Hitler finds out that the hoped for Arctic Sea Ice recovery isn’t happening, and that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real.

That would be funny.

Tim Dickinson has some pretty amazing investigative reporting in which he notes that the origin story for Romney is that he …

… took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began … campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a “long-shot miracle,” bragging that he had “saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company.”

What really happened was somewhat different.

… Romney’s initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had “no value as a going concern.” Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC … out of at least $10 million. And … Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.

There is more to it than this, including what may be a bit of inside dealing and some whitewashing. Go have a look.

I like to ask people who believe in reality the following question: “What is the one single piece of evidence that convinces you that reality is real?” The answer is always easily debunked. For example:

“Evidence”: Reality is real because I can sense the world around me.

Answer: Senses have been known to fool people, quite often.

“Evidence”: Reality is real because if I base predictions on my understanding of it, they are generally accurate, so my understanding of it is probably pretty accurate.

Answer: Predictions are not evidence.

“Evidence”: When people from entirely different backgrounds and personal histories and different parts of the globe compare notes, they find that their realities are fundamentally the same.

Answer: Since when is a sample size of “2” acceptable for anything?

“Evidence”: Reality is internally consistant.

Answer: So are mirages.

“Evidence”: Math based on simple observations of the universe requires reality to be real.

Answer: Since you don’t understand the math it would be all to easy for you to be fooled by this.

For more on how reality is not real, see this post by S. Fred Singer

Creationists are holding everyone else back

This is a book for global warming sketpics so they can be more convincing in their skepticism. The title is “The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism.” Continue reading Skeptical about global warming? Here's your book. →

In Defense of Science: An Interview with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott

A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens when people respond to well-established science with disbelief or mistrust. As I noted, this is an occupational risk for researchers who work on vaccines (and journalists who write about them), which is why I told a cautionary tale about rejecting science in the face of super-bugs. The piece resonated with readers, but not in the way I’d hoped. Of nearly 220 comments, the vast majority opposed vaccination, for various reasons, rejecting the science.
As I considered how to respond, I wondered how science educators might deal with the chasm between scientific facts and public opinion. Then it struck me: who better to consider rebukes of mainstream science than the Bay Area’s own Eugenie Scott?

Read the rest here

Eugenie Scott on the Stealth of Science Denialism

This October, Dr. Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education, will speak at the much-anticipated CSICon 2012 in Nashville, Tennessee. She’ll be focusing on the anti-science initiatives now rampaging their way into Tennessee schools, and I wanted to get some perspective from her about where all this troubling activity is leading, and what’s behind it all. She was kind enough to take the time to have the following exchange with me.

Read the interview here

The NCSE is Here.

Neil Armstrong died today. NASA has released a statement.

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet is a new book by Michael Chorost. I’ve not thoroughly read it yet but I’ve looked through it and I’ve listened to an interview with Chorost. Here’s the book description from Amazon to give you an idea what it is about:

What if digital communication felt as real as being touched?

This question led Michael Chorost to explore profound new ideas triggered by lab research around the world, and the result is the book you now hold. Marvelous and momentous, World Wide Mind takes mind-to-mind communication out of the realm of science fiction and reveals how we are on the verge of a radical new understanding of human interaction.

Chorost himself has computers in his head that enable him to hear: two cochlear implants. Drawing on that experience, he proposes that our Paleolithic bodies and our Pentium chips could be physically merged, and he explores the technologies that could do it.

He visits engineers building wearable computers that allow people to be online every waking moment, and scientists working on implanted chips that would let paralysis victims communicate. Entirely new neural interfaces are being developed that let computers read and alter neural activity in unprecedented detail.

But we all know how addictive the Internet is. Chorost explains the addiction: he details the biochemistry of what makes you hunger to touch your iPhone and check your email. He proposes how we could design a mind-to-mind technology that would let us reconnect with our bodies and enhance our relationships. With such technologies, we could achieve a collective consciousness – a World Wide Mind. And it would be humankind’s next evolutionary step.

With daring and sensitivity, Chorost writes about how he learned how to enhance his relationships by attending workshops teaching the power of touch. He learned how to bring technology and communication together to find true love, and his story shows how we can master technology to make ourselves more human rather than less.

World Wide Mind offers a new understanding of how we communicate, what we need to connect fully with one another, and how our addiction to email and texting can be countered with technologies that put us – literally – in each other’s minds.

My first thought in considering this set of ideas was the writing of Howard Bloom (Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century) but Chorost is really talking about something different. The second thing I thought about was the idea of adding, as the very first project, a tactile connectivity that allowed for a slap upside the head. When I look at the behavior of a lot of people on line, such as the global warming denialists who send me death threats or the misogynist creeps who stalk Rebecca Watson or Surly Amy, it is clear to me that those people would probably not act as they do if a) everybody knew who they were (though certain people seem to not care about that) and/or b) if their behavior was being carried out face to face with other people. And, more importantly, within reach.

This is not to say that there should be or would be actual slaps upside the head necessarily. What we’re talking about here is Mutually Assured Slap Upside The Head (MASUTH). In a world where this is the prevailing situation, like the world of the forager, whence we came culturally and psychologically, there is MASUTH. And, less. asshattitude.

Listening to the Chorost interview, by Desiree Schell, also brought up some other questions, by Desiree herself, which she called me up to discuss, and that discussion has been transformed by the Magic Hand of KO Myers into a segment produced along the interview, which you can download HERE.

And there is yet another idea that I had in mind that I’ll expand on in another post. It is not true that every culture has a flood myth, or even a form of fried bread (see this for a detailed discussion) and generally you should be wary of any statement that starts out with “every culture has a…” But, I suspect that many cultures have a Lorem Ipsum. I’ll explain later.

This week on Skeptically Speaking:

This week, we’re discussing some fascinating science focused on the liquid portions of our big blue planet. We’re joined by graduate researcher Andrew David Thaler, founder of Southern Fried Science, to talk about the weird and wonderful networks of life that exist in the Deep Sea. And on the podcast, University of Alberta researcher David Schindler joins us to talk about the work, and the uncertain future, of Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area and its freshwater ecosystem research.

We record live with Andrew David Thaler on Sunday, August 26 at 6 pm MT. The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, August 31

Click here for details and links.

Soon To Be Hurricane Isaac

Isaac is a tropical storm currently located south of Puerto Rico and heading for Haiti and Cuba. After rolling over those land areas for several hours, and reaching the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, Isaac is expected to become a modest hurricane, likely to menace the west coast of Florida and the Florida Panhandle and nearby Mississippi. Conditions are actually right for Isaac to become a fairly strong storm, even though at the moment it is very poorly organized.

Arctic Cyclone

The other storm of interest is now historical, but worth a mention. This was the arctic cyclone that occurred over the Arctic earlier this month. I mentioned it before in relation to sea ice melting, but I just noticed a nice writeup about it on the NSICD web site: Continue reading Meteorological Items of Interest (including a hurricane) →

Atheist Voices of Minnesota is a unique book. Other books on atheism are mostly philosophical or political. They are written by people who derive their income from their writing. They argue for atheism, or at least for secularism, and tell atheists how to be atheists. They are often specifically about religion.

Atheist Voices of Minnesota is none of those things. It is instead a collection of personal writings, talking about the effects of atheism on our lives and on our values. It covers voices who are not usually included in atheist projects. And it is receiving rave reviews.

This Sunday, we are doing an unusual show to talk about this unusual book. Nine of the contributors will gather in the studio to. Join us to hear:

• Bill Lehto (editor)
• George Kane
• Jill Carlson
• Ryan Bolin
• Stephanie Zvan
• Eric Jayne
• James Zimmerman
• Michelle Huber
• Kim Socha

They will be talking about how the book was made and their contributions to it.

Get the details here.

Mimicry is when one species has changed over time via Natural Selection to look like another species. Three commonly defined forms of mimicry are:

• Batesian mimicry, named after Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century Natural Historian, where one species is poisonous or otherwise dangerous to a predator, and another species takes evolutionary advantage of that by looking like it but not actually being poisonous;
• Müllerian mimicry, named after Fritz Müller who worked at about the same time as Bates, where two species that are poisonous or otherwise bad for predators evolve to look like each other thus shortening the learning curve for the predators; and
• Agressive mimicry, not named after anyone, in which a predator mimics its prey to better sneak up on or ambush it.

There is not necessarily a clear distinction between Batesian and Müllerian mimicry in all cases. Also, although the statements above are generally considered true (they could be from a glossary of a biology textbook) they are misleading, because the relationship is not always between predator and prey. For instance, a European Cuckoo looks like a bird eating raptor, and thus scares off the host birds in who’s nest they wish to lay eggs. There is no predator eating something and there is no poison, but it is considered Batesian mimicry because one species is imitating another and thus fooling a third into reacting by aversion or avoidance with the expectation of something nasty happening. In general, it is better to think of inter- and intra-species relationships that are potentially shaped by Natural Selection in more abstract and general terms. Putting it this way, we could define the first two types of mimicry as selection operating on one species (the “mimic) to appear to the senses of a “dupe” be a member of a third species (the “model”) with whom interaction will confer a negative effect on fitness on the “dupe” and whereby the mimicry will confer a positive effect on fitness of the “mimic.” In the case of pure Batesian mimicry, the model and the mimic are distinct, while in Müllerian, the model and the mimic share the role. The effect on the model may be positive or it may not be.

There is a bit of an irony working here. In order for mimicry to work there has to be either a deeply built-in genetically determined avoidance mechanism (something that says “orange butterflies are always poisonous”), which is highly unlikely for various reasons, or there has to be learning on the part of the predator. The predator must learn by trial and error that certain species taste bad, are poisonous, fight back, or whatever. This means, however, that in order for mimicry to work, the strategy of mimicry also has to be vulnerable, because just as the mimic can dupe the dupe into learning the wrong thing, the dupe can smarten up. Taking this a step further, species that can learn stuff may end up, depending on evolutionary context, becoming a species that is really good at learning stuff.

Another consequence of the dupe learning to avoid the model and mimic morph is that both the model and the mimic are influenced in their fitness by numbers. If there are exactly two individuals, a model and a mimic, that will ever be encountered by a predator (and eaten on the spot) and if the predator (the dupe) learns in one trial to never eat that kind of thing again, then there is a 50–50 chance for either mimic or model of being eaten first. Note that if the mimic is eaten first, then the model may well be eaten because the predator did not learn to avoid food that looks like these particular individuals. If, however, there are a gazillion models and only a few mimics, then the mimics will do pretty well because most predators it encounters will have already learned to avoid individuals that look like model or mimic.

Also, consider each node of the mimicry triangle in relation to the selective forces working on it, in relation to all the variables. For in stance, a model species might suffer a fitness consequence if there are too many mimics, because predators may actually learn to like the morphotype that has been conferred on it by Natural Selection. Mimics would not gain as much if they were too common as well, but that sets up a tension between the benefits of reproducing a lot and the cost of being common. Also, one might ask why mimics don’t just make their own poison or other nasty bits. There must be a cost of doing so that is being avoided.

There is a case that I’ve written up here of a bird mimic (one of the afore mentioned cuckoos) that has two morphs mimicking a predator; the idea here is that polymorphism (having several different appearances) helps with this problem of being too common, or of the dupe learning too much. Also, the dupe species seem to do a lot of social learning, which can really mess up your strategy if you are a cuckoo. Go have a look.

Agressive mimicry is a totally different thing that we won’t talk about here except to mention that humans are one species that does this, and that it is a key feature in the biologically underrated novels by Mary Doria Russell, Children of God and The Sparrow. In those novels, there are two intelligent life forms on another planet, and one is a predator the other prey. They look a lot alike, and this is attributed to agressive mimicry by the predaceous species.

By the way, Henry Walter Bates was an interesting guy. His BD dates are 1825–1892, so he overlapped a great deal with Darwin (1809–1882). Bates worked with A.R. Wallace in the Amazon. Wallace, who is often viewed as under appreciated in the blinding light of Charles Darwin, lost all of his Amazon biological material in a shipwreck. Bates, on the other hand, supplied the scientific community with samples representing over 14,000 species, most insects. He discovered about 8,000 new species.