In another venue where I participate this article published in Arvix, Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance, and previous articles from the same source published in recent months, is undergoing a lively discussion.

In a nutshell, a couple of earth based research programs measuring the half lives of radioisotopes have a significant seasonal variation in the raw data values which correlate with distance from the sun. It was brought to our attention by scientific creationists who are constantly on the lookout for things which might dispute the widely accepted yardsticks used to measure geologic age.

I accepted those yardsticks as much as anyone short of being dogmatic about it. Upon reading this I immediately pointed out that significant variation in measured radioisotope half life correlated with distance from the sun, evidenced by seasonal variation in earth based experimental raw data, could be due to instrumentation error. To be fair though I also did some research on radioisotope thermal power supply performance on deep space probes and found there’s a rather large gap between predicted and actual performance. I also pointed out that the measured discrepancies aren’t large enough to turn a 4 billion year old planet into a 6000 year old planet. Still though, if not instrumentation error it raises a legitimate question of what the heck solar generated field or particle emission explains it and what are the bounds for this field or emission effect in the history of the solar system. The scientific creation crew have been predicting a variable half life for a long time and have been roundly dismissed by the scientific establishment at large. It looks like they might have been correct if not in magnitude then at least in principle. Credit where credit is due is my position regardless of the source of inspiration for the hypothesis.

A great article on the Big Bang and the Large Hadron Collider.

The big bounce vs. the big bang

Joseph Brean, National Post
Published: Friday, October 03, 2008

WATERLOO, Ont.. — Among the crushing throng of physics enthusiasts who gathered this week for a lecture by Sir Roger Penrose, who is to the University of Oxford what Stephen Hawking is to Cambridge, the very mention of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland elicited a resounding throaty chuckle.

Everyone knew that when the world’s biggest particle accelerator was switched on last month, its computers were promptly hacked and its superconducting magnets accidentally melted. And provided one is skeptical of all the press reports about how this “Big Bang machine” might create an apocalyptic black hole somewhere beneath Geneva, this is all pretty hilarious, just a few broken eggs for the omelette of discovery.

The capacity crowd of several hundred had a similarly blasé reaction to the nub of the lecture.

“The universe seems to go through cycles of some kind … Our universe is what I call an aeon in an endless sequence of aeons,” Prof. Penrose said in an address enlivened by his breezy Oxbridge banter (10 to the power of 64 years is, for example, “a jolly long time”), and illustrated by overhead transparencies so artful in their multi-coloured, hand-drawn penmanship that they would not have been out of place alongside a baking-soda volcano at a grade school science fair.

But this was top level, cutting-edge physics, hosted by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He described data he received just this week that appears to show traces of the previous aeon in the microwave background radiation that fills the universe and is regarded as the lingering “flash” of the Big Bang. If it actually does, a lot of science will have to be reconsidered.

Read More »

Everybody’s talking politics now. It’s enough to make me replace my “ant motel” traps with “politician motel” traps.

Oh, wait. The National Enquirer beat me to it. Yesterday, I voted in the advance poll (Canadian General Election October 14), so I can mostly just plug my ears in peace.

But passing by in the news stream, I noticed a column explaining why Teddy Roosevelt had his flaws as a US Prez. In ”Choosing the right role model” (October 5, 2008), George Will offers some interesting information about Teddy:

Having read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” at age 14, and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated “warrior republicanism” (Hawley’s phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the “Anglo-Saxon” race and lesser races. Blending “muscular Christianity,” the “social gospel” — which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation — and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.

Well, that’s classical Darwin fascism, all right.

TR invested the materialist doctrine of evolutionary struggle with moral significance for the most manly “races.” He wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor would pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put them in harness for redemptive collective action.

Sounds to me like a recipe for government paying a ton of tax money for a zillion civil servants to poke their collective nose into the smallest corner of everyone’s business and promote laws against everyone who offends them, on the theory that we are “helping” evolution.

It’s nice to see that someone other than the usual suspects like Richard Weikart ( From Darwin to Hitler) and John West (Darwin Day in America) is talking about Darwinism’s actual effects on society.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist: Read More »

…you may as well know what you’re getting:

I posted this a week or so ago but Universal and Warner shut it down for copyright infringement of the background music. It’s about the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and those involved.

View the original with the great sound track by clicking here.

This just in from a colleague:

I encourage you to take a look at the Panda’s Thumb and follow the entire thread devoted to the optimality of the genetic code. It is simply priceless. Someone styling himself Chunkdz dominates the discussion and by virtue of a very considerable gift for profane abuse, succeeds in doing what I never thought possible, and that is reducing the entire PT crowd to sputtering, dim-witted incoherence. You must link to it.

Here is the link.

One reason the artificial intelligence fantasy (”Soon computers will think and feel just like people!”) has enjoyed such a long shelf life is a fundamental misunderstanding: The computer is thinking.

Actually, the computer is not thinking. A programmer has developed a series of responses to our inputs. To the extent that the programmer can guess what we need, things will work. One way of seeing this is “thought, in the past tense.”

Just yesterday, for example, I was trying to order ten copies of a book from an automated book ordering site. But the programmer apparently forgot to build in the option of ordering ten copies at once. Needless to say, I was hardly going to order one copy ten times. But it’s no use trying to talk to the computer. I e-mailed the office and asked to have someone phone me.*

That’s what I mean by “thought, in the past tense.” If the programmer didn’t think of it, the computer won’t either.

Now, fast forward to the Turing test (can a machine fool you into believing it is a person?), which is once again being tested. David Smith, the Observer’s technology correspondent reports,

Can machines think? That was the question posed by the great mathematician Alan Turing. Half a century later six computers are about to converse with human interrogators in an experiment that will attempt to prove that the answer is yes. 

In the ‘Turing test” a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be ‘thinking’. (”‘Intelligent’ computers put to the test. Programmers try to fool human interrogators,” October 5, 2008)

October 12, the designers of six computer programs are competing for the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence - an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000. Volunteers will sit at a computer, half of whose split screen is operated by another human and half by a program. After five minutes of text-based talk, they must guess. If 30% are unsure, then the computer is said to be “thinking.”

I’ve always felt there was something pretty fishy about this “Turing test”, and I agree with philosopher A.C. Grayling who points out,  Read More »

Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea — Darwin’s idea — bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pg. 63

Unfortunately, Darwin’s idea, the Greatest Idea Anyone Ever Had — which is a totally naive and preposterously simplistic notion concerning macroevolution and the complexity of the cell, and which is based upon 19th-century ignorance about how biological stuff works — is more like Sodium Hydroxide (a universal Lye) than a universal acid.

Dennett got the pH backwards.

In a column explaining why Teddy Roosevelt had his flaws as a US Prez (”Choosing the right role model, October 5, 2008″), George Will offers some interesting information:

Having read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” at age 14, and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated “warrior republicanism” (Hawley’s phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the “Anglo-Saxon” race and lesser races. Blending “muscular Christianity,” the “social gospel” — which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation — and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.

Well, that’s classical Darwin fascism, believe it or not (and I don’t).

TR invested the materialist doctrine of evolutionary struggle with moral significance for the most manly “races.” He wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor would pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put them in harness for redemptive collective action.

Sounds to me like a recipe for government paying a ton of tax money for a zillion civil servants to poke their collective nose into the smallest corner of everyone’s business and promote laws against everyone who offends them, on the theory that we are “helping” evolution.

It’s nice to see that someone is actually talking about this.

What Makes Science ‘Science’? Trainee teachers don’t have a clue, and most scientists probably don’t either. That’s bad news.

So says James Williams, kvetching in The Scientist, 22(10) October 2008, Page 29:

As a science educator, I train science graduates to become science teachers. Over the past two years I’ve surveyed their understanding of key terminology and my findings reveal a serious problem. Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How will school-kids learn to distinguish the questions and problems that science can answer from those that science cannot and, more importantly, the difference between science and pseudoscience?

And, in “Why the Philosophy of Science Matters” (The Scientist, October 2008), Richard Gallagher follows up, grousing:

You might expect that newly minted science graduates - who presumably think of themselves as scientists, and who I’d thought of as scientists - would have a well-developed sense of what science is. So it’s pretty shocking to discover that a large proportion of them don’t have a clue. At least that’s the case in the UK, going on the evidence of our Opinion author James Williams (”What Makes Science ‘Science’?”). He found that a sizeable proportion of science graduates entering teacher training couldn’t define what is a scientific fact, law or hypothesis.

No, but why should that matter? Gallagher goes on to announce that the reason this ignorance is a problem is that the grads won’t be able to properly diss “climate change deniers, GM modification scaremongers, or creationists.” Read More »

David Berlinski & Brad Monton vs. Denis Alexander & Larry Krauss on the topic of ID. For details go here:

www.st-andrew.com/content/7794_GreatDebate_Email.pdf

Blue: Intelligent Design; Red: Darwinian Evolution; Orange: Scientific Creationism; Green: Theological Evolution

Any questions?

Source: Google Trends

Update: Due to whiny protesters who say Darwinian evolution isn’t fair, I shortened it to evolution. And just to be fair I shortened intelligent design to design.

Steve Fuller offers his thoughts on the removal of Michael Reiss from his position at the Royal Society, and what it means for academic freedom. Fuller believes that the furore over Michael Reiss’s comments signifies a worrying trend that is bad for freedom to do science. He comments further on the Index for Freedom site that.

“All theories with the grand explanatory aspirations of creationism or evolutionism are based on worldviews that people have believed for reasons other than their specific scientific payoff. The challenge then for the science educator - especially the science textbook writer — is to demonstrate how such worldviews provide the basis for valid scientific research.”

Read more - Steve Fuller - Science shouldn’t shut down discussion, Index on Censorship, 21/09/08

A friend writes to draw my attention to “Mark Lynas: the green heretic persecuted for his nuclear conversion” (Sunday Times, September 28, 2008)

We are told that

The climate change expert Mark Lynas has been scorned by eco-colleagues for daring to speak up for atomic power.

Why?

Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it. Prescription for the Planet, a new book by the American writer Tom Blees, opened my eyes to fourth-generation “fast-breeder” reactors, which use fuel much more efficiently than the old-style reactors, produce shorter-lived waste and can also be designed to be “walk-away safe”.

Best of all, these new reactors – prototypes of which have already been tested – can produce power by burning up existing stocks of nuclear waste. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.” Who could object to that?

Who? Funny you should ask. That guy went from hero to zero in six seconds, just because he made the mistake of finding out about promising new developments in nuclear power. Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the stellar courage of big science toffs is well illustrated by his experience:

When I e-mailed a senior ecological scientist with my conclusions, he agreed, but only privately. “Do not cite me as promoting nuclear,” he begged. I am still shocked that people of his stature are too intimidated to speak out. The result of this fear is that the public is dangerously misinformed about nuclear power.

Years ago, a retired Canadian scientist told me that he, for one, felt that properly managed nuclear was far safer in the long run than dependence on oil, which is disproportionately associated with dangerous politics. He also pointed out that keeping nuclear energy out of the wrong hands is a problem we will have, whether we use nuclear or not.

I guess he’d be a heretic too these days.

Anyway, American Darwin fan Jerry Coyne prophesies

There is a crisis in scientific literacy in the United States: only 25% of Americans accept our evolution from ape-like ancestors, yet 74% believe in angels.

Let’s leave the apes and angels out of it for a moment. The United States is still the world science leader, so “Coyne’s crisis” needs some unpacking.

Maybe I can help.

In the United States, and to some extent in Canada, people feel comfortable dissenting respectfully from authorities. Especially authorities that have often been wrong.

People here have access to non-state controlled media. So they know that authorities are often wrong. Yesterday, I talked about the false convictions that have depended on bad forensic science. Yes, reform is possible, of course. But reformers must start by facing the fact that “the assured results of modern science” can be plain wrong. And that requires critical thinking.

I myself have written several health science stories about wrong ideas marketed to the public. For example, being somewhat overweight is not a serious health hazard. Trying to lose a slightly excess amount of weight may harm your health more. And - since we are here anyway - any believable model of human evolution would predict that slight overweight is a plus, not a minus.

But that is only one example. There are many others. I don’t want to get into the enormous global warming controversy because I do not have the background in it. But I must say that when foretold apocalypses do not occur, the dumb masses begin to question the wild-eyed prophets of climate science. They may not say anything, but they do know what to think.

If Prophet Coyne has so few followers in his native land, he may well wish to look to his Message.

Progress in science often depends on people who are willing to turn around and start running the other way, while the herd is stampeding off a cliff.

Following up on the USA Today fantasy: “All is well in Britain between faith and science … scientists holler for Jesus in pulpits … ”

In case anyone wonders how angry the angry god of British science is - against anyone who believes in the existence of another God - read on:

In “Blinded by a divine light” (Guardian, September 28, 2008), Harry Kroto, a 1996 Nobelist and part of a cabal who went after sinner Michael Reiss explained,

I do not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs – for all I know the President of the Royal Society may be religious. However, I, and many of my Royal Society colleagues, do have a problem with an ordained minister as Director of Science Education – this is a totally different matter. An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface. Reiss cannot have his religious cake in church and eat the scientific one in the classroom. This is where the intellectual integrity issue arises – and it is the crucial issue in the Reiss affair.

I have had numerous reasons over the years for thinking that theistic evolutionists like Reiss are mostly the useful idiots of a political church, Soviet-style, but his fate surely makes that clear.