BrisScience is on again, this Monday 25 June at City Hall, with a lecture by Dr Paul Francis entitled WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT COMETS (ALMOST ANYTHING!) (details over the fold
Category: Science
BrisScience does comets, Stern does climate
I have to admit that comets have been mostly a source of disappointment to me. After waiting thirty-odd years for Halley’s comet and driving far out of town to look for it, I thought I saw a faint smudge on the horizon. Apart from that, there’s been Kohoutek and Hale-Bopp, both more notable for failed apocalyptic prophecies than for lighting up the sky. The lesson, I guess is that if you want to find out about comets, you should find an astronomer who has the proper equipment.
BrisScience is giving you the chance, this Monday 25 June at City Hall, with a lecture by Dr Paul Francis entitled WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT COMETS (ALMOST ANYTHING!) (details over the fold
For the net couch potatoes among us, Sir Nicholas Stern and other eminent figures (Christian Azar,Bert Bolin, Carl Folke,Karl-Goran Maler, Martin Weitzman, Barbara Wohlfarth) will be discussing climate change, live on the Web if you can work out time difference (it’s form 9am to 12 noon in Stockholm) (via Terry Hughes).
See the lecture on Friday 15th June. (Windows Media Player) mms ://wmedia.it.su.se/Nicholas_Stern
Beatups
Since we’ve been discussing beatups lately, here’s a classic example of the genre. MSNBC runs a story with the headline “Study links imprisoned veterans, sex crimes” and the lede (US pressparlance for opening sentence)
Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses than nonveteran inmates, the government reports. Federal researchers cannot say why.
Reading on, it turns out that Federal researchers can and do say why. Military veterans are about half as likely to be in prison as non-veterans. So, the startling finding is that (drumroll) the imprisonment rate for sex crimes is about the same for veterans and non-veterans.
As one of the authors observes when she gets a word in halfway down the story
“I don’t want people to come away from this thinking veterans are crazed sex offenders. I want them to understand that veterans are less likely to be in prison in the first place.�
This is a mildly interesting finding, but presumably explained by demographics (veterans are, on average, older than the population at large, and active criminals younger) the fact that (except in desperate times like the present) the US military does not like to recruit people with criminal records.
Hayek on evolution and global warming
I’ve been working on a piece on why so many on the right have embracing delusional thinking about global warming, and I ran across a great quote from Hayek’s Why I am not a Conservative, cited by Jim Henley in relation to the debate currently going on in the US right about evolution and creationism/Intelligent Design. Hayek’s statement reads just as well if you replace “evolution” with “global warming”.
Looking at the NYTimes debate, it’s notable that debate at AEI (at least as reported by the Times) is about whether evolution is or is not politically favorable to conservatism, with ev psychists and Social Darwinists pitted against the Christian right. It’s only in the last para that the reality-based community has anything to cheer for (also quoted by Jim).
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.�
BrisScience today
The latest in the popular BrisScience lecture series is tonight at the Town Hall, on the topic Windows to the Brain. Details over the fold.
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Science Wars: The Battle of Five Armies
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has joined forces with Alan Sokal, scourge of leftwing relativism and pseudoscience, in an LA Times op-ed piece on the current state of the Science Wars.
As Mooney and Sokal note, the decline of antiscience views on the left
frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).
War on/over Science thread
This is the promised open thread on science. If you want to defend or attack climate science skepticism, take a stand on intelligent design, argue about passive smoking or whatever, here’s your chance. No coarse language, and try to keep it civilised.
Belated congratulations
As everyone knows by now, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel went to Edmund Phelps. Phelps award is one of the relatively rare cases where the Economics Nobel has genuinely been awarded for a single big discovery rather than for a research program. By incorporating inflation expectations into the Philips curve, Phelps killed the idea of a stable long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation, and, in effect, predicted the emergence of inflation in the 1970s. As Phelps himself noted, the implication of the new model that there exists a ‘natural’ or ‘non-accelerating inflation’ rate of unemployment has not fared nearly so well, but the central point that there is nothing to be gained, in the long run, by allowing inflation rates to rise, remains valid.
Congratulations also to the winner of the Peace Prize, Muhammed Yunus who founded the microcredit provider Grameen Bank
Even more belatedly, Australian Terry Tao shared the Fields Medal in mathematics back in August for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.
Republican War on Science: the book of the on-line seminar of the reviews
A while back, I organised a seminar at Crooked Timber, on Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science. Now, thanks to Parlor Press and the tireless efforts of John Holbo, the seminar has appeared in book form, and the presentation is beautiful. I’m looking forward to getting a physical copy, and to the promised appearance of more in the series.
War on Science: Science Strikes Back
The war on science driven by a combination of Republican* ideology and corporate cash has been ably documented by Chris Mooney (see the Crooked Timber seminar here). Now, finally, science is striking back at one of the worst corporate enemies of science, ExxonMobil. As evidence of human-caused global warming has accumulated, leading energy companies like BP have seen the need to respond, with the result that industry groups like the Global Climate Coalition have broken down, leaving ExxonMobil to carry on a rearguard action through a network of shills and front groups. Now the company is finally being exposed by a major scientific organisation.
In an apparently unprecedented move, the British Royal Society has written to Exxon, stating that of the organization listed in Exxon’s 2005 WorldWide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research‘, 39 feature
information on their websites that misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change
(full copy of the letter here)
John Quiggin 