Even Science Is Primarily Political

One of the things that I have come to a reluctant conclusion on is the fact that hard science is not really hard at all. It is subject to the same vagaries that all things human are, which is a fancy way of saying politics. Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is just the latest of many unsubstantiated theories touted as fact for political gain. This is nothing new with recent examples including ice age hysteria in the 1970’s and about anything to do with the Leakey’s in Africa.

For me, learning the reality of this has gored some of my sacred oxen held from childhood. I was always ready to believe my teachers and Walter Cronkite (aka Voice of God to generations) when they breathlessly talked about the latest discovery. Somewhere in my late teens I began to look harder at things as my love of things scientific blossomed further. I admit a twinge of desire that I had not done so, for ignorance truly is bliss.

So when my father forwarded the link to a story on child psychologist Arnold Gessell, I recognized the timeless aspect of politically motivated but accepted theories that had been flushed down the toilet once exposed to the sunlight of reality.  Eugenics is one of the nastier branches of science that has long since been discredited, but one hundred years ago it was at the cutting edge of left wing politics. Of course it took decades for it to fall out of favor, yet it spawned an organization, Planned Parenthood, which is still very active today. This quote sums up the problem:

How, Harris wondered, did someone such as Gesell become so enamored of eugenics that he would actually manipulate research? Harris said it is important to place Gesell in the context of the times. Social scientists were as much crusaders for the improvement of the human lot as they were researchers.

Things are no different today.

This behavior is not uncommon, despite what researchers would have you believe. There is another influence that does damage and that is simple greed. Far too much money flows into science supporting causes, though I admit quite a bit of data doctoring is also to keep one’s position in a “publish or perish” academic climate.

Beware do-gooders in science is what I say since it usually ends up skewing all the results . Science needs to be cold and ruthless. More Spock’s and fewer Dr. McCoy’s are needed. It may not be exciting to the masses, but I prefer accuracy over popularity. I imagine the residents of Alma back in 1913 would agree.

To wit, science should no longer be put upon a pedestal. Perhaps it never should have been in the first place. I can only hope time filters out all the corrupted data rather than accumulating it or we are in real trouble.

Odds and Ends

The Large Hadron Collider finally did something noteworthy by colliding two protons together.  Shockingly, a black hole did not develop. I’m just glad to see the thing finally running!

Closer to home, there has been no snow in March for the first time on record.  While I’m enjoying the warmer than usual daytime temps, the lack of precipitation has me concerned.  We can only coast off the water from the snow melts for so long before it becomes an issue. 

Things are tenser than usual between North Korea and South Korea after the sinking of a Southern navy vessel.  With 46 crew unaccounted for, the emotions are running high. Probably a mine, but I doubt it was an old one.  More than likely the Norks are testing what they can get away with.  With a weak U.S. president, the little dictators are running wild.

On the home front, I’m needing to get more ammo for my Savage .17HM2 to zero it in.  We want to plant a garden and there are large amount of rabbits around here.  Never have dressed and cooked a critter before, so I plan to kill two lepus with one stone by protecting the garden. 

The .17HM2 is a necked down .22LR round with high velocity and frangibility.  Shooting flat to 100 yards it disintegrates when it hits something which makes it a safer round to use than the venerable .22LR.   It is a scope only kind of round and I need to get experience with scopes (being an iron sight kind of guy).

Manmade Global Warming Scandal Fallout

Over at Honolulu Magazine, A. Kim Napier faces the growing evidence of corruption and fraud involving AGW scientists and writes:

I feel I’ve been had.

Right now, I think a lot of supporters of Green policies are in denial or afraid to admit they were wrong.  It is nice to see somebody come forward who had been pushing AGW and admit there is a scandal. 

Sadly, science has lost its ethics in the pursuit of grant money, with the IPCC scandal being the most obvious example.  That will be damaging for those who have invested great faith in scientists and research.  Like Napier, I feel that disappointment – though I realized the problem a long time ago.  Too often studies get big attention then within a decade are completely rebutted well after most people have accepted theory as fact.

Just another sign of the times, I suppose.

Science needs to purify itself, go back to observation leading to theory, not theory leading to falsified observation.

del.icio.us Tags: science,global warming,AGW,scandal

Reality Is Stranger than Fiction

Global warming has gotten so bad that iguanas are falling out of trees from the heat in Florida. Oh wait, they are freezing from the record cold there.  My mistake.

The next link may not be reality, since it is only theory, but it qualifies as stranger than fiction.  The theory postulates that 8 percent of our DNA was inserted by animal viruses and furthermore they may cause schizophrenia!

I always though insanity was hereditary, but I thought you caught it from your kids, not your pets.

Bloodhound to Run 1000 mph

Except this is no dog, this is a car.  The Brits who officially broke the sound barrier on wheels 12 years ago are back with a project to go 1,000 mph in South Africa.  The SSC Thrust hit 763 mph for an average using two jet fighter engines but that isn’t enough now that others want to break the record.  With a hybrid rocket motor this project is aimed at more than setting an amazing record.  They are hoping the involvement of schools and universities will have an effect like the Apollo moon shots did back in the 1960’s by bringing in more students into science degrees.

Quote of the article:

Put it this way, if you fired what used to be the most powerful handgun in the world, Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, at the tail of the rocket/jet car as it passed and Green toggled the 20,500lb thrust hybrid rocket as the revolver went off, the bullet would never hit the car.

I wonder how big a speeding ticket he’d get for that?

But seriously, I’m skeptical they can do it because the low level speed record for an aircraft is only 994 mph.  An aircraft has a lot less friction to deal with -- not only involving air but with no energy being lost to contact with the ground. The other thing worrying is the dual engine concept with a jet engine and a hybrid rocket motor.  That won’t be the easiest thing to work out. It reminds me of Chuck Yeager’s flight in a similarly augmented NF-104A Starfighter that ended in a crash so vividly depicted in The Right Stuff.

Speaking of Starfighters, I’m looking forward to seeing if the North American Eagle team can break 800 mph with an adapted F-104 Starfighter fuselage on wheels. Being very fond of the F-104 in all its incarnations, I’m rooting for their success.  They’ve been ramping up test runs and have run into some problems lately but it doesn’t look project threatening.

Most people don’t know of it, but back in 1979 Stan Barret broke the sound barrier in the Budweiser Rocket Car built by Hal Needham’s team.  Sadly, the first supersonic car run couldn’t be recognized because it had three wheels and only did a one way trip.   Check out the story at YouTube:

Is Science Losing Its Stature?

With the East Anglia “climategate” scandal slowly starting to get a little media attention, I’ve found out I’m not the only one worrying it will tarnish all scientific research.  At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henniger has an opinion piece warning that the credibility of all science is at risk.  In it he brings up some valid points why this may happen and this quote gets to the heart of the dilemma:

Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science. Because "science" said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.

There is great danger in mixing politics and science, but I’ll only address the biggest and possibly least perceived danger. That being the loss of stature in the public eye. Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey breaks down the Rasmussen Reports poll that shows 59% believe data on global warming has been falsified.  What is amazing in these polarized times is that majorities across the strata believe this. If that isn’t a loss of credibility, I don’t know what is.

I’ve always thought AGW was based on faith rather than hard science as that massive nuclear furnace in the center of our solar system dictates more than we fully comprehend. Perhaps it is because I remember two previous panics that were widespread.  In the 1970’s it was the fear of another ice age that some of the AGW scientists actually pushed back then.  Later on the terror of the hole in the ozone layer dominated the media and led to a banning of CFC’s to reduce damage to it. In these I see the arrogance of man combined with the allure of hysteria making for bad science driven by the politics of anti-capitalism.

Shifting gears a bit, it doesn’t help that we are starting to hit some hard walls with scientific research producing practical results. While the search for knowledge is a good thing, in the end most of it needs to deliver something of use to humanity in general. This is particularly true in medical research.

The Telegraph has a sobering article about the diminishing returns of the huge amounts of money thrown into medical science.  While I think the title of the article is overly pessimistic or sensational, it is hard to argue that we aren’t getting our moneys worth.  Such high hopes were placed on the human genome project that it couldn’t possibly live up to expectations.

Unfortunately, it is not looking good there and if science is done objectively as is suggested in this article, it may open a Pandora’s Box of political and racial problems.  The promise of finding the causes of diseases and ways to treat them with gene cocktails has not had much success so far, possibly due to the small sample. Geoffrey Miller posits that the research will instead go in another direction once wider sampling is done:

The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.

In the pop culture, the original Star Trek television series speculated that there will be a eugenics war between genetically enhanced and superior humans with the rest of humanity.  That is where we got the memorable villain, Khan.  If we do get the kind of research suggested, I don’t think that scenario is too far fetched.  The wealthy will want to tinker with their progeny and I can see state run programs in totalitarian states wanting to achieve dominance in a genetic arms race. Worse, I can see racial strife based on both rejection and embracing of the studies coming out of the research.

All of that could lead to an extreme neo-Luddite reaction, especially if science has already become viewed as just another political football. The last people to see that coming will be the scientists themselves due to their living in insulated academic bubbles.  Perhaps more transparency and less politics would help, but it needs to happen quickly before the public consigns science to the trash heap of politics.

LHC Ramps Up the Power

More good news from CERN, the Large Hadron Collider hit 1.18 trillion electron volts in the wee hours of the morning. It looks like it is finally overcoming the technical problems that stalled the program.  Still waiting for the first proton smashing but they are hopeful of doing that before Christmas.

Climate Change Scandal Taints Science

I’ve avoided writing on the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit having their files “hacked” because it is hard to get worked up over the turning battle over man made global warming. The majority of people have now realized that this is bogus movement with the tipping point happening some time this year. Still, a significant percentage still believe in this junk science so the revelations of data tampering exposed by the documents has done quite a bit of damage.  Christopher Booker’s commentary at the Telegraph lays out why this is such an important scandal and I highly advise reading it.

This needed to be brought to the light like any politically driven pseudo science, but I fear there will be fallout across the board tainting the public perception of scientific research.  The old problem of a few rotten eggs ruining things is something I’ve worried about. An example of how science is now getting a negative reputation can be found in the hysteria that starting the CERN supercollider would create a black hole. The earth will be sucked into and we’ll all die!

Yes, people have little understanding of scientific method and I blame our pathetic public education system for that. The bad eggs in politicized junk science have aggravated the problem as they use sensationalism to obtain large grants.  Maybe it is time to seriously audit all research grants to see how the money is actually spent and see if there is graft going on. Of course, that would be negative publicity for scientific research again. *sigh*

We still have to get the truth and I hope this scandal will have a chilling effect on corrupt scientists.

Supercollider Blues Over?

The Large Hadron Collider suffered a magnet meltdown after its first run last year, shutting down operations until this past week. I’m happy to see the first test went well Friday and hope to see it get to smashing atoms soon.  In a small (microscopic) way, I’ve been involved through crunching research numbers for it on my computer.

While it is doubtful what the PC did was actually used, it felt good to contribute to something that will further research into physics.  I still remember the keen disappointment I felt when the much larger supercollider project in the US was cancelled back in the 1990’s. Now if we could get those idiots who believe that the LHC will create a black hole the special care they need…

Sparing Time for Helping Humanity

PC time, that is. As I posted earlier, I've downloaded software from BOINC that allows distributed computing projects to use computer users spare time to do work on various projects for science. It all really got rolling with SETI at Home, the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and blossomed into the medical field with projects on smallpox vaccines, and human protein folding which applies to many illnesses from cancer to AIDS. Collectively, the thousands of home computers add up to a super computer for each of these projects, often doing thousands of days of computer time in hundreds of days.

Out of gratitude for getting BOINC rolling, I give SETI about 1% of my spare computing time and devote most of it between two other projects. Both Rosetta@home and World Community Grid serve as coordinators for various simulations for medical researchers. While I'm never sure exactly what I'm working on from Rosetta, they have been involved in AIDS treatment research as well as trying to map out how proteins in the brain work for patients who have Alzheimers Disease. World Community Grid is something IBM started and hosts multiple projects that you can pick and choose from by setting up your profile. Not all are available to BOINC users, as they are also using a different platform from Grid.org. Currently, WCG has Help Defeat Cancer, FightAIDS@Home, Genome Comparison, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, and are starting up Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy. I've concentrated my time on Cancer and Genome Comparison while occasionally beta testing the new software for the various programs. Right now HPF2 isn't out for BOINC and I'm eager to crunch data for that.

The most important one to me is the cancer program, it requires quite a bit of PC power to do and is a project to automate the diagnosis of lethal fast moving cancers by running slides of biopsies through scanners. Eventually, the algorithyms being perfected for this will allow diagnoses in days rather than weeks, which is critical with fast moving cancers.

I also give time to two other projects at a much lower priority. One is Spinhenge@home which is a nanotech research project into how different nanocarbon molecules react magnetically under a wide range of temperatures. Getting switching to work in nanoparticles will be a big achievement and open the doors to ever smaller electronics. The other project is SIMAP, which is a project to database protein simularities for researchers to access. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do molecular medicine comparisons, it will be in a pre-existing database. This project is intermittent and just finished a limited batch of data this past week. Blink and you miss out on this one.

There are many other projects out there, including one's aimed at finding pulsars, breaking cryptography, predicting climate shifts, even rendering 3D computer animations. Check out this site for a full listing of them.

These are my current BOINC based stats, back in the past I also crunched numbers for the SETI@home Classic and for Grid.org's cancer and HPF1 programs.

Odd & Ends

Trying to type with a demanding cat is what leads to today's short post. Sid is recovering from an abscessed wound with the side effect of being really demanding now that it is healing. His life has been unhappy ever since we took in another cat from a young couple who moved out West. They hate each other and have tried to kill each other when my dad and I were in Indiana for a funeral. Sid used to be top cat as far as terrorizing our property, but age has caught up to him and he's slowing down. Thing is, he doesn't think he has and has had his butt handed to him repeatedly over the past year or so. Anyway, it's good to see him happy again.

Great post at Captain's Quarters that illustrates why McCain-Feingold has turned out to be the perfect way to protect incumbents from challengers. McCain is a total piece of opportunistic work and I'm sorry so many haven't yet seen through his facade.

Found a new blog, Adamant, that has some fascinating posts of a scientific bent. I particularly liked this post on black coal vs. natural gas emissions. The other posts are well worth reading too.

Here is a good post on religion and the current conflict going on worldwide.

Demoted to the Minor Leagues

Poor Pluto has never gotten any respect and now has lost its major league status as a planet. It was bad enough that Disney named a none too bright dog after the planet, now it is considered a "small solar system body." Plucky little Pluto used to be our ambassador planet to the outside galaxy, now it is just a "body." Pity poor Pluto.