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Aug 6

Every Nuclear Detonation, from 1945-1998

This sobering video by Isao Hashimoto speaks for itself. You’ll need about 15 minutes to watch the whole thing, but if you want a reminder of what the pace of testing in the nuclear age has been, this is well worth it.

The reminder that more than 1,000 nuclear explosion took place in the American Southwest almost leaves you wondering how the entire region isn’t an atomic wasteland, doesn’t it?

The official page for this video on the site for the Preparatory Commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has more information about the artist.

(As the page notes, the video does not show two nuclear tests that occurred after 1998, both by North Korea, in October 2006 and May 2009.)

Aug 5

Once Again, False Balance on Climate at the N.Y. Times

By rights, I should have seen and commented on this article in the New York Times days ago, and perhaps a better blogger would now shrug it off as a lost opportunity. But even if it is only a fairly trivial example of the chronic problem with false balance that dogs reporting on the climate policy debates, this particular instance of it still annoys me so much that I need to vent it out of my system anyway.

Tom Zeller, Jr., writes:

In any debate over climate change, conventional wisdom holds that there is no reflex more absurd than invoking the local weather.

And yet this year’s wild weather fluctuations seem to have motivated people on both sides of the issue to stick a finger in the air and declare the matter resolved — in their favor.

…

Last February, for example, as a freak winter storm paralyzed much of the East Coast, relatives of Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is a skeptic of climate change, came to Washington and erected an igloo.

They topped it with a cheeky sign asking passers-by to “Honk if you ♥ global warming.” Another sign, added later, christened the ice dome “Al Gore’s new home.”

…

Now, with record heat searing much of the planet from Minnesota to Moscow, people long concerned with global warming seem to be pointing out the window themselves.

“As Washington, D.C., wilts in the global heat wave gripping the planet, the Democratic leadership in the Senate has abandoned the effort to cap global warming pollution for the foreseeable future,” wrote Brad Johnson at the progressive Wonk Room blog, part of the Center for American Progress.

Must it be necessary to point out that the climate deniers and the environmentalists are “invoking the local weather” in completely different, nonequivalent ways?

Inhofe and the sign makers were implying that the cold weather disproved claims of global warming and showed they were ridiculous. The scientific fraudulence of that argument is precisely why using isolated weather incidents to argue about climate is absurd.

In contrast, even though the Times titled this story, “Is It Hot in Here? Must Be Global Warming,” no one in the story makes that argument. Johnson did not say the heat wave proved global warming was real. Instead, he highlighted the irony of lawmakers forsaking a sound response to the problem while the world was suffering from extreme heat—a kind of heat that will only become more commonplace and extreme as global warming continues.

One side illegitimately used weather as evidence. The other used weather as an example. Were Zeller and his editors too foolish to recognize the difference or was the thrill of getting to say both sides are doing it just too sweet to ignore?

Aug 4

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Memoirs of an Entomophage

Food insects in Thailand. Photo credit: Eugene Tang

JR Minkel, who blogs as only he can over at A Fistful of Science, recently brought to my attention this Paul Adams article for Popular Science (and indirectly, this news story in the Guardian) about the underappreciated importance of insects as a food source for many people around the world. That prompted me to dig out this recollection of my own foray into eating insects, which I wrote up years ago.

Memoirs of an Entomophage

My reputation in some circles as a person who eats bugs has been blown out of proportion. Yes, I have knowingly and voluntarily eaten insects, but I wish people wouldn’t pluck out that historical detail to epitomize me (“You remember, I’ve told you about John—he’s the bug-eater!”). It was so out of character for me. As a boy, I was fastidious to the point of annoying priggishness; other children would probably have enjoyed making me eat insects had the idea occurred to them, but I wouldn’t have chosen to do so myself. Bug eating was something I matured into, and performed as a professional duty, even a public service.

New York Entomological Society logo

Here’s how it happened. Back in 1992, the New York Entomological Society turned 100 years old, and decided to celebrate with a banquet at the map-and-hunting-trophy bedecked headquarters of the Explorers Club on East 70th Street. Yearning for attention, the Society’s leaders had the inspiration to put insects not only on the agenda but also on the menu. For hors d’oeuvres, you could try the mini fontina bruschetta with mealworm ganoush, or perhaps the wax worm fritters with plum sauce. Would you care for beetle bread with your potatoes, or are you saving room for the chocolate cricket torte? Waiter, could I get more mango dip for my water bug?

Mind you, eating insects is not so bizarre and alien a concept in most of the world. According to Gene DeFoliart, the editor of the Food Insects Newsletter (that’s right, they have a newsletter), societies outside of Europe and North America routinely eat at least some insects, sometimes because they are the closest things to livestock that’s available. Most of the world does not share our squeamishness about eating things with antennae. Moreover, the consequences of our cultural bigotry can be serious. The U.S. and Europe largely drive the budgets for food-related research around the world, which means that most spending on raising better food animals goes to studying cows, chickens and the like. Millions if not billions in Africa, Asia and Latin America however, would get much more direct benefit from knowing how to improve the fauna with six legs (or more) that provide much of their protein.

Then, too, it’s not as though most of us in America haven’t ever eaten insects. Eight million of us live in New York alone, after all, and the Board of Health can’t be everywhere. The key difference is how many insects we’ve eaten, and how aware we were of it at the time.

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Aug 2

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The Road to Scientopia

Bing, Bob, Dorothy Lamour? Please take note.

The constructive chaos triggered by the PepsiCo fiasco at Scienceblogs.com continues to evolve, in ways that I have to hope will ultimately be to the advantage of bloggers, scientists and the science-reading public alike. The latest evidence is that as of 10:00 a.m. EDT today, there’s a new game in town: Scientopia.org, “a new blogging collective to educate and entertain anyone interested in eclectic voices of science,” according to the press release announcing its launch (emphasis added).

We invite the world to ponder, argue, converse, and laugh along with us. Each blog is produced by an individual or group that retains complete editorial control of its own content. Some bloggers are moving from other networks; others are creating new blogs. At launch Scientopia will consist of 24 blogs, including the following:

The Urban Ethnographer (scientopia.org/blogs/urbanethno) Krystal D’Costa

This Scientific Life (scientopia.org/blogs/thisscientificlife) GrrlScientist, formerly of Living the Scientific Life, and Bob O’Hara

Skulls in the Stars (scientopia.org/blogs/skullsinthestars) Greg Gbur

Adventures in Ethics & Science (scientopia.org/blogs/ethicsandscience) Janet Stemwedel

Good Math, Bad Math (scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath) Mark Chu-Carroll

WhizBANG! (scientopia.org/blogs/whizbang) Pascale Lane

The complete listings can be found on the Scientopia.org home page. More blogs will be added in the months to follow.

The Scientopia network is more than a collection of individuals: it’s a scientific community. It serves the common goals of sharing our love of science, while respecting the diverse interests of its members. At Scientopia, the community — of bloggers and readers, engaging with science and each other — is not a side effect. It’s the whole point.

To my mind, that last part about community is the most important, and the one that bears most strongly on the raison d’etre for blogging networks. Individual blogs with their individual authors’ voices can link to one another informally as easily as networked ones can; they can encourage cross-talk and mutual traffic, too, in loose alliances. So why have the formal structure of a network at all?

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Jul 26

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Busted Explanations for Karate Breaking

A karate classmate breaks three boards without spacers.

Martial arts are my hobby and explaining science is my job, so the recent appearance of “How karate chops break concrete blocks” on io9.com naturally caught my eye. Unfortunately, not only did it fall far short of my hopes of offering a lucid explanation, it parroted misleading statements from an article on exactly this same subject that has been annoying me every time I remembered it for 10 years. (Oh wonderful Web, is there no old error you can’t make new again?) Indulge me while I try belatedly to set the record straight.

The io9 article starts by asking how the squishy human hands of martial artists can break concrete slabs, wooden boards and other considerably harder objects. Reassuringly, it wastes no time on talk of chi and similar Eastern mysticism but instead goes right to a very loose discussion of the biomechanics of hitting efficiently and striking to vulnerable positions in the target. So far, so good, although the descriptions of what to do are probably too vague to be helpful to readers who don’t already know what they’re doing.

Then the article seems to go off the rails (emphasis added):

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Jul 11

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A Little Gene Music (Eine Kleine Nukleotid Musik)

Credit: Gil Alterovitz, via Technology Review

It won’t be Lady GaGa. But maybe a little Lady GAGATCAGCTCATTCGAC…?

On Tuesday at the British Royal Society of Music, the New London Chamber Choir will publicly perform a new choral piece with the lilting but jargony name “Allele.” The genetic allusion isn’t a superficial conceit: it is genuinely genomic music. Each of the 40 members of the chorus will be singing a score based on part of his or her own DNA.

The project began with geneticist Andrew Morley and the Wellcome Trust’s “Music from the Genome” project, which had sequenced the DNA of 40 gifted singers to learn whether they had any distinctive genetic commonalities that might be indicative of musical ability. The findings of that genomic study have not yet been published. In the interim, however, Morley—who had sung with choirs in his youth, according to the BBC—decided to use the genomic sequences as the raw material for an artistic work.

He turned the data over to composer Michael Zev Gordon, who first translated the strings of nucleotides into notes, then rendered them musical through his selection and rhythmic arrangement of them. The poet Ruth Padel provided the lyrics for the singers. As Pallab Ghosh of the BBC writes:

To begin with, there is a single voice singing a simple rhythmic phrase; but as the piece develops, more voices join in – conveying the biological idea of replication and reproduction.
At its climax, each member of the choir is singing their own unique genetic code – resulting in everyone singing a subtly different song.

Morley and Gordon seem not to be the first to think of translating genome sequences into music. Indeed, some artist-scientists have attempted the maybe even more intriguing trick of turning music into DNA and inserting it into living cells.

Research fellow Gil Alterovitz at M.I.T. and Harvard Medical School has developed a computer program that translates information about cells’ gene and protein expression into musical sequences. His purpose is scientific rather than aesthetic, however. Because our brains are particularly adept at picking up patterns in the sounds we hear, Alterovitz hopes that his system could help researchers identify subtle derangements in the synchrony of gene expression that might underlie disease states.

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Jul 9

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Off the Clock

Unemployed people have time on their hands, you say? Sure, if by “time” you mean the ability to travel backward through time.

I would have thought it was impossible, too, until esteemed economist Arthur Laffer set me straight with his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Laffer was arguing that it is economically counterproductive to raise unemployment benefits during economic hard times—say, now, for example—because it only creates disincentives for people to work:

Imagine what the unemployment rate would look like if unemployment benefits were universally $150,000 per year. My guess is we’d have a heck of a lot more unemployment. Common sense and personal experience indicate higher unemployment benefits will make unemployment less unattractive and thereby increase unemployment even in the Great Recession.

Can’t argue with that. True, unemployment benefits aren’t actually $150,000 a year—about three times the median household income in 2008. They’re closer to just $300 a week, or $15,600 a year. This hypothetical argument that supposes the exact opposite of reality, that one could on average make much more money by being unemployed, is nevertheless irrefutably compelling.

What really persuaded me, though, was this graph that Laffer and the WSJ supplied to bolster the argument that “since the 1970s there’s been a close correlation between increased unemployment benefits and an increase in the unemployment rate.”

The correlation is indeed close—with increases in unemployment benefits lagging spikes in unemployment by a year or so. This can only mean one thing. Those unemployed layabouts are using some of their $150,000 a year incomes to lounge around in Hot Tub Time Machines, jump back in time and get themselves laid off and so that they can soak up all that sweet, sweet government gravy.

Laffer is apparently not alone in his profession in believing that time travel is a major influence on the U.S. economy. Nobel laureate economist Edward C. Prescott recently stated at the Society for Economic Dynamics meeting in Montreal that Obama caused the current recession, which is a neat trick because the recession started in December 2007.

In summary, then, the keys to time travel are: (1) Lose your job. (2) Study economics.

Jul 8

1 Comment

PepsiCo Scienceblog Goes Flat

That didn’t take long. The PepsiCo-sponsored blog on Scienceblogs that caused such an uproar this week, and which I discussed here, has now been removed completely from the network site. Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Journalism Tracker had published a further follow-up this morning that included some additional steps announced by publisher Adam Bly to improved the presentation of advertorial blogs on the site. In the end, though, PepsiCo’s Food Frontiers blog proved too much of a sore point to retain. (Surely, even PepsiCo must have started to see the initiative as liability.)

Still, damage has been done to the Sb’s relationships with its bloggers, some of whom have decamped permanently. What any of this will mean to Sb’s audience, or for the future of blog networks more generally, remains to be seen.

This episode illustrates one potential obstacle that all would-be blog networkers should consider. Are the management, the bloggers and any sponsors all of a like mind about what the network’s mission is? Is everyone clear on what the supposed advantages and ground rules for the existence of the network should be? Do all the parties understand what the stakes are for the others? If not, severe conflicts like this one seem more than likely to occur.

Jul 8

Unsolicited Advice for Patrick J. Michaels

As an editor, I have this suggestion for Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute. It might help his public communication skills.

Patrick, in the future if a reporter asks you, “Did you mean to imply that undercutting the credibility of the field [of climate research] in toto is a good thing?” and your answer is, “No,” followed by this:

I think that most environmental policies (or non-policies) require some type of “event”. Consider “Waldenstrube” (acid rain), the mis-named “Ozone Hole” (more accurately known as the early-spring Antarctic depletion) and the Montreal Protocol, or Bob Watson’s completely fabricated Northern Hemisphere ozone hole (did you ever write about that?) prompting a complete phaseout by the senate, 99-0. I think our science has always been fraught with uncertainty. Look at the history of Methane concentrations in the last two decades. “Consensus” science (including myself in this one) was dead wrong about the second most-important human-related greenhouse-gas emission! That’s a pretty big flop that the public is completely unaware of. So if they don’t trust us as they used to, that’s a good thing…at least it is the right thing!

I don’t have a problem with the public not trusting scientists. The way we do science today ( Kuhn + large programmatic funding = stasis + shenanigans) certainly doesn’t inspire my trust.

Then it would be faster and clearer if you just said, “Yes.”

Jul 8

So… Benjamin Santer was asking for it?

Pity, if you will, Andy Revkin. As a reporter who worked the environment beat for The New York Times for many years, and who now continues as the author of the Dot Earth blog for that paper, Andy has the mixed blessing of being one of the most prominent journalists covering climate change, which means that he is a prominent target for arrows from all sides. Those who doubt, deny or otherwise resist efforts to stop anthropogenic global warming—whom Andy calls stasists and whom I’m usually comfortable calling deniers or denialists—attack him for pushing “climate alarmism.” Meanwhile, proponents of climate policy reform paint Andy as frustratingly, deliberately centrist: too willing to echo the talking points of seemingly respectable opponents; too willing to discount the efforts of the disinformation campaign that maintains the energy/climate status quo.

Of course, anyone who knows Andy and is familiar with his body of work can have no doubt that he recognizes the reality of climate change and the importance of trying to prevent it. I know his heart is in the right place. I know he isn’t namby-pamby on the subject.

But it’s easy to see why so many climate scientists throw up their hands at Andy’s work when, in a post about the wild goose chase that was Climategate, he writes things like this (emphasis added):

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