Chemists can, sometimes, do pretty work

One of the advantages of working at a small university that puts a variety of disciplines cheek-by-jowl in a single building is that I get exposed to all sorts of different stuff. It sometimes has its downsides — I’m on an interdisciplinary search committee, so next week is consumed with seminars in statistics and computer science, all very mathy, that will sorely strain my brain — but I get to learn stuff all the time, which makes me happy.

So this semester I’m always trundling stuff up and down between the second and third floors for my genetics lab, and the third floor is where all the chemistry labs are taught, so I run into these cool posters that I have to stop and stare at every time I go by. They’re cartograms of the periodic table of the elements from webelements.com, and yes, you can buy them for yourself ($10.14, cheap). Unfortunately, the thumbnails available on their site are fairly low quality and don’t do justice to them — they’re very pretty posters.

elementabundance

So here’s some perspective for you, two periodic tables where each element is proportionally scaled by abundance (the product of the big bang!), the top one of abundance in the universe, and the bottom one showing abundance in earth’s crust (products of nucleosynthesis in exploding stars).

That’s what the universe is all about: thinly distributed hydrogen and helium in a vast space, with traces of heavier elements occasionally forming in energetic accidents.

Also, any time I see a periodic table anymore — which is all the time — I am reminded of that awful debate with Jerry Bergman in which he claimed that Darwinists were trying to criminalize the periodic table because it revealed that all the elements were irreducibly complex. That’s how out of touch with reality those guys are.

Boom

Last night, or 11.4 million years ago, a star exploded in galaxy M82. These photos are about a month apart.

supernova

I’m looking at that and thinking, “I bet it was warm there.”

It’s expected to get brighter over the next few weeks, to the point where it might be possible to see it with your home telescope or even a pair of binoculars. Over eleven million light years away, and the supernova is going to be faintly visible from my yard.

Revise my earlier sentiment: I bet it was really warm there.

Bill Nye is to creationists as the Catholic Church is to Galileo

At least, that’s what right-wing überlöön (so metal, he deserves a 3-umlaut title) Glenn Beck. Watch his meandering monologue* in which he accuses science and science education of being on the wrong side of history, and literally accuses Nye of persecuting creationists.

*In Beck’s case, that’s redundant.

Abortion: Safe, legal, and as frequent as you want one

Elyse talks about abortion, and there she goes, undermining the conventional narrative.

And when we talk about abortion, we talk about the hand wringing. The indecisiveness. The longing to keep the baby. The understanding that the woman already knows a part of her will always regret her decision. There’s pacing around the house. There’s sleepless nights trying to make a decision. There’s waffling. And there’s tons of crying. So much crying. When we talk about abortion, we imagine every woman feeling nothing but profound sadness over the decision she is trying to make. Choosing between herself and her child.

But fuck that narrative. It’s bullshit. It robs women of their right to be viewed as fully actualized human beings. We are not people who are a lot like men but with a psychological and biological mandate to become mothers one day, struggling to figure out if that day is today, worried that if we don’t seize this opportunity, right here and right now, we will never become what we were always meant to be: moms. We are people. Just like men are people. And just like men, some of us want to be parents. Some of us do not.

And we need to stop talking about pregnancy like it’s some kind of fucking alternative to ecstasy. Women who are carrying pregnancies they planned don’t always bond with their babies-to-be. To paint the picture of the unwanted, unplanned pregnancy as one that causes grief because of instant maternal instinct that begins around two minutes after pissing on a stick is harmful to women. It’s harmful to families. It teaches us that mothers like me are less than. We don’t love enough. We’re broken. It’s hard enough to try to nurture and support a person who moved into your abdomen and that you don’t necessarily like. It’s harder when you think not loving them makes you a sociopath.

It takes a creationist to pack so much wrong in so little space

Apparently, Martin Cothran believes that there is no life elsewhere in the universe, and that this unimaginably vast emptiness is evidence that a god created us. I don’t understand the logic, but then I don’t understand most of his weird leaps in this post on how life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

First, there is the naive scientific oversimplification.

We are told by many New Atheist scientists in particular (who like to mark their territory) that a belief can only be scientific if it is falsifiable. This is their demarcation criterion of choice and they use it to ruthlessly guard the borders of science. This is one of the reasons, they say, we must reject Intelligent Design. This idea comes generally from Karl Popper, a philosopher, who said that a theory cannot be considered scientific merely because it admits of possible verification, but only if it admits of possible falsification.

Oh, go away, Karl Popper. He seems to be the only philosopher of science the creationists have heard of. Falsification is one criterion; it’s part of a general effort to solve the demarcation problem, a problem I don’t think can be solved because the boundary between science and non-science is a grey murky haze. Personally, I think observation and evidence are more central to science than falsification.

How can a creationist even talk about applying falsification to science, though? They believe in so many things that have been falsified.

They don’t even get our jokes.

It is this general idea that is behind Richard Dawkin’s "Flying Spaghetti Monster." The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists just outside the range of the most powerful telescopes and the more powerful the telescopes, the further away the monster gets so that we are never able to actually detect him. There is therefore, no way in which belief in him may be disproven.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Dawkin’s send-up of the belief in a theistic God, belief in Whom has the same status as his imaginary monster: there is no evidence that can possibly count against his existence. God can never be disproven.

Dawkins didn’t invent it. Bobby Henderson did.

The flying spaghetti monster is a collection of absurdities intended to mock religious goofballs like Martin Cothran, so I guess it’s unsurprising that he doesn’t get it. It was clearly made up out of whole cloth, so it lacks any supporting evidence — just like religion. It makes ridiculous claims, like that pirates prevent global warming, with no mechanistic relationship and that are clearly false — just like religion. It makes untestable promises of an afterlife — just like religion. You can’t distinguish pastafarianism from Christianity on any criterion, not just the Popperian one, so Cothran’s single-minded focus on falsification is inappropriate.

But come on, let’s get to the claims about life in outer space.

Okay, now take the belief that life exists somewhere else in the universe. This is a common belief among atheist scientists. In fact, Dawkin’s himself conjectured that life on earth may have come from other planets. But how can that belief possibly be falsified?

There is a possibility that, if true, it can be proven true simply by finding it somewhere in our outside our own solar system. But if it is false, how could we ever know that it was false? If it was false and the universe were infinite, as many scientists believe, then would could never know it to be false even theoretically. And if it was false but the universe was finite, there is no practical way we could ever know it to be false even though it is theoretically possible–although there is some question whether it is even theoretically possible for humans to investigate a universe as massive as we know ours to be.

Once again, Cothran fails to grasp the argument or understand the science.

Here’s the key point: the hypothesis that life exists on other worlds is not about astronomy. It’s about life. It’s a religious premise that the purpose of the universe is all about us, and you’ll find that the most fervent opponents of the idea of life beyond earth are religious people who dislike anything that detracts from their geocentric view of the universe. That’s unscientific. To be fair, you’ll also find many science-fictiony types who populate the universe with aliens because they can’t write a drama that doesn’t involve interactions between sentient beings. That’s understandable, but also unscientific.

But no one came up with a scientific hypothesis of extraplanetary life because they looked outward and saw signs. The primary evidence for that derives from the study of biology. Life is just chemistry. There is no clear sharp boundary between what is alive and what is a chemical reaction. Chemistry is a ubiquitous property of the universe; it’s really just a subset of physics. So if you want to say no life exists elsewhere, you have to argue that there is something unique about Earth to only allow that chemistry to occur here.

The creationists are actually on the right track when they try to claim that life is a historical product of a design intervention; that would be a kind of event that could be restricted to a tiny subset of worlds. Unfortunately, their work to date has consisted of shouting assertions (COMPLEXITY ONLY ARISES FROM DESIGN!) that have been falsified (oops, hoist by your own petard, Cothran), or that rely on vague and poorly stated premises (what the heck is specified complexity?) or require distorting and lying about the actual evidence.

Biology has not found anything unique, supernatural, or exclusively dependent on exceptional properties present only on this one planet. Absent a restriction, the null hypothesis is that other worlds with similar physical properties are also likely to contain self-propagating, energy utilizing chemical processes. If creationists want to claim otherwise, that Earth is unique, they are obligated to provide the specific and unique property of life that confines its origin to one planet.

They have to make the falsifiable claim, not us.

This doesn’t count. It’s just stupid.

Even in this latter case of a finite universe theism would be less problematic since a theist could simply say "Well, we will find out after we die." And since everyone will certainly die, at least he has that to go on.

So there you have it. Belief in extra-terrestrial life. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Theoretically indistinguishable. And taking this into consideration, how is believing in God any more or less scientific that believing there is life on other planets?

Again, the expectation of extraterrestrial life is based on studying life on earth and knowing its properties. No one has studied any gods, including the flying spaghetti monster, in any scientific way. That makes the claims trivially distinguishable.

So theism is a more scientific idea because it’s falsifiable, and it’s criterion for falsification requires testing it by dying? By ceasing to exist?

That violates another criterion for science. How will you publish?

I get email — gun-fondler edition

So, so tired of the gun-fondlers in my in-box…their arguments are so bad, so stupid, so off, and they don’t see it. It’s like the creationists who write to me with their sloppy reasoning and wacky assumptions — they aren’t persuading me, they’re just convincing me how wrong they are.

Here’s the latest.

Dear Dr. Myers:

I have e mailed you before to present the other side of the issues you talk about on your blog. I would like to try to explain the concept of how firearms prevent crime.

Yeah, he’s mailed me multiple times. Every time I start reading them, go “gaah, what an idiot”, and trash them without reply. Since he’s not going away when I ignore him, time to let everyone else laugh at him.

Let me begin by assuming you have gone into a restaurant or cafe where police officers are eating. Because they are police officers, doesn’t that make you feel more at ease? But not only that, doesn’t the fact they have a gun contribute to that feeling of well being? I would venture to say the chances of the place becoming a crime scene, at least while the police are inside, are close to zero. Another example is that of an armored car. The little “ports” you see on them allow the guys inside to stick their guns out if anyone was to try something. There are also warnings on the vehicle “do not approach”. It is essentially the threat of looking down “the business end” of a gun that is the true deterrent. Wouldn’t you agree that the chances of an attempted robbery are close to zero with an armored car because of guns and the possibility of being shot? Again guns are preventing crime.

Did he just compare trained police officers with responsibilities, a uniform, and a specific role in the community to random jerkwads with a pistol tucked in their pants? That the police dissuade crime is their job; I would not feel more at ease in a restaurant if everyone was sitting there, armed. Quite the contrary.

If most of us are unarmed, relying on a few delegated officials to suppress crime, it’s true, we’re less likely to have crime scenes erupting all over the place. If everyone’s carrying a gun, we’re more likely to have criminal activity that turns into a blazing bloodbath. Not interested. Not convinced at all.

And then he goes on to suggest my daily life would be improved if I were living in the equivalent of a fucking armored car? This guy is nuts.

Now let’s take this a step further to the ordinary citizen. Do you think a criminal is going to try to commit a crime somewhere he might get shot by a law abiding citizen carrying a concealed gun? A criminal, who by definition has no regard for the law, will go and commit crimes in “Gun Free Zones” like churches, schools, hospitals and other places the local authorities deem should be “Gun Free”. Look where mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora took place. Also look at places like Chicago that have a lot of gun violence, because, until recently, law abiding citizens have been unable to carry concealed firearms to defend themselves against criminals. Criminals know where they can commit gun crime without fear of being shot. I’d be willing to go so far as to say that men can be “taught not to rape” if there were the probability of being shot by the woman!

Right. Let’s trade gun-free schools, churches, and hospitals for places where we all walk in fear, just so these obsessed kooks can strut about with weapons. How about instead if we regulate guns more tightly, cut off the killers at the source, and have fewer guns in our communities? That would also reduce the problem. And that’s his solution to rape? Make women carry firearms around and shoot people? Fucking barbarian.

But oh, I forgot — this is all about giving gun-fondlers carte blanche to cling to their object of affection everywhere they go.

Of course there are no statistics on crimes that have not been committed. It is not known exactly how many crimes have been prevented by law abiding citizens carrying concealed guns. The best way to extrapolate how many crimes have been prevented is to look at the crime rate, which has been steadily falling since enactment of concealed carry laws. Just try to “think like a bad guy” with this. Our elected officials can enact all the gun control legislation they want, but that is NOT going to stop criminals one iota.

They do love that fraud, John Lott. Lott is the primary source for this claim that concealed carry laws and an armed populace reduce crime. He’s been exposed as a phony way back in 2002.

Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey — which supposedly found that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack” — that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of “More Guns, Less Crime”. Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, “Mary Rosh,” and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a “false identity for a scholar,” charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud.”

My correspondent is not only making a bad argument, it’s a dishonest one.

You suggest keeping a telephone by your bedside. Fine and well. By the time the police arrived, you could very well be dead. 1500 feet per second is the response time that I advocate in dealing with someone who has broken into my house. Often, just showing the gun to a perpetrator is enough to diffuse the situation.

Oh, god. The 1500 feet per second bullshit. If I’m at the point of having to outrace a goddamn bullet, it’s too late and a gun isn’t going to help. What I have to do in these situations is make it so hanging around isn’t cost effective anymore, and knowing that the police are on the way is a good deterrent.

Besides, the speed of my signal down the fiber optic line to my house is 300,000,000 meters per second. I win on that facile and stupid comparison.

Gun control advocates are quick to blame guns for high murder rates. But let me ask you; when a kid throws a rock through your picture window, do you blame the rock? Or do you blame the kid?

Does he think rational gun control advocates imagine that guns are floating about autonomously blasting away at people? Of course not. We know that the problem is that guns are in the hands of the weapon wankers. When a kid throws a rock through a window, the plan is to tell him to stop throwing rocks.

Also, you know rock throwing isn’t as casually lethal as firing a gun, right? Right? I’m not so sure these guys are that clever.

Expanding from our local communities and states to that of a National level, to namely our Armed Forces, who, with other tools use GUNS to prevent the invasion of foreign powers unfriendly to us. It is the presence of GUNS and the threat of retaliation by us that protects and defends the sovereignty of The United States. It is the presence of the very GUNS you despise that affords you the freedom to be a godless liberal. GUNS also afford you the freedom to post mindless ejaculations on the internet.

Again, this buffoon is trivializing the specific purpose and specific training of police and military forces to equate them to his fellow gun-lovin’ goons. No, I don’t rely on armed guards to be able to post on the internet, you goddamned thimble-witted gun-waving dogma-loving right wing ideologue. Fuck off and stop sending me your feeble parroting of NRA bullshit.

Yosemite Sam will have to move to the East coast

There has been another school shooting, this time at Purdue. One person is dead, and the shooter has been arrested.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a pair of Republicans have proposed rewriting their “stand your ground” law…to expand it.

The current bill would amend the state’s expansive Stand Your Ground law—which permits residents to use deadly force in numerous circumstances—so that it also allows the nebulous "threatened use of force." In effect, it means that gun owners could walk free for brandishing their gun in a threatening manner or firing a shot indiscriminately to "warn" a potential assailant.

That also means gun owners would get blanket immunity from the state’s "10-20-life" law, which mandates an automatic 10-year sentence for anyone accused of flashing or using a gun in the commission of a felony.

Oh, boy — a whole state full of Yosemite Sams, waving their guns in the air and shooting away, all completely legally.

But the two Republicans didn’t write the bill, they’re just sponsoring it. Who wrote it? A former president and current lobbyist for the NRA, Marion Hammer. Being a politician sure is the cushy life. No work at all; if you’ve got a bill to regulate an industry, you just ask the industry to write it for you.