Yearly Archives: 2013

Minnesota Same Sex Marriage Bill

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The Republican dominated Minnesota Legislature got almost nothing done over the last two years that they were in power. But they did manage to put two boneheaded constitutional amendments on the ballot for last November, one to restrict voting rights in a way that Republicans would have a better chance of winning, the other making it unconstitutional for same sex couples to marry. Same sex marriage was already illegal in the state, but the GOP saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that this legal restriction would not last, so they imposed the amendment on us.

Both of those amendments were resoundingly defeated by the good people of Minnesota. And now, there is a bill before the Democratic Party ruled legislature that would allow same sex marriage if it is passed.

Of note: Many religious organizations came out in recent committee hearings on both sides of the issue, but Minnesota Atheists took a different tact. They came out in favor of the bill, but noted that this is not a religious issue at all. August Berkshire of Minnesota Atheist provided the following moving testimony:

Minnesota Atheists Testifies in Favor of Marriage Equality

(Testimony by August Berkshire, representing Minnesota Atheists, at a Minnesota House Civil Law Committee hearing, in favor of the bill HF 1054, changing state law to allow for marriage equality. March 12, 2013, 6:00 p.m. The bill passed the committee on a 10-7 party line vote – Democrats for, Republicans against. The 9 p.m. “FOX at 9” local TV news on channel 9 reported that the bill’s “supporters ranged from Catholics to atheists.” Earlier that day a companion bill passed a Minnesota Senate committee. The bill now moves to the full legislature, which will vote on it after they have passed a budget.)

Thank you, Mr. Chair; Committee Members. My name is August Berkshire and I represent Minnesota Atheists, our state’s oldest, largest, and most active atheist organization.

We view this as a matter of separation of church and state. It can be confusing because the same word, “marriage,” is used for both a civil contract and a religious ceremony. But we must keep in mind that these are two separate things.

Today you may hear testimony from some people that their god is in favor of same-sex marriage, and testimony from other people that their god is opposed to same-sex marriage. Fortunately, that’s not a debate you have to resolve. Government laws must have a secular basis.

The best secular arguments in favor of same-sex marriage are the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law and the fact that long-term relationships, gay or straight, help to stabilize society.

In our opinion, there are no secular arguments against same-sex marriage that hold up to scrutiny. Many of these arguments were also used 50 years ago to oppose interracial marriage.

I would like to end on a personal note. My partner, Rachel, and I are heterosexuals and we have been together for 17 years. We are both atheists, and so we will not be getting married in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Instead, we will seek a judge to perform a civil marriage ceremony.

However, we will not get married until it is legal for everyone, because how can we stand up in front of family and friends, some of whom happen to be gay and lesbian, on what is supposed to be the happiest day of our lives, knowing that this happiness is not available to them as well?

So please pass this pro-marriage bill and make civil marriage available to everyone. Thank you.

If you want to sign a petition to encourage the legislature to do the right thing, visit the newly redesigned Minnesota Progressive Project web site and look for the petition on the right sidebar.

Minnesota Progressive Project: New Layout and a Petition

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As you know, I write now and then for the Minnesota Progressive Project. I should do more there, I know, and I try. But anyway, the MPP has a new blog layout which preserves the Kos-esque diary thingie but loads faster and is easier to navigate, with a few cool “discoverability” features that link readers to writing about key issues and candidates. Please go check it out.

While you are there check out the right sidebar for a place to click to sign a petition to encourage our state legislature to support same sex marriage by passing a bill that is right now before them.

Your World View May Be Wrong

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In response to a comment on my blog, I issued a snarky tweet (and repeated it on Facebook) to the effect that if your argument involves the phrase “World View” you might be wrong. This led to a number of light hearted but snarky, and often helpful, responses on Facebook and Twitter indicating that the term “World View” could mean a lot of different things, such as opinion, paradigm, or point of view. So I thought I’d expand on the concept a bit. In short, “World View” does not mean any of those things, and is in fact a term with a very weighty and rather specific meaning.

The term is an English translation of the German “Weltanschauung.” I’ll leave it to the philosophers reading this to discuss the meaning of that term and its history. When I refer to the term I am talking about the way it is used today in arguments about evolution, creationism, and possibly matters related to religion. In this area of discussion, World View (or Worldview, if you like) is a lot like Steven Gould’s “Magisteria” but mostly it is a simple dog whistle.

Paradigms are general ways of approaching a related set of problems, with a number of agreed upon assumptions, accepted facts, and widely accepted models for how things work. People with different paradigms recognize, or should recognize, that their differences are resolvable with more information. Or, everyone may have the same paradigm and then over time the ruling paradigm is challenged from various sources, and finally overturned in the famous Kuhnian Paradigm Shift. Which has probably happened very few times the way Kuhn described it, leading us to consider the possibility that the Kuhnian paradigm of paradigm shifting has … shifted. Anyway, that’s paradigm.

Point of view is a bit different. Multiple points of view may exist at the same time even with a commonly held set of assumptions and a common knowledge base. But people can have different points of view because of the way they prioritize various parts of the problem. For instance, we can all have and hold the same basic facts about nature and human-nature interactions, but some will see nature as a source of human usable resources while others will see humans as an invasive and damaging species that needs to be controlled for the benefit of nature. Different points of view.

I first grappled with the concept of World View while working with my friend Mischa Penn in developing courses on race and racism for high school teachers. Like Gould’s non-overlapping Magisteria, World Views are different sets of assumptions that are a) not resolvable and b) lack possible resolution because everyone agrees you can’t and don’t need to. This is an important distinction. Two different religions may have two different savior-messiah entities, each purported to be the messiah to the exclusion of others. But that can’t be true. The belief in each messiah excludes belief in the others. People living together in a single society with these two messiahs can not resolve this difference. I won’t go into the World View issue in relation to race and racism as that would involve too much work for a mere blog post, and a careful reading of a great deal of literature in Spanish. But in the area of evolution vs. creationism the meaning is obvious. Science is a world view. Evangelical fundamentalist Christianity is a different world view. Individuals can have both sets of beliefs mixed up in their brains, but really, the two are in fact utterly irreconcilable.

When an argument is advanced that “I’m OK, and You’re OK” but we have different world views, or even “I hate you” and we have different World Views, the interlocutor is saying that it is possible to describe the world around us in two different but irresolvable ways. When I hear that from creationists, what I really hear is “I’ve run out of way to argue that the science is wrong, please don’t hurt me.” When I hear this from scientists, what I really hear is “your religion is wrong, science rules, but I can’t say that out loud and also go to Thanksgiving Dinner with my family.”

There are no valid alternate World Views. If there are two World Views competing in a certain conversation, one is wrong. They could both be wrong, of course, but not if one of them is science.

“World View” … the dog whistle that says “I know you’re right, please don’t hurt me.”

Christian Science Monitor Screws The Pooch Big Time

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Today, the Christian Science Monitor published on their web site a piece, Global luke-warming: Is the threat of climate change overstated? by James Stafford. It is an interview with climate science denialist Anthony Watts, in which Watts gives his usual argument that climate change is not important. Well, not his actual usual argument, because he has several different conflicting things to say about climate change, ranging from it isn’t happening it’s actually cooling to it is only warming a little to yeah, it’s warming a lot but we’ll adapt.

The thing is, interviewing a denialist like Watts about climate in a mainstream news outlet, even if it is just a guest blog, is a little like interviewing a Bigfoot Expert about wildlife conservation or zoology. I don’t know what possessed Stafford or the CSM do to this.

Don’t be surprised if once the editorial staff realizes what they’ve done there is some sort of retract or some other remedy. Or at least, let us hope so for the sake of what is otherwise a reasonably good source of national and international news and opinion.

Meet to talk about Meat

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This is an event some of you in the Twin Cities may be interested in attending

Viewing of American Meat at the Bell Museum

“A fabulous panel of dedicated agri-food issue talkers have agreed to walk us through this conversation with the film’s director after the film, all with tremendous credentials relating to supportive critique of issues we need to face in the food system (panel listed below!)”

Wednesday, March 13, 6 p.m. Reception, 7 p.m. Film with panel discussion to follow

Bell Museum Auditorium, free and open to the public

Panel:
Jan Joannides, of Renewing the Countryside, is a key liaison between sustainable farmers and the Univesity of Minnesota via Minnesota Institute of Sustainable Agriculture, which is hosting this screening

John Mesko changed his life to become a farmer and along the way became the Executive Director of Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota

Tracey Singleton is a member of the Homegrown Minneapolis Food Council and owner of the Birchwood Café

Julia Frost Nerbonne is the director of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs programs in Environmental Sustainability, Environment and Agriculture, and Agriculture and Justice and faculty in the U of M’s Sustainability Studies program

Graham Meriwether is the director of American Meat and of Leave It Better, a film production company committed to telling solutions-oriented stories about environmental challenges.

Facilitated by Laura Hedlund, co-host of Food Freedom Radio, 8-9am on AM950, the Progressive Voice of Minnesota

American Meat looks at chicken, hog and cattle production in America and is being screened as part of a food and agriculture miniseries brought to you by: the Agri-Food Reading Group, The Institute for Global Studies, The Institute for Advanced Study, The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, The Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and the Bell Museum of Natural History.

A bit of American Meat:

The Best Raptor Book Ever – The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors

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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors is just now coming out. I was able to spend a little time with it a few weeks ago, though my official copy has not arrived yet. But Princeton (the publisher) is organizing a major blog hoopla over the publication of this new book, and I’ve signed on to participate. Starting yesterday a number of bird-related blogs are producing posts related to this book. My post comes out next Tuesday and it will consist of a quiz, a bird quiz. Anyone who gets the quiz right will be eligible for random selection, and whoever gets randomly selected will be hooked up with Princeton who will give you something nice.

I’ll review the book officially next Tuesday, in the same post as the bird quiz. Meanwhile, you may want to look at these posts that have already come out. I’ll up date this list as I get more information.

Gun Ownership is Way Down in the US

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Gun ownership rates in the US have been declining in recent decades. The National Rifle Association has started to produce denialist rhetoric to obscure this well documented fact. One of the reasons there is less gun ownership is because of changes in the demography of the US population; Angry white men whose recent ancestors were angry white men are declining in numbers and less paranoid and less violent browninsh people often with recent ancestors from other, non gun-happy countries are becoming more common.

You’ve heard about the rush to buy guns that happens every time Obama mentions firearms, or every time a bunch of babies are slaughtered in a school (the idea being that such an event will cause the rest of the country to consider backing off on our national worship of deadly weapons). These things do seem to happen but they are not as large scale as the press seems to tell us and consist almost entirely of angry white males who already own guns using an available excuse to squander more of their household income on their toys.

The gun ownership rate has dropped across all regions of the country and across a wide range of demographics from about 50% in the 1970s to about 35% now. In 1970, about 44% of Americans where white males. In the present year, that number is closer to 35%. In other words, the same guys are holding on to their guns, more or less, as the rest of the country changes. It won’t be long before the number of people who care about protecting gun ownership, for their own personal reasons, will be small enough that a constitutional amendment to repeal the second amendment and replace it with something useful will be a possibility. For instance, we could get rid of the “well regulated militia” thing and replace it with an amendment that says that the Armed Services and federal police can’t treat US Citizens like they weren’t US Citizens. (Eventually one would hope that we would also stop treating non citizens like non citizens as well, but one step at a time.)

Anyway, the gun ownership study is summarized here.

So, what do you think about de-extinction?

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John Platt has a nice summary of recent activity in the are of de-extinction. This is where you use modern genetic techniques to bring species that are extinct back into existence.

I find it interesting that casual talk about this sort of thing almost always starts out with things like de-extinction very large and very long extinct, and I’m sure, very expensive to take care of creatures like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths. People in the de-extinction business (and there are some, and there have even been some efforts carried out) are more realistic, of course.

I’ve always said we should start by cloning something that is not extinct, from its remains. Start with the dumpster behind a KFC and see if we can get a chicken. (If it turns out to not be a chicken, that’s another matter.) After doing that a few times, try cloning something that has a living ecological analog: The Quagga, for instance. They went extinct recently and are basically a variant of a zebra (though a different species). Then if that works look into endemic recently extinct animals such as the dodo.

After that, we can sit down and talk mammoths and passenger pigeons.

It was so unexpected that we thought there was something wrong with the instrument

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I love it when scientists say that! And, so said scientist Daniel Baker, speaking of a newly observed feature of the famous and well known, or at least, we thought well known, Van Allen Belts.

First discovered in 1958, the Van Allen belts have been thought to comprise two reservoirs of high-speed, electrically charged particles, corralled into separate doughnut-shaped rings by Earth’s magnetic field. The outer ring orbits at a distance of some 10,000–60,000 kilometres above Earth, and encircles an inner band of even more energetic particles, roughly 100–10,000 kilometres above Earth. … that’s … the structure that NASA’s twin Van Allen Probes recorded when they began operation on 1 September 2012.

ResearchBlogging.orgBut just two days later, telescopes on the probes revealed the emergence of an additional, narrow belt of charged particles sandwiched between the inner ring and a now highly eroded outer ring….

This was apparently caused by a burst of solar wind which messed up the outer Van Allen Belt and led to the reconfiguration of orbiting electrically charged bits and pieces. A wave of solar wind in October then removed all of the remaining outer ring and also wiped out the new middle ring. Then, a third wave of solar wind restored the Van Allen Belts to what we had been thinking was the normal configuration.

From the original paper:

Since their discovery over 50 years ago, the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts have been considered to consist of two distinct zones of trapped, highly energetic charged particles. The outer zone is comprised predominantly of mega-electron volt (MeV) electrons that wax and wane in intensity on time scales ranging from hours to days depending primarily on external forcing by the solar wind. The spatially separated inner zone is comprised of commingled high-energy electrons and very energetic positive ions (mostly protons), the latter being stable in intensity levels over years to decades. In situ energy-specific and temporally resolved spacecraft observations reveal an isolated third ring, or torus, of high-energy (E > 2 MeV) electrons that formed on 2 September 2012 and persisted largely unchanged in the geocentric radial range of 3.0 to ~3.5 Earth radii for over four weeks before being disrupted (and virtually annihilated) by a powerful interplanetary shock wave passage.

Here’s what it looks like:

Typical and Atypical Van Allen Belts
From Science: “Diagrams providing a cross-sectional view of the Earth’s radiation belt structure and relationship to the plasmasphere. (A) A schematic diagram showing the Earth, the outer and inner radiation belts and the normal plasmaspheric location. (B) Similar to (A) but showing a more highly distended plasmasphere and quite unexpected triple radiation belt properties during the September 2012 period. These diagrams show the highest electron fluxes as white and the lowest fluxes as blue. The radiation belts are really ‘doughnut’ or torus-shaped entities in three dimensions. The Earth is portrayed at the center. Also shown, as a translucent green overlay in each diagram, is the plasmasphere.”

Baker, D., Kanekal, S., Hoxie, V., Henderson, M., Li, X., Spence, H., Elkington, S., Friedel, R., Goldstein, J., Hudson, M., Reeves, G., Thorne, R., Kletzing, C., & Claudepierre, S. (2013). A Long-Lived Relativistic Electron Storage Ring Embedded in Earth’s Outer Van Allen Belt Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1233518

Insect Wings Can Shred Bacteria To Pieces

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The “clanger cicada” can physically kill bacteria by poking and shredding them with tiny pointy structures that seem to look a little like an old fashioned cheese grater. Keep in mind that this happens at a very small spacial scale, so the relationship between objects is different than in normal human experience. Essentially, the membrane of a bacterium spreads itself over the pointy nano-spikes of the insect wing. This is a little like a failed “laying on the bed of nails” attempt, but where the force involved with the bed of nails is gravity, gravity has nothing to do with the bacterium interacting with the nano spikes. Also, the bacterium does not shred because the nano spikes pierce it. Rather, the bacterial membrane is stretched to breaking point and falls apart that way. From the write-up in Nature News:

The clanger cicada (Psaltoda claripennis) is a locust-like insect whose wings are covered by a vast hexagonal array of ‘nanopillars’ — blunted spikes on a similar size scale to bacteria (see video, bottom). When a bacterium settles on the wing surface, its cellular membrane sticks to the surface of the nanopillars and stretches into the crevices between them, where it experiences the most strain. If the membrane is soft enough, it ruptures…

Here’s the model:

Not all bacteria are subject to this effect; it depends on the rigidity of the cell membrane.

Obviously, we want to make all doorknobs and toilet seats out of this stuff.

Pogodin, Et Al. 2013. Biophysical Model of Bacterial Cell Interactions with Nanopatterned Cicada Wing Surfaces. Biophysical Journal 104(4):835-840. The article was published on Feb. 19th in Biophysical Journal. Abstract:

The nanopattern on the surface of Clanger cicada (Psaltoda claripennis) wings represents the first example of a new class of biomaterials that can kill bacteria on contact based solely on their physical surface structure. The wings provide a model for the development of novel functional surfaces that possess an increased resistance to bacterial contamination and infection. We propose a biophysical model of the interactions between bacterial cells and cicada wing surface structures, and show that mechanical properties, in particular cell rigidity, are key factors in determining bacterial resistance/sensitivity to the bactericidal nature of the wing surface. We confirmed this experimentally by decreasing the rigidity of surface-resistant strains through microwave irradiation of the cells, which renders them susceptible to the wing effects. Our findings demonstrate the potential benefits of incorporating cicada wing nanopatterns into the design of antibacterial nanomaterials.

Arctic Sea Ice: A System In Collapse

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For the last 25 years or so there has been a decrease in the amount of ice that remains on the surface of the Arctic Ocean every summer. This is a trend that can be attributed to global warming, which in turn, can be attributed to the steady release of previously fossilized Carbon to the atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. But over the last few years, this decrease in ice has been much more dramatic. The trend has steepened. The formation and melting of ice has to do with air and water temperatures. This in turn can be affected by how much ice there is, because ice reflects energy from the sun, while open water absorbs it. There are other factors as well having to do with the distribution of air masses. It is all very complicated, but the bottom line is that reduction in ice can lead to further reduction in ice. It is quite possible that the recent very steep declines in Arctic sea ice represents not just a trend that happens to be, for random reasons, a bit steeper than usual for a while, or that it is even a long term change in the rate of inter-annual loss. Rather, it could be that the phenomenon of summer sea ice in the Arctic is simply something that is no longer sustainable because of new conditions caused by climate change, and that the sea ice we see now is mainly the remnant of a previously existing, no longer operational, system. Time will tell. Probably not much time, in fact. If the recent dramatic reduction in summer ice is a random blip, then the amount of summer sea ice over the next five years or so may go up rather than down. If the recent reduction is a result of a different relationship between sun’s energy, water temperature, air temperature, and ice formation, then over the next five years or so the trend of declining ice should continue and at some point settle on a new equilibrium with variation around a new mean.

There is probably a rule of thumb that could be applied here. One of the most important Quasi-cyclic climate variations, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), has an average period of about 5 years. Let’s assume that a full cycle is a strong El Niño followed by opposite conditions for the same period of time. Conservatively, we might want to let a climate change in some part of the Earth’s system to run for 10 years without changing direction before we can be pretty sure that it isn’t just a perturbation that will later readjust. Consider a ten-year rule of thumb in relation to the following graphic showing Arctic sea ice from 1979-2012:

That’s a nice graph, produced by Andy Lee Robinson. Robinson created this very nice looking animation from data he had earlier depicted in a simpler two dimensional form, which actually is in some ways more dramatic (It’s a moving GIF, click to watch it move, then come back!):

icevolanim

The story behind these graphs, including data sources, is summarized in this post by Peter Sinclair.

In these graphics, the last seven years show sea ice surface area occurring several years in a row at a much lower average than previously, and with a steady decline continuing. But there is a strong declining trend that actually starts earlier, closer to 2002. It is a little hard to put an exact year on this. If there is a new equilibrium being reached, when we look back on these data in a decade or so, where would we start the trend? Late 1990s? 2000? 2002? 2007? Hard to say.

But there is a problem with this view of the Arctic: The sea ice that rebuilds every winter starts with a core of “old ice” which during cold trends is added to every year. This is thick ice. A huge amount of the volume of sea ice in a give year, say back in the 1970s, is actually stacked up vertically. This ice has been melting as well, and climate scientists who study the arctic regard the decline of this old ice as more important than the simple reduction in surface area. In other words, the important area here might be volume rather than surface area. Volume is harder to measure over the long period because the instrumentation needed to make good volume estimates is has not been applied to the Arctic for very long, but we do have an idea of what has happened.

Have a look at this demonstration of the importance of volume:

The following graphic and the video I just showed you are both from Andy Lee Robinson:
arctic-sea-ice-min-volume-comparison-1979-2012-v3

If we look at volume rather than surface area over time, in a graph from here, we get something like this:

siv_annual_polar_graph
Each of the colored ringoids on this graph is a decadal average of ice volume around the seasonal cycle. The drop in volume each year is a function of both decreased ice formation in the summer and decrease in volume, but the latter, volume, is driving the change you see here. Noticed that each decade has less ice volume than the previous decade. Also noice that the 2000-2009 decade is dramatically smaller in volume than the previous decades, and the last few years have at least the same amount of decrease. This shows that the dramatic drop in Arctic sea ice may be a thing that has been happening both very recently and for enough years that the 10-year rule of thumb may already apply. We’ll see what happens over the next few years.