Category Archives: Political Commentary

Education, General Science, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Mystery “Solved”

Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:

By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of “mud-rich slurry” that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly – and enduringly – in a deep-sea tomb.

The mass death was “not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one – and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures,” said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.

I use the scare quote because that’s the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like “fact,” rather than “theory”) that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes “solved” a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.

In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they’d been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have “proven” that this is what happened? No. As I’ve written many times, science is not about proving things–scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.

There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.

And of course, I won’t even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that’s what they are, even if they don’t recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we’d like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn’t science–it’s just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).

Education, General Science, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Mystery “Solved”

9 Comments

Scientists now have a plausible, and likely theory for what created the Burgess Shale:

By looking over hundreds of micro-thin slices of rock taken from the famous shales, the researchers have reconstructed the series of catastrophic underwater landslides of “mud-rich slurry” that killed tens of thousands of marine animals representing hundreds of species, then sealed them instantly – and enduringly – in a deep-sea tomb.

The mass death was “not a nice way to go, perhaps, but a swift one – and one that guaranteed immortality (of a sort) for these strange creatures,” said University of Leicester geochemist Sarah Gabbott, lead author of a study published in the U.K.-based Journal of the Geological Society.

I use the scare quote because that’s the word used in the headline. This kind of language, I think, is (at least partly) what bothers people who continue to rebel against evolution, and science. It is a certainty of language (like “fact,” rather than “theory”) that they consider hubristic, and arrogant. After all, when Sherlock Holmes “solved” a case, it generally was the last word, case closed.

In this case, what the word means is that scientists have come up with a plausible explanation for an event for which they’d been struggling to come up with one for a long time, and it is sufficiently plausible that there are few scientists who argue against it, thus presenting a consensus. Does it mean that they have “proven” that this is what happened? No. As I’ve written many times, science is not about proving things–scientists leave that to the mathematicians. What scientists do (ideally) is to posit theories that are both reasonable and disprovable, yet remain undisproved.

There may be some other explanation for what happened up in what is now Yoho National Park that corresponds better to what really happened, but until someone comes up with one that makes more sense, or comes up with some inconvenient indisputable fact that knocks this one down, it (like evolution itself) is what most scientists, particularly the ones who study such things for a living, will believe.

And of course, I won’t even get started on how upset some anti-science (and yes, that’s what they are, even if they don’t recognize it) types will get over the statement that one of the ancestors of humans is in that shale.

[Update a few minutes later]

Oh, the main point about which I put up this post. This is an excellent illustration of how rare are the circumstances in which we find the keys to our biological past. Those that demand that we cannot know the history of life until every creature has died on the body of its parents, perfectly preserved, are being unreasonable. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, we do science with the (rare) evidence that we have, not the evidence we’d like to have. There will always be many huge holes in the fabric of the evidence, barring the development of a time machine to the past. We simply do the best we can with what we have, and put together theories that best conform to it. To say that God (or whoever) did it isn’t science–it’s just a cop out. And that is true completely independently from the existence (or not) of God (or whoever).

Political Commentary

How Clueless Is Obama About The Military?

15 Comments

This clueless:

A platoon is the smallest unit deployed outside of [special forces] operations. Sending 24 men to one theater and 15 to another would destroy unit cohesion, leave one group without an officer and be a nightmare for the next higher unit’s (the company) command, control and communication structure. You should take this story with a grain of salt — that grain being the size of the moon.

“Ready to be CiC.”

Riiiigggghhhht.

Of course, if Hillary wasn’t equally clueless, she would have called him on it–she missed a huge opportunity to embarrass him. But then, it took a couple years for Bill Clinton to learn how to throw a proper salute (IIRC). And of course, she’d have probably loved to use the story herself.

[Update in late afternoon]

Despite comments, my post title stands. The fact remains that whatever the actual story, Obama told a tale in the debate last night that was implausible on its face, for reasons that many pointed out. The fact that there was an actual story that was somewhat like it (it was a Lieutenant at the time, they were split up before they were deployed, they didn’t actually have to capture Taliban for their weapons, etc.) doesn’t change the fact that as actually related in the debate, it was clueless about the way the military works. Someone with actual military experience would have realized this, and worded it differently (and more accurately).

And the point was never that the Obama campaign fabricated the story. It was that they didn’t recognize one that seemed implausible, because they didn’t have the wherewithal to recognize it as such, and it fit their political agenda (Bush is the Worst President Ever) as was, ignoring the fact that there’s never been a time when troops had everything they needed, when they needed it, under any president.

Ace has more thoughts, and continues to call bovine excrement.

Political Commentary

Dodgy

2 Comments

Is Hillary avoiding process servers?

Doesn’t the question answer itself?

Hillary Clinton was dismissed as a co-defendant in the case at a hearing in April, 2007 because of democrat Appellate Court Judges’ support of her belated effort to seek the protection of California’s Anti-SLAPP law. At that hearing, trial court Judge Aurelio Munoz admonished David Kendall by telling him unequivocally that any effort to deny Senator Clinton’s testimony as a witness in the case would be “Dead on Arrival”. To emphasize his point, the Judge followed his statement by saying “Did you hear that Mr Kendall?”

In typical Clintonian hubris and contempt for the judicial process, Hillary had her diminutive counsel with the over inflated ego state to Paul’s lawyer, Colette Wilson, that none of the three lawyers of record representing Hillary in the case would accept a witness subpoena for her deposition on her behalf.

It doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard. Just show up at a campaign event, ask her for an autograph, and hand it to her. Then announce that she’s been served. Be sure to have a confederate with a videocam, though.

Economics, Political Commentary

Better Print Some More Money

6 Comments

Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is 100,000%:

In Africa’s fastest shrinking economy, per capita gross domestic product in Zimbabwe fell from about $200 in 1996 to about $9 a head last year.

What a disaster Mugabe has been. It shows how easy it is to destroy a once-vibrant country (Rhodesia was the bread basket of southern Africa) with insane government policies. And the sad thing is that his fellow African autocrats refuse to denounce him. I’ll bet that if there was a free and fair election there today, the people would vote Ian Smith back in.

Political Commentary

Arbeit Macht Frei

8 Comments

You know, I think that someone wrote a book about this sort of thing:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

They can have my cynicism and uninvolvedness when they pry it from my cold dead soul that needs healing.

[Update a few minutes later]

Further thoughts from Mr. Steyn:

I wouldn’t mind if it was a high-minded call to a self-reliant citizenry, but you get the feeling all it boils down to is a demand that we take our place and twirl our batons in the 300-million cheerleading squad for Barack! The Barack Obama Show starring Barack Obama. The “shed your cynicism” bit sounds like a scene from one of those dystopian movies where you get slid into the Cynishedder as a bitterly sardonic old crank in a pork-pie hat and after 30 seconds bathed in the rays of the Obamatron you emerge in a turquoise 1970s catsuit with a glassy-eyed stare.

Political Commentary, Space, Space and Campaign 2008

“Progressive” Space Discussion

12 Comments

This post by Matthew Yglesias would be a lot more interesting if he explained why it was “advantage, Obama.”

What is Yglesias’ position?

It kicked off a lively discussion in the comments section, in which he doesn’t participate (so we still don’t really know what he thinks), but in which sometime commenter here, Bill White, and Ferris Valyn, do. Ferris has further thoughts, and links.

It also roused a spirited defense of government manned spaceflight programs (at least I assume that’s what he’s defending) by Chris Bowers. I find Bowers’ argument a little (well, OK, a lot) incoherent:

…the space program is about as good an example of stretching and expanding our capabilities as a nation and as a species that one can name. Deciding to not test the limits of our engineering and intellectual potential, and to not explore our surroundings because we have more important things to do, strikes me as a profoundly dangerous path to follow. That is the path of stagnation, and even regression, as a people. Further, it is a terribly utilitarian approach to life, concluding that only bread matters, and that roses are worthless. Personally, I don’t want to live that way, and I don’t think many other people want to live that way, either. Everyone, no matter their financial situation, has aspects of their life that expand beyond mere bread and into roses: art, religion, family, travel, and scholarship are only a few examples of this. To think that we shouldn’t have government funded roses in our lives is to posit a far more dreary nation than the one in which I want to live.

Well, I think that a nation in which one must count on the government to provide either bread or roses a dreary one. Last time I checked, there was plenty of bread, of all varieties, on the shelves of the local grocery, and I suspect that if the government weren’t involved, it would be even cheaper. I also bought two dozen roses last Thursday at the same place–there was no shortage, and they didn’t seem to have a stamp that said they were manufactured by the government. If he means rose gardens, there are plenty of those, too, both government and private. And I sure don’t want the government involved in family or religion, so I guess I just don’t see what his point is.

I do agree with this, though:

Space exploration is not an issue with clear partisan divisions. Some conservatives view it as a wasteful government expenditure that is better handled through private enterprise, while some progressives view it through a utilitarian lens in that it does not provide much direct benefit to humanity.

Unfortunately, this is quite true. In fact, it’s one of the reasons that our space policy itself is so incoherent. The people who promote it don’t generally do so from any kind of ideological base. It’s either a bread-and-butter local issue to provide jobs, or it’s a romantic urge that crosses ideological boundaries. And that’s why the arguments (in both Bowers’ and Yglesias’ comments section) are never ending, and never resolved. Heinlein once wrote that man is not a rational animal; rather, he is a rationalizing animal. Most arguments for a government space program are actually rationalizations for something that the arguer wants to do for emotional reasons, which is why so many of them are so bad. I say this as a space enthusiast myself, but one who recognizes that it is fundamentally an emotional, even religious urge.

I’m not going to beat up on Obama over this (though I’m not going to vote for him, either). Here’s what he reportedly said:

…the next president needs to have “a practical sense of what investments deliver the most scientific and technological spinoffs — and not just assume that human space exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always the best investment.”

Contrary to what some reading-challenged people write (see the February 16th, 2:22 PM comment), this doesn’t mean that he “hates manned spaceflight.” Those words, as far as they go, are entirely reasonable, and Hillary was pandering for votes in Houston. The rub lies in how one makes the determination of what is “the best investment.”

Unfortunately, in order to evaluate an investment, one must decide what is valuable. That’s where all these discussions founder, because everyone comes to them with their own assumptions about goals, values, costs, etc. But these assumptions are never explicitly stated, or agreed on, so people tend to talk past each other. Until we have a top-down discussion of space, starting with goals, and then working down to means of implementing them, people will continue to argue about what the government should be doing, and how much they should be spending on it.

This is why getting a private space program, a dynamist space program, going is so important. Because it will short-circuit all the arguments, because we won’t be arguing about how to spend other people’s money, which is always contentious. We will be spending our own money, for our own goals, rational or irrational, with no arguments in the political sphere, or blogosphere.