Category Archives: Science And Society

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Democrat War On Science

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John Tierney has some useful thoughts on the politicization of science in the new administration:

Most researchers, Dr. Pielke writes, like to think of themselves in one of two roles: as a pure researcher who remains aloof from messy politics, or an impartial arbiter offering expert answers to politicians’ questions. Either way, they believe their research can point the way to correct public policies, and sometimes it does — when the science is clear and people’s values aren’t in conflict.

But climate change, like most political issues, isn’t so simple. While most scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a threat, they’re not certain about its scale or its timing or its precise consequences (like the condition of California’s water supply in 2090). And while most members of the public want to avoid future harm from climate change, they have conflicting values about which sacrifices are worthwhile today.

A scientist can enter the fray by becoming an advocate for certain policies, like limits on carbon emissions or subsidies for wind power. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for scientists, as long as they acknowledge that they’re promoting their own agendas.

But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as “unqualified” or “unscientific.”

“Some scientists want to influence policy in a certain direction and still be able to claim to be above politics,” Dr. Pielke says. “So they engage in what I call ‘stealth issue advocacy’ by smuggling political arguments into putative scientific ones.”

My concern with Chu and Holdren is that they are Club of Rome types who seem to be anti-technology. I’m sure that they would say that they are in favor of “appropriate” technology (yet another leftist theft of an intellectual base, like “progressive”), but it amounts to having no faith in our descendants to come up with technological solutions to today’s burgeoning problems. That inability to account for technological improvement is at the heart of apocalyptic predictions like world-wide famine and California agriculture drying up from lack of water. It’s that same blindness (and ignorance of basic economics) that resulted in Holdren and Ehrlich losing their bet with Julian Simon

Not to say, of course, that famines and droughts can’t occur, but if they do, it will be a result of foolish (or evil) government policies, not an overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

Weight-Loss Drugs

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The current state of play.

[Update a while later]

Here’s an interesting article on progress in anti-aging. I found this part particularly interesting:

The study will also give more confidence to people who are trying to extend their lives by severely restricting their food intake. Such extreme dieting, popularized by the late Roy Walford, has grown into a movement.

“I’m not going to get on the diet-restriction bandwagon,” Morimoto said. “But a little less consumption would be good for us. If you fast for 12 hours, that’s enough to send the right signals to your system.”

I sometimes do go a while without eating. I often skip breakfast, and since I (literally) don’t break my fast, I can end up going twelve hours or more. It’s nice to know that it could be good for me. It also indicates that breakfast may not be the most important meal of the day, and could in fact be harmful. In any event, it’s harder for people who are susceptible to blood-sugar swings to do this.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

You Don’t Say…

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What would we do without psychologists?

“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.

Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn has further thoughts.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Fighting The False “Consensus”

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Frank Tipler on the tendency of the global warm-mongers to argue from authority rather than from the science:

…why did Halsey believe the meteorologists against the evidence of his own eyes? The report of the Board of Inquiry on the disaster answers that question. Halsey simply accepted the authority of his chief meteorologist, against his own experience. The report listed the “qualifications of this “expert” — his degrees, the numerous courses on climate studies he had taken, his years flying over hurricanes. But in contrast to Bryson’s successful forecasts, two of which I have described above, not one correct forecast was mentioned by the Court of Inquiry! I find this extraordinary. Imagine picking an admiral on the basis of the prestige of an officer’s education. Halsey himself had two famous victories, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I admire Halsey immensely, but he was wrong to give any weight at all to mere academic credentials, rather than performance credentials like his own. For true scientists, one knows the achievements, not the academic credentials. Albert Einstein discovered relativity (everyone knows E = mc2), he discovered the photon, and he discovered gravitational waves. But where did Einstein go to school? Who cares?

Not me.

General Science, Science And Society

Reconstructing the Ancestral Routes to Nucleobases

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A few weeks ago, I linked to a very interesting paper on how life may have evolved. In response to some comments here, the abstract has been revised. Here is the note to me in email:

The abstract was revised to (hopefully) eliminate ambiguity and make it clearer that Sylvain’s proposed chemical steps are not just a partial solution, but rather, go from the first reaction all the way to all the biomolecules necessary to “usher in the RNA world.” The full-picture illustration was also added on the home page to help readers grasp the scope of what is being offered.

To me, one of the compelling aspects of this is that all the relevant biomolecules form in one location through ‘room temperature’ chemical steps that do not require anything exotic.

Topics relevant to the Origin of Life that are addressed in this paper:

  1. Why the relevant amino acids are all left-handed

  2. Why there are 20 standard amino acids, and why those 20
  3. Why the relevant amino acids are all “alpha-amino”
  4. Why the relevant sugars are right-handed
  5. The origin and preservation of homochirality
  6. The origin of nucleobases A, G, C, U
  7. The origin of RNA

  8. The origin of the lipids

To put this into perspective, each one of these topics is a major big deal. That this model shows them as possibly being parts of interrelated cascading chemical steps is stunning. It is interesting to note that these chemical steps take place, not in a “primordial soup,” but in a sheltered microenvironment of a mineral host structure. Since these proposed reactions do not work in water, the concept of life originating in a “primordial soup” may have mislead Origin of Life chemists for many decades.

We’ll see where it goes. If it can actually tackle abiogenesis, it is a big deal.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Ad Astra To A Visionary

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I’ve just learned that Tom Rogers, former head of the Space Transportation Association, has died. I hadn’t talked to him in a few years, and deeply regret now that I hadn’t. There is so much more to say about him than that he is the former head of the STA, and I’ll make a probably pathetic attempt to do so on the morrow. All that I can say now is that I am more frustrated than usual with this news by the boneheaded space policies that the nation has had for half a century, and all of the dreams that they have crushed, and all of the hard-working and far-sighted people who couldn’t live long enough to see better.

[Update a few minutes later]

Konrad Dannenberg has died as well.

Do space pioneers go in threes, like Hollywood? If so, who’s next? I don’t even want to speculate.

[Late evening update]

Clark Lindsey has some Rogers-related links.

[Tuesday morning update]

There are some more encomia for Tom over at NASA Watch. Here’s one from Courtney Stadd:

I interacted with Tom for over 25 years – both in my capacity as a government official and in my various private sector incarnations. In speaking truth to power, he marshaled his data and did everything he could to persuade the government that the commercial space sector offered innovative and cost effective solutions. And if logic failed to penetrate the prefrontal cortex of his intended target – e.g., a Member of Congress during testimony or an agency official or the audience at a space conference – Tom was legendary for raising his voice to a decibel level that ensured that no one with functional hearing could possibly ignore his key arguments. His footprint was deep and wide – from early pathfinding work on GPS, among other leading edge research (during his tenure heading the Air Force and MIT R&D labs) to the first director of research at Housing and Urban Development. For many years his was a lonely voice in the wilderness as he organized fora on space tourism and funded a series of studies via his Sophron Foundation. (I was a happy recipient of one of his grants many years ago.) His Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) study regarding the issues and challenges of the International Space Station – issued during the Reagan Administration – is a classic in terms of clarity of thought and prescience regarding the cost and policy challenges that have confronted the Space Station in recent years. In a world increasingly populated with self-regarding incrementalists, Tom’s legacy is an inspiration to all of us who believe in the power of big ideas (based on sound principles) and the passion and courage to counter conventional wisdom in pursuit of one’s convictions. As Arthur C. Clarke once said, “The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.” Few embodied this philosophy as well as the late Tom Rogers. Godspeed, Tom.

I was also a grant recipient, about a decade ago. The results were this study on near-term prospects for space tourism. Also over at NASA Watch, Mark Schlather recounts (though he bowdlerizes) Tom’s stock response to anyone who asked him why he wanted to go into space: “None of your goddamned business!” The point being that no one should have to justify to anyone, government or otherwise, why they wanted to go into space or what they wanted to do there. Only if the government was paying for the trip should it care.

I had heard Tom give one of his fire-and-brimstone speeches on commercial space at the Denver ISDC back in the mid-eighties, but I didn’t actually meet him until I attended a conference sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the early nineties, on standardizing commercial space operations. He saw the dreaded word “Rockwell” on my name badge, decided to make me a surrogate for his big-aerospace nemesis, and proceeded to harangue me on everything that the industry was doing wrong, repeatedly calling my company “Rockwell North American.” It took several discussions over the course of the conference before he finally decided that I wasn’t one of those horned devils trying to hold America back in space for purposes of corporate greed. It was the beginning of a wonderful and productive friendship, with breakfasts at the Cosmos Club whenever I was in Washington. Sadly, though, it’s one that I’ve regrettably been remiss in upholding in the last few years on my end.

Tom was a raconteur (to dramatically understate), and he loved to tweak the establishment, though he was deeply of it. For instance, I never saw him not wearing a suit. On the other hand, one of his favorite (non-space-related) stories was when he was invited to a meeting at Orbital Sciences, and was informed that the company dress code was casual. He showed up out in Reston, as usual, in his suit, and walked up to the receptionist behind the counter inside the entrance. She signed him in, and then gently reprimanded him: “Mr. Rogers, you didn’t need to wear a suit. Didn’t anyone tell you that we dress casually here?” He replied, “You don’t understand, dear. I know you can’t see from where you’re sitting, but I’m not wearing any pants.”

Tom had decades of experience in the Beltway, and had learned through an accumulation of (as he often put it) “cleat marks in his back” the difficulty of the task that was laid out for us, and how long it would take. He always cautioned against impatience, and to not expect sudden shifts in policy, or overnight success. He would counsel, instead, to look for smaller signs of optimism, to consider the immense inertia of federal policymaking, and just look for “curvature in the wake” of the policy. It is pretty hard, on a day-to-day basis, to see it. But when one looks back over the past thirty years or so, the ship has changed course considerably, from an era in which it was almost inconceivable that a private entity could put up a satellite (let alone a human) to one in which the FAA is granting launch licenses to suborbital space tourism firms, with prospects on the horizon for private human spaceflight into orbit. And one of the heaviest shoulders on that stiff rudder was Tom Rogers. And wherever he ends up, whether with God or Beelzebub (the latter seems highly unlikely), either of them will have their hands full with him, and he’ll have a great time.

[Bumped to Tuesday morning]

[Update a little later]

Some more thoughts over at NASA Watch from Alan Ladwig (Obama administration space adviser), which I also remember:

He was a great mentor and always had time to share ideas and dispense advice. At various points in my career he would stop by my office to admonish me for focusing on non-priority issues. ‘Ladwig,” he proclaimed, “stop screwing around on page two and page three issues and concentrate on page one!”

I think about this proclamation constantly and although I still get bogged down on the back pages, he gave me a goal to strive towards that I’ll never forget.

The problem with space policy is that it remains on the back pages in general. Tom always advocated a complete scrape-down-to-the-paint approach to remaking space policy (as have I, and even more since meeting and being influenced by him) that the politics and policy inertia simply will not allow.

Popular Culture, Science And Society

Legacy/Plagiarism

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And/Or lack of originality.

The local cable channel in LA (Verizon) is running Twilight Zone episodes on one of the lower channels (one of the lowest ones, actually). The first one was about a fallout shelter, which later became a Simpson’s episode. The second was a precursor to The Sixth Sense. In Lileks style, I’ll leave it up to the reader to guess which episode it was. If no one gets it by morning, I’ll at least provide another hint.