The Libet free will experiment revisited

I have long been interested in the question of free will and back in 2010 even wrote a 16-part series (!) looking into what was known about it. Many people are Cartesian dualists where they view the brain and mind as distinct, the former being a physical organ while the latter is an immaterial entity, dubbed the ‘Ghost in the Machine’ by Gilbert Ryle, that controls the cognitive processes of the former, though how that actually happens has not been made clear.
[Read more…]

Sonic attack? Crickets? Insecticide? Update on the Havana mystery

There is a new twist to the long-running saga about the mysterious ailment that struck personnel working at the American and Canadian embassies in Havana, Cuba. Initially the US accused Cuba of using some kind of sonic weapon to attack their diplomats. But this seemed highly implausible, not least because there did not seem to be any evidence that such a weapon existed and it was not clear why the Cuban government, even if it had such a weapon, would do such a thing at a time when they were trying to improve relations with the US.
[Read more…]

Richard Stallman will not be the last clueless nerd to fall

The fall of computer scientist Richard Stallman, forced to resign his position at MIT because of his apologetics for rape and sexual abuse is now widely known. But Steven Levy says that the entire nerd culture that these people were steeped in that found their eccentricities amusing is also one that made them oblivious from seeing that their views on so many matters were utterly appalling.
[Read more…]

Chess and weight loss

In my history and philosophy of science course, I used to start by asking students whether cheerleading was a sport. This aroused lively discussion because they usually had surprisingly strong feelings for and against this issue. But my real goal was to introduce them to the idea of demarcation criteria, setting up necessary and sufficient conditions that would establish whether some thing X belonged definitely to class A or definitely did not belong to class A. An important and unresolved question in the philosophy of science is the effort to identify necessary and sufficient conditions that would determine whether some theory was scientific or not, and this early exercise on cheerleading was meant to be an introduction to that more abstract question later in the semester.
[Read more…]

Danger to pedestrians is increasing in the US

Kevin Drum looks at data that suggests that being a pedestrian in the US has gotten a lot more dangerous over the past decade, while it has got safer in Europe. Pedestrian fatalities in the US dropped steadily from 6,482 in 1990 to 4,109 in 2009 before growing rapidly to 6,227 in 2018.

Why? He quotes an article that says that the reasons for the steady drop in Europe are design changes in cars that were required to be implemented by manufacturers there 14 years ago but are not as yet required here.

The focus of the new EU standards has been on safer front-end design to minimize injuries to the legs and head in 25 mph crashes. They will require passenger cars and light vans to pass tests involving the A-pillar, bumper, the hood’s leading edge and windshield to determine if they protect adults and children from leg and head injuries in frontal impact accidents. Automakers will also be required to install flexible bumpers and hoods that crumple and to add 8 inches of space between the exterior structure and the under-hood structure from the front bumper to the windshield to better disperse the impact energy of a person hitting the front end. More stringent rules are expected to be phased in beginning in 2010, when the number of tests doubles to four — two for leg injuries and two for head injuries. The changes are expected to save 2,000 lives annually.

But while this could explain the disparity between the US and Europe, it does not explain the recent rise in the US. Are car drivers in the US getting more aggressive and reckless? Is road rage rising? Are drivers and pedestrians getting more distracted?

UPDATE: In the comments Dunc has a helpful comment that takes into account population numbers and vehicle numbers traveled that provide a better measure than the raw fatality numbers in my post. The conclusion of a drop and then a rise does not change.

Utterly revolting treatment of climate scientists by Trump administration

Will Happer has resigned as a member of the Trump administration’s National Security Council. Since Trump never got around to filling the position of Science Advisor to the president, Happer tried to play that role. Happer is one of those physicists who seems to think he is an expert on many things and even though he is not a climate scientist, he was a fierce climate change denialist and had a plan to thwart the scientific consensus on the causes and dangers of global warming by following the playbook that had been adopted by earlier generations of industry-funded skeptics on things like the dangers of smoking, and that was to sow doubt on the scientific consensus.
[Read more…]

How to con scientists and skeptics

When I was in graduate school, magician James Randi gave a performance for the university and then he gave another performance to just the physics department and I attended both. They were both fun to watch, especially the second since I was able to see him in action up close. At the end of his physics department show and after he had pulled off a lot of tricks to the amazement of the audience, he said that scientists were the easiest people to fool because they thought they were so smart that they easily fell prey to the most basic of misdirection techniques. There was some embarrassed laughter from the audience of physicists.
[Read more…]

Parents risking children’s lives

When I was a boy, a diagnosis of leukemia was pretty much a death sentence and in fact a school friend of mine died from the disease. Thanks to advances in modern medicine, nowadays many forms of childhood leukemia can be treated and cured. So it is unconscionable when parents decide that they want to treat their child with ‘alternative’ treatments that will likely result in death. One couple in Florida decided to skip the chemotherapy session for their four-year old child and fled the state with him.

Authorities caught up with them in Kentucky and took the child back to continue the treatment, and the child now lives with his grandmother.

After the boy, who the BBC is not naming, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in April his parents opted to treat him using cannabis, oxygen therapy, herbs and alkaline water.

Medical cannabis is legal in Florida.
…

Chemotherapy is often associated with debilitating side effects, but many types of modern chemotherapy cause only mild problems.

According to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, about 98% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia go into remission within weeks of beginning treatment, and about 90% of child patients are eventually cured.

The report does not say if the parents are highly religious. The fact that they sought to treat the child with cannabis and other things and not prayer suggest they are not. Instead, they are probably those who, like the anti-vaxxers, think that they know better than what modern science and medicine says are the best treatments for disease.

The parents have lost custody of their son but are planning to file an appeal.

He’s not going to last long

[UPDATE: Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA and himself a career meteorologist facing a potentially hostile audience of weather scientists at a meeting in Huntsville, Alabama who had threatened to walk out on his talk, tried to smooth over the conflict by tearfully thanking the Birmingham scientists in the audience for their work. The semi-apology seemed to have been accepted.]

There has been much publicity over the absurdity of Donald Trump claiming that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian when it was not. National Weather Service scientists in Birmingham immediately corrected it as they should, since warning residents that they are in the path of a major storm when they are not is a serious matter. Trump then doubled down on his claim by showing a doctored NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather map that showed Alabama in the projected path. But the most serious aspect of this was when an unsigned press release came from NOAA (the NWS is overseen by NOAA) saying that earlier forecasts did include Alabama, implicitly rebuking the NWS scientists.
[Read more…]

This is unnerving

I am someone who thinks that self-driving cars are the future and am not opposed to them. But I was not aware that they had already been allowed on public streets. This unnerving video shows a driver and passenger in a Tesla self-driving car fast asleep while speeding along the Massachusetts turnpike. Tesla says that drivers should be awake and have their hands on the wheel, ready to take control if necessary.

This driver has way more confidence in this new technology than I have. I would not have the nerve to fall asleep like that.