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" ...?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: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. ...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.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. ...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 UnderstoodThe 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.7No, 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. ...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. ...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:--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. ...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.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.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: 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 GodPeter 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.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. ... 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?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.We only have about 20k genes. Some plants have a lot more. Creationists are going to love this.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.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.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.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."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?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".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 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.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.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.”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.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: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.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.(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].) 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. ...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.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. ...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.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: 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. ...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. ...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 THEREOFPoincare 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. ...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. ...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.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 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 leapNot 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.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.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.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]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.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 scienceArdi 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.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 HemisphereI 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.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: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. ...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.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)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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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 RevolutionThe 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.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.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" 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:>What is astonishing is that evolutionist professors can deny that humans are high on the evolutionary scale.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. 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 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: So I guess Coyne is admitting that atheism is essential to evolutionism, and the goal of all good evolutionists is to wipe out religion.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.” Coyne follows up with this: 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.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.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. 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." ...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.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.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. ...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.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 RELATIVITYHolton 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.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.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. ...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: 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 DvorakThey 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.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.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.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 ...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 achievementsThis 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?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.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 PerspectiveNo 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?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.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.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. ...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.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.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. ...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. ...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? 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. ...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?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. 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.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 precedenceThere 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.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.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."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?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 ...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: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 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. 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.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. ...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” ...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. ...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. ...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.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 dataThis 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."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;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. ...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):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. ...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, ...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.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 REVOLUTIONWow. 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. ...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, ...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'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.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.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 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:
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 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. ...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.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 ...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." ...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. ...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.
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.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. ...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: ...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.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.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.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. ...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.”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"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. 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.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.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.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.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 RelativityIn 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 theoriesSo 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 *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: 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.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.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.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.”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.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.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.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. 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.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.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!"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.'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 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.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.John Dvorak writes: The iPhone is Ruining the CountryThere 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 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.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.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; ...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: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.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. 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.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.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.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.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.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!) ...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.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.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 ...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: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.Dear Sir, 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.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.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.' "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?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 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.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?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. ...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. ...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.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. ...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).2In 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?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: He also writes:We know the brain has been evolving in human populations quite recently," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.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. ... 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.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. ...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.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.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]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. ...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.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.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.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.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”. ...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.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.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. ...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. ...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. ...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. ...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. ...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: Reany responds:"Tom M-G" 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. ...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.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.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.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.
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. ...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 universeI 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."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.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]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. ...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.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. ...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.) ...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.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.
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; ...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. ...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.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,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."'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.'" 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.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.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. ...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. ...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.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.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.
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?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.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, ...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).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. ...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:
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.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."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.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.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.” ...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. ...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??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.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).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. ...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.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 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 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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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 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.
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."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 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. ...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.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?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.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.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 GRAILThe 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."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.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.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.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.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.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: 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 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).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.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, ... 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 SmolinThere 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.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.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.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).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.”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:
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 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 RightsThat 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?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). ...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.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.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. ...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. 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. ...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.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. ...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.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.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.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?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?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: TauntingWhat? 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. ... 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.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 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. ...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 ...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.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.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. ...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.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: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.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-checkedI 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? ...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.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.”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.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.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.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 awayThe 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.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. ...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.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."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. ...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. ...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. ...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.”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. ...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. ...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....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.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. ...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. ...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. ...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 ...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.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). 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.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 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.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.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.
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.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. ...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.Yahoo News reports: But the governor and his lawyers are boycotting the trial on grounds that it has been stacked against him.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. ...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.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.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.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. ... 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 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.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.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 relativityThat 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 CellsThis 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. ...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 GodYou 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.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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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?It then lists all the lawyers. Monday, Nov 03, 2008
Why I am voting for John McCain 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.
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.
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 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.
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.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.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:
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.
There is now overwhelming evidence by Jack Cashill that Obama's memoir was ghostwritten, and probably by 1970s terrorist Bill Ayers.
No. Bill Clinton was right to call this a big fairy tale. I wrote more here.
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.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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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.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?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?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.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.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.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. 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 PhysicsThis 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.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.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."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.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: 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!"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?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.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. ...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.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 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.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.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. ...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.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.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 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 ... 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. ...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.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. ...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. ...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.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.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. ...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?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 ...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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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,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. 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.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.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.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.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.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.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?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.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. ...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."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 unlicensedWho 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.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.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. ...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 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.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.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 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.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. ...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":He is correct. Iowa has a surplus of immigrants, not a shortage.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. 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?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.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 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? ...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.”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.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. ...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. ...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. ...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. ...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 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. ...(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. ...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 WorkplaceI 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. 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.
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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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.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.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. 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. ...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 ChangeGlad 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.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. 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. ...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.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.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.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:
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. ...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.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: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.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. 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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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.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 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. ...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.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. ...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.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. 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 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.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.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); ...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. ...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.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. 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.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.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? ...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.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.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.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 ...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. ...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.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.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.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. 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. ...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, ...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: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.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.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 PrizeNo, not 1 mathematician and 2 physicists. The prize went to 2 mathematicians and 1 astronomer. Witten is "the greatest theoretical physicist in the world." ...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".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. ...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.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. ...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. ...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. ...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 evolutionThis 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 factIt 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 theorySomehow 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.)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.”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.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. 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,” ...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.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.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.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. 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.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.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 DetectiveThis 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?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.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.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.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.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. ...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.”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. 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. 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?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: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.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. 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. ...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, ...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. 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 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.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. ...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. 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 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.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: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].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.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.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. 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. 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.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.” ...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 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.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. ...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.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.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…”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."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.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: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.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. 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? 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.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.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. 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.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.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.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. ...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. 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.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. 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. ...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. 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.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. ...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.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”.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". ... 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 ...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 changeNote 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,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.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 ... 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.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. ...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.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.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. 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?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. ...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. ...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. ...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.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.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. 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. ...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.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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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: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.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. ...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. ... 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.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 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]"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. ...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. ...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. ...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.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 ...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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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 anywayWoit 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.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. ...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.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.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:
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.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. ...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.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 ReformNo, 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. ...(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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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.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." 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: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. 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.and this: The reason I give little weight to Free Exercise issues is that the case inevitably involves two parents, ... Best Interest must control.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.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 SkepticHere 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.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.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.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.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. ...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:Maybe Einstein mellowed a bit, but he still wouldn't directly credit Lorentz and Poincare for what they did.I hope that one will also take care on that occasion to suitably honor the merits of Lorentz and Poincare. 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: 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.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. 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.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.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.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.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. ...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. ...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. ...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.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: 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.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 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.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?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." ...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 framersThe 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?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? ...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.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: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.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 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'.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.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. ...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)?"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.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?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.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.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. ... 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. ...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 JudiciaryWeird. 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.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. ...(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.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.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. ...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 practiceThose 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?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.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. ... ...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.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.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:
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. 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.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. ...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:
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.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).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: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.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. ...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: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.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. 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.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?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.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.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 ...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. 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. ...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 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.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. ...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.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.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 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. ...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 SpaceThis 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." ...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."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.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: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. ...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. ...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.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. 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]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. ...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.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. ...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 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. ...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.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.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.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. ...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.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." ...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. ...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:Yes, she does complain about our schools, but she wants to improve our schools, not import foreign guest workers to make our schools irrelevant.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? 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."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. ...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. ...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.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 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.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: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?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 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].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.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.)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. ...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. 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. ...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" ... ... 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?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 ..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." ...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.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. 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. ...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. Re some readers’ defense of The Bell Curve, the worst of the worst science books, see ...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. ...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:
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. ...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.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."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.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. ...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.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.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? ...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.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.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. ...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 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. ...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: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:(KillerChihuahua was the one who helped FeloniousMonk by imposing the Block on me.)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. 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). ...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. ...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.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 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. 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.
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.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.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." ...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.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 rightsNo, 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."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?"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: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.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.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, ...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.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.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.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. ...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. ...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.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.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 ...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'."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. ...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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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: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.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 ...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.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 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 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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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". ... KenosisThere 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.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?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.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 52-47And 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.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."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. ... ... 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.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.' " ...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.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 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.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. 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.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: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." ...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.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.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.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.”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:
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.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.) ...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.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. ...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."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.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.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.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.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?"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 mythIf 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..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. ...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." ...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 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".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.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?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.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.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. ...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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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 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.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.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.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?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.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 RisksThe 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.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. ...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. ...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 warmingThe 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.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:John replies: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!!! 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."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.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 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). 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.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)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.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: UNCONSCIOUSThis 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 DEVELOPMENTThis is kooky, and has no merit. ID, EGO AND SUPEREGOThis was just new terminology for old ideas. DEFENSE MECHANISMSThere is no scientific evidence for what Freud called repression. PSYCHOANALYSISAll 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 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!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."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.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.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.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.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.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.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:
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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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. ...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.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 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.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 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.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.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. ...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. ...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: STIPULATIONSo 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. 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. ...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 creationismIt 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 meSigh. 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.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, thatMathematics 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. 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).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, ...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. ...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. 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 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. ...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.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.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.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?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. 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. ...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. ...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.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.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?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. ...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 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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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: 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!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."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: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.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? ...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.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. § 1811. Authorization during time of warI 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.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.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
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)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.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. ...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." John Dean on libel John W. Dean, the famous Watergate felon, writes: Defamation Law Is In Need of a Major Revision, as Justice Scalia SuggestedSo 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?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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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 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.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.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?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.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. 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?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.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.) ...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.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.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.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.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."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: 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.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.No, their skills are not in high demand. The next day, the same paper said: Silicon Valley's job growth remains sluggish.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.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. - DavidHmmm. 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. ... 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. ...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.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.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 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.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.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.The leftist supremacists are complaining about Alito, but the real judicial activists are judges like Reinhardt. Saturday, Nov 12, 2005
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.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.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.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?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. 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."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."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.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 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 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. 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?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:
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. "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.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.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. 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.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?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.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." ... 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 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. ...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 critics are correct when they point out that leftist-atheist-evolutionists push their definitions in order to force their unscientific agenda.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. 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.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.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. ...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.Here is a letter to the San Jose paper: Gorilla evidence may be misleadingCorchero 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 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.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. ...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.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.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.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." ...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.”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 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. 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. ...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.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: 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.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. 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.) ...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 theoryLander 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:
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-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 CrusadeI 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.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.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."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.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.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: 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. ...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 2005You 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 ...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.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."(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 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").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.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, ...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." ...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.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.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.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. ...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." ...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. ...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.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.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. ...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 ZooNo 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.” 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." ...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.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.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.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.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.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/TheoryThe 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: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.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. 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. ...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.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."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.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. ...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 protectionCalifornia 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?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.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."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. ...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.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.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?He's right, as usual. 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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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: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.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 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.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. ...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 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 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.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?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.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: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.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.And the blogger responds: Two points: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.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: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.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.) 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."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?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.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. ...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: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.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. 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. 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.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. ...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 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. ...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 StandardDoes 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.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.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.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.John responds: Chuck Schumer immediately picked up on this. Commenting on her contingent resignation today, Schumer said: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.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. 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. ...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?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.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: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.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: 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. ...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: 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. ...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.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 As it happened, Wells treated the women in his life shabbily. He cheated on his wives and impregnated his mistresses.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.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. ...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.”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.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 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 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, 2005Yes, 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.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.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.�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. ...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.Most atheist-evolutionists tolerate pagan gods, but not Christianity. 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.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.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.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.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?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.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
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.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.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 EvolutionBut 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.)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."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 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.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.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.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."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, ...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.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.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.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.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. ...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." ...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 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.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.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.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.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 & EvolutionNPR 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: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.NY Times slanders judgesTo 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. 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.”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.
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 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.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.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."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. ...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.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.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.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 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.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. 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.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 MuslimsThose 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. ...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?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), UCSCHere 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.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.I am waiting for what the evolutionists have to say. Crows scaring toads to death by explosion?! Mathematical ancestry I found my mathematical ancestry:
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 Wednesday, Apr 20, 2005
Research on the internet AP reports: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay intensified his criticism of the federal courts ...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?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.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.pdfYes, 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.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 ...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.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 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.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. ...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.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 SchlaflyGoogle 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.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. 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. ...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.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."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 rationalWe 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.Here is a NY Times reader who wants to declare war on religion: Science, Faith and FossilsIs 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 AllColumbus 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. 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."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. ...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 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. ...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. ...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.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.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.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.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." ...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. ...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: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?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. 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?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?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)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.)Mike writes: In his latest Scarboroughesque twisting of the truth, Roger blogs: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. ...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.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.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 GalileoNo, 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."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.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.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. 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. ...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)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.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.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.No doubt the news media will justify this by saying that there was more negative news about Bush. Sunday, Mar 13, 2005
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.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. ...(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.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: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."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 amendmentI 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.''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.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.The NY Times published this letter already: Re "Afraid to Discuss Evolution" (editorial, Feb. 4):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.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"!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 paperThat 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.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 childrenNote 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.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. ...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.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.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 ThursdayWe 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.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. 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.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.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:Kepler's reply mentions Plato and Pythogoras, and some of the Pythagoreans believed in a heliocentric system.[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 ... 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. ...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.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.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.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?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?"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.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 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/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 responds: John omitted how he and Roger generally defended the decision, and were happy to shift blame (unjustifiably) to Congress.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. ...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.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: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.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. ...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.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.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 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.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.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?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.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. 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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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. 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 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.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. 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) 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.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:John writes: This decision strikes directly at Congress's most basic and absolute power - the spending power. It must be appealed.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.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. 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."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.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.)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 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. 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. 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 JUSTICEI 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.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. 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.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 ResearchActually, 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.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.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.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." ...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.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: 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?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.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.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. 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.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: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.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.Article IV, sec 2 of the Constitution says: 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. 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 HallsThe 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?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. 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.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.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.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.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.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).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.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. 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 CourtThat 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.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.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 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.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.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.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 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.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."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: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 clothYes, 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.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.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.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.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?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 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."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.Thurlow is corroborated by other eye witnesses and lack of battle damage reports. 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.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?Chris writes: Doesn't this directly corroborate my statement that all medals awarded in the Vietnam War are now suspect?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.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:I think that a column on this subject is in the works.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. 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.'"John replies: A bestselling book about 10 years ago was entitled "Smart Women, Foolish Choices"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."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.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.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 ...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
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.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"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.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. ...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.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.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. ...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. ...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.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?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.Liza responds: Yes, I read Redish's testimony, and found it troubling. He states: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.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. 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.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.John replies: Liberals always raise the specter of race discrimination whenever conservatives challenge the power of federal courts.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)?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.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.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.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. ...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. 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.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.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: 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: 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."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.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.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 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. 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.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 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 SupremacistsA 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?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. ...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.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.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: 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. ...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. 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.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 ReadAll 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.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.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 imageI 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 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?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 scienceOppenheimer 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.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.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. 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.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.(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.John writes: (1)Why is it better to seek medical records by subpoena rather than by judge-approved search warrant? 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 French Terror Alert Bob sends this: NEWS FLASH! 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. 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.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 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.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.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.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.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.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. 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.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.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. 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.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.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.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 ...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.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: 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.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."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.Liza writes: Well, this is a difficult tradeoff. Not using antibiotics can result in hearing loss, which this article doesn't mention.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 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.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: 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. ...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 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.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.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. ...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.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.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. 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.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?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).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.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.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. Monday, Feb 23, 2004
Chickenpox vaccine The NY Times reports: Vaccination against chickenpox has been routine in the United States for nearly a decade.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.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. 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 SideThe 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. 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: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.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. 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.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. 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).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: 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"! 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.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.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: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.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.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.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.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.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:That prediction has not proved correct. If that were right, we wouldn't start seeing a HBV decline until 2006. Instead, the CDC says: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.] 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:
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?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.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:You know the judges are left-wing kooks when they talk about "an evolving paradigm".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. ...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. 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." Monday, Feb 02, 2004
California teachers are well paid The Si Valley paper explains: Teacher housing crisis a mythThe 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 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.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.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. ...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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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).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.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.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: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.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.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?”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.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. 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 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 rulesNo, 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.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.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.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 SEIZEDThe 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. ...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.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?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 practiceShe 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.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. 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 ... 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.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.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. 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.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.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."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. 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 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 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.”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.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
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.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. 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. 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: 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: 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.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 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 commercialsBut 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 advertisementsBut 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.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
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 MarriageBut 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]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.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.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.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." 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.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?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 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.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.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.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.Joe responds: Interesting article. He says:Andy responds: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. 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.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.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.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.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! 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.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
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. 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.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.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.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? 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. 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. 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.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. 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.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 saysThere 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.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 sexBut 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?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. 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. 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: 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
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: 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!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 overeatingIt 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.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: 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: 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 ...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. 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: 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!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.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. 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? ...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: 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.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
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. 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. ...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.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.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 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.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 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:It is hard to believe that guy is governor of California. 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.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?" Friday, Aug 29, 2003
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.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
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: 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.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 kidsAntidepressants 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.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. 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.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.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: 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. 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: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.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.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.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. 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.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. ...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. 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
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: 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.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.Apis writes, sarcastically: Yeah, that'll teach those idiotic bureaucrats at DARPA to think outside the box.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.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.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: 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.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. 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."John replies: Andy responds: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. 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.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..."Andy responds: Conservatives did oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though I cannot parse that opposition title by title.John responds to Andy: Andy responds: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"! 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. 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.)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: 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 wrongBut she doesn't equivocate. The transcript says: Chris Matthews: Was Jack Kennedy 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.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.Andy replies: It's not champerty unless Boies sought to profit, and there is no accusation in the article that he did.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 responds to Andy and me: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! 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. 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. 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.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.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!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. 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: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.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.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.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. 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) 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 censorshipThe 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.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,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.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 DisorderIf 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.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 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.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. 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."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: 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. 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: 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. ...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 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 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.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. ...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.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. ...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?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 teachingIn 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:
(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?
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 ?
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:
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!
Liza writes:
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.
Andy writes:
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.
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
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. 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. ...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 PresidentAccording 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. 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. 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.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.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. 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 thatIt 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 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.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.
John writes: Isn't it funny that Andy cites his class as if it were an independent authority?Joe writes: Capitalism and Freedom - FriedmanAndy writes: John wrote, "So you construct a list with that in mind, and sure enough - not a single president made the list! Imagine that!"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.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. ....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/. There is a point with critics: Unlike Latex or HTML whichNo 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. 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. 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. ...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.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.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. 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.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).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 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.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. ..."Math can be translated without changing meaning. Other things also. Laws can be translated and explained. Eg, your law school textbooks. But: 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. 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).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.John responds: 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. 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.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.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. 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.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: NewsdayPhyllis 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.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."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.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. ...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." 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 PresidentNothing Phyllis Schlafly has said could approach the negativity of Angela Davis. Davis is mainly famous for: 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.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!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.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)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. 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.'' ...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 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."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: 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.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".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. 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. 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?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." ...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. 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" themDrudge 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 followsJohn 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.)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 responds to Andy: So does your ranking of the first 15 presidents reflect their relative "adherence to moral and logical principles"? Obviously not!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.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). 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.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: Andy responds to John: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. John wrote, "Liberals appeal to abstract moral principles much more often than conservatives, who rely more on history and culture."John responds to Andy: 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.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. Andy responds: 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.)Liberals do not appeal to "moral principles." They do appeal to terms like "rights" and "equality", but these are not moral principles. 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.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: 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." ... 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 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:This is more nonsense from Andy. Note that Monroe only refers to European powers, and has no bearing on Iraq."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. 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.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.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.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.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. 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.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.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: 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.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. 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.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? 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: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.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: Andy responds:>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.htmlProvided he can prove it is authorized by existing UN resolutions. He has to make the case. It's not obvious.>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. 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.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." 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.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.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). 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.War involves killing people. Better them than us. Failing to act might get more people killed. John responds to me: John responds to me again: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.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.>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.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.The status quo is not the solution.Yes, the status is the solution unless somebody finds a better one. No one has.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.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.And what are those reasons? Their failure to articulate a clear, overriding reason for war invites speculation about what the true reason may be.>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. 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.>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? 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.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?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.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.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
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: 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.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. 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.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!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. 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.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: 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.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. 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.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.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!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!"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.Andy responds: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. 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."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: Andy responds: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. Madison's Federalist No. 10 is here. 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.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.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.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?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.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. 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.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.Liza says: Andy, if I were you I'd be a little nervous about what your dog might do if it escaped.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?"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 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.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."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.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 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, 1996The 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: 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. 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: 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.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? 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?" ...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.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.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: Liza responds to John: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. 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.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.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.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. 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.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?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.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.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.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. ..."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.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: 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 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.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.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 responds: Joe, the flammable polyurethane was the soundproofing. I don't see how it could be covered with fire-resistant drywall. 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.. Thursday, Feb 27, 2003
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?'"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: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?"(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. 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.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.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.” ...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? 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. 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: 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?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." 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. 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. 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. 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?"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.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, 2-13-03Ok, 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.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 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. 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: 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? 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).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: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.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. 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: And Andy responds: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." 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 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.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.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 personalityQ 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. 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: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."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.[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." 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: That is about how much we knew about Souter. A usually-reliable conservative had strongly recommended him.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? 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. 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 wroteJohn responds to Andy: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 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." 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. 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: 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.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. 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: 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. 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.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). 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. 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.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! 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.Andy writes: John writes, " But there is never a legitimate reason for using racial preferences at schools that receive federal tax funds."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?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. John sends this LA Times story about companies bailing out of California because of the anti-business political climate. 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? 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.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.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."John responds: 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???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. 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. 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.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:If the fetus survives the abortion, then it is outside the scope of Roe v. Wade. Ordinary laws about murder apply.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. 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: Another reformation or schism?? Cool. Meanwhile, I think divorced Catholics can get Communion, but not those who remarried outside the Church.Andy wrote: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 defends his abortion opinion: 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.Andy wroteI continue to disagree with Roger's view that a PBA ban cannot be upheld without overturning Roe v. Wade.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. 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:I am not an advocate of states rights.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. 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 ..." 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. People say: I was awoken when the alarm went on.And also: I called the radio show, and got my answer on 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. 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.]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.)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. ... 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.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! 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... 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. 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.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 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
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 wroteI don't think Kennedy's dissent makes much sense. Note that only Rehnquist signed onto that opinion.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. 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:
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. 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. 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. 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 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. ...."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.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.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? 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
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.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:Andy responds: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."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. 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. 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. 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. 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 unacceptableI 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."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.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.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. 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. 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: 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. |