I have some thoughts on this weekend’s successful arean invasion, over at PJ Media.
[Update at 7:40 AM EDT]
Some less lofty thoughts over at Althouse’s place, particularly in comments.
[Mid-morning update]
Jeff Foust writes about a second chance for an underdog, over at The Space Review.
The neurology of org@sms. Mostly safe for work.
Congratulations to Alan Boyle for six years of Cosmic Log.
SciAm has an article on the six things that Ben Stein doesn’t want you to know about the movie. Just the first one is sufficient to me to think the whole thing a contemptible fraud.
Jim Manzi reviews Expelled. He’s not impressed.
And John Derbyshire is appropriately dismayed by Jews like David Klinghoffer and Ben Stein latching on to this anti-science schtick:
One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.
Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don’t the two of you know, don’t Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don’t, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). Your new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.
Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.
The mistake that these people make is to equate science with atheism. It is true that, as science advances, and more scientific explanations are put forth, much of the need for God, at least insofar as an explanation for natural phenomena, is removed. But then, that’s the nature of natural phenomena–if they require the supernatural, they are by definition not natural.
But it doesn’t follow that a belief in science in general, or evolution in particular, requires atheism. Many (including Manzi in the link above) have pointed out numerous examples, going back to Aquinas, of the compatibility of rationality and reason, and theism. Stein and Klinghoffer would return us to the dark ages, even if they don’t realize it.
Alan Boyle has a long review of the movie Expelled. While I largely agree with it (and it has reduced my estimation of Ben Stein, who seems to have gone completely off the deep end, tremendously), it is marred, severely in my opinion, by the use of the politically loaded word, “swiftboating,” not just in the text, but in the title itself.
He seems, from context, to be using the word in its popular, but grossly mistaken and (Democrat) partisan sense, as in “spreading malicious lies about something or someone.” But for those of us actually paying attention at the time, and using more enlightened sources than Lawrence O’Donnell screaming “Liar! Liar! Liar!” at John O’Neill, the word means “revealing inconvenient truths about a political candidate who is a Democrat.” Most of the charges of the Swift Boaters were in fact validated–on the subject of Christmas in Cambodia, despite it being “seared, seared into his memory,” John Kerry was either lying or fantasizing, and his campaign essentially was forced to admit that. And the video of his Senate testimony in which he slandered his fellow sailors, airmen, marines and soldiers, calling them war criminals, was indisputable.
So it would be far better to simply avoid the word, given the fact that it has almost exactly the opposite meaning to two different sets of readerships, and is bound to raise hackles, regardless of the context. I expect it from political polemicists, but I expect (and almost always get) much better from Alan.
I’ll have more thoughts on the movie itself (which I haven’t seen, and have no plans to), but will save them for another post.
[Thursday morning update]
Alan responds, but seems to miss the point that I was making. Apparently, to him, the term “swiftboat” as a verb simply means “negative campaigning,” something that he doesn’t like. But I don’t think that’s what it means to most people, on either side of the partisan divide. As I describe above, Democrat partisans have come to use it to mean not just negative campaigning, but lying about their candidate, whereas those of us who were opposed to John Kerry (for reasons that the Swift Boat Vets stated, and many others) view it as telling inconvenient truths that didn’t reflect well on him. Both of those fall under the rubric of “negative campaigning,” if by that one means saying things about a candidate (or a concept) with the intent of making people think less of them.
Now, in light of what I think is my understanding of Alan’s point, I disagree. I actually have no problem at all with negative campaigning per se, if the campaign is truthful. I think that in order to make a judgment about a candidate or an issue, the more information the better, both pro and con. If a candidate happens to be an ax murderer, would there be something reprehensible about pointing this out? I think that it would be information that the voting public would have a right to know, despite the fact that it’s (sigh) “negative.”
Likewise, I have no problem with movies that oppose evolution, per se, as long as they’re honest, and I would not characterize such movies as “Swift Boating” (particularly since I think that the Swift Boat Vets, in pointing out facts about John Kerry of which the voting public was largely unaware, performed a public service). From what I’ve heard about Expelled, however, it’s scurrilous, and to associate the tactics used there with John O’Neill and his cohorts is slanderous, if not libelous, to them. There’s been a lot of discussion about the movie in the last couple days, and the war on science in general (a war that, by the way, contra Chris Mooney’s flawed, or at least limited, thesis, is thoroughly bi-partisan). I hope to provide a link roundup and some thoughts of my own shortly, if I can find the time.
In any event, I continue to find Alan’s usage of the new (and ambiguous) verb “swiftboating” problematic, for reasons stated above. As I already noted, I expect to hear that word from “political consultants” on partisan talkfests on the cable news channels, but not in a reasoned discussion about science and society.
New (and apparently controversial) genetic evidence that dinosaurs (and particularly T. Rex) were closely related to birds.
…on centrifugal force.
A new class of high-temperature superconductors:
According to Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford, “[there exist] enough similarities that it’s a good working hypothesis that they’re parts of the same thing.” However, not everyone hopes the mechanism is the same. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist at Princeton, says that an entirely new mechanism of superconductivity would be far more important than if they mimicked the current understanding of superconductivity. “If it’s really a new mechanism, God knows where it will go,” says Anderson.
Let’s hope.
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