The creationist heat problem…SOLVED!

Every once in a while, it sinks into the creationist mind that they have a problem, the heat problem. They extraordinarily rapid transitions they claim had to have occurred — a globe-drowning deluge falling out of the sky and surging up out of the earth in a year, vast amounts of lava building huge geological features in a geological instant — would involve the release of immense amounts of heat, among the multitude of impossibilities in their flood myth. Just ask Phil Plait.

Creationists need the Earth (and the Universe, don’t forget) to be 6000 or so years old, due to a lengthy list of “begattings” in the Bible. The problem is, we see lots of processes going on right now that are very slow — but we see their effect because the Earth is incredibly old. But if the Earth is young, these processes have to have been cooking a lot faster in the past. Cooking indeed, because these forces expel a lot of heat. And it can be hard to dump that heat: it has to go somewhere (like an oven heating up a room when you open the door), and we just don’t see that happening.

Just imagine all the tectonic activity that we say was spread out over billions of years compressed into a single year, as creationists believe — there’d be enough heat generated to melt the crust of the Earth. Or consider all the radioactive decay that occurred to generate the elements we find on the planet, which we say is an indicator of great age. They want all that to occur in about 6000 years, postulating in some cases that radiometric dating is falsified by accelerated rates of decay…boom, that would mean natural nuclear bombs would have been popping off constantly.

Some creationists realize this, and invent all kinds of wacky mechanisms for dissipating planet-melting quantities of heat. Dan Phelps finds one who admits the one true solution: voila, it was a supernatural miracle.

However, it is important to appreciate that our inability to identify an acknowledged mechanism for removing the excess heat deposited during and after the Flood, an issue first identified over 35 years ago (Baumgardner 1986), is only a problem in the sense that it represents the limited nature of our human understanding. In a biblical context there is no fundamental problem because God purposely brought about the Flood (Genesis 6:17) as a judgment on the wicked human race of Noah’s day and covenanted with Noah to preserve human and animal life through the cataclysm (Genesis 6:18). He sovereignly accomplished both objectives, implying that environmental temperatures could not have risen beyond biological endurance limits. The only real problem is our current lack of understanding of how this was accomplished; the Flood account in Genesis 6–9 does not tell us directly whether supernatural processes were involved, though it seems very likely that they were. The same basic issue arises in connection with the topics to be covered in Parts 5 (heat due to Accelerated Nuclear Decay) and 6 (heat due to bombardments from space) of this series, and will be considered at greater length in Part 7.

I’ve been saying for years that creationists have an easy out for dealing with the difficulties their model generates. Just say it was a miracle. Just say God did it.

Usually they are reluctant to do that because it’s an admission that they don’t actually have any kind of scientific explanation.

For the birds

The Washington Post is claiming that listening to bird songs is good for you.

Looking to improve your mental health? Pay attention to birds.

Two studies published last year in Scientific Reports said that seeing or hearing birds could be good for our mental well-being.

So give them a listen as you learn why they may help.

Research has consistently shown that more contact and interaction with nature are associated with better body and brain health.

Birds appear to be a specific source of these healing benefits. They are almost everywhere and provide a way to connect us to nature. And even if they are hidden in trees or in the underbrush, we can still revel in their songs.

OK, fine, I will believe that going on regular walks in the park, paying attention to your environment, and living in a place compatible with other living things, is beneficial. I object to the idea that the effect is specific to birds. Why not spiders? A stroll in the park and checking out the trees and underbrush is something you can do while spidering, too.

You aren’t going to hear spider songs unless you have much better ears than I’ve got, but on the plus side, spiders don’t start shrieking and screeching and whistling outside your bedroom window at 5am.

Summer plans

I have turned in all my grades, and it’s beginning to sink in that there will not be a relaxing summer of relaxation. We’ve got an arachnology conference coming up at the end of June — the core data is all done, but we’ve got some details to fill in and lots of pretty photos to take, and we have an ongoing project in putting together a staging series. We’re also going to make some field trips throughout the summer to get out of the lab and see some sunshine and more exotic spiders. I’m also reviving my course in developmental ecology next spring, so I’ve got to do all the prep work for that this summer.

I just want to take a nap.

Poor Peterson, beset on all sides

I’ve said before that Jordan Peterson is a bad biologist, not any kind of biologist at all, and especially not an evolutionary biologist. When someone knowledgeable in the field looks at his expertise, he’s not even a good clinical psychologist. What, exactly, is he supposed to be good at? We can definitely say it sure isn’t ancient languages and the Bible.

…I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them.

Peterson frequently makes etymological arguments, which I’ve always found silly and are typically used creatively by know-nothings to make rhetorical points. Fake etymologies are common on the internet. The annoying thing about Peterson is that he uses them to sound “scholarly,” but he’s using them in bizarre ways.

By the way, sin. There’s two derivations of the word sin: one is chet, which is from the Hebrew, and the other is hamartia, from the Greek. And they both are archery terms that mean to miss the target.

And then he goes on to babble about sports arenas and crowds and I don’t know what, all while gesturing madly. It’s weird display. Very cringe.

But he’s getting everything wrong! Not that that would slow him down in the slightest.

In these few short sentences, Peterson has already made three serious errors. First, he mispronounces the Hebrew word חֵטְא (ḥeṭʾ)—a noun derived from the verbal root ח־ט־א (ḥ-ṭ-ʾ)—as /t͡ʃɛt/ (pronouncing the ⟨ḥ⟩ at the beginning like the ⟨ch⟩ in cheese) when it should actually be pronounced /χɛt/. This is a pronunciation mistake that no one who actually knows anything about Hebrew would make, since the sound /t͡ʃ/ does not exist in ancient or modern Hebrew. By mispronouncing the word in this blatant manner, Peterson clearly demonstrates that he does not even know the Hebrew alphabet.

Second, Peterson claims that these words are “derivations of the word sin,” but this is factually incorrect. Neither of these words is the etymological root of the English word sin; instead, they are ancient Hebrew and Greek words that occur in the texts of the Bible that modern translators normally render into English as the word sin because translators have decided (whether rightly or wrongly) that sin is the closest English equivalent of these terms.

Etymologically speaking, the English word sin actually derives from the Middle English word sinne, which derives from the Old English word synn, which derives from the Proto-West Germanic word *sunnju, meaning “responsibility,” “care,” “worry,” or “need.” This word, in turn, derives from the Proto-Germanic word *sunjō, meaning “truth.” This, in turn, comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₁sónts, meaning “a thing which exists or is true,” which is the active participle of the Proto-Indo-European verb *h₁es-, meaning “to be.”

Third and finally, Peterson claims that both the Hebrew word ḥeṭʾ and the Greek word ἁμαρτία are “archery terms,” but this is only partly true. It is true that ancient texts do use both of these words to refer to when a person shoots an arrow or throws a spear and misses their intended target. Nonetheless, ancient texts also use both of these words in a much more general sense to refer to any kind of mistake or failure that a person makes. In fact, some of the earliest attested occurrences of the word ἁμαρτάνω use it in this more general sense to mean simply “make a mistake.”

I’ll take the author’s word for it all, but using a tenuous link between sin and archery is already ridiculous. It’s an unwarranted extrapolation and interpretation, even if the etymology were correct. It’s like if I were talking about developmental biology, using technical terms we take for granted, like “competence” and “induction” and “determination,” and used a dictionary to declare that we thought embryos were self-willed intelligent beings. No, it’s more that embryologists in the 1920s were enamored with psychology and were borrowing terms to apply to concepts that had absolutely nothing to do with minds.

Peterson is that clueless nerd with a dictionary making stuff up to justify his conclusions.

They grow up too fast

She might have growed up a little since this photo was taken.

My daughter, Skatje, is doing her PhD defense on Thursday, and Mary and I will be attending over Zoom. Naturally, not wanting to look like a dope, I thought I’d look up her work (finally) and get a little hint of what I’m going to hear. I’m already lost.

Hallo, I’m Skatje Myers, a PhD student in Computer Science (joint degree in Cognitive Science) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, advised by Martha Palmer.

My research focus is in accelerating development of new corpora for semantic role labels (SRL).

I’m investigating techniques for conducting active learning for semantic role labeling: How can we determine which sentences will most improve the model when annotated and added to our training data? This methodology enables us to improve annotation efficiency by selecting only the most informative sentences to annotate.

Additionally, I’m examining approaches for projecting semantic annotation cross-lingually: If we know what the semantic roles are in an English sentence, and we know the translation of that sentence, can we figure out which words to assign those roles to in the target language? These projected annotations may serve either as a starting point for manual annotation that will expedite the process, or as training data themselves.

I’m presently exploring these techniques specifically in regards to developing and expanding a Russian PropBank corpus.

I suspect that plunging right into a thesis defense in this field is going to be bewildering, but we’ll try.

Brain bleach, stat

I’ve been poisoned with unwanted images of a corrupt 70-year-old Republican hopped up on Viagra demanding that a young woman service him, over and over.

Giuliani also took Viagra constantly. While working with Ms. Dunphy, Giuliani
would look to Ms. Dunphy, point to his erect penis, and tell her that he could not do any work until
“you take care of this.” Thus, Ms. Dunphy worked under the constant threat that Giuliani might
demand sex from her at any moment. Even when the Covid-19 pandemic halted Giuliani’s ability
to physically assault her, he demanded that she disrobe during their work-related
videoconferences.

It’s gross and disgusting and vile, but exactly what I should have expected of Giuliani.

A bombshell lawsuit out of Manhattan accuses Rudy Giuliani of forcing a former employee to submit to sex acts as a condition of her employment — including making her give him oral sex while he took calls from then-President Donald Trump on speaker phone.

“He often demanded oral sex while he took phone calls on speaker phone from high-profile friends and clients, including then-President Trump,” ex-staffer Noelle Dunphy claims in the 70-page lawsuit filed Monday.

“Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that he enjoyed engaging in this conduct while on the telephone because it made him ‘feel like Bill Clinton,'” according to the lawsuit, which seeks $10 million in unpaid wages and damages.

Like the worst of Bill Clinton.

I don’t want to hear more about the sex stuff, but I do want the law to dig deeper into the money stuff.

The lawsuit also alleges — buried on page 25 — that Giuliani asked Dunphy for help “selling pardons” for $2 million a pop. Giuliani told her that he and Trump “would split” the fee, the lawsuit alleges.

“He also asked Ms. Dunphy is she knew anyone in need of a pardon, telling her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split,” the lawsuit says.

Dunphy said she continued to work for Giuliani despite being “shocked and saddened by what had happened” because she feared losing the $1 million salary he had promised as well as free legal representation he had also agreed to give her.

It’s amazing how you can sit here thinking the crap from the Trump administration couldn’t possibly get worse, and then it does.

Where’s my Big Carrot money?

Big Meat is training up influencers to propagandize meat eating.

This has been around for a while. Several years ago, a student at our local high school talked up vegetarianism — I think he even got an op-ed in the local paper — and almost immediately the Cattlemen’s Association showed up at the school to give away free steak sandwiches. I think they’re running scared.

We’ve mostly* given up on red meat for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the meat industry is incredibly wasteful and damaging to the environment. It’s very sad that the Lettuce Industry or Bean Corp. isn’t knocking on my door offering big bucks to chat up their delicious vegetarian items. Moderation doesn’t pay as much as indulgence.

*”Mostly” because we’re not fanatical about it. If we’re out visiting friends or family and they serve a lunch with meat in it, we’ll say thank you and consume it — we’re mainly just trying to cut way, way back on it. Heck, if the Cattlemen’s Association shows up at my front door and hands me a steak, I’ll say thanks and include it in that night’s dinner, and also tell them I won’t ever be buying their dead cows, or encouraging others to order it.

Everyone hates Elsevier

Everyone. For years. As a grad student I knew what a parasite Elsevier was. Librarians hate Elsevier. You should hate Elsevier, if you don’t already. It’s a company with their boot on the neck of scientific information, and they’re one of the reasons you can’t easily get past the paywalls limiting access to information you already paid for.

Some editors are taking a stand and walking out on Elsevier.

More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier.

The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King’s College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.

In case you’re wondering why…

Elsevier, a Dutch company that claims to publish 18% of the world’s scientific papers, reported a 10% increase in its revenue to £2.9bn last year. But it’s the profit margins, nearing 40%, according to its 2019 accounts, which anger academics most. The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free. They “peer review” each other’s work to verify it is worth publishing for free, and academic editors collate it for free or for a small stipend. Academics are then often charged thousands of pounds to have their work published in open-access journals, or universities will pay very high subscription charges.

That’s right. Somehow we all work for Elsevier. We reinforce that because we voluntarily make our volunteer work in reviewing papers for the publishing companies part of our praiseworthy work listed in our tenure and promotion reviews.

We have to laugh at our situation.