Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

“Rock-Solid Science”

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Some thoughts on Michael Schermer’s latest.

As I noted on Twitter yesterday, it’s kind of ironic that such a tool is head of the “Skeptic Society.” I was actually a member myself back in the eighties, until I realized that it was mostly just an excuse to bash traditional religion and push fashionable lefty causes.

[Update a while later]

Is it the “death of expertise”? Or the democraticization of it?

Considering the difference between weather and climate expertise provides an interesting example of the many dimensions of expertise that are needed to address a complex science/policy problem. It is well known that there are many professional meteorologists that are not convinced by AGW arguments. It has been argued that meteorologists are not climate experts, and hence their opinions should be discounted relative to climate experts. Well, many climate experts know nothing about climate dynamics; rather their expertise is in the area of climate impact assessment. Meteorologists generally have a very good understanding of climate variability and the natural causes of climate variability. Discounting the expertise of meteorologists in the climate debate in part has led to the current conundrum for climate science whereby natural internal climate variability has been discounted.

The broader and more significant issue of relevance to climate science expertise is the new phenomena of independent climate scientists, who have no formal training in climate science or its subfields. The emergence of Steve McIntyre as an expertise on paleoclimate proxy data and the statistical analysis of climate data was viewed by university/IPCC paleoclimate experts as an absolute affront, as evidenced by the Climategate emails. The influence of Steve McIntyre on the course of paleoclimate research and the public debate on climate science has been profound.

And not in a way that makes the Apostles happy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Pennsylvania Bomber

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Well, what to make of this?

Altoon Mayor Matthew Pacifico said Miftakjov is a student at Penn Stat University Altoona.

He is charged with possessing a weapon of mass destruction, risking a catastrophe, possessing instruments of crime, prohibited offensive weapons, incendiary devices, recklessly endangering another person, and several drug-related charges.

Officers had been investigating an alleged marijuana growing operation when they discovered the alleged bomb, according to a statement posted on the police department’s Facebook page.

They said the bomb was found inside a suitcase along with “assorted bomb making materials.”

“The bomb was safely deconstructed by experts from the Pennsylvania State Police Bomb Squad,” the statement read.

Unless it’s a nuke or chemical weapons, it is not a “weapon of mass destruction.”

It’s too early to tell, but there’s no mention of his religion, just his Russian nationality. He’s a college student in Altoona now, but it looks like a couple years ago, he was a HS sophomore in Belmont, California:

Sophomores are required to take the ELA (English language arts) portion that is a multiple-choice test along with an essay prompt. The following day sophomores took the mathematics portion with a total of 92 questions.

”I thought the English [section] was easier, but overall the CAHSEE was really boring,” Vladislav Miftakhov said.

He doesn’t seem to update his Facebook page much, which might explain why it says San Carlos (might be where he lived while attending the school in Belmont), rather than western Pennsylvania. But he did have an interesting answer to a question about that time, two and a half years ago:

“Do you believe Bind Laden is dead?”

“No”

It’ll be interesting to see how they caught him. I’m guessing it wasn’t NSA data mining, though.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Space Journalism

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Why oh why do reporters imagine that cosmologists know anything about spacecraft?

Dr Xing Li, an Aberystwyth University expert on astrophysics and cosmology, said as a scientist it would be “beautiful” to be one of SpaceShipTwo’s privileged passengers.

But SpaceShipTwo travels at a super-sonic 2,500mph – more than four times faster than a passenger jet – and Dr Li believes it’s difficult to imagine anything that goes at that speed becoming affordable.

He said: “Now we don’t have supersonic flights because of the cost issue. At the moment I don’t see that it will be possible even in 30 or 40 years. It will only happen if we have some technological advance that would bring down the cost.”

Ask a frickin’ engineer, not a scientist.