Test-Driving the 2012 Porsche 911

I mentioned that I worked valet parking back in the '80s. It was a fun job. Valets get to drive the world's best cars, and in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa (South Coast Plaza), there's no shortage of fabulous vehicles. The thrill of a Mercedes wears off pretty quickly, but I never tired of the Porsches.

In any case, I'm reminded of all this with the review at Popular Science, "Driven: The All-New 2012 Porsche 911" (via Instapundit).

Yep, best 911 ever. The new 991 is larger, faster, sportier, more efficient, and basically makes the last generation look as outdated as a four-button ventless suit with double-pleated pants. We loved the drive of the new version and feel it is the telos of the 911 model range. With its near-perfect blend of style, speed and technology, it's a surefire winner. Until the next all-new 911 comes out and starts the cycle anew.

Note: The video features owners taking possessing of their new cars at the El Toro Air Station in Irvine earlier this year. Saddleback Mountain can be seen at just after 1:00 minute at the clip.

Giant Pandas Prepare For New Life In Scotland

At Sky News:

Edinburgh Zoo is about to take delivery of two of the rarest animals on the planet - a pair of giant pandas on loan from the Chinese government.

Sunshine and Sweetie - Yangguang and Tian Tian in Chinese - are both seven-years-old.
They have grown up together in the misty mountains of southwest China.

On Sunday they will embark on a 5,000 mile journey to Scotland, where they will become star exhibits at the Edinburgh Zoo.

Continue reading.

NASA Launches New Mars Rover

At Wired, "NASA’s New Mars Rover Launches Successfully":

Graphic Representation of Global Warming

Former climate skeptic Richard Muller's Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature group, which last week issued its report (about which I blogged here) confirming what climate scientists have been saying for the past two decades, has now released a video representation showing global warming since the mid-1800s. Cooler temps are depicted in blue; warmer temps in red. Note the large, 0.9 degree increase in global mean temperatures since 1950.

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in the Digital Commons

England's Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific publisher of the world's oldest peer-review journal, has decided to make its entire archive, going all the way back to the first issue published in 1665, freely available to the public. The archive includes Ben Franklin's reports on his original kite-based experiments on electricity, Sir Isaac Newton's first published scientific paper, and an early paper on geology by Charles Darwin. It is a treasure trove for historians of science and anyone interested in the history of scientific publishing. The announcement is here; and a search page is here.

Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Report Confirms Climate Science

For those who have not yet seen it, the report as well as all the data can be viewed here. The study was headed up by former climate skeptic Richard Muller (his research team included Saul Perlmutter, who just received the Nobel Prize in Physics) and funded by a variety of organizations, including the uber-conservative, climate change-denying Koch Foundation. As Muller promised at the outset, the study was comprehensive and even-handed, and it strongly confirms the work of other climate scientists, as the chart below indicates.

It is too much to hope that this will mollify the climate deniers, especially those with financial ties to the fossil-fuel industries. As Upton Sinclair wrote back in 1935, "It is hard to get a man to understanding something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." But for the rest of us, this report represents a tremendous vindication of climate science and the scientists who have been working on it over the course of many decades.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction - Where blue eyes and light skin originate from

by: Glenn Robinson

I'm not saying human eyes are directly from chimp eyes. This photo is just an example of the mutation that reminded me of another post, which together prompted me to write this post. 

When I saw this picture of the albino monkey with the blue eye, I was reminded of the theory that blue eyes, and light skin in humans are from mutations. Maybe it's not a theory. Maybe it's just a fact. All our physical differences are from mutations. Thank you Mark Wells for pointing this out in his blog post about albinos.

When I saw this video, it was the icing on the cake to reinforce the idea that mark Wells made in his blog.

Combining the photos, blog posts, videos, and NPR shows (below), it makes one view the world with a new perspective. I can't stop thinking that the hairless chimpanzee looks like my grandpa. I guess that's because chimpanzee's have about 99% the same DNA as humans. One of the most horrifying thoughts is a human / chimp chimera. The video above is about as close as I hope we get to seeing what one would look like O_O   

Defining Human Uniqueness In 'Almost Chimpanzee'

DNA Tests Shed Light on 'Hybrid Humans'

===

Glenn is a European-American married to a Mexican-American. They have two children. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.
Connect to Glenn at CommunityVillage.us

Wonderful Essay on Marie Sklodowska Curie

At Smithsonian.com, here, on the 100th anniversary of her second Nobel Prize.

Dawkins on Perry and the Dangers of Scientific Illiteracy in Politics

Richard Dawkins has a wonderful column in today's Washington Post (here). I especially like his suggestion that the strength of a scientific theory can be measured as a ratio of the number of facts about the world it explains divided by the number (and, I would add, size and scope*) of assumptions required to explain those facts. "A theory that assumes most of what it is trying to explain is a bad theory." Notable examples of such "bad theories" are creationism and intelligent design.

By the way, Dawkins' definition of "bad theory" should also have application in the social sciences. For example, the "findings" of economic studies, especially those based on formal models, too often depend entirely on initial assumptions.

The entire column is both instructive and entertaining.

*Merely assessing the ratio of number of assumptions per number of facts explained would actually seem to favor the God hypothesis. After all, it requires only a single assumption: a self-motivating, omnipotent God. And it can explain (if only poorly) every fact in existence. Dawkins makes clear in his op-ed, however, that it is not just the number of assumptions that matters, but their size, scope and plausibility, given facts we already know.

Tim Harford on "Trial, Error, and the God Complex"

From TED:



Hat tip: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

Mitt Romney:The GOP's Pro-Science Candidate

As many news outlets are reporting (see, e.g., here), GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has publicly broken from Republican Party orthodoxy by proclaiming that climate science demonstrates the need to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. His willingness to follow the scientific data, as opposed to political expediency, is both refreshing and laudable. I cannot help wondering, however, why he would buck his party on climate change, while kowtowing to it on health care, disavowing policies that are embodied in a law he championed and signed as Governor of Massachusetts. As a matter of political strategy, I find his comparative positions on climate policy and health care reform puzzling. What's his calculus?

Life after Death and the Green Cheese Content of the Moon

An excellent column by Sean at Discover Magazine's blog (here), explains why the notion of life after death is incompatible with our scientific understanding of how the world works. He recognizes, of course that "everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese."

Hat tip: The Browser.

House Energy Committee Votes Against Climate Science

Today, the House Energy Committee voted 31-3 to send H.R. 910 to the House floor for a vote. The bill would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that climate change endangers public health and the environment under the Clean Air Act, thereby preventing the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and other major sources. All Republicans on the committee and three Democrats voted in favor of the legislation. Nearly all of the Republicans on the Committee are on the record as "climate deniers" and have publicly attacked climate scientists.

It is, of course, a vanishingly small possibility that climate deniers are correct about anthropogenic climate change. Ironically, the bill they voted for today has about the same chance of ever becoming law. To do so, it must be enacted by the Republican-controlled House (which is probable), the Democrat-controlled Senate (which is highly unlikely), and then either signed into law by the President (which is virtually inconceivable, although with President Obama's recent record on climate change, one begins to wonder) or enacted over his veto by a 2/3 majority of Congress (which is also inconceivable).

However, even if everyone believes the bill is going nowhere, we should beware of drawing facile conclusions about the actual beliefs and intent of House Republicans concerning climate science and policy. Legislators may simply be pandering to their base. Even if that's true, however, their willful anti-scientism and ignorance of facts is both appalling and deplorable.

13% of Public High School Biology Teachers Promote Creationism/Intelligent Design

An article appearing in Science Daily (here) provides a troubling picture of science education in US high schools. Based on a representative sample of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, researchers found that only 28 percent consistently implement National Research Council recommendations for teaching evolution. Nearly half that number instead promote nonscientific theories of creationism and/or intelligent design.

The Science Daily article notes that this is occurring despite nearly a half-century of court rulings that teaching creationism and intelligent design in science classes violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. It just goes to show that legal, even constitutional, rules are not always more powerful than social norms, especially at the local level where pressure from religious groups is most acute.

This depressing story gives me the same feeling I from television advertisements for the "Creation Museum" in Kentucky: Ignorance is a correctable problem, but willful ignorance is a deplorable contagion that, if left unchecked, leads to the epidemic disease of militant ignorance.

What the Climategate E-mails Tell Us about Communication in the Sciences

A very interesting study by Marianne Ryghaug and Tomas Moe Skølsvold in the September 2010 issue of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science treats the Climategate non-scandal as an example of how scientists communicate with one another on complex and controversial issues. Access to the full article (here) requires a subscription, but here is the abstract:

This article analyses 1,073 e-mails that were hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009. The incident was popularly dubbed 'Climategate', indicating that the e-mails reveal a scientific scandal. Here we analyse them differently. Rather than objecting to the exchanges based on some idea about proper scientific conduct, we see them as a rare glimpse into a situation where scientists collectively prepare for participation in heated controversy, with much focus on methodology. This allows us to study how scientists communicate informally about framing propositions of facts in the best possible way. Through the eyes of science and technology studies, the e-mails provide an opportunity to study communication as part of science in the making across disciplines and laboratories. Analysed as 'written conversation' the e-mails provide information about processes of consensus formation through 'agonistic evaluations' of other scientists' work and persuasion of others to support one's own work. Also, the e-mails contain judgements about other groups and individual scientists. Consensus-forming appeared as a precarious activity. Controversies could be quite resilient in the course of this decade-long exchange, probably reflecting the complexity of the methodological challenges involved.

Hat tip: RealClimate.org

Most Interesting Sentence I've Read in Some Time

A parenthetical in a column by theoretical physicist Brian Greene in today's New York Times:

(Although nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light, there's no limit on how fast space itself can expand.)

Recursive and Self-Correcting Processes in Science

The gang over at Real Climate have posted an instructive piece (here) on how science and scientific publishing work, with special relevance to various climate science controversies and faux controversies. The blog post infers a set of "lessons" from the controversy that recently erupted over preliminary research, published in the journal Science, claiming, contrary to the conventional scientific wisdom, that arsenic can provide a basis for life. The lessons include the following: 

• "Major funding agencies willingly back studies challenging scientific consensus."
• "Most everyone would be thrilled to overturn the consensus. Doing so successfully can be a career-making result. Journals such as Science and Nature are more than willing to publish results that overturn scientific consensus, even if the data are preliminary - and funding agencies are willing to promote these results."
• "Scientists offer opinions based on their scientific knowledge and a critical interpretation of data. Scientists willingly critique what they think might be flawed or unsubstantiated science, because their credibility - not their funding - is on the line.

The last bullet point is the "key lesson..., and it applies to all scientific disciplines: peer-review continues after publication. Challenges to consensus are seriously entertained - and are accepted when supported by rigorous data. Poorly substantiated studies may inspire further study, but will be scientifically criticized without concern for funding opportunities. Scientists are not 'afraid to lose their grant money.'"

On This Date

On December 27, 1831, the Royal Navy's HMS Beagle left anchorage and headed out of Plymouth Sound on a nearly 5-year journey to survey South America and return via New Zealand and Australia. The ship's captain Robert Fitzroy had her extensively and expensively refitted for the voyage. Having failed to find a friend to accompany him on the trip, Fitzroy asked a fellow captain, Francis Beaufort, to identify a naturalist who might join the venture at his own expense. A young man preparing for the clergy named Charles Darwin filled that role. His  voyage on the Beagle altered his way of thinking about nature and the natural sciences as we know them today (although the later would have changed regardless based on the contemporaneous work of Alfred Russel Wallace and subsequent naturalists).

A Visual Demonstration of Improvements in Per Capita Income and Public Health Over 200 Years

Public Health expert Hans Rosling, on the BBC program "Joy of Stats," provides a stunning visual depiction of how public health has improved along with per capita income (in virtually all countries) over the past 200 years.



Hat tip: Bob Kleinops and LiveScience.com

Thaler on Wrong Scientific Beliefs

Over at The Edge, University of Chicago Business School Professor Richard Thaler, coauthor with Cass Sunstein of the influential book Nudge (Yale 2008), has raised an interesting question for regular Edge contributors:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

I am not a contributor to The Edge, but I nevertheless sent Thaler the following message:

Already a couple of respondents have correctly indicated Newtonian gravity as a “wrong scientific belief.” Interestingly, it’s a wrong scientific belief that still seems to be treated as true, not by physicists of course, but by large segments of the public. I suspect there are two reasons for this: (1) gravity is both intuitive and conforms to our “common sense” of the world (of course, common sense is often treated as a infallible guide to judgment, but often is misleading); and (2) Newtonian gravity is only falsified at very high speeds, which none of us experiences. Thus, while Newton’s theory of gravity is scientifically false, it seems experientially “true.”

Long before Newton, when Aristotle’s “scientific” theories held sway for centuries, it was thought that objects move faster as they approach the earth because they sensed that they were approaching “home,” i.e., where they belonged. This theory, too, made some intuitive sense if one also accepted Aristotle’s belief that vacuums were impossible.

More generally, my sense is that all scientific theories, like all religious theories, are not only about people trying to comprehend the mysterious world and universe in which we live, but to establish regularities so as to be less frightened by the world and attain some (true or false) psychological equilibrium. The need for some such equilibrium is innate.