This is a nice, compact debunking of the "B-b-but in the 1970's all the scientists were predicting global COOLING!" meme that the denialists seem unable to resist. It won't help with the hardcore denialists, of course -- "You can't reason someone out something he didn't reason himself into" -- but it's worth keeping around to show those who might be on the fence. Be sure to follow the links; there's some good stuff there.

Derailing for Dummies

I'm not going to say I agree completely with all the arguments herein, but it nonetheless ought to be required reading for anyone (and particularly, yes, for white men) who is considering jumping into discussions about race, sex, religion, and other Sensitive Subjects. It strikes me as being akin to lists of common logical fallacies -- not at all (a large number of Slashdotters to the contrary) the be-all and end-all of understanding how to have a good debate, but an incredibly useful tool for understanding the basics of how not to make yourself look like a fool.

The reactions to Christopher Hitchens' death have reminded me that I am, even among my fellow nonbelievers, a stranger in a strange land.

My personal "I had no need for that hypothesis" brand of atheism, or agnosticism, or whatever, is important to me to exactly the same degree it was important to Pierre Laplace -- that is, not at all, unless someone with the power to order my head chopped off makes an issue of it. (To be fair to Napoleon, he did nothing of the sort. Modern bloody-minded political leaders could take a lesson from this.) I spend as little time as possible pondering (and pontificating on!) the nonexistence of God, or the Gods, or the Universal Spritual Force Which Holds Everything Together But Which I Don't Want To Call God Because That's Too Conventional, because it does not matter to me. I have science to do.

But then, I was raised by two atheists, an ex-Catholic and an ex-Jew, and they didn't get that luxury. Neither, I strongly suspect, did Hitchens, or any of the other more vocal "New Atheist" leaders -- and neither did the vast majority of the nonbelievers I know. Almost everyone I have ever known, in my entire life, was raised with some sort of religious belief. Most of them retained that belief, or switched over to a closely related one. Some broke away from it, and the use here of the verb "to break" is appropriate. It is a breaking, and like all such violent events, it leaves scars. The ex-believers almost universally have in their minds something very much like the titanium rod I have in my leg; it provides some support against the stresses and strains of the world, but one is always aware that it is there, and sometimes it rubs against other, organic structures in uncomfortable ways.

My father is an immigrant, and although he's lived here for what is now by far the greater portion of his life, he's still sometimes taken aback by some cultural reference which was common to the childhoods of his native-born contemporaries. In a culture which is shaped as deeply by religion, specifically Christianity, as is ours, I sometimes feel like a long-term immigrant too. I may look and talk and for the most part think like the people around me, but there's that common cultural reference point, that history of belief if not the belief itself, that I don't have.

"You don't know what it was like, man! You weren't there!" Indeed. And I don't regret this, because I've seen the scars the breaking leaves. But I do regret that there really is no other way to understand what it feels like, without having to go through the associated pain.

Hitchens was an abrasive, egotistical loudmouth, and the things he was loud about tended to be opionions with which many of my family and friends passionately agreed. For what it's worth, I agreed too, for the most part, but without the passion. Because I just don't have the background -- the Passion of the Atheist, if you will -- to feel it. I have no need for that passion.

This leaves me free to look at the man and his life with the immigrant's eye. If the immigrant's lack of a common cultural reference point comes with a price, it confers advantages as well. My father often makes astute observations about American culture which no native-born citizen, not even one as culturally introspective as I am, could quite come up with. Objectivity helps. And the objective truth is that while Hitchens was right about many small things, he was wrong, badly wrong, about One Big Thing.

Hitchens saw 9/11 as the result not merely of Islamic extremism, but of religion in general -- in which he was right -- and conceived of America's subsequent kill-em-all reaction, specifically the Iraq portion, as a war against religious extremism -- in which he was wrong. Deeply, tragically, bloodily wrong. And he compounded the wrongness by turning his considerable eloquence and wit to propagandizing for the war, often turning against his fellow leftists in the process, growing ever louder as the corpses piled higher.

One Big Thing. And I understand that to my fellow nonbelievers, more specifically to the ex-believers in whose land I-the-immigrant live, the small things were not small. Hitchens wrote for decades against Yahweh, after all, and for only a few years in the service of Mars. But for myself, while I have no need of the Yahweh hypothesis, I know Mars quite well. Bright-speared Mars, and Odin who stirs up wars among men, and Morrigan who sends her ravens to feed on the dead -- these Gods I know; and Hitchens preached their gospel. To others, this may well be a minor heresy. So be it. It is a sin I find myself unwilling to forgive.

http://the-scientist.com/2011/11/16/opinion-the-dark-side-of-science/

The author seems to think we live in a world of wild, unregulated research in which unlimited time and money are available for latter-day Frankensteins to create monstrosities in their labs, hidden from public view until the horror is unleashed. In reality, the opposite is true. The primary ethical concern in biomedical science is with curing disease, saving lives, and reducing suffering -- and progress toward these goals is increasingly hindered by philosophers, theologians, and politicians who inject themselves into a process they refuse to understand.

I can't help but wonder if their remote ancestors during the Paleolithic were rubbing their chins and muttering about the dangers of this new flint-chipping technology. Of course, once the hand axe was established as part of everyday life, they were happy enough to use it, all the while warning that tying a smaller, sharper piece of flint to the end of a stick was Going Too Far ...

The more any participant in an online discussion proclaims that he's being logical, the less likely it is that there's any actual logic on display in his posts.

As an American, and specifically as a Westerner, I reject the idea that culture is in the blood. The West is a distillation of America, with all its best and worst ideas, and one of these ideas is that we are who we choose to be, not who our ancestors were. Our names, our languages, our religions, even our lands: these things matter, but they do not define us; we define ourselves.

But I have to admit that there is something distinctly Russian in the way I see America, and particularly Colorado. The Motherland, the Rodina. A very old way of thinking, and one which doesn't fit particularly well with the New World.

The linguistic root of "patriotism" is "patria," that is, "fatherland" -- a word which tends to make people nervous these days, and with good reason. I am a patriot, and (says the Westerner again) I choose what that word means to me. I am far past the age when it meant beating the drum and waving the flag. I did that when I was younger, and I don't regret it, but honestly I'm not sure how well it ever fit me. Nor, with my rational modern eye, can I indulge in the idea of mommy-land; I've lived too many places (largely as a side effect of the drum-beating and flag-waving, it should be noted) and known them too well to believe that any of them is bound to me by blood.

Grown-ups love their parents too, even when they go far from home. Adult patriotism is hard to define. It's easier to remain a child, to be tough like Daddy says or run crying to Mommy when acting tough doesn't work out so well. My parents raised me with something more thoughtful and more useful than that, and in so doing earned my eternal gratitude.

I'm still working out how to apply that to my country. I probably will be for the rest of my life.

(Jumping off from the conversation here, for those who are interested.)

There is deep satisfaction in finishing an elegant proof, like writing a good short poem or a beautiful paragraph, though not exactly like either of these. It is, I suspect, very much like finding the right arrangement of notes when writing a piece of music; I'll probably never know.

In writing a paper full of such proofs, there is fatigue and blurred vision and, often, actual pain. So it goes.

If either (a) it wasn't really bin Laden they killed, or (b) Obama could have had him killed at any time, and in either case the announcement was for political purposes, when would have been the right time to do it? The short answer is, "not right now."

The longer answer is, sometime in early September -- not September 11th itself, that would have been too obvious, but say sometime during the first week of the month. It could have been last year, in the run-up to the midterm elections, to give the Democrats a boost. It could have been this year, to tie in with the 10th anniversary of the event, since we all seem to like nice round numbers. Or it could have been next year, to give Obama as well as the Congressional Democrats a boost for the upcoming election.

But doing it now, as a political act, would just be dumb. Obama is, very roughly, at the same point in his (hopefully) first term as GHW Bush was at the close of Desert Storm -- at which point, you may remember, Bush the Elder enjoyed approval ratings of 90+%, a record no President has equaled before or since, and was widely considered unbeatable. And if you don't remember what a certain Governor of Arkansas did a year and a half later, I assure you Mike Huckabee does.

There is no reason, at all, at least on political grounds, not to think this is the real thing.

Everything that's wrong with Atlas Shrugged, and with Objectivism, lucidly explained. Kind of a one-stop-shop for responding to the Randroids in your life.

I will disagree with the author on one important point. The essay opens with the mandatory dig at Rand's writing style; de gustibus and all that, but personally I think Rand was a pretty good writer, stylistically speaking. She was wordy, to be sure, but she put those words together well. It was what she was saying with the words that was so thoroughly messed up.

I learned today -- or relearned, rather; it's one of those lessons that apparently I have to keep learning -- not to try to out-calculate the computer. What I mean by this is that math, real math, the kind of math that involves pushing symbols around, is hard; but calculation is easy, so easy that we build machines to do it for us. And in that limited realm, those machines are much better than we are. So we should concentrate on the math and let the machines handle the number-crunching, rather than molding the math to fit our idea of what we think the machines are doing.

Specifically, when formulating a mathematical model, formulate that model in a way that makes sense to you. Matrix transposition is trivial for a computer, but it can completely screw up a human's mental picture of the problem. That screw-up then propagates through the modeling process. You will end up with something that is neither good math nor good programming. It may work, but it will be less flexible, less maintainable, and -- here's where the lesson re-learning comes in -- probably less computationally efficient than it would be if you'd just written the math the way you wanted to in the first place and then turned the math into code.

Computers are really, really, really good at matrix algebra. It's pretty much what they were invented to do. Let them at it.

Critical posts on Sarah Palin's Facebook page are deleted almost as soon as they appear, but a post celebrating the death of the 9-year-old victim in Tucson remains. The blogger calls this "inexplicable," but of course there's no mystery here. This is how Republicans think. Forget this at your peril.

However, just as a good engineer must be able to hypothesize and experiment on occasion, a good scientist must sometimes be able to pound a problem into the desired shape with a hammer.

... is a writer whose works people want to read.

That's it. That's the whole thing. There's nothing else.

And the definition of a great writer is a writer whose works people want to read long after the writer is dead. Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen: great. Their long-forgotten contemporaries: not great.

If in a hundred years, or five hundred, or two thousand, people are still reading The Girl ... novels, then Larsson was a great writer. If they're not, then he wasn't. None of us will be around to know. On the other hand, we can at least say, based on the current evidence, that he was a pretty good one.

Also, I confidently predict that not only will people not be reading anything by Docx a century from now, they will have forgotten that he ever existed once he's been dead the few short years that Larsson has today. He won't be remembered as a great writer, or a good one, or at all, for the simple reason that people don't want to read pretentious crap churned out by bitter twits.

A company called Revolution has a plan for making money from R, the gold standard in F/OSS statistics programming. That's fine, but the way they're planning to do it is a little disturbing. Two snippets from the first article really jump out at me:

Revolution is going to be employing an "open core" strategy, which means the core R programs will remain open source and be given tech support under a license model, but the key add-ons that make R more scalable will be closed source and sold under a separate license fee. Because most of those 2,500 add-ons for R were built by academics and Revolution wants to supplant SPSS and SAS as the tools used by students, Revolution will be giving the full single-user version of the R Enterprise stack away for free to academics.

So are they going to try to take CRAN offline? Because I don't think they can actually do that, legally speaking -- and if they did manage it, doing so would completely kill the advantages R currently enjoys over SAS, SPSS, etc. And then there's this bit:

Smith says that there are a number of problems with R that need to be addressed to help it go more mainstream. For one thing, he says that while R has a number of different graphical interfaces available, it is still fundamentally driven through a command line interface.

I'm honestly not sure if there's any response to that one.

... this is what you're actually supporting.

Note that this guy is a city councilman. He's not just some radio loudmouth. People voted this guy into office.

Spread the word.