No sympathy for the devil

I don’t get it. First there was Climategate, in which hackers illegally broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and stole a pile of emails from climate researchers. The denialists seemed to be fine with that, and quote-mined the heck out of the documents to find damning statements, lying and claiming that they showed that the scientists faked their data (they did no such thing, of course). All the sturm and drang at that time was over the contents of the emails, not the illegal method of their acquisition.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank with an agenda of willful dishonesty, leaked, and leaked hard. Someone mailed a collection of internal documents to Peter Gleick, and Gleick responded by sending a request to Heartland under a fake name, and got additional copies that confirmed the accuracy of the documents. Was this wrong? It doesn’t seem to be illegal, and I think it’s an open question whether it was unethical — it would be unethical if Gleick lied and misrepresented the contents of those documents, as the denialists did with the East Anglia emails, as the Heartland Institute did with those emails.

And there’s Peter Gleick beating himself up for exposing the Heartland Institute’s mendacity. I really don’t get that. He’s a scientist. Scientists gather data to make informed decisions. Gleick got the data the Heartland Institute tried to hide. You can’t on one hand condemn Gleick for asking for the information and getting it handed to him, while praising hackers for breaking into a server and illegally taking data.

And then Mann, Trenberth, Bradley, Overpeck, Santer, Schmidt, and Karoly write the most naïve letter ever, pointing out the hypocrisy of the denialists while deploring the acquisition of the documents, and saying this:

We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.

Really, people? Seriously? This is what the Heartland Institute wants, the poisoning of the debate and the undermining of public understanding. They probably read that letter and said, “Yay! It’s working!”

How about if we focus on the content of the leaked documents instead? They do reveal a deep truth: that the Heartland Institute is a propaganda organization with great support from right-wing political organizations and individuals, and that their mission is to parcel out money to disinformation agents like Anthony Watts and Fred Singer, who sow unfounded doubt and confusion about real science. And they plan to poison American education.

Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. To counter this we are considering launching an effort to develop alternative materials for K-12 classrooms. We are pursuing a proposal from Dr. David Wojick to produce a global warming curriculum for K-12 schools. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain- two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We
tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.

No matter how it was obtained, the Heartland Institute has confirmed that it stupidly mailed out internal documents. The denialists are trying desperately to claim that one of the documents is fake, which just affirms that all the others are accurate.

That ought to be the central story here.

(via Greg Laden)

(Also on Sb)

Keep that Santorum out of our science

Jeez…Rick Santorum, young earth creationist, climate change denialist, anti-stem cell research crusader, fundamentalist/evangelical Christian, has just accused liberals of being anti-science. He might have been right if he’d been talking about the liberals who are mushy-headed over alternative medicine, but in this case, he’s pinning his accusation on the fact that we don’t want to burn more coal.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum charged on Monday that President Barack Obama and Democrats were “anti-science” because they refused to exploit the Earth’s natural resources to the limits of technology.

Over the weekend the candidate had been criticized for saying that President Barack Obama followed a theology that was not “based on the Bible.” He later insisted that he was talking about the president siding with “radical environmentalists.”

“I accept the fact that the president’s a Christian,” Santorum told CBS host Bob Schieffer on Sunday. “I just said when you have world view that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth — like things that are not scientifically proven like the politicization of the whole global warming debate.”

The scientific view is that global warming is occurring, and that it’s driven by anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases; the politicized, ideologically demented view is a denial of the evidence. Like Santorum’s nonsense.

This is a speech he gave to the crowds in Ohio:

But if we don’t provide those opportunities for those jobs that can sustain a family, for power in this country that is affordable, not just coal but all energy. It drove the economy of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio for a long time. And through a variety of things — yes, problems with management, problems with negotiations — but actually there were bigger problems. The bigger problems of environmental regulation. In many cases environmental regulation that has gone extreme, particularly in this administration.

What they have done? And I referred to it the other day and I got criticized by some of our, well, less-than-erudite members of the national press corps who have a difficulty understanding when you refer to someone’s ideology to the point where they elevate Earth, and they say that, well, men and humanity is just of a variety of different species on the Earth and should be treated no differently.

Whereas, we all know that man has a responsibility of stewards of the Earth, that we are good stewards and we have a responsibility to be good stewards. Why? Because unlike the Earth, we’re intelligent and we can actually manage things.

Did Santorum just call the press “less-than-erudite” while arguing against the idea that humans are one of a variety of different species on the planet? What a maroon.

And yes, we’re intelligent, and we should try to manage things. So what does that make a head-in-the-sand denialist like Santorum who wants to allow unrestricted, unmanaged exploitation of natural resources? Not a good steward, I would say.

That didn’t work: Samsung sucks

Remember that I complained about an obnoxious bug in the Mac OS, which was traced to the Samsung printer driver? I was gratified to see that the Mac update mechanism announced an upgrade to that printer driver (is it possible they actually pay attention to complaints on the web?), so I installed it tonight.

In case you were anxiously awaiting a bug fix yourself, I’ll tell you…it didn’t work. I’m watching printtool eat up all my memory right now, and am about to shut it down and go to bed.

(And you know what? If any idiots start pointless, stupid OS flame wars in this thread, I’ll delete you in the morning, and close thread comments.)

Aaaaand…of course I had to delete a half-dozen comments this morning, although it wasn’t as bad as I feared.

I also had some helpful email: at the suggestion of a correspondent, I also killed this stupid little startup item called SPanel that was installed when I got the printer. It’s behaving so far this morning.

Lots of people suggested that I simply drop-kick the printer into the nearest landfill, which may happen. I don’t trust it anymore; I’m reluctant to use the goddamned thing, because I feel like everytime I fire it up I have to monitor CPU activity to see if it is bleeding memory again, and I have to restart my computer afterwards…whereas I typically go months without a shutdown or restart.

Bottom line: treat Samsung devices as equivalent to vectors for viruses that will corrupt your system and degrade performance significantly. I’ll never buy anything from Samsung ever again — they’ve got plenty of competitors so there’s no reason to risk struggling with their incompetence.

Family matters and cheesy insinuations

What do you know? Richard Dawkins and I have something in common.

In a particularly slimy move, the Telegraph has posted an article that tries to tar Dawkins with the sin of slavery. Not that Richard Dawkins himself has slaves or endorses slavery, but that he had an 18th century ancestor who had a Jamaican estate with over a thousand slaves. The reporter also made the ludicrous suggestion that slave-holding was genetic.

I’d scarcely had time to re-open my lecture notes when he rang back: “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

So now there’s a slavery gene? That is quite possibly the dumbest assertion I’ve heard in a whole week…and I read creationist websites. As Dawkins points out, he had 512 direct ancestors in that same generation, and that he has a number of ministers in his lineage. Not only is it ridiculous to invent a slavery gene, but it’s a selective absurdity to cherry-pick members of a large population of remote relatives and claim that an individual is responsible for everything every ancestor did. That’s a rather biblical position to take, I think.

So what do we have in common? I poked around a bit in the genealogical records and found this: a piece of the 1820 US census.

It’s not easy to read, but that’s a bit of the records for St Stevens Parish, King William, Virginia. I’ve mentioned before that I’m Scandinavian on my mother’s side, but on my father’s side, I’m English/Irish/Scots and an undefined mingling of who-knows-what, including a bit of Dutch, and they’ve been skulking around North America since somewhere in the 17th or 18th century, and some of them were even Southerners. My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Garland Hurt (1764-1839) was a Virginian married to Martisha Thurston (1768-1818), who had 3 sons and 3 daughters…and also 1 female slave under 14, and 1 female slave between 14 and 25.

Oh no! Do I carry the slave-master gene?

I suppose if I were interested and extremely ambitious (sorry, I’m not), I could trace all of Garland Hurt’s descendants forward, and then we’d find not only that some of you readers might be related to me. I suspect that some of the people who utterly despise me (if they even know of me) are distant cousins. We’re different from each other and from our ancestors.

My family is a bit down-class compared to those fancy-pants Dawkinses, but as you can see, it’s easy to find slave-owners for any of us among the swarms of ancestors we all have, just by going back far enough. I also have at least one ancestor who fought on the Union side (an Iowan who fought with Grant in the Mississippi campaign) in the Civil War. I deplore the slave-owner, but I don’t own his guilt, nor do I get to take credit for the great-great-grandfather who was mustered out in New Orleans. We’re all a great gemisch of subsets of genes from a bounded population. It’s simply silly to start parsing out characteristics from individuals in a complex cloud from the ancestral gene pool and arbitrarily assigning them to single contemporaries. The writer of that article, Adam Lusher, is an idiot…and the Telegraph ought to be embarrassed at publishing such tripe.

A different view of Las Vegas

I’ve been to Las Vegas several times, but every time I’ve spent all my time inside a building, usually a noisy casino. Not this time! I made a hike out to Red Rocks, a very lovely place.

That’s a blurry Vegas off in the distance on the top left, if you were wondering.

The Midwest Science of Origins Conference!

It’s on! Students here at UMM got together and have organized their very own Midwest Science of Origins Conference, to be held in Morris on 30 March-1 April. As the big name speaker, they’ve got Neil Shubin to tell us all about Tiktaalik, and some other regional folk to talk about physics, biology, anthropology, and philosophy…and also Chris Stedmaaaaaan (you can tell right away that this isn’t a case of me dictating to them what to do — this is entirely student-organized and run). Come on out and learn!

What, you say, you can’t come all the way out to itty-bitty Morris on the edge of nowhere? Then send your money, instead. The conference is free, but they are looking for donations to cover costs.

For every hundred dollars donated, I promise to growl angrily at Stedman. See? That’s how he can contribute to freethought!

(Also on Sb)

Looking for Mac troubleshooting advice

OK, I’ve got a problem on my laptop, equipped with the very latest Mac OS, plenty of memory, and no shortage of storage. Every once in a while, it turns into a total slug: the worst symptom is that the Mac Mail program takes ten minutes or more just to display the contents of a folder (admittedly, I really strain that program). In addition, when I look in the activity monitor, a process called “printtool” has turned into a colossal resource hog, consuming 40-60% of the CPU and 500mb or more of real memory. I can kill it, it comes right back with maybe 1 or 2mb of real memory, and then it steadily grows and grows. Is it just a memory leak (bad enough) or a virus? Anyone encountered this before, and how can I fix it?

This is extraordinarily annoying. Most of the time, everything is working smoothly, and then this parasitic monster takes over and I have to shut down and restart, and then I’m good for a few more hours to days until it comes back.

Ugh. This may be a problem with the Samsung printer driver — which is precisely the model printer I have at home.