Troll physics explained

Rage comics are one of my guilty pleasures. Combine them with my love for science, and you can’t go wrong. A physics professor was asked to explain the (lack of) science behind some of the funnier “Troll physics” comics. Here’s one of my favorites:

“DM: Jumping off the ground – or even a chair on the ground – is nothing like jumping off a chair while you and the chair are in freefall. Because the chair isn’t connected to anything, you’ll be pushing the chair DOWN as much as pushing yourself up (via Newton’s third law). And since you have much more mass than the chair, the force you and the chair exert on one another will speed up the chair’s descent much more than it slows your own.”

Is it bad that I think I would have learned more from my physics class if it would have incorporated internet memes?

Firebrands, Comfrontationalists, Accommodationists, oh my!

These labels have been flung around the atheist blogosphere lately. Jerry Coyne seems to be one of the people most outspoken about “accommodationists,” those that think science and religion can happily get along. Coyne thinks science and religion are inherently incompatible – a view I happen to agree with – and explained it nicely in a piece for USA Today.

The opponents of accommodationists have been labeled “confrontationalists.” PZ Myers wrote up an excellent piece on why he’s a confrontationalist after a panel discussion at the Secular Humanism conference. Apparently the whole accommodationist vs. confrontationalist idea was interesting enough for the New York Times to do a piece on it. It’s the whole firebrands vs. diplomats thing all over again – I guess the media love seeing drama within movements. So why am I beating a dead horse?

Because I hate labels, especially crappy labels.

They’re not just crappy because typing accommodationist and confrontationalist over and over makes my hands cramp up – they’re simply horrible at describing what they’re trying to convey. We’re really dealing with two totally different topics: 1) The relationship between science and religion, and 2) Strategies for engaging people.

I would argue the way people think about science and religion falls (mostly) into a binary. There’s the camp that thinks science and religion are compatible, comprised of people like Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Francis Collins, and Chris Stedman. They’re the people you’ll hear talking about “non-overlapping magesteria” and listing successful scientists who are also religious. Then there’s a camp that thinks science and religion are incompatible, comprised of people like Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne, Hemant Mehta, and myself. We’d argue that religious belief is inherently unscientific, and simultaneously being religious and a scientist involves a bit of compartmentalization in your brain.

Notice how religious belief or lack thereof doesn’t necessarily put you in one category or another. You have atheists who believe science and religion are compatible, and atheists who don’t. And I’m sure there are religious people out there who think religion and science are incompatible – the type of theists who make whole museums devoted to poo-pooing science.

The problem starts when we try to merge this viewpoint with different ways people engage others, like labeling the other side as “confrontationalists.” We try to lump this binary with the idea of firebrands and diplomats. But I’m going to argue that it is not a binary, but rather a spectrum. And it’s not just a spectrum in that some people are more aggressive than others – some people can also span wide parts of the spectrum. To illustrate, here I compare myself with some bloggers I enjoy (mainly chosen since I feel the most familiar with their strategies, and didn’t want to misrepresent others):


Notice how I didn’t simply rank people along the spectrum with a single point. That’s because I think there’s a serious aspect people miss when trying to employ this false dichotomy: those who can engage people differently depending on the situation.

I generally hate labels, so I’m hesitant to add “Situationalists” to the growing list, but it describes some people the best. PZ is pretty much always a firebrand, but bloggers like Hemant and Greta can be more or less aggressive depending on the situation.

It also describes me best. When I was president of my student group at a conservative college in a religious area, I needed to be much more diplomatic. I could have run out guns blazing, but the club would have never gotten off the ground. Because I chose a more diplomatic route, we became as well respected as we’re going to get in our community. That’s what was needed in that situation – becoming established, and letting people know that atheists aren’t all monsters.

But here on my blog, I have a much different approach. I’m more of a firebrand. I’m not representing an organization, so I’m more able to speak my mind and “rally the troops.” Or as Rebecca Watson lovingly called me during our panel podcast last week, I’m “a dick with a purpose.”

I don’t think my range is broad just because I’m young and new to the movement – I can think of other student leaders who rank on either extreme of that spectrum. Lucy Gubbins of the University of Oregon’s Alliance of Happy Atheists is very much a diplomat, and JT Eberhard of the Missouri State University Pastafarians is very much a firebrand.

And I think they both are amazing – being a situationalist is not necessarily better. People should do what they’re good at. If you’re good at playing Bad Cop, there’s a Good Cop out there too. We just have to remember there are people like me who don’t neatly fit on either side.

Then why are we labeling all people who think science and religion are incompatible as confrontationalists? We have people like Hemant who clearly fall into that group, but are about as friendly and diplomatic as you can get. If I had to guess, it’s because most people who think science and religion are compatible also happen to be diplomats. The term “accommodationist” is the mish-mash of those two ideas – you don’t just think science and religion are compatible, but you want to use that idea as a way to reach people in a friendly matter.

So, can we nix the confrontationalists label? It seems to serve no other purpose than to paint those who think science and religion are incompatible in a negative, hostile light. Hey, maybe the reason why the arguments of accommodationists seem so wishy washy is because they don’t have enough firebrands on their side.

…Or maybe it’s just because they’re wrong. But that’s a whole other post.

Scientific illiteracy

Reading scientific papers helps me understand why so many people hate or distrust scientists.

Let me clarify briefly. This is not meant to be me bitching about my graduate school workload. This is not me thinking my PhD was going to be a cake walk. I was prepared to finish undergrad feeling like a genius and walk into grad school feeling average. I was prepared to learn, and learning requires feeling stupid first.

This is me trying to think what science looks like to an outsider.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing pretty much nothing but reading scientific papers – that is, peer reviewed research papers published in academic journals. Some of these have been historical, the oldest being from the 1940s, and some have been from the last couple of years. Some have been good, some have been excellent, but the majority have made me want to stab my eyes out with the nearest pipetman. I’ve been reading primary literature for the last three years, but dealing with so much recently has made me realize one thing:

Most scientists are terrible writers.

And when I say terrible writers, I’m not just talking about English skills – though that certainly is a problem. When I had to read some of my classmates’ papers in undergrad, I was often thankful to find a sentence that wasn’t a fragment or a run-on. I don’t have perfect grammar, especially when informally blogging, but I can usually get general concepts across. And don’t even get me started on the organization of some papers. Your methods are where?

But most science writing is simply impenetrable. Everything seems to be lingo and jargon, to the point where they might as well be speaking another language. This problem gets worse with time, since fields are becoming more specialized, not less.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, so many scientific papers are drier than Indiana on a Sunday. You would never guess most papers were authored by the same person who will perk up with excitement when you ask them about their research. Obviously papers are meant to be impartial, but that doesn’t mean they have to be devoid of all liveliness. When a paper does include a rare joke, or even a clever ribbing of another study, readers get excited. We like being reminded that humans wrote these papers, not some computer program (unless simulating papers is what your research is about, then…). I nearly pooped myself when I saw a paper use an exclamation mark once. Needless to say, exclamation marks should not provoke this amount of surprise.

So why is this an issue outside of my own graduate school woes? I hate tooting my own horn, but allow me to prove a point. I have a BS in Genetics and Evolution from a respected university. I have three years of research experience in a laboratory. I have one published paper and at least one more on the way. I won the award for Outstanding Biology Student every year I was at Purdue. It’s safe to say that I am more trained in biology than your average person, yet I still have to spend hours reading a biology paper to grasp even the most basic concepts.

I look back on all the times I asked people if they read the original research before passing judgment on a study. Or all the times I sighed at another bad piece of science reporting. Now I just sympathize. If I’m having such a hard time, how do we expect laypeople to understand science?

I’m but a lowly first year graduate student, so I obviously don’t have all the answers… But I’m also a blogger, so here’s my opinion on two things we can do to improve science communication:

Relax pointless publishing rules. Journals are so focused on word count, formatting, figure size, supplemental material… Are you really communicating in the best way possible when you’re worrying about having to spend hundreds of extra dollars for every page you go over? Or when you sacrifice clarity in a graph because it’s cheaper to get it printed in black in white?

One of my papers recently was rejected, and I cringed at some of the questions reviewers had. We clarified all of those points in the initial draft, but they were eventually cut due to word limit restrictions. This is made all the more ridiculous when you consider that most people access journals electronically now. Is the internet not big enough for that extra pdf page? We obviously want some limits so people don’t get excessively verbose, but this is just silly.

Encourage more scientists to be journalists. And I don’t just mean recruiting science majors after they’ve been taught how to write (though for the love of FSM, someone please do that too). I mean encouraging scientists to blog about what they know, and then utilizing those bloggers who have proved their communication skills. It’s hard enough to understand the primary literature, let alone translate it into something people can understand. We need to exploit that talent we have.

The thing that worries me the most? That this is probably just the first of many disillusionments I’ll have about science over the next couple years.

And all the bloggers wept

It was bad enough knowing a sedentary lifestyle can lead to weight gain. Now persistent exposure to light at night can too? I give up, I’m doomed. Pass the cheesy puffs.

I feel bad for all the computer addicts who put their computer in front of a treadmill in an attempt to stave off the inevitable. Resistance is futile! Accept your plumper future!

What? At least you won’t be as overweight? …Shut up, you.

(Via Boing Boing)

Dance Your PhD finalists are up!

If you’ve ever had a hard time explaining what your research is about, maybe you should consider interpretive dance. That’s what the Dance Your PhD contest at Science asks grad students to do. It’s fun, but the winner also gets a $500 dollar prize.

You can vote for whichever one you like the best here. To show I’m not inherently biased toward biology, my favorite was actually the chemistry one. I thought it did the best job at actually explaining the concept, while having the least abstract dancing. Oh, and I loved the part with Taq polymerase in the middle. Seriously, just watch it.

…Okay, it still had to do with DNA, shush.

Maybe in a couple of years I’ll be able to do this, though I kind of suck at dancing. Right now my lab rotation project wouldn’t be too interesting of a video though – not sure how to interpretively dance to coding in Python…

Off to lab safety training!

This morning is the mandatory lab safety training new graduate students have to go through. I probably shouldn’t be excited, since I heard this is actually just a boring lecture. But we do get to use a fire extinguisher at the end, so I’m holding out for that bit of excitement.

But we all know the cool part about working in laboratories is the potential for disaster, right? I mean, who didn’t go to chemistry lab secretly wishing something would explode? Be honest.

What’s your best lab disaster story?

Mine actually happened when I was teaching, rather than as a student. We were using Bunsen burners and the rubber tubing connecting the Bunsen burner to the gas source caught on fire. The professor, other TA, and I all just sort of stared at it dumbfounded for a couple seconds before one of us thought to just turn off the gas. Molten rubber is not a nice smell.

Watch out! I'm susceptible to madness!

Biologists are the most common type of mad scientists in books, movies, and television in the last two hundred years. I never thought of starting my PhD in genetics as heading toward the dark side, but I may have to rethink that. I’ll try not to create any horrific chimeras or crazy viruses during my lab rotations.

Though it makes sense, really. Biology is obviously the coolest scientific field, so we have more potential for fiction novels. Just think about it. What would a mad astronomer do? Look at stars maniacally? Yeah, biologists totally trump that.

(Via Skepchick)

Who knew gays were like CO2?

Looks like Global Warming is in need of a scientific update:

Clerics in the South Pacific have fingered the key cause of climate change – homosexuals.

The revelation came at a conference at the University of the South Pacific considering the implications of Climate Change and Creativity.

Academics were apparently thrown off their consideration of “Arts in the Age of Global Warming” and “Ecology in Poetry / Poetry in Ecology” by reports of Church Ministers who maintained that climate change in Samoa are clearly attributable to to homosexuals.

Come on, that’s preposterous. How in the world do gays cause climate change? I mean…

…wait a second.

GBLT.

Global Bolstering of Lavalike Temperatures.

Oh my god.

An ingenious plan, gay agenda. An ingenious plan.

Another example of feminist distrust of science: Vaccinations

Not all feminists distrust science, but it’s a common enough theme that it’s become a major pet peeve of mine. I ran into another example reading a blogger I usually love, Lena Chen (who’s also one of More Magazine’s up and coming young feminists). So Lena, I apologize ahead of time for making an example out of you, but this issue is very important.

One of Lena’s readers commented that vaccination seemed a lot like circumcision in that it lacked consent, and asked for Lena’s opinion. Here’s the bulk of her post:

I’m against mandatory vaccinations, but that doesn’t mean that I’m against vaccinations. […] Invasive or not, vaccinations are something that individuals should be able to decide on themselves. Requiring them means that the government is essentially making health decisions for its citizens, without taking into account what they (or their parents) may want. (Most girls getting the vaccine are at an age when they can be informed about the benefits and risks of the procedure.) I got the HPV vaccine myself, and I’d recommend it to anyone, but I would never be able to justify mandating it, because I value personal freedom and think that choice should be left up to the patient.

And while, of course, it makes sense — in theory — to say that a modicum of personal freedom is a rather minor sacrifice for the “greater good”, it’s not like this line of reasoning hasn’t been abused in the past. Women — especially women of color and poor women — have more than just cause to be wary of a medical establishment that has historically profited from the coercion of marginalized groups. Forced sterilization of Black women threatened with the loss of welfare benefits, forced sterilization of individuals deemed “mentally defective”, electroshock aversion therapy to cure homosexuality … all of these things occurred in this country in the last fifty years. Frankly, I could give less of a damn about “public health” if it means that I get to live in a slightly more civilized society where no one is told what to do with their bodies anymore.

I commented:

Sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree. The way vaccinations work is through herd immunity. If the vast majority of people don’t get vaccinated, it puts those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons (newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised individuals) at even higher risk. If the government didn’t require vaccinations, they would be effectively worthless.

Thanks to vaccination fear mongering by people like Jenny McCarthy and people who make it into a personal freedom issue instead of a scientific issue, we’ve seen a sharp rise in diseases that were thought to have been eradicated. See: Whooping cough in California.

This isn’t some nebulous “for the greater good” ideology like forced sterilizations. The mechanics of herd immunity are pretty cut and dry.

Lena replied:

I think that one can definitely make a case for vaccinations being a good thing that benefits society and people’s health, which is why I don’t see a lot of folks opting out of vaccinations just because they’re no longer mandatory. I do think that a lot of anti-vaccination advocates spout arguments that sound like conspiracy theories (I’ve even seen 9/11 comparisons made), but I have to agree that there’s no reason why the government should be able to make decisions about their citizens’ bodies. This isn’t even something I would necessarily call fear-mongering, since there’s a historical precedence for this concern.

Me:

Except that people do opt out of vaccinations when they’re not mandatory. That’s precisely the reason why we’ve seen a sudden whooping cough epidemic. This is especially true when you have people like Jenny McCarthy going around lying about how vaccines are dangerous and cause autism. Not to mention that she’s well publicized by people like Oprah.

To say the government should not be able to make decisions about their citizen’s bodies is nice in theory, but ludicrous in practice. Do we want disease epidemics spreading across the country? Do we want children dying of genetic disorders that could have easily been treated if tested at birth? Do we want food and drugs we put into our bodies to become dangerous because the government shouldn’t regulate what’s safe or not?

There’s a point where historical precedence becomes antiquated distrust for science in general. We shouldn’t forget the past, but we shouldn’t be paralyzed by it either.

This could be worse. She obviously accepts that vaccine works and rejects the completely anti-science loonies. But at the same time, this is a perfect example of when ideology, specifically liberal and feminist ideology, supplants science and reason. And I say that as a liberal feminist. People have abused science in the past, but that doesn’t mean science itself is forever evil. It’s something that needs to be closely scrutinized, not ignored.

From my personal experience, I have a hypotheses as to why you see this sort of distrust in the feminist community. So many vocal feminist aren’t scientists by training, but rather come from liberal arts educations like English, Political Science, Sociology, or Woman’s studies. And when you consider most liberal arts majors probably only had to take one or two introductory science classes in college, it’s understandable why they might not fully grasp how vaccinations are effective or why not all evolutionary psychology is bunk (though some is). If I tried to give my opinion about economics based on one class I took senior year of high school, I’m sure I’d be wrong about a lot of things.

Now, plenty of scientists are feminists – we sort of have to be in a traditionally male dominated field – but there’s usually not much overlap between our studies and our feminism. That is, a political scientist can use their expertise to focus on women’s issues, but a chemist can’t really weave feminist philosophy into her next paper. Since we have less overlap, we can get busy in our geeky scientific jobs and forget to be vocal about other issues we care about. That’s why I personally try to be an outspoken scientific voice for feminism whenever I can.

And that’s why I’m going to give a damn about about public health – because it means I get to live in a civilized society, instead of dying from preventable whooping cough, measles, rubella, or polio.