NASA, lawsuits, and jelly doughnuts

One of the questions you seldom hear asked, either of skeptics or of their counterparts, is, "What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?"

It was asked at the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, and it may have been the most telling moment of the whole thing; when Ken Ham said, "Nothing could ever convince me I was wrong," and Bill Nye said, "All it would take is one piece of hard evidence," it pointed out both the fruitlessness of debating people like Ham, and also the fundamental difference between a scientific viewpoint and a non-scientific one.  If you are a scientist, one piece of reliable evidence that your previously-held understanding is wrong would be sufficient to force a review of what you thought you knew.

I say "review" rather than "revision" because the one thing this leaves out is the quality of the evidence.  There are still the possibilities of measurement error, uncontrolled variables, and researcher bias to consider.  And factoring in these is no mean feat.  However, this is why peer review exists -- and why anecdotal reports, of the sort that are usually trotted out to support various woo-woo claims, don't sway me much.  If you want me to sit up and take notice, then go the traditional route of peer review.  Once you've done that, we can talk.

Of course, the problem is that a lot of woo-woos don't like peer review because they perceive the cards as stacked against them.  And this is when the whole issue takes on the added dimension of a systematic coverup.  In the first chapter of his wonderful book Voodoo Science, Robert Park tells the story of Joseph W. Newman, who claimed that he had circumvented both the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics by inventing an "energy machine" that could solve the world's problems by outputting more energy than was put into it -- in effect, a Perpetual Motion Machine With Benefits.  Scientists rolled their eyes and walked away, prompting Newman to blame his failure to get a patent on a conspiracy against him.  And while no one who understood any physics did much more than scoff, he gained considerable traction amongst people who love to see the Underdog take on The Man.

It's probably much the same sentiment that led to a guy named Rhawn Joseph to announce last week that he's suing NASA, claiming that the recent "jelly doughnut rock" situation was evidence of life on Mars -- but that NASA, in the way of Evil Government Agencies, was covering the whole thing up.

You might have heard about the "jelly doughnut," which made the news a couple of weeks ago.  It's a light-colored rock that appeared suddenly in the field of view of the Mars rover Opportunity where no such rock had been in earlier photographs.  The whole thing was certainly a shock -- any time you're doing remote sensing of another planet, and something plays now-you-don't-see-it, now-you-do, it makes scientists sit up and take notice.

[image courtesy of NASA]

To me, the rock doesn't look that much like a jelly doughnut; and NASA scientists called it, with marginally better justification, "Pinnacle Island."  But whatever you call it, it was sort of a mystery.  "Much of the rock is bright-toned, nearly white," a NASA spokesperson said, in a press release.  "A portion is deep red in color.  Pinnacle Island may have been flipped upside-down when a wheel dislodged it, providing an unusual circumstance for examining the underside of a Martian rock."

Well, as soon as I saw this, I knew that the woo-woos were not going to be able to resist wooing all over this story.  And it wasn't long before claims that this was alien life started to appear on fringe sites like Above Top Secret.  But now, we have someone going a step further, with a lawsuit against NASA that demands that they come clean about the nature of the rock.  Rhawn Joseph, a self-styled cosmologist, is demanding that the agency "perform a public, scientific, and statutory duty which is to closely photograph and thoroughly scientifically examine and investigate a putative biological organism."

The problem, of course, is that it remains to be seen what NASA could do that would convince Joseph that this was just a rock.  Joseph himself seems to have somewhat dubious allegiances; he has written for the Journal of Cosmology, a journal that biologist and skeptic P. Z. Myers says "... isn't a real science journal at all, but is the... website of a small group... obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth."  As for Joseph himself, it's fairly significant that he was involved in a rather ugly shouting match with astronomer David Brin and JoC editor-in-chief Rudolf Schild over a paper Joseph had submitted for review to Brin which Brin said contained "glaring faults."

So Joseph is not, perhaps, someone with the highest credibility in the scientific world to begin with; but leaving that aside (as we must, because it's always important to separate the claim from the claimant), does he have a basis for suing NASA to force them to reveal what they're hiding?

In a word: no.  I mean, think about it.  What earthly (or Martian, to be more precise) reason would NASA scientists have to cover up evidence of life on Mars?  The first scientists to demonstrate the existence of extraterrestrial life will be instantaneously famous.  Especially, as in this case, if the living thing in question is large, multicellular, and capable of slithering quickly into the view of a remote camera.  Considering that NASA has been trying to figure out if there was life on Mars since the Viking probes of the 1970s, it's highly unlikely that they'd cover it up if some living creature just happened to photobomb Opportunity's surface photographs.

But that sort of logic is apparently not convincing to Joseph.  "The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre," Joseph said, in the text of the lawsuit.

You have to wonder how the folks at NASA are responding to all of this.  Considering the bullshit they have to deal with on a daily basis -- whether or not Nibiru is heading toward Earth, what the current position of the Comet Elenin is, what our likelihood is of being struck by a huge asteroid -- I can only imagine that they just rolled their eyes and said, "Oh, hell, not another freakin' lawsuit."

And of course, even if the lawsuit is settled in NASA's favor -- which I can only hope it will be -- it's doubtful that it will silence Joseph and his supporters.  As I've commented before, once you've decided that everyone is lying to you, there is no piece of evidence that will be sufficient to convince you.

It is the salient point, really, and the acid test for whether you've left the realm of science.  If ever you are asked, "what would convince you that you are wrong?" and your answer is "nothing ever could," you are no longer doing science.  You are off in the rarefied air of woo-wooism -- and it might just be time for a u-turn.

Dentophobia

I only have one real phobia, and that is: dentists.

I know where this phobia came from.  My childhood dentist, Dr. Webre, was not of the kind, gentle, "you seem to be uncomfortable, do you need more Novocaine?" variety.  Dr. Webre graduated from the Josef Mengele School of Dentistry.  Once, when I was about nine years old, he was filling a small cavity, and I could still feel the drill.  I tried to man up, and was doing my best not to scream, but evidently I flinched a little.  Dr. Webre's response?

"Stop that jerkin' around, or this drill is going to go right through your face."

He said this to a nine-year-old child.

I know, as an atheist, that I don't believe in hell, but I'd almost be willing to revise my belief system if somehow it would mean that Dr. Webre was there.

Oh, and I haven't mentioned that when he removed my wisdom teeth, he broke one of them.  Into three pieces.

So, like I said, it's kind of understandable that I have an absurdly powerful fear of dentists.  I start feeling nauseated about a week before an appointment, and it doesn't go away until I'm in the car driving home afterwards.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Doctors have made great strides in treating deep-seated phobias.  The trick is disconnecting the limbic system fear-response from whatever the stimulus is, and is often accomplished through a combination of medications and exposure therapy.  The problem is, exposure therapy means... exposing yourself to the cause of the phobia.  In my case, it was much easier just to avoid the whole thing and hope that my teeth wouldn't fall out.

Now, let me say up front that my current dentist is awesome.  He has this wonderful thing called "sedation dentistry" in cases where you need something major done.  You not only more or less sleep through the entire procedure, you don't remember anything afterwards.  I saw this work wonderfully when my younger son, Nathan, had his wisdom teeth extracted.  Nathan was given a combination of diazepam and triazolam prior to going in.  You might be wondering what these two drugs are, so allow me to explain that the difference is that diazepam has two azepams, while triazolam has three azolams.

Okay, I admit, I have no idea what those drugs are.  But they were amazing.  When Nathan came out of the dentist's office after the extractions, he was showing the level of agitation normally associated with lobotomy victims.  On the way home, he had to exert all of his effort to avoid drooling on the upholstery.  He went right to bed, woke up five hours later, and had no memory of any of it, then or since.

So I'd seen the whole thing work splendidly, but I still couldn't bring myself to go in.  My feeling was that I'd have needed some diazepam and triazolam just to be able to make the phone call and make an appointment without fainting or throwing up.  But last month, I realized I had to do something, because one of my teeth was kind of sensitive, and I was worried that if I didn't get it checked I was probably going to regret it.

So I called and made an appointment.  The only way I was able to do it was that I kept telling myself that (1) I could cancel it if I freaked out too badly, and (2) Dr. Webre wasn't going to be there, cackling and rubbing his hands together maniacally, when I got to the dentist's office.

I made it through the following month, barely.  The nightmares started about a week before the appointment.  I couldn't concentrate on anything but the thought of OH DEAR GOD I HAVE A DENTAL APPOINTMENT IN A WEEK.  Then it was the day before, and the day of, and a sort of gallows-hilarity descended upon me.  Yesterday, during my classes, I had this frenetic, hysterical energy.  "Ha ha!" my brain seemed to be saying.  "May as well laugh, given that you're going to die in five hours!"

I know that this may all seem ridiculous to my readers who aren't phobic about anything.  But I am not exaggerating when I say that anyone who has a phobia about something they have to deal with on a daily basis -- like going outside, or the dark, or insects -- must truly exist in perpetual agony.

Anyway, I drove to the dentist's office, was welcomed warmly by first the secretary and then the hygienist, and taken into the examining room.  And...

... everything went fine.

My sensitive tooth turned out to be a little bit of root exposure from receding gums.  The hygienist and the dentist both said that it was nothing to worry about, that it could be treated with a sensitive-teeth toothpaste and a fluoride rinse, and failing that, the spot could be sealed with a simple procedure that takes about 45 minutes and doesn't even require Novocaine.  Everything else about my mouth was fine, which shocked everyone given that the last time I'd been in the chair was fifteen years ago.

Dumb luck, sometimes, is a wonderful thing.

So they made me promise to come back in a year for a cleaning.  I said I would, and I think I was being honest.  As exposure therapy goes, this one may have been fairly successful.  I can only hope that next year, I won't go through the agonizing four weeks between phone call and appointment, picturing every possible worst-case scenario my limbic system can dredge up.  I think, actually, that I won't worry very much at all.

Take that, Dr. Webre.

Fiddling while the education system burns

It's late February, and if you're a teacher, you know what that means:

Time to start worrying if you'll have a job next year.

In my own school district, we're just starting to see the proposed cuts being announced.  And while out of respect to my friends and colleagues whose jobs are on the line I won't give any details about what's come out thus far, I will say: it ain't gonna be pretty.

The problem is, it hasn't been pretty for years.  This is the seventh year in a row that my little upstate New York school district has had major staffing cuts.  We've seen classes dropped, curriculum lost.  Veteran teachers are being reduced to half-time, are teaching in two different buildings, are teaching four and five different subjects, are teaching classrooms in which every available seat is occupied.  Other, less fortunate individuals have simply been axed.  And every year we're told that the administration is really, really sorry about all of this, that they and the School Board and the Board of Regents and the State Department of Education have the students' interest in mind and are doing their level best to Keep Excellence in Education.

When are we, as a nation, going to wake up and point this out as the falsehood it is?

Oh, it's not that any of them are setting out to harm children; but if that's the ultimate outcome, does that really matter?  Shouldn't someone who is responsible for the oversight of education recognize this, and have the balls to point it out?  And, perhaps, do something about it?  But no; we're stuck with the same antiquated system of school funding, that places a stranglehold on poor and rural schools, that puts local school boards in the Hobson's choice of either raising property taxes or else cutting school staffing to the bone.

And school boards are elected positions, and the votes come from residents, who pay property taxes.  Guess how the decision almost always plays out?

The problem is that this kind of thinking -- today's dollar, today's tax increase, today's elementary school student -- ignores the fact that schools represent an investment in the future.  We don't know yet which third-grader is going to be the next Krishna Shenoy, finding a way to give quadriplegics the ability to walk again.  Which will be a Jocelyn Brown, who developed a device to help infants with compromised respiratory systems to breathe.  Who could be a Paige Cramer, who discovered that an old cancer drug could be used to ameliorate the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's.

And we're going to need the Shenoys, the Browns, the Cramers.  As a society -- and, perhaps, as a species -- we will face in the next couple of decades some of the most significant challenges we have ever seen.  Type-2 diabetes is rising so fast worldwide that doctors are calling it an "epidemic."  The effects of anthropogenic climate change are being felt across the globe.  (And sorry, deniers; it is happening, and it is anthropogenic.  The US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society issued a joint paper just yesterday that was unequivocal.  Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said, "We have enough evidence to warrant action being taken on climate change; it is now time for the public debate to move forward to discuss what we can do to limit the impact on our lives and those of future generations.")  Supplies of fresh water and clean air are imperiled; we are using fossil fuels and other resources at a rate that is unsustainable.

And what are our politicians focusing on?  Here in the US, state legislators are monkeying around with bills in twelve states that are versions of the "Turn Away the Gays" bill that was just vetoed in Arizona.  Think about it; our elected officials think that reenacting the Jim Crow laws is a higher priority than assuring that our children receive a solid education. 

This is worse than fiddling while Rome burns.  This is having a Ku Klux Klan meeting while Rome burns.

The problem is, much of the benefit from education is (1) unquantifiable, and (2) realized only in the future.  So, to our legislators, and (unfortunately) to many voters, it doesn't exist.  If you can't show that the damage being done here and now by funding cuts to schools is causing a drop in the Almighty Standardized Test Scores, then we must be doing just fine.  Never mind the larger class sizes; never mind the loss of electives, music, and the arts.  Never mind the demoralized teachers who are right now reconsidering their choice of a career.  Never mind the students who, if you don't afford them the opportunity for learning and expanding their horizons, will never accomplish what they could have accomplished, for their own good and for the good of humanity.

[image from a ca. 1899 postcard, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For some, that's not an immediate enough problem to warrant doing anything about it.  Easier to keep doing what we've always done, figuring that we'll find our way forward somehow.  But remember; like canoes, societies have tipping points.  They don't often flip as spectacularly as canoes do, which means that we can pass the point of no return without being aware of it.  The signs of an incipient crash are already here; failing inner-city schools, poor rural school districts that are merging in order to survive or else going bankrupt, overcrowded classrooms with nothing to offer but the bare-bones graduation requirements.  We have to ask, as a society, if we are willing to accept this -- seeing a whole generation growing up without the skills, knowledge, enrichment, creativity, and critical thinking ability that will be needed to lead us forward.

If the answer is no, and yet we fail to act, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

How to get disinvited

Okay, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I am (1) not particularly knowledgeable about politics, and (2) kind of clueless about human social behavior.

The first one you're just going to have to take my word for.  The second, though, has as hard evidence the fact that more than one of my students has nicknamed me "Sheldon."  And while I'm not, I hope, quite as awkward as my (nick)namesake, I have to admit that I am often baffled by what makes people act the way they do.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So what follows may be an analysis that someone who is more politically or socially adept could tear to smithereens without even breaking a sweat.  Just to be up front about it.

I am referring to the apparent conflation, in many people's minds, of the topics of politics, religion, and the degree to which an adherent to some version of one or both of the above is an asshole.  Am I wrong that there really should be no logical connection between the three?

I mean, at its simplest, the liberal vs. conservative split is about (on the one hand) being inclined to welcome change, broad tolerance for many views, and a strong belief that government should have a hand in social welfare, and (on the other) being inclined to prefer consistency and stability, a preference for traditional views of what America is and should be, and a strong belief that government should be limited to absolutely necessary functions like national defense.  I realize that there are gradations within those views -- I have one friend who calls herself a "social liberal and an economic conservative," for example -- but I think that this characterizes the divide with reasonable accuracy.

Religion is basically a decision about the existence of god, and if a god exists, the nature thereof, and some set of behaviors that this god or gods expects of you.  It's not a political statement at all.  Nowhere, at least in the holy texts I've read, is there anything that says something like, "And then the Lord saideth unto Moses, 'Thou shalt see to it that any illegal immigrants be deported back to the country of their origin, especially if they speakest not English.'"

Then, there's the third thing, which is behavior.  I've known liberals and conservatives who are kind, caring, gentle, friendly people.  Same with people of a variety of religions, and those of no religion at all.  On the other hand, I've known complete humorless pricks who identify as belonging to each of the above.  Once again: no relationship.

This makes it a little hard for me to understand why yesterday it was announced the the Conservative Political Action Conference has disinvited the American Atheists Organization, who had spent $3,000 to have a booth there.  (Their money was refunded, however, if you're curious.)

The disinvitation seems to have been issued largely because David Silverman, the American Atheists' president, said, in an interview with CNN, "I am not worried about making the Christian right angry.  The Christian right should be angry that we are going in to enlighten conservatives.  The Christian right should be threatened by us."

Now, Silverman is, in my opinion, kind of a jerk.  He is one of those people with whom I agree on religion, but who I think is not a very nice person.  (Remember: the two aren't related.  cf. What I wrote three paragraphs ago.)  I am in complete agreement that he could have put it in a more diplomatic fashion, since presumably one of the goals of being at the conference was to show scared conservatives that we atheists aren't baby-eating monsters.  Or, failing that, he could have just shut the hell up entirely.

Well.  The response from the conservatives, especially the religious ones, was loud and clear.  Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, was especially incensed, and not just at the atheists:

The invitation extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles.  It is an attack on God Himself.  American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God.  How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?

 

It makes absolutely no difference to me that CPAC and ACU have backed down and removed the booth.  I am sick and tired of these games.  

 

I will continue to denounce CPAC, ACU and Cardenas.  No conservative should have anything to do with this conference. If you do, you are giving oxygen to an organization destroying the conservative movement.

Well, just to correct a misapprehension; atheists don't hate god, they don't believe he exists.  Which isn't the same thing.  I don't think Aphrodite exists, either, so hating her on top of that would be a little pointless.

And like I said earlier; what, exactly, does being a political conservative have to do with being religious?  Really?  Okay, I'm willing to accept that by the numbers, a lot of devout Christians are Republicans.  But how do the two ideologies have the least thing to do with one another?

Or with whether an atheist organization should be allowed to voice their opinion at a conservative conference?  What, do you only support the free speech you agree with?

The CPAC leadership, of course, was cornered, and they did what you'd expect; they caved.  Meghan Snyder, spokesperson for CPAC, said, “American Atheists misrepresented itself about their willingness to engage in positive dialogue and work together to promote limited government.  People of any faith tradition should not be attacked for their beliefs, especially at our conference.  He has left us with no choice but to return his money."

So I have the rather sick feeling that all David Silverman did was reinforce people's opinions that atheists are sneakily trying to infiltrate the enemy camp and steal souls.  They've lost the valuable possibility of showing at least some conservatives that we're capable of espousing conservative political ideals without simultaneously participating in a religion.

It's unfortunate all around, and the inflammatory language of people like Brent Bozell doesn't help matters.  However, Silverman's comments, and Bozell's response, does support my third contention, to wit: there are assholes on both sides of the religious and political divide.

Academic gibberish

About three years ago, I wrote a post on the problem with scientific jargon.  The gist of my argument was that while specialist vocabulary is critical in the sciences, its purpose should be to enhance clarity of speech and writing, and if it does not accomplish that, it is pointless.  Much of woo-wooism, in fact, comes about because of mushy definitions of words like "energy" and "field" and "frequency;" the best scientific communication uses language precisely, leaving little room for ambiguity and misunderstanding.

That doesn't mean that learning scientific language isn't difficult, of course.  I've made the point more than once that the woo-woo misuse of terminology springs from basic intellectual laziness.  The problem is, though, that because the language itself requires hard work to learn, the use of scientific vocabulary and academic syntax can cross the line from being precise and clear into deliberate obscurantism, a Freemason-like Guarding of the Secret Rituals.  There is a significant incentive, it seems, to use scientific jargon as obfuscation, to prevent the uninitiated from understanding what is going on.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The scientific world just got a demonstration of that unfortunate tendency with the announcement yesterday that 120 academic papers have been withdrawn by publishers, after computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble, France) demonstrated that they hadn't, in fact, been written by the people listed on the author line...

... they were, in fact, computer-generated gibberish.

Labbé developed software that was specifically written to detect papers produced by SciGen, a random academic paper generator produced by some waggish types at MIT.  The creators of SciGen set out to prove that meaningless jargon strings would still make it into publication -- and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  “I wasn’t aware of the scale of the problem, but I knew it definitely happens.  We do get occasional emails from good citizens letting us know where SciGen papers show up,” says Jeremy Stribling, who co-wrote SciGen when he was at MIT.

The result has left a lot of folks in the academic world red-faced.  Monika Stickel, director of corporate communications at IEEE, a major publisher of academic papers, said that the publisher "took immediate action to remove the papers" and has "refined our processes to prevent papers not meeting our standards from being published in the future."

More troubling, of course, is how they got past the publishers in the first place, because I think this goes deeper than substandard (worthless, actually) papers slipping by careless readers.  Myself, I have to wonder if anyone can actually read some of the technical papers that are currently out there, and understand them well enough to determine if they make sense or not.  Now, up front I have to say that despite my scientific background, I am a generalist through and through (some would say "dilettante," to which I say: guilty as charged, your honor).  I can usually read papers on population genetics and cladistics with a decent level of understanding; but even papers in the seemingly-related field of molecular genetics zoom past me so fast they barely ruffle my hair.

Are we approaching an era when scientists are becoming so specialized, and so sunk in jargon, that their likelihood of reaching anyone who is not a specialist in exactly the same field is nearly zero?

It would be sad if this were so, but I fear that it is.  Take a look, for example, at the following little quiz I've put together for your enjoyment.  Below are eight quotes, of which some are from legitimate academic journals, and some were generated using SciGen.  See if you can determine which are which.

1. On the other hand, DNS might not be the panacea that cyberinformaticians expected. Though conventional wisdom states that this quandary is mostly surmounted by the construction of the Turing machine that would allow for further study into the location-identity split, we believe that a different solution is necessary.
2. Based on ISD empirical literature, is suggested that structures like ISDM might be invoked in the ISD context by stakeholders in learning or knowledge acquisition, conflict, negotiation, communication, influence, control, coordination, and persuasion. Although the structuration perspective does not insist on the content or properties of ISDM like the previous strand of research, it provides the view of ISDM as a means of change.
3. McKeown uses intersecting multiple hierarchies in the domain knowledge base to represent the different perspectives a user might have. This partitioning of the knowledge base allows the system to distinguish between different types of information that support a particular fact. When selecting what to say the system can choose information that supports the point the system is trying to make, and that agrees with the perspective of the user.
4. For starters, we use pervasive epistemologies to verify that consistent hashing and RAID can interfere to realize this objective. On a similar note, we argue that though linked lists and XML are often incompatible, the acclaimed relational algorithm for the visualization of the Internet by Kristen Nygaard et al. follows a Zipf-like distribution.
5. Interaction machines are models of computation that extend TMs with interaction to capture the behavior of concurrent systems, promising to bridge the fields of computation theory and concurrency theory.
6. Unlike previous published work that covered each area individually (antenna-array design, signal processing, and communications algorithms and network throughput) for smart antennas, this paper presents a comprehensive effort on smart antennas that examines and integrates antenna-array design, the development of signal processing algorithms (for angle of arrival estimation and adaptive beamforming), strategies for combating fading, and the impact on the network throughput.
7. The roadmap of the paper is as follows. We motivate the need for the location-identity split. Continuing with this rationale, we place our work in context with the existing work in this area. Third, to address this obstacle, we confirm that despite the fact that architecture can be made interposable, stable, and autonomous, symmetric encryption and access points are continuously incompatible.
8. Lastly, we discuss experiments (1) and (4) enumerated above. Error bars have been elided, since most of our data points fell outside of 36 standard deviations from observed means. On a similar note, note that active networks have more jagged seek time curves than do autogenerated neural networks.

Ready for the answers?

#1:  SciGen.
#2:  Daniela Mihailescu and Marius Mihailescu, "Exploring the Nature of Information Systems Development Methodology: A Synthesized View Based on a Literature Review," Journal of Service Science and Management, June 2010.
#3:  Robert Kass and Tom Finin, "Modeling the User in Natural Language Systems," Computational Linguistics, September 1988.
 #4:  SciGen.
#5:  Dina Goldin and Peter Wegner, "The Interactive Nature of Computing: Refuting the Strong Church-Turing Thesis," Kluvier Academic Publications, May 2007.
#6:  Salvatore Bellofiore et al., "Smart Antenna System Analysis, Integration, and Performance on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs)," IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, May 2002.
#7:  SciGen.
 #8:  SciGen.

How'd you do?  If you're like most of us, I suspect that telling them apart was guesswork at best.

Now, to reiterate; it's not that I'm saying that scientific terminology per se is detrimental to understanding.  As I say to my students, having a uniform, standard, and precise vocabulary is critical.  Put a different way, we all have to speak the same language.  But this doesn't excuse murky writing and convoluted syntax, which often seem to me to be there as much to keep non-scientists from figuring out what the hell the author is trying to say as it is to provide rigor.

And the Labbé study illustrates pretty clearly that it is not just a stumbling block for relative laypeople like myself.  That 120 computer-generated SciGen papers slipped past the eyes of the scientists themselves points to a more pervasive, and troubling, problem.

Maybe it's time to revisit the topic of academic writing, from the standpoint of seeing that it accomplishes what it originally was intended to accomplish; informing, teaching, enhancing knowledge and understanding.  Not, as it seems to have become these days, simply being a means of creating a coded message that is so well encrypted that sometimes not even the members of the Inner Circle can elucidate its meaning.

On the universal genetic code, glow kitties, and human/alien hybrids

One of the most powerful pieces of evidence of our common ancestry with every other life form on Earth is that we all read the genetic code the same way.  The RNA codon chart, the work of such giants in the field of genetics as Marshall Nierenberg, Francis Crick, and James Watson, works equally well for every species from bacterium to petunia to wolf spider to human.  It's the basis of genetic engineering; you can take an embryo of a cat, and insert a gene from a jellyfish that in the jellyfish produces a phosphorescent protein, and with luck and skill you will end up with...

... The GlowCats from Hell.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The cats' genetic decoding mechanisms read the DNA in exactly the same way as the jellyfish did, and therefore assemble the glow-in-the-dark protein in precisely the same way.  Put simply, every organism on Earth speaks the same genetic language.

It's why, as I was discussing with some students just yesterday, Mr. Spock is vastly improbable.  That a DNA-based life form could arise on another planet is entirely plausible; the building blocks of DNA, called nucleotides, are apparently rather easy to produce abiotically.  But the likelihood that the decoding protocol would have evolved precisely the same way on Vulcan as it did on Earth, and therefore result in two species that can interbreed, is about as close to impossible as anything I can think of.  So however tantalizing a plot element it was to have the tortured, half-emotional and half-stoic First Officer struggling to control his human side with logic, it's much more likely to be a simple biological impossibility.

If the extraterrestrials even turn out to be humanoid, and have the right... um... equipment to engage in some hot alien/human bow-chicka-bow-wow in the first place.

Interestingly enough, given the morning's rather odd topic of conversation, that yesterday afternoon I ran into a website that claims that not only are human and alien DNA compatible, but that we are hybrids already.  Well, at least some of us are.  Frankly,  it's a little hard to tell what exactly the writer is claiming:

Civilizations from parallel realities and parallel dimensions similar to our own reality have been manipulating human DNA from the beginning of our recorded history and it is highly likely that all of this activity over the decades is the visually elusive air traffic of beings involved in one singularly focused mission involving humans.  This genetic program is a part of our human history,  it is here with you and I now and will continue flowing down line into humanities future.  It is time to accept the fact that we are hybridized humanoid beings with alien DNA.

The problem is, human DNA is pretty much like the DNA of any other terrestrial species, as I mentioned earlier.  There's nothing alien about it.  But this doesn't stop the owner of the website, The Hybrids Project, from claiming that we're somehow... different.  And getting more different all the time:

Hybridization of a conscious humanoid appears to be quite complex. Evolution is not ruled out, but there is a point at which highly advanced humanoids begin to upgrade other humanoids. The benefits of this process would, at its simplest, be the perpetuation of life, intelligence and consciousness. This is a logical expectation within an infinite multiverse and likely a process that spans countless worlds and vast expanses of time as we know it. Earth is but a part of the process and not the process itself. We will come to realize that we are part of a larger galactic family and the relatives are coming to introduce themselves.

I have to admit that we certainly could use an upgrade, given some of the behavior we like to engage in.  But the kind of thing that this website goes on to describe isn't, as far as I can tell, much of an improvement.  The alien species he describes are all a little... sketchy.  We have the Tall Grays and the Short Grays, who differ only in size and otherwise are your typical bald, skinny gray aliens with enormous black eyes.  Then there are the Tall Whites, which are bald, skinny white aliens with enormous blue eyes.  None of these, frankly, are my type.  I'll stick with plain old Earth women, thanks.

At least a bit more appealing are the Tall Blonds, the male version of which looks a little like Orlando Bloom.  But then, finally, we have the Mantid Beings, which are just horrifying.  The idea of a human/mantid hybrid would imply that there was some way for a human to have sex with what amounts to a giant grasshopper, a mental image which I really didn't need to have bouncing around in my skull.  (And about my decision to pass it along to you: "You're welcome.")

By the way, if you're curious to see what any of these things look like, I encourage you to peruse the website, which is chock-full of artists' depictions and is really highly entertaining.

Also on the website are all sorts of descriptions of abduction experiences, in which Earthlings were captured and brought on board ship and examined, probed, and worse by various members of these alien species.  The hybrid children thus produced, the website tells us, "are quite different and far more advanced than you and I and thus are currently living off world out of harm's way."  Which is pretty convenient.  All of the kids I see on a day-to-day basis seem like regular old people to me.  None of them have gray skin or black eyes or look like Orlando Bloom or a giant praying mantis.

Fortunately.

So, anyway.  As much as I love the idea of extraterrestrial life, the tales of abduction and hybridization and so on seem to me to be not only delusional, but biological impossibilities.  Much as some people don't like the idea, Homo sapiens forms nothing more than a tiny little blip in a continuum with other terrestrial life forms -- any interesting features we have, like our (relatively) large brains, are perfectly well explained by the evolution and genetics we already understand.

Which, in some ways, is too bad.  Mr. Spock was kind of cool.  And if I'm wrong, let me just mention to any alien life forms who might be looking in my direction; I'm already spoken for.

Islam and the fatwa against Mars One

Sometimes I run into a story that infuriates the absolute hell out of me.

Most of the time, I can maintain a sense of perspective about things, even if they frustrate me.  Despite my often strongly-worded missives here on Skeptophilia about the illogic of certain claims, very little of it gets me truly angry.

Yesterday, though, I ran into a story at The Register that raised my blood pressure into the "incipient aneurysm" zone.  The subject of it was a fatwa issued by group of Muslim clerics -- preventing observant Muslims from participating in the Mars One mission.

[image of the Martian surface courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, on first glance, this isn't surprising.  Traditional Islam isn't known for its progressive stance with respect to science.  (Contrast that to Islam in the Middle Ages -- when they were the shining lights of reason and rationalism and experimental inquiry.)  But it becomes more interesting -- and infinitely more absurd -- when you find out why the fatwa was issued.

"Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam," read part of a statement from a committee appointed by the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowment, as reported in The Khaleej Times.  "There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death."

Dr. Farooq Hamada, president of the GAIAE, went on to say, "Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe is an issue agreed upon by all religions and is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Qu'ran: Do not kill yourselves or one another."

Now wait just a second, here.  Seriously?  You're concerned about observant Muslims joining what could turn out to be a suicide mission, and so your response is to issue a fatwa against the Mars One mission?

How about issuing a fatwa against suicide bombers?  Or the Muslims who are right now slaughtering each other in Syria?  Or "honor killings?"  What about the fact that seven of the top ten countries, in terms of numbers of executions, are Yemen, Iran, Syria, Libya, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, and in those countries the execution methods include public hanging, beheading, and stoning?  The Muslim world has a few bigger problems at the moment than the chance that some observant Muslim might end up on a mission that could end with the deaths of the participants.

Oh, but wait!  Coming together, as a unified voice, against any of that other stuff would be controversial.  That would require the hidebound, patriarchal, tribal-minded leadership to reconsider some of what their devout adherents are actually doing.  It might even require them to say, "You know that violent, brutal, inhumane shit that we've accepted for all of these years?  That stuff is wrong.  It's always been wrong, but we've been too cowardly to say it.  So you people need to knock it off."

To be fair, there was a fatwa issued against terrorism, back in 2010.  It was hailed as a landmark by press in the west -- and then promptly forgotten.  Ever heard a leader of any Muslim country mention it?  Have you noticed a decrease in violence in the Middle East in the last four years?

Didn't think so.

It's possible that if the leaders of all of the Muslim countries -- and that includes the religious leaders, since politics and religion in most Muslim countries are so entangled as to be inseparable -- said, with one voice, that killing others would condemn the killer to hell, that some of it would stop.  At least, perhaps, it might slow down the killings that are motivated by Islam itself, the ones that are acts of violence committed in the name of some twisted notion of sanctity and purity and holiness, where all too often the victims are random strangers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But that's not going to happen.  It's much easier to go around issuing fatwas against distant eventualities (Mars One, even if it succeeds, isn't going to depart for the Red Planet until 2023) than it is to change present evils that have been accepted without question by the leadership up to this point.  It's much easier to give lip service to "protecting life against all dangers" than it is to demand that the people here and now who are raping and murdering cease and desist.

You have to wonder, don't you, what would happen if all the religious leaders of the world finally stood up for human rights?  I'm no apologist for the Catholic Church, but I have to admit that Pope Francis has made some real strides in that direction.  But the others?  Not so much.  Most of them are too busy worrying about who is having sex with whom to deal with the issues of how their followers are infringing on the basic rights of their fellow humans.  And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the Muslim leaders are about the worst offenders in this regard.

I don't know how much this blog gets read in Muslim countries.  Not much, is my guess.  But you never know.  And so I'll issue this challenge: if you really claim to follow the Qu'ran, then the verse that Dr. Hamada quoted should be taken at its face value.  Your leaders need to demand, now, that all of the murders and suicide bombings and honor killings and public executions stop.  All along, they have tacitly supported a worldview that allows people to claim that they are observant Muslims, approved by Allah, and are headed to heaven, while simultaneously hurting or killing others (and sometimes themselves).

Maybe you could change that.  Turn your religion into a force for good.  Leave aside useless gestures like objecting to missions to Mars, and deal with the problems that some of your followers are causing here and now.

To do any less is pure hypocrisy.