I get email

I mentioned earlier this week that sometimes I get positive email, and that it actually outnumbers the outright hostile hate mail. But both classes are greatly outnumbered by the most common kind of email I get, the cranks and crazies. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Woolsey, Stephen D Mr CIV USA — a perfectly representative exemplar of the crap clogging my in-box.

Yes, he’s posting from an army.mil email address, which may account for some of the strange stuff inserted in the text, but not all of it.

[Read more…]

In which I have to defend Morgan Freeman

People were apparently rather peeved about Morgan Freeman’s appearance on the Daily Show on Wednesday night (that link is to the whole episode; Freeman appears at about 15 minutes in). He’s narrating a new science show that, in the clip shown, seems to be mainly about physics and cosmology. After talking a bit about the show, they get down to the problematic bit: Stewart asks if scientists know what happened at the beginning of the universe, and Freeman basically says they don’t; that there are different scientists with different ideas, some contentiousness, and some outright ignorance about the details.

This is not offensive. That’s the truth. I hope no one was bothered by that.

I get the sense that what did bother people, though, was that Stewart pressed a bit and asked Freeman what scientists tell him when faced with stuff they don’t know, and here’s how Freeman replied:

Whatever scientists don’t know becomes the god factor.

Again, Freeman is right! This is what happens so often: there are many things we don’t understand, and some people, even some distinguished scientists, are prone to look at the gaps in our knowledge and announce that that is where god lurks. It’s the standard ‘god of the gaps’ logic, and it’s bogus, but it really does happen and there are a lot of scientists who indulge in it. Look at Einstein, who was constantly flinging out god references for all the mysteries of the universe, despite the fact that he was an unbeliever himself.

Now it’s a short clip, a seven minute interview, and of course they don’t get into meanings and implications at all, so Freeman’s interpretation is completely ambiguous. If he’s trying to say our ignorance is evidence for a god, then he’s full of it and we can point and laugh at the movie star floundering out of his depth…but he didn’t say that at all. In the context, I took it as more of an admission that there is still a lot of god of the gaps thinking even in the scientific community, and that’s entirely true.

So don’t get mad at Morgan Freeman just yet. Roll your eyes at the scientists who bleat out “God!” every time they’re baffled by something, instead. Save your scorn for the nonsense of people like Tipler and Davies and even Kaku. They’re the ones feeding mystical fluff into our perception of reality.

It’s usually not this blatant

Oleg Savca is a boy in Moldova who had a deadly brain tumor, and was expected do die, because nobody in his area knew how to treat him. His mother, Zina Savca, was reduced to hoping for a miracle from god.

Left alone, the tumor would put Oleg into a coma and ultimately kill him. What happened next Zina Savca can attribute only to divine intervention.

Yes! He has been saved! Because the Savcas sacrificed all their livestock, burning the bones wrapped in fat on an altar, and god sent angels who lofted them all into the air and carried them to a strange, magical land where devout mystics with miraculous powers hummed and prayed and waved their hands over Oleg’s head until the tumor-demon crept out, at which time Jesus himself wrestled with it and finally opened a deep pit into fiery hell, where he cast the monster. Oleg lives!

Oh, wait. That’s not quite right. The divine intervention was a little more mundane.

The Savcas’ doctor, Andrey Plesco, visited Sutter Memorial in late April on a professional exchange. He saw Ciricillo operate and realized Ciricillo could save the boy.

Yeah, the “divine intervention” was finding an American doctor who had the skills to carry out a delicate operation. They did have to sacrifice all their livestock…to raise airfare for the flight to magic miracle land, which happens to be Sacramento. I suppose you could use Clarke’s third law — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — with the Savcas as a real world example, but I’m simply not buying the divinity of Sacramento.

Monckton dissected

Christopher Monckton, that pompous know-nothing who professes to be an expert on climate change and doesn’t believe in it, gave a talk here in Minnesota last fall, at a little Christian college called Bethel University (which curiously has a biology department that manages to never once mention evolution in its curriculum, just to give you an idea of what it’s like). That talk infuriated a professor at another Christian university — but one that doesn’t try to hide away from the evidence — who has put together a rebuttal of Monckton’s claims. Would you believe that essentally all of the studies Monckton cited as supporting his claims about the nonexistence of global warming actually said the exact opposite? It was so bad it’s impressive — it’s as if you don’t have to actually read and understand research papers if you’ve convinced yourself that they say what you want them to say.

John Abraham has put together a thorough presentation on the follies of Monckton. Good stuff!

Stereotyping women right out of science

One of the most cunning tools of the patriarchy is the assignment of woo as a feminine virtue. Women are supposed to be intuitive, nurturing, accepting, and trusting, unlike those harsh and suspicious men. It’s a double-trap; women are brought up indoctrinated into believing that being smart and skeptical is unladylike and unattractive, and at the same time, anyone who dares to suggest that intuition and soothing, supportive words are often unproductive can be slammed for being anti-woman, because, obviously, to suggest that a human being might want to do more with their life than changing diapers and baking cookies is a direct assault on womanhood.

This naive imposition of unscientific modes of thought on women specifically leads to the state we have now. Assume a fundamental difference in attitude: women feel, while men think. Now declare an obvious truth: science requires rigorous thought. The conclusion follows that women will not be taking advantage of their strengths (that woo stuff) if they are trying to do science, therefore they will not be as good at science as men, and they will also be harming their femininity if they try to shoehorn their tender and passionate minds into the restrictive constraints of manly critical thinking.

I’ve seen that condescending attitude often enough; it was at its most vivid when I was working with surgeons in training, and if there were any women in a group, they would invariably be shunted off into some task like post-op animal care while the men would get the sharp scalpels and dental drills and do the hard work of cutting into the animal subjects. I once dared to ask the team I was assisting, after seeing that casually assumed division of labor, if maybe they should ask her what she wanted to do, and was told indignantly by the men that she would be so much better at taking care of sick cats, as if their concern was their inferiority at the nurturing part of the job. It’s the academic version of the wheedle, “Honey, I couldn’t possibly do housework as well as you do…”, and it’s just as phony.

Twisty Faster has the other side of this bias — it ends up portraying science as anti-woman, therefore women should embrace the woo.

The argument has been made that intuition is superior to science because it is somehow free of the oppressive misogynist entanglements that encumber its dude-dominated counterpart. A spin-off of this argument says that, because academia has traditionally given (and continues to give) women the stink-eyed bum’s rush, science is antifeminist and, presumably, must be shunned in favor of this women-centric intuition dealio.

I have to say that I really like her two answers to this view.

Science, like everything else on the planet, is Dude Nation’s minion, yes, but “intuition” doesn’t exist in a magical patriarchy-free zone merely because it is associated with women’s reality. In fact, it is because of patriarchy that women were assigned the supposedly unique and mystical power of hunchiness the first place.

Exactly. Woo is powerless; you want to make someone powerless, put them in charge of nothing, but give it a happy-sounding title. Women have been taken on a millennia-long snipe hunt. But, you know, it keeps them busy and out of the hair of the guys doing the real, important work.

Her reply to the argument that science is anti-feminist, is even better:

But the statement “science harms women” is not as accurate as is “the application, by misogynist knobs, of scientific method to systems of oppression harms women.”

The answer seems clear to me. Women shouldn’t be cornered into the realm of superstition because it is more touchy-feely, and they shouldn’t be anti-science. What they need to do is take the toys out of the hands of the misogynist knobs.

Five odd movies

Jerry Coyne has put together a list of his 20 most favorite movies, and invited us all to join in. I can’t. I just don’t believe in it. There is no such thing as a best movie, just movies that some of us like a lot. I also can’t list 20, so you’ll have to settle for an idiosyncratic 5 movies that aren’t the best, but made me happy anyway.

  • Zardoz : One of those movies where I just sat there with “Wait, what?” on an infinite loop in my head. Giant flying heads spewing guns, immortals and barbarians, Sean Connery in a diaper, Charlotte Rampling in nothing at all, Beethoven’s Seventh, just weird, weird, weird. At first I was thinking that it was one of those movies I should be stoned to appreciate, and then it sunk in that I was getting stoned just watching it. Plus, Charlotte Rampling.

  • The Incredible Shrinking Man : I saw this one as a young kid, and I quite enjoyed the main character getting smaller and smaller and facing greater and greater problems, like avoiding the cat and fighting off a spider with a needle. But it was the end that surprised me: he’s facing certain doom, he knows there’s nothing he can do to stop the shrinking process, and he has no idea what will happen as he gets to the size of a bacterium or an atom…but he’s looking to his fate with curiosity, not fear. And then it ends. But wow, for a movie with no salvation, what an optimistic ending.

  • The Goonies : The best way to watch this kind of movie is with a child. Way back when we lived on Clark Street in Eugene, with our first boy, I’d put him in a little red wagon and we’d take the footbridge across the Willamette (we’d always stop there for a bit so he could throw rocks in the river) to the theater in the mall, and we saw this movie there. My little guy was so enthusiastic — he wanted to go looking for pirate treasure right away, make friends with a monster, and we absolutely had to get a plastic sword for the wagon ride home. I don’t care if the movie was crap, it was the experience.

  • Children of the Damned : I saw this in a drive-in theater, the El Rancho between Kent and Renton, way back when I was about six years old. Ah, the drive-in — the whole family bundled up into the station wagon, Mom making bags of popcorn to bring with us, playing on the swings in the dusk before the movie started, those clunky old speakers we’d have hanging from our car window, and of course, Dad would fold down the back seat so we kids could lie down in blankets and sleeping bags and watch the show. That’s the way to do it. I don’t remember much about this movie — creepy alien kids with psychic powers, glowing eyes, and British accents being born in and taking over a small village — and I didn’t see the ending at all, because in the middle of the movie my mother went into labor and we had to leave. We kids went home, the parents went away, and next thing you know, I’ve got a baby brother named Mike. Whose eyes, fortunately, did not glow.

  • Attack of the Monsters : Awful, cheesy, terrible, cheap. Not a good movie at all. But back when I was in high school, I’d watch the late night creature features on the television on Fridays (what? You thought I’d be out on dates?), and my father, who’d usually be exhausted after work, was starting to show the signs of the heart disease that would eventually kill him, and one of the things he suffered was insomnia. And this one time he joined me on the sofa to watch whatever was on, and there was this movie about a rubber-suit giant turtle that would shoot fire out of his butt and fly through space. We laughed.

    Hey, isn’t that enough? Laugh with your dad while you’ve got him.

What did you expect? The Godfather movies? Everyone picks those.