Category Archives: Science And Society

Science And Society

Here Comes Fay

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The circulation finally closed this afternoon, but the storm is going to have to fight its way through the mountains of Hispaniola. It seems to have gone directly from a low to a storm, without the usual intermediate tropical depression (does that mean that TD 6 remains available for the next one?). Unfortunately, even though the chances that it will actually hit Boca Raton aren’t high, I’ll probably have to shutter up on Monday, just in case.

The good news is that most of the models are taking it over Cuba as well, which will keep it from intensifying much. If it comes up here, the only chance for strengthening will be in the open water over the Straight of Florida (where it would beat up the Keys). If it stays at tropical storm force, as SHIPS is currently predicting, I may be able to get away without shutters, as we did with Ernesto two years ago. Only one of the 2 PM model runs (HWRF) has it coming through town. The tracking models are probably going to get better now that there’s a definite center of circulation to use as a starting point. Unfortunately, I’m kind of in the middle of the spectrum. By Monday, it should be more clear where this thing is going.

Sigh…

I prefer earthquakes. You don’t have any false alarms with them.

[Update about 6:30 PM EDT]

Jeff Masters confirms my own thoughts:

If Fay does hit South Florida, the storm is likely to be a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane, since it will not have enough time over water to reorganize much. I think the models are overdoing the intensification of Fay once it does pop off the coast of Cuba. We saw in 2006 that Ernesto popped off the coast of Cuba as a weak tropical storm, and took a full 36 hours to get its act together. If Fay misses South Florida and veers either to the east or west of the Peninsula, the storm could easily reach Category 2 status before a potential landfall either on the Gulf Coast or in North Carolina/South Carolina.

So if it’s a major storm, it won’t be one here. But we won’t really know until late Sunday or Monday.

Administrative, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Time To Dig Out The Shutters?

I’ve been keeping an eye on that disturbance in the Atlantic for a few days, but it’s starting to look like there’s a chance of a hurricane here early next week. The models are all showing it curving to the north off the coast, and missing Florida, but the models aren’t to be trusted this far out. I may have to shutter up on Sunday.

[Update early afternoon]

This morning’s model runs have it heading across the top of the greater Antilles, and then tearing up through the Bahamas. Except for GFDL, which has it heading right up the Florida east coast, starting in northern Palm Beach County, and then right up to the Cape, four and a half days from now (i.e., late Monday). Despite my earlier musings on the palliative effects on space policy from a Kennedy Center hurricane, I hope it’s wrong.

Science And Society, Technology and Society

One Less Thing To Worry About?

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Is the Yellowstone caldera fizzling out?

This adds to suggestions that the plume has disconnected from its heat source in the Earth’s core. If this is true, it means the plume could be dying – and that the sequence of mega-eruptions could come to an end. “If it doesn’t have clear source, as it rises eventually the plume will die out,” says Schutt.

Let’s hope so. A Yellowstone explosion could be a civilization-ending event, and there’s not much we can do to prevent it, at least with current technology.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Science As A Religion

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And a fundamentalist one, at that:

When Salon interviewed me about my new book, “Saving Darwin,” I suggested that science doesn’t know everything, that there might be a reality beyond science, and that religion might be about God and not merely about the human quest for a nonexistent God. These remarks got me condemned to whatever hell Myers believes in.

Myers accused me of having “fantastic personal delusions” that could actually lead people astray. “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter,” Myers wrote, “and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth. That’s harsh, I know … but he is undermining the core of rationalism we ought to be building, and I find his beliefs pernicious.”

Myers’ confident condemnations put me in mind of that great American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who waxed eloquent in his famous 1741 speech, “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” about the miserable delusions that lead humans to reject the truth and spend eternity in hell. We still have preachers like Edwards today, of course; they can be found on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But now we also have a new type of preacher, the Rev. PZ Myers.

And they don’t even recognize it in themselves. Dawkins and Myers and Hitchens are doing more harm than good for science in their evangelizing, I think.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Was Barbie Wrong?

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Girls have caught up with boys at math.

Does this vindicate all of the mature, liberated women who had to hie to their fainting couches at Larry Summers’ comments a few years ago?

Not really. He never said that boys were better, on average, than girls. His comment was that there was a much higher standard deviation for boys, which was why there were more brilliant mathematicians among them (it also means that there are more innumerates among them). This was posited as a possible explanation for the disparity in math PhDs and faculty between men and women, a conservative proposition for which he was hounded from the presidency of Harvard (though it was really just the last straw, and excuse).

Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Fat Fight Continues

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John Tierney has the latest:

What we have to keep in mind here is that nutrition is a science (or at least should be) and science is about generating hypotheses, making predictions from our hypotheses, and then seeing if they hold true. The relevant hypothesis here — i.e., what we’ve believed for the past 30-odd years — is that saturated fat causes heart disease by elevating either total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol, specifically. So our prediction is that the diet with the higher saturated fat content will have a relatively deleterious effect on cholesterol. We do the test; we repeat it a half dozen times in different populations. Each time it fails to confirm our prediction. So maybe the hypothesis is wrong. That seems like a reasonable conclusion. No one is proving anything here — as some of your respondents like to decry — we’re just looking at the evidence and trying to decide which hypotheses it supports and which it tends to refute.

…These latest trials just happen to be the best data we have on the long-term effects of saturated fat in the diet, and the best data we have says that more saturated fat is better than less. It may be true that if we lowered saturated fat further — say to 7 % of all calories as the American Heart Association is now recommending — or total fat down to 10 percent, as Dean Ornish argues, or raised saturated fat to 20 percent of calories, as Keys did, that we’d see a different result, but that’s just another hypothesis. The trials haven’t been done to test it. It’s also hard to imagine why a small decrease in saturated fat would be deleterious, but a larger decrease would be beneficial.

I think that what the nutrition industry and the FDA have done over the past decades with their pseudoscience war on dietary fat borders on the criminal. I’m pretty much convinced at this point that the biggest culprit in both our health and weight is starch and refined sugars, and that the FDA “food pyramid” has been, and remains (despite recent improvements) quackery, not science.