Impolite Company

Does God Exist?

Simmer down, I'm not going to try to tackle that question, not even peripherally.  Rather, there's a video making the Facebook rounds with that title (Does God Exist?) that purports to tell a story about young Albert Einstein challenging an atheist teacher as a schoolboy.  Having read a bit about Einstein, I'd like to put the video into some historical context.  The quotes below come from the chapter on Einstein's childhood in Walter Isaacson's very enjoyable biography of Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe.  My conclusion is that while it's improbable that the video is factual, I won't go as far as Snopes in saying that the account is definitely false.  I think that the producers of the video could have accomplished much of what they were seeking to accomplish by not attributing the words to Einstein but there has been a longstanding battle to try to present Einstein as a believer in a Judeo-Christian God without a lot of evidence to support the assertion.  I'm assuming that's why they went with Einstein.

Einstein was raised without religious practice in his home, "Einstein's parents, on the other hand, were "entirely irreligious" and felt no compulsion to hedge their bets.  They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father referred to Jewish ritual as "ancient superstitions."  But while his home life wasn't religious, it appears that the schools he attended did include religious practice.  His first school was Catholic:

...Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home.  Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood, the Petersschule.  As the only Jew among the seventy students in his class, Einstein took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.  Indeed, he did so well in his Catholic studies that he helped his classmates with theirs.  (p.15)

The Internal Combustion Engine v. Electricity

A recent study is out showing that using electricity that has been produced using biomass to run your car is 81% more efficient on a per acre basis than running a car on cellulosic ethanol (not currently available for consumption).  The study used a straight comparison between plug-in battery cars (not quite available for the regular consumer) and internal combustion cars; it didn't look at hybrids.  Here's the bit in the Grist article on this subject that I found most interesting, Electric Cars Get Better MPA (Miles Per Acre):

What we have here is a battle forming up between increasingly electrified transport (hybrid—plug-in hybrid—fully electric) and corn ethanol powered internal combustion engines (cellulosic is and will probably always be just five years from economic viability). One side is championed by consumer demand being met by market forces and the other side is championed by our politicians who force us to pay to turn our own food into fuel and then pour it down our throats. These are the same politicians who subsidize oil with one hand and its competitor, biofuels with the other. If it hasn’t dawned on you yet that our politicians are not capable of solving complex problems like this, maybe it’s time it did. Take matters into your own hands. Make your next car purchase a hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or full electric when they arrive (on dealer lots next year).

Wave Powered Electricity

There's a new invention that looks like an underwater wind sock that turns the power of ocean waves into electricity, Shockingly Simple Wave Device Will Beat Wind Energy in Price:

A new prototype of a wave power generator has been unveiled in England, and its inventors followed the creed espoused by Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The new wave power device, known as Anaconda, is a basic tube made from rubber and fabric and filled with water. It is still in trial phase, but its creators, optimistic about its potential as a source of mass power, are confident it will be cheaper than a wind farm generating the equivalent amount of power and less controversial in terms of public protest since the devices will be below the sea [Telegraph].

50/50 Chance the Earth Will Be Destroyed

Good, good stuff.  This appears to be old Daily Show footage, from back when the Large Hadron Accelerator was supposed to go online last year.  But it's classic work and is making the rounds--I ran across it on Bad Astronomy, Intelligence Falls Into a Black Hole:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

The Swine Flu Mother Lode

Effect Measure put up a post yesterday that included a link to the Mac Daddy of all swine flu resources, H5N1:  News and Resources about Avian and Swine Flu.  I'll probably mainly follow Effect Measure, just because it's relatively condensed whereas H5N1 may be a little too rich for my blood for every day consumption.  Still, if you want a place to go to find the real loot on the swine flu, go there!  Here's a little bit from a recent post, Pandemic:  Come as You Are, Dumb as You Are:

Stress, we hack novelists know, is the key to revealing character. So it's discouraging to see how little stress it takes to reveal a serious lack of character, not to mention basic common sense, in our political masters.

The Iraqis, after six long years' experience with irrational and pointless violence, shoot the three wild boars in the Baghdad Zoo. Just to make sure. (Why didn't they shoot all their chickens back in 2006 when they actually had a couple of human H5N1 cases?)

The Egyptian government is slaughtering all the pigs, who belong to Coptic Christians, while the Copts and cops get into punch-ups about this policy.

China, home of a large fraction of the best minds on the planet, has banned Canadian pork imports.

Bitch

Isis the Scientist has posted the first of her Letters to Our Daughters Project letters and it does a bang up job of reducing down to a few paragraphs something I've written about before here and elsewhere and something that was a huge topic during the presidential election, particularly during the Democratic Primary.  Assertive women are often seen as "bitches", certainly by men and often by some other women as well.  Let me give you a particularly good paragraph from the letter here and please go read it for yourselves--it is really more about being a strong woman than about being a women scientist, The Letters to Our Daughters Project--Dr. Pascale Lane:

When my daughter was starting middle school, I explained the world to her in my own warped way. I give my students the same advice. If you have a voice that gets heard in the world, someone will call you a bitch. If you perform acts of kindness and charity, someone will say that the bitch is showing off! If you show more spine than a jelly fish, someone eventually will brand you a bitch. Accept it. If someone calls you a bitch, you are probably doing something right.

Swine Flu and Industrial Farming of Pigs

The other day, a friend of mine asked me about the possibility of a link between swine flu and CAFO's.  I'd seen some buzz around the sustainability and organic corners of the internet and forwarded a post by Tom Philpott in Grist, Swine Flu Outbreak Could be Linked to Smithfield Farms but with the huge caveat that I didn't see any real evidence that lead to his speculations.  I told her that was the reason I hadn't posted any of that stuff on ImpCo, because I didn't see anything other than finger-pointing without evidence.  Now the Columbia Journalism Review has posted a nice little summary of the action on the Swine Flu/CAFO front for any of you who want to look at the vacuum of information, the tiny little bits of evidence and the discussion in the mainstream medium over the possibility of a connection between swine flu and huge pig operations, Swine Flu and CAFO's?

Clearly, it is too early to make bold pronouncements about CAFOs’ role in abetting the epidemic that has now spread to seven countries. As a front-page article in The New York Times on Wednesday pointed out, even “La Gloria may not, in the end, be the source of anything.” And Yulsman, who originally chided the press for ignoring factory farms, wrote a follow-up postdecision to slaughter all of the country’s 300,000 pigs despite no confirmed cases there, or an article in criticizing CNN’s Headline News for hyping the threat they pose. Many worry that jumping to conclusions can lead to panic or incite unnecessary and costly control measures. (Take, for example, Egypt’s The Washington Post about the threat to the global economy.)

That said, now is the perfect time for journalists to begin investigating CAFOs in a responsible fashion. That means doing things a little differently than the early blog posts, which tended to have a finger-pointing tone, did not deliver much context about evidence and controlling for alternative hypotheses, and did not call experts to test their theories.

The Flu Wiki

As the Swine Flu situation continues to develop, I'll keep trying to post links to good sources of information, both on the basics of disease transmission and so-forth and on the ongoing situation.  Effect Measure has posted a link to The Basic Science of Flu Wiki, a resource for all the basics and more.  They've also got a segment of the Wiki devoted to current events in flu, The Flu Wiki Forum.  There are plenty of scary numbers out there and plenty of things for us to obsess about if we want to scare ourselves shitless.  These sites give us some context for the situation and I'm convinced that more and contextual information is going to help us keep level heads over the next few weeks.  We need to be both concerned and informed about the possibility and dangers of a pandemic--to be concerned without being informed leads to poor decision-making personally and policy-wise; to be informed without being concerned leads to no one acting soon enough or aggressively enough.  So we need both.  As it has been from the beginning of this crisis, my go-to source of info is Effect Measure.

Women in Science: Letters to Our Daughters Project

Just passing along a little tidbit that sounds pretty interesting from Isis the Scientist over at the On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess blog.  She's trying to put together a collection of her scientific forbears--women who came before her, paved the way for her and inspired her to pursue a career in science.  From what I've read, there's a very sad dropoff of interest in science and math by girls as they transition into their teenage years--part of the socialization process that informs them what they're supposed to be interested in.  So I'm thrilled at all steps taken to strengthen a connection between young women and the sciences and I think that Isis's idea is a good one, The Letters to Our Daughters Project:

When I was a graduate student, I took a physiology class in which I was given the assignment to recreate my scientific family tree. When I did, I found that my family tree is composed some brilliant scientists. But, my family tree is also composed entirely of men, plus me. The same is true of the tree from my postdoc. I have scientific fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, but no aunts, grandmothers, or mothers. As I considered my career path in science, I found myself wanting and needing the perspective of more senior women scientists.

The inspiration for my Letters to Our Daughters Project comes from my hope that we can recreate our family tree here, creating a forum where the mothers and aunts in our fields (which I hope to not limit to physiology, but that's where I'll start because that's who I know) can share their wisdom with us. I think there is a wealth of information among these successful women and I hope to use this forum to share it with young scientists who are yearning for that knowledge.

Nash Equilibria and Vampire/Human Populations

Mathematician and all-around wonder-thinker John Nash got his Nobel Prize for his formulae introducing the concept of equilibrium to the field of game theory.  Back in the day, game theory could only measure for I-win, you-lose game situations where you could win only at the expense of another.  Nash came along with the math that allowed folks to study situations where both sides could win by introducing the idea of equilibrium points, or stable relations between two sides that were in the best interest of both sides to maintain.  His work has revolutionized fields as diverse as economics, evolutionary biology and the construction of auctions for such commodities as broadcast airwaves.

It was inevitable that someone would apply the mathematics derived from Nash's work to the balance between human and vampire populations and whether their interaction is a zero sum situation or one in which both populations can survive and thrive.  Big thanks to Pharyngula for linking to the study and opening it up to a world of dorks who might not otherwise have read about it (but it's "SunnyDALE" not "SunnyVALE"--but here's hoping you will fix it and make this aside irrelevant), Theoretical Ecology of Vampires. 

And here's a link to the five page paper on Vampire Ecology in the Jossverse (pdf).

Yes, We Have No Bananas

Oh.  Man.  I just ran across the following Banana Clip (no, it's not too early in the morning for bad puns) at one of the science blogs that the Feed Demon devours daily and it's right up there with the teabaggery for innuendo.  Except in this case there is no doubt that the innuendo is unintended.  It's a video in which Kirk Cameron is listening to a guy talk about the perfection of the banana as a tasty snack for human beings and how evolution can't explain its existence.  It's perfectly shaped for your mouth and has ridges!!  I think I'd almost rather you watch the video at this post, These Jokers Think the Banana is Perfect?  I Think Not to read about some of the weaknesses of the banana as a plant but, in case you're just in it for the fun (one minute):

Genetically Modified Crops Are Not Increasing Yields

Well, at least according to analysis of 20 years worth of research, Transgenic Seeds are Toast(ed):  New Report Says that GE Seeds Have Not Increased Yield.  First, a little bit of copy from a Monsanto ad and then they talk about the report:

Providing abundant and accessible food means putting the latest science-based tools in farmers’ hands, including advanced hybrid and biotech seeds. Monsanto’s advanced seeds not only significantly increase crop yields, they use fewer key resources — like land and fuel — to do it. That’s a win-win for people, and the earth itself.

Oh, really?

I’m not here to challenge their cheery scenario, though I could. And I’m not going to dig into the claim about using fewer resources. Nope, today I’m just tackling the assertion that “Monsanto’s advanced seeds… significantly increase crop yields.” Luckily, I have a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists to help me.

Life as We Don't Know It

Sometimes it seems like the popular imagining of the search for life in the universe is just a little bit off.  I don't know, maybe it's because of ET and all that, but the search with the best hope of results in the short term and even within our own solar system involves a search for much more exotic forms of life.  Life as we know it developed in the Goldilocks Zone, the narrow band around the sun that provides the sort of climate we enjoy here on earth (made even more special by things like the tides created by a relatively large moon and a jaunty tilt to the earth's axis).  But as scientists continue to poke around in the corners of our own planet, lift up out of the way rocks and check out what's growing underneath, journey to the super-hot vents at the bottom of the oceans, drill down below ancient glaciers, we're finding that there's plenty of life on our own planet that really isn't life as we know it. 

For instance, consider "Blood Falls", an oddly red-stained glacier first discovered a hundred years ago, Blood Falls--Bacteria Thrive for Millions of Years Beneath a Rusty Antarctic Glacier:

The source of the blood-red colour is an underground saltwater lake that was trapped by the encroaching glacier at least 1.5 million years ago. The temperature of the water is -5 Celsius, but it's so salty that it doesn't freeze. It's also rich in iron salts, which are slowly leaching the ice - these are the source of the distinctive red hue. Blood Falls is a rust glacier.

But it also houses another secret, which scientists from Harvard University have started to uncover - it's home to an entire ecosystem of bacteria, trapped for millennia in conditions that could hardly be more inhospitable to life.

Go.  Read more.  Explore!

The Real 'Hand of God'

Folks with an internet connection or maybe with an eye on The Cable Newses over the past week may have seen the following picture of The Hand of God:

However, those of us with an eye on football history know what the real Hand of God looks like on video:

Solar Energy from Space

Is this cool or what?  PG&E in California is apparently signing on to a proposed solar energy platform in space that would beam the energy to earth via radio waves.  Since Grist has the dirt on the proposal in nice, readable terms, why don't you just go over there and read about it?  Seriously, why not?  Not convinced it's worth the trip?  Okay, okay, here's a tease, California Utility Bets on Space-based Solar Power:

Solaren is using an innovative space-based solar technology, which, if successful, would represent a break-through in the renewable power industry,” Brian Cherry, PG&E’s vice present of regulatory relations, wrote to the California Public Utilities Commission on April 10.

That’s putting it mildly. The sun never sets in space and if Solaren technology works—and that’s a Star Wars-sized if—space-based solar could supply electricity 24/7 to just about anywhere in the world, including regions without access to abundant sources of renewable energy. A 2007 study by the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office found that just a one-kilometer-wide band of space in earth orbit receives enough solar energy in just one year nearly equal to “the amount of energy contained within all known recoverable conventional oil reserves on Earth today.”

Seriously, get outta here!  Go ahead, there's a one minute video too with funny-looking "smoke rings" and creepy music.

Why Evolution is True

It's not a terribly imaginative title, as I stole it from the post I'm linking to, but it is simple, concise and direct (and it's also the name of the book in question).  Bad Astronomy has written a brief post on a book by Jerry Coyne entitled (you guessed it!), Why Evolution is True.  Though I've read a number of books looking at evolution for the layperson, this one sounds like my cuppa tea and I may just splurge and get it.  Here's a bit of what the Bad Man has to say:

Moreover, he shows that the scientific theory of evolution by natural (and in some cases, sexual) selection makes clear predictions which are borne out by observations. And on top of that he shows why these conclusions make no sense at all if you think there is some Creator that made us the way we are out of thin air (or dust, I suppose).

I was particularly struck by the concept of geographic isolation and how that affects evolution (perhaps because I spent more than a week last year touring the Galapagos Islands). Species isolated on islands adapt genetically and morphologically (or vice-versa) to the environment, and you can see how there are changes in those species as they radiate out to other nearby islands. We only see species on those islands that come from nearby land masses, as you’d expect from natural methods of dispersion over long time periods (but not what you’d expect for a Creator to simply pop life into existence). And all of this fits in with what geologists see by way of plate tectonics and continental drift.

Corn-based Ethanol Smackdown

The CBO has posted a report and a blog entry on the short and long term costs of ethanol made from corn and whether it is beneficial to continue subsidizing and requiring it.  I'm glad to see it and hopefully it will give Congress the cover it needs to have  real policy debate on it.  Hat tip to Grist for publicizing the report (The Impact of Ethanol Use on Food Prices and Greenhouse Gas Emissions) and here's a bit from the blog post, Ethanol, Food Prices and Greenhouse Gas Emissions:

Most ethanol in the United States is produced from domestically grown corn, and the rapid rise in the fuel’s production and usage means that roughly one-quarter of all corn grown in the U.S. (nearly 3 billion bushels) is now used to produce ethanol. The demand for corn for ethanol production has exerted upward pressure on corn prices and on food prices in general. CBO estimates that the increased use of ethanol accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008.

This Little Piggy Takes Antibiotics (even though he isn't sick)

Back some time over the past week, Nicholas Kristof posted a couple of reports on possible links between the hog industry and an increase in antibiotic resistant staph infections (MRSA) and the use of antibiotics on healthy animals.  My brother was kind enough to pass the links on to me and I'll do the same for you.  I'm not sure that the links are proven to the point that we should panic yet, but there are plenty of questions about the use of antibiotics in our farm industry and whether that has led to more strains of resistant antibiotics.  These issues should at the very least supply us with another reason to turn a skeptical eye on our industrial farming methods--if the ethical problems of raising animals in concentrated animal feeding operations isn't enough to get you there are plenty of practical ramifications from disposing of the waste, to increased risk of disease and health problems related to animals eating what we think they should eat rather than what their nature dictates.  The articles are:

Our Pigs, Our Food, Our Health on the ties between MRSA and health problems in a small, rural Indiana town.  And Pathogens in Our Pork looks at the heavy use of antibiotics on healthy pigs:

Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.

The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.

“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”

The answer is simple: politics.

Thanks, Gibbs.

Brain Scans Bely Rational Economic Decision-making

(Post headline is brought to you compliments of the theory that you should say what you're going to say in the headline--it appears that such a policy produces clunky headlines)

A recent study involving neuro-economists, brain scans and investment decisions indicates that when people get expert advice on investment decisions, the portion of their brain that does the tough analytical work shuts down and they do what Jim Cramer says (or whomever they think is an expert).  Though Lynn might argue that's how my brain works when Paul Krugman says something, I would like to point out that I have been critical of him (especially when he's critical of Pres. Obama!  Yeah, Obama!! Obama trumps Krugman!!) in the past.  This sort of calls into question the whole idea that humans are rational decision-makers when it comes to economic decisions.  But it seems to be a pretty preliminary study and we shouldn't jump to huge conclusions based on it.  It does indicate that at least to a certain extent we still have some sort of hardwiring that promotes respect for authority and this makes sense--it's easier, it's less brain-resource intensive, to make a decision based on what an expert says rather than trying to do all the legwork necessary to gather all the facts and do all the analysis yourself.  Read about the study at Given "Expert" Advice, Brain Shuts Down:

A brain-scanning study of people making financial choices suggests that when given expert advice, the decision-making parts of our brains often shut down.

The problem with this, of course, is that the advice may not be good.

"When the expert's advice made the least sense, that's where we could see the behavioral effect," said study co-author Greg Berns, an Emory University neuroscientist. "It's as if people weren't using their own internal value mechanisms."

Women's History Month: Women in Science

I'm not very hip to keeping up with what month is in terms of what we're supposed to be saluting, but I just ran across a good post over at Science Women that is an interview with the writer's mother, a biology professor who first started teaching back in the dark ages of 1974, back when only 10% of the students in high school and college math and science classes were women.  It's always good to be able to look back and see where we've come from when we're evaluating where we are now--just like electing an African American president doesn't mean we've fixed the whole racism thing, the fact that we're getting higher numbers of women in the sciences doesn't mean we've fixed the gender bias thing, but we are making progress.  Trailblazing Teacher and Role Model:  An Interview with a Woman Scientist Who Went Before:

Over the course of two hours, I had a wonderful conversation with this woman scientist, who earned her PhD in 1974. Her research focused on ecology, and after a two-year stint at a private liberal arts college, she spent the rest of her career at an undergraduate only public institution. She taught 36 classes in 32 years, averaging 6-8 different courses per year. She never had any help from teaching assistants, so she did all of her own grading, lab prep, and lab teaching. And she also raised two kids, most of the time as a single parent. My interviewee would like to remain anonymous, so for the purposes of this post we'll call her "Dendro." Most of the time, I simply call her Mom.