CNN.com – Is U.S. becoming hostile to science? – Oct 28, 2005

This is heartbreakingly sad, and pathetic. America is becoming such a laughingstock of the world, and I’m becoming embarassed to be associated as American.

[Cornell University acting President Hunter] Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. “When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,”

It’s what I’ve been saying:

Other polls show that only around a third of American adults accept the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, even though the concept is virtually uncontested by scientists worldwide.

“When we ask people what they know about science, just under 20 percent turn out to be scientifically literate,” said Jon Miller, director of the center for biomedical communication at Northwestern University.

He said science and especially mathematics were poorly taught in most U.S. schools, leading both to a shortage of good scientists and general scientific ignorance.

U.S. school students perform relatively poorly in international tests of mathematics and science. For example, in 2003 U.S. students placed 24th in an international test that measured the mathematical literacy of 15-year-olds, below many European and Asian countries.

Scientists bemoan the lack of qualified U.S. candidates for postgraduate and doctoral studies at American universities and currently fill around a third of available science and engineering slots with foreign students.

CNN.com – Students launch satellite into space – Oct 27, 2005

First the X-Prize, now this… it’s not much longer before true commercial space flight becomes a reality!
Possibly in the next 20 years.
Unfortunately, it will still be, in my lifetime, too expensive and exclusive for me to ever have a chance at leaving Earth’s atmosphere… but it’s still a great advancement for humanity!!

My wife watches some evangelical morning show before work, I forget the name of it or the host. But they have guests on constantly hawking their new book or tape series.
This morning was Janet Folger, author of “The Criminalization of Christianity : Read This Book Before It Becomes Illegal!”
That has got to be one of the most asinine ideas I’ve heard. Like Jon Stewart has said: “I have a DREAM! That one day we might live in a world… where we can have an openly Christian President! Or, perhaps, 42 of them. In a row.”
This persecution complex Christians have is so absurd, and in a second I possit, very dangerous. But Christianity has no risk of becoming criminalized, not when this President is “born again,” the last one was a Southern Baptist, the next one will likely be expected by the American people to have some profession of a Christian faith, more than half of the current Senate and House are conservative Christians…. This is a rediculous idea.

I’m interested in the full background of the examples she gives as evidence. How skewed and incomplete the information is. For example, she professes that “Believers in Philadelphia faced felony charges and jail time for simply quoting from the Bible in public.” I will bet there’s more to the story than provided. They were certainly doing more than innocently quoting Bible passages. Likely they were accosting and assaulting people. And in any case a couple of erroneous arrests in a country of tens of millions does not a pattern of criminalization make. Even if some zealous cop falsely arrested them, they will be released and you can be certain the officer will be repremanded.

Another example: “A group called American United for Separation of Church and State is sending people to churches to monitor sermons to see if there are any so-called church/state separation violations.” And this somehow is a sign of criminalization? Some private, fringe organization is monitoring sermons? And to what end? What if they find some… “violation”? It’s a sermon in a private church. There’s nothing legal or governmental involved here. The separation of Church and State protects the public institutions run by the government from establishing a state religion or promoting one religion over another. This private “American United for Separation of Church and State” group has no connection to the legal system or the government.

Look, most Americans claim to be Christian. Most politicians claim to be Christian. Our federal politicians are mostly expected to profess Christianity. “Under God” was added to the Pledge only 50 years ago and likely won’t get removed. Neither will “In God we trust” from our money. We have about as many churches as gas stations and convenience stores. Every cable and satellite service have handfulls of religious channels. A rediculous number of evangelical books and tapes get produced every year. Shows like “Touched by an Angel” and “Joan of Arcadia” and “7th Heaven” are popular and successful. Promise Keepers seminars are held all over the country. America is argueably the most religious country in the world next to the former Talibahn ruled Afghanistan. There is no threat to religion in general or Christianity in particular.

What this is about is enagelicals NOT getting to be the State religion. If they can’t have prayer in school, and symbols of fundamental Christianity in government buildings, then they are being “persecuted.” And they will not be happy with just a conservative Christian Senate and House and a “born again” President, they want what they have wanted since 1780: A Constitution which professes Jesus as Lord and a government that endorses if not promotes Christianity. And anything short of that is persecution.

Also, by playing the “persecution” card, they get to be inflamatory and aggressive and caustic themselves. “These groups are attacking us! So we have the right to attack right back.” But no one’s attacking them. It’s like the Evolution/ID War blog the other day mentions, there is no debate or controversy in the scientific community. Until the Christian fundamentalists adamantly misrepresent and erroneously present the case of evolution and when scientists move to correct them, the Christians point to that as controvery and debate about evolution.

If you look hard enough you can make up a controvery, a conspiracy out of anything. In a country with tens of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of arrests and lawsuits a day, you can pick and chose a few that point up some made up conspiracy to prove any point you want to make.

Something to check out:
This except is from an e-mail list I’m on for “The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.”
In this one they announce the subject of the latest “Skeptical Inquirer” magazine: “ ‘Evolution and the ID Wars’: Skeptical Inquirer Weighs in on Latest Debates over Evolution.”

We devote the core of the new Skeptical Inquirer issue to Evolution and the ID Wars. The “Intelligent Design” movement is the most pernicious pseudoscience of our time.

It seeks to undermine the teaching of evolution, at a minimum, but at its root is a broad attack on the nature of science itself-science’s insistence on evidence, its unrelenting testing of hypotheses, its tradition of first airing new propositions before knowledgeable colleagues, its requirement of peer-reviewed scientific publication, its skeptical scrutiny of all new ideas, its error-correcting mechanisms and welcome acceptance of new ideas that better fit better evidence, its wonderful and imaginative creativity.

In its place, ID advocates would give equal time to an ancient and long-discredited faith-based idea with zero scientific evidence. They would bypass all of science’s institutional mechanisms that painstakingly sift unsupported ideas from well-supported ones and that are at the core of what science is all about.

The ID advocates are well supported and crafty. They turn scientific arguments on their heads. They paint themselves as the open-minded inquirers. They just want to be “fair.”

They just want to “teach the controversy.” They in fact create the controversy by publicly advancing outrageously misleading, often outright false, statements about evolution. Then when scientists respond to correct them, the IDers organize vast letter writing campaigns and point to the “controversy” that ensues as evidence that it should be taught in the classroom.

They disingenuously pretend that the resulting controversy is about science, not about religion and culture. They tirelessly work to put likeminded people on local school boards. They seek, and get, political support. They claim that it is science advancing dogma, not themselves. They pretend they want only to give the “alternative” view.

The media responsibly report on the “controversy” and allot 50-50 space and time to each viewpoint, falling right into the ID advocates’ hands.

It has been a remarkably successful political and public-relations strategy, and they keep waging the war on public battlegrounds that continually put science to the disadvantage. The main articles, commentaries, reports, and statements in this issue deal with all these issues and many others.

We asked notable scientists and scholars knowledgeable about this debate to present their ideas. They analyze intellectually the ID argument, they propose better ways for presenting the scientific case to the public, they discuss why scientists get so angry at ID proponents, they provide poll results of Americans’ beliefs about evolution and creationism, and they comment knowledgeably about those beliefs.

Biologist Sean B. Carroll, in an excerpt from his new book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, presents an overview of some new evolutionary science, combining embryology with evolutionary developmental biology, that has provided remarkable new advances and insights into evolutionary processes over the past two decades.

This reminds us – importantly, I think, as would even a quick perusal of nearly any current scientific journal – that the science goes on, advancing, illuminating, producing exciting new understanding, even while a public mostly ignorant of it dithers over and argues about the modern-day equivalent of how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

– Ken Frazier; Editor, Skeptical Inquirer

CNN.com – ‘Cheeseburger bill’�puts bite on lawsuits – Oct 20, 2005
Finally! Politicians do something right.
Ironic that they agree issues of personal responsibility doesn’t belong in the court, but they will make huge shows of political grandstanding to keep alive an undead woman (Shiavo) against the will of her husband, her doctors, and every judge that reviewed the case, and they constantly make laws against consensual “crimes”.

“As one judge put it, if a person knows or should know that eating copious orders of super-sized McDonald’s products is unhealthy and could result in weight gain, it is not the place of the law to protect them from their own excesses,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

You know, that statement can be applied to OH so many other areas of one’s personal lives the courts/government have no place to interfere.

Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do : The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country

The title of the blog comes from Stephen Colbert in explanation of his new comedy news show’s motto.

Reading that prompted me to talk about the idea of “truth” and whether truth is possible ignoring facts. Isn’t that kind of self-contradictory? How can you have “truth” when facts prove otherwise?

There’s a debate on “truth” over on NewSojourn blog:
Myth About Truth and More About Truth.

Last night on “The West Wing,” a fictional school teacher asked the fictional Presidential nominee, “Some of us would like to see a science program that is more in line with our beliefs,” in reference to Intelligent Design controversy. Good thing I don’t write for that show, because the fictional politician gave a great, political, reasoned response. My response would be more like: “OK are you a complete idiot? By what skewed reality do you live in in which you would prefer that science, the means by which we use observation and testable data, be twisted and contorted and made false and irrelevant in order to fit your religious beliefs?”

Good thing I’m not a politician.

But that just really irks me to no end, when people reveal their disconnect with reality and prove that they would rather believe a fantasy, a fable, a legend, a mythology, over hard data and facts. They will do anything to reason and rationalize the literalness of their mythology and fly in the face of facts and data. They want to find any way to “prove” the literalness of a story in a book written 4000 years ago, over decades or even centuries of hundreds of thousands of scientists testing and retesting and double checking and observing what is really happening and can be proven to have happened. Isn’t that insane? Neurotic at the very least?

How rational is it to believe in the literalness of a story, written by two people (as the canonized Genesis is a merging of at least two different collections of the same stories according to biblical historians) in an age in which there was no knowledge of cosmology or physics or anthropology or geology, over centuries of hundreds of thousands of people who constantly take the data from observations and tests and work endlessly to develop formulas and theories and explanations and predictions for phenomena, and are constantly critiqued and reviewed and fact checked and scrutinized and rigorously put to the test with experiments and duplication?

Is it any wonder why the ever increasingly religious America is falling behind not just industrialized nations like Germany and Japan, but even countries like China and India, in science and mathematical education? Not just the jobs, but the education as well.

And of course it’s not just the influence of religion, to be fair. We have a culture of instant gratification and laziness. Of expected benefits without the effort. We simply don’t care about good education any more. We led the world in education and science up until the ’60′s, and then rested on our laurels as the world passed us by. We no longer put teaching up as a respected professional career, and don’t demand from teachers expert proficiency in the fields they teach. It’s telling that most of my friends and co-workers agree that their science and math and biology teachers in jr. high and high school were primarily coaches who taught a course on the side. It’s no wonder that everyone except experts in the field completely misunderstand the nature of the Big Bang and the “shape” of the universe. Why more people believe in alien visitation and telekinesis than they understand conservation of energy or relativity. It sickens and saddens me how ignorant, and even downright stupid our culture is.

It’s not so much that middle-class, supposedly “educated” masses are ignorant, but that they chose to fill their minds with pseudoscience rather than real science. That people spend brain cells and valuable time learning all about aliens and holistic medicine and angels and intelligent design and faith healing and fortune telling and ghosts and ignore the even more amazing and mind boggling wonders of the real universe and the real Earth we live on!

I understand one reason. It’s so much harder to try to understand reality than it is a mythology. Want to believe in the Genesis explanation? All you need to do is know how to read. Want to understand the Big Bang and evolution? You need to be able to follow scientific processes, understand Euclidean geometry, how genetic mutation works, and more than a little algebra. So it’s really easy to say “Ah pooh! That crazy science stuff is its own religion. The data is made up or wrong, anyway. I’ll just read this children’s fable over here and believe what it says.”

And so I ask you, a 4000 year old story in a book that is both fantastic and illogical, or hundreds of thousands of fact checking and data checking and experiment performing scientists who constantly work to make sure the results are valid and repeatable and strive to constantly learn more and more and correct errors and misunderstandings? “Truth” without facts is fantasy and falsehood.

Wow. I learned some things this weekend that are absolutely mind-boggling.
First let me ask you to describe in one or two sentences what the “Big Bang” was. If you say something like “In the beginning, everything in the universe was compressed into one little spot and then it exploded out it a great bang, spreading the material for the universe far and wide,” I’d have agreed with you before this weekend. That’s how we all learn about it. That’s how my basketball coached slash physics teachers in high school understood it.

But that’s only a small fraction of the truth of it.

It all started with my questioning a section early in the book “The Elegant Universe” which was explaining how all references to velocity or position must be in reference to something, because otherwise something has no position or velocity. For example, two astronauts in deep, dark space with nothing to see for a point of reference. One it travelling through space past the other. To each astronaut it looks as though they are stationary and it’s the other astronaut that is moving past them. Their velocity and position is relative only to each other and is completely fluid depending on which one you decide is actually moving.

And I thought that was all well and good, but they both have a definite, exact velocity and position based upon the center of this finite universe, right?

Wrong. The universe has no center. No edge.

But, the Big Bang, it was a central location and everything came out of it, there HAS to be a center, and an edge, even if it’s constantly expanding, that defines the end of the matter that came out of the Big Bang.

Nope. The universe is, as best as we can tell, infinite, with an infinite instances of simultaneous Big Bangs, with everything moving away from each other like points on the skin of an expanding balloon.

Take a look at this for starters:
“Where was the center of the Big Bang?”

Every point is the center, with everything radiating away from it. Our galaxy is at the center of the universe, the M31 galaxy is at the center, everything is it’s own center of the universe with everything expanding away from everything else.

But, how? How can there be infinite point, centers, to a singular “Big Bang” instance?

Take a look at this:
“How can the Universe be infinite if it was all concentrated into a point at the Big Bang?”

If that doesn’t just twist your mind around thinking about.

That site has a lot of great information, both simply explained, and with more than enough math and formulas and observational data to choke a galaxy of horses:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html

So I ask around on some physics newsgroups, how definite is all of this? How much is just mathematical hypothesis and how much is from observable data?
Well, evidently nearly all from observable data which spawned the necessity to come up with the math to explain it.
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
WMAP: Foundations of the Big Bang theory
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html
WMAP: Tests of Big Bang Cosmology
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bbtest.html
are just a few of the links, with lots of links from those links, that explain the observable data to show this is something known about the universe for decades.
This is not a new idea.

So in effect, there IS no universal constant as far as time and place. Everything really is relative to everything else. There is potentially and endless amount of possibility and potential for anything out there.

Like Keanu says: “Whoa!”

Apologies to Stephen King for using his title. Great book, by the way: “On Writing.” Highly recommended to any aspiring writer, or King fan.

Anyway, today’s blog is about writing, particularly mine. *grin*

First I want to announce the fixing of my blog site for Internet Explorer! Huzzah! With the help of some usenet advice I found out that little traffic counter I had below the menu was throwing off my CSS blocks. But only in IE. So, I just got rid of it. Wasn’t really useful anyway.

Secondly, I reread the other day something about H.P. Lovecraft and how he hated writing to people so much, sending a thank-you for a gift was a painful exercise. All he wanted to do, could do, was write his stories. Until sometime in his 30′s when he suddenly became a prolific letter writer with constant ongoing correspondences with people. And it made me wistful for the pre-Internet days. (Can one be wistful for a time one barely remembers?) Fortunately, because of the Internet, I’m writing all the time. I’m responding to e-mail list postings, Web boards, writing my blog. But there’s just something about putting actual ink on actual paper that just feels… sensual. Not sexy sensual, weirdos, but the original sense of the word. It just FEELS good.

I had a friend I met at Church Camp in high school who I wrote letters back and forth with. She was an aspiring poet, was smart and bookish, and I felt giddy every time a new letter would arrive in the mailbox from her. It was just a wonderful feeling to tear open a letter, hold paper in your hand as you read words hand written by someone you appreciated. I miss that.

Finally, I’ll be mailing out my first attempt to publish a story tomorrow. I’ve been writing, er, trying to write since oh… I was 10. Through high school and college and a little since, I’ve started and never completed probably around 50 or more stories. Short, novella, novel. I usually get around 5 to 20 pages in, realize it’s crap, and drop it. Completely ignoring one of the most important duties of the writer: Just write!

I hate editing. Hate it. Not that I’m not good at it, I believe I am. I’m quite competent with English grammar, despite what you see on my blog. See, with my blog I just spew stream of consciousness like I should, but never go back to edit because when I reread what I’ve written (prose or non-fiction,) I realize how awful it is and how much work is needed to make it readable, and give up. So I never edit my blog (as I’m sure you can tell.) And I try to edit AS I write fiction, which is a HUGE no-no. You’re supposed to get it out, get it down, and then only after it’s all out do you go back and edit. And edit and edit.

Author Michael Stackpole reminds the writer in his podcast and newsletter that when writing the first draft, even if you realize something major half way through that has to be added in from the beginning, DON’T GO BACK! Don’t ever go back. Make a note to add it, and then just keep writing as though it was there from the beginning. Another author has said, “Great novels aren’t written, they’re rewritten.” I’ve known that since I was 13, but I still refuse to follow it.

So, I have VERY few, like, only three or four of the 50+ half finished stories that I’ve actually forced myself to finish. This one I’m finally submitting to publish I actually finished about four or five years ago. But when I started to go back to edit, realized how bad it was and put it away. Finally I forced myself to edit it. It was a painful, degrading, self-abusive task that left me shaking my head often pondering “Who wrote this crap! Oh yeah, I did.” I had my brother at one point early in the editing look at it and make notes. He’d make a very good writer himself (if he got off his lazy butt and wrote *grin to him*,) and he filled the first five pages with notes and just stopped saying “Dude, seriously.” And only about 5% of his notes I didn’t follow. But I put aside pride and said, “This can be done. I can take this sludge, because I believe in this story, I believe in these characters, and I can pound out a better narrative.”

And so now, I have something that’s a little better than sludge. And so tonight or tomorrow (depending on when I can get stamps,) I’ll actually send it in to a magazine. And I fully expect it to be rejected. But you know, I’m OK with that. Knowing this story is OK, but not great, I expect it to get rejected, I won’t be devastated when it is. I’ll say “Yeah, that was expected,” and hope the editor may have made a useful comment about it I can use in the rejection letter (hoping it’s not a form letter.) But even so, doing this, sending it in and getting rejected, will tear down that other wall I have: fear of rejection. Another reason I’ve never REALLY tried to finish a story and send it in, because I don’t want it officially rejected by people whose job it is to know good writing from bad. So I’ll be sending this in, expecting a rejection, fix anything noted if any, and send it somewhere else. And I will keep doing that until I’ve run the gamut of genre magazines, and then I will submit it to e-zines. And maybe eventually one will take it pour gratis, and that’s fine. But in the meantime, I’ll have the will and fortitude to be working on the next story and the next.

Actually, at the moment I’m working on one of my novels. I’m still debating whether I should write stream of conscious as I do and then force myself to edit the resulting garbage, or edit a bit as I write risking not finishing it in frustration, but having something a little easier to edit at the end. It’s painful either way.

An interesting episode of Nova coming up regarding Artificial Life, and our coming very close to creating life:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01.html

An interview with Fracis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, regarding the human ability to create life from “nothing.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01-collins.html

Here is an excerpt from the interview that addresses the place of God in this endeavor:

Krulwich: So God wouldn’t be a little bit diminished if a human could make a living thing from a nonliving thing? Or humankind wouldn’t be inflated if we could make a living thing?

Collins: Well, God would certainly not be diminished. God, if it’s the God that I worship, created the universe and all the laws that regulate it, and gave us this incredible gift of an intellect. And I, like Galileo, don’t think that he gave us those abilities in order for us to forego their use. And so I think God kind of thinks that science is pretty cool!

So I’m not worried about God. I am worried about humans, because we have a long tradition of assuming greater importance for ourselves than we deserve. And so this does slip into the zone of hubris: “I’m no longer just an ordinary person; I am creating life. That makes me a little closer to God, and maybe a little less in need of Him, after all.” If somebody were to wrap themselves in that kind of philosophical mantle, then I think we’ve actually not upgraded man, we’ve downgraded him.

(First, yes, the main blog page still is messed up in Internet Explorer. I’m still working on that.)

The Crime of “Unauthorized Reproduction”

This bill probably won’t become a law. Likely won’t become a law. A LOT of wachked out bills and resolutions get written that don’t become laws. This will hopefully be one of them.

But imagine if it does pass. Imagine if Indiana legally prevents anyone who is not a heterosexual married couple from having children? Imagine if it becomes a crime to assist anyone in having children, who aren’t a married man and woman? One state makes it law, other states will follow suit and we’re suddenly in a world resembling a sci-fi distopia where thought-crimes will be the next step.

We’re actually almost there socially. It’s not a crime, yet, but you can get yourself seriously maligned for just questioning the President and doubting the necessity for war, and being labeled as “unpatriotic” for questioning authority.

(First, yes, the main blog page still is messed up in Internet Explorer. I’m still working on that.)

Bush calls for military role in epidemic outbreak:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/bush.reax/index.html

Bush began discussing the possibility of changing the law banning the military from participating in police-type activity last month, in the aftermath of the government’s sluggish response to civil unrest following Hurricane Katrina.

“I want there to be a robust discussion about the best way for the federal government, in certain extreme circumstances, to be able to rally assets for the good of the people,” he told reporters September 26.

Last month, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush “wants to make sure that we learn the lessons from Hurricane Katrina,” including the use of the military in “a severe, catastrophic-type event.”

The lesson to learn is not how to use the military for civil matters but to establish efficient and working civil processes and infrastructure. To use government resources to help the private sector to help itself. Put in place, before disaster happens, working plans of action that don’t require people to have to rely on the government to save them.

One step closer. Fascism doesn’t happen all at once. It took many years for Hitler (yes, I played the Nazi card) to wrest fascist control of Germany. Communist Russia is known to have begun with a revolution, but the dictatorial control of Lenin took many steps. And moreso in modern times in an industrial world, fascism won’t come in one great obvious move until the very end. It starts with a slow erosion of freedoms, of liberties. We’re going through that since 9/11/2001.
Exacerbated with increased secrecy and the operation of the government behind closed doors and outside the observation of the public that is supposed to run the government. This administration has been the most secretive in modern history. Secret energy commission meetings, refusal to release historically public records and meeting minutes, for a couple examples.
And now a call for increased military roles in the civilian sector.

Each step, each removal of a freedom, each little encroachment of military power, only leads to another and doesn’t lessen. It’s far easier to remove a liberty than to get it back. So the administration wants to use the military for domestic police action for a flu outbreak. Maybe during a natural disaster. Once that’s done, how difficult do you really think it would be to go a half-step further and use the military to support FBI arrests and investigations? To “aid” local police in times of “danger”?

Give the FBI or National Security agent a spiffy black uniform instead of a suit and flank him with two armed soldiers, and we might as well call “sieg hail” to the Supreme Chancellor, er President.

And every person who calls another “unpatriotic” for questioning the government, specifically the President, will be complicit in the removal of our freedom. The most patriotic act, as implied by the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution, is to question the government, hold it accountable, and force it to serve us, not the other way around.