The Southwest is going dry

A great story from Rebecca Solnit: the huge dams that were erected in the 1950s are failing. Not in a catastrophic sense, but in the sense that the water is going away, leaving them useless, due to a combination of aggressive consumption by humans (Las Vegas and Phoenix are going to face huge problems) and climate change — less rainfall, more evaporation. It’s not entirely a bad thing.

When the Sierra Club pronounced Glen Canyon dead in 1963, the organization’s leaders expected it to stay dead under Lake Powell. But this old world is re-emerging, and its fate is being debated again. The future we foresee is often not the one we get, and Lake Powell is shriveling, thanks to more water consumption and less water supply than anyone anticipated. Beneath it lies not just canyons but spires, crests, labyrinths of sandstone, Anasazi ruins, petroglyphs, and burial sites, an intricate complexity hidden by water, depth lost in surface. The uninvited guest, the unanticipated disaster, reducing rainfall and snowmelt and increasing drought and evaporation in the Southwest, is climate change.

So at the same time that Florida and all those coastal cities face inundation, the desert boom is going to die the slow death of dehydration. Don’t imagine that you’re living someplace where nothing will change, though; it’s going to hit us all.

The idea is that climate change doesn’t merely increase the overall likelihood of heat waves, say, or the volume of rainfall — it also changes the flow of weather itself. By altering massive planet-scale air patterns like the jet stream, which flows in waves from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere, a warming planet causes our weather to become more stuck in place. This means that a given weather pattern, whatever it may be, may persist for longer, thus driving extreme droughts, heat waves, downpours and more.

I wonder what the economic cost of shutting down the golf courses of Scottsdale and the fountains at the Bellagio might be? And then of course there are the unpredictable disruptive effects as millions of people living in a place temporarily made habitable by futile exercises in short-term hydroengineering find themselves having to migrate elsewhere.

Don’t come to Minnesota! We’re probably going to experience an arctic vortex now and then and plunge into the deep freeze for a month at a time, alternating with winters that barely happened (like this recent one), and overall we’re going to turn into Kansas North.

Now taking odds on who is going down first

Will it be Donald Trump?

A combination of controversy, scandal and low polling numbers have prompted oddsmakers at a U.K. betting house to predict President Donald Trump would likely either be impeached or resign – or both – before the upstart politician’s first term in the White House officially comes to an end in 2020, according to a new report. The odds for an impeachment to happen were given a 4/5 chance of happening as of Friday, according to Inverse, a website that describes itself in part by asking “ What could happen next? ”

Or will it be Bill O’Reilly?

Months after lamenting his status as a “target,” we are learning that O’Reilly was speaking from deep experience. The New York Times reported on Saturday that about $13 million has been dished out over the years — by O’Reilly and his employer — to resolve complaints from women regarding O’Reilly’s antics. The claims shed light on just why O’Reilly and his former boss Ailes fashioned a mutual protection racket on the premises of Fox News: They both needed someone who’d have their back.

Both are “awful, awful” people, both are on the record saying “awful, awful” things, and we’ve known how “awful, awful” they are for decades. So on the one hand they’ve survived their disgraceful reputations for a long time, and in fact have prospered because of their publicly unpleasant personas; on the other, well, we all wish these odious human beings would just go away.

If they do experience a downfall, the one I wish most would get splattered fast is Trump, because his reign is the most acutely disastrous for the country. If I were putting money on it, though, I’d have to guess that O’Reilly will be shown the door first, just because the eviction of Roger Ailes set a precedent.

I would not bet on whether either will suffer the consequences they deserve. You know there’s a soft landing planned for both, with plenty of money and luxury.

The ideology of an “ideal” science

One of the worst fates to befall an idea is that it becomes an ideal. We argue against this when the ideal is a deity; ever notice how defenders of religion like to fall back on the argument that they’re helping people, that they inspire high sentiments, that they’ve supported arts and music, etc.? I agree with all that. My problem is when they bring in their invisible, unquestionable god as an authority (who must be addressed through the medium of his priests, of course), and suddenly we’re dealing with an idol who is, by definition, perfect, and all argument is shut down by fiat. Yeah, maybe the church is a bit exploitive, but JESUS LOVES YOU, so sit down, shut up, here’s the donation plate, and you’re going to Hell if you don’t love him back.

And by “love him back”, I mean support child-raping priests, preach the prosperity gospel, and burn that witch over there.

We are constantly asked to pretend that sordid realities don’t exist, in the name of the Lord. The servants of the church may be subject to human frailties, but keep your eyes on the perfection of the ideal, on paradise and the imagined flawless reification of the gods. It’s an old game, but it works. Humans are often quite ready to overlook overwhelmingly horrid situations if it’s done in the name of a beautiful concept — we’re used to suppressing our decency out of loyalty to a beautiful higher cause. Concentration camp guards enisted to serve the dream of Volk and Vaterland; brutal abuse of people who weren’t part of the dream were a small price to pay. Crusaders murdered and raped their way across the Holy Land in the cause of liberating Jesus’ home for Christendom. Americans vote to deregulate coal and oil extraction so they can work in dirty, dangerous jobs because Capitalism has taught them that jobs are important, and that tax breaks to plutocrats are a small price to pay to keep the dehumanizing machinery running.

And some people will allow people to suffer a lifetime of untreated syphilis in the name of the sacred Scientific Method. Some have their idealized vision of a future rational world where the variables are all flattened out, the control group cheerfully meets their fate, and the experimentals regard the electrode, the poison, the deprivation, the hallucinations, the sterilizations, the radiation burns, as a small price to pay for Progress.

Yeah, Science gets deified, too.

None of that is true. Not one word.

Science is universal…if you are wealthy enough to get the education you need to understand it.

Science is international…except for those cases where competition is whipped up to drive investment (space race, anyone?), or we are driven to keep technology out of the hands of countries we don’t like.

Science is inclusive…except that it isn’t. It’s expensive and difficult and access is restricted.

Science is nonpartisan and apolitical…hah. Lamar Smith. Scott Pruitt. Donald Trump. How out of touch can you be?

Science is a-gender, a-race, & a-ideological…the only people I’ve ever heard claim that are the kinds of people who complain about “identity politics” with a straight face. Identitatarianism is an alt-right, racist affliction.

Shermer is now trying to defend his fantasy by claiming that I was tweeting about an ideal we should strive for. That’s nice. If we haven’t met that ideal, shouldn’t we be addressing our shortcomings? And what definition of “strive” are you using that says we ought to be silent about disparities and failings and not march to oppose them?

An ideal is not a reality, and swiftly swapping in a nonexistent ideal when confronted with real problems does not make the problems go away.

And then there’s this appalling piece of theater:

Yesterday I hosted the theoretical physicist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss for our Science Salon series and we were asked our thoughts on the March for Science by an audience member who had been following the Twitter-Storm over my tweet. Given that Krauss has worked in academia his entire career, including being involved in the hiring process of physicists, I asked him why people seem to think that science still excludes women and minorities (and others) when, in fact, it is peopled by professors who are almost entirely liberals who fully embrace the principles of inclusion (and the laws regarding affirmative action). Are we to believe that all these liberal academics, when behind closed doors, privately believe that women and minorities can’t cut it in science and so they continue to mostly hire only white men?

Krauss was unequivocal in his response. Absolutely not. There has never been a better time to be a woman in science, he explained, elaborating that at his university, Arizona State University, not only does the student body perfectly reflect the demographics of the state of Arizona, the President of ASU has mandated that if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job. Full stop.

Holy crap! Two white men have declared that the problems of sexism and racism have disappeared from the academy! High five!

What? No high five? I’m sure these guys will give that demonstration a standing ovation.

mike-pence-with-freedom-caucus

It’s made exceptionally ironic because these two men have…unfortunate…histories. Shermer, as is well known, has an unsavory reputation at conferences, and even tried to sue me for exposing his behavior. Krauss seems to think there’s nothing wrong with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender; Krauss has even bizarrely used science to defend him.

“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” says Krauss. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” Though colleagues have criticized him over his relationship with Epstein, Krauss insists, “I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

Oh god. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of person I want defending the ideals of science. It’s all right! He’s buying young women, but they’re not that young!

I have to explain that while academics are largely liberal, they are also people, and mostly white people at that, and often mostly men. People, it turns out, are flawed. We can have ideals (that word again!), but we rarely live up them, and we have to struggle to compensate by imposing policies to consciously compel us to meet those ideals. Since Krauss has been on hiring committees, he knows that there are constraints placed on his impulses — we get training from human resources on our policies — every time! I’ve been on many hiring committees, and every time we get the same rules recited at us in the same lectures. Why all the repetition? Why all the rules? Because even liberal professors can be implicitly sexist and racist, and it takes hard work to correct your biases.

These policies do work to correct historical injustices — most universities are working hard at social justice to create a fair balance of women and minorities. As Krauss points out, correctly, Arizona has seen excellent steady progress in improving representation in their student body, which is impressive for a state that elected Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio.

But the triumphal attitude is inappropriate. It may be true that there “has never been a better time to be a woman in science”, but that does not mean the problems have gone away — it only means that in recent history the treatment of women in science has been abysmal. I suggest that Dr Krauss read Paige Brown Jarreau, or perhaps this summary of top issues for women faculty in science and engineering. He’s sufficiently liberal that he’d probably agree with all of those concerns, while simultaneously suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t be so loud about bringing them up.

I would also point out that while it’s very nice to point out the great strides that the University of Arizona is making, I also took a look at the University of Arizona Physics faculty page. It’s very impressive. 31 faculty listed.

Two of them are women. I know I’m only a biologist so maybe my math skills aren’t up to snuff, but I think that’s about 6.5%. I rather doubt that that accurately reflects the demographics of Arizona.

That is not to criticize the faculty! They may be entirely enlightened and eager to improve faculty representation, but are simply the recipients of a long history of privilege and unfair investment in education. It’s OK. I would not be at all surprised if a majority were active in bringing attention to the inequities present in science, and think we ought to be bringing these problems to the attention of the public, and funding agencies, and political entities.

Some, obviously, don’t.

By the way, I laughed aloud at that declaration from the university president that “if two candidates are equally qualified for a professorship, one a man and the other a woman, the woman should be selected for the job.” It sounds good. It’s completely cosmetic, though. There has never in the history of science been two candidates competing for a science position who are equally qualified. Never. There are so many skills involved in these occupations that people can’t possibly be equal in all things, and some of the reasons one might offer a tenure position to someone are subjective. Taking a look at the literature on implicit bias would be a good idea.

“Most people intend to be fair,” Handelsman insisted. “If you ask them, ‘When you do this evaluation, are you planning to be fair?’ they will 100 percent say yes. But most of us carry these unconscious, implicit prejudices and biases that warp our evaluation of people or the work that they do.” The biases Handelsman is referring to are most readily measured in hiring studies, where hiring managers are asked to evaluate potential candidates for a job or a promotion. With astonishing reliability, the evaluators will assign higher scores to the exact same application if the name on the application is male versus female. These studies are “absolutely canonical” in the social psychology literature, and their results have remained shockingly consistent over the past four decades despite all of the social progress that this country has made.

Most universities have initiatives to attempt to correct, or at least make us aware, of theses biases; mine certainly does, and here’s Northwestern’s list of resources for faculty hiring.

For anyone to tout an administrator’s declaration as if it definitively ends the problem is embarrassingly naïve. Or a conscious attempt to diminish a serious issue.

A little Saturday morning nonsense: iridology and sclerology?

Somehow, I found myself looking at iridology diagrams. Iridologists claim that the surface of the iris is connected to every organ in the body, so the detailed pattern of flecks and lines and spots in the colored portion of your eye is a map to your health, as good as an X-ray or MRI. They actually do get quite specific.

iridology1

From there I stumbled onto sclerology — these sclerologists claim the map is in the whites of your eyes, and that the network of blood vessels, for instance, tells you all you need to know about the state of your body.

sclerology

Why, just this morning, I got up, looked in the mirror at my rheumy bloodshot eyes, and learned instantly that I was a walking tumorous mass that apparently was simultaneously exploded and crushed in a tragic farm machinery accident yesterday. It was terrible.

But this is just patent bullshit, every bit of it.

For one, we’ve taken eyes apart and looked. There is no connection between eyes and every other organ; the iris is innervated via the ciliary ganglion (the parasympathetic pathway) and the superior cervical ganglion (sympathetic). There are patterns to the capillaries of the eye, but they are more for efficient circulation of the blood than reflecting a mystical connection to your pancreas.

These maps owe more than a little to the model of the cerebral homunculus, which shows the targets of innervation by the sensorimotor cortex. That makes sense. There are necessary connections that the brain makes to control or receive input from the periphery. There are no such necessary associations with the eye. Also, those maps were made with thorough experimental and observational analyses of thousands and thousands of people — functional deficits were mapped to stroke lesions, and focal stimulation of brain regions were found to lead to specific sensory and motor responses. We’ve got data to back up the idea of how brains are connected to body parts.

And then there’s the plagiarism: why are the sclera and iris maps so similar, with bowels below and brain above, and heart central lateral and lungs central medial? It looks like someone invented a pattern for one part of the eye, and then a copy cat con artist stole it and redrew it for another part of the eye. And look at the pretense of precision! Do you believe the pituitary is associated with some specific point at about 11:30, while the ego is found at 11:10?

I confess, my ego compelled me to go look in a mirror for my ego. Couldn’t find it. My ego is just shattered now.

It’s still impressive in a pseudoscientific way. None of these maps are constructed by scientific methods — carefully replication of meticulous empiricism — and are totally lacking in any kind of observational foundation. You can just sit down and make stuff up, and if it’s flashy enough and apes the lingo of real scientists, someone will believe it enough that they’ll pay real money to a quack.