Right, I'm taking the two dogs out for a walk before getting on my bike for a wild ride around town that will climax on top of Mt. Helix (hopefully before 3:30PM) to catch the transit of the planet Venus across the sun.
Alas, my good camera (the one with 10x zoom) fell off the wagon the other day... literally, so I'm left with the not so good camera (the one with 4x zoom and a few dust spots on its lens) to try to capture some good shot of the rare phenomenon with. That, and the eclipse glass I bought from the North Star Science Shop at the Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park, of course (if you're in San Diego and don't have a good #14 welder's shield or don't know (or can't be bothered to know) how to make a pin hole projector to safely watch the transit with, they're selling eclipse glasses at Fleet Sci Ctr for only $2).
And here's a little prayer to Venus...
Offenbach's Helen may be a bit flaky, but she has a point; Venus is a bit airy and hard to catch.... I hope you'll be able to catch a glimpse of the transit, if it is visible in your area. The alignment is so rare that if you miss this one you most likely won't live to see the next one in 2117. If you are in South America or Africa, though, I'm afraid the transit happens at night your time, and so isn't visible... though you can watch the event live via the NASA Edge Program at Mona Kea, Hawaii.
Edit: Well, well, it's nice and sunny outside (I was expecting at least partly cloudy today)... think I'm heading to the beach instead of up the mountain to catch Venus (after all, who wants to ride down wiggly Alto Dr after sunset anyhow? Besides, the sun will look bigger as it sinks into the ocean!).
The computer is malfunctioning, so I'm taking it easy on this blogging thingy. Am running into lot of interesting stuff this month, though. will drop in to tell you about some of them later, but for now here's a cool video for the cool weekend.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Richard Phillip Feynman, but that doesn't stop me from missing the man every now and then. Why?
"Question:When you are looking at something, do you see only light or do you see the object?
Prof Feynman: The question of whether or not when you see something you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with.
Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting and eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he's looking at perhaps might only be the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that weren't able to make that analysis and that idea have fallen by the wayside from hunger."
I read too many books at once and end up not retaining as much of each as I would like to. Though some books manage to capture my attention more than others
I'm one of those eaters who sometimes doesn't want to know what I'm eating. Knowing the chemistry involved in the food-making, though, is a different matter altogether. I'm a glutton for info like this...
I'm glad she said 'burp' instead of 'fart'...
If the video on this page doesn't work for you, try going to the original source here.
Guess I should be glad I was always too fascinated by the telescope and the microscope to pay much attention to the horoscope else I'd be experiencing such an identity crisis right about now!
Indi half-dog-half-kangaroo (either half-kangaroo or half-jumping bean. I think the former isn't as big a genetic leap as the latter is) took me out for a stroll Sunday evening. It was cloudy and chilly. Probably in the mid 60's Fahrenheit (yes, that is "chilly" by a spoiled Southern Californian standard. If it ever gets cold enough here for the car doors to freeze shut, most of us would be unconscious and couldn't careless about using normal people's adjective in describing coldness).
I was bundled up in 3 layers and dreaming of steaming mugs of hot cocoa while furry Indi just went about her business with total indifference to the dropping temperature... Which, naturally, made me ponder about the 'common wisdom' that man is the most evolved species on the planet.
But, of course, man is not 'the most' evolved species on the planet. All the other species (hyperactive furry canines included) are just as evolved as we are! We just evolved differently to cope with our natural niche. And that's the same thing all the other living species do!
Drop an unarmed man into the middle of the wilderness anywhere with no tool whatsoever (knife and flint included), and most likely he won't survive anywhere nearly as well as all the other untooled local species can and do. Indi the kangadog, for one, is so well insulated by her fur that she'll be able to survive winter nights out without suffering hypothermia. Without my clothes, I probably won't be able to do that. And if the cold doesn't do me in, I'd probably starve because I'm not fast enough nor can I see well enough without my glasses to catch a rabbit or a panicky squirrel for dinner.
Physically Indi the dog and Spooky the squirrel are much better adapted to the Southern Californian land environment than I am (and I can't live in water the way the sea bass and other fish can either). The one luck I and my fellow humans have, however, is that many many moons ago our human ancestor hit the genetic jackpot with brain development. Intelligence. It doesn't give us any physical advantage to other less intelligent species, but it along with the physical convenience of the opposable thumb allow us to improvise like no other earthlings could. We can't run as fast as the cheetahs can, but we thought up and built not only speedy cars but even rockets that can travel beyond our solar system. We can't see as well as the eagles do, but we thought up and created binoculars and even telescopes that can see galaxies forming so far away that it takes light 14 billion years to deliver their sight to us.
Having said that, having intelligence and using it are two different things. Why do I keep hearing people dissing the effort to reduce CO2 gas in the atmosphere and (hopefully) reversing the current global warming trend as if the natural- or unnatural- ness of its cause should make us behave differently? If you know that a moon-size meteor is taking a dead aim at planet Earth, would you not want the scientists to do everything possible to try to prevent the collision - regardless of how natural the event is? If you spot a naturally occurring wall of wild fire making a mad dash toward your house, would you not ask the firefighters to try to fight the blaze? Shall we sit prematurely defeated at home instead of organizing flood containing levees of sandbags when the river nearby overflows its banks?
Why should inaction be excused if man isn't the main cause of the current speedy warming trend (though the scientific consensus is that it is)? We are not trying to save the earth itself. The planet will survive the next ice ages as well as boiled ages with or without us. What the sensible people are trying to do is to do what is humanly possible to preserve the current earthly condition that supports our species' survival... regardless of whether its cause is more natural or man-made. Yes, the earth has seen many naturally heated and iced periods in the past. But why let it lapse into one of those humanly inhospitable conditions again if we can do anything at all that may prevent it???
The earth is going to be here whether Southern California turns into the bottom of a hot ocean or a frigid mile-thick glacier... You can either do what you can to prevent so drastic a climate change that will make it hard for your offspring to live or you can just sit on your hands while condemning others for causing you energy-inconveniences in their attempt to pass along a humanly viable earth to future generations. There is no escaping doom in the latter, whereas the former retains a possibility of survival. And if the driving force of this drastic climate change is more natural and our every efforts to stop and reverse it fails, at least the species will have gone down in fighting dignity rather than as a bunch of defeatists. If only all choices in life can be as clear cut!!!
PS: If you click on the link at 'climate change' to see the EPA's page on the phenomenon, be sure to read the footnote at the bottom of the page. It always bugs me how lay naysayers like to dismiss scientific views for the use of 'passive voice'. In the scientific world 'uncertainties' are measured on a very different scale as they are in lay conversations.
Like Charles Darwin's theory of the diversity of life, Evolution by Natural Selection, Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, General Relativity, has been around for a hundred year now, and it is still being tested by current independent studies based on real observations... without failing to produce accurate results.
Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently (as of April 14th, 2010) reported on how Einstein's theory stood up better to independent observations of gravitational effects in distant galaxies than its two new challenging theories; the f(R) theory and the DGP gravity, do (calculations based on General Relativity correspond better to what were observed than calculations based on the other two theories do).
This doesn't mean that Einstein's theory has been positively proven to be 100% accurate, of course. Science is not in the business of offering 100% certainty. It is in the business of minimizing uncertainties. And the more theories like General Relativity and Evolution by Natural Selection withstand their (almost daily) tests against real observations and experimental data, the more confidence they earn in that they are the current best description of the natural phenomena they describe. And since the people that came up with f(R) and DGP gravity are good and real scientists, they aren't pushing for their idea to be given equal time in science class with the theory that beat them.... Unlike what those people who are trying to push for a religion in disguise as a 'science' to be taught in science classes in America regardless of how thoroughly it had been debunked like to do...
Space shuttle Endeavour having an acrobatic moment while astronauts at the International Space Station give its exterior a visual inspection. The video is played at 8 times the actual speed.
Do you know? Do you? I apparently didn't... and I had written quite a few reviews for that site. :o( Here's something you should look out for:
(issue discovered and exposed by Max)
Intelligent Design is a FAILED postulation. It FAILED in its attempt to masquerade as a scientific theory. It even FAILED in the court of law when Christian parents in Dover, Penn sued to remove it from its wrongful imposition in science class at school there (and the trial, Kitzmiller v Dover, was presided and fairly ruled by a Christian conservative judge!).
What Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort are doing is a disservice both to the Christian religion and to science.... and, most of all, to the intelligence of those they are trying to propagate their willful quackery on. Dr. Ken Miller, the guy doing the lecture in the clip below, is a Christian, which means that he and I have a few things to disagree about. What Dr. Miller is NOT, however, is a sucker who abdicates his ethical will to use his god-given (pure figure of speech here) brain and ability to think in favor of lazily believing the BS other gullible human beings want to put in god's mouth.
Questioning what the certifiably unscientific quacks like Cameron and Comfort say about science is NOT synonymous with questioning god. Think about it.... Is there really a bigger blasphemy than to take whatever idiots like these says to be god's truth without even giving a god a benefit of the doubt that something as mystically powerful as that would be capable of sounding as incoherent and self-contradictory as these guys do?
Aside from KPBS's excellent recap of what happened at Kitzmiller v Dover, those really interested in knowing how Darwin's theory of evolution stacks up against the pseudo-science that is 'intelligent design' should see this very lay-friendly 2 hrs long lecture Dr. Miller gave a few years ago?
Every now and then I dump off my excess books at the local Salvation Army Store before checking their book sections to see if there's any good book I can pick up for a dollar. The check out line was moving slowly so I got to look around a bit and spotted this sign...
This store will sell you heavy things but won't help you put it in your car even if you're a frail looking 80 yrs old grandma because they're afraid that you'd sue them if you happen to twist an ankle while helping them load the stuff... or the store helper would if he twists his ankle. To hell with good will, right? Everybody is so fearful of the law even though they aren't criminal. And why shouldn't you be fearful of the law if you live in America? There are so many of them even lawyers can't keep them straight!
And while I'm ranting... Just ran into another acquaintance who had somehow warped into yet another Jesus-freak since the last time we met. I was a JF once. I know how the mind works there, but then I had the advantage of having grown out of it by the time I hit 27. It is sort of frustrating to see someone who used to make good sense all of the sudden turns into a robotic Bible-citing parrot. Definitely a progress in the wrong direction... And, as anyone familiar with how American evangelical Christians are these day would predict, our conversation quite preposterously landed on Darwin vs the Bible. I posted what I feel about people who base all their argument on what the bible says a while back, of course, so I won't repeat myself.
What really bugs me, though, is this notion that just because one is now a Christian one automatically knows all there is to know about things that haven't got anything to do with Christianity to begin with. Why is it that none of the Christian fundamentalists who have tried to convince me that Evolution dictates that life came from nothing and that the liberals want more laws because they want to impose social Darwinism on us all actually know anything about what science and evolution and social Darwinism actually say to begin with? Worse yet, they don't even realize that they are the ones who are espousing the very ideas (something came out of nothing, more laws/regulation means applied Social Darwinism, etc) they are supposedly fighting against!
Evolution is a theory of biology that address how the diversity of life on planet earth came about. It doesn't say anything about how the first life as we know it came to be... much less how the universe itself came to be (that's a question for astrophysicists, not biologists). And the physicists don't believe that something came out of nothing 'at the beginning of time' either. If anything, the Big Bang theory posits that it was space-time and everything else that existed that got bunched up into the infinitestimally small singularity that then expanded into the cooler and much bigger universe we're living in today. That's why the physicists are busy trying to come up with a grand unifying theory... they know that both Einstein's general relativity and Quantum Mechanics break down at the beginning because the universe at time zero was not only fantastically small, but it was also fantastically dense as well. The people who go around saying that the scientists think that something came from nothing have no clue what the heck they're talking about. Even the notion of 'empty' space in science really isn't empty anymore, thanks to Quantum Mechanics (quantum particles continuously pop into existence and annihilation each other, so the sum total at any given time is zero, but it is a very active zero rather than static!).
On the other hand, had they thought about the position they're championing out loud for a minute, 'something coming out of nothing' is precisely what special creation dictates. God spoke, and poof, something popped up into being from nothing... Definitely not something any scientist is espousing.
(AronRa... if I could ever have a crush on a dude, he (or, rather, his brain) would be it!) Darwin's theory was and is only a scientific theory meant to enable scientists to decipher how the diversity of life on earth came about and related to one another. It was never put forward as a social theory where 'survival of the fittest' is to be the rule of the land. Now... I don't like the idea of having more laws and regulations myself. I think there are already too many petty little laws that nobody pays any attention to and not enough sound judgment being practiced. All the same, the lefties aren't proposing rules and regulations to force 'survival of the fittest' on people. They are doing it to prevent 'survival of the fittest' from actually playing itself out in society! All the medicines and technology that science enables are being used to keep more of us alive longer and more comfortably... regardless of what defective genes we carry.
In short; if you apply Social Darwinism on real human society you don't get socialism. What you'll get is an unrestrained free market capitalism where everybody only does what is best for himself and the 'self-regulation' turns up something much more macabre than what the short-sighted right-winged fundies are capable of foreseeing! Try growing some bacteria on a petri dish and witness exactly what self-regulation is... real life isn't as neat as the text book would have you believe. The population growth chart doesn't see a smooth transition from exponential growth curve to the stabilized equilibrium line when there are real organisms involved. The line is wiggly. The 'straight' line represents the averaged population... It's akin to looking at the US weather map and expecting St. Louis, Missouri to get hit by multiple tornadoes every year because the isotherm showing where the cold northern air meet with the moist warm air from the Gulf of Mexico passes right through the city. In reality, though, half of the tornadoes in the area happen north of the city, and the other half to the south of it and St. Louis itself rarely gets hit at all.... even though the line drives right through the place. In a totally unrestricted free-market, the wiggliness of the thing will represent real human casualties. To heck with Jon Stossel and his ill-founded self-regulating skating rink analogy. In real life it only takes one spectacularly bad driver with a big and speedy car to cause a major traffic accident. And it isn't realistic to expect every single drivers on the road (some are professional drivers, most are not, and many are inexperience newbies) to be able to detect every potential car-wreckers out there. There is a LOT of room between socialism and judiciously regulated free market... and anarchy.
It is easy to take the value of science for granted when all you do each day is to uncritically use its byproducts without stopping to think about what makes such a technology possible in the first place.
So... it is refreshing to me to watch the clip above every so often and be reminded of just how far we have come and just how much knowledge the human species has accumulated over the years. How lucky I am to live in the days when I have the ability to climate-control my living space so that I can sit nice and cool in an air-conditioned room in the dead of summer, sipping on a ice-cold Crush's finest orange root beer while the sun gives its best effort to sterilize my roof and lawn. How nice is it to be able to walk outside in the cold Midwestern winter, crunching through the layers of snow for hours without getting frost-bitten because of today's high tech clothing that traps body heat while allowing perspiration and keeping out moisture... all without weighing a ton.
It's a great comfort to live in a time when I can take over-the-counter medicine for minor aches and pain, and when I can be mostly certain that I'll be able to walk out of a doctor's office alive (they don't just bleed you to death as a way of fixing everything anymore) after allowing him and his colleagues a good look at what my internal organs are doing without having to be cut open. Coming down with an illness that has neurological symptoms doesn't immediately causes you to be accused of witchcraft and liable to follow the end path of Joan of Arc and the other 'heretics' that got either burned or stoned to death nowadays... well.. in most places of the world, that is.
And, get this, I can make my favorite opera singers sing for me all day long... over and over again at my command. All it takes is to hit a little button on the stereo and - voila! - endless acoustic bliss. It a luxury many people who are a lot more talented and deserving than I am never had the chance to enjoy. Mozart could only hear his music performed when someone paid for the musicians to do it for him.... live. The rest of the time he just had to do his best to re-create it in his memory. And he could only hear the musicians that he could travel to see live performances of while I have heard... or at least glimpsed at (since recordings sometimes can't capture a performance the way it really sounds in live setting) many great musicians and actors and other sorts of performance artists via CD, DVD, television and internet broadcasts that I wouldn't be able to ever experience in person.
Scientists don't know everything. Of course not. But they are the first to admit it and to keep working hard in order to know more and more. The incomplete knowledge we have today is a whole lot better than what we had a century ago (and beyond that). I just don't get it when some folks seem so keen on just dismissing this massively useful though 'incomplete' knowledge for its 'imperfection' in order to argue for some theology that offers nothing more than assurances it can't deliver. And I don't understand why some religious people are still fighting to discredit a scientific theory like evolution by natural selection without even knowing what the theory addresses and states (and not states) in the first place... all in their quest to pit the science against their religious teaching.
"The word of God is the creation we behold, and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man -----
In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation."
Hmmm... I see the bees had already been through here.
This little Costa's humming bird was a busy glutton when I found him. He was so bent on sucking all the nectar out of the entire bush that he couldn’t care less about intrusive me and my prying camera.
Watching the feeding frenzy, I found myself wondering about how some grade school biology teachers would tell their student about the adaptation of the bird’s beak and the shape of the flower petals. How they fit so well - in some cases - that a certain type of flowers can only be pollinated by a certain type of insects or birds. Biology teachers have to be so careful with how they phrase their explanation or they’ll end up implying purpose where none is really warranted.
Adaptation by natural selection is not a purposeful nor is it a directional event. You don’t have the ‘which comes first; the flower or its pollinator?’ deal here. Both species had to have evolved together since one can’t survive without the other. The flower of a certain shape can only survive to reproduce if there also happens to also exist a pollinator that can physically enable the spores and eggs to meet... and one that is particularly attracted to the flower's particular feature. If such a pollinator didn’t already exist when the first flower with this structure appeared, then the flower would have simply died out... as many flowers and trees and animals obviously had done (and that's why 'purpose' is not inferred. If the process is directional or guided for a purpose, then there wouldn't be 'extinct losers' littering the history of this planet. Life didn't evolved on a one-on-one progressive basis. Many different varieties evolved (and are still evolving), and only those that hadn't gone extinct remain).
The pollinators also benefit from the 'fit', of course, especially when the specific hummingbird's beak type enables it to get to a food source that the other sorts of hummingbirds that have different beak-shape can't physically utilize. Then he can monopolize the food source without having to engage in more competition from other hummingbird varieties. Now... the pollinators come with varieties of their own, of course, and there is competition inside the same species (refining the 'fit') that, over time leads to greater diversity with more variations of petal shape and beak shape being accommodated by each other.
That is, until some abrupt changes in environment come about and cause a drastic drop in the population of one or more of these organisms thriving in a symbiotic arrangement. This 'bottleneck effect' is a big cause of extinction. Some organisms may survive the change, but if there isn't enough survivors to keep producing offspring that can also survive the new environment, then... Adieu, mes amis. Il faisait bien de vous connaître ...
And here I should probably give a shout out to those who love to dismiss the phenomenon of climate change/global warming as 'unimportant' or 'not worth worrying about since the earth won't get destroyed by it'. The really intelligent folks are worrying about it not because they think that the earth won't survive but because they realize that the sort of environment this climate change/global warming is leading to may not be one that OUR SPECIES can survive very well in. See the difference? And it doesn't comfort us any if we will be able to survive but the species that we eat for food will not - which also means that the survival of the species that our food source depend on for food is also of tremendous importance to us! Among other things....
Extinction... is a cold hard fact of life. That extinction occurs over and over again to reflect the change in environment and other 'stress factors' reinforces Darwin's theory. 'Survival of the fittest', be it a bit of a misnomer since a trait doesn't have to be the fittest to survive, it just has to be relatively harmless to the organisms' survival, is NOT a theory. It is an observed phenomenon of nature. A fact of life. The theory that Darwin came up with in order to explain that phenomenon is called 'Evolution by Natural Selection'. And what it says is simple - the diversity of life on earth came about because only the organisms that have the traits that enable (or at least fail to hinder) them to survive and reproduce (passing along those traits to the next generations) in the prevailing environment are spared from extinction. 'Swim or sink, you lot' is what nature says.
The theory hinges on there already being life (it does NOT say anything about how the first life came to be in the first place), a variety of it, for that matter. And it also depends on the traits being capable of modifications (mutations), and that the modified traits can be transmitted from one generation to the next. If possessors of a certain trait aren’t competitive enough and lucky enough to keep surviving to reproduce (not to mention finding a niche like the hummingbirds and the flowers with long and narrow tube-like petals enjoy), they just go extinct. The process is non-directional, but it is by no mean random. It is regulated by the prevailing environment (so if someone tries to tell you that ‘evolution says that things happen at random’, you should immediately look out for flying bullshit and other superfluously inane stuff that surely are about to start splattering around you). Had life on earth been 'intelligently designed', then there shouldn't be naturally occurred extinction now, should there be? Else, the term should have been modified into 'unintelligently designed'.... in order to fit in with what the evidence says.
Another evangelical Christian expressed her dismay at my lack of faith in ‘god’ today. It wasn't anything I did or say that caused her anguish. It is just the fact of my not believing in her religion... One of those 'if I didn't like you then I wouldn't feel sorry that we won't be meeting in heaven after it all' sentiment. Something I find both patronizing and flattering at the same time.
I believe things when it jives with real evidence. I buy into a notion when its predictions and assumptions are borne out of established patterns of nature and experimental data or a solid line of testable reasoning that can be repeated by anyone with the necessary tools. Nature itself and reality are the arbiter of what I accept as truth. If god is the maker of nature or is nature itself, why would it have any problem with that?
A real god doesn't need a middle-man/cellphone to talk to me.
On the other hand, her ‘faith in god’ is not based on ‘god’ at all. It is based on what some men wrote in a bunch of books thousands of years ago that hundreds of years later were compiled by another bunch of men who picked and chose what books to keep or to leave out - whose motives were based as much on politics as they were on beliefs. Not only does she NOT have any certain knowledge that any of the original authors were actually god or were inspired by one, she doesn’t know for sure nor does she have an indisputable chain of evidence that attest to the identity of the actual author the individual books of this religious text she worships. If you are one of those who actually think that the books of the Bible were written by the men they are named after, you have some serious research to do. Most of them weren't!
And yes, I said ‘the religious text she worships’... She can dispute that all she wants while claiming to worships ‘god’ (not just any one of the many different ideas of god put forward by many different religions, but ‘the god’... As if her willingness to believe it makes it more true than all the other notions of gods out there that she hadn’t even put in the time to investigate and study yet.... And likely never will. Bite that, Pascal!), but there is a difference, a crucial difference, between worshiping what one thinks (hopefully after having put a lot of thoughts into it) ‘god’ really is, and worshiping what other people say ‘god’ is or did or said or wants. When one would brush aside what nature itself can testify to in favor of what a man-made church and/or its representative says god said... Think about it... the choice is really between nature (which no man can fake since it is something only a ‘god’ would have control of) and what other men wrote and say and want you to believe.
If you are a god, what would you think of a bunch of self-righteous men who go around trying to pass their own ideas off as yours? And what would you think of the people that willingly accept such travesties as YOURS without considering first what your real scope of capability is? Would Renoir be thrilled with you if you ‘faithfully’ pay $1,000,000 for a grade-school level painting that I said was done by Renoir but really wasn’t?
A god that is responsible for every single thing in this mind-blowingly large universe from the tiniest of subatomic particles to the biggest of stars and galaxies, from inanimate pebbles on the beach to thinking human beings... And you are willing to believe that that powerful a god lacks the ability to directly communicate with you and has to ask some other lowly human beings to be his middle-men? To write for him? To speak for him? Honestly?
If the answer is still yes, well, I have this suspension bridge uptown that I’d love to get off my street that you can have for a very reasonably price...
Am I an atheist? No... The closest description of me is as an agnostic. Whether I am a theist or not depends almost entirely on how ‘god’ is defined. I can entertain believing in a ‘god’ that is defined as nature itself, or its most fundamental laws/essence. Though I wouldn’t be ‘worshiping’ it. A god by that definition would be in everything... me and the snail and the deer droppings on the yard included. A ‘god’ as defined with all the weird mixes of human qualities (i.e; jealousy, vengefulness, lust, temper tantrums, all sorts of emotional insecurities, and whatever else things humans feel) that the theistic religions, with perhaps the exception of the Deists, believe in, I don’t buy for a minute.
Now, I’m not writing this up to try to convert anyone. I’m just fed up with being evangelized all the time by the various Christians who have now taken to hanging at street corners in downtown and sticking their ‘come to god’ pamphlets in my face whenever I pass by (this is no isolated occurrence! It's something evangelical Christians are doing all the time now, unapologetically and with complete disregard to their preys' thinking). The 'self-defense' excuse doesn't fly when you are the ones playing offense! You guys ought to be careful... there might actually be a god out there who isn't keen on having words put in its mouth!
I have no faith in a ‘god’. If there is one, it and I can do fine without it.
Rather, I have faith in the consistency of nature
And that those who judge by the weight of empirical evidence and sound reasoning
are less susceptible to manipulation and malice than those
who defer to the judgment of revered others and humanly authors of scriptures
to avoid being ultimately accountable for their own deeds and thoughts.
I have faith in neighborly good deeds...
That are not done just for the sake of one’s religion, nor in the hope of after-life rewards
or to avoid possible eternal punishment,
but because their doers are genuinely compassionate
and have empathy and the awareness of own vulnerability.
Faith in fantasy is easy. Living with things as they really are and accepting one's own limitations and actual lack of absolute knowledge is harder. But you at least get to say in the end; 'At least I know that I don't know and didn't go around pretending to know something I really didn't.'
"It is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong." - Warren Buffet
People aren't skeptical enough about the data they receive sometimes. What exactly is this need to appear to know things or to draw a certain conclusion even when it isn't backed by solid data? Why does there seems to be a pervasive over-emphasis on 'knowing' even when one can only suspect (but doesn't really know), while the ability to recognize own ignorance or to doubt oneself is somehow regarded with disdain.... as a character flaw. A political candidate who tells the truth and says that he doesn't have a sure answer is likely to lose to a politician who lies and pretends to know the solution (even when everyone, himself included, knows that he doesn't).
Why is this so? What is wrong with admitting to not knowing something for sure because there simply isn't enough credible data to justify an informed answer? What is served, really, when we pretend to know something that we really can't back up with evidence or a solid chain of logic for? My teenage niece was doing a paper on the conservation of cougar in the wild, for her first college biology class a while back, and I got to sit in the back of the room as she gave her presentation (I was giving her the ride home). Toward the end she was asked about the current state of the cougars' wild population (to see whether the conservation techniques were working). So the dear girl, armed with a vague lay-language fact sheet from a website that states that the number of sightings of the animal 'had increased in the past 10 yrs', confidently proclaimed that the conservation techniques being used are working and the cougar populations are recovering simply because of the growth in the number of reported sighting. And what did her professor do? She smiled and nodded her approval without offering any correction or thought.
Is that reasonable to you? Think about it a bit... Just how good and solid is that data that my niece based her very positive conclusion on? What else, aside from the actual increase in the population size of the cougars, can cause the number of sighting to grow? Is the 'data' even discriminative enough to support any conclusion? The fact is... She doesn't have any idea exactly what sort of data was used to make up the 'number of sightings' that the fact sheet based its conclusion on. If the data says '10 sightings in a week', can she tell if that means that: A. 10 different people had each seen a different cougar? B. 10 different people had all seen the same cougar once and reported their sighting separately? C. one same person had seen the same cougar 10 times and reporting each encounter? D. one same person saw 10 different cougars in a week? Or if it was anything else in between?
With that sort of data, the actual number of live cougars sighted can range anywhere from 1 to 10! The only thing you can say for sure is that there is at least one out there being seen and reported on. There is nothing discriminative enough in this piece of data to infer more out of it. Also... even if the most optimistic presentation of the data is true, what else, aside from the actual increase in the number of the things being sighted, can cause the number of sightings to increase? How about the increase in the number of the people doing the sighting? How about the closer proximity between the populations of the sighted and the sighters? And how about the improvement in reporting percentage (more people who have seen a live cougar in the wild know where and how to report the sighting to the authority) now from before? (this is the same sort of problems associated with the idea that certain diseases like lupus is more wide spread than before... Has there really been an increase in the incidents of lupus or has the modern diagnostic techniques and education enabled the milder cases to be diagnosed that would have been missed before? and is this reflected in the lower fatality rate?) It is not enough to have a hypothesis and then to search for the data that would back it up. You must also search (even harder) for the data that may contradict your hypothesis!I don't know about the state of the cougar's population, but I do know for sure that the human population in the United States has increased each year. I do know that our towns and cities are expanding, that we're building more roads, and developing further into what used to be the wilderness. Wouldn't we then expect to run into wild animals more as we encroach further into their home range? In fact, the number of live cougars in the wild can be decreasing while the number of sightings increases... as long as the rate of human encroachment on the cougar's home range out-paces the rate of decline in the animal's population.So what is the proper answer to the question that my niece was asked in class? Insufficient evidence to support a conclusion! There is NOTHING wrong with admitting that you don't know the answer when you really DON'T know the answer. When you pretend to know the answer even though you really haven't got a good supporting evidence for it, you have boxed yourself in and closed the door to further investigation.
One must be aware of one's assumptions when one looks at a scientific data! And even when the data is demonstrably good, it isn't enough to seize on the most favorable (to your hypothesis) interpretation of a piece of data. You must never lose sight of the validity of the interpretations that don't fit the result you wanted. The biology professor missed one heck of a teachable moment in class that day. The lesson goes right to the heart of what separates a scientist from someone dabbling on some science stuff. Scientists aren't in the business of gaining absolute certainty. They are in the business of reducing uncertainty. It is imperative that they are intellectually humble enough to know that they don't know absolute truth, and so must work harder to get as close to it as possible.
