Perspective

While I appreciate the perspective on the relative investment in science, SciAm, this is a terrible graphic.

howbigisscience

It’s interesting that the total American investment in science is slightly larger than what the military throws away on just the F-35 program, but otherwise, this image has very low information density.

Humans are lousy at comparing surface areas, and here the money spent on each project is represented by…the area of a circle. That’s poor data representation. I’m sorry, but the creator of this graphic is going to be lined up against the wall with the person who invented pie charts.

Each data point is shown as a circle drawn arbitrarily somewhere on the page. There is no information in relative location — I guess the circles were just splotched down in an arrangement that looked good to a graphic designer somewhere. Are there any relationships between any of these data?

Colors are also arbitrary. Nations are in blue, genomes are orange, brains are purple, and telescopes are red. Just because.

There is so little information in this wall of circles that it needs to be helped along with paragraphs of text dumped onto the page in teeny-tiny print, and most of that text doesn’t tell us anything about the relationships between the circles. They are just circles of varying size on a bland blue background.

A tidy table would have been more than adequate for expressing numbers.

Oh, and there is content. Let’s shut down the F-35, give all that money to the NSF, and double the amount of grant money.

I guess we’ve been doing the advertising wrong

Heather Armstrong, better known as Dooce, is a mommy-blogger — she writes stories about her family and personal life — and she’s giving up the game for a surprising reason. Not because of the trolls (although there’s some of that) but because keeping her advertisers has been a pain in the butt.

The problem, Armstrong says, was that because she felt so beholden to them, she was agreeing to do just about anything to keep the advertisers happy.

“What happened over the last couple of years is the brands have been given a lot more say and a lot more control than they did when I was starting out,” Armstrong said.

“At the beginning, it was, ‘We’re just gonna put the logo at the end of the post. Write something around this.’ … And then it was, ‘Well, actually, we need you to show pictures of the product”. And then it was, ‘We need you to show the product.’ And then it was, ‘We need your kids involved in the post.’”

Wait, what? I’ve never been asked to personally endorse or build an article around the annoying items that we get as advertisements. No wonder we’re not rolling in the big bucks here!

Good for Armstrong for refusing to put up with it, but I’m wondering now how we’d handle it if FtB decided to sell out. Can you imagine the makers of homeopathic medicines, or shills for Bible colleges, asking me to show the product in an article or bring in a heartworming (not a typo) story featuring my godless, snarky kids? Not gonna happen. First try in which I mention some of our advertisers, they’d be frantically phoning me up to never mention their company name again…hey. HEY. I just had an IDEA.

Got something you want to bring to the public attention? I’ll start talking on the blog about your fantastically godless, liberal, feminist hair gel…wait a minute. What’s that poking out of the side of my laptop?

I didn’t know companies could transmit $100 bills through HDMI ports. That’s kind of cool. And a very fast response, Nameless Company That I Shall Never Ever Mention on the Blog Ever Again.

Wish I could be in Philly in December

The pope will be gone by then, right? They’re having a party:

The Freethought Society (FS) is pleased to be co-sponsoring a very special event with Ethical Humanist Society of Philadelphia (EHSP) and the Delaware Valley Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (DVAU) to mark the 10th anniversary of the “Intelligent Design” court case of Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket No. 4cv2688).

The Sunday, December 6, 2015 event starts with a free and open-to-the-public 11:00 AM, EHSP morning platform featuring Hugh Taft-Morales (EHSP Leader).

That was the best Kitzmas ever.

Capering about with a dead pig latched on to an embarrassing location

snout

Who knew that being an Oxford professor was such a lousy proxy for being intelligent? Christians do seem to adore John Lennox, the Oxford apologist for Jesus, yet every time I’ve read anything by him, it’s been embarrassingly silly and stupid. You want an example? Here’s ten. Lennox was asked to give rebuttals to ten common atheist arguments, and he blew it each time with a series of inane responses.

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Sciencing the crap out of Trump

Maginot_2

Ah, don’t you love the sight of nonsensical claims getting vaporized by science? An engineer thought about Trump’s proposal to build a giant wall at the Mexican-American border. It turns out to be a non-trivial project.

Twelve million, six hundred thousand cubic yards. In other words, this wall would contain over three times the amount of concrete used to build the Hoover Dam — a project that, unlike Trump’s wall, has qualitative, verifiable economic benefits.

Such a wall would be greater in volume than all six pyramids of the Giza Necropolis — and it is unlikely that a concrete slab in the town of Dead Dog Valley, Texas would inspire the same timeless sense of wonder.

That quantity of concrete could pave a one-lane road from New York to Los Angeles, going the long way around the Earth, which would probably be just as useful.

Concrete, of course, requires reinforcing steel (or rebar). A reasonable estimate for the amount of rebar would be about 3 percent of the total wall size, resulting in a steel volume of 10,190,000 cubic feet, or about 5 billion pounds. We could melt down 4 of our Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and would probably be a few cruisers short of having enough steel.

But the challenge is far greater than simply collecting the necessary raw materials. All of these hundreds of miles of wall would need to be cast in concrete facilities, probably project-specific ones that have been custom built near the border. Then, the pre-cast wall pieces would need to be shipped by truck through the inhospitable, often roadless desert.

The men and women doing the work of actually installing the wall would have to be provided with food, water, shelter, lavatory facilities, safety equipment, transportation, and medical care, and would sometimes be miles away from a population center of any size. Sure, some people would be willing to to do the work, but at what price? Would Trump hire Mexicans?

This analysis also ignores the less sexy aspects of large-scale engineering projects: surveying, land acquisition, environmental review, geological studies, maintenance, excavating for foundations, and so on. Theoretical President Trump may be able to executive-order his way through the laser grid of lawsuits that normally impede this kind of work, but he can’t ignore the physical realities of construction.

But I don’t know — I’ve otherwise blocked Trump out of my mind for the last week or so. Is he still considered a viable candidate? Or have people yet realized that makes America look stupid?

They knew

The tobacco industry knew that cigarettes were both addictive and carcinogenic. They sold them anyway, and hired professional obfuscators and lobbyists to bury the truth.

Now we know that the oil industry is the same way. Exxon knew how much carbon was buried in oil reserves. They knew how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. They were able to calculate in 1979 what burning all that oil would do to the carbon dioxide concentration.

exxonknew

They knew. They didn’t care what its effects were. They only cared about their bottom line.

You know, the future is going to look back on rabid capitalism as one of the damning pathologies of our history.

Casey Luskin vs. Homo naledi

The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label — they’re not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They’re scientists, they think. They’re just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth than those horrible Darwinist notions. But of course, everything about them just affirms that they’re simply jumped-up creationists with airs, from their founding by an evangelical Christian, Phillip Johnson, to their crop of fellows like Paul Nelson and William Dembski, who happily profess their science-denying faith to audiences of fellow evangelicals, to their stance on every single damn discovery that comes out of paleontology and molecular biology. The real misnomer is that they work at a think-tank called the Discovery Institute, when their response to every scientific discovery that confirms evolution is a spasm of jerking knees and a chorus of “uh-uh” and “no way”.

It makes no sense. They completely lack an intellectual framework for dealing with new findings in science, so instead of explaining how Intelligent Design “Science” better explains an observed phenomenon, they instead dredge up some entirely unqualified spokesperson to mumble half-baked, pseudo-scientific excuses for why those Darwinists have it all wrong.

Case in point: Homo naledi, the newly discovered South African species. If they actually were Intelligent Design “Scientists”, they’d respond with the same puzzled happiness that real scientists do: we’re not sure where to place this species in our family tree, but it’s very exciting, and fits with our growing knowledge about the diversity of early hominins — there were lots of different species of human ancestral species and dead-end branch species living at the same time on Earth right up to less than 100,000 years ago. This fact of the fossil data has been known since I was a wee young lad growing up reading about Louis and Mary Leakey in National Geographic. That multiple hominin species coexisted and overlapped in time is part of the body of data that we have, and it fits just fine with evolutionary theory. The history of a lineage is a braided stream, with populations branching off and diverging, sometimes dying off, other times merging with other branches. And we explain this pattern with theories about common descent, genetic drift, and selection.

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Another kind of profiling

The story of Shadi Petosky makes no sense to me. She’s a transgender woman — a perfectly normal thing to be — who was trying to take a flight — another perfectly normal thing to do. TSA freaked out at an “anomaly”, the fact that someone presenting as a woman happened to have a penis. Apparently, like shoes, there’s a fear that one of those might be loaded with high explosives, although no one has ever stopped me from boarding an airplane because of my dangerous genitals.

She was screened and searched and probed multiple times, and taken aside to one of those featureless little rooms where they stash the suspicious people. She missed her flight, and they seemed downright truculent about helping her get another one. And then there’s the business of telling her to “get back in the machine as a man or it was going to be a problem”, whatever the hell that means.

It all seems to have escalated absurdly. They needed two police officers, four TSA agents, and an explosives expert to wrestle with their own ignorance about what genitals are supposed to look like.

You can follow Shadi Petosky on Twitter if you want to see how it all turns out (it looks like she’s not home yet).

I guess TSA needs to learn that trans bodies are not anomalies.

And then there were eleventy-seven

walker

One down, one swarm of stupid to go. Scott Walker is no longer running for president, not that any of the other Republican candidates are better qualified. But I did like this summary of the Walker Experience.

The New York Times says Walker once was “seen as all but politically invincible,” which seems maybe a tad overstated in reference to a shrimpy, pallid, balding twerp with a face like mashed potatoes and the oratorical skills and personal charisma of a jellyfish. It’s true that he was regarded as something of a rising star of the right not so long ago, thanks to his proud and endless cruelty to and contempt for workers and vulnerable people. He all but killed Wisconsin’s public-sector unions with his “budget repair bill,” then pulled a hit on private-sector unions by signing a right-to-work law he’d denounced while campaigning; he needlessly turned away millions of dollars in federal food aid to his state’s poorest residents; he rammed through a (not-even-all-that-) crypto-racist voter ID law; he diverted state school funding from public schools that educate the poor to private ones that educate the wealthy; he tried to eliminate the weekend! This is how one becomes a darling of the right in the United States. Unfortunately for him, though, an elected official will never be as good an avatar for America’s hatred of the poor as a pure capitalist—if nothing else, settling for a governor’s salary implies less than total commitment to the cause—and so he found himself outflanked by both Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina (failed capitalists both!) on the only front he had.

Who’s next to go? I’m guessing it’ll be any of them that said God called them to run, because that old fart gets everything wrong.