Cool free stuff

I’ve mentioned the Earthviewer app from HHMI before: think of it as a bit like Google Earth, only you can dial it back to any period in the planet’s history. There have been a couple of developments: it’s also available for Android, and it’s added some new features, including tracking for major fossils. So now you can see the long strange journey of Tiktaalik’s bones on the screen.

They’re also making available a lovely big poster of earth’s history. This year, we here at UMM are putting together a teacher training program to be implemented in the summer of 2015, and it’s going to be a lot of work for us — but I’m realizing that HHMI has already done a lot of material preparation that will help a great deal.

I’ve been known to moan in chagrin over all the multimedia garbage that Answers in Genesis provides to corrupt education in this country — you can just pop into AiG’s website and download lesson plans and powerpoint slides to teach creationism. But now HHMI makes them look feeble as well as wrong.

The real creeps are the Republicans

I watched this ghastly video supported by the Koch brothers, and my jaw dropped and I said “Holy shit.” Literally. Not a metaphor.

They are trying to scare women away from getting a Pap smear and turning gynecological exams into a creepy episode, all in the name of squashing government-insured health care.

We’re just going to have to face it. Republicans are simply awful human beings.

I’m so sorry, Colorado

My daughter moves to Boulder, and what happens? The worst storm in a century. I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship, but you know we sent her far far away for a reason, right?

Actually, I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with it. But there are things we could have done and should be doing right now.

As I wrote late last week, thanks in part to climate change, the odds are shifting toward more frequent extreme weather events like this. We all watched as the Hurricane Sandy relief bill languished in Congress for months. An economy on the doorstep of recovery doesn’t need yet another surprise $20 billion tab to pick up. Action on climate change would also help to prevent future disasters.

However, perhaps a more ominous takeaway is that the torrential rain in Colorado wasn’t well-forecast. The first flash flood watch was only issued by the National Weather Service on Thursday morning, less than 24 hours before the peak flooding. At the time, the forecaster on duty remarked “rainfall amounts today not expected to be as great as those observed during the past 18 hours.”

At the very least, Republicans should stop trying to dismantle the national weather service. Optimistically, they should stop dragging their heels on environmental issues. Once upon a time, Republicans could be relied on to snap to attention when a problem threatened to cost big money if not addressed; no more. Ideology is all.

The SETI boondoggle

Here’s Seth Shostak pumping up SETI again, and now he’s predicting contact with aliens within 20 or 25 years, or by 2030.

I don’t buy it for a minute, and I think his whole argument is ridiculous.

As these guys always do, they have a small set of arguments. One is the argument from very big numbers: there are 1022 stars in the known universe, and the current data shows that a significant fraction of them have planets, and they’ve even observed a few of them that have earth-like temperatures.

I say, big whoop. The other big numbers we could throw around are the distances of these stars from us and each other, which completely negate the bonus of large numbers. We’re simply not going to get an accidental signal from elsewhere; signal strength is going to drop off as the inverse of the square of the distance, so we’re not going to pick up some broadcast from an alien civilization. They’re going to have to aim a signal at us (one unexceptional star out of 1022), and they’re going to have to invest a significant fraction of the energy output of their star to get the signal to us.

I would ask, from the example of the sole technological society we know about, are we doing that? Why do we expect other civilizations are going to do that, and specifically send a signal to us?

But the most objectionable part to me, personally, is the short section titled “Biology: An Easy Thing?” Life arose very early on Earth, and there is good reason to expect that we are not unusual, and the emergence of life as an outcome of normal planetary chemistry probably is common and likely. Biology is only easy, though, if you’re willing to point to a stromatolite and leap immediately to the conclusion that life will build radios. There’s a rather wide chasm there that Shostak elides. The ubiquity of bacteria in no way implies the ubiquity of technology. The specific kind of intelligent life that builds telescopes and radios and artificial intelligences is going to be really rare: I can understand how an astronomer might get excited about incremental increases in likelihood by discoveries that maybe 70-80% of stars have planets, and maybe planets orbiting red dwarf stars would have habitable zones, but those numbers do not compensate for the fact that in the 4 billion year long history of life on earth, the technology to even dream of collecting signals radiating from other stars is only a century old. Only one 40 millionth of this planet’s existence contains that kind of capability.

Add to that the likelihood that any matching civilization might be a thousand light years or more away, and that their signal (although from our example, they probably aren’t signaling; think instead of thinly scattered civilizations all listening casually and unintently for a bit of patterned electromagnetic radiation) can only be received and echoed back over a time span far greater than the duration of any of our cultures, and that puts Shostak’s 16 or 20 or 30 year bet in perspective. That’s a convenient eyeblink on the scale of the time and space SETI proponents tout as an advantage for their calculations.

I do agree with Shostak’s comments about how science isn’t shackled to the narrow hypothetico-deductive method taught in introductory science courses, and that sometimes fishing expeditions are legitimate components of a research program. But I tend to expect fishing expeditions to have slightly better rationales and expectations of useful results than SETI can provide.