I had to go with bees because tomorrow, 6pm, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse in Morris, Minnesota, it’s time for Café Scientifique. Carrie Eberle, research agronomist post-doc at the North Central Soil Conservation Research Lab, will be talking about “The good, the bad, and the honey,” efforts to provide alternative forage crops to keep bees happy and healthy.
There’s a new app called Spreadsheets. This is not new; there are millions of apps, and 95% of them are crap. Spreadsheets purports to use the accelerometer and microphone in your smartphone to measure your sexual performance — a kind of fitbit for sex (do not tell my wife, she’s already slightly obsessed with her fitbit stats).
I find the whole idea a little weird, and have zero interest in the thing, but whatever floats your boat, ‘k? But here’s what I find offensive and stupid: calling the noise from these smartphone stats a study of sex duration in America. It’s basically a sex toy that will be used sporadically and idiosyncratically, and you’re not going to get anything that could be called “information” out of it. Case in point: look at the data on intercourse duration.
That makes no sense. Why would you even expect variation to fall in the arbitrary boundary lines of the states? For instance, the part of Minnesota where I live is, culturally and geographically, very similar to the Dakotas, yet somehow I’m supposed to believe that there’s some kind of remarkable transition in sexual behavior over there? Why? Show me the variance in the data. Give me a somewhat finer grained breakdown. What these data show is that what they’re measuring is patternless and random.
The one message I take from that figure is this: dudes, your app doesn’t work.
Right now! They’re battling it out on the nature of the universe in a God and Cosmology Debate.
The preliminaries started at 7, my time. You missed the opening prayer in which the officiant begged god to lead everyone to a deeper understanding of the truth, concluding with the declaration that Jesus is the truth. I think the deck is stacked.
Well, sort of. I expect Carroll to mop the floor with Craig, because he has the understanding, Craig just has the rote rhetoric.
We’re at the intermission. Here’s the short summary of the debate so far:
Craig: I’m going to pretend to be a physicist and use sciencey words to retrofit modern cosmology to my primitive, crude, vague theistic sensibilities, and religion explains the universe better than physics because I can make up any ol’ shit I want.
Carroll: No, you get everything wrong, you’ve quote-mined and misinterpreted all these papers you cite, and cosmological theories must be rigorous and describe details of the universe beyond simply “it started”.
Carroll is speaking with authority — he knows this stuff, and it shows. This is why qualified scientists with expertise in public communication are so important — they can talk about the real science with depth, and recognize when their opponent is spouting bafflegab.
Really, I don’t know this stuff. Except now I’m learning a lot from listening to Sean Carroll. It would be nicer if Craig would shut up, sit down, and try to learn something too, since he is so far out of his depth.
They’ve locked the video down and made it private. I’m sorry to see that; Carroll was extremely edifying and did a terrific job of exposing Craig’s pretenses. Maybe it will be made available later, or we’ll just have to keep reading Sean Carroll’s blog to learn what physics really says.
After informing us of her environmentalist cred — she drives a hybrid car and has solar panels on her home! — Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science magazine, makes a remarkable statement.
I believe it is time to move forward on the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from the tar sands deposits of Alberta, Canada, and from the Williston Basin in Montana and North Dakota to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Environmental cred…blown.
She’d better have a really good argument for why an environmentalist ought to support the Keystone XL pipeline, given that it is a great big leaky pipe full of death that will feed America’s oil addiction. Really good. Blow my socks off with an ultra-potent, evidence-based argument, please. And here it is.
Even after accepting that Keystone XL would not accelerate extraction of the Canadian oil sands, I still opposed the project because the pipeline would cross environmentally sensitive regions, such as the Sandhills of Nebraska, a natural wetland that supports many species, including migratory birds, and the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest groundwater resources. The project’s developers, the TransCanada Corporation, modified the pipeline to avoid sensitive areas and have promised comprehensive monitoring and state-of-the-art shutoff valves to reduce risk to the environment. No method for moving hydrocarbons can be considered completely fail-safe. At least the current permitting process can, and should, be used to ensure that Keystone XL sets new standards for environmental safety.
That’s it? The Canadians are going to continue to turn Alberta into a toxic craphole even if we don’t build the pipeline, they made a slight detour to avoid the most sensitive parts of our environment (but it’s still a great big dribbly fragile source of poison bisecting the US from Canada to Louisiana), and…
…and…
Fuck me, Transcanada promised to be really, really careful.
We all know that no fossil fuel company would ever, ever, ever lie.
Then she makes the tepid suggestion that we ought to let them build their colossal douchehose of noxious blight, and ask them nicely to contribute some small fraction of their pollution profits towards research in alternative energy.
Seriously? That’s it? That was so pathetic and unconvincing, it couldn’t possibly persuade anyone. But somehow, that’s enough to get the editor-in-chief of one of the most prominent science journals in the world to change her mind.
This does not add up.
McNutt M (2014) Keystone XL. Science 343(6173):815.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a new exhibit, Tentacles. It is about…I think you can guess what it’s about. Can I find an excuse to visit California in mid-April?
It’s been one of those days. Lots of grading. Lots of meetings. Lots of classes. Lots of labs. I’m tired. I come home, I fire up the laptop, and…everything is awesome!
Rupert Murdoch ends global climate change!
Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) February 18, 2014
Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.
You know what happens when the local fracking well explodes?
FREE PIZZA! Chevron actually gave out coupons for free pizza to residents of Bobtown, Pennsylvania, after a colossal explosion of a fracking well killed one person and burned uncontrollably for five days.
Wait, these things explode?
Don’t worry, forget that. Also free 2 liter soft drink! Shut up and stuff your face!
More happy news! Further progress has been made in bringing a little bit of Alberta to America!
You do not think that looks good? Need I remind you: PIZZA. So many many pizzas!
Everything is awesome!
Nobody believes me. Well, not nobody…but Ray Comfort sure was incredulous, and I’m always getting these querulous complaints from people. Now, though, I can just tell them to watch Your Inner Fish, the PBS series that will be coming to your television in April.
You can’t wait? No problem. PBS has already made available an informative web site with video excerpts, interactive demos, and a classroom guide. You can see it all now! I’ve been perusing it for the last hour, and it’s all very well done.
Hmmm…and this summer, my colleagues and I have to put together a high school curriculum for teaching evolution…a good chunk of my work might already be done for me here.
I watched it, and I was unimpressed. Blackburn had a smirk on her face that was baked in rock solid; Nye couldn’t close the deal; the moderator was trying so hard to be “fair” to both sides when Blackburn was full of shit. I just about threw something through the TV screen when she made that absurd argument that CO2 has only gone from 320ppm to 400ppm. Lying with a smile; it’s what the right wing frauds are great at.
Let’s look at the positive benefits of carbon!
Yeah, and let’s look at the benefits of ocean-front property in central Pennsylvania.
Here’s an antidote.
Hey, why couldn’t they get someone like Peter Sinclair to debate that congressfool?
At least, that’s what a guy with some children’s toys thinks.
I take flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and milk and mix them up even more thoroughly than our smug Islamist fool does his Legos; then to be really, really sure, I put it in a 350° oven for 40 minutes and totally destroy the original ingredients. And out comes…CAKE (no lie!).
Thus, I have disproven god.
Look, their argument is invalid. You can’t talk about a chance-driven process shaped by selection over billions of years and so blithely compare it to a few seconds of shaking, with no selection, of building blocks. You also cannot compare one specific possible combinatorial outcome out of an uncountably vast number of possibilities and say, presto, that you didn’t get this one result implies that the process doesn’t work. Every poker hand, with its improbable individual likelihood, does not in any way imply that dealing cards is impossible.
