A national weight problem?

A new study suggests that obesity is increasing in the US:

Currently, figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adults at about 66 percent. But lead study author Dr. Youfa Wang of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore says that if current overweight and obesity trends continue, 86 percent of Americans could be overweight or obese by the year 2030.

The standard measure used is the body mass index (BMI) that is obtained by diving your mass (measured in kilograms) by the square of your height (measured in meters). This website calculates it for those who use pounds and feet and inches. A BMI of 30 or over indicates obesity while 25 or over means overweight. The ‘normal’ (i.e., supposedly desirable) range lies between 18.5 and 25

The study’s authors also say that, “By 2048, all American adults would become overweight or obese.” I tend to be wary of this kind of extrapolation, especially when it involves human behavior. A self-correction usually sets in at some point.

Another study released around the same time projects figures that are not quite as high:

If obesity rates continue to climb in the U.S. as they’ve done in the past, about half of all men and women could be obese in 20 years, adding an extra 65 million obese adults to the country’s population.

The current figure of 66% of overweight and obese adults surprised me. Can it really be that two out of every three people are like that or is the cut-off for being overweight too low? One common comment I hear from overseas visitors is their initial surprise at the number of overweight people they see in the US. Have I simply got used to thinking of larger people as the norm after living in the US for so long?

One of the peculiar features of the coverage of people’s weight in the media is the appearance of headless torsos accompanying the stories. News stories on obesity will be accompanied by photos and videos of people from the neck down, an indication of the stigma associated with being overweight. In fact, overweight people are often subjected to gratuitously rude comments and made to feel as if they have some kind of moral failing.

Some are fighting back, saying that they do not see obesity as a disease or even a problem, and definitely not anything to be ashamed of or have to apologize for. They say that that is simply who they are and the rest of the population simply has to deal with it. They have rejected the idea that the word fat is some kind of slur requiring the use of euphemisms to soften it, and have embraced it and made it their own, the way that the gay community did with the word queer. They are fat and proud of it.

The Daily Show had a segment on the coverage of obesity some time ago, and interviewed some who see the campaigns against obesity and the drive to eat healthier as a sign of creeping fascism.

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Hurricane Irene

Cleveland was not in the path of Irene so we just observed it from afar but I am puzzled by those who now claim that it was over-hyped, merely because it caused less damage than expected.

It is quite extraordinary that the National Hurricane Center is able to predict the track and intensity of a swirling storm five days out with pretty good precision, enabling cities and people to take safety precautions. David Kurtz points out that there have been huge gains recently in the ability to predict the track of hurricanes, and less progress in our ability to predict the intensity, as was the case with Irene.

But it was still quite an impressive feat for which the people at the NHC deserve a lot of credit.

The logic of science-15: Truth by logical contradiction

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

Theologians often try to claim that they can arrive at eternal truths about god by using pure logic. In some sense, they are forced to make this claim because they have no evidence on their side but it is worthwhile to examine if it is possible to arrive at any truth purely logically. If so, we can see if that method can be co-opted to science, thus bypassing the need for evidence.

In mathematics, there is one way to prove that something is true using just logic alone and this is the method known as reductio ad absurdum or reduction to absurdity. The way it works is like this. Suppose you think that some proposition is true and want to prove it. You start by assuming that the negation of that proposition is true, and then show that this leads to a logical contradiction or a result that is manifestly false. This would convincingly prove that the starting assumption (the negation of the proposition under consideration) was false and hence that the original proposition was true.
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The logic of science-14: The rational progress of science

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

Karl Popper’s model of falsification makes the scientific enterprise process seem extremely rational and logical. It also implies that science is progressing along the path to truth by successively eliminating false theories. Hence it should not be surprising that practicing scientists like it and still hold on to it as their model of how science works. In the previous post in this series, I discussed how Thomas Kuhn’s work cast serious doubt on the validity of Karl Popper’s falsification model of scientific progress, replacing it with a seemingly more subjective process in which scientists switched allegiance from an old theory to a new one based on many factors, some of them subjective, and that this transition had some of the elements of a gestalt switch. This conclusion was disturbing to many.
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The logic of science-13: How ‘good sense’ emerges in science

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

The philosopher of science Pierre Duhem said in his book The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906, translated by Philip P. Wiener, 1954) that despite the fact that there is no way to isolate any given theory from all other theories, scientists are saved from sterile discussions about which theory is best because the collective ‘good sense’ of the scientific community can arrive at verdicts based on the evidence, and these verdicts are widely accepted. In adjudicating the truth or falsity of theories this way, the community of scientists are like a panel of judges in a court case (or a panel of doctors dealing with a particularly baffling set of symptoms), weighing the evidence for and against before pronouncing a verdict, once again showing the similarities of scientific conclusions to legal verdicts. And like judges, we have to try to leave our personal preferences at the door, which, as Duhem pointed out, is not always easy to do.
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Tests of the existence of other universes

When Louis de Broglie first proposed in 1924 that particles had wavelike properties, the technological challenges to investigating the idea were so immense that the prospects for testing it seemed to lie very far into the distant future, if at all. But one of the features of science is that however incredible an idea may seem when it is first proposed, if it gains credibility and acceptance from the scientific community as a whole, it will only be a matter of time before someone finds an ingenious way to try and test it. So it was with de Broglie’s idea. It was such so beautiful in the way that it unified waves and particles in a symmetric way in quantum mechanics, that it spurred creative thinking and within just three years C. J. Davisson and L. Germer were able to construct an experiment that confirmed it, resulting in de Broglie receiving the Nobel Prize in 1929, an incredibly rapid pace of advance.

So it is with the multiverse idea, that entire universes can be created spontaneously from the vacuum and thus our own universe may be just one of an enormous number (as many as 10500) of universes, each having their own laws and structure. This idea not only does not violate the laws of science, it is not even a new theory, being in fact a prediction of other theories.

As with de Broglie’s hypothesis, when the multiverse idea was initially proposed there seemed to be no way to test it. But now people have come along with suggestions of how to do it, by looking for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background that may be the telltale relics of collisions of other universes with our own.

Science is such fun.

Radioactive heating of the Earth

Recent measurements show that about half of the 40 trillion watts of heat radiated continuously by the Earth comes from radioactivity taking place in its mantle and crust, while the remainder is due to the primordial heat that was created at the formation of the Earth and is located mainly in the core.

Historians of science are aware of the importance of the discovery of the radioactivity as an ongoing source of the heating of the Earth. Before the immense amount of heat associated with radioactive decay was discovered around 1903, physicists like Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth by treating it as an initially hot body that was steadily cooling. They concluded that it could not be older than 100 million years and could be as low as 20 million years. This made it very difficult, if not impossible, for the theory of evolution by natural selection, because it was a slow process that required long time scales. This was seized upon by religious people to argue against the evolution and in favor of the special creation of species by god. (See my series on the age of the Earth for a more detailed discussion of this.)

The discovery of radioactivity had two revolutionary impacts. It created an awareness that radioactivity was an ongoing source of the heating of the Earth that undermined all the earlier calculations of Kelvin and others, and it provided an important new tool for measuring time that opened the gates to new discoveries that rapidly pushed the age of the Earth to more than four billion years, giving plenty of time for evolution to take place.

The logic of science-12: The reasoned consensus judgment of science

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

The previous post illustrated a crucial difference between science and religion that explains why scientists can resolve disagreements amongst themselves as to which theory should be considered true but religious people cannot agree as to which god is the one true god. In competition between scientific theories, after some time the weight of evidence is such that one side concedes that their theory should be rejected, resulting in a consensus verdict. In religion, since evidence plays no role, and reason and logic are invoked only when they support your own case and discarded by appealing to faith when reason goes against you, there is no basis for arriving at agreement. It would be unthinkable for a scientist to argue in favor of his or her theory by denying evidence and logic and telling people that they must have faith in the theory for it to work.
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Is there anything that makes humans special?

Primatologist Frans de Waal’s latest book The Age of Empathy (2009) argues against the idea that we humans have some special quality that separates us from all the other animals. Some people, especially those who are religious, seem to be very reluctant to accept that idea that other animal species share pretty much all the same basic physical and emotional characteristics that we humans have.

There is an interesting passage in the book (p. 206-208) where he says that this wrong idea in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam originated because the part of the world in which those religions originated were those that did not contain our closest non-human relatives.
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The logic of science-11: The problem with falsification

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous post, I discussed Karl Popper’s idea of using falsification as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from non-science. The basic idea is that for a theory to be considered scientific, it has to make risky predictions that have the potential that a negative result would require us to abandon the theory. i.e., declare it to be false. If you cannot specify a test with the potential that a negative result would be fatal to your theory, then according to Popper’s criterion, that theory is not scientific.

Of course, I showed that falsification cannot be used to identify true theories by eliminating all false alternatives, because there is no limit to the theories can be invented to explain any set of phenomena. But steadily eliminating more and more false theories surely has to be a good thing in its own right. This is why falsificationism is highly popular among working scientists because it enables them to claim that science progresses by closing down blind alleys.
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