Category Archives: Science and Edumacation

Science and Edumacation

Rockets

Happy Goddard Day. I love this:

As for the press — especially The New York Times, which had been very hard on Goddard and openly mocked his belief of reaching the moon in a 1920 editorial — it eventually came around. On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left for the moon, the Times got around to running this belated retraction:

“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”

Based on this, I think we can expect the Times to acknowledge that Reagan’s tax cuts were a good thing, oh, about 2031.

Politics, Science and Edumacation, War on Terror

Don’t Panic

One thing I can’t stand is panic-mongering. I used to buy it, now I’m deeply skeptical of anyone who claims the world is ending.

Here are two BS artists called on their crap. First up, Sullivan debunking the “Eurabia” myth being pushed by the Right.

So did Steyn confuse “million” for “percent”? D’oh! Or is Steyn referring to another source? It is the premise of the entire book, after all

And here, in the same journal, is Easterbrook taking on the Global Warming hysterics. I agree with every word he says:

And to the extent that the media has been pushing doomsday on this, one of my worries is that the press corps has totally shot its credibility in a classic crying wolf exercise all through the ‘80s and ‘90s. The big deal press corps—The New York Times, everybody—has repeatedly demonstrated total incomprehension of the relative risks of environmental issues. We’ve heard an awful lot about arsenic in drinking water and electromagnetic emissions from power lines and things that even in the worst case analysis are really marginal threats and affect only very small numbers of people and only very slightly raise risks. Since the press corps—and the worst is The New York Times—constantly demonstrates that they have no sense of relative proportion in what are serious risks and what are minor risks, well, now they’re saying, “OK, now there’s proof of global warming.” They’re right, but Americans aren’t paying attention. They’ve cried wolf so many times when there was no wolf that now, when there is a wolf, no one believes them.

Read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

Civil Liberties, Politics, Science and Edumacation

HPV

I’ve of two minds about the HPV vaccine. I don’t like being friends with the religious zealouts who think that eliminating VD and pregnancy risk will turn women into wanton harlots. But at the same time, I’m not comfortable with mandating the use of the vaccine. This post from Cato is as good a response as any, making both good points:

The rate of all 37 types [of HPV] together is high – 34% among women ages 14 to 24, but the rate for the types 16 and 18 that are responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases in the U.S. – is only 1.5% and 0.8% respectively.

And unfortunately hysterical ones:

Risk assessment is not easy, particularly when, as is the case with Gardasil, the long term effects of a vaccine are totally unknown. Women who participated in the drug trials were followed for an average of less than three years. Consider this totally hypothetical example: what if 90% of all school age girls are vaccinated within the next five years and then ten or twenty years from now it is discovered that the vaccine made them sterile or actually caused them to get a different type of cancer than what they were vaccinated against?

Side effects don’t magically appear at 20 years. They phase in slowly. If Gardasil were going to ruin women’s reproductive systems, it would already be showing up.

I am also disturbed by the deliberate deception and buying of politicans Merck is displaying (and I own stock in them). My fundamental philosophy of human nature is that we are basically good people but we are easily tempted to be bad. And with $10 billion in Gardasil on the line, it’s easy to fudge the ethics.

My opinion? Recommend it but don’t mandate. This isn’t like polio or measles, which can be spread by casual contact and become an epidemic. This is spread by intimate contact and actually kind of rare (although Sue’s grandmother died of it). I will probably get my soon-to-arrive daughter vaccinated when she is of age. Of course, by then, we’ll have ten years of data to show how effective the HPV vaccine is and if there are any side effects. And as anyone who knows me or reads this blog is aware, I have nothing but antipathy for the anti-vaccination crowd, be they ignorant libs, faith healing theo-cons or ideology-addled libertarians.

But let’s take it slow, huh?

Politics, Science and Edumacation

GW Panic

When the IPCC sticks to the scientific facts, they’re fine. But now we have their new report that is nothing but a collection of potential panics about things that could happen as a result of global warming – potential secondary effects of a primary process that is poorly understood at best.

In fact, parts of it have already been disproven. And parts of its are demonstrable nonsense. Global warming will produce longer growing seasons. How precisely does this cause famine?

(There’s a wonderful critique of famine specifically in P.J. O’Rourke’s All the Trouble in the World in which he goes over numerous studies that have shown that no famine in the last millenium has been the result of a lack of food. All of them have been the result of politics.)

This is precisely what I’ve been ranting about on global warming. It’s not enough to present the facts – we have to be presented with disaster scenarios.

The dire predictions this reports makes are precisely the predictions Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb – famine, pestilence and destruction of the world’s poor. Well, the hysterics were wrong then and they’re probably wrong now. Among other things, they assume no adaptation of human beings. No flood walls. No slow migration to higher elevation. No pesticides to wipe out malaria. No improvements in water infrastructure. No adaptation by the bears either. It’s the Fallacy of the Unbroken Trend all over again.

Politics, Science and Edumacation

Risk

One thing we ape-folk are really really bad at is risk assessment. We’re afraid of terrorism even though we’re more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. We worry about our children fondling guns when more of them drown. John Stossel here debunks the latest bunch of crap being peddled by that hypocritical moron RFK, Jr — the notion that vaccinations are creating autism.

The first time I heard RFKJ spout his nonsense on the Daily Show, I knew he was wrong. I practically yelled . . . actually did yell, “You moron! Maybe autism is up because we’re better at diagnosing it!” Well, my instinct was right. And his blithering was wrong. And God knows how many children are going to suffer because their parents panicked about the imaginary danger of vaccines instead of the extremely real dangers of what those vaccines protect us against.

Politics, Science and Edumacation

Two Warm Points

Continuing on my global warming theme, there are two points I’d like to make.

The first is sort of a side-step. One of the things I can’t stand is when an issue is “debated” on television and the debate is presented betwen (a) an articulate informed individual arguing for the side the host favors; (b) a raving idiot arguing for the side the host opposes. The idea is to make it look like one side are a bunch of morons. Both liberals and conservatives do this. Neal Boortz does it by associating all illegal immigrants with La Raza. And while the blog was down, Jon Stewart did it on global warming. He had on a guest presenting a view opposing the global warming consensus. But he didn’t have someone like Patrick Michaels, who is a climatologist, a Cato scholar and has been arguing that while warming is real, the situation is not as dire as protrayed (a position vindicated by the IPCC report). No, he had the moronic author of the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” who ranted and raved about how the environmental movement is filled with ex-commies.

His point about the commies was true, BTW. Fidel Casto was, after all, the keynote speaker at the first Earth Summit. But his point was also irrelevant. I despise “guilt by association” arguments. Most of the people I work and associate with are spectacularly wrong, IMHO, on issues like taxes, socialism and the power that government should have. But they are right, again in my opinion, on other issues like the culture war, civil liberties and creationism. I can’t dismiss their ideas on one issue just because I disagree on something else. A lot of enviros are ex-commies; actually a lot are still commies. But even the commies were right occasionally. Like, um . . . like going to the moon was as good idea. Arguments have to be beaten, not smeared.

The second thing that’s my driving me crazy on this subject is the abuse of the word “consensus”. There is consensus among scientists that man-made global warming is taking place. (Not that consensus necessarily means they’re right, of course). What is not a consensus at all is how bad it is, how bad it will be, how emission levels will change over the next century, whether glaciers will melt and, if so, how much. The “c-word” pushes climate change debate into the realm of religion: That having accepted global warming as your personal savior, you are now required to accept every hysterical doomsday scenario that comes down the pipe.

Nuts to that. Just because I accept cosmology doesn’t mean I have to believe that H-naught is 72. Just because I accept evolution doesn’t mean I have to take Time’s “what man will look like in a million years” spread seriously. And, contrary to what the Bushbots think, being conservative doesn’t mean I automatically support the GOP.

Accepting man-made global warming as reality does not require one to accept the doomsday scenarios being peddled by the igorant likes of AlGore. They might be true. The IPCC seems to think not.

I realize that many of the remaining warming skeptics tend to overlap with the creationist crowd and have the same mentality. Debate within evolution means that evolutions isn’t true. Likewise, debate about the scale, effects and future of global warming means that global warming is a scam.

But the response to this is not an inverse orthodoxy. It’s educating people about how science works. That there is always room for debate and discussion; that we are never 100% sure. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that. I promise.

Politics, Science and Edumacation

My Hesitation

One of the things that make me hesitate to jump on the global warming bandwagon is the unanimity that has arisen on the subject. I get nervous when everyone agrees, especially on a scientific issue. We ape-folk are prone to panics, moral and otherwise. And I fear that in our haste to “do something”, we will cause immense damage not only to our economy but perhaps to the environment. What stupid and destructive technologies might we adopt in our hysteria? What if we all get CFC lightbulbs and it turns out they’re putting mercury in the air? Could we get another MTBA where we put an additive in gas the pollute the water?

We have a bad history with this sort of thing. The excesses we have gone to to “solve” poverty, drugs, crime, terrorism and racism have often had terrible side effects. Our industrial engine is vast, complex and powerful. We should be very careful about tinkering with it.

And again, there’s an atonishing amount of smarminess and stupidity popping up on the issue. My diatribe here was stimulated by Al Gore’s back-patting in Hollywood — once again asking everyone else to sacrifice. And getting rewarded for the hysterical, false and destructive claim that global warming caused Katrina.

I can guarantee that bad solutions to global warming are going to be foisted upon us. Ethanol for example.

Culture War, News, Politics, Science and Edumacation, The Nanny State, War on Terror

What I Learned

During my 12-day absence, I missed the hell out of blogging. I was relentlessly pressuring my brother to “Get the blog back up!”, which is fairly presumptuous since I don’t pay him nuthin’. Anyway, there may only be three people that read this blog if you include my cat. But there’s something therapeutic about putting my thoughts out there. At the very least, it puts off my rendezvous with a rooftop and an AK-47 off for a few more days each time I post.

There’s been a lot to talk about. We’ve had:

  • Republicans insisting that the Brit pullout means things are going well. The GOP loves the “everything is going fine in 80% of the country” meme. I’m really glad we’ve secured such huge areas of uninhabited desert. When it’s possible to drive from Baghdad to the airport without being shot, let us know.
  • Walter Williams brilliantly guest-hosted for Limbaugh and wrote a column on one my favorite subjects — the danger of Opportunity Cost.
  • John Stossell had a nice special on the disproportionate fear we have of things. We fear terrorism and child abduction more than we fear lightning strikes, which kill more people. Of course, it’s not that simple. We feel like we can prevent terrorism and child abduction. Most people don’t feel that way about lightning.
  • Cato reported that kids are, for the first time, trailing their parents in education. The NYT chimed in that grades are rising even as reading ability falters. This is the system we have to forgo vouchers to protect? Every day makes it clearer to me that our education system is fundamentally broken.
  • And there was a nice diatribe from Radley Balko in response to Michael Medved’s nonsense about how only men of God can be President.