Shutting Down the War on Science

I was listening to This American Life's latest podcast, which was about the inauguration and all things Obama.

One part of the program talked about an event that Obama did not attend, it was on November 19, 2008, after he was elected, but before he was President. Instead of going in person, he sent a video.

This was a conference on climate change. It was in California and was hosted by Arnold Schwartzeneggar. They described how all these climate change scientists got emotional about the video. It was the first time they had see someone from the White House (soon to be from the White House) actually acknowledge the problem and give concrete goals to be aimed for.

Many of the podcasts I listen to are science based and only since Bush has been leaving office have they really been talking about what they are now starting to call the "War on Science". Bush's record on science may have been dismal, but society and industry's use of and belief in science has flagged over the last few years as well. Whether it's stem cells, climate change, or evolution, many of the religious community see science as a force opposing their beliefs, and many of the political right see it as attacking their business interests.

Obama sees science as a critical cornerstone of our society and a source of our prosperity. If he does half of what he says he is going to do, we've got a chance of digging ourselves out of this hole. I'm hopeful it will start to turn things around.

Many of the scientists at the conference had an emotional reaction to the President-elect's speech. This was the first time someone had acknowledged their hard work and promised not only to not actively thwart their efforts, but to help them. To these warriors that have been on the wrong side of the war on science, the ground has shifted and for the first time, they have reason to hope that they may be allowed to start the work of saving the planet.

Bush spent a great deal of the last couple of months worrying about how misunderstood he was and how he was going to preserve his legacy. He wants to make sure that years from now, people will finally agree with what he did and vindicate his low poll numbers while he was in office. I see things differently. I think 50 or 100 years from now, people will question why we tolerated such a dangerously willfully ignorant leader and why we didn't rise up sooner to get rid of him. I think they'll lament all the damage we could have prevented if only we had had the last 8 years to start turning things around. History will not vidicate Bush, it will eviserate him.

Iron and Sand

I was catching up on my reading of Analog Magazine, which I highly recommend to anyone that is a fan of Science Fiction. I've been a reader off and on for almost 40 years. Go to www.analogsf.com today and get your subscription. You may never see it on newsstands. They have it in audiobook and electronic versions, but I've always loved the art that goes with the stories. It's all hand drawn.

The story Iron and Sand by Michael Flynn in the July/August 2008 issue was about people in a distant future finding pre-human artifacts on a planet that I imagined to be very much like Mars. Digging through the ruins of the extinct culture reminded me very much of the recent podcast on Assyrian history I wrote about before this entry. There's something evocative about the image of exploring dusty ruins. The interesting flavor of this story was just how advanced and incomprehensible this civilization had been, yet it was now gone without much of a trace, no survivors hanging around anywhere.

With this story kicking around in the back of my mind, I was listening to NASA's JPL podcast on the 5 year anniversary of the Martian explorer rovers Spirit and Opportunity. I wrote about them on July 15th and September 11th, 2007 in this blog. See: http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/07/spirit-opportunity.html and http://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/09/rover-update.html

I've had a growing affection for this project and its unparallelled success. The thought of these almost indestructible little robot rover probes continuing to survive way beyond anyone's wildest speculation, all just to learn and discover and explore - how could you not love it?

The JPL podcast started by marking the 5th anniversary of the landings, Spirit on January 5th and Opportunity on January 24th. John Callus, JPL Project Manager for the rovers, was being interviewed. Through a failure of a wheel on the Spirit rover, the engineers at JPL determined that they could drive and steer the rover by dragging the wheel. The wheel cut a furrow in the soil behind the probes, and they discovered silicates, an indicator of water. Both rovers uncovered evidence of water, which brings hopes that life once existed there. Callous asked, "Why did Mars become a cold dry barren planet? Another way to express these questions is: Are we alone, and what is our future? Exploring Mars helps us to address these questions."

I had one of those resonance/revelation moments. "Are we alone?" This sounded like a response to the Iron and Sand story, people kicking around on a dry dusty planet looking for someone's traces. Then I wondered what he meant. The rovers aren't looking for people (intelligent beings), they are just looking for life. John Callus meant, are we - life - alone, or is there life in other places than besides Earth. I'm confident that there is life out there. The odds are stacked heavily in our favor. 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and as we look deep into space, countless trillions of galaxies. Then spread that out over 13 billion years, and it's just inconceivable to me that we are the only place life could self assemble.

The angle of the Iron and Sand story bent my train of thought into an unexpected place. What might we find in our future explorations that will be completely unexpected? We're looking for life, but what if that's not all there is to find? What if there are other forms of intelligence that are not life as we define it? What if there are other forms of self-assembly besides life? Something like machine intelligence? Something aware built into the structure of matter or energy? Something symbiotic to life that we have always had an inkling of understanding about, and just defined it as God or Religion? What will we find that we don't even know to look for yet? I want to find out.

Assyrian Revelations

My brother recommended a podcast to me that I've been enjoying immensely. Dan Carlin actually has two podcasts, Hard Core History and Common Sense. I listened to his 12/14/07 Hard Core History podcast called Judgment at Nineveh.

The subject was the ancient Assyrians. I remember them briefly during History classes in High School. They were treated as background information. "...before the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were the Assyrians, Hittites, and Summerians".

So it was an unexpected pleasure to find a whole block of history I was completely unaware of. New discoveries are so cool.

What Dan revealed was Brutality.

Here was an advanced civilization with massive cities, written archives, relief sculptures, big buildings, a far flung territory, and massive armies. The lasted about 1500 years and preyed upon and terrorized everyone around them. Some people that opposed them were wiped out completely. Whenever anyone tried to rise up against them, they put down the uprising with a ferocity and brutality designed to dissuade anyone from trying to go against the king again. They tortured and mutilated the vanquished in ways that the world has not seen since.

When they finally were overthrown, their rivals destroyed their works, their people, and most of the records they left behind. 200 years afterwards, when Alexander the Great swept through the area, he found the ruins of huge cities that no one could tell him anything about. The Assyrians were not only defeated, but wiped out of existence. This may be part of why I never heard of them before.

One of the devices Dan used in his podcast to describe what happened to the Assyrians, was that scene at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes when Charleton Hesston finds the ruin of the Statue of Liberty on the beach and realizes that he is not on some other planet where apes rule, but on a future Earth where man works were wiped out. The take away message was that this is what happened to the Assyrians, and that could happen to us again.

Whittled to the Core

I just watched President Bush's farewell address, which struck me as symbolic.

If you remember the 2004 campaign, you'll remember that in order to get into any of his campaign appearances, you had to sign a loyalty oath (okay, I don't think it was called that, but you had to state that you supported Bush just to get in to see him). This room, like those rallies, had only loyal supporters in them. Bush has almost never subjected himself to hostile crowds. The thing that strikes me about this performance is that it was a feeble attempt to recapture the glory days of cheering rallies that were full of people that supported him and his policies, but it is now whittled down to a small core of die-hard supporters.

And that core was sorely whittled down. From the high of post 9-11, where frankly, we would have rallied around any leader that may have been in office at that time, through the contentious and divisive 2004 election, to now, we have seen the biggest erosion of support in modern history. Support does not erode away by itself or through a lack of understanding. People usually earn disapproval. Each challenge, disaster, and revelation of Bush's Presidency has uncovered more flaws. There was a constant shedding of supporters, until here at then end, only a small core remains. Only the people with an exact match in Bush's values, or those that stood to gain from the way the game was rigged under Bush are left by his side.

For a President that rarely exposed himself to questions from the press, his final press conference in Iraq was also symbolic of the miscalculations of his Presidency. Putting aside why we went into Iraq and whether we were justified, I believe the President buys into his own propaganda about his role in Iraq. He feels that the people in Iraq should love him because he rid their country of a dictator. Unfortunately, the shoe throwing Iraqi was a fair indicator of what most Iraqis think of our President. Were we greeted as liberators? Is Iraq better off today than it was when we went in? None of that counts if the typical Iraqi is looking forward to the day we leave their country. Does anyone in this country count the Iraq War as a success? Even within his supposedly most loyal core of supporters, the troops that volunteered to serve under Bush, his support is dwindling. Too many veterans have had their families shattered under continuous rounds of deployments and too many wounded soldiers have failed to get the support and treatment they deserve when they returned. You can see them turning their backs on a leader that convinced them to support his misdeeds.

The biggest irony, while watching Bush make one last attempt to spin his legacy into something positive, something to be proud of, was the comparison to the other big story of the day. Visions of a passenger plane going down and ditching in the Hudson river were all over the news. This proved to be a more interesting story than the President's farewell. I could not help but see the parallels. A small group of traumatized people waiting patiently to get out safely from a serious plane wreck, where the events were so disastrous, that they should have had no hope of getting out unscathed. Just like the Bush Presidency.

You Can Dish It Out, But...

I don't know whether to file this under the rantings of a sore loser, the irony of someone that only applies rules and standards to the other side, or just someone that can dish it out, but can't take it.

Go to http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2009/01/palin_crazy_or_crazy_like_a_fo.html?hpid=sec-politics to see some excerpts of the interviews that comprise a new documentary. The film clips have www.HowObamaGotElected.com across them and consist of Sarah Palin being interviewed for the documentary. I listened to the clip with a combination of amusement, disbelief, and scorn.

She was still mad about the Katie Couric interview, when she was asked what news sources she reads, what newspapers and magazines. She claimed that this was a stupid gotcha question and wants to know if Caroline Kennedy would be asked tough questions. "What do you read" is a tough question? Maybe, if you don't read anything and don't want to admit it and look like an idiot. They should have asked her what she thinks about most of the time. That would have been an interesting question to hear her stumble around, unable to answer. Think? Who has time to think when you're out speechifyin'?

She asked "Why do reporters not check on facts?" Like your conservative friends, Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh? Like you when you started attacking Barack Obama for "palin' around with terrorists"?

She asked, "When did we start accepting as hard news sources, bloggers?" Like the Drudge Report? She continues, "It's a sad state of affairs when media relies on bloggers ... for their hard news information." I'm not sure which mainstream media outlets rely on bloggers to provide information, but I do know that a prominent conservative book that came out just before the election was sourced mostly from discredited blog accounts.

She said, "What is the double standard here why people would choose to believe lies, and reporters especially, not just takin' one extra step to get to the facts and report the facts, but instead continue to spread things that are not true." But you didn't hear anyone on the right disputing the obvious lie that Obama was a Muslim.

She questions if her perceived mistreatment by the media is political or sexism: "What is it that drives some people to believe the worst and perpetuate, the worst, in terms of gossip, lies" (Like charges that Obama is a Muslim, or pals around with terrorists, or must be condemned for the words of his pastor?)

She noted that Barack Obama said that family was off limits, and she respectfully believed that this applied to everyone. She claimed that recent "attacks" on her family (like reporting that her high school dropout daughter that conceived a child out of wedlock dropped out of high school and conceived a child out of wedlock) by the media violated some rule that Obama supposedly put into place. Suddenly, this great rule that she violated at will was lamented when it didn't apply to her. Apparently, she forgot the attacks on Michelle Obama for the "I'm finally proud of my country" statement.

Said that she asked the media to correct the report that her daughter and son-in-law are high school dropouts. I'm not sure what correction is possible, given that her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend dropped out of high school when she got pregnant. Granted, her daughter is taking correspondence courses to get a high school degree, which is not necessary or possible if you stay in high school and don't drop out. So the media is not being inaccurate in saying that she dropped out of high school, just incomplete in not saying that she is going to complete her degree out of high school. It's kind of like when you say that someone's pastor makes inflammatory remarks, and conveniently forget to mention that he condemned what the pastor said.

Palin commented on the Katy Couric interview, saying that "after it didn't go well the first day, why were we going to go back for more?" So it's the McCain campaign's fault for subjecting you to interviews, not your fault for failing miserably in them?

She also complained about Tina Fey's portrayals of her on Saturday Night Live, but then went and appeared on the show. I'm sure at the time that it was calculated to make her look cool, like she was a good sport. You lose the good sport points if you later complain about those mean people making fun of you.

She complained that people were capitalizing on and exploiting her position. Isn't that what she attempted to do when she stumped for McCain?

She asked how Caroline Kennedy will be handled, and if she will be handled with kid gloves. If asking questions is the opposite of being treated with kid gloves, I would hope Caroline Kennedy will be subjected to the same treatment as Sarah Palin. I wonder if she'll stumble on being asked what magazines and newspapers she read, or if she'll draw a blank when asked about any Supreme Court decisions that she disagrees with.

She talked about the hypocrisy of the media because they attack her for being conservative. I don't think anyone attacked her for being conservative. I think they attacked her for being a hypocrite and an idiot. But it's perfectly OK for anyone in the right wing loudmouth talk radio or Fox News world to accuse and attack people for being liberal.

She implored us, "Don't get sucked into believing what too many in the "main stream media" would want you to believe." Just stick to Hannity, O'Reilly, and Limbaugh, and you'll be fine, America.

The Demise of Newsprint

I subscribe to a print version of the Kansas City Star and it gets delivered to my driveway every day. My father did it all my life, and I kept it up without thinking about it much. The average age of the people in my neighborhood is older than me, and there is still a newspaper on every driveway in the morning.

Are we dinosaurs? I know that with the Internet, there is a world of news out there, freely available at the click of a button. I know that the gas to deliver the newspaper to me and the paper used to print the newspaper are not the best choices environmentally. I keep doing it mostly through habit, but there are some reasons why it's really nice to have a paper newspaper.

The chief reason is portability. I love having a paper when I fly on an airplane because you have to keep your laptop off and don't have an Internet connection in a plane anyway. Sometimes it's nice to take the paper out on the porch, over to the easy chair, or into the bathroom (sorry! but it's true). It's nice to pull out a pen or pencil and do the crossword puzzle.

You can also browse a newspaper better than an online article. When you want to know what's going on in the world, you have no idea what that might be, or you wouldn't need a newspaper. It's good to flip through and see if anything interests you. Online, someone is telling you what is important, and you're offered some of their choices of what you might need to know. One of my most annoying revelations was when I found out that the AOL newsfeed had the exact same headlines that the gossip mags have in the checkout line of the grocery store.

I do like the idea that the people that write for a newspaper are accountable for its content. I still don't feel that is true for the online alternatives. Do those people even check their facts, research sources, or worry about someone pointing out that they got it all wrong? Plus, the instantaneous nature of online access, along with what I usually see on the online news story feeds, leads me to believe that impatient shallow minded browsing is the norm for that form. If you want to know it in depth and take it all in, you're better off going for the print on paper.

I also like the size of a page and how you can take it all in at a glance in a newspaper, versus the annoying paging down you have to do on a computer screen. In a newspaper, you know what you're getting into as far as time commitment goes when you read an article. Often, online, I feel like it was completely truncated or surprisingly stretched out. And don't get me started on advertising. It's so much easier to ignore advertising that doesn't move on a printed page. I'll never get used to those stupid ads where something moves around or dances, continuously annoying me. You can't turn them off, either.

All that said, major and minor newspapers are failing, folding and leaving communities unserved in a sudden rush. This can't be a good thing. I would prefer if they transmorgrified into online versions rather than disappearing completely. I understand that the online alternatives of classified ads are one of the biggest factors robbing newspapers of their revenue. They should have seen this and come up with alternatives. If they had invested in a system that would have made selling or finding things locally more easy and convenient, and worked to make it make money without costing the buyers and sellers too much, it would have been an overwhelming success. I can think of dozens of ways to do this, lots of features I would build into the system if it was me.

They could also have had two tiers, free news and subscription news. With subscription news, you get to post comments (don't let any crazy kid with a computer spew nonsense onto comment pages - if you pay, you'll leave thoughtful comments that I would actually want to read), you get more content and sources, maybe even emails of the authors, and ability to pic pictures off the web. It's possible.

Whatever system we come up with and settle down to in the future, if it serves communities, provides timely and accurate content, and keeps us connected to the world, that's alright with me.

Childraising

I've got a son coming into the world any day now, and I've been thinking about the things I'd like to do with him to raise him. I know that these are a little like ideals, and while they are nice ideas, I'm sure I'll fall short of trying all of them and give up on others after attempting them, but for now, it's nice to have these little fantasies about what I can do to help prepare my son for the world.

I started making a list when the ideas started coming left and right, but I don't have the list now, I'm just going to remember the parts of it that I can.

First of all, I don't want to be one of those parents that is going to do exactly the things that my parents did if I thought it was stupid when I was on the receiving end. This means not telling them that their music is crap, specifically. Generally, it means to allow for differences in opinion, allow them to enjoy whatever cultural offerings they enjoy as long as it doesn't hurt someone or prevent them from getting their work done. This means paying attention to the difference between letting them enjoy something that isn't to your taste and stating your objections when they are well reasoned.

I want to teach him Spanish from the time he is a little baby, so that it will be easier when he's older.

I've always thought it would be good to teach them sign language, because I understand that children can learn that way before they can speak. I think sign language is also great for communicating when the noise level is too high, when you're trying to be silent, or as a secret shared language or code.

I want to have him try to do things blindfolded from time to time. It's amazing how many things you can learn to do if you can't see. I used to watch a show when I was a kid about a blind detective, and you learned a lot of the tricks the blind use to navigate and relate to the world. I think a variation on blind man's bluff could make the exercise fun and interesting.

I want to try some ESP exercises with him. I have heard that ESP is a latent talent that people have that they unlearn as they age. Perhaps he will be able to use it a little bit if he opens his mind to the possibility at a young age.

I'd like to teach him to exercise, stretch, and meditate. These are skills that would be very handy to have built in early, rather than wishing you had some way to learn it when it's more difficult because you are set in your ways.

I'd like to teach him to appreciate nature and wildlife, and to photograph it. There's no reason not to hand over one of today's super simple cameras and let your kid have a shot at it. Appreciating nature is usually just a matter of paying attention, then actually thinking about what you are seeing. It can be pretty simple.

I want him to appreciate books and to learn that there are many fun secrets buried in them. I want to remember not to assume that he's too young to understand something. It's worth trying to explain it no matter what age he is.

I would like to teach him to introduce himself to people and not be shy.

I plan on exposing him to things that many would consider too dangerous for a little kid, mostly to teach him what those dangers are so he doesn't discover it on his own in what could be a fatal mistake.

I want to teach him to admit his mistakes and admit when he doesn't know something, and I hope to teach by example. I vow to avoid taking correction from him when he catches me saying or doing something incorrectly.

I hope to teach him manners by treating him respectfully. I hope to teach him humor by letting him be silly. I hope to teach him love by loving him unconditionally, and tolerance by accepting him for what he is.

I wish I could be certain of remembering these pledges, and always abiding by them, and I hope he will forgive me for my shortcomings. I hope he'll be proud that I am his father and know that I am proud of his accomplishments and better nature.

I think I'm ready.

Plague Year

I just finished reading Plague Year by Jeff Carlson. I would highly recommend this book for fans of the science fiction, future struggle, scientists as heroes genre. SPOILER ALERT. Do not read further if you plan on enjoying the book yourself.

The short summary of the book is that an engineered self replicating nano-machine gets loose and almost destroys humanity. The book focuses on the survivors and their desire to reverse the machine plague.

I thought I was into a poorly written and possibly disappointing book as I started it out. I didn't care about the characters stranded on a mountaintop in California, or the whiny self centered astronaut-scientist at the other focal point of the story. What compelled me to continue was the basic premise of the story.

The machines that nearly wiped out humanity did not work over 10,000 feet. People throughout the world retreated to mountainous regions and struggled to survive. Tiny pockets of survivors clustered on lone mountaintops in California, while some 14 million people made it to the highlands in Colorado, preserving the core of the American government. Some strange war is being waged in the highlands of Asia, which you are only given tantalizing glimpses of.

While you are treated mid-story to an interesting landing of the Space Shuttle on a highway near Leadville Colorado, up to that point in the book, I was still wondering what I was waiting for. Things quickly unravel at that point. You find that the remnant of the American government is brutalizing the survivors and using their carefully collected scientists not to find a cure for the machine plague, but a way of weaponizing it further so they can destroy the Chinese and Muslim survivors and emerge to rule the world. While the astronaut-scientist plots to cure the plague and thwart the evil machinations of the corrupt government, the other big reveal happens at the other end of the story. One of the survivors of the plague on an isolated mountaintop turns out to be the designer of the nano-machines. He makes a harrowing trip to a nearby mountaintop where there is a radio and contacts the government.

Now the book really jells together in an exquisite fashion. The government flies out the astronaut-scientist who teams up with the designer. They figure out how to fix the mess, and go down to raid the original lab that the machines were designed in. There is a mini-coup and the scientist quickly engineers an anti-machine plague from the remnants of the lab. Angered at their defiance, the corrupt government sends in troops to quell the coup and snatch the technology and information. The heavy handedness of the response virtually guarantees the destruction of the prize, but the scientist manages to slip away with the cure and 3 survivors of the coup. The book ends with the coup survivors infecting themselves with the cure and splitting up to strike out and spread the cure among any other survivors.

The book has some nice embedded ironies. The designer resorts to cannibalism to survive, which is what his invention did to the human race. The surviving government, rather than providing refuge and seeking to cure the plague, brutalizes the survivors and seeks to make things even worse. The savior scientist has to go rogue in order to be effective and ends up working almost alone against overwhelming odds. In the end, the cure is passed on by drinking the blood of the inoculated ushers of the cure, which is resonant of a religious salvation.

In the end, well worth the read, and a good story to be made into a movie.

The World Without Us

I just finished reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

This book was released a while back, late summer of 2007. I remember when it came out, the book tour generated a great deal of interest. One of my favorite shows, Science Friday had the author on for an extended interview.

What I remember about the coverage of the book was that it mostly focused on how quickly our achievements would decay or be erased. There was a kind of joyful interest in contemplating our homes and cities and factories crumbling and going back to nature.

It reminded me of the Gunslinger series by Stephen King. In those stories, the heroes have to navigate through a long dead New York City of the distant future. The eminent collapse of the Brooklyn bridge was a strong symbol of decay taking down the works of man.

This book was not just a fantasy for those that dream of a pre-human pristine earth, this book was a condemnation of our environmental legacy.

The reader that they got for the audiobook was annoying. He had a condescending sneer in his voice that dripped with scorn and seemed to be saying, "See what you did? You wrecked the planet, you stupid humans!" At first, I thought that this was inconguous with the intent of the author, but by the end of the book, I was thinking maybe it was not.

I'm more than willing to believe that we have not paid enough attention to the environment. I'm more than a little leery of launching new technologies before the impacts are fully understood. This book goes way beyond where I sit on the green spectrum. Weisman seems to both condemn humanity for the mess we have made, but also to offer no hope that the planet can ever completely recover from what we have done.

I believe in technology. I know its limits and its shortcomings, but I believe that if we continue to seek answers and continue to monitor our actions and the world around us, that our understanding will generate better answers to the problems posed by the interaction of technology and the world around us. The problem with Weisman's book is that the question he poses is, "What if we just quit right now?" The answer to that is the same answer you get for any problem. If you quit in the middle, you get a mess. What we need to do is commit ourselves to seeing through what we have started and making it right.

Dark Knight

By now, everyone knows the story of Heath Ledger. He just finished filming the latest movie in the Batman series and died unexpectedly. I liked Heath Ledger. His film roles were really good, in my opinion, and he seemed like a good guy in real life.

This role is amazing. I was not prepared to agree with that, after all the hype about it. It felt like he was being canonized after he died. I figured it would be a good performance, at best, and that the praise was the movie equivalent of not speaking ill of the dead.

The movie is interestingly written. While never an avid reader of comics myself, I've always enjoyed the movies that were derived from comics, from X-Men to Spiderman. The other Batman movies seem like cartoons, a little too childish or contrived. This movie, while still full of the comics book-like special effects and toys, manages to have some depth to it.

I'm not going to spoil it for anyone reading this. Partly, this is because I'm not certain what the actual deeper meaning here is. They explore the nature of good and evil, the way one almost creates the other. They talk about chance and fate versus effort and choice.

Mostly, you just enjoy watching Heath Ledger paint the depth of the character of the Joker, in a way that the original series or Jack Nicholson's 80's portrayal could not touch.