Category Archives: Science & Data

Lumière Brothers

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Lumière BrothersForgive me the slowdown in posting. I am reading the first draft of a friend’s novel. And there is relatively little traffic here on weekends anyway. And I badly need a break from doing this anyway. I’m not terribly clear what I do it for. Sometimes it seems like housekeeping — just because. Except, of course, that I don’t actually do housekeeping, and I actually do publish about 4,000 words per day here. But not yesterday and probably not today.

On this day in 1862, Auguste Lumière was born. But we celebrate it with his brother Louis Lumière, who was born exactly two weeks later, but in 1864. They are collectively known as the Lumière brothers — cinema inventors and pioneers. You know how motion pictures work, right? An image is displayed on the screen for a fraction of a second; the screen goes dark while the next image is put into place; the next image is displayed on the screen for a fraction of a second. Done over and over, this appears to create action. Well, the Lumière brothers invented the perforations on the side of film that allow it to be moved quickly and accurately through the projector.

In addition to this, the two made almost 200 films together. They are notable in this regard because their films show great care in terms of the framing of shots. Unlike Edison, they were actually interested in photography. So even though their films are all very short (generally less than a minute), they look good. Consider, for example, their most famous film, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat:

Yes, not a lot of drama. But it was made in 1895. The first film was not shown publicly in the United States until 1896. In France, of course, they were already displaying their films publicly. It actually shows the artistic potential of motion pictures and makes the work done by Edison at that time look pathetic. Here is another Lumière film from the same year, The Sprinkler Sprinkled. It is arguably the first comedy ever shot:

Happy birthday Auguste and Louis Lumière!

Going Crazy Over Baseball ERAs

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Louise from Bob's BurgersAs you may know, I am a baseball fan. I just like the game. I kind of understand it and it suits me. Unusually, I’ve been drawn into watching the Major League Baseball playoffs. In fact, I watched the entire six and a half hour 18-inning game between the Giants and the Nationals. Normally, I’m not that interested in “the majors,” but it is unfortunately the main kind of baseball that I have the opportunity to watch. Some time ago, we got some little station that allowed us to watch the A-advanced San Jose Giants. That was very cool.

Anyway, I watched most of the Cardinals-Giants game today, and so I was looking at the box scores. One of the great things about baseball is that it has a whole bunch of statistics. I remember reading an essay by Carl Sagan in which he talked about how his first real introduction to mathematics was reading baseball box scores with his father. That was also true of me too, although I was alone because my father has never especially cared for sports. One of the more mysterious statistics in the Earned Run Average or ERA.

ERA Basics

The ERA is the number of runs that a pitcher allows in a nine-inning game. (The “earned” part of this is that the run must not have been scored because someone made an error.) But given that pitchers rarely play entire games, the ERA must be prorated. For example, in today’s game, John Lackey allowed four runs over the course of six innings. This is equivalent for allowing six runs over the course of nine innings, and so the box score indeed shows an ERA of 6.00. Via Wikipedia, this can be calculated very simply:

Earned Run Average Calculation

What’s interesting about the ERA are the details. For example, players don’t necessarily play complete innings. So given that there are three outs in an inning, the inning is broken up into thirds. So if a player retires one batter in an inning, he is said to have played one-third of that inning. For example, in today’s game, Tim Hudson pitched the first six innings and then got one batter out in the seventh before he was removed. Thus, he pitched six and a third innings. (This is confusingly indicated by 6.1 in the box score.) Because he allowed four runs during that time, his ERA was 4/6.33 or 5.68. And indeed, that is what the box score shows.

He Never Pitched at All!

But what about the situation when a pitcher doesn’t get anyone out? This isn’t that uncommon. A team can bring in a pitcher for one particular batter. If that batter hits a home run, the pitcher could have allowed up to four runs. If the pitcher is taken out at that point, he hasn’t pitched any innings, because he has not retired any batters. Thus, in the worst case scenario, his ERA would be 4/0.00 or ∞?! Well, unfortunately, yes.

Just such a thing happened in today’s game. It was tied at the end of nine innings, so the game went into extra innings. In the bottom of the 10th inning, the Cardinals did not score. That meant all the Giants had to do was get one run and the game was over. Randy Choate was brought in to pitch that inning. He walked the first batter. The second batter got a single, leaving men on first and second base. The third batter bunted, allowing the player on second to score and the game was over. So Choate didn’t pitch any part of an inning because he got no outs.

Normally, this would provide an ERA of ∞. But in this case, there were no earned runs, because the run was caused by an error. (Interestingly, the error was by the pitcher Randy Choate himself — he made a bad throw to first base.) So this provides an ERA of 0/0.00 which is simply undefined. Nonetheless, the MLB box score from the game gives Choate an ERA of 13.50. But it gives the same ERA to the Giants’ Sergio Romo, who pitched to a single player (the last) and got him out. That should be an ERA of 0/0.33 or 0.00 — not 13.50.

Am I going crazy?!

My friend and business partner Will tells me that the ERA is not really a stat that anyone pays attention to anymore. More interesting is WHIP (Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched). Clearly, the same problem applies to the WHIP as to the ERA. He is too practical to be interested in such cracks in the system. And he is right that these statistics are really meant to apply to seasons or even whole careers — not single games. But it drives me crazy.

If MLB is going to post an ERA for a game, they ought to get it right. And if there is some special calculation that goes into dealing with players who don’t pitch for at least one out, it ought to be made clear. Instead, I find no explanation. What’s worse, people set up whole ERA calculators that do nothing but spit out the simple calculation above. And if you enter 0.00 innings, they say, “Please make sure the number of innings pitched > 0.” Great help!

As Louise on Bob’s Burgers would say, “Am I going crazy?!”

Digging Into My Philosophy of Science

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The Limits of ScienceI always find it interesting when I believe a certain thing that seems at least a little obscure, only to find that there is a name for it. It isn’t that I think I’m that unusual. For example, most of what I think in terms of “spirituality” was laid out two centuries ago by Arthur Schopenhauer. I just add some of the science that we’ve learned since his time to come up with my own thinking that is somewhat distinct. I’m sure there are not that many people who have done the same. But it wouldn’t surprise me that there are enough such people to have a name like neoneuroschopenhauerites.

Earlier today, I was reading a devastating attack on Richard Dawkins’ new memoir by John Gray, The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins. If you don’t much care for Dawkins, I recommend reading it. If you do care for him, you might stay away because you would not be wrong in thinking it is at least a bit unfair. But I’m not that interested in that. Gray actually spends a surprising amount of time not talking about Dawkins.

In the article, he mentioned, “For all his fervent enthusiasm for science, Dawkins shows very little interest in asking what scientific knowledge is or how it comes to be possible.” And so he provided a little primer on the philosophy of science:

There are many philosophies of science. Among them is empiricism, which maintains that scientific knowledge extends only so far as observation and experiment can reach; realism, which holds that science can give an account of parts of the world that can never be observed; irrealism, according to which there is no one truth of things to which scientific theories approximate; and pragmatism, which views science theories as useful tools for organizing and controlling experience.

That was very exciting for me. So it turns out that my philosophy of science is pragmatism. I had actually always thought that all people who thought at all seriously about science thought as I did. But I guess I’m wrong. This explains why otherwise smart scientists often say things that I think are totally indefensible. What I most have in mind is the confusion between theoretical scientific models and reality itself.

I most often run into this with quantum mechanics where people will claim that reality is stochastic. I generally respond with something like, “No, no, no! Our models of reality at the smallest level are stochastic; we have no idea what reality is!” And I still think that’s true. Most scientists are empiricists. It strikes me as a fairly simplistic understanding of science.

But then, I would think that, wouldn’t I? I am, after all, more a mystic and a mathematician than I am a scientist. I am deeply skeptical of reality — even to the point of having questions about my own existence. So I accept science like the guy in the chicken joke: I need the eggs.

But I’ve never felt that science answers fundamental questions. That’s not a knock against science, that’s just how science is constructed. For example, science generally answers “how” questions. Evolution theory shows how organic chemistry leads to life and eventually to us. Or if I were being more careful, I would say that evolution theory provides us with an extremely useful narrative about how organic chemistry leads to us. Regardless, science is mostly mute on the “why” questions. For example, why is it that carbon has this structure that allows complex chemical chains to be constructed? That’s not really even a scientific question. We can certainly learn that because of the makeup of subatomic particles after the big bang, it necessitated that atoms be constructed in a particular way and so on. But again, we are talking process (or “narrative”) not “Why?”

This is perhaps a critical element in my fights with the atheist community. It is empiricism versus pragmatism. Although I still don’t get how they can claim to be empiricists after Gödel. If sufficiently complicated deductive systems inevitably lead to contradictions, won’t science — an extremely complicated pseudo-deductive system — eventually tell us, for example, that atoms exist and that atoms don’t exist? It won’t matter to my philosophy of science. It will still be the case that in the reality of my consciousness, hummingbirds are territorial and the light still goes on when I flick the switch.

But what will it mean to those who think that reality is this thing and science uncovers its secrets? I remember reading The Limits of Science by Peter Medawar. In it, if I recall correctly, he said that there were no limits to science in the way that science had always been useful. I took this to mean that the knowledge that we had gained wasn’t going to reduce our ability to gain more knowledge of that type. At the same time, it meant that there had always been limits to science.

I don’t have a problem with this. What’s more, I don’t have a problem with limits to knowledge. And I certainly don’t have a problem with limits to rationality. And none of this has any effect on my philosophy of science.

The Wisdom of Senate Election Models

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United States SenateI’m a little embarrassed to be so fascinated by the argument between Nate Silver and Sam Wang. It was only three days ago that I wrote, The Ballad of Sam and Nate. But it just keeps on going. The most recent round took place on Political Wire, Nate Silver Rebuts Sam Wang. And then this morning, Sam Wang Factchecks Nate Silver. If I weren’t so interested in it, I would tell them both they ought to find a nice quiet boxing ring somewhere.

Today, over at The Daily Beast, Daniel Altman came to much the same conclusion I did over the weekend, Why Is Nate Silver So Afraid of Sam Wang? For most of this, I think you are better off just reading my article. One thing I noted was, “The truth is, at times, The Monkey Cage model has been a big outlier.” But Altman went one step further. He pointed out that at the time he was writing, Silver’s model (FiveThirtyEight) actually disagreed more with The Monkey Cage than it did with Wang’s model (PEC).

Nate SilverAt that time, the FiveThirtyEight model predicted a 58% chance of the Republicans taking control of the Senate. The Monkey Cage predicted 77% and PEC predicted 42%. Thus FiveThirtyEight predicted 19 percentage points lower than The Monkey Cage and 16 percentage points higher than PEC. Today, it is even worse. FiveThirtyEight still predicts 58%, but the others have moved toward the extremes: 84% and 36%. Thus, FiveThirtyEight is 26 percentage points lower than The Monkey Cage and 22 percentage points higher than PEC.

I stick with what I said over the weekend: I like the inertia in the FiveThirtyEight model. And I tend to think that Silver has things right. And if we include the Daily Kos and Huffington Post models to provide the five primary Senate models, we end up with a median that is the FiveThirtyEight model (58%) and a mean that is closer to the FiveThirtyEight model than any other: 60%. Even if we throw out The Monkey Cage and the PEC models as outliers, we get almost the exact same conclusions. The median, of course, is still the FiveThirtyEight model (58%) and the mean is 59%.

Sam WangSo by using the wisdom of the crowd approach that Sam Wang uses with polls, but instead use it with the Senate models, the FiveThirtyEight model is the winner. Of course, that just makes Sam Wang look better. If he were not one of the “big five” models with his most basic — statistics only — model, then what the modeling community as a whole would be telling us would be way off. The median would be 63% and the mean would be 66%. That would be closest to the Daily Kos model, which currently gives the Republicans a 67% chance of taking the Senate. (I wonder about the Daily Kos model, however; it has been stuck at 67% for a very long time, during which time there have been major changes in the polls.)

Daniel Altman’s main point is the same as mine: if the Democrats manage to hold the Senate, it will make Nate Silver look bad, even though it doesn’t mean what people will think it means. And the fact that Wang is doing it with the most boneheaded model imaginable won’t speak well for wonderboy. It will say to many that there is a very simple way to separate the signal and the noise. But maybe this whole election cycle is teaching us something more important. Maybe it’s teaching us that Nate Silver has a really big and obnoxious ego. Just kidding; we already knew that!

What we may be learning is that the best way to model elections is for a lot of smart people to create models the best way they can think of. And based upon this, we not only get a good idea of how the election will turn out, we get a better idea of what matters and what doesn’t. And if Nate Silver gets his fee-fees hurt, so be it. The world is generally improved by large groups of people doing things; it is rarely improved because one Romantic hero steps up and shows us the way. And even if Nate Silver’s model is the best, it just shows that he’s picked the best of The Monkey Cage approach (fundamentals only) and the PEC approach (polls only). That’s the signal. The rest is noise.

Afterword

I screwed up and forgot to include The Upshot model, which currently gives the Republicans a 61% chance of taking the Senate. It is very similar to the FiveThirtyEight model. Adding it to the analysis changes the numbers very little. However, it does tip things toward The Upshot so that the mean of all the models is closer to it. If PEC is removed, the median is exactly The Upshot and the mean is still the Daily Kos. I think the reason I forgot The Upshot model is that I don’t think it is really any different from the FiveThirtyEight model.

George Westinghouse Elephant Lover

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George WestinghouseI’m back from my trip. I spent almost all day yesterday sleeping. But today, we are back to the usual schedule, except, of course, that I didn’t get the birthday post up at midnight. What are you gonna do? I wasn’t going to crawl myself out of bed in the middle of night. And it was probably for the best, because today is not a great day for birthdays. I mean, I think Carole Lombard is cute as a really, really cute button, and also very funny. But I did her last year anyway.

On this day in 1846, the great inventor George Westinghouse was born. Of course, that was a time when it was pretty easy to be an inventor. There was a lot of stuff going on. That’s why the government has allowed the patent system to get so out of hand now. If you have enough money, you can get a patent on walking, and the rest of us would have to pay royalties to walk into the kitchen.

When it comes to inventors, people tend to think of Thomas Edison. They shouldn’t. To begin with, Edison was kind of a jerk. But more than that, he worked tirelessly to saddle our country with a terrible electrical system. You see, he had all the patents related to direct current (DC) electricity. Westinghouse had the patents related to alternating current (AC) electricity. DC is a perfectly good system for running small devices, but it is terrible for delivering electricity over large distances. There is too much line loss. Ultimately, Westinghouse won out and we got AC.

Part of Edison’s campaign against AC was to tie it to its use in the electric chair. This is quite interesting, because Edison was a very smart and knowledgeable man. He knew that for the purpose of large scale electricity distribution, AC was the way to go. But his own personal profits (Edison was already ridiculously wealthy) trumped the common good. And that brings us to the story of Topsy.

Topsy was a circus elephant in the New York area. She bounced around between owners, eventually ending up at Luna Park under the care of William Alf. Alf was caught abusing Topsy with a pitchfork, causing him to release her to roam free in the streets. This (and not the pitchfork), got Alf arrested. Later Alf tried to ride Topsy into the police station. Alf was apparently a drunk. Anyway, Luna Park fired Alf, but then they didn’t know what to do with Topsy, so they decided to kill her. They were going to hang her, but the ASPCA said that would be cruel. So they decided to electrocute her.

When Edison found out, he was thrilled. He sent a bunch of people out to help in the murder and to shoot the film, Electrocuting an Elephant. Obviously, the murder of Topsy did not win Edison the contract to create an electrical grid. But the truth is that Edison would have electrocuted half of the American people to get more money. Of course, none of this is to say that Westinghouse was a wonderful guy. But it would be hard to come close to Edison on the “evil greedy bastard” scale.

Happy birthday George Westinghouse!

Ebola, Malaria, and Boner Pills

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Do You Have Ebola?

Here is a simple test from Ezra Klein over at Vox, This Paragraph Perfectly Sums up America’s Overreaction to Ebola. Look, I get it: it isn’t just Americans. Humans are like this. We don’t think statistically; we are afraid of whatever is being pushed by the media. This is why people are so afraid that their children are going to be kidnapped by some stranger but not at all concerned that they are going to drive in one of their friends’ cars.

Klein pointed out one of my favorite statistics: there are 200 million cases of malaria each year. It continues to be the biggest medical problem in the world today. But what are we worried about? Ebola. And there were just 7,000 confirmed cases of Ebola in this outbreak. That’s during the worst Ebola outbreak in history. Oh! My! God! How will be ever survive?

I don’t mean for anyone to get the impression that the Ebola outbreak isn’t serious for those who are being effected by it. But it’s pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and it isn’t an issue in the United States at all. It reminds me very much of the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS. As bad a disease as ALS is, it is a minor disease. And all that “awareness” could have been focused on a disease that had a larger effect on humanity.

And this brings me back to what I always come back to: malaria. Why have we not cured it? Because it is a disease that affects mostly poor people. As a result, drug companies don’t spend their research dollars working on it. But each new year comes another drug to cure erectile dysfunction. If ever there were a reason to nationalize drug research, it would be this.

The claim that we need the “free market” in drugs and long patent protections is that drug companies wouldn’t innovate if they couldn’t sell a drug for hundreds of times what it would sell for in an actually free market. I’m not sure this logic ever flew, but it certainly isn’t the case today. I say get rid of drug patents, and use the estimated $60 billion per year that we save to have the government hire scientists to do research. As it is, that is far more than the drug companies spend on R&D.

Contrary to what conservatives claim, the free market isn’t perfect. What’s more, patents distort the free market. And finally, the way we bring new drugs to market is stupid. It is a way to bring only drugs to market that rich people want, because they can pay the exorbitant prices. Given that the public is currently freaked out about Ebola, that could actually do a bit of good. But as I’ve already pointed out, even Ebola isn’t that important a disease. And within a month or two, rich Americans will have forgotten about Ebola and so the drug companies will be back to pushing boner pills.

Rocket Man Robert Goddard

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Robert GoddardOn this day in 1882, the great scientist Robert Goddard was born. Given that yesterday we did Sputnik 1, it just makes sense to do America’s most famous “rocket man” today. It reminds me of an old cartoon where a man walks up to two men who are trying to fix a car. The man says, “May I help? I am a rocket scientist!” Well, that was Goddard. He is best known for having build the first liquid-fueled rocket. The first of these was launched in 1926.

In his lifetime, he patented 214 inventions. One, of course, was the liquid-fueled rocket. But of equal importance to the future of space flight was the multistage rocket. If you are old enough to remember the Apollo missions, you will recall the the rockets got shorter and shorter as the flight progressed. The reason for this is so that the mass of the rocket gets smaller as it runs out of fuel, and so takes less fuel to accelerate. Goddard was the first man to propose that idea.

Goddard was ahead of his time and this led to his often being mocked in the press. For example, The New York Times mocked his idea that a rocket could propel itself in the vacuum of space without having anything to push against. Of course, this was well known by Newton. It is about the most basic concept in mechanics: conservation of momentum. So Goddard was being mocked about even the most rock solid of science that he proposed. The New York Times later printed a retraction, 49 years later — long after Goddard’s death — the day after the launch of Apollo 11.

As a result of this, Goddard tended to work alone with his own technicians. This undoubtedly slowed the speed of innovation in the field. Small minds — especially those with large audiences — have a tendency to do that. In the 1920s, The New York Times had the power to slow innovation in rocket and space science. Today, Fox News and other ring wing media outlets (along with a strong assist from mainstream media outlets) have the power to stop serious public debate about the unquestioned findings of climate science. Back then, we had to fear small minds. Today we have to fear a total lack of minds.

But Goddard was a great man and if it weren’t for him, Sputnik 1 would doubtless have been delayed by years or even decades. Although the circumstances of his life and work were not optimal, Goddard shows that science and scientists will not be denied. Great minds will flourish if given the smallest opportunity. Sadly, there are many in this country who want to deprive even the smallest of opportunities.

Happy birthday Robert Goddard!

Sputnik 1 and the Birth of the Space Age

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Buster KeatonOn this day in 1957, Sputnik 1 was born. It was one of the greatest moments in the history of humanity. Americans tend to forget about it the same way they forget that the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis. (Americans think George C Scott did it.) But proud and patriotic Americans are not so insecure that they cannot admit that someone else did a great thing. And Sputnik 1 was a very great thing.

It was on this day 57 years ago that the space age started. And if that wasn’t cool enough, the launch of Sputnik 1 made America go crazy — but in a good way. It’s not that we didn’t have rocket scientists doing great work. But it took this national embarrassment to get the government to properly invest in space exploration.

The history of Sputnik 1 on both sides is filled with government silliness. They were both most interested in its military applications. Sputnik 1, for example, was funded by the Defense Ministry. What’s great, of course, are the scientists and the others involved in the actual work. The project was headed by Dimitrij Sergeevich Mordasov, and it was outfitted with four radio antennas that transmitted measurements of “the density of the atmosphere, its ion composition, the solar wind, magnetic fields, and cosmic rays.” These were critical to future space exploration, but it also yielded important information of general interest.

Right now, the human race (and not just the United States) has two vehicles roaming around Mars. And I’m sure that part of that is each government is still afraid that one country might learn something that might give them a military advantage. And indeed, I was very displeased when the conflict in the Ukraine was used by the United States to cut off scientific collaborations with Russia. But mostly, I think the space program is motivated by our best impulses. If species are judged by what they are at their best, humans do very well, because all you have to do is point to the international space program.

In a big way, that is thanks to Sputnik 1. It only operated for three months. It lived fast and died young. But it has had a great a positive impact on the world for the last six decades. In the flash of this moment, it is the best of what we are.

Happy birthday Sputnik 1!

Afterword

I really like the following image that I created for last year’s birthday post. I wrote, “There are four artist birthdays today in as many countries and centuries. First, there is Lucas Cranach the Younger, a German Renaissance painter, who was born in 1515. Second, is Francesco Solimena, an Italian Baroque painter, who was born in 1657. Third, is Jean-Francois Millet, a French Barbizon painter, who was born in 1814. And fourth, is Frederic Remington, an American artist of the old west, who was born in 1861.”

Four Painters

There Is No End to Denial

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Who Coulda Known - March of Doom

This cartoon is courtesy of Daily Kos. It speaks for itself, but that has never stopped me before. I present it because it gets at one of my biggest, yet most petty, complaints about conservatives. After global warming is clear and devastating, the most reasonable denialists will claim that no one could have known. At best, we will get a Rick Perry, “Oops!” And the same people who have been totally wrong will continue to be listened to as though they are oracles. But at worse, the denialists will never admit they were wrong.

This morning, Dean Baker brought my attention to a good example of this, The Unrepentant Inflation Hawks and Obamacare Foes. It is mostly about a Bloomberg News story, Fed Critics Say ’10 Letter Warning Inflation Still Right. It is about the infamous open letter signed by 26 conservative economists and economic types telling Ben Bernanke that quantitative easing was going to lead to high interest rates and economic collapse. It is four years later and interest rates are substantially lower.

The point is that not one of the people who signed that letter are willing to admit that they were wrong. Of the ten who were willing to talk to Bloomberg, none would admit error. So you see, the cartoon above is a best case scenario. The old man in Miami-Dade would be saying, “What global warming?! There’s no evidence that this is related to global warming! Anyway: University of East Anglia!”

The reason I say that my complaint is petty is that I know that I will be deprived even of the pleasure of saying, “Told you so!” But that’s the problem with politics in the United States. The right-wing is totally post-fact. I know the response to this, “What about liberals who aren’t vaccinating their children?!” Well, those are not liberals. That is a particular social group, many of whom are liberal. But liberals in general don’t behave in such a silly way.

But the Republican establishment absolutely doesn’t care about facts. And why should they? They have created the perfect media system that is impermeable to facts. Jonathan Chait explained the situation perfectly today, Is Republican Climate-Science Denialism a Mental Block? He noted, “They follow cues from Party elites, whose positions they trust and emulate (or distrust and oppose).” Of course, that’s true of the people of all political leanings. The problem is that elites are completely vested in the interests of the super rich that are almost completely at odds with the interests of the nation generally and the Republican voters specifically.

The inflation hysterics can always claim that the promised inflation is just one year away. Similarly, with global warming there really is no point at which deniers will absolutely be proven wrong. Climate is variable. And even conservatives have given up on claiming that global warming is not happening. Most of them are now hanging onto the idea that global warming is not caused by human activities. And that’s a game that can never be disproved. It might just so happen be that global temperatures started to increase during the industrial revolution when we started pumping large amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.

So there is no end to this. Unless global warming brings on global catastrophe (and it may), the super rich will still be able to live in the best places on earth. There will be fewer of them, but so much the better for the rich. For once, their billions might actually buy something worth having — like fresh fruits and dry land. And they can sip tropical drinks and scoff at those fools who used to warn about global warning.

Tribal Atheism

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Seth AndrewsOver the weekend, I heard a talk by Seth Andrews. He’s a prominent atheist who runs The Thinking Atheist podcast. He is very good, which is not surprising. He had worked in Christian broadcasting before becoming an atheist. And he has a gorgeous radio voice and he’s pretty smart and knowledgeable. But I made the mistake of listening to more of his work. None of it is bad. It is just that he presents an extremely common and troubling outlook on life.

Again and again, he talks about atheism in terms of science and what we can prove. Most annoyingly, he claims to base his life on rational thought. It is such an arrogant view. And untrue! We humans are very strange and how we make decisions is only very slowly coming into any kind of focus. But what we do know is that we aren’t nearly as rational as we think we are.

Belief in God, at least today, is more silly than irrational. Most people believe in God for the same reason they vote Republican or root for the Raiders — it’s a cultural thing and they really don’t think much about it. The houses built by fundamentalist Christians are generally as sound as those built by atheists. So theists may be misguided in their belief in specific myths, but they aren’t irrational in a general sense.

I never believed in God. From a fairly young age — from about the time I understood what death was — I wanted to believe in God. But it always seemed too stupid to believe in. Even at the age of ten, I could not see any more reason to believe in Jesus than to believe in the Greek myths I read about in school or the Norse gods I saw in comic books. So perhaps I have a different approach to atheism. I didn’t start off in one culture and move to another. So it isn’t necessary for me to make religious belief or non-belief into a tribal issue. And I believe this is what Andrews has done.

Hemant MehtaThat doesn’t mean that Andrews is bad. He’s actually charmingly inclusive. One thing I really like is that when I listen to him, I feel like I am an atheist. Too many in the atheist community make me feel like I’m a heretic. But a big part of why Andrews includes the great range of non-believers is just that he is so focused on his former Christianity. And I’m glad he clawed his way out of that tribal association. But let’s not go too far in claiming the intellectual high ground.

Much better than Andrews is Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist. Of course I would think that: he is a former math teacher. But as much as I like him, he exhibits some of the same issues. For example, I came upon the following video, “Atheists, where did the universe come from?” I was very exited to see that title, because too few atheists will even engage with the question. But I was really unhappy with his answer:

I don’t have a problem with the answer, “We just don’t know!” That’s a perfectly fine, if incredibly boring, answer. But he makes a critical mistake in framing the question as he does. He says, “Scientists can come up with theories of what may have been there [before the big bang], but the truth is, right now — and maybe forever — we won’t be able to answer that question definitively.” This makes the same mistake that theists make when they claim that God created the universe: it just pushes the question back a step. What if scientists proved that our universe is just part of a multiverse? That would be no more final an answer than the Big Bang is.

When it comes to this ultimate ontological question, I find science and theology equally useless. But theologians understand that the existence of “God” is a real problem — that it must exist in a form that we cannot comprehend because of our being locked into this universe. Scientists largely don’t see the real problem. They are like mechanical engineers thinking that they might figure out the structure of the periodic table by building better bridges. They won’t, because they aren’t even approaching the question.

I understand that we ask the kind of questions that we have tools to answer, and we really don’t have the tools to answer this question. But what a great opportunity this provides! There ought to be common ground here among scientists and theists. The scientists ought to look out at the universe as the theists look out at “God.” Because it is the same thing: the great unknown. I understand that theists are, in general, annoying in their dogma and fear of anything that might counter it. But they aren’t any more irrational than anyone else. What’s irrational is the universe.

I think that people who claim to be science-based and rational are generally people who don’t understand science all that well. Science is a fantastic tool for learning things about the universe. But it is, thus far, limited to the universe. And math has shown us that logic itself is not necessarily consistent if you push it far enough. Thus I see no contradiction between science, atheism, mysticism, and macro-scale rationality. Who wants to join my tribe?

Napoleon, Antosia, and All About Donkeys

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Napoleon and AntosiaLast night, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Napoleon and Antosia[1], two donkeys at the Poznan Zoo, in Poland. These donkeys have been a couple for a decade and have had six children during that time. The most recent was this year. But some people complained because it turns out — and this is shocking — in order for a jenny (female donkey) to have a foal, a jack (male donkey) must have sex with her. What’s more, donkey’s don’t even have the decency to us the missionary position.

Oh! My! God!

Can you imagine?! This was being seen by children — human children, specifically. So some people complained to local politician Lydia Dudziak who convinced the director of the zoo to separate these immoral donkeys who were, not to put too fine a point on it, acting like asses. Now let us consider this for a second. Zoos are not the nicest places for animals. This is probably the biggest reason why zoos have problems mating animals. The fact that Napoleon and Antosia manage to carry on their affair after ten years and six foals should be celebrated.

What’s more, if you are as old as I am, you will have noticed a change in nature documentaries. When I was a kid, predators never killed their prey in these things. The rabbit always got away from the fox. Now, watching a cheetah tear apart a beautiful gazelle is no big deal. Yet Napoleon humping Antosia from time to time is going to scar the kiddies? Really, if someone had told me at 5 years old that they were just playing, I would have believed them. I’m not a parent, and so I probably shouldn’t say this, but a lot of parents really need to get over themselves.

It all had a happy ending. After a week the zoo reversed it’s decision:

The zoo acknowledged making a mistake on Thursday and said the donkeys — Napoleon and Antosia — were back again in one pen. “It was never our intention for any animals to feel uncomfortable because of their natural behaviors,” the zoo said in a statement.

The interruption of the long-standing romance has turned into a national news story in Poland in the past days. Nearly 7,000 people signed a petition to have them reunited.

Two fan pages that appeared on Facebook devoted to their cause attracted nearly 10,000 likes — and photos of donkeys in the act.

Experts weighed in, saying that forcing the donkeys to live alone could affect their psychological wellbeing. Politicians were asked about it on the country’s leading news programs.

“Animals separated by sex into different cages? It’s complete idiocy,” said Stefan Niesiolowski, a legislator with the governing party, Civic Platform.

Even the spokesman for the conservative Law and Justice party, which Dudziak belongs to, would not come to her defense.

“It’s a level of absurdity — that has been crossed to such an extent that I don’t even want to read or know about this,” Adam Hofman said on Wednesday, on behalf of the party.

This is all great news, but it got me reading about donkeys last night. I found this great sentence on Wikipedia, “Although formal studies of their behavior and cognition are rather limited, donkeys appear to be quite intelligent, cautious, friendly, playful, and eager to learn.” That sounds very much like me. I’ve always known that donkeys get a bad rap because horses will basically do anything you tell them to and donkeys know better than to trust you. Yes, you can train horses to walk sideways. But I’m a lot smarter than a horse and if you try to teach me to walk sideways, I’m going to react very much like a donkey, although with more violence.

In my reading, I also learned about mules and hinnies. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and female horse. A hinny is the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse. Because of the way that chromosomes interact (horses have 64, donkeys 62, and mules & hinnies have 63), it is a whole lot harder to create a hinny than a mule. But one thing I absolutely did not know is that hinnies and mules are not necessarily sterile. Well, all males are. But there are 60 documented cases of a female mule giving birth. Again, though, hinnies are much less fertile, with only one documented case of a female giving birth.

Regardless, I’m not sure how I feel about the breading of mules and hinnies. It strikes me a bit like something that Dr Josef Heiter would have done. I know: because of hybrid vigor, these mostly sterile animals are smarter and stronger than either horses or donkeys. Still, isn’t it kind of lonely, both in a personal and evolutionary way? Maybe I’m a hybridist, but I think it is best to let donkeys be with donkeys. (As for horses, they should stick together too — and as far away from me as possible, because horses are evil.) It is a very good thing that Napoleon and Antosia are back together!

[1] Antosia is the name of a town in Ukraine, but between the two world wars, it was in Poland.

Adrien-Marie Legendre

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Adrien-Marie LegendreOn this day in 1752, the great mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre was born. He was born to a rich family, which is more or less the way it goes. You see, if you were born poor, you were lucky to get to learn to read. If you look at the history of great thinkers, they mostly came from the middle of the income scale. The rich were too busy counting their money. They didn’t have to do anything, so they didn’t. And the poor were too busy not starving. So that left the children of the artisans and shopkeepers. But Legendre was a bit different.

But when revolution came to France, Legendre lost his fortune. But he wasn’t part of the useless rich, and so he survived. He was named one of the six members on the mathematics panel of the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts. And shortly before his death, he was made officer of the Légion d’Honneur.

What he is most well known for is one of the most powerful tools of mathematical physics: the Legendre transformation. As I wrote last year, “It allows you to transform a function from one set of variables to another. There are two classic examples of this. One is to transform the Lagrangian formulation of classical mechanics into the Hamiltonian formalism. The other is the transformation of thermodynamic internal energy—which we can’t measure—into enthalpy and other variables that we can measure.” It is a beautiful thing.

Happy birthday Adrien-Marie Legendre!