Los Links 1/21

I’d write you an inspiring lead, and helpfully split this week’s links into categories, and generally do more by way of saying “Go read all these and then some!” But my book on South China agriculture just came in, I’ve still got Krakatoa to finish, and a dream has sent me on a scramble through old photos, so this is all you get:


Go.  Read.

Dr. King’s Nightmare: “It’s the priorities MLK spoke of that I find interesting. In retrospect, he seems to have predicted the place we’re in now – a nation diminished both economically and intellectually from what we were in his time. We’ve become more inclusive, but we’re mostly more inclusive at the bottom 99% of our society. The ones who really count are what they’ve always been.” (Slobber and Spittle)

At Least He’s Honest: “These people don’t believe that America is a country. They don’t believe that it is an American value, across all state lines and across all political divisions to ensure that children are not exploited. If Oklahoma wants to allow people to hire 10 year old children to make cheap consumer goods for whatever the market will pay, that’s just the price we pay for freedom.

“Likewise, slavery. But we had that argument already. They lost.” (Hullabaloo)

Battle Hymn Of The Republican: “I was just continuing to muse a bit over the fascinating change in rhetoric over the past week. The above verse is meant as an amalgam, not merely the obvious target. I remember Rush bloviating “talent on loan from God”; Beck gloating over the attendance at his rally, Billo’s obsession with the numbers competition between himself and his MSNBC counterparts… WHen it suited their interest, they claimed tremendous influence. That influence, however, has the fascinating property of disappearing altogether when reality catches up to rhetoric.” (The Digital Cuttlefish)

When Human Research Gets Inside Your Mind…:  “Early in the research career I began 11 years ago, I worked with a population of Vietnam War veterans with terminal lung disease.  They were incredibly sick, although still ambulatory and living independently, and we were trying a new medication to try to relieve some of their symptoms.  They visited my office every month for a year and would stay for 18 hours at a time.  None of them ever wanted to sit alone in our patient room with the comfortable couch, television, and fridge full of water and juice and snacks.  They wanted to sit with me in my office in the small wooden chair in the corner, and I accommodated them. Usually they would sit quietly, sipping decaf coffee and reading the paper or a book while I worked on my charts and entered my data.  Sometimes they would want to make small talk – tell me about the town’s latest gossip, their children and grandchildren, or discuss the weather,  And sometimes, late at night, at the end of our time together, they would tell me about the things they had seen.  Things so sad and so horrific that those stories are blistered permanently inside of my mind. Knowing these things changed me.  I don’t know that they made me better, but I know that they made me different inside.  I know now that there are things you can never forget.  But I also know that what are even more horrific, are the stories they couldn’t bring themselves to tell me.”  (On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess)

Helpless in the Face of Madness: “What is the matter with us? Are we really helpless in the face of the astounding toll that guns take on this society?

“More than 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. Another 66,000 or so are wounded, which means that nearly 100,000 men, women and children are shot in the United States annually. Have we really become so impotent as a society, so pathetically fearful in the face of the extremists, that we can’t even take the most modest of steps to begin curbing this horror?” (NYT)

How Plate Tectonics Became Accepted Science:  “‘Most of the really great breakthroughs in science are unifications,’ said Owen J. Gingerich, a science historian at Harvard. Newton’s laws of motion unified the sky and Earth as ruled by the same physics; that was radically different from the earlier Aristotelian concept, in which the two realms were separate. Einstein’s laws of relativity unified space and time.

“’Obviously, plate tectonics was an enormous unifying theory that began to make sense of disparate sorts of phenomena,’ Dr. Gingerich said.” (NYT Week in Review) (h/t)

How deep the Universe: “Now there you go. Did you see that? What I said? ‘The nearby spiral…’. ‘The galaxy is close to our own…’. But it isn’t.” (Bad Astronomy)

Dysteleological Physicalism: “Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘dysteleology’ to describe the idea that the universe has no ultimate goal or purpose. His primary concern was with biological evolution, but the conception goes deeper. Google returns no hits for the phrase ‘dysteleological physicalism’ (until now, I suppose). But it is arguably the most fundamental insight that science has given us about the ultimate nature of reality. The world consists of things, which obey rules. Everything else derives from that.”  (Cosmic Variance)

Palinspeak and Violence: “One of the constants in Sarah Palin’s worldview is violence. You see it in her reality show where most wildlife is immediately identified as a threat to be guarded against or killed. You see it in her inflammatory language, and the ways in which she corrals supporters to sometimes shockingly violent threats. You see it even in completely innocuous Facebook postings on sports. Just check out this Palin stream-of-consciousness on, yes, March Madness…” (The Daily Dish)

“An armed society is a polite society”:  “So how is the aphorism; ‘An armed society is a polite society’ supposed to work?  I often hear people use it who advocate universal access to firearms as a solution to social problems.  What form, exactly, would that politeness take?  And what would happen if it were violated?  What would the result be in very crowded places?  How would it work out for people who cannot conform socially? What about the exchange of ideas considered by some to be inherently rude?  How would social innovation ever take place? A bit of imagination is in order and for that we might turn to a very imaginative author.” (Decrepit Old Fool)

The elephants in the room at ScienceOnline 2011: “Chris Mooney told us that we need ‘Deadly Ninjas of Science Communication’, Tom Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center said that he had been told by a Congressman that the debate over climate change was a ‘knife fight’, and Josh Rosenau drew some compelling parallels between the tactics and rhetoric employed by denialists and the creationist playbook. And yet, there was still a rather odd focus on the communication skills – or the implied lack thereof – of scientists as the reason that so many seem to think that the basic fact of anthropogenic climate change is still up for discussion. Sure, we can refine our message. But how effective is this in a media landscape, particularly in the US, where manufactured controversy abounds, and people who knowingly distort and misrepresent the science are happily given a megaphone? Our ninjas are going to need more than better framing in their toolkit of rhetorical jujitsu moves.” (Highly Allochthonous)

Krugman Finally Has His ‘Creationist Moment’: “I’ve written many times that everything you need to know about movement conservatism can be understood by observing creationists (not surprising, since the theopolitical right is a major element of the conservative movement). I’m glad to see NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman has finally reached his ‘creationist moment’: the epiphany one realizes that, to creationists, words have no meaning, that they are not being honest.” (Mike the Mad Biologist)

When my Inner Writer is stomping her foot in protest….: “I love writing. I really do. Editing, not so much. Background info….meh. But I love writing.

“And yet, there are days when I sit at my computer and open my WIP*, and all I can think is, ‘Okay….now what?'” [What follows is damned good advice, and all writers should go read it.  Now, in fact.] (The Coffee-Stained Writer)

Flooding on the flanks of Mt. Hood: “It’s the middle of January. You’ve traveled to Oregon’s majestic Mount Hood for a weekend of skiing the snow- and glacier-covered slopes. On Saturday morning when you begin to head up the mountain from Portland, it’s warm and raining. ‘No problem,’ you think, ‘it will be snowing at higher elevations
.’ (Thanks t
o generally decreasing temperature with increasing elevation, or the environmental lapse rate.) But it’s not. Instead, it is raining. Not just run-of-the-mill Oregon drizzle, either. It’s really raining hard. (Highly Allochthonous)

The Significance of a Symbolic Gesture: “With yesterday’s vote, Republicans effectively told American families, ‘We’ll gut the health care system now, and maybe figure something else out later. In the meantime, good luck — and don’t get sick.’ Those who find this compelling probably aren’t paying close enough attention.” (The Washington Monthly)

A Really Big Erratic White Rock in Jefferson County: “A few weeks back David Tucker posted a query regarding big erratics located within the Puget Sound area. He has done some nice write ups on our local glacial erratics including ones I would recommend. So it took me a few days to think of some. Some of my favorites are resting on the mud flats of Drayton Harbor southwest of Blaine, but an impressively large erratic is located north of Hood Head on the west shore of the upper Hood Canal. It is so big and prominent, you don’t have to take a field trip to see it. You can see it using Google Maps or Bing Maps.” (Reading the Washington Landscape)

Los Links 1/21
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Los Links Addendum

I’m behind on my normal rounds and almost missed this post by Dan McShane: A Cautionary Chapter in Washington State Public Power.  If you read no other post on the Giffords shooting, read this one.  Dan does an amazing job illustrating the consequences of violent rhetoric:

The lies told about John Goldmark in that campaign combined with toxic rhetoric regarding issues in the 1980s and led to the murder of his son Charles, Charles’ wife and children more than 20 years later. Neither John Goldmark or his son Charles had ever been communists, but the lies that had been spread in the Okanogan Valley funded by a corporation opposed to public power for monetary reasons had confused a member of an anticommunist group years after the fact to commit a senseless murder. The rabid rhetoric of that group further inflamed the killer.

There are consequences, and there are precedents, something all too many would like us to conveniently forget.

And the most chilling lesson is that our insane political discourse may continue to inspire violence decades down the road.

Los Links Addendum

Los Links 1/14

This week, there’s going to be a rather heavier focus on politics than usual, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  

Meanwhile, major bits of Queensland are underwater.  Information on the disaster is available at the Australian Red Cross site, and you can donate there or at the Queensland government’s Flood Relief Appeal site.  In light of what’s happening in Queensland, I’m putting Anne Jefferson’s post on flooding front and center:

A flood is a disaster when people are in the way: “So while our hearts go out to those who are losing lives and property in Australia, let us not forget that there is a flood tragedy still unfolding in Pakistan, largely out of the media spotlight. Let us also remember that when we see increases in the human impacts of meteorological and geological phenomena, it’s usually not changes to the size or frequency of the phenomenon that drives the trend, but the increasing number of people in nature’s way.” (Highly Allochthonous)

Politics:

Who is responsible for the murder?:  “Mohammed Hanif asks who is responsible for the murder of Salman Taseer? (And who is responsible for the multiple deaths and critical injuries in Arizona? Who is responsible for the attempted assassination of a Congressional representative and the successful assassination of a federal judge outside a Safeway in Tucson? The questions are related. It’s not just a single assassin in either case – it’s also a society, a culture, a discourse, a world view, a rhetoric, a climate, a mindset, and the people who help to create them.)” (Butterflies and Wheels)

Beware Compulsive Centrists and ISlate-esque Contrarians Bearing False Equivalencies: “Because a diary, out of hundreds posted every day, on a blog site is just like the political ads created by a former governor and vice-presidential candidate who has a potential audience of millions. Bai has to know enough about the internet to understand how diaries work (and that most probably aren’t even seen by regular visitors to the site). But this narrative is part of the Village’s Compulsive Centrist Disorder.” (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Gabrielle Giffords’ brain surgery: Decompressive hemicraniectomy: This surgery is known as a decompressive hemicraniectomy. I’ve published research with people who have had this procedure, blogged about that work, talked about it a TEDxBerkeley last year, and even got picked up by Mind Hacks and Wired for it.  (Oscillatory Thought)

The Absence of Civility Is Not the Problem: Lying and Inaccuracy Are the Problems: “We’re now seeing all of the civility trolls coming out of the woodwork. If by civility, one means ‘not engaging in violent eliminationist rhetoric’, well, then I’m all for it. But what I’m concerned about is that honest criticism will be silenced. While I’m not as sanguine about political rhetoric as, let’s say, Jack Shafer, the fact is a lot of people in political life are habitually…counterfactual. That is, they’re liars. Others are ideologically blinkered, while yet others, sadly, are either just kinda dim or else stone-cold ignorant. (Mike the Mad Biologist)

Tea party in the Sonora:  “But there is, in fact, one place where the results of Tea Party governance has already been tested: Arizona, where the Tea Party is arguably the ruling party. Less driven by issues of national security, on the one hand, or moral values on the other, Arizonan conservatives are largely obsessed with taxes and immigration—also the twin fixations of Tea Partiers, who, like Arizonans, are disproportionately white and older. So it comes as little surprise that top Republican elected officials in Arizona eagerly seek the Tea Party’s support and make time to speak at the group’s rallies. Should the Republicans succeed in retaking power nationwide over the next four years, the country might start to resemble the right-wing desert that Arizona has become.” (Harper’s Magazine)

“Don’t politicize this tragedy!”:  “Screw that. Now is the time to politicize the hell out of this situation. The people who are complaining are a mix of lefty marshmallows whose first reaction to the fulfillment of right-wing fantasies by a lunatic is to drop to their knees and beg forgiveness for thinking ill of people who paint bullseyes on their political opponents, and right wing cowards who are racing to their usual tactic of attacking their critics to shame them into silence. This is NOT the time to back down and suddenly find it embarrassing to point out that right-wing pundits make a living as professional goads to insanity.” (Pharyngula)

Who Profits from Violent Rhetoric? Can We Reduce The Profit?:  “KSFO/ABC/Disney/Citadel, as employers, can tell their hosts not to talk about killing people on the air as a condition of their employment, just like they can tell them not to swear. Management doesn’t like swearing because swearing earns them fines up to $500,000. However saying:

We’ll trace you back, run you down and kill you like a mad dog.‘ (audio link)
–Lee Rodgers about a Ron Paul supporter
Had no instant effect on Lee Rodgers’ finances. Rodgers eventually was fired. Part of the reason was he wasn’t generating as much revenue via advertising as he had in the past — before my advertiser alerts.” (Firedoglake)

Tucson Heroes: Unarmed People Who Stopped the Armed from More Killing: “The unarmed kept the armed from killing more people. Deal with it, America.” (Firedoglake)

Being Wyatt Earp: “And you don’t have to be an expert to understand this without having to have it acted out on the streets of Arizona. It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that people wading into gunfire with a gun will just be adding more bullets to the chaos. This rationale for arming everyone to the teeth has been nonsensical and absurd from the beginning and the fact that anyone has ever taken it seriously is a sad comment on our culture.” (Hullabaloo)

Wednesday’s Mini-Report: Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), reflecting on Saturday’s shooting, said, “I wish there had been one more gun there that day in the hands of a responsible person.” (There was — the man holding that gun very nearly shot an innocent man.) (Washington Monthly)

The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy: “Extremist shouters didn’t program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.” (Slate)

Arguing Tucson: “In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.” (Interesting Times via Kevin Drum)

Since When Do Conservatives Believe Words Don’t Have Consequences?: “The same wingnuts who are insisting today that there’s absolutely no connection at all between speech and actions have spent an awful lot of time over the past several decades saying exactly the opposite.” (Firedoglake)

Mental illness expert: We should be asking whether political climate helped trigger shooting: “A leading expert in mental illness tells me that asking whether the Arizona shooter’s violent behavior might have been partly triggered by the nation’s political climate is a wholly appropriate line of inquiry — even if the shooter is found to be insane.” (The Plum Line)

Sarah Palin and the Blood Libel:  “She’s trying to avoid taking any responsibility for the shooting. That’s
fine – she isn’t responsible for the shooting. But the way that she’s doing it is by falsely presenting herself as the victim in this situation. And to make matters worse, she’s doing that by cluelessly presenting herself as the victim of a historic anti-semitic slur that falsely accuses Jews of being murderers. She’s trying to distance herself from the attempted murder of a Jewish woman by presenting herself as the victim of an anti-Jewish slur.” (Good Math, Bad Math)

Required Reading: “Wouldn’t it be nice if national tragedies inspired everyone to band together to take an unflinching look at the causes and to determine what each of us can contribute to keep them from happening again? Yes, DrugMonkey, I am a dreamer. Still, it is important to recognize that how we react determines where we go from here, and a number of people are finding the public reactions to the Tucson shooting sadly wanting.” (Almost Diamonds)

Science:

The Slippery Slope of Anti-Vaccine Complacency: “What if a family decided that they didn’t want to confine their baby in a car seat? The baby cries whenever they strap him into it, and besides, accidents are rare. They’ve done their research, and they feel the baby is safe enough in the mother’s arms. Would my friend be as sanguine about that decision?”  (Musings of a Dinosaur) (h/t)

I’ve Been Selected for the Open Lab 2010 Anthology of Science Blogging: “I am pleased to announce that I’ve been selected as one of the 50 finalists for the Open Lab 2010 compendium of science blogging. I’m absolutely thrilled to be included in this group of talented and enthusiastic communicators of science. Below is the post that will appear in the volume (to be published in a few months).” (Clastic Detritus)

Experimental vs. historical science, and environmentalism:  “Experiments inform our understanding of nature, but nature comes first. Parts of our understanding may be decoded in a lab setting (e.g., isotopic dating, strain ellipse analysis, or groundwater chemistry), but the data are collected outside and must then be processed indoors. In geology, the big experiment has been run: its result is the planet we see before us. As archaeologists, cosmologists, and crime scene investigators must do, geologists use subtle clues to interpret the past.”  (Mountain Beltway)

More on Wakefield’s descent: money, money, money!: “The BMJ has just published Part 2: how Wakefield stood to make not just millions, not just tens of millions, but actually hundreds of millions of dollars by promoting the false link between the MMR vaccine with autism and Crohn’s disease.”  (Bad Astronomy[Editor’s note: can I just say I love it when Phil’s being a dick!]

Meteorites and Geology: big holes in the ground: “Putting it another way, on average over the last 542 million years, over 700 big asteroids would have hit a part of the earth with a subsiding basin covered by a shallow sea. This is rather cool, I suggest, particularly the idea that many of these craters may already have been surveyed, but the seismic data has yet to be appropriately analysed. It’s a nice thought that most examples of what happens when something very big falls out of the sky are to be found deep underground.”  (Earth Science Erratics)

On scientism: BioLogos‘s big meeting, in which Francis Collins embarrasses himself and the NIH: “As for the rest of the phenomena, ‘beauty’ (an evolved neural response), ‘love’ (probably a neural and chemical condition evolved to facilitate bonding), ‘friendship’ (ditto), and ‘justice’ (a byproduct of morality, which we’re working on, and social organization), the statement fails to show why religion provides a ‘source of knowledge’, especially because different religions have different—and mutually exclusive—solutions.  All they can say is ‘God made them.’” (Why Evolution is True)

A rant on the evolution of religion: “To the people of Iron Age northern Europe, garotting members of their community and dumping their bodies in the bog probably seemed like a damned fine idea. No doubt it appealed to a host of human mental biases. It also seems to have been successful in building communities (at least, in relative terms) – after all, the culture survived for millennia.

“And yet, it’s an approach to life that most people would frown upon today.”  Epiphenom (h/t)

Los Links 1/14

Los Links 1/7/2011

‘Tis the Winter Writing Season, which means I’m pre-loading a lot of posts in order to make time for work on ye olde magnum opus.  Unfortunately, this means the bits I blog either have to be a) old news or b) original.  The schedule of 1 post per day exacerbates the situation.  This, I’ve come to feel, shamefully neglects worthy posts that I should commend to your attention in a timely fashion.


Which is a long way of saying, “Friday linkfest!  Woo-hoo!”


These linkfests might end up being long, depending on how much demands inclusion.  Sample at will!

The Real Death Panels: “Throughout the debate over health care reform, Republicans said the initiative didn’t do enough to cut costs, and would instead lead to things like rationing and ‘death panels.’ More than a year later, those identical Republicans want to reverse Democratic efforts to cut costs, while cheering on states that are already rationing and implementing their own versions of ‘death panels.'” (The Washington Monthly)

Deep Time: “And so, viewing all of geologic time, or particular parts of geologic time, requires me to slide my view to the right and left — or to slide time itself — while expanding or contracting the detail of the time frame, depending on what I want to look at.” (Looking for Detachment)

Simosuchus and the trouble with “living fossils”: “A modern crocodylian is not prehistoric; it is, by definition, modern. It, like every other living thing, has been evolving for millions of years. That’s one of the reasons that the oxymoronic term “living fossil” is one that always gets under my skin.”  (Superoceras) (h/t)

Can Hurricanes Trigger Earthquakes?: “Hurricanes and other storms are powerful agents of change of the Earth’s surface. In mere hours, storms can erode material from one area and deposit it somewhere else. In some cases, this sudden movement of sediment can completely transform a landscape. But can atmospheric forces trigger movements within the crust?”  (Clastic Detritus)

Ten million feet upon the stair: “This wear is the cumulative result of a century of people walking up and down from their flats. As they left for and returned from work, as they nipped out to the shops or ventured out for an evening in one of Edinburgh’s many pubs, many times a day the feet of the people who lived here would fall upon each stair. The force applied by each footfall may not be great, even for those who had over-indulged in deep-fried Mars bars. But as every geologist knows, even a small force, repeated over a large enough stretch of time, can add up to some very large effects indeed.”  (Highly Allochthonous)

When we can’t confess an awful mistake: “This is what Nationalism does.  It is what Religion does.  It is the kind of thing you expect someone to say while they’re holed up in their mountain cabin during a tense, 78-hour standoff with FBI and BATF agents.  It is what the President Of The United States did say, trying to persuade the president of another country to join him in an invasion.” (Decrepit Old Fool)

Sunday Photo(s): “What’s especially remarkable is that it’s easy to see the Cascade Mountains in front of Mt. Rainier. Usually, they look kinda like one mountain ridge at this distance.” [click for image – outstanding!] (Slobber and Spittle)

INSANELY awesome solar eclipse picture: “Earlier today Europe, Asia, and Africa got to see a nice partial solar eclipse as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, blocking as much as 85% of the solar surface. The extraordinarily talented astrophotographer Thierry Legault traveled from his native France to the Sultanate of Oman to take pictures of the eclipse. Why there, of all places? Heh heh heh.” (Bad Astonomy)

So… the Earth is 6,001 years old now?:  “If you look up at the sky, and you watch the Sun, the Moon, and the planets all move through it, you’ll notice something spectacular.”  (Starts With a Bang)

Lords of the rings: understanding tree ring science: “The ancient Greeks were the first people known to realize the link between a tree’s rings and its age but, for most of history, that was the limit of our knowledge. It wasn’t until 1901 that an astronomer at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory was hit with a very terrestrial idea—that climatic variations affected the size of a tree’s rings. The idea would change the way scientists study the climate, providing them with over 10,000 years of continuous data that is an important part of modern climate models.” (Ars Technica) (h/t)

Apologetics and Apoplexy: “This post is about demonization. It’s about basic empathy and humanity. And it is, sadly, about kids and rape and a suicide note. This may get too intense for some people. If you’re one of them, you’ll find the rest of what I have to say at the very end of this post, below the fold.” (Almost Diamonds)

“Piltdown” Medicine: Andrew Wakefield’s scientific fraud was worse than previously thought.  “The more we find out about how Wakefield put together his case series for The Lancet, the more it becomes obvious that he calculatingly put together a fraud every bit as elaborate and planned as that of the Piltdown Man hoax.”  (Resp
ectful Insolence
)

Los Links 1/7/2011