Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

An article over at Feministe, “OK. folks, it’s time for a privilege check.”, on how its okay to take pills for problems that people have lived through even before there were pills around to treat them. Comment threads for posts like this tend to attract pseudo-science like moths to a flame. This was confirmed in a post on The Trouble With Spikol, which quoted the original article and some pieces from the comment thread. I’ll chime in from here after the fold. (more…)

I’ve personally argued with a fellow experimental physicist about the validity of research done at PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Center). I’ll confess that I am unfamiliar with the vast majority of the mathematical and statistical babble in the PEAR papers, but over on the archives of Good Math, Bad Math Mark has some excellent rebuttals. My chief objection to the PEAR studies doesn’t really take a dissection of their methods to get to: their studies are not double blind.

The most frequent counter to my rallying for double blind studies is the claim that the data will be the same regardless of the blindness of the study. This I agree with. However, what will change is the researchers’ interpretation of the data. To clarify the importance of double blinded studies, see the control group article on Skepdic. Personal anecdotes and discussion of the actual subject line occur below this wonderful fold. (more…)

Anymore these days it seems like any bit of patent nonsense that appears on the blag-o-blag garners posts on every science blog worth reading while your code’s compiling. I guess at this point Sal Cordova’s nonsensical barking is just too far gone for anyone else to bother with. Here’s his claim on Young Cosmos from a couple days ago:

Walter Brown speculated that Noah’s flood created explosive water and steam that accelerated ice into the moon. This would cause water to melt rock on impact! Furthermore, we would expect water to boil off on the moon, but we have a peculiar circumstance of water being trapped inside rock!

There is so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to start, so I guess I’ll direct anyone with a subscription to Nature to the relevant science article: The early moon was rich in water. I had never actually heard of Walter Brown’s hydroplate idea before, but a quick look over at TalkOrigins echoed my original objections to the proposal: rock doesn’t float.

Glazing over that issue for a moment, let’s also note that the original article states (and this is even mentioned in the ling Cordova gives to a creationist news source) that, “This relationship is the opposite to that which would be seen if the volatiles had been added to the glass by any process, including contamination back on Earth, after its formation.” This pretty much rules out the Noah’s flood water on the moon proposal without going any further.

Really, though, to launch ice into an orbit as far away as the moon would require some fairly finely tuned velocities. Using the differences in gravitational potential from the Earth, I estimate the number at around 11.1 km/s (about 24,800 mi/h), which is just under the escape velocity for Earth. Using some other calculations I found on the internet (which could easily be wrong) as a starting place, I’d estimate that a 1 m^3 piece of ice accelerated along a 10km tunnel between the proposed water cavity and the atmosphere would accelerate the ice to over seven times the escape velocity of the Earth.

It would be able to hit the moon, true. But it would have to be a direct hit. If it failed to hit the moon on the first try there would not be a second. Even assuming that such events would have been frequent while the subterranean water was escaping only a tiny handful of these would ever successfully strike the moon, if any. Like already noted, there’s plenty wrong with the idea of hydroplate geophysics and Noah’s flood, but even if it were to be so it would in all likelyhood not account for the amount of water we seem to be seeing in the volcanic crystals on the moon.

The internet has been abuzz with a story about a 13-year-old German student who has calculated that it is much more likely that the asteroid Apophis will collide with Earth than NASA had figured: 1 : 450 as opposed to 1 : 45000. For various reasons discussed over at Bad Astronomy and Good Math, Bad Math this is silly. The boy’s claim is that the asteroid will hit a satellite, causing its orbit to be deflected enough to increase the likelihood of impact. First, it is very unlikely in and of itself that the asteroid will hit a satellite. Second, the differences in mass between the two bodies is so great that I imagine the classic physics proceedure of ignoring the mass of the smaller object would be quite valid.

In slightly less doomsday related news, there’s an interesting and tangentially related article on Cocktail Party Physics about space debris, why its a problem, and what might be done to help alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like fixing it in the near future will be technologically and financially unfeasible.

I’m clearly behind on everything, still. Hopefully the recent beginning of classes will help me organize my thought enough to get back into this with vigor. Nonetheless, I bring you comments on another scrap of Sal Cordova nonsense, hand picked because at first glance it doesn’t seem to be nonsense. Here, he proffers the possibility of a variable speed of light as the solution to the problems of young earth creationists.

We will simply have to wait and see how the physics of a Variable Speed of Light (VSL) will play out. But it could yield much fruitful support to a Young Cosmos hypothesis. For example, a VSL-YEC cosmology would resolve the problem of stellar-age homogeneity. I have in the past humorously tried to describe the situation with pictures of people. What we would expect to see in a constant speed of light cosmology is old stars nearby and young stars far away. …

He does not, however, provide a mechanism by which this variable speed of light will fix the apparent problems of the young earth creationism perspective. Stellar age seems to be fairly trivial for a YEC, and it’s not even made clear how a non-constant speed of light resolves this issue. Granted, I am not a cosmologist, but neither is Mr. Cordova, and he puts forth very little of any actual reasoning behind his claims. Should any of these have come from reputable sources, I’d love to have these as references.

However, I think his greatest shortcoming here is putting the cart before the horse. I’ll proceed to illustrate this in similar form to his demonstration of stellar age: with a photograph:

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I had no idea what a Neti Pot was until I listened to the latest Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast this afternoon. Turns out, it’s pretty disturbing. The gentleman mentioned in the Oprah piece is Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is now, according to Wikipedia, the Chief Wellness Officer at the Cleveland Clinic. Which is somewhat disturbing, as an earlier blog entry by Dr. Steven Novella in Neurologica indicates.

At the very least, I recommend checking out the podcast linked above, as it’s a fairly passive thing so you can take it in while you eat your breakfast or what have you and Dr. Novella gives a physicians take on the whole Neti Pot phenomenon, as well as some new magnet therapy studies if you’re in it for the medical information.

So with time I’m developing a folder in my RSS catcher of blogs and websites that I can count on to spout nonsense which is relevant to my interests. As of last night Salvador Cordova’s Young Cosmos has earned its place in that folder, and has provided me with… I’m not even sure what to call it. He’s repeated a quote from Darwin several times now in which Darwin relates his difficulty with mathematics. Cordova then does some completely pointless, irrelevant algebraic manipulations in what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate that he is smarter than Darwin was.

I don’t have a strong background in biology–I’m a physicist through and through. So it would be fairly pointless to criticize me for my lack of knowledge of some sub-discipline of biology which is completely irrelevant to my research. That is what Cordova is effectively doing to Darwin. Unless he can provide some compelling arguments for the relevance of his algebraic floundering to the biological sciences of Darwin’s era, then I think I’ll have to continue to write this off as complete and utter nonsense.

Sure, you can come up with a need for algebra in biology. Like I said, it’s not my field, but I can put forth Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium as an application of fairly simple mathematics in Biology.  But criticizing Darwin for not knowing this kind of mathematics is meaningless. The Hardy-Weinberg principle was proposed no sooner than 1908 (if Wikipedia is correct), at least 20 years after the death of Charles Darwin. So the criticism that Darwin was unfamiliar with tools that he did not even need is hardly a criticism at all. It is a joke. Criticizing Cordova and his apparent heroes Dembski and Wells for apparently not being familiar with the fundamentals of methodological naturalism, on the other hand? That sounds like fair game to me.

It would appear Salvador Cordova is back in fighting action and now making bizarre assertions about “Darwinism” not holding up to some equations he states without ever explaining anything about them. Later, he claims that the use of Fourier analysis in both electrical engineering and quantum mechanics implies that both share characteristics of design. This is, of course, true in the same way that Darwin and I share characteristics of being scientists by both having beards.

More comments can be found by way of Good Math, Bad Math.

The podcast is a beautiful thing for those of us too busy to stay on top of temporal happenings like radio shows. I was just going through this past NPR Science Friday and thought it was a relevant interview with Christine Castillo Comer who was forced to resign after sending out an email informing some biology teachers of a talk on the Evolution v. Intelligent Design scuffle.

Listening yesterday to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, they discussed some criticism received from another podcast called Skeptiko. Today, my curiosity got the better of me and I had a listen. I was hardly a few minutes in when I heard the first tidbit of inanity and paused to go look for a few appropriate links. The question Alex Tsakiris poses is whether or not the general public would rather see research into whether or not sheep are gay or whether they’d rather see research into whether or not a medium can communicate with dead relatives. 

Now I remember hearing some controversy about some research involving gay sheep, so I did a quick search on scienceblogs and found these posts on Gene Expression, The Frontal Cortex, and A Blog Around The Clock. This is not a failing of science. This is a failing of the media and public relations. Research into homosexuality in sheep tells us something about life–perhaps not human life, but life nonetheless. I’m not a biologist, so I can’t even begin to speculate as to what benefits might come out of research like this, but I think one can rest assured that it might very well help someone someday stay alive.

Regardless of whether or not a medium can communicate with my deceased grandfather, I would personally be significantly happier in a world in which the likelihood of myself becoming someone’s deceased relative has been reduced. Which choice the general public would make is a matter of speculation, but should they choose to fund research into mediums’ ability to communicate with the dead over research into anything that might prevent someone from becoming dead, they would be making the incorrect choice. We all inhabit the world of the living together, and as of yet there isn’t a shred of evidence that there even is a world of the dead.