Miscellany

And here I thought the comments at Fark.com on our arrow-of-time paper were a little lowbrow. Why didn’t anybody tell me there was also a long thread over at the Free Republic? This comment was pretty good:

Okay, I’m no physicist, but I maintain that time does not exist. It is an artificial construct of man that simply represents the number of ticks from a clock. Somebody prove me wrong.

But here’s my favorite:

“Scientists blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah-blah, blah-blah-blah…”

Well, to quote Opus, “Research physicists need Porsches too”. You can bet this article will help pull in that federal NSF grant money. Which, unfortunately, is often the whole point of the exercise. As soon as someone comes up with a new wrinkle in elementary particle physics, all the cosmologist’s theories will go out the window anyway. But the grant money, that will just keep on flowing. Sort of like time.

From where, exactly, did the stereotype spring about theoretical physicists being all in it for the money? And dammit, where’s my Porsche?

In the course of giving numerous presentations to the public on exciting ideas in modern cosmology, eventually someone is going to ask you about how God fits into the picture. It’s not obvious how to answer; this is the kind of thing cosmologists love to argue about at coffee breaks during conferences.

Of course, the first problem is what is the “right” answer, in terms of what the speaker actually believes. For me that’s easy; I think the notion of God is an outdated fiction. (I understand that not everyone agrees.) But it doesn’t obviously follow that you need to be so blunt to your audience. An argument could certainly be made that, if you were speaking to a polite group of people whom you knew to be religious, you might not want to distract from the purely scientific message by turning them against you with your godless atheism. This isn’t to say you should be dishonest, but simply polite; there is no law of human interaction saying that we have to tell the full truth about every issue at every possible opportunity. (If there were, everyone in the world would be single.)

But increasingly I’m coming to believe that directness is the best policy when it comes to God and the universe. I will illustrate this unscientifically by a story. Some time back I visited DePauw University, a very religious Midwestern institution, to give an invited talk on cosmology and atheism. So, I was in a context where the issues couldn’t be avoided; but I tried to defuse the situation by being friendly and non-confrontational, and was generally afforded a very polite reception (by these people who didn’t believe a word I was saying).

It was after the talk that I learned something important. Several people came up to ask questions or simply make a comment, all of them unfailingly friendly. But one young woman in particular was very effusive in her thankfulness for the talk I had just given. It turns out that she was an undergraduate student there. As she explained it, for a long time she had been having doubts about religion and the existence of God, but had been reluctant to talk to anyone about them on this devoutly Methodist campus. She said that hearing my talk had been a revelation for her, as it put into words many of the ideas that had been floating around in her head. More importantly, it gave her courage to hear someone actually stand up and say them out loud in a public forum.

Usually my cosmology talks don’t have such a dramatic effect on people. I guess the point is that we can worry so much about being polite to the people we disagree with, that we can shortchange the people who want to agree with us if we would only put our best arguments forward. I don’t ever mention religion when I am giving pure science talks, but from now on I will be less reluctant to give blunt answers when someone asks me about it afterwards.

We’ve known for a long time that the center of our galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole, perhaps two million times the mass of the Sun. (Still only a very tiny part of the galaxy, which is perhaps one hundred billion times the mass of the Sun.) There are different pieces of evidence in favor of this, all of which come down to mapping out a gravitational field that implies a huge mass in a small area, without seeing the radiation you would expect if the object weren’t a black hole. You can even see time-lapse movies of stars orbiting the black hole. These days we suspect that most large spiral galaxies contain such black holes at their center, and in earlier days these black holes were powering quasars or active galactic nuclei.

Now scientists have found another black hole near the galactic center, much smaller than the first but still big — about a thousand solar masses. Careful observations resolved a single blob into a cluster of a few individual stars zipping around this black hole. The size is especially intriguing, as it is “intermediate-mass” — not just a few solar masses, as you might get from the explosion of a massive star, nor a million solar masses, as you find at the center of large galaxies. Not surprising that such objects could form by having smaller holes gradually accumulate mass in very dense environments, but it’s good to see it directly.

Small and intermediate black holes will occasionally spiral into supermassive black holes, giving off gravitational radiation. This will be a primary target for next-generation gravitational-wave observatories, like the LISA satellite. This particular black hole is in no danger of inspiralling any time soon, but probably its cousins are common in other galaxies.

Do what PZ says — go to CNN and vote against creationism in their dopey online poll.

I’m jealous of Chris Mooney. It’s one thing to needle the religious right, but it’s a whole extra level of accomplishment to have them label you an “anti-Christian bigot.”

The bigotry charge comes from the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, a group that fights against abortion on the grounds that it leads to an increased risk of cancer. It’s a tough fight, since studies have shown that, well, it doesn’t. But the rhetorical fight goes on, and the CABC has a clever strategy: they claim that the scientific studies indicating no link between abortion and cancer are just as bogus as those that failed to find a link between smoking and cancer, and even have invented the concept of “Big Abortion” in analogy with “Big Tobacco.” (Because, as a doctor, performing abortions is your easy road to fabulous riches, I guess.) Then they will trot out pro-life scientists who will continue to flog the link against all evidence. Dress up the website in pink ribbons, and you’re all set.

It’s interesting to ask what kind of scientist would be moved by religious conviction to argue for a conclusion that the mainstream has long-ago dismissed; the parallels with the Intelligent Design movement are clear. That’s what Chris has done, in an article for Washington Monthly. He examines how the religious right is increasingly pushing pseudo-scientific arguments to help advance a variety of its agendas, from campaigns against condoms to stem-cell research. It’s a scary article, and well worth reading. These “scientists” begin with the conclusions they want to draw and only then construct a reasoning that will get them there; that’s not how science is supposed to work. But as Chris says, it’s an effective strategy:

All told, Christian conservatives have gone a long way towards creating their own scientific counter-establishment. Indeed, the religious right’s “science” represents just the most recent manifestation of the gradual conservative Christian political awakening that has so dramatically shaped our politics over the past several decades. “They’re saying that their faith is not just a pietistic private exercise, but that it has implications in the world of education, or politics, or the world of science,” notes Michael Cromartie, an expert on the religious right at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And by providing a scientific cover–albeit a thin one–for religiously-inspired policies, this appropriation of science has at least temporary benefits for groups seeking to promote them. After all, the scientific method is inherently open to abuse. Because it encourages open publication, continual challenges to the conventional wisdom, and a presumption of good faith on the part of researchers, those who would deliberately slant their interpretations or cherry-pick their facts find plenty of running room.

He also is careful to point out that there is no reason why someone can’t be very religious and also an excellent scientist; there are countless good examples. But it’s also possible for one’s religious beliefs to derail one’s scientific investigations. Pointing that out is not “bigotry,” although it should be a badge of honor to be stuck with the label, considering the source. Congratulations, Chris!

Operation Migration is helping restore the whooping-crane population by an unusual strategy: using human pilots in ultralight planes to lead the cranes on their annual migration.

There are only two migratory wild flocks, one with about 200 birds and one with about 20. They are flying from Canada to Texas and from Wisconsin to Florida, respectively. (You don’t think that cranes are Republicans, do you?)

I like to think I am a gracious loser, not a whiny sour-grapes conspiracy theorist. Which is why I’m hesitant to suggest that malicious tampering with the vote counts somehow contributed to Bush’s win last Tuesday. But, at the very least, there is a significant pattern of irregularity going on, which should be cleared up if only for the sake of future elections.

We already know that one Ohio county gave Bush 3,800 extra votes, a mistake which has now been corrected. And there have been claims of systematic bias, some rather hysterical. But Brian Leiter points to a study that is provocative to say the least. The study compared the declared makeup of each Florida county in terms of registered Democrats and Republicans to the final votes. The results are startling — a sizeable number of overwhelmingly Democratic counties, mostly smaller ones, where Bush came away with a big victory. Franklin county, 77% Democrat, went for Bush 3,472 to 2,400. Hamilton county, 79% Democrat, went for Bush 2,786 to 2,252. Holmes county, 73% Democrat, went for Bush 6,410 to 1,810. Lafayette county, 83% Democrat, went for Bush 2,460 to 845. Liberty county, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 88% to 8%, went for Bush 1,927 to 1,070. And on and on.

Interestingly, all of the counties with these wild discrepancies between results and registrations have something in common — they used optically-scanned ballots whose results were fed into a central PC. In counties where the much-maligned touch-screen voting method was used, the results conformed nicely to what the registrations would have you believe. I suppose the good news is that a recount should be straightforward in such counties — although we all know how hard it is to get a recount done in this country.

The dramatic conclusion from this would be that there is a simple reason why the exit polls, which were indicating a substantial Kerry victory, deviated so dramatically from the final results — they were right, the results weren’t. (As Dick Morris says, “exit polls are almost never wrong.”) But the minimum conclusion is that a grown-up civilized nation like the United States should be able to figure out how to count votes quickly, accurately, and verifiably. I would think that even the Republicans should be in favor making every effort to figure out what really happened, if only to shut up the sore losers once and for all.

Update: Blogging of the President has a list of links to other stories about possible tampering, including a very good piece by Keith Olbermann on how a story like this crosses from the blogosphere into the mainstream media. As I mention in the comments, I hope that there really wasn’t any tampering going on; but there’s every reason to investigate it as thoroughly as possible.

Update again: People who are more sophisticated than me (see, if I were sophisticated, it would be “than I”) have pointed out that it’s not really the results in small counties that are most problematic, as those can perhaps be explained by accidents of history creating misleading party registrations. But there is a discrepancy between the optically-scanned results and the touch-screen results even when you control for size of county. See also interesting commentary at Rhosgobel and Pharyngula.

Update yet again: Brian Leiter now points to an online discussion that seems to make sense, and gives good reasons not to take the study referenced above seriously as evidence of tampering. There are still some disturbing stories floating around, especially about Ohio, but nothing that seems to me to be extremely strong evidence of wrongdoing (much less “proof,” as Atrios emphasizes). Worth re-checking everything as carefully as possible, of course, if only to give the appearance that the truth is what matters.

Ha, I bet you think the title is some clever metaphor for some contemporary political situation about which I will now snarkily comment. Nope, it’s just the straightforward truth. Philosophy, Etc. links to a report from the University of Florida about researchers who have grown a brain of rat cells in a vat. Aforementioned brain, feeling all cooped up, then took a fighter jet for a spin.

To be clear, the “brain” is a collection of 25,000 neurons extracted from the brain of an actual rat, and cultured in a Petri dish. The neurons are placed separately in the dish, at which point they stretch out to each other and grow connections. Thomas DeMarse, the scientist leading the study, obviously has a sense of humor, so the first thing he did was to hook up the newly-formed brain to an F22 fighter simulator. The brain interacted with the simulator through electrodes, both giving and receiving information.

Just think of that poor rat brain, tricked into thinking it’s a fighter pilot when it’s really stuck in a dish in a laboratory. Philosophers love this stuff. (What will Daniel Dennett think? Or Descartes, for that matter?) The scientific justification is that there are certain tasks that organic brains are much better at than computers — pattern recognition being a simple example. Someday the autopilot on your plane might be constructed from neurons rather than integrated circuits. Let’s just hope they don’t rise up and take over the world!

The people who rule the internet over at Fark.com have pointed to a press release about our arrow of time paper. The comments, to be honest, are not very helpful.

I don’t want to talk about the damn election forever and ever, so let’s just get some links out of our system.

• At Alas, a Blog, ampersand says what I said below, but with considerably more brevity:
  

  The big mistake the Democrats, and most of the left, made was to believe that by winning elections we will change the country.

  Just the opposite is true. It is only by changing the country that we will win elections.

• Over at Daily Kos, a quote worth remembering from Barack Obama’s convention speech:
  

  In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

  Like kos says, “He speaks of God in a way that not just fails to offend this atheist, but inspires me.”

• Daniel Drezner is right: Thomas Frank’s speaking fees just went through the roof.
  
• At Crooked Timber, Daniel poses a fascinating math problem:
  

  If you flip a coin four times and it comes up heads, heads, tails, tails, then does it make even the slightest bit of sense at all to spend the next month thinking about what major structural changes need to be made to the coin if it is ever to come up heads again?

• Majikthise collects more responses. Couldn’t agree more: I’m so proud to have all these folks on my side.