Privilege blindness

I've been slow to realize how blind privilege can make you.  I'm sure a lot of this comes from being a white heterosexual middle-class male; white heterosexual middle-class males in the United States enjoy a tremendous amount of privilege (exceeded only by changing "middle-class" to "wealthy").  The tragic part is that being born to privilege, I haven't had to think about it.  It just comes with the territory.

I haven't had forced upon my consciousness the constant undertow members of other groups feel.  The necessity of having to prove oneself constantly in order to be taken seriously at work.  The fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being under suspicion just because of your skin color or mode of dress.  The demand that you always be able to justify yourself, prove why you have a right to be treated with dignity.  The fact of being unsafe demonstrating affection to the person you love in public.

Being who I am has made it hard not to take those things for granted.  Not that I earned a single one of the privileges I enjoy; coming from the family I did, and receiving the genetics I did, automatically dropped that manna from the sky into my upturned hands.

So the gradual realization that other groups don't have the same automatic entrée into the country club has been painful.  I was also born with a fair share of empathy, so watching the struggles that my African American, Jewish, and LGBT friends go through -- hell, hearing from a female former student that she never puts out of her mind the fear that she might one day be raped -- makes my heart ache.

And it also makes me angry.  Which is why I reacted to an article a friend sent me yesterday with a string of language that I won't print here.

The story, from the site Addicting Info, is called, "Student Group Says Gays Need 'Sensitivity Training' to Be More Tolerant of Bigotry."  In it, we find out about a student group called the Young Americans Foundation at George Washington University, who wants a religious exemption for taking LGBT sensitivity training workshops.

We hear quotes from two spokespeople from YAF, the first one YAF President Emily Jashinsky:

Mandated training is not really being very tolerant of all religious beliefs.  The way that people who are deeply Christian behave is for a reason, and if you’re training them to change that behavior, there’s obviously a problem with that. There's honestly no need for further 'diversity training;' everything here is pretty harmonious.

Which is bad enough, but wait until you hear what the Vice President, Patrick X. Coyle, said:

Why is there not sensitivity training for gay and liberal groups to respect the free speech rights of other groups on campus?  Why has the student association not considered similar training to teach students to respect those who believe in traditional marriage?  The hateful atmosphere that currently exists at The George Washington University will remain as long as the university allows liberal bullies to intimidate and attack students or clubs that dare to express opinions different from their own.

Let me get this straight; you're asking a group whose members can't walk down the street hand in hand with the person they love, who are the subject of legislation targeted specifically at denying them rights that other people enjoy, who are heckled and bullied and subjected to hate speech on a daily basis, to engage in sensitivity training so they can learn how to interact appropriately with wealthy heterosexual white people?

What's next, reinstituting the Jim Crow laws so that people of other races don't get uppity?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This represents a level of "I don't get it" that boggles my mind.  But it's the same thing that caused more than one person to comment during February (which was Black History Month) and on March 8 (International Women's Day) how terrible it was that we never have a day to celebrate the accomplishments of white males.

You know why that is, you insensitive clods?  Because every single day of the year, we celebrate the accomplishment of white males.  White males never have to fight to be recognized.  We're never asked, "Wow, how did you manage to become an engineer?"  We never hear people comment about how forward-thinking our society is at having a white male President, Governor, Congressperson, Supreme Court Justice.  We never have to prove our right to be in the running, to justify our position in the world.

Because the biggest privilege of all is not having to think about how privileged you are.

People make a big deal about how we should alter public school textbooks to be inclusive, to make sure that history texts aren't just about Dead White Men, that science textbooks laud the accomplishments of women and minorities.  But the enculturation of privilege still underlies the whole enterprise, doesn't it?  The white men are already there in force; the rest have to be inserted, almost as an afterthought, to give us the nice glow of appearing broad-minded.

I'm not saying that such inclusion is wrong, mind you; only that it's the first step, and we're fooling ourselves to believe that by such actions, we're done, that we've counteracted the damage from centuries of unquestioned hegemony.  The fact that people like Jashinsky and Coyle could even ask the question of why sensitivity training was necessary, and their suggestion that LGBT individuals take sensitivity training so that they'll know their place, are particularly offensive reminders of the fact that we have a long way to go.

So maybe it's good that they revealed their attitudes, that they came right out and said what they did.  Maybe we more empathetic privileged people needed a kick in the ass to remind us that however far we've come in the past hundred years, we've still not won this battle.

Maybe it was time for someone to say, "Hey, don't forget, it's still White Heterosexual Male month."

The devil went down to Georgia

In a move that many are characterizing as the latest end-run past anti-discrimination laws by the extremely religious, Georgia's Senate has passed Bill 129, the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act," by a vote of 37-15.

The legislation would "prevent the government from intruding or abridging faith-based beliefs," stating explicitly that "laws neutral toward religion may burden religious exercise as surely as laws intended to interfere with religious exercise."

Opponents of the bill were well aware of its hidden agenda.

Senator Curt Thomas, who voted against the bill, said that he believed that the measure was a direct response to the spread of marriage equality laws in the United States.  "There’s no way anyone’s going to convince me that that’s not what’s happening now," Thomas said.   He made reference to similar measures that have been instituted in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court just ordered judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. "We don’t want to be the next Alabama and be the next circus that they are becoming."

He was not the only one who recognized the law's subtext.  Marty Rouse, National Field Director of the Human Rights Campaign, was even more blunt than Thomas.  "This bill is a reprehensible attack on LGBT people and their families in Georgia," Rouse said, in a statement released last Thursday. "It does not address any legitimate problem with current law and creates harmful consequences for businesses throughout the state.  It threatens not just the LGBT community, but women, members of minority faiths and other minority classes.  All Georgians deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and we need all fair-minded people in the state to help stop this bill."

It now goes to the Georgia House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass, and then be signed into law by Governor Nathan Deal.

The whole thing has LGBT advocates seething, for understandable reasons.  Religious rights have been cited more than once in the past few months as reasonable justification for denial of services to LGBT individuals, and the RFRA is expected to give the anti-LGBT crowd legal standing in doing so.  But given the wide support the bill has in the Georgia legislature, what can be done?

Just ask the Aquarian Tabernacle Wiccan Church.

In a statement that should go down in the Annals of the History of Bluff-Calling, the Aquarian Tabernacle Church thanked the Georgia policymakers for their "forward-thinking... dedication to religious freedom."  They then outlined their practices that would be protected under the RFRA, citing which lines of the legislation covered each of them.  These practices included:

• Polyamory.  "Marriage is a religious institution," the statement reads.  "A uniting of souls before the almighty...  Many Wiccans live in multi-partner households, and until now have been unable to realize their religious right to marry the partners they are in love with.  Many of these partnerships have children from multiple partners all living under the same roof.  SB 129 has now opened the way for those children to all be under family insurance/health plans, as outlined in lines [22-23].  And if lines [34-35] hold true to their intent, then the least restrictive means of enforcing this change, is a simple revision to existing policy."

• Ingestion of psychotropic plants.  "With the passing of GRFRA," says the statement, "the ATC will be informing all Wiccans within the state of GA that there are no longer restrictions on which plants they may grow, own, harvest, ingest, distribute, or refine into compounds that the practitioner finds need to use within their religious practice, so long as no other laws besides substance abuse are broken...  As Government's definition also includes lines [82-83] “authorities; [...] or other person acting under color of law” it should be a matter of course to inform all officials to begin their refrain from detaining the practitioners for, and impeding the lawful use of said plants and animal parts.  This includes, but is no way limited to this non-comprehensive list, all plants currently residing upon any list of banned substances, plus any and all animal parts that may be found on the property or in the possession of anyone practicing the faith of Wicca within Georgia State limits."

• Drug screening by employers, and other restrictions based on "bodily sanctity."  "[The RFRA] means that all Wiccans are to be free to choose to be exempt, at the individual’s discretion regarding the sanctity of their essence, with no repercussions from Government bodies [77-83] upon an employer adhering to these inalienable religious rights, from urinalysis, blood tests, hair follicle tests, breathalyzers, tattooing, rfid chipping, or anything else that adds to or removes parts of our essence."

To which I have only one thing to say:  BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *falls off chair*

Man.  This should be good.  How many times do the clowns in elected office have to be shown that "freedom of religion" doesn't mean "freedom for the majority religion to do whatever it damn well pleases, and to hell with everyone else?"  Perhaps this will finally get it through their thick skulls that religious freedom (1) doesn't trump anti-discrimination laws, and (2) works best when the government just keeps its grimy paws off of religion entirely.  People should be free to practice whatever religion they want, in whatever way they want, unless such practice contravenes existing federal or state laws.  And that includes laws against discrimination.

How hard is that?

I certainly hope that the Aquarian Tabernacle Church pushes this as far as they can.  They seem to have done their homework, and although I can't say I buy their worldview, I applaud what they're doing, here.  And I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the legislators in Georgia backpedaling like mad to undo what they've done once they realize its implications.

Hammer of the gods

For those of you who have found yourself distressed by the heavy topics that have appeared here in Skeptophilia over the last couple of weeks -- climate change, the anti-vaxxers, the persecution complex amongst many American evangelicals, the misrepresentation of science by charlatans -- I'm afraid that today I need to bring to your attention an even more serious threat to life and limb:

Someone has found Thor's hammer in Denmark.

Yes, the fearsome weapon Mjölnir, capable of leveling mountains in a single stroke, the bane of many a Frost Giant and evildoer.  It was a short-handled metal hammer, forged in Svartálfaheim by the dwarf brothers Sindri and Brokkr.  They also at the same time made a few other special offers, including Odin's spear Gungnir, and Freyr's magic boat Ski∂bla∂nir and golden boar Gullinbursti.

No, I don't know how you forge a pig.  But then, I'm not a dwarf, which probably has something to do with my lack of expertise.

Be that as it may, Thor's hammer was considered by the Norse gods to be the best of the gifts that the dwarves ever made, because not only did it smash anything you like to rubble (its name means "the pulverizer" in Old Norse), it returned to Thor's hand when it was thrown, which is pretty convenient.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, the problem is that it, like the spears and boats and golden pigs and (in fact) the Norse gods themselves, are mythological.  I.e., not real.  This is a point that seems to have escaped a lot of people, most notably Giorgio Tsoukalos (he of the amazing hair), who thinks that they were aliens.  The Norse people couldn't just have made them up, he says.  No way could people dream up valiant warriors and magical powers and epic battles between good and evil without it having some basis in the visitation of Earth by extraterrestrials.

Which therefore also presumably explains how Tolkien came up with Lord of the Rings.

So, according to the story over at Ancient Code that I linked above, we now have concrete proof that Thor existed, because they've discovered his hammer at an archaeological dig on the island of Lolland, in Denmark.  The hammer bears an inscription that says, "Hmar is" ("This is a hammer"), in case we weren't sure.

This is just thrilling the Ancient Aliens crowd to pieces.  Over at Arcturi Extraterrestrial Community, we read:

One intriguing mythological figures in human history when analyzing ancient aliens connection with past human evolution is one of the most well known Norse gods named Thor, god of thunder, whom [sic] wielded a powerful hammer-weapon that would allow him to destroy his enemies and protect humanity from the giants who roamed the earth. To better understand why Ancient Alien theory truly looks at this mythological figure as an intriguing character for ancient alien influence, one must have a basic understanding of who Thor was and his role on Earth, who his enemies were, and where his majestic and mythical hammer (named Mjollnir [sic]) came from... Could it be possible that
Thor's Hammer is some kind of ancient alien weapon that allowed him to reign throughout the lands and protect his people?

Furthermore, it was said that Thor's Hammer was made by two dwarfs. This really interested us because Ancient Alien theorist [sic] do believe in various alien races, which could lead us to believe that these dwarfs could have been Grey Aliens, commonly depicted as standing 3-4 feet in height and having an advance knowledge in technology which could be mistaken as magic to those who are unaware of the power behind the laws of the Universe. In addition, it seemed that the Hammer was made to be used with the aid of two "iron" gloves, perhaps giving some kind of a magnetic signal to the Hammer, so when thrown, the Hammer would return to Thor. Looking deep into the depictions of the use of this weapon, it really seems more like a modern day weapon, something conceivable to us today, but magical to those in the past.

So that sounds pretty amazing, and you can certainly see why this discovery has induced the Norse-gods-are-aliens aficionados to leap about making happy little squeaking noises.

But unfortunately, there's a problem with all of this, and although I hate to put a damper on their enthusiasm, but I feel honor-bound to mention it.  If you look at the photographs of the artifacts released by the National Museum of Denmark, you can see that the newly-discovered Mjölnir, fearsome hammer of the gods, bane of the giants...

... is only about five centimeters across.

For those of you who don't think well in metric, that's a little under two inches.  With a hammer that size, Thor would have been able to fell mice, and possibly a bunny, but not much more than that.  The Frost Giants, on the other hand, wouldn't have had much to worry about.  So the archeological find is probably just a piece of Norse jewelry, and all of the hype a bit anticlimactic.

Not that this will stop Giorgio Tsoukalos et al.  As we've seen over and over, it doesn't take much to get him excited.  Expect an episode on this amazing find on the This Really Isn't History Channel soon.

Miasma and misrepresentation

One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about woo-woos is the fact that they will take incorrectly or incompletely understood scientific research and pretend that it supports whatever goofy idea they are currently promoting.

It's why the creationists immediately go for the holes in scientific knowledge as support for the universe being 6,000 years old (the "god of the gaps" idea), throwing in an occasional bit of actual science as support, and ignoring the vast ocean of evidence that completely discredits their claim.  It's why the homeopaths talk about vibrations and quantum states as if they understood what they were saying, stopping with Deepak Chopra in their quest to find out what the scientists themselves have to say on the matter.

I ran into an especially good (or bad) example of this yesterday, when I bumped more-or-less accidentally into a concept from the woo-woo canon called "Inherited Miasma."  Here's what the Ascension Glossary has to say about inherited miasma:

Miasma is a psycho-spiritual inherited distortion created by trauma, abuse, fear based belief systems and Soul Fragmentation which, over time, was genetically encoded in human DNA, and resulted in various forms of dis-ease or imbalance. These dis-ease patterns were then encoded and passed down in Negative Ego behaviors or DNA code from generation to generation from the genetic alteration made from the NAA influence. Levels of the passed down distorted or flawed DNA would result in a dissipation of the original form of the disease. The manifested diseased energy and its physical body pattern would sometimes skip generations. The dissipated energetic pattern (cellular memories from the Ancestry or Family of Origin) of the original disease would then manifest in future generations in lesser or hybridized forms.

Which sounds pretty scary, especially when you find out that "NAA" stands for "Negative Alien Agenda," which, we are told, consists of the plans of a bunch of alien psychic parasites to use us as a food source.

If you descend from people who were oppressed at some time in history (who doesn't?), not to worry; you can get past all of this:

When one awakens, one will then need to decide what you want to energetically “wear” - as everything you inherited in your family (and the collective human race) does not have to become a part of your self-defined identity. As you observe and take responsibility for what you are inhabiting (this is your fleshly body) and being accountable to the current station of your life circumstances, one can participate with healing your genetic and miasmatic relationships that reside as energetic memory in your flesh. In most cases if you pay attention to the various patterns (attitudes, ideals, emotional intelligence) in your current Bio-Family dynamic, you will know these archetypal patterns extend to other lifetimes as well as hold relevant information and clues to what you agreed to heal (types of collective human miasma) while you incarnated on planet earth during the Ascension Cycle.

So yeah, that's a relief.

What is maddening about this is that these wingnuts don't have any evidence to support their claims, and they don't need to; the claim itself is so vague that you could decide that damn near anything you experience comes from "miasma."  Headache?  It's because one of my ancestors got punched in the nose.  High blood pressure?  My ancestors experienced stress that is now encoded in my genes.  No specific, testable, potentially falsifiable statements, just an evil influence stalking us from our long-dead relatives.

Convenient, no?

Miasma by Robert Seymour [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Okay, now for the really maddening part.  These folks have latched on to some actual science as support for their silly pseudoscience.  A relatively recent discovery in genetics is that some variations in a population are not due to changes in the DNA itself, but due to changes in the transcriptional potential -- the degree to which certain genes are expressed.  Called epigenetics, this phenomenon often has to do with the amplification or silencing of genes in parents or even grandparents, which then affects how the children (or grandchildren) express their own copies of the genes.  It's kind of a weird twist on the ideas of Lamarck -- that in certain cases, acquired characteristics can be inherited.

A fascinating example of this phenomenon just came out in Scientific American last month.  A study has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have elevated levels of stress hormones.  The leader of the research team, Rachel Yehuda of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, found that children were influenced in utero by the stress their mothers were experiencing:

It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol. The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats. The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults. This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations.

Note how precise the language is.  No hand-waving psycho-spiritual inherited distortions; a specific claim that elevated cortisol levels in a pregnant woman can affect her child's ability to transcribe a gene related to cortisol metabolism.  Measurable, testable, and based in comprehension of the actual science.

The unfortunate part, though, is that the "inherited miasma" people love epigenetics, the same way the homeopaths love quantum physics, because at a quick read the science appears to support their crazy stance.  They read the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article on the topic (I swear, from some of the stuff I've read, they can't have done any more than that), and then blather on about how inheritance doesn't require DNA, our ancestors' spirits are still influencing our lives, karma, reincarnation, and off the edge of the cliff they go.

Look, it's not that I'm some kind of elite scientist myself; one of my faults is that my knowledge is a light year across and an inch deep.  I'm a generalist, a dabbler, a dilettante, or whatever other related epithet you want to throw at me.  But when I talk about something, I take the time to read what the actual non-dilettantes have learned about it, rather than picking up a ten-dollar word or two and then pretending I'm claiming something valid.  Anyone else can do the same.  What these people are doing is not only misleading, it's lazy.

And frankly, I'm glad that there's no such thing as inherited miasma.  I've done a good bit of genealogical research on my family, and some of the people I descend from went through some seriously awful times, which, given that they were mostly French and Scottish peasants, is perhaps not too surprising.  On the other hand, one of my ancestors, one Alexander Lindsay of Glamis, Scotland, apparently lost his soul to the devil in a card game.  So maybe there's something to it, after all.

The source of the noise

A common theme in Skeptophilia is that people in general need to learn some scientific terminology.

Not only is science cool, and thus learning about it a worthy goal in and of itself; but knowing how science works, and some of the field's vocabulary, will keep you from being duped.  As we've seen over and over, the world is full of folks who either through ignorance or outright duplicity misrepresent what scientists are doing -- and without adequate mental firepower, you're gonna fall for their nonsense every time.

As an example, this weekend, a story started popping up all over that claimed that we'd finally received a good candidate for an alien signal from an extrasolar planet.  This immediately caught my eye -- it is one of my dearest wishes that we have incontrovertible evidence of alien intelligence before I die.  I'd be perfectly satisfied if it comes in the form of some kind of radio signal, but if an actual alien spacecraft landed in my back yard, that would also be acceptable, at least until they started vaporizing my dogs with laser pistols.

So my reaction was one of cautious enthusiasm.  Cautious, because I suspected that if this had actually happened, it would be all over the news, not just surfacing in the form of links on Twitter and Facebook.  But the stories all made the same claim.  Here's an excerpt from the version that appeared on UFO Blogger:

Astronomers have picked up a mystery "noise" which they believe could be coming from an Earth-like planet in the outer space [sic]. After analyzing the strange signals emitting from the object, scientiscientistssts [sic] are certain that a habitable planet exists some 22 light years away, a report said. 

In 2010, scientists had dismissed the mystery noise or signals as stellar bursts but after the latest research it was clear that an Earth-like planet, or Gliese 581d, has conditions which could support life, and is likely to be a rocky world, twice the size of Earth.

Okay, given the typos and grammar, it's not exactly the most credible of reports.  But all of the links I saw agreed; an extrasolar planet called Gliese 581d, 22 light years from Earth, had been reported as the source of a strange, unexplained noise.  The planet was bigger than Earth, but in the "Goldilocks Zone" -- the "just right" region around its star where water would be in liquid form, and therefore a place where life something like what we have here could evolve.

So immediately I started picturing Star Trek-style aliens, complete with fake rubber alien noses and bad accents.  Then I thought of the amazing final scene in Star Trek: First Contact, which is clearly the best movie the franchise ever produced, wherein Zefram Cochrane shakes hands with a Vulcan for the first time.  And before you know it, I had myself worked up into a lather about the possibilities.

Then I thought, "Calm down, dude.  Verify your sources."  So I typed "noise Gliese 581d" into a Google search to see if I could find out where this information had come from.  Clearly it was all similar enough that it had some kind of common origin, and it wasn't wacky enough to have come from The Weekly World News.  And after five minutes' search, I found the press release in Phys.org that had caused the stir -- the origin of the "noise."

And I put "noise" in quotation marks for a good reason, as you'll see.  The press release was a blurb summarizing a paper in Science by Anglada-Escudé and Tuomi called "Stellar activity masquerading as planets in the habitable zone of the M dwarf Gliese 581."  Here's the relevant passage:

A report published in Science has dismissed claims made last year that the first super-Earth planet discovered in the habitable zone of a distant star was 'stellar activity masquerading as planets.' The researchers are confident the planet named GJ 581d, identified in 2009 orbiting the star Gliese 581, does exist, and that last year's claim was triggered by inadequate analysis of the data.

The planet candidate was spotted using a spectrometer which measures the 'wobble', small changes in the wavelength of light emitted by a star, caused as a planet orbits it. In 2014 researchers revisiting the data said that the 'planet' was actually just noise in the data caused by starspots. The possible existence of the planet was widely dismissed without further questioning. 

But now researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of Hertfordshire have questioned the methods used to challenge the planet's existence. The statistical technique used in the 2014 research to account for stellar activity is simply inadequate for identifying small planets like GJ 581d.

Note the use of the word "noise" twice.  This, apparently, is the source of the story of an alien noise coming from Gliese 581d.

Scientists use the word "noise" differently from the rest of us.  To a scientist, "noise" is scatter in the data, background junk, that might obscure something real and measurable (the "signal").  If you have enough noise, the signal becomes impossible to detect, so reducing the noise in a data set is critical.  A high "signal-to-noise ratio" is what you're after; lots of signal, little noise.  So when the astrophysicists re-analyzed the data from 2009 that had been rejected last year as supporting an Earth-like extrasolar planet around Gliese 581, they found a way of reducing the noise in the data, and were able to confirm that the planet did, actually, exist.

What they did not find was some kind of unexplained noise coming from Gliese 581d.  The noise was the scatter in the data, not some Klingon sending an insulting message at the Earth such as "Hab SoSlI' Quch" ("Your mother has a smooth forehead").

Not that I'm happy to report this, mind you.  No one would be more thrilled than me if we had received an alien communiqué, even if it contained an insult.  But unfortunately, the stories about mysterious and unexplained alien noises turn out to be unmysterious and completely explainable ignorance of bloggers regarding the use of scientific vocabulary.

So we keep waiting.  Given the number of extrasolar planets the astronomers are discovering, I'm still optimistic that one day, we'll find the aliens.  Or maybe they'll find us.  Either way, it'd be amazing, because, after all, Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam ("Today is a good day to die").

Solution to the Census-Taker puzzle...

A few days ago, I posted a puzzle, and challenged my readers to try to solve it.  I've had several requests for the solution, so here it is.  (If you're still working on it, read no further!  It's always more fun to work something out yourself than to have someone simply tell you the answer.)

Here's the puzzle:

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters. 

The man says, "The product of their ages is 36." 

The census taker says, "That's not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. The sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street." 

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "That's still not enough information to figure it out." 

The man says, "Okay. My oldest daughter has red hair." 

The census taker says thank you and writes down the ages of the three daughters. 

How old are they?

Clue #1 -- that the product of the three girls' ages is equal to 36 -- gives us eight possible combinations of ages:

1, 1, 36
1, 2, 18
1, 3, 12
1, 4, 9
1, 6, 6
2, 3, 6
2, 2, 9
3, 3, 4

So the census taker is quite right that this is insufficient information.

The second clue is that the sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street.  So let's see what the house number could be:

1 + 1 + 36 = 38
1 + 2 + 18  = 21
1 + 3 + 12 = 16
1 + 4 + 9 = 14
1 + 6 + 6 = 13
2 + 3 + 6 = 11
2 + 2 + 9 = 13
3 + 3 + 4 = 10

The census taker looks at the house number through the window, and still can't figure it out.  This is the key to the puzzle.  

Suppose the house number had been 21.  Then looking at the house number would have been sufficient information for solving it; the children would be 1, 2, and 18.  The only way that looking at the house number would be insufficient is if there were two triplets that added to the same thing -- which is only true for 1, 6, and 6, and 2, 2, and 9, both which add to 13.

The third clue is that the oldest daughter has red hair.  In the first of our remaining possibilities, 1, 6, and 6, there is no oldest daughter -- the eldest children are twins.  Therefore the daughters are 2, 2, and 9.

I hope you enjoyed this puzzle -- I think it's one of the cleverest ones I've ever seen!

Melting ice and picking cherries

I don't usually like to post multiple times on the same topic only a few days apart, lest I be seen as constantly ringing the changes on the same idea, but sometimes circumstances demand that I do.

Last week I wrote a piece about the discovery that climate change denier Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon had financial ties to the petroleum industry and the Koch brothers that he had not disclosed in his academic papers, an omission that clearly contravenes standards of scientific ethics.  Although Dr. Soon's transgressions surprised no one, it was worth noting from the standpoint of doing what the deniers themselves demand, that is, "following the money."

Shortly thereafter we had Senator James Inhofe telling a bunch of his fellow senators that because it was cold outside, climate change wasn't occurring.  He demonstrated his entire knowledge of climatology by holding up a snowball, thus simultaneously proving that your skull can be filled with cobwebs and dead insects, and you can still get elected to public office.

But what brings this topic back to my attention is the release of information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center that shows that the Arctic Sea ice is already thinning rapidly (it's March, folks) and is set to go into a melt this year that climatologists are calling "catastrophic."

Here's how the trend was described by science blogger Robert Marston Fanney:

(T)he March 4 measure finds NSIDC values sliding below previous records for the date set just 8 years ago. 

Ever since Monday, extent values have been falling by an average rate of 10,000 square kilometers each day. A steady progression of warm air fronts through the Barents coupled with well above average temperatures in the Bering and near Alaska region have generated heat pressure along the ice edge and well into the Central Arctic. 

As of today, we have extreme temperature departures in the range of +20 degrees Celsius above average in the Barents northward through to the polar zone. From the Bering through Alaska and into the Southern Beaufort near the Mackenzie Delta departures are in the range of +5 to +20 C above average. 

These two hot spots, together with another warm pool over Greenland have shoved the Arctic, as a whole, into the +2 C range. A rather high departure that is only forecast to worsen in the GFS model summary over the coming days. 

The added warmth, wind, and waves in these ice edge regions drove these extent losses and now, as of Wednesday, values had fallen to 14,383,000 square kilometers. By comparison the previous record low for the day in 2006 was 14,411,000 square kilometers, so the new record is 28,000 square kilometers lower. An area approximately the size of the State of Maryland. 2011 now comes in as third lowest for the day at 14,451,000 square kilometers or 68,000 square kilometers above the 2015 value.

I don't want to quote anything further from Fanney's post, because it deserves to be read in its entirety (please go to the link I posted above to read it), but you get the picture.  Record high temperatures for the Arctic, including many regions above the freezing point of water -- and we haven't even hit the Vernal Equinox yet.

Sea ice coverage in 1980 (bottom) and 2012 (top), as observed by passive microwave sensors on NASA’s Nimbus-7 satellite and by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). Multi-year ice is shown in bright white, while average sea ice cover is shown in light blue to milky white. The data shows the ice cover for the period of 1 November through 31 January in their respective years. [image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

The frightening part of all of this is that once you start opening up gaps in the ice sheet, there's a risk of a positive feedback effect.  Open water absorbs heat from insolation far better than snow and ice do.  This will accelerate the warming, opening up further gaps, and so on.  Storing vast amounts of heat in the Arctic Ocean will also affect the weather; the Northeastern deep-freeze this winter, and the repeated snowstorms that slammed the mid-Atlantic states and New England, were caused by a meander in the Polar Jet Stream that brought a blob of Arctic air far south of where it should have been, this time of year.  So Inhofe's snowball is actually consistent with climate models -- not that I expect him to have the intelligence to understand that.

In fact, the whole climate-denier mindset depends on three things; confirmation bias, the power of money, and a sly ability to cherry-pick your facts.  This last one is particularly insidious; that game involves publicizing like hell any specific data points that seem to support your claim, and not mentioning anything else.

You have to wonder how the deniers would explain away the latest from the NSIDC.  My guess is that what we'll hear from them is the following:

*sound of crickets chirping*

It puts me in mind of a quote from linguist Alice Kober:  "Facts are slippery things.  Almost anything can be proved with them, if they are selected correctly."