DDT causes polio???!?

I think I’m trapped at home today — I tried walking to work, and didn’t get beyond my driveway, because we had a thaw and a refreeze and it’s slick as snot out there. Then we’re supposed to get more snow this morning, with temperatures plummeting down to -15°C with 50mph wind gusts, so I’m cowering at home today. The spiders will go hungry for a day (they are opportunistic feeders, they can handle it).

If you’re similarly stuck at home, here’s an hour long video that I thought was very good. It rips into a couple of self-styled “science” based influencers who are anything but.

The most shocking bit was seeing Joe Rogan getting furious at any push-back on his anti-vax views, and basically shutting down the conversation by claiming that the polio epidemic was co-incident with they years of heaviest DDT use. He also made the standard skeptical claim that vaccines were a late response to an already fading plague, which is sort of true. There are multiple approaches to a serious disease: behavioral shifts, like self-quarantine, and improved hygiene can reduce the incidence and severity of infections, but it takes efficacious medical responses to deliver the coup de grace. And Joe Rogan doesn’t understand science at all if he falls for the correlation equals causation canard. DDT does not cause polio.

The video also jumps on Bill Maher. He’s got this canned response to any claims, saying that we don’t know 100% of everything, more like 20% or 10%, so his weird fads might be true. It’s nonsense. Of course there is much left to learn, but we can say with 100% confidence that you shouldn’t eat cyanide, or that the earth is spherical, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, because smart, skeptical people have studied that stuff and have objective data to back up their arguments. We don’t even quantify knowledge as a percentage fraction of everything, so that’s a bogus metric anyway. I’m willing to go along with a claim that we only know 0.00001% of everything, but that the bits we know, we know pretty damn well, so please, Bill Maher, don’t jump off the roof of a New York skyscraper to test your ‘theory’ of gravity.

Another good topic was about what having a PhD means. It’s not a free pass to make everything you say valuable, important, and true. It just says you passed an apprenticeship. You presumably got some training in critical thinking which the Joe Rogans of the world lack, but you have to demonstrate your skills throughout your life. There are also some really bad theses out there — there is some pressure to get students out the door so you can get a new crop started, and some bad PIs who will let garbage pass as long as they get a publication out of it.

(By the way, I think my PhD thesis holds up. Not only did multiple researchers build on it afterwards, but it wasn’t even just mine — it was the product of a collaboration with several absolutely brilliant mentors and colleagues, which is how every thesis ought to be.)

It’s tough to argue with someone who lacks evidence

I’m sure you’ve noticed how creationists only want to talk about their perceived flaws in evolutionary theory, but never about their preferred creationist explanations (they can’t, because they don’t have a reasonable creationist model to discuss.) Here’s a cartoon illustrating that fact.

It’s also the case that they think there is nothing to discuss: you either accept that god did it, or you’re wrong. It all makes conversations with them pointless and boring.

Theological “wisdom” makes me roll my eyes

Here’s a taste of what some apparently consider a persuasive argument.

One minute after you die you will be either elated or terrified…and it will be too late to reroute your travel plans. When you slip behind the parted curtain, your life will not be over. Rather, it will be just beginning—in a place of unimaginable bliss or indescribable horror.
— Erwin Lutzer

Ooh, false dichotomy. Also, I have to ask Erwin…how do you know? Have you died (he’s still alive and 84 years old)? Do you have reproducible observations of your two and only two possible afterlives? I think we can dismiss this argument on the basis of its fundamental illogic and its total lack of supporting evidence.

It’s nothing but threats and fear. Sorry, Erwin, you fail. Don’t feel too bad, though, it’s a universal property of all theologians.

Cleaning up spam

PragerU has been flooding my in-box with trash lately.

No, I don’t give a good fucking goddamn about Dennis Prager’s personal life, I’ve never wondered what makes Dennis who he is (he’s yet another god-soaked authoritarian with a mission to ruin America), and it’s arroggant to presume anyone wants to know what makes him tick. We don’t, and shouldn’t, care.

Time to update the filters.

A little wisdom from Chief Joseph of the Nez Percés

Heinmot Tooyalaket

He was a smart guy and gave the only good argument against education I’ve ever heard.

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools.
“Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked.
“They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered.
“Do you not want churches?”
“No, we do not want churches.”
“Why do you not want churches?”
“They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”

I can respect that, but I think it would be better understood as an argument against dogma. Do not impose your unwarrantedly confident dogma on me!

All you have to do is go on YouTube and look at a few atheist channels, and it’s infuriating: most of them are dealing with the idiocy of religious certainty, explaining that the apologists have no evidence for their god, over and over, with occasional intrusions by thick-skulled dickwits who make stupid and extravagant claims while disregarding what atheists actually say. I wouldn’t want to attend a school led by William Lane Craig or John Lennox or Lee Strobel or Gary Habermas either.

Keep education secular.

Not all astronauts know much about geology

The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd

How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.

Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.

The illogical logic of Avi Loeb and the 3I/ATLAS clown show

Avi Loeb is playing games with his peculiar interpretation of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. He keeps suggesting that this interesting, carbon-rich, and very old rock is an artificial construct built by a distant civilization, that it is a probe sent to examine our solar system, and that it could be a “Trojan horse” that will do something, who knows what, when it arrives.

Reading some his justifications for that claim, I am forced to conclude that he is an idiot putting on a display to get attention.

Worse, he’s a bad scientist whoring irrational claims and calculations that he has to know are invalid. I am not an astronomer, but I do understand logic a little bit, and seeing him derive extravagant conclusions from mundane observations hurts, especially since he’s using them to obscure the really interesting (and entirely natural) interpretations of the data.

For instance, he’s on the record for inferring the probability that 3I/ATLAS is an alien space probe on the basis of “anomalies” that turn out to not be anomalous at all, just unique properties of an interstellar comet.

As of now, I assign a 30–40% likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin, based on its seven anomalies that I listed here. This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.

Show your work, Avi. How did you calculate that 30-40% likelihood? I think he got it by fumbling about in his rectum and pulling out a squishy number that he likes because it fits his presuppositions. There is nothing in his list of seven “anomalies” to warrant that degree of estimation. They aren’t even anomalies, he’s just looking at the brute facts of its existence and declaring that the details are improbable. Of course they are! It’s a unique object in space!

I tried looking at his list. I am unimpressed.

Anomalies that could be alleviated or explained away with upcoming data:

1. Size: The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 5 kilometers, making its minimum mass of 33 billion tons, larger by a factor of a thousand to a million than the mass of the second and first interstellar objects (as derived here).

OK, it has a size. That is not anomalous. Call me when you observe an object that is massless–that would be anomalous. I don’t see how finding that it has a mass of 33 billion tons makes it more likely to be artificial than if it had a mass of 3 billion tons or 333 billion tons.

I also don’t see how more data would explain away the mass.

It’s also a fuzzy blob far away and hard to resolve. The size is subject to revision, so how do you conclude anything from a measurement with so much variability?

Initial estimates suggested 3I/ATLAS might be up 20 kilometers (12 miles) across—very big for a comet—but most astronomers now think it is much smaller. “It’s probably somewhere in the range of one or two kilometers,” says John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama. That would be somewhat comparable in size to our first two interstellar visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was discovered in 2017 and was up to about 400 meters (0.25 mile) long, and 2I/Borisov, which was found in 2019 and was about one kilometer (0.6 mile) wide.

It doesn’t matter — any number you attach to it will be used by Loeb to claim it is probably artificial.

2. Jet: The Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS showed a forward jet of scattered sunlight — 10 times longer than it is wide, pointing towards the Sun (as discussed here). A weak tail showed up only at the end of August (as reported here).

Yes? It’s apparently a carbon-rich object, and gasses are sublimating off of it and spewing in the direction of the heat source, the Sun, that is thawing them, making an anti-tail. How does that make it more likely that it is artificial? It has a chemical composition is what that tells me.

3. Unusual chemical composition: the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron (as discussed here and here), as in industrial nickel alloys. Unlike solar system comets, the plume contained mostly carbon dioxide and not water (as reported here and here).

Note the dishonest trick he’s pulling here, comparing it to “industrial nickel alloys.” These are estimates of the composition of the comet made from the spectroscopy of the diffuse cloud of gas surrounding it, not a determination that it’s made of metal alloys.

It actually is an interesting difference — its composition differs from more familiar comets found in our solar system. That composition also seems to be changing over time, which is somewhat odd, but explainable.

To make sense of this mystery, scientists turned to chemistry — specifically, to organometallic compounds, which are molecules containing both metal atoms and carbon-based groups.

In particular, they looked at compounds called carbonyls: nickel tetracarbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)₅). Both can form under cold, low-pressure conditions, like those found in the outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk — the birthplace of comets and planets alike.

These carbonyls are highly volatile, meaning they can sublimate (turn from solid to gas) at relatively low temperatures. Nickel tetracarbonyl is more volatile than its iron counterpart, meaning it will vaporize first as the comet warms up.

This neatly explained what the VLT was seeing. When 3I/ATLAS was still far from the sun, only nickel tetracarbonyl had begun to sublimate, filling the coma with nickel. As the comet drew closer, the temperature crossed the sublimation threshold for iron pentacarbonyl — and suddenly, iron began to appear. The Ni/Fe ratio plummeted, not because the amount of nickel was decreasing, but because iron was finally joining the show.

Now, though, somebody needs to explain to me how being composed of volatile organometallic compounds is a signature of artificial manufacture.

4. Polarization: the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization (as reported here).

I read the paper, and I must admit, the topic is beyond me. It does say that 3I/ATLAS has distinct, unique polarization properties and that “Its polarimetric characteristics provide novel insights into the dust properties of interstellar objects, suggesting that ISOs may encompass a broader diversity than previously recognised,” but does not even come close to implying that this is a marker of artificiality.

Anomalies that will remain puzzling forever:

5. The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees (0.2% likelihood), as discussed here.

It has a trajectory. That is not anomalous. Every object moving through space has one. Yes, this trajectory is roughly similar to the ecliptic plane, but so what? 3I/ATLAS is very old, between 3 and 14 billion years old, is Loeb suggesting that aliens aimed their space probe at a condensing protosystem before the planets existed in order to tour potential planets?

6. The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS was optimized to pass near Mars, Venus and Jupiter (0.005% likelihood), as discussed here.

“optimized”…such misleading language, implying intent behind its trajectory. Here’s what that trajectory looks like:

Ooooh. Does that look like a pre-planned course to you? It does to Avi Loeb.

7. The arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the “Wow! Signal” from August 15, 1977 (0.6% likelihood), as discussed here.

The “wow” signal was a brief, unexplained, unrepeated pulse of radio signal noise. It got SETI researchers very excited for a while, but there’s no reason to think it is a message from space aliens, and Loeb is making an exceptionally tenuous connection between it and 3I/ATLAS. A 9 degree difference is an immense difference in location at the astronomical distances we’re talking about.

You know, as an atheist I read far too much nonsense from religious apologists claiming to have proof of their god’s existence — bizarre non sequiturs about physical constants and numerological coincidences, collections of anecdotes that are supposed to add up to evidence, and a tiny set of permutations on the same old arguments that even in their best interpretations don’t make up a justification for their beliefs. Reading Avi Loeb’s work gave me a strong sense of deja vu. It’s the same thing! A good analysis of a phenomenon should lead one to a minimal conclusion, but everything Loeb does ends up supporting the remarkable interpretation that God Aliens exist, and they want to talk to you, and this tiny fragment of data is how they shout at you, Occam’s Razor be damned.

I’m going to say it: Loeb has gone batty, and all this noise he makes is nothing but a dedicated (and successful!) effort to get his name in the tabloids. He’s the Percival Lowell of our generation, a scientist who did good work but whose reputation was poisoned by his irrational pursuit of astronomical phantasms, the Martian canals in one case and this alien obsession in Loeb’s.

Ken Ham claims to have saved a life

He proudly claims that he saved a life. His account:

A few minutes later, as the service was starting, Pastor Davis collapsed in cardiac arrest. Two nurses in the congregation came to his aid, started CPR, and utilized an AED device before the ambulance arrived. Praise the Lord, they were able to restore his heartbeat, and he survived. His wife later shared with me that had Pastor Davis not come to see me speak at the church that morning, he probably would not have survived because it would have happened at home with no help!

He did nothing but watch, as other people saved him. The only being who had less to do with it was God, since what really saved him was two nurses, CPR, and an AED.

God is so useless that he isn’t even present at home — he would have died if he’d had to rely on the God who was absent in his house.

Ken Ham still claims credit, though.

I could have predicted this would flop

Dan Stern Cardinale offered an opportunity to creationists: come to his channel and present their affirmative evidence for their theory of origins. It was an open invitation to anyone to show up and explain their perspective. I could have guessed that no one would show up, because participation would require 1) a theory, and 2) evidence, and they don’t have either.

I was right. No creationists even tried.

Dan expected this to happen, too. He prepared a brief discussion of a creationist paper: Donny Budinsky of Standing For Truth, a used car salesman and a creationist propaganda site, titled “From Kanto to Cambrian,” which uses Pokemon to explain the ordering of fossils by the great flood.

You can’t make this stuff up. Budinsky says,

This idea is not presented as a final word, but as the beginning of an ongoing research project. Just as Pokémon captivates younger generations, this analogy may provide a creative, accessible, and scientifically robust way to engage new audiences in the creation-evolution debate.

I have never before heard Pokemon described as scientifically robust.

Go ahead, read the ‘paper’ for yourself, but Dr Dan has already torn it apart.