Galactic Interactions

Galactic Interactions has moved! I’ve been invited to join the community of science bloggers at scienceblogs.com, and from now on I will be posting to my blog there.

All of the entries here will stay up for archival purposes, but all new posts will be found at the new site : http://www.scienceblogs.com/interactions/ — please update your links, your blogrolls, and your bookmarks.
Those of you who’ve been reading this via the LiveJournal mirror — I won’t be doing that mirror any more. If, for some reason, you want to continue reading my blog, you’ll need to go straight to the source.

A week ago, a colleague pointed me to this New York Times article about Marcus Ross. Ross is an individual whom I personally have a hard time respecting, given what he’s done. He’s a Young-Earth Creationist who has managed to get a PhD in geosciences studying a species that vanished 65 million years ago… and all along maintaining as if he believed what he was doing.

This has been written about elsewhere in the blogosphere; I’ll just point you to Janet’s blog entry on the matter, and you can jump forward from there.

Here’s my take on the matter: Ross is not intellectually honest, at least not given the ground assumptions that make science worth doing.

One of my hobbies is role-playing games. If I’m going to play an RPG, I learn the rules and mechanics of the system. Not because I really believe that anything in the world works anything like (say) the magic system of a game I’m playing, but so that I’ll be able to play the game. I’ll be able to speak the same language as the other players, understand how things will proceed, understand what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, and generally know enough of the ground rules to have a good time.

This, it seems, is the approach that Ross took to science. He learned the rules and played the game, but didn’t believe that it was any more than a game.

As a scientist, I think that what I’m doing is real. We’re not just playing games. I think that there is a real nature out there, a real Universe that may be understood, and that what we’re trying to do is understand that Universe. We’re not just operating within some “paradigm” — fancy language for saying that we’re playing the rules of some arbitrary game that we’ve set up. If that’s all that we were doing, then there should be little or no public funding for science. However, the long and amazingly good track record of science in making things work make it very clear that what we’re doing when we’re doing science is very different from what we’re doing when we’re playing roleplaying games.

Yet, Ross thinks he’s just playing a game, and he learned the rules well enough to get a PhD out of this.

This does not make me happy.

Now, let me step back and play devil’s advocate (only to step forward again and point out that I think that my devil’s advocate position is just a straw man). All the time in science we have to behave as if we believe something is true, even though deep down we don’t believe it really is true. Here’s a concrete example: in Physics, we have two very excellent, very well-tested fundamental theories. For gravity, there is General Relativity (GR). For everything else, there is Quantum Mechanics (QM). Unfortunately, the two are inconsistent; if you try to do quantum mechanics where gravity is significant, you get nonsensical results.

This means that GR and QM can’t both be right. And, yet, we soldier on, using GR every day to do gravity calculations, even though it probably isn’t completely correct. We learn the rules and play the game so that we can get the results out.

Is this not the same thing?

Well, no.

Here’s the difference: although we know that either GR or QM isn’t the most fundamental description of reality– most physicists assume it will be GR, rather than QM, that needs to get modified– we do believe, and indeed know, that GR is an excellent approximation to what is going on for a wide range of situations. GR may not be “The Truth,” but it does work for predicting the orbit of Mercury or the gravitational lensing of light around a cluster of galaxies. And here’s where it is different from what Ross is doing. Ross is merrily going forth playing the game of science while assuming disbelieving the theories he’s working with at a level that would render his answers nonsensical. GR may not be the fundamental truth, but we really believe that there is mass there when gravitational lensing measurements tell us that it is there. Ross, meanwhile, doesn’t believe the ages he measures when he’s working in his lab.

Ross is not intellectually honest. To be intellectually honest is to admit that what you’re doing is an approximation, but still a useful one. To keep doing it and carry on getting a PhD when you believe that what you’re doing is a completely false approximation is… well, Janet said it best. It’s lying.

To Ross, science is just another “paradigm” that lets people have intellectual sounding discussions. Great. Bully for him. I wonder how he explains that we were able to come up with things like the wheel, the lever, the light bulb, the transistor, and so forth… but no matter. Let’s not try to get so down to brass tacks. He thinks he’s playing an intellectual game, indulging in mental masturbation, and that’s it. He’s got to– otherwise, in studying science and seeing how well it works, he would have had to question and ultimately discard his world view that suggests that it’s at all reasonable to literally interpret scripture. Since he didn’t, he lied just as assuredly as Kim Philby was lying when he claimed to be working for British Intelligence.

What’s more, people like Ross really piss me off because it adds fuel to the fire of the radical atheists who say that anybody religious who is a scientist is lying, is compartmentalizing and pretending to believe science when they really don’t. That’s not true, but Ross is a poster boy for their arguments. Assuredly it does happen– Ross makes that clear. But just as a cold spell makes it difficult to argue that global warming is happening, jerks like Ross make it difficult to argue that one can be intellectually honest, a scientist, and not an atheist, all at the same time.

Hey all, sorry about this, but — I’ve disabled comments on all posts. I’m currently swimming in spam. Until I get it under control, comments will be disabled. (This will make more sense later, in any event.)

Update: I am going to leave comments disabled on old posts, but as I make new ones I’ll have comments enabled on them. After a week or two, I’ll disable comments on the new posts. This will cut way back on the volume of spam I get here, at least.

I just got home from a trip, and, I must say, it’s just ridiculous.

You go through these lines at the airport, and there are these TSA officials all in uniform and talking very seriously, making sure we understand the conditions under which we travel given the War on Liquids.

It reminds me of a Christopher Guest movie like This is Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman, where the movie is made as if it were a documentary, where the people in the movie are completely serious, but the whole thing is a big joke.

How much of a self-parody does airline security have to get before we realize that somebody’s playing a joke on us?

I recently upgraded my machine at home, which meant reinstalling Debian. It’s good to do that sometimes; a purgative, fresh install means that any cruft that may have accumulated gets wiped out. By and large, the cruft is minimized, because I’m extremely anal in my system administration, but there is some.

Well, after the reinstall, I was finding that I was always having to manually enable the ethernet card attached to the cable modem. Why?? Everything was configured properly. I know, because I did it myself, and did it the same way I’ve done it before.

I look in the system logs and find that somewhere along the line this program called NetworkManager was whining that the driver for my ethernet card didn’t support carrier detection or some such. This is odd, because I’ve used this exactly ethernet driver for many years without trouble (it’s an ne2k-pci card, a very basic and common card), and the driver has a 2003 date on it. What’s different?

Well, I man Network Manager, and see the following:

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. …, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

Aha, I think, I’ve seen this sort of thing before.

Next step:

aptitude purge network-manager

…and NetworkManager goes away.

I reboot my machine.

The ethernet card comes up and just works. The irony is delicious.

If you know what you’re doing and know how to configure stuff, you’ll almost certainly run into collisions with the user friendly things that try to do everything for you. When you don’t realize that the user friendly stuff is there, you can get into trouble.

I’ll take well-documented nerd-friendly over user-friendly any day, because, after all, I am a nerd. (This is why I use fvwm rather than Gnome or KDE!)

An honorable man died today. My grandfather, Elmer Fike, lived a long and full life. The last few year of his life, he’s suffered from dementia, and his memory has been going. I last saw him a couple of years ago at a family reunion, and he didn’t know who I was.

Elmer was a colorful character. He’s a man for whom I had a great deal of respect, even though he made some personally poor choices in his life, and even though there are many topics on which I would today disagree with him. He was a long-time staunch Republican fund-raiser. Indeed, when my mom sees me go on a rant and talk about the evils of intellectual property maximalism and how I want to send money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, she worries that I might fall into the trap that Elmer fell into– throwing too much money after political causes that in the end might not even be as much in favor of me personally as I believed. (I really do think that what the EFF is doing is best for people like me, but then, Elmer thought that about the Republicans as well.)

Elmer became a public figure around Nitro, West Virginia (where he lived) back in the 1980’s and thereabouts. He was the owner of a small business, a chemical company named Fike Chemicals. He had been for a long time, and as with anybody who had been in the chemical business, there had been questionable environmental practices on his lot– not because he was a polluter or a criminal, but because it was just the standard practice of the day.

Elmer’s real mistake, though, was campaigning against the extremely powerful and classic back-room politician Robert Byrd, the still scarily powerful senator from West Virginia. Yes, I must admit, what I say here is speculation, but it’s really kind of obvious. Elmer became a particular target of the EPA and of project Superfund. They harassed him, they wouldn’t let him go. Together with the media, he became Public Enemy #1; I remember seeing TV shows (including one episode of 60 minutes) that were egregious in their treatment of this very human, very honorable man. Part of Elmer’s problem was that he didn’t know how to shut up– he would rant on and on, a trait that I clearly have inherited. There was one “counterpoint” type show where he and another person were supposed to be debating, and Elmer couldn’t stay within the alloted time. Eventually, the people running the show turned off his mike and pushed his picture to the edge of the screen… with him still there silently ranting away, looking like an idiot. Yet another case of the media loving to show my grandfather as sombody to make fun of, somebody to laugh at.

The thing is, Elmer was every much a victim of the big business Republican campaign donors as anybody else; I suspect he would deny it to this day, but he was. The lot where his chemical company was built had formerly been a Monsanto lot, and almost certainly the worst contamination came from there. Indeed, it was clear that much of what the EPA was doing in supposedly trying to protect the environment was all part of the show of crucifying this small businessman. They would stand on one side of a chain link fence, put on their protective gear, and walk to the other side of the chain link fence…. Never mind that the greatest concentration of contamination signal was not centered on the center of Elemer’s lot, but towards the edge such that if the suits were really for anything, they’d have needed them on both sides of the fence

I don’t know what the final verdict was, but I do know that the EPA kept hounding Elmer, eventually driving him out of business, even as they weren’t finding the smoking-gun evidence that I’m sure Senator Byrd indirectly instructed them to find. (Disclaimer: this is my speculation, not fact.) It was for this reason that it was with great glee that I witnessed the “dickless” government bureaucrat villain from Ghostbusters to be an EPA agent….

And here’s me today, thinking everybody should see Al Gore’s movie, thinking that the Republicans are the party of fact-denial given that they still stand up and try to argue that global warming isn’t happening or isn’t human-caused. My grandfather would be horrified. The real lesson, though, is that the EPA is first and foremost a government bureaucracy with all of the inhumanity that that implies.

Elmer was also one who was a convenient stepping stone for Leslie Stahl, a now very successful but (I’m sure) as evil as ever TV journalist. If you’ve ever seen the Babylon 5 epsiode The Illusion of Truth, you have some idea of what 60 minutes and other media have done to my grandfather. She came to the plant visited the plant, and told him the whole time, “This is great, Elmer, you’re really going to love what you see.” When the broadcast starts, in front of a picture of a pipe dripping water with steam coming off of it, she says, “Fike Chemicals was the dirtiest place I ever visited.”

In this episode, Elmer’s mistakes were some of his classic mistakes. First, he made the mistake of thinking that people might be honest. Why did Leslie Stahl visit Elmer’s plant? Because he was the one stupid enough to allow it. He had nothing to hide, he reasoned, so why not invite the media in? Be honest with them, and expect fair treatment. Big mistake; Leslie Stahl was in it to build a career, not to tell the truth, and she spun it for maximum effect and maximum self-attention without regard to anything she had said, without regard to what might really be going on, without regard to honesty or humanity. This, alas, in many fields, is what makes for succesful people.

Elmer’s other mistake was a disdain for window dressing. Whereas the big chemical plants have wonderfully landscaped lots with planter boxes and flowers so that it just looks pretty, Elmer didn’t bother with any of that. The result is a lot that looks muddy and industrial, just the sort of thing that plays very well for background footage if you’re trying to convince people that this is a polluted site.

He was also a little guy, easy to pick on. The big companies– they can afford the phalanx of lawyers and the various other things needed to comply, or at least look like the are complying, with any old regulation.

Elmer was no angel; I’m sure that there are many things he did as part of running a chemical plant that I would not approve of. But he was no devil; he was a good man, and the treatment he received at the hands of the government, the media, and the public was utterly, utterly inexcusable.

Several years after all of this, Elmer because something of a folk-hero among lower-level businessmen in various companies and such. Indeed, he would give talks about how corporations were fundamentally flawed, with top executives having “golden parachutes” that would allow them to bail out of a complete disaster and live personally very well. Just look at Enron! Sometimes, I really think Elmer was missing the boat by remaining loyal to the Republican Party even though it had moved beyond the values he truly held dear.

Elmer died today, but he’s only be a shadow of his former self for several years. He was always a colorful character, always a ranter, and always too attracted to conservative causes. But he was also an extremely honorable and intelligent man who did not deserve the public humiliation that he received.

Vanderbilt is currently conducting a search for a new theoretical astronomer.

First, the trials, because I’m really more interested in the tribulations.

Trial #1: it’s exhausting! Now, yes, I know it’s far more exhausting for the candidates themselves, and it’s more exhausting for David Weintraub (chair of the search committee) than it is for me. But it remains exhausting. Back in December, there was the reading of massive numbers of candidate files, and the difficult choices involved in cropping the list of promising candidates down to a “mere” six for an interview. (Six is a lot, by the way! Most searches tend to interview three or four people.)

Trial #2: we haven’t even interviewed everybody yet, and already I can tell that I’m going to seriously regret that we’re only going to be able to make one job offer…. I want more than one of these people to be my new colleagues! A perusal of the astrophysics job rumor wiki shows that all of these candidates have other interviews, so I suspect and hope that all of them will get offers somewhere, but it’s going to be sad to have to turn some of these people down here!

On to the tribulations.

Primarily, it’s a lot of fun to meet new people– extremely energetic, young, active, creative, intelligent people. (Of course, they were selected to be that way!) It distills some of the best parts of going to a professional conference. I’ve learned things from every visitor so far. Despite the fact that we’re going to have to turn some of them down, it is exciting to think that one of them most likely will be a new colleague next year. Whichever one comes, it will be new opportunities, new strength in astronomy. But even beyond that, as I said, it’s just fun and enriching to have all of these people come through, to talk to them, and to hear their colloquia.

(Plus, I do have to admit that so far two out of the four speakers have shown a figure from this page — and not intending to kiss up, but simply because it’s a paper that they all cite — gives me a little egoboo.)

Post removed — I came to my senses.

At least molliska noticed that at some point very shortly after the NC blogging conference a couple of weeks ago, I dropped off of the face of the Earth… or at least, off of the face of the blogosphere.

It’s true. I’m sorry. So what’s been going on? Lots and lots of things, some of which I’ll write about a bit later, but the main reasons are all very prosaic.
Primary reason: the term started at the same time as the AAS meeting I was liveblogging. Things are always busy when the term starts. I’ve noticed, recently, that there seems to be a second law of businessoftermsodynamics; each term is busier than the last. It’s especially frightening when one expects a term to be less busy, as honestly I did with this term.
We have a search for a new theoretical astronomer going on. You may remember reading on Chad’s blog a while back about the search at Union; this can take a lot of attention, time, and energy from those on the search committee. We’re in the thick of interviewing candidates right now. It’s an interesting process. It can be exhausting, but it can also be exciting. Meeting new people, some of whom one would be very happy to have as a faculty colleague next year, is always fun. (Even if I still worry due to the funding situation that next year will be my last at Vanderbilt, whether I want it to be or not.)
Another thing I’ve done this term is set aside a day — Wednesday — on my schedule for research. I was noticing last term that even though as a research faculty member my teaching load is 1/3 that of faculty at small liberal arts colleges, I still wasn’t getting anything done. What happens is that meetings and other similar diddily commitments fill the time available. In between, the random people dropping by with questions, etc., eat up the rest of the time. Even if every hour isn’t scheduled, the day gets so chopped up with a meeting here, an hour or two off, a class, another meeting, an hour, another meeting… that it becomes impossible to get anything done. “Swapper has the CPU” is the term I use, in reference to a process on VMS machines that would be using up too much of the CPU when the machine was really in trouble. It’s impossible to do anything really deep and cognitive when you only have short contiguous periods of time to think.
So Wednesday gets set aside as a time when I can’t schedule any other meetings (although I’ve already caved in two specific single-shot cases.) One result of that is that the other days are all the more full– especially since we have candidates visiting. Thursday is the worst; I feel like Arthur Dent now, completely unable to get the hang of Thursdays.

In any event, hopefully I’m getting into the swing of things and my usual blog blathering rate shall resume.

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Sitting in the middle of a session about teaching and blogging, although we’re talking about science in the classroom and Internet resources in general.

We started with a heated argument over accuracy. How can you be against accuracy, you might wonder? Well, is accuracy the most important goal? What is accuracy? If I had told you last year that there were 9 planets in our Solar System, by some ways of measuring it that was an accurate statement… although I would argue that just presenting it as if that were a closed and settled fact obfuscates the very nature of the science. Many present seem to think that understanding the nature of science and that science is a process is more important than making sure you are absolutely accurate in all facts.

Another assertion came up: more science blogs will harm general science education, and the Internet has been a disaster for scientific understanding in the general public. I asked where this came from, and was not surprised by the answer. The Internet has put the power for anybody at all to put any old thing they want up on the Internet. There’s no filter to make sure that only authoritative sources can produce information. There’s a lot of crap, a lot of bad science, on the Internet. You can find, for example, cosmology sites (some written by folks who have commented on this blog) that are full of long words and equations, such that to the uninitiated they may look like they know what they’re talking about… and yet, they’re bunk. The other example was given that if you go and search for “evolution” on Google, you get… well, heck, I just did it, and the assertion was wrong. But, OK, it doesn’t take much searching to find places like the Institute for Creation Research or the Discovery Institute that promulgate bad science.

My response: consider somebody who lived in a small town in whatever state you want to make fun of. In the world communication available 60 years ago, people would talk to each other, and all they would hear is that the Universe is 6,000 years old, and that evolution is wrong. Now, however, with the Internet, they have a hope of getting the information from a variety of legitimate sources. Yeah, the Internet has brought the Institute for Creation Resaerch into everybody’s home, but it’s also brought the National Center for Science Education into everybody’s home.

Yes, it’s easy to be paranoid and say, geez, any nut can now publish his wrong science, the Internet must be terrible. But before condemning the Internet for that, I’d like to see that the spread of ignorance via the Internet is faster or more effective than the spread of knowledge; I suspect it would turn out to be a net positive.

Perhaps if you like the one-to-may, only the annointed authorities can dispense information, model, then there was a golden age for several decades in the latter half of the 20th century. There had become a national, or even global, media. Some newspapers became national. There was radio, with some national broadcast. There were only a very small number of national news networks. There were “big” sources of information that everybody in our culuture shared. As such, if you thought you trusted those big sources of information, then the information being spread could be controlled and trustued.

I’m enough of an instinctive libertarian that I can’t help but think that the big “one-to-many” model of news and information distribution, where there are very few sources, is a scary model. While, yes, perhaps not it makes it easier for more people to get wrong stuff, they can also get the right stuff that previously wouldn’t have been considered to be worth the airtime on national networks, and they can get multiple takes on good stuff.

Increased communication ability can help spread ignorance, but it can also help spread truth. Insofar as we have any faith in the intrinsic strength of truth, the more communication there is, the better, ultimately, for truth.

(And now I’ve missed about 15 minutes of discussion because I was typing this.)