I’m very happy to piss you off

It’s been “scientifically” shown that Christians are happier than atheists.

With the help of a text analysis program, the researchers found that Christians tweet with higher frequency words reflecting positive emotions, social relationships and an intuitive style of thinking – the sort that’s gut-driven.

This isn’t to say that atheists don’t use these words, too, but they out-tweet Christians when it comes to analytic words and words associated with negative emotions.

Christians, they found, are more likely to use words like “love,” “happy” and “great”; “family,” “friend” and “team.”

Atheists win when it comes to using words like “bad,” “wrong,” and “awful” or “think,” “reason” and “question,” said Ryan Ritter, one of the students behind the study.

While not perfect – for example, this sort of word examination can’t account for sarcasm – word choices, Ritter and his colleagues argue, reflect something about a person’s mindset.

I would agree that it does reflect differences in mindset, but I would say that the biggest obstacle to interpretation isn’t sarcasm, but the researchers biases, which got heavily loaded into their conclusion.

The conclusion: When they are limited to 140 characters or less, these researchers say, believers are happier than their counterparts.

Well, yes, if you’re going to infer unhappiness from use of the words “think,” “reason” and “question,” atheists must be the most miserable, unhappy people in the universe. Or perhaps you might recognize in that “mindset” premise that perhaps atheists are people who find great joy in thinking, reasoning, and questioning. That we use judgmental words like “bad” and “wrong” might also be a consequence not of our unhappiness but of being a minority in a world dominated by happy clappy assholes — and that we’d be more unhappy to be one of them. You simply don’t get to make judgments about happiness from these kinds of analyses.

I speak with some authority now. I reconciled myself to the publisher’s title for my book, The Happy Atheist, despite the fact that it is largely about mocking the absurdities of religious belief and asking that we have a more profound appreciation of the wonder of reality precisely because I am so damned happy to be who I am. There is absolutely no contradiction between struggling rationally to create a better world and being happy.

We can interpret those results in different ways. Here’s my twist on those words:

Christians are superficial and unthinking seekers after acceptance and status from their communities. They lack confidence in themselves, and constantly seek reassurances from others that they fit in, are part of a team, are good people. This leads to a lack of substantial content in their communications; they are basically social groomers, their minds unengaged.

Atheists are confident and proud, and are willing to risk social capital by probing and challenging commonly held assumptions. Group cohesion is of lesser importance relative to making sure the group is progressing in a productive direction; they readily call out destructive or demeaning behaviors both within and outside the community. Their primary decision making strategy is by logical evaluation of consequences, rather than relying on tradition and the safety of aligning with the herd.

There. Much better.

Historical and observational science

Dealing with various creationists, you quickly begin to recognize the different popular flavors out there.

The Intelligent Design creationists believe in argument from pseudoscientific assertion; “No natural process can produce complex specified information, other than Design,” they will thunder at you, and point to books by people with Ph.D.s and try to tell you they are scientific. They aren’t. Their central premise is false, and trivially so.

Followers of Eric Hovind I find are the most repellently ignorant of the bunch. They love that presuppositional apologetics wankery: presuppose god exists, therefore god exists. It’s like debating a particularly smug solipsist — don’t bother.

The most popular approach I’ve found, though, is the one that Ken Ham pushes. It’s got that delightful combination of arrogant pretense in which the Bible-walloper gets to pretend he understands science better than scientists, and simultaneously allows them to deny every scientific observation, ever. This is the argument where they declare what kinds of science there are, and evolutionary biologists are using the weak kind, historical science, while creationists are only using the strong kind, observational science. They use the distinction wrongly and without any understanding of how science works, and they inappropriately claim that they’re doing any kind of science at all.

A recent example of this behavior comes from Whirled Nut Daily, where I’m getting double-teamed by Ray Comfort and Ken Ham (don’t worry, I’m undaunted by the prospect of being ganged up on by clowns.)

According to Ken Ham’s blog at Answers in Genesis, Minnesota professor PZ Myers, who was interviewed by Comfort, said: “Lie harder, little man … Ray Comfort is pushing his new creationist movie with a lie. … What actually happened is that I briefly discussed the evidence for evolution – genetics and molecular biology of fish, transitional fossils, known phylogenies relating extant groups, and experimental work on bacterial evolution in the lab, and Ray comfort simply denied it all – the bacteria were still bacteria, the fish were still fish.”

But Ham explained that Comfort “asks a question something like this: ‘Is there scientific evidence – observable evidence – to support evolution?’ Well, none of them could provide anything remotely scientific. Oh, they give the usual examples about changes in bacteria, different species of fish (like stickleback fish) and, as to be expected, Darwin’s finches. But as Ray points out over and over again in ‘Evolution vs. God,’ the bacteria are still bacteria, the fish are still fish, and the finches are still finches!”

Isn’t that what I said? I gave him evidence, which he denied by falling back on a typological fallacy: the bacteria are still bacteria. What he refuses to recognize is that they were quantitatively different bacteria, physiologically and genetically. To say that something is still X, where X is an incredibly large and diverse group like fish and bacteria, is to deny variation and diversity, observable properties of the natural world which are the fundamental bedrock of evolutionary theory.

But the giveaway is that brief phrase “scientific evidence — observational evidence”. That’s where the real sleight of hand occurs: both Comfort and Ham try to claim that that all the evidence for evolution doesn’t count, because it’s not “observational”. “Were you there?” they ask, meaning that the only evidence they’ll accept is one where an eyewitness sees a complete transformation of one species to another. That is, they want the least reliable kind of evidence, for phenomena that are not visual. They’re freakin’ lying fools.

All scientific evidence is observational, but not in the naive sense that all that counts is what you see with your eyes. There is a sense in which some science is regarded as historical, but it’s not used in the way creationists do; it does not refer to science that describes events in the past.

Maybe some examples will make that clearer.

We can reconstruct the evolutionary history of fruit flies. We do this by observation. That does not mean we watch different species of fruit flies speciate before our eyes (although it has been found to occur in reasonable spans of time in the lab and the wild), it means we extract and analyze information from extant species — we take invisible genetic properties of the flies’ genomes and turn them into tables of data and strings of publishable code. We observe patterns in their genetics that allow us to determine patterns of historical change. Observation and history are intertwined. To deny the history is to deny the observations.

Paleontology is often labeled a historical science, but it doesn’t have the pejorative sense in which creationists use it, and it is definitely founded in observation. For instance, plesiosaurs: do you think scientists just invented them? No. We found their bones — we observed their remains imbedded in rock — and further, we found evidence of a long history of variation and diversity. The sense in which the study of plesiosaurs is historical is that they’re all extinct, so there are no extant forms to examine, but it is still soundly based on observation. Paleontology may be largely historical, but it is still a legitimate science built on observation, measurement, and even prediction, and it also relies heavily on analysis of extant processes in geology, physics, and biology.

The reliance on falsehoods like this bizarre distinction between observational and historical science that the Hamites and Comfortians constantly make is one of the reasons you all ought to appreciate my saintly forebearance, because every time I hear them make it, I feel a most uncivilized urge to strangle someone. I suppress it every time, though: I just tell myself it’s not their fault their brains were poisoned by Jesus.

News from the world of fish drudgery

I’ve been away from my office and computer all day doing manual labor. Our little fish facility had a problem: the tanks all drain into these custom built trays (we made them from sheet plastic with PVC angle rods glued and caulked around the edges), which then drain into the reservoir tank. It turns out they leak, not much, just a few drops an hour, but when you multiply that by two dozen tanks and 24 hours 7 days a week, it adds up. The custodians complained.

That constitutes a full scale emergency, you know. As every scientist learns early in their careers, the two groups of people you cannot ever piss off are 1) the department secretaries, and 2) the custodians.

So I bought a bunch of solid strong trays (Christian trays, no less) and a pile of bulkhead fittings, and have spent most of the day with a hole saw punching tidy precise holes in their bottoms and clamping on watertight fittings and adding vinyl tubing for precision delivery of waste water, and then ripping out old trays and putting in the new ones.

Now I’m all damp and sweaty. But now water goes in, and water goes out, and I can account for every last drop, so we’re all good.

Also, by the way, we’re getting steady production of about 50 eggs a day, and I’ve got about a hundred larvae I’m nursemaiding every day, with more on the way. We’re struggling with the science side of things now that the production side seems to be working smoothly.

zebrafishembryos

An evening of satisfying relaxation

The Lone Ranger is playing at the Morris Theater and I had a hankerin’ to watch Johnny Depp mete out justice in the Old West.

So I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. It’s on Netflix.

I don’t know why anyone would watch that glossy hollywood tripe when you can see gorgeous black & white cinematography, a weird and thoughtful movie, listen to a Neil Young soundtrack, and see Johnny Depp playing a stupid fucking white man. Bonus: well-researched portrayal of the diversity of Indian culture, and the actor playing an Indian is actually a First Nations person in real life.

Also, it’s one of those movies where the ending is set in the Pacific Northwest, and it always makes me homesick. When I’m dying, I want to be just pushed out to sea in a cedar canoe, please.


I should have known everyone in the world was going to compare Lone Ranger to Dead Man.

Mmmm, pesticide cut with baking powder, yum!

Matt Cahill is pretty much unqualified to do anything.

Cahill said he had been pursuing a program in exercise physiology, but when questioned by attorneys he couldn’t remember taking any courses in chemistry or pharmacology. He never received any degree. Before the accident, his job experience after high school involved working as a condominium lifeguard and at an ice rink.

But, he said,

“I had a scientific background in school, I just don’t have a degree.”

That’s all it takes to be a hack who markets supplements…supplements that cause liver damage, blindness, or kill. As it turns out, all those companies selling magic pills have a loophole: call it a dietary supplement, and the federal inspectors are mostly incapable of doing anything about it, short of the pill actually killing people with cyanide or something obvious.

But Matt Cahill can cut insecticide with baking powder and sell it as a “weight loss supplement”. It actualy works — low grade poisoning will tend to make you shed pounds. His pills killed a young woman, a crime for which he served a two year sentence, and as soon as he got out he was packaging marginal chemicals as “herbal supplements” for body builders and raking in $30,000/month.

a href=’http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/25/bodybuilding-supplement-designer-matt-cahill-usa-today-investigation/2568815/’>Read the whole disgraceful story (warning: autoplay video at link!).

How did they get that past the IRB?

There was this thing called Drunk Science on Boing Boing, where they got a scientist very very drunk and then asked them questions.

It was a very bad idea, as the drunk scientist, Charles Choi explains.

I ended up having five Irish car bombs, five doubles of Jameson’s, two beers and a good swig from my hip flask. Since Irish car bombs are essentially two drinks in one, made up as they are of a beer and a shot of liquor, and since a double is by definition two shots, I ultimately drank 23 drinks that night. In the span of an hour.

Um, yeah. Their subject just poured alcohol down his throat in a short period of time so that he’d talk funny in an interview. He blacked out, the others thought he might die, he was basically doing the stupid binge drinking that college students do every weekend, all in the service of a really pointless story.

I guess the world outside of science is a strange one. If I were to attempt that ‘experiment’, I’d have to justify it (“it will be funny” isn’t good enough), I’d have to lay out carefully what I was going to measure and what I expected to learn, and any protocol involving another human being is going to get inspected up the wazoo by an institutional review board. I guarantee you my proposal to get my subjects to talk funny for my amusement after drinking uncontrolled quantities of alcohol would not only get turned down flat, the ethics panel would probably recommend immediate remedial instruction in the ethical execution of science, and any pending protocols would be suspended pending re-review.

They’re not going to continue the series, by the way. Smart move.