If you're interested, the website associated with this blog has had over 1000 unique visitors, from 32 countries, since the beginning of the year.
This blog has only been activity-measured since February 28; if it continues at its current access rate there will be over 3000 "unique" readers by year's end... we'll see. Of course any reader of a blog like this one would certainly be considered unique, no question about it.
Both the website and the blog went on-line circa Nov. '07, and there have been 93 posts prior to this one.
Just FYI.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Teaching the Controversy
The article, "Evolution, What's the Real Controversy?" misses the mark by miles. By going to a series of evolutionary lectures the author of the article, John Timmer, apparently expected to hear a review of the YEC/ID v.s. Evolution controversy; instead he heard the science being debated, and concluded that there is no controversy, at least amongst those scientists. Timmer commits the error of looking in the wrong place. The controversy he claimed to be looking for is between two communities, not within a single. And the controversy between communties does exist, as he could have known with proper searches of both communities. His conclusion of "no controversy" is indicative of a bias toward one community.
No matter what you might think of one side or the other, there is a very real dispute between these two ideas. It has been incendiary for at least 150 years. But should be resolved, and could be if both sides would put up their guns for awhile. The shots fired recently by the science-only community have not served to promote a view of science as an objective pursuit.
The recent frontal attacks on ID in the form of ridicule and lawsuits against the movie "Expelled" have not served science well. Such attacks smack of the very thing that is the subject of the movie. This in no way serves to bolster faith in science, and will probably work against it.
I am no YEC/ID proponent. Neither of these can satisfy the requirements of empirical science endeavors. Both require large extrapolations, and wind up being abductive in a big way. This is not to say that I support macro-evolution, which also is abductive; but that is not the issue here.
It seems to me that the most intellectually honest and straight-forward approach would be to teach as follows: First, teach a short section on the philosophy, methods and history of science; include the basics of critical thinking and probability as applied to evidence. This section would then be followed by a brief section on science v.s. non-science, such as chemistry or physics v.s. say, philosophy and mathematics, and a differentiation between them. Then science-only could begin to be taught, and "evolution v.s. ID" would fall away quickly as an issue.
I suspect that many teachers already do this, in varying degrees. But if it became official, as "teaching the controversy", then the controversy might be defused to some extent. If not for this generation, then the next perhaps. If science organizations supported this, it would easily happen.
The problem that seems to be recurrent is the religious-like attacks mounted by the pro-evolution camp against any mention of YEC/ID in education. This is hysteria, and is not rational; as stated before, the attacks are in the form of ridicule and lawsuits. In other words, the attacks are fear-based, and in the form of warfare. Scare-mongering from the science side proves the point: it will NOT be required that science classes teach "stork theory" along with sexual reproduction.
Teaching the controversy need not - and should not - include the idea that religion is or could be scientific. The controversy should address the questions, what is science? And what is not? Is there a reason not to do this?
The only reason is fear. (Perhaps the fear is justified, in the case of evolution...?)
No matter what you might think of one side or the other, there is a very real dispute between these two ideas. It has been incendiary for at least 150 years. But should be resolved, and could be if both sides would put up their guns for awhile. The shots fired recently by the science-only community have not served to promote a view of science as an objective pursuit.
The recent frontal attacks on ID in the form of ridicule and lawsuits against the movie "Expelled" have not served science well. Such attacks smack of the very thing that is the subject of the movie. This in no way serves to bolster faith in science, and will probably work against it.
I am no YEC/ID proponent. Neither of these can satisfy the requirements of empirical science endeavors. Both require large extrapolations, and wind up being abductive in a big way. This is not to say that I support macro-evolution, which also is abductive; but that is not the issue here.
It seems to me that the most intellectually honest and straight-forward approach would be to teach as follows: First, teach a short section on the philosophy, methods and history of science; include the basics of critical thinking and probability as applied to evidence. This section would then be followed by a brief section on science v.s. non-science, such as chemistry or physics v.s. say, philosophy and mathematics, and a differentiation between them. Then science-only could begin to be taught, and "evolution v.s. ID" would fall away quickly as an issue.
I suspect that many teachers already do this, in varying degrees. But if it became official, as "teaching the controversy", then the controversy might be defused to some extent. If not for this generation, then the next perhaps. If science organizations supported this, it would easily happen.
The problem that seems to be recurrent is the religious-like attacks mounted by the pro-evolution camp against any mention of YEC/ID in education. This is hysteria, and is not rational; as stated before, the attacks are in the form of ridicule and lawsuits. In other words, the attacks are fear-based, and in the form of warfare. Scare-mongering from the science side proves the point: it will NOT be required that science classes teach "stork theory" along with sexual reproduction.
Teaching the controversy need not - and should not - include the idea that religion is or could be scientific. The controversy should address the questions, what is science? And what is not? Is there a reason not to do this?
The only reason is fear. (Perhaps the fear is justified, in the case of evolution...?)
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Gore's Assault on Reason
Al Gore is not impressed by science apparently. Or maybe he just doesn't keep up. Gore has made a charge that the Myanmar cyclone was caused by the warming of the oceans. Gore has famously promoted anthropogenic global warming (AGW) warnings to the point of obtaining a Nobel prize. He claims that AGW science is settled. Is his evidence for this claim then, scientific?
Just recently I posted about NASA's data showing that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been verified to have flipped states circa 2000, from hot to cold. This explains why the global temperature has shown no warming, for the last 8 years. To the east, the Atlantic oscillation has been attempted - unsuccessfully - to be mated to damage costs on the eastern coasts of the U.S. This failed primarily due to the false inflation of damage costs incurred by affluents who tend to live near the shore, and to faulty insurance and non-insured cost data. And according to Chris Landsea (more on him below), the granularity of wind speed measurement accuracy is too low to measure the differences in hurricane energies with enough accuracy to develop causality: The signal to noise ratio is too low.
In fact, AGW is not universally supported as Gore would have us think. As reported in INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY , February 07, 2008, "Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity."
"Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century."
"Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle."
"This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe."
"Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere."
Also, "...researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.
If the sun is the driving factor, what of CO2 as a factor? "R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."
Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
And according to IBD, "A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion. The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz. The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But the U.N.'s IPCC is undeterred in its assessment of both AGW and its effect on hurricanes. Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a "lead author" at IPCC made a claim for the connection between AGW and hurricanes. According to Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, January 23, 2005, "A federal hurricane research scientist resigned in January of 2005 from a U.N.-sponsored climate assessment team, saying the group's leader had politicized the process.
Chris Landsea, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane research division in Miami, said Monday that he would not contribute to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's chapter on atmospheric and surface climate conditions because the lead author had told reporters global warming contributed to intense Atlantic hurricanes last year.
Landsea said, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," he wrote. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."
Hans von Storch, a climatologist at the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, says "It's a demonstration of how highly politicized the IPCC process has become."
Storch and Lars Bärring of Lund University in Sweden published a paper on their study of storminess in Scandinavia since Napoleonic times. "That article is an outgrowth of work that began in the early 1990s, at time when, according to von Storch, European newspapers were full of stories about increasing storm activity, which was described as an early signal of global warming. A more careful analysis by von Storch's group, however, found that the level of storminess in Europe in 1995 was, in fact, similar to the level existing in 1900."
While these types of contradictory data are ignored by the IPCC, also ignored are their own data, according to some who accuse the summarizing authors of actually contradicting the conclusions of their own data. It is said that it is these summaries that are generally read and used for policy decisions, not the detailed data and analysis sections in the back of the IPCC reports. So exactly what is the science? It is not difficult to discover blogs of scientific disputation on the subject.
Most damaging is the Report of the U.S. Senate Committeee on Environment and Public Works December 20, 2007. This report reveals that the IPCC consensus involved only 52 scientists, who were politically constrained: "The 52 scientists who participated in the 2007 IPCC Summary for Policymakers had to adhere to the wishes of the UN political leaders and delegates in a process described as more closely resembling a political party’s convention platform battle, not a scientific process."
The Senate report also lists over 400 scientists from around the world who are opposed to AGW, and gives their reasons for opposition. It also gives instances of oppression of dissension. There are 800% more scientists listed as opposed, than the original consensus contained. The "universal" consensus does not exist and never did.
It should be demanded of Gore that he show the irrefutable (settled) science that proves his assertion. Because without the science behind his cause-and-effect declaration, Gore is violating the AGW activist's main claim: that it is based on science. One suspects that Gore will have a hard time producing a data-driven defense of his accusation. This places Gore in the position of being guilty of his own "assault on reason".
Just recently I posted about NASA's data showing that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been verified to have flipped states circa 2000, from hot to cold. This explains why the global temperature has shown no warming, for the last 8 years. To the east, the Atlantic oscillation has been attempted - unsuccessfully - to be mated to damage costs on the eastern coasts of the U.S. This failed primarily due to the false inflation of damage costs incurred by affluents who tend to live near the shore, and to faulty insurance and non-insured cost data. And according to Chris Landsea (more on him below), the granularity of wind speed measurement accuracy is too low to measure the differences in hurricane energies with enough accuracy to develop causality: The signal to noise ratio is too low.
In fact, AGW is not universally supported as Gore would have us think. As reported in INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY , February 07, 2008, "Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity."
"Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century."
"Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle."
"This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe."
"Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere."
Also, "...researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.
If the sun is the driving factor, what of CO2 as a factor? "R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."
Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
And according to IBD, "A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion. The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz. The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But the U.N.'s IPCC is undeterred in its assessment of both AGW and its effect on hurricanes. Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a "lead author" at IPCC made a claim for the connection between AGW and hurricanes. According to Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, January 23, 2005, "A federal hurricane research scientist resigned in January of 2005 from a U.N.-sponsored climate assessment team, saying the group's leader had politicized the process.
Chris Landsea, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane research division in Miami, said Monday that he would not contribute to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's chapter on atmospheric and surface climate conditions because the lead author had told reporters global warming contributed to intense Atlantic hurricanes last year.
Landsea said, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," he wrote. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."
Hans von Storch, a climatologist at the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, says "It's a demonstration of how highly politicized the IPCC process has become."
Storch and Lars Bärring of Lund University in Sweden published a paper on their study of storminess in Scandinavia since Napoleonic times. "That article is an outgrowth of work that began in the early 1990s, at time when, according to von Storch, European newspapers were full of stories about increasing storm activity, which was described as an early signal of global warming. A more careful analysis by von Storch's group, however, found that the level of storminess in Europe in 1995 was, in fact, similar to the level existing in 1900."
While these types of contradictory data are ignored by the IPCC, also ignored are their own data, according to some who accuse the summarizing authors of actually contradicting the conclusions of their own data. It is said that it is these summaries that are generally read and used for policy decisions, not the detailed data and analysis sections in the back of the IPCC reports. So exactly what is the science? It is not difficult to discover blogs of scientific disputation on the subject.
Most damaging is the Report of the U.S. Senate Committeee on Environment and Public Works December 20, 2007. This report reveals that the IPCC consensus involved only 52 scientists, who were politically constrained: "The 52 scientists who participated in the 2007 IPCC Summary for Policymakers had to adhere to the wishes of the UN political leaders and delegates in a process described as more closely resembling a political party’s convention platform battle, not a scientific process."
The Senate report also lists over 400 scientists from around the world who are opposed to AGW, and gives their reasons for opposition. It also gives instances of oppression of dissension. There are 800% more scientists listed as opposed, than the original consensus contained. The "universal" consensus does not exist and never did.
It should be demanded of Gore that he show the irrefutable (settled) science that proves his assertion. Because without the science behind his cause-and-effect declaration, Gore is violating the AGW activist's main claim: that it is based on science. One suspects that Gore will have a hard time producing a data-driven defense of his accusation. This places Gore in the position of being guilty of his own "assault on reason".
Materialism and the Darks
This month's Scientific American magazine reminds us that this is the 10th anniversary of Saul Permutter's discovery that the universe expansion is accellerating, not slowing. Perlmutter used the radiation of supernovae to measure the rate of expansion. Apparently supernovae all have something in common: a single stable frequency of radiation. So when a very distant supernova is found, the Doppler change in its frequency of radiation tells how fast it is moving away. Using this technique, Perlmutter determined that the universal expansion is becoming more rapid, rather than slowing.
The increasing expansion has led to some interesting twists on reality as we know it, and as we don't know it. For example, what would cause the rate of expansion to increase? Gravity between bodies would cause it to slow down. So there must be an "anti-gravity dark energy" which is currently unknown to us.
It is currently estimated that the universe is composed of 72% anti-gravity dark energy, 23% dark matter (unseen, uncharacterized, but susceptible to gravity), and 5% normal matter (protons, neutrons, electrons). In other words, we have a physical reality of only 5% of the universe.
Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University says, "It could well be that there's some big piece of reality that we don't understand".
It is easy to show that logically, the belief that material reality is all that exists, is self-refuting. As science marches on, it shows similar conclusions. In the case of the "darks", science will be able to measure them by their effects, if not their actualities. This is the same with gravity, for example, which is known to exist only by its effect. But with the "darks", the effects contradict our normal experience of reality, at least the "material" reality that we all experience every day.
Scientifically, the belief in philosophical materialism began to unravel with the realization that in the quantum world existence of material things change merely by the interference of being observed. In fact, the wave/particles seem to have advance "knowledge" of the presence of an observer. The connection between a mind and a particle goes against material-only reality.
Now with "unseeable mass" and "anti-gravity energy", we again see the disconnect within the materialist philosophy. In fact the ability of two competing energies to exist within the same realm suggests a differential nonlinearity, where one energy declines less rapidly with distance than the other. For example, why would galaxies be formed by gravitational attraction, yet be pushed away from other galaxies? Such a finding would explode our current understanding of geometric distribution of energy, at least for 72% of the real universe. And can dark matter exist on top of, or within the same space as our regular matter?
It might be easier at this juncture to assume that our "material reality" is just a small backwash eddy in the overall reality of our universe.
And the final questions: Can life exist (in any form) in the dark regions? And if so, can they see us? If they can, could they interfere with our reality? After all, the "darks" are 95% of the universe - we are outnumbered.
Or maybe it works like this: our universe is like a single droplet of water placed into the geometric center of a pressure cooker, where it explodes into steam. The steam expands rapidly, at first away from the other vaporized atoms, but then accelerating toward the walls of the cooker due to gravitational attraction. After a while, and a lot of cooling, the water droplet condenses evenly on the entire interior of the cooker.
So I'm thinking that, just maybe, there's another reality still, just outside our dueling realities in our little universe. Or maybe it is just everywhere, barely on the other side of the quantum field that is called the fabric of our reality. But who can say for certain? Not philosophical materialists.
The increasing expansion has led to some interesting twists on reality as we know it, and as we don't know it. For example, what would cause the rate of expansion to increase? Gravity between bodies would cause it to slow down. So there must be an "anti-gravity dark energy" which is currently unknown to us.
It is currently estimated that the universe is composed of 72% anti-gravity dark energy, 23% dark matter (unseen, uncharacterized, but susceptible to gravity), and 5% normal matter (protons, neutrons, electrons). In other words, we have a physical reality of only 5% of the universe.
Christopher Stubbs of Harvard University says, "It could well be that there's some big piece of reality that we don't understand".
It is easy to show that logically, the belief that material reality is all that exists, is self-refuting. As science marches on, it shows similar conclusions. In the case of the "darks", science will be able to measure them by their effects, if not their actualities. This is the same with gravity, for example, which is known to exist only by its effect. But with the "darks", the effects contradict our normal experience of reality, at least the "material" reality that we all experience every day.
Scientifically, the belief in philosophical materialism began to unravel with the realization that in the quantum world existence of material things change merely by the interference of being observed. In fact, the wave/particles seem to have advance "knowledge" of the presence of an observer. The connection between a mind and a particle goes against material-only reality.
Now with "unseeable mass" and "anti-gravity energy", we again see the disconnect within the materialist philosophy. In fact the ability of two competing energies to exist within the same realm suggests a differential nonlinearity, where one energy declines less rapidly with distance than the other. For example, why would galaxies be formed by gravitational attraction, yet be pushed away from other galaxies? Such a finding would explode our current understanding of geometric distribution of energy, at least for 72% of the real universe. And can dark matter exist on top of, or within the same space as our regular matter?
It might be easier at this juncture to assume that our "material reality" is just a small backwash eddy in the overall reality of our universe.
And the final questions: Can life exist (in any form) in the dark regions? And if so, can they see us? If they can, could they interfere with our reality? After all, the "darks" are 95% of the universe - we are outnumbered.
Or maybe it works like this: our universe is like a single droplet of water placed into the geometric center of a pressure cooker, where it explodes into steam. The steam expands rapidly, at first away from the other vaporized atoms, but then accelerating toward the walls of the cooker due to gravitational attraction. After a while, and a lot of cooling, the water droplet condenses evenly on the entire interior of the cooker.
So I'm thinking that, just maybe, there's another reality still, just outside our dueling realities in our little universe. Or maybe it is just everywhere, barely on the other side of the quantum field that is called the fabric of our reality. But who can say for certain? Not philosophical materialists.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Hate Speech ? Your opinions and comments needed!
It has been suggested that I am showing intolerance by posting the instances of speech from another website that demonstrate - in my view, of course - category hate in the form of false and inflammatory accusations and characterizations designed to denigrate a certain category of people...as well as fantasizing about the death and killing of people in that category.
Questions:
1. What constitutes hate speech?
2. When it occurs, how long should it be tolerated before calling it out?
3. When does tolerance become enabling?
All viewpoints gratefully accepted (so long as they are civil and not obscene).
Thanks!
Questions:
1. What constitutes hate speech?
2. When it occurs, how long should it be tolerated before calling it out?
3. When does tolerance become enabling?
All viewpoints gratefully accepted (so long as they are civil and not obscene).
Thanks!
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