A consummation devoutly to be wished

Like a lot of people, I'm struggling right now against sleep loss because of the silly switch from Standard to Daylight Savings Time, a switch I've heard compared to "cutting the top off a blanket and sewing the piece on the bottom to make it longer."

Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that it's still light when I get home from work, but given how far north I live, that'd have happened eventually anyhow.  And seems to me that since a lot of people like having more daylight hours after work, it'd make sense just to keep it that way, and not to return to Standard Time in November, further fucking up everyone's biological clock.

I mean, I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.  I've been an insomniac since my teenager years.  I never have trouble falling asleep -- my problem is staying asleep.  I'll wake up at 1:30 in the morning with my thoughts galloping full tilt, or (more often) with a piece of some song running on a tape-loop through my head, like a couple of nights ago when my brain thought it'd be fun to sing the Wings song "Silly Love Songs" to me over and over.

I hated that song even before this, but now I really loathe it.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Evgeniy Isaev from Moscow, Russia, Sleeping man. (7174597014), CC BY 2.0]

In any case, it was with great interest that I read some recent research from Bar-Ilan University (Israel) that has elucidated the purpose of sleep -- something that up till now has been something of a mystery.

In "Sleep Increases Chromosome Dynamics to Enable Reduction of Accumulating DNA Damage in Single Neurons," by David Zada, Tali Lerer-Goldshtein,  Irina Bronshtein, Yuval Garini, and Lior Appelbaum, which appeared last week in Nature, the authors write:

Sleep is essential to all animals with a nervous system.  Nevertheless, the core cellular function of sleep is unknown, and there is no conserved molecular marker to define sleep across phylogeny.  Time-lapse imaging of chromosomal markers in single cells of live zebrafish revealed that sleep increases chromosome dynamics in individual neurons but not in two other cell types.  Manipulation of sleep, chromosome dynamics, neuronal activity, and DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) showed that chromosome dynamics are low and the number of DSBs accumulates during wakefulness.  In turn, sleep increases chromosome dynamics, which are necessary to reduce the amount of DSBs.  These results establish chromosome dynamics as a potential marker to define single sleeping cells, and propose that the restorative function of sleep is nuclear maintenance.

"It's like potholes in the road," said study co-author Lior Appelbaum in an interview with Science Daily.  "Roads accumulate wear and tear, especially during daytime rush hours, and it is most convenient and efficient to fix them at night, when there is light traffic."

This repair function is critical for cellular and organismal health.  If mutations and chromosomal breaks aren't fixed, it can trigger the death of the cell -- which, in the case of neurons, can create havoc.  You have to wonder if some of the age-related degradation of memory, not to mention more acute cases of dementia, are correlated with a reduction in sleep-induced genetic repair.

"We've found a causal link between sleep, chromosome dynamics, neuronal activity, and DNA damage and repair with direct physiological relevance to the entire organism," Appelbaum said.  "Sleep gives an opportunity to reduce DNA damage accumulated in the brain during wakefulness...  Despite the risk of reduced awareness to the environment, animals -- ranging from jellyfish to zebrafish to humans -- have to sleep to allow their neurons to perform efficient DNA maintenance, and this is possibly the reason why sleep has evolved and is so conserved in the animal kingdom."

What it doesn't explain is why some of us have so damn much trouble actually doing what we're evolved to do.  Shutting my brain off so it can do some road maintenance is really appealing, but for some reason it just doesn't cooperate most nights.

Which explains why I'm so tired this morning.  But what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?  So here I go AGAAAIIIIINNNNN....

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Confidence, impacts, and ice ages

One of the most common misunderstandings about science by laypeople centers around the concept of degree of confidence.

This misunderstanding can be summed up that "all unproven hypotheses are equally likely."  You hear it with lots of loopy ideas -- that (for example) because we don't have strong evidence one way or the other regarding the existence of an afterlife, it's on the same footing as other phenomena for which we have no direct evidence, such as dark matter, time travel, and the claim we've been visited by extraterrestrials.

Another way this shows up is the dismissive, "all of this could be proven wrong tomorrow" attitude toward science.  The fact that new discoveries have on occasion overturned what we thought we understood is taken as evidence that all of science is on thin ice, that it's all equally tentative.  But this rests on a serious misapprehension about the reliability of evidence.  It's true that, as Einstein allegedly put it, "one experiment could prove wrong" either the Second Law of Thermodynamics or our understanding of the mechanisms of quantum entanglement; but the first is extremely unlikely (the Second Law is one of the most extensively-tested scientific principles known, and there has never been a single exception found to it) while even the physicists would admit the second is a possibility (we're still elucidating the idea of quantum entanglement, and new and intriguing data is being added to our understanding on nearly a daily basis).

This frustrates people who like to have certainty, or at least like to be able to say with confidence that something isn't possible.  I ran into an especially good example of this just yesterday when I was reading an article about the Younger Dryas, a mysterious climatological reversal that occurred 12,900 years ago and lasted only 1,200 years -- a mere blip on the geological time scale.  What happened was that during a period when the Earth was warming, in only a few decades the average temperature of the Earth dropped by an average of four degrees Celsius, enough to put most of the Northern Hemisphere back in the deep freeze.  (The event is named after a plant, Dryas octopetala, which only grows in extremely cold places, and which became common across Europe and North America through the duration of the temperature drop.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Opioła jerzy, Dryas octopetala a4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Of course, presented with such a conundrum, the first question that comes up is "Why did this happen?"  There are three main hypotheses:

• As the Earth was warming up after the last major glaciation, a huge freshwater lake that had piled up behind an ice dam was suddenly emptied when the dam collapsed.  This lake, nicknamed "Lake Agassiz," emptied out through what are now the St. Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers, and caused a slowdown (or complete cessation) of the thermohaline circulation.  Put simply, this is the engine that powers the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water northward and keeps the northeastern United States and most of western Europe relatively temperate.  When the flood occurred, the north end of the thermohaline circulation became too fresh to sink, and the whole system ground to a halt, propelling us into another ice age.  It was only after a thousand years had passed, and the lake water had adequately mixed with the ocean water, that the circulation rebooted and things warmed back up.
• 12,900 years ago, the Earth was hit by an object from space -- probably either a comet or a meteorite -- and that collision flash-burned a significant fraction of the vegetation in northern North America.  The debris and ash blocked sunlight, cooling down the surface of the Earth and halting the warm-up we'd been experiencing in its tracks.  Eventually the ash settled out, the forests regrew, and the climate restabilized, but that took several centuries.
• A supernova in the constellation of Vela created a burst of radiation that destroyed the Earth's ozone layer and killed most of the Earth's megafauna, including mammoths, mastodons, dire wolves, and several species of temperate-climate camels, rhinos, and hippos.  The gamma radiation striking the atmosphere caused a cascade of chemical reactions that disrupted the balance of nitrogen-containing compounds (such as nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide), and this caused a sudden and drastic temperature drop.

Each has some points in its favor.  The ice-dam proponents argue that the temperature drop wasn't as fast as you'd expect from something catastrophic like a collision or supernova, and that in fact the extinctions that occurred were in species that had already been declining for millennia.  Scientists supporting the impact hypothesis were buoyed by the discovery of a previously-unknown crater in Greenland -- but they've been unable to pinpoint its age any more accurately than "some time between three million and twelve thousand years ago."  The supernova enthusiasts point to the existence of "black mats" -- thin layers of the remnants of anaerobic organisms -- as evidence that something drastic happened to the atmosphere at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, and samples taken from it do seem to have skewed nitrogen content.  (This same evidence is considered support for the impact hypothesis, because there have been "microspherules" -- tiny spheres of melted and refrozen metal -- found in some of those boundary layers.)  But the black mats in different locations seem to date from different time periods, with only three of the thirteen studied being coincident with the Younger Dryas event.  And most of the black mats studied don't contain microspherules.

So the argument is still out there.  As far as my own opinion, I can only say that I'm neither a paleoclimatologist nor an astrophysicist, so am unqualified to weigh in (and my opinion wouldn't mean much anyway).  It seems like the dam collapse model is the one that currently has the most support, but -- like all science -- new information could tilt us toward one of the others.

Why does this come up with regards to our confidence in scientific models?  Not only because it's a great example of competing explanations and the fact that good scientists are willing to entertain the possibility of alternate solutions to the conundrums they study.  The idea for this post came to me because of another twist on the Younger Dryas -- this one from noted wingnut Graham Hancock, who says that the Younger Dryas event not only inconvenienced the camels and dire wolves, it also wiped out an advanced technological civilization...

... which gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.

So this is what I mean about levels of confidence.  No, we haven't been able to rule out two of the three models for the cause of the Younger Dryas with any real certainty.  But the fourth idea -- that whatever caused the event also destroyed Atlantis -- has nothing, not a shred of evidence, to support it.  As the brilliant skeptic Jason Colavito put it:

[R]egardless of whether a comet hit, the existence (or non-existence) of the comet implies nothing about the existence of Atlantis any more than it would unicorns or leprechauns. 

It remains a point of astonishment that the bones of megafauna that supposedly died in the comet strike turn up with regularity, but every human being and all of the buildings, tools, and material possessions of the lost Atlantis-like civilization were blasted clean off the face of the Earth, without a single trace remaining.  I have trouble imagining that a sloth can manage to have its bones preserved for all time, but not a single outpost of Atlantis had even a single bolt or screw remain.

As do I.  All unproven assertions are not on an equal footing.  And that's really the point of Ockham's Razor, isn't it?  The fastest way to winnow down competing ideas is to see which ones require you to make the most ad hoc assumptions.  And I'd put any of the three scientific explanations I mentioned above ahead of Hancock's assertion that the Younger Dryas event destroyed the lost civilization of Atlantis.

I'm perfectly willing to stay in uncertainty, indefinitely if need be, in the absence of convincing evidence one way or the other.  But in the case of explanations that require us to stretch credulity to the snapping point, I have no problem saying, "Nope.  That one isn't true."

**************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Rules of engagement

One of my besetting sins is being easily frustrated and taking things way too seriously.

Which is why recent developments in government have made me want to punch a wall.  Paul Manafort's softball prison sentence. Trump's demand that tornado-struck Alabama -- a red state -- receive "A-one treatment" with respect to disaster aid, while California -- a blue state -- was told they "should have raked their leaves" when they experienced the worst wildfires in the state's history.  The fact that a bunch of Republican legislators in New Hampshire thought it was appropriate to wear strings of pearls when confronted with gun law activists (ridiculing them by implying they were "clutching their pearls" -- making a big deal out of nothing).

All of those had me grinding my teeth down to nubs out of a sense of impotent rage.  A feeling of helplessness has become endemic in the last two years -- that we're powerless to stop the freewheeling corruption of this administration, the blind eye being turned toward Russian interference in American elections, and the complicity of lawmakers (exemplified by the smirking Mitch McConnell, who just this week said he wasn't going to bring an election reform bill onto the Senate floor purely because he "gets to decide").

So it was a bit of a relief to read a paper that appeared in appeared in Nature last week.  It's by climatologists Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell (of Yale University) and Robert Brulle (of Brown University), and is titled, "Evidence-based Strategies to Combat Scientific Misinformation."

Unsurprisingly -- even had I not already told you the field Farrell et al. were in -- is that the specific misinformation they're referring to is anthropogenic climate change.  The authors write:

Nowhere has the impact of scientific misinformation been more profound than on the issue of climate change in the United States.  Effective responses to this multifaceted problem have been slow to develop, in large part because many experts have not only underestimated its impact, but have also overlooked the underlying institutional structure, organizational power and financial roots of misinformation.  Fortunately, a growing body of sophisticated research has emerged that can help us to better understand these dynamics and provide the basis for developing a coordinated set of strategies across four related areas (public inoculation, legal strategies, political mechanisms and financial transparency) to thwart large-scale misinformation campaigns before they begin, or after they have taken root.

Which is packing a lot into a single paragraph.  They are unhesitatingly (and correctly) blaming the doubts in the public's mind over climate change on a large-scale -- and deliberate -- misinformation campaign on the part of the fossil fuels industry and the politicians they're funding.  In a press release from Yale University on the research, lead author Justin Farrell said:

Many people see these efforts to undermine science as an increasingly dangerous challenge and they feel paralyzed about what to do about it.  But there’s been a growing amount of research into this challenge over the past few years that will help us chart out some solutions...  Ultimately we have to get to the root of the problem, which is the huge imbalance in spending between climate change opponents and those lobbying for new solutions.  Those interests will always be there, of course, but I’m hopeful that as we learn more about these dynamics things will start to change.  I just hope it’s not too late.

Farrell et al. describe four realms that need to be addressed to counter these misinformation campaigns.  They are:

• Public inoculation -- presenting the public with refuted arguments (including how they've been refuted) before the disinformation specialists have a chance to launch their campaign, so non-scientists are immune to their effects, and upon hearing them, will say, "Oh, yeah, that.  That's already been disproven."
• Legal strategies -- actively target fossil fuel companies (and their lobbyists) with lawsuits when they libel reputable climate scientists with accusations of bias or outright falsification of data.  The difficulty is that the fossil fuel companies have way deeper pockets than do environmental activists -- but at least the attempt will bring the smear tactics into the public eye.
• Political mechanisms -- focusing on research into how the political process has been subverted by corporate anti-environmental interests.
• Financial transparency -- promoting legislation requiring public disclosure of who is funding political candidates, and encouraging investigation into elected officials whose actions have been compromised by donations from corporations.

Having concrete strategies to approach the problem is good, but the difficulty is, many of these rely on laws being passed by senators and representatives who are already compromised and have every reason to block change.  "We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the full network of actors and how they’re moving money in these efforts," said study co-author Kathryn McConnell.  "The better we can understand how these networks work, the better the chances that policymakers will be able to create policy that makes a difference."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is an optimistic outlook.  Still, it's frustrating that any efforts in these directions are bound to be glacially slow, and my sense is that we don't really have much time left in which to act.  But the fact that this research is out there is a good first step.  Now we need to make certain that it doesn't simply sink into obscurity like most of the research on climate has done, buried under the sneering climate denialism of Fox News.

What it highlights is that this is a battle we can win.  Not that it'll be easy or quick; overcoming the mountain of misinformation out there, deliberately created by groups whose priority is short-term profit over the long-term habitability of the Earth, won't happen overnight.

But the fact that a team of climatologists thinks it can happen at all is encouraging.  Despite what feels like daily losing battle against succumbing to despair, it's not time to give up.

If they think we can win, maybe we should, too.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Ness in distress

Yesterday, we looked at the Flat Earthers who would rather doubt a twenty-thousand dollar piece of precision scientific equipment than their own guesses about how the world works.  Today, in further adventures of confirmation bias and wishful thinking, we have:

The Loch Ness Monster is back.

Of all the cryptid legends, the Loch Ness Monster is (in my opinion) one of the least likely.  The cryptid-seekers go on and on about how any and all cryptids could exist because we've rediscovered animals that were thought to be extinct.  This usually involves bringing out the coelacanth, which was presumed dead for the last sixty-odd million years, that was shown to be alive when someone caught one off the coast of Madagascar.

Coelacanth [Image is in the Public Domain]

Even if you accept that there are animals out there that we haven't successfully captured, Nessie is a poor bet.  Up until about 14,000 years ago, Scotland was entirely covered by a thick sheet of glacial ice, so if there had been a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction event that killed all of his cousins and survived in a lake up to then, during the Pleistocene Epoch he would have been turned into a plesiosicle.  Plus, Loch Ness is oligotrophic -- nutrient-poor -- and therefore has a fairly small population of fish and other animals, pretty certainly not enough to support a breeding population of large aquatic dinosaurs.

So Bigfoot, yeah, okay, it's at least possible.  Not likely, mind you, but possible.  Nessie?  Not so much.  The evidence thus far brought to bear upon the question is far insufficient to prove the case -- and that's even the opinion of Adrian Shine and Steve Feltham, two of the foremost "Nessie hunters" in the world.

"The fact is that well over a thousand honest and sober people have seen monsters in Loch Ness," Shine said.  "Yet over eighty years of expeditions have failed to find them.  Either we’re fairly bad at what we do or there’s another reason for that...  I think it’s fair to say we’d all like there to be a Loch Ness monster.  But equally there are people who will see what they want to see."

That, of course, hasn't stopped enthusiasts.  And you can expect the whole craze to be ramping up over the next few weeks, because there have been two sightings of Nessie in the last month that have enthusiasts leaping about making excited little squeaking noises.

So naturally, I thought I'd look into it further.  Open mind, and all.  I was even more intrigued when I found out that one of the people who claimed a sighting, Eoin O'Faodhagain, had taken a still shot from the "Nessie cam" that's always pointed out across the lake, and it was alleged to have caught a good view of the monster.

Nota bene: I have no idea how to pronounce Eoin O'Faodhagain.  A Scottish friend once told me, "There are only two rules for pronouncing Gaelic names.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Anyhow, I thought I'd take a look at O'Faodhagain's photograph, which has evidently caused a considerable stir in the cryptozoological community.  So... ready?  Here it is:

And I'm thinking: "that's it?  That's your earthshattering photo?"  Hell, it's so blurry that he even had to circle the vague gray blob that we're supposed to think is Nessie because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to find it.  Oh, but O'Faodhagain says it has to be Nessie, because as he watched it disappeared, and "boats don't do that."

Well, I'm convinced.

In any case, here we have another discussion over something that -- if I may borrow a phrase from Dorothy Parker -- is such slim evidence that to call it wafer-thin would be to insult wafer-makers the world over.  Not that I expect this to discourage Nessiphiles.

Nothing ever does.  Confirmation-Bias-"R"-Us.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Spin doctors

It's always entertaining when the woo-woos start running experiments or collecting actual data, because that moves the argument into the realm of testable science.

It happened with homeopathy (homeopathic remedies don't work), anti-vaxx (vaccines don't cause autism), and astrology (horoscopes rely on dart-thrower's bias, and when that's controlled for, show zero accuracy).  So it's kind of inadvisable to play that game and think they're going to win -- much better to stick with "I believe this because it sounds right."

This is a lesson the flat-Earthers ("Flerfs") have yet to learn, judging by a recently-released Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, in which some dedicated Flerfs spent a huge amount of money on a highly sophisticated ring laser gyroscope, determined to show that the Earth is flat and does not rotate -- and ended up proving the opposite.

Gyroscopes are a particularly good tool for this kind of study, because they have an interesting property -- they exert a force to resist changing their axis of rotation.  I remember being in high school physics and playing with a bicycle wheel gyroscope.  I spun the wheel, and sat on a lab stool -- when I tried to change the angle of the axis of rotation, it actually made the lab stool rotate so the axis remained parallel to where it was when it started.

And that was a low-tech gyroscope that wasn't even spinning very fast.  Ring laser gyroscopes use a beam of polarized light instead of a spinning wheel, and have an accuracy to within less than a hundredth of a degree shift per hour.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Misko from Bilbao but I wish it was Amsterdam or Biarritz, Simple Gyroscope, CC BY 2.0]

So it's a hard instrument to fool.  And the head Flerf, Bob Knodel, who has a YouTube channel devoted solely to proving that the Earth is flat, actually bought a ring laser gyroscope (to the tune of twenty thousand dollars), and the gyroscope showed...

... that the axis of rotation was deflecting by fifteen degrees per hour.  Precisely what you'd expect if the Earth is making one full rotation (360 degrees) in twenty-four hours.

"What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift," Knodel said.  "A 15-degree per hour drift.  Now, obviously we were taken aback by that - 'Wow, that's kind of a problem.'"

Yeah, you could say that.  But he and his friends were undeterred.

"We obviously were not willing to accept that," Knodel said, "and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth."

Yup, that's the way to approach science.  If the data from an extremely accurate instrument disagrees with your favorite hypothesis, then throw out the data.

"We don't want to blow this, you know?" Knodel said to another Flerf.  "When you've got $20,000 in this freaking gyro, if we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad?  It would be bad."

Then he added, "What I just told you was confidential."

Which explains how the entire conversation ended up on the internet.

I try to be kind, but I have to admit that when I read this, my response was:

BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, pant, wheeze* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

I mean, really.  These people have gone to ridiculous lengths trying to support their ridiculous ideas, so I have to say when they sunk twenty grand into an instrument and it ended up proving them wrong, they deserved everything they got.

It'd be nice to think that this would be the end of the Flerfs, that they'd retreat in disarray and we'd never hear from them again.  Of course, this is almost Flerf-level wishful thinking.  Once woo-woos find out their cherished ideas are wrong, they immediately go into wild gyrations to show how the evidence is actually what's wrong.  For example, every year there are more studies to show that the anti-vaxxers are completely full of horse waste, and yet they are not only undaunted, their numbers are growing, and they dream up all sorts of convoluted reasons (mostly revolving around conspiracies by Big Pharma) to show that the data is wrong.

Same with the Flerfs, which is kind of depressing. especially since their arguments all kind of boil down to "I've looked, and it sure looks flat to me."  But I'd better wrap this up, because the Sun is getting high above the edge of the disk, so time's a wastin'. 

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Heavy weather

Some days it seems like it would be a good move to get off social media altogether.

This is largely because I'm so easily pissed off.  Fortunately, at least I've learned the "don't argue with people on the internet" rule, but the "just keep scrolling and don't worry about it" rule hasn't sunk in very well yet.  I ran into a good example of this yesterday, with a conversation that showed up on my Facebook feed that left me fuming for a couple of hours afterward.  It started as follows:

This is a good brief overview that explains how and why human emissions of carbon dioxide are not causing catastrophic climate change. I have been also explaining the same points made in the article to anyone who would listen for the past 10 years.

He then included a link to an article by David Legates, professor of geography and climate science at the University of Delaware, called, "It's Not About the Climate -- It Never Was."  In it, Legates makes a variety of points, including that the climate is not sensitive to carbon dioxide concentration, that a warmer Earth will not generate more numerous or intense weather events, and that higher carbon dioxide concentrations (and a global temperature increase) will be beneficial to the human race and the global ecosystem.

To say Legates is a biased witness is a statement of mammoth proportions.  He's affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical group known for rejecting claims of anthropogenic climate change which has been accused of being a "front group for fossil fuel interests" because of its ties to Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which is directly funded by Exxon-Mobil and Chevron.  To give you a flavor of the Cornwall Alliance's philosophy, here's a direct quote from one of their publications:

The world is in the grip of an idea: that burning fossil fuels to provide affordable, abundant energy is causing global warming that will be so dangerous that we must stop it by reducing our use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost. Is that idea true? We believe not. We believe that idea – we'll call it "global warming alarmism" – fails the tests of theology, science, and economics.

The fact that they put theology first -- hell, that they included it at all -- should tell you all you need to know.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NOAA]

Anyhow, Skeptical Science and Climate Science Watch did a good job of taking apart Legates's claims piece by piece, and that's not what I'm here to do.  To get back to the original post -- claiming that Legates is correct and he (the original poster) has been "explaining the same points... for ten years," there were the following replies:

Courageous of you, and I say good job, T____, with posting something that flies in the face of the prevailing face of leftist ideologues -- calling anyone, for example, climate change deniers, which is a reprehensible things [sic] to accuse someone of who has a different opinion that the Neo-Puritanical leftist ideologues -- of the West.  Thousands of scientists disagree with Obama and Leftists on this subject.

The Green New Deal ...now that is pseudo science. Stop cow farts and spend 4x a countries GDP.  Outstanding how a 29 year old bartender could have that drafted and ready so quick. 

Kudos T____ for speaking up on your beliefs based in reality.  Even one of the founders of Greenpeace says ita [sic] a sham.

And so forth and so on.

One of the most maddening things about all of this is how the climate change deniers (okay, I guess that makes me reprehensible -- so be it) set up straw man claims and easily identified biased, cherry-picked statistical arguments, and all the people who would very much like us not to have to change what we're doing just go, "Yup.  That's the truth.  I knew it all along."  The thing is, there is consensus among climatologists, notwithstanding what a handful of rogues like Legates have to say.

And being a rogue is not somehow noble, or courageous, or realistic.  Sometimes when you're flying in the face of consensus, you're simply wrong.  Here, there are mountains of data supporting the connection between fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide levels, between carbon dioxide and climate, and between climate change and increasingly violent weather extremes.  I don't see any way that a truly unbiased individual could evaluate the evidence and not make those connections.

So Legates is obviously biased.  Why is a matter of conjecture, whether it's simple confirmation bias or something more sinister.  (If you still doubt this, go back to the Climate Science Watch article that I linked above, which is well worth a read -- and ends with slamming Legates for "uncritical reiteration of tired and discredited criticisms.")

But again, it's not that I didn't know there were climate change deniers.  Hell, the White House is home to one of 'em.  It's the association of science -- based on hard evidence -- with "leftist ideology," as if climate data had a political opinion, that really torques me.  Even more, labeling this kind of biased pseudoscientific diatribe as "courageous" makes me want to hurl a heavy object across the room.

So honestly, I should probably get off social media, or at least severely curtail how much time I spend on it.  Probably good advice for a lot of us, for a variety of reasons.  Right now the chief of which is that I really don't need anything to make my blood pressure higher.  I've got enough to worry about, such as whether Donald Trump is going to open the Seventh Seal of the Apocalypse before or after he's indicted.  The last thing I want is to add infuriating Facebook posts to the list.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Hipster math

One of the guiding principles of teenagerhood is "I want to be unique, just like everyone else."

Not, mind you, that I'm criticizing efforts toward individuality.  We all have to find a way to express ourselves, be it how we dress, talk, or style our hair.  But what's always struck me as funny is how the drive to be different often pushes people toward the same solution, creating stereotypical pseudo-rebellious subcultures that are often parodied because they all on some level look and act alike.

This subject has been the focus of mathematician Jonathan Touboul, of Brandeis University, who looks at how information transfer through societies affects behavior.  And he's been studying something he calls the "hipster effect" -- that rejecting conformity simply drives people to conform to something else.  Even more interesting, he's found that these patterns of synchronization have parallels in how many other systems interact, in areas as different as neural firing patterns and reactions by investors to information about the stock market, and may well be describable by the same mathematical model.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Infrogmation of New Orleans, Redbeans15 Downtown Hipsters, CC BY-SA 2.5]

In his paper "The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists All Look the Same," which appeared in the online journal arXiv, he has the following to say:

In such different domains as neurosciences, spin glasses, social science, economics and finance, large ensemble of interacting individuals following (mainstream) or opposing (hipsters) to the majority are ubiquitous.  In these systems, interactions generally occur after specific delays associated to transport, transmission or integration of information.  We investigate here the impact of anti-conformism combined to delays in the emergent dynamics of large populations of mainstreams and hipsters.  To this purpose, we introduce a class of simple statistical systems of interacting agents composed of (i) mainstreams and anti-conformists in the presence of (ii) delays, possibly heterogeneous, in the transmission of information.  In this simple model, each agent can be in one of two states, and can change state in continuous time with a rate depending on the state of others in the past...  [W]hen hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will consistently make the same choice, and realizing this too late, they will switch, all together to another state where they remain alike.  Similar synchronizations arise when the impact of mainstreams on hipsters choices (and reciprocally) dominate the impact of other hipsters choices, and we show that these may emerge only when the randomness in the hipsters decisions is sufficiently large.  Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding synchronization of nerve cells, investment strategies in finance, or emergent dynamics in social science, domains in which delays of communication and the geometry of information accessibility are prominent.

Which is kind of cool.  Although it's a little humbling to think that our choices about how to express who we are, which feel so important and deeply personal, can be emulated by a simple mathematical model that works equally well to describe how nerves fire and how investors make their stock trading decisions.

What's funniest is the outcome when Touboul tried to model a population with equal numbers of conformists and hipsters.  It resulted in a seesawing oscillation between different outcomes -- for a while the hipsters have beards and the conformists don't, but if you wait for a while, the reverse becomes true.

Of course, life is usually more complex than a bunch of binary choices.  But when this is the situation, the result is remarkably predictable.  "For example, if a majority of individuals shave their beard," Touboul said in an interview with Technology Review, "then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to a new, synchronized, switch to shaving."

Touboul wants to expand his model to include choices where there are more than two options, and see if it continues to emulate observed trends in social dynamics.  My guess is it will, although I don't begin to understand how you'd manage the mathematics involved.  As for me, I've got to look around and count the number of guys with facial hair, and decide whether I should shave off my beard.  You know how it goes.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is not only a fantastic read, it's a cautionary note on the extent to which people have been able to alter the natural environment, and how difficult it can be to fix what we've trashed.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee is a lucid, gripping account of three times humans have attempted to alter the outcome of natural processes -- the nearly century-old work by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River within its banks and stop it from altering its course down what is now the Atchafalaya River, the effort to mitigate the combined hazards of wildfires and mudslides in California, and the now-famous desperate attempt by Icelanders to stop a volcanic eruption from closing off their city's harbor.  McPhee interviews many of the people who were part of each of these efforts, so -- as is typical with his writing -- the focus is not only on the events, but on the human stories behind them.

And it's a bit of a chilling read in today's context, when politicians in the United States are one and all playing a game of "la la la la la, not listening" with respect to the looming specter of global climate change.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the environment -- or in our rather feeble attempts to change its course.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]