The Adventures of My Pet Hamster » steve

The Carbon Bowl

steve — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:44:34 +0000

Apparently, each year the SMU Provost hands out a book for the faculty to read. Last year, that book was Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” a collection of stories (including diary entries) about surviving the worst environmental disaster in American history: the dust bowl. The dust bowl was an event in the 1930s which devastated much of the Southern Great Plains, a consequence of poor farming practices coupled with government and private incentivizing of conversion of grasslands into farmlands. Winds which normally whipped across the plains and caused little damage, owing to the protection offered by Buffalo Grass, suddenly found top soil loosened by plows on unplanted land. These winds kicked up clouds of dust 2000 feet high and 200 miles across, killing men, women, and children and destroying countless communities.

I’m reading this book now, and wondering if the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico represents America’s “Carbon Bowl,” an environmental disaster that is the face of global warming. Just as greed and poor homesteading policy fueled the farming boom leading up to the dust bowl, an unslakeable thirst for energy coupled with bad public and private policies for energy diversification have led us to desperate measures to drill for oil. Just as the natural forces that move energy across the plains – wind and heat – were then unchecked by the natural ecology that had long developed in and protected the plains, unleashing the dust bowl, the natural forces that move material around the Gulf are sending the fruits of energy labor – crude oil – into bays and marshes. Countless plant, animal, and human life was destroyed during the dust bowl; we probably can’t know the extent of the oil’s damage on sea life for quite some time. Dust pneumonia was the disease of the dust bowl, the delicate tissue of the lung severed by fine silicates; who knows what the long-term health effects of all that oil and oil cleanup will be on Gulf coast residents.

Just as FDR had a chance to do something great to save the land and save the people, this President has a chance to do something great to create good energy policy while bringing relief to the Gulf and its people. With so many other comparisons to FDR under President Obama’s belt, will he rise to the challenge and meet this historical cycle head-on?

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Take TV Anywhere

steve — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:58:07 +0000

I’ve commented on how much I love my MythTV box, “Stevo.” I’ve found another reason to love it more: streaming recordings from my home in Texas to my laptop in France.

Fundamentally, all MythTV does is take output from a TV tuner card and convert it to MPEG, writing it to disk. MythTV makes the videos available through a “TiVo-like” interface. But in addition to TV, it collects your music and photos, RSS news feeds, web content (Hulu), and podcasts and makes them available through your computer or TV.

Marry MythTV, SSH, and VLC, and you have a personal streaming empire. Let me tell you how I get my videos from Texas to France.

It begins by opening an SSH tunnel, with port-forwarding, from my laptop to the Stevo machine. Since Stevo lives behind a firewalled server, I need to do a “two-hop SSH tunnel”. From one terminal, I type:

ssh -l -L 8080::8080 -2

and from another I type:

ssh -l -L 8081::8081 -2

The reason for two tunnels with two ports – 8080 and 8081 – will become apparent in a moment.

Using one of the two SSH sessions, I then log into the internal Stevo machine. I navigate to the directory containing my TV recordings and choose the one I want to stream. I then execute VLC, launching both its web server (to control the stream) and its streaming capability:

cvlc -I http –http-host :8080 –sout \
‘#transcode{fps=25.0,height=320,width=240,vcodec=mp4v,vb=768,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2}\
:std{access=http,mux=asf,dst=:8081}’

You’ll have to tune your bitrate (video and audio) settings to suit the quality of your connection. I find that with my home server upload speeds and the download speeds of my local internet connection, 768kbps for video and 128kbps work very well. We also see why two port tunnels are needed. One is for the HTTP interface that lets you control VLC (8080) and the other is where the stream goes (8081).

Now, one important thing. You may need to tweak the .hosts files provided by VLC for its HTTP interface. By default, it’s locked down and you can’t access the webserver, even with the SSH tunnel, from anyplace other than 127.0.0.1. I edited the /usr/share/vlc/http/.hosts file and made the server allow people from outside localhost to access the VLC interface.

Now, from my laptop’s web browser I go to http://localhost:8080 and I can control where in the stream I am located. I can launch VLC from a terminal on my laptop using

vlc http://localhost:8081

and I can watch the stream.

By the way, here’s a fun tip based on something I learned from Lifehacker [1]: if you are watching a certain GLOBALLY POPULAR sporting event using this method, and you cannot STAND Vuvuzelas, you can open VLC’s audio mixer, enable two-pass mode, and drag down the following sliders to zero: 600Hz, 1kz, 3kHz, and 6kHz. This removes the higher range of frequencies occupied by the Vuvuzela, leaving voices and cheering intact.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/showmeyourcleats/2010/06/18/127928951/vuvuzela-tricks

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Summer vacation is either a lie or a memory

steve — Wed, 26 May 2010 03:08:57 +0000

When I was a kid, I got used to the idea that summers were my own. That’s thanks to the way the U.S. school system works, starting in August and ending in June of the next year. Summers were a time for play in my youth, yard work and play in my teens, a job and music in early college, physics research and music in late college, and then physics research in graduate school. The progression from play to steady employment was slow enough that I didn’t notice. By the time I became a post-doc, summers were the crunch time, all prep-work for conferences and no play. Of course, the lack of play led to stress-related health issues that I am still learning to tackle. The lesson: play is important.

As a faculty member, I am first struck by the perception that many students have about what a faculty member does during the summer. Their first instinct is to assume that you have the summer off. The second instinct is to recognize that you’re doing research (or teaching, depending on your track), but to fail to understand how draining that is. For instance, many students don’t seem to realize that to work on the LHC you have to spend time at CERN . . . away from your spouse . . . and home. It’s stressful, but necessary, and certainly not different from what hundreds of other physicists are doing at CERN this summer.

I’ve realized how non-existent my summer is, to the point where I can’t even plan for a summer side project this year. As soon as classes ended, I had a week to recover before the SMU Society of Physics Students trip to California, which I chaperoned (c.f. [1]). That drained me. It was fun – a LOT of fun, actually – but the irregular sleep schedule, plus constant driving and walking and planning . . . it took its toll. I had a few days with family, and one day with Jodi, before my latest travel: to Brookhaven National Lab for the Brookhaven Forum 2010 [2]. I’m speaking here, and while writing a talk for an invited parallel session presentation is a piece of cake at my age, it’s still time away from Jodi and home.

All of this is in the context of the next few months. In mid-June, I’ll be relocating to CERN until Aug. 1. Thanks to the generosity of my friends at CERN, I have a few places to call home for the summer (so as not to burden any one person). In addition, I’ll be starting my own effort on ATLAS with a post-doctoral researcher, also moving to CERN in June, and with a summer graduate student who will accompany me to CERN for the summer.

August will bring a few weeks of down time, including a MUCH NEEDED vacation (I haven’t even started the major summer work and yet I already know in my heart that I desperately need a vacation). It will also bring the need to prep for teaching next semester, which will be MUCH different than teaching was this past semester (pre-med students instead of engineers and physics majors/minors). I’ll be sneaking class prep work into the summer, so as to relieve the burden in August. But it’s a lot to think about.

Nobody said being faculty was easy, and it’s not. But it’s a metric shit-ton of fun, even if it’s exhausting. I just hope I survive to my vacation in August, and I hope I can get my batteries back to where they need to be in preparation for my 50 pre-meds, my post-doc, and my research students.

[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/goingupalleys/category/event/smu-sps-trip-to-slacsilicon-valley/

[2] https://indico.bnl.gov/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=189

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Seen and Unseen

steve — Wed, 26 May 2010 02:51:32 +0000

The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is an immediate crisis, getting immediate attention. It poses long-term effects for sea life, coastal life, and human economics (fishing, tourism, etc.). That oil leak represents a major release of carbon into the Gulf; oil in its crude form is a thick and viscous material, rich in carbon and hydrogen. That oil was on its way to a surface platform. Before it exploded, that platform was to raise the oil from the deep and pump it into oil tankers for shipping to coastal refineries. Hydrocarbon, in liquid form, was on its way to being burned in cars and households across the United States. That burning releases the carbon, primarily in the form of carbon dioxide. A potent greenhouse gas, that CO2 is then free to become part of the growing blanket of CO2 covering the entire earth. That blanket continues to affect changes in the global climate.

While the research demonstrating a causal link between human fossil fuel activity and global climate change (e.g. global temperature) is clear beyond any doubt, the United States has been slow in responding to the challenge of addressing the problem: the burning of fossil fuels. Part of that failure is simply due to the politics of fossil fuels, and the challenge of transforming a carbon-based economy to something more diverse. Another part is in American science education, wherein we have failed to educate the general public in the scientific method. This leaves America vulnerable to the false dichotomy of “both sides get equal time” and the belief that science is a democratic process, rather than one of elimination of bad hypotheses. The final problem, I opine, is the invisibility of CO2.

CO2 is colorless and odorless, and while necessary for the functioning of plant life it is lethal to humans in large enough quantities (e.g. in an enclosed space). However, when it’s not directly affecting human respiration it might as well not exist; it’s unseen. A blanket of CO2 surrounds the earth. In partnership with water vapor, it helps keep the earth’s surface at a comfortable temperature. But the size of that CO2 blanket has increased by 50% since the industrial revolution. We know that this extra CO2 is due to the burning of fossil fuels because oil and coal, long sequestered in the earth (millions of years), are free of the radioisotope Carbon-14 [1]. Historical studies of C-14/C-12 ratios in the atmosphere, as through tree ring research, shows that the declining C-14 content in the atmosphere tracks exactly with the increase in CO2, all since the industrial revolution.

The problem is that we cannot see it. CO2 is not like smog; it doesn’t hang on our cities, induce asthma attacks in our children, lead to “spare the air” days, etc. Rather, it rises into the atmosphere, thickening the blanket and affecting average temperatures world-wide. We are fooled by seasonal variations in weather – witness the snow in Dallas this past winter – into thinking climate change is a joke, but meanwhile the CO2 blanket thickens as we warm (or cool) our houses and ignore the problem. In contrast, the Gulf of Mexico oil leak – no less a carbon-based disaster – will coat wildlife in crude, starve sea life of oxygen and sunlight, ruin beaches and choke fisheries. It will stir anger from Congress and from the American people that too little is being done too late to save us. Pictures of the slicks, of tarballs, of sick and dying wildlife, of fisherman and children affected by contaminated food or water, will dance across our TV screens. We will react. There will be no debate about whether the oil spill is real, or whether the devastation of wildlife will have a causal connection to oil. There will be nothing but the intent to act, and a frustration when action doesn’t lead to immediate relief. Anger will rule policy, lawsuits will fly, and no doubt coastal communities will be affected for years, if not decades.

Imagine this level of emotion and dedication was brought to the CO2 problem. Imagine if CO2 could make you sick, hurt your kids, lead to widespread death of wildlife. Imagine if all the false skeptics were silenced by images of CO2 wreaking widespread devastation.

Of course, this is not too realistic. CO2 takes a long time to have its impacts, as we have seen. Those changes are gradual, spreading over generations so that no one generation feels compelled to act. CO2 is truly invisible, and in being so has become conveniently ignorable. The dichotomy in our world is between how we act against things seen (the oil spill) and unseen (the incredible thickening of the CO2 blanket). Ironically, both of these problems have the same cause – our insatiable need for energy combined with a hesitation to change the fundamentals of our energy economy.

Humans are ignorant creatures, by evolution. We are sensitive to only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, making us long blind to radio and UV light. It is science that lights a candle in the dark, and makes us aware of the unseen and its daily impacts on those things seen. We know that UV is bad for us, because each of us can get sunburn; as a result, we accept the benefits of sunscreen against an invisible enemy. We know that viruses (polio, measles, smallpox) cannot be seen, but are devastating to us in less than a generation; we accept that vaccination can save us from crippling diseases. We fight the unseen, in the hopes of preventing the seen.

The challenge of CO2 is a cross-generational problem, one which has not been addressed. The oil spill in the Gulf is real opportunity, much as the recognition that viruses (unseen) are connected to disease (seen). The oil spill is the seen, the disease; the energy demand, the need to separate hydrogen from carbon by burning the product is the cause. We have an opportunity to tackle the disease and develop a cure, by diversifying our energy portfolio and minimizing our dependence on old carbon-based fuels. Let the devastation in the Gulf be the face of the invisible CO2 blanket in the atmosphere, and let the devastation wrought by this disaster be a proxy for all the devastation to come from climate change. Maybe, if we recognize THIS as the face of our enemy, we will be compelled to act.

[1] http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1981E&PSL..53..349S

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Aerosols

steve — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 16:12:21 +0000

I’m nursing a cold. Laying about on the couch has given me some time to think, and I’ve been thinking about aerosols. The recent eruption of an Icelandic volcano has brought air traffic over Europe to a grinding halt. When this same thing happened after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S., local climate was slightly altered as jet contrails disappeared from the atmosphere. Albedo, the reflectivity of the atmosphere, kicks sunlight back into space and reduced energy input to our global greenhouse. The water vapor in contrails also serves to trap heat once it’s in the atmosphere. As a result, the range of high and low temperatures INCREASED markedly in the U.S. during the days after the attacks [1]. Whether a long term lack of contrails causes more warming (by allowing more sunlight into the atmosphere) or cooling (by preventing the trapping of radiation in the atmosphere) is unclear.

Volcanoes, on the other hand, seem to have a more clear impact on climate. The fine particulates in volcanic ash increase the albedo of the earth’s atmosphere and cause more sunlight to be reflected back into space. Less sunlight then gets trapped as heat in the atmosphere, and cooling results [2]. In fact, perhaps not coincidentally, “Ben Franklin noted that volcanic aerosols reflect sunlight to space, and therefore argued that the eruption of a large volcano on Iceland may have been responsible for unusual cold in 1783-4.” [2]. Franklin was even in Paris in 1783 [3], working on a peace treaty, so again the prevailing westerly winds brought the ash over Europe.

So I make a prediction, as a very amateur climate science armchair guy. I predict that Europe will experience unusually cold temperatures in the next year. In the next days, this will likely be a combination of the lack of contrails and the ash, but once air travel is restored I’ll wager that local temperatures in the European continent will still go unusually cold this coming year due to the ash. As a result, global warming detractors will seize on this as “more evidence” that global warming is a myth, making the same mistake they make when arguing that “global cooling” happened in the 1970s – neglecting aerosols.

[1] Travis, D.J.; A. Carleton and R.G. Lauritsen (8 2002). “Contrails reduce daily temperature range.”. Nature 418: 601. doi:10.1038/418601a

[2] JE Hansen, AA Lacis – Nature, 1990 http://hokulea.soest.hawaii.edu/ocn435/papers/1990_Hansen_Lacis.pdf

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_franklin

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No Malfeasance, Learn Statistics

steve — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:49:46 +0000

An independent review of the climate research at East Anglia University has turned up no malfeasance [1]. The center of the Climate-gate controversy, I’ve been waiting patiently to see how this review went. Importantly, the report concludes that researchers need to spend more time working closely with statisticians to make sense of messy data. Amen to that.

Climate-gate taught the public a lot about just how messy science can be, and how opinionated scientists can be. While I am glad than an independent review found no wrongdoing, I still encourage scientists not to be jerks.

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8618024.stm

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The Lawn as an Evolutionary Playground

steve — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:32:16 +0000

Ever since moving to Texas, we’ve had a lawn. I had spent months looking forward to the opportunity to take care of the lawn, even though we’re renting the house. Lawncare seems silly – a caricature of suburban American life. It’s important to me for two reasons. The first is the peace of mind a little sweat and toil can bring. The second is that the American lawn is a micr0cosm of the problem with America: soaked in chemicals, the lawn is a monoculture sustained not by the health of the grass but by the brutality of the agents brought to bear against invaders.

A lawn consists primarily of a single type of grass. After some careful study and comparison, I’ve determined our lawn is Bermuda grass. It’s a species capable of withstanding the brutal summers of the American Southwest [1], growing best when in direct sunlight and temperatures between 75-99 degrees Fahrenheit and faring poorly in shade. It can put down deep roots, giving it access to water many inches below where standard weeds can put down roots.

Accepting for a moment that the preservation of the monoculture is the highest good in lawncare, there are right and wrong ways to promote the Bermuda grass. First and foremost is the simple evolutionary rule that the dominant species will maintain dominance through traits best suited to the situation.

I didn’t do my homework on my lawn before the spring came. I did do a few right things – I put down some fertilizer to enrich the nitrogen content of the soil. However, not realizing that deep roots (and thus resilience against dry conditions) were one of the traits of Bermuda grass, I started watering my lawn several weeks ago. Instead of promoting the growth of the lawn – temperatures have only very recently entered the 70s and 80s – this promoted the growth of broadleaf weeds such as dandelions and chickweed. Bermuda grass needs SOIL temperatures between 75-99, and clearly I had jumped the gun. The grass was still brown because it was dormant, not because it was thirsty. My rookie move got me a bad dandelion and chickweed infestation.

By creating conditions favorable to weeds before the grass could naturally awake, green, and grow, I gave weeds the evolutionary advantage. They certainly took advantage; half my front lawn is chickweed, and half my back yard is dandelions.

In order to restore balance, I then had to do the very thing I wanted to avoid in the first place. This weekend, I was forced to put down post-emergent weed killer to prevent the chickweed from hoarding all the sun in the front yard and thus starving the Bermuda grass. Similarly, I had to stunt the growth of the dandelions in the back yard before their thick, broad leaves blocked all the sunlight. Since the dandelions were spraying seeds like crazy, I also had to put down a pre-emergent weed killer – something normally reserved for the fall. Instead of creating a healthy lawn with the dominant species being the grass, I gave weeds the advantage by watering too early.

So now I am in damage control mode, and I can only look to next year to get onto a more healthy cycle. Weed killer is a short-term solution that allows you to behave badly and still have a good-looking lawn.

I was encouraged, however, as I paid closer attention to the lawn. I pulled a number of weeds myself. In doing so, I got a look at the soil “under the hood.” There are a lot of worms – a good sign for the soil. I also paid attention to where the soil seemed rich and where it seemed poor. I grabbed bags of cedar mulch and put that down on the poor earth, in the hopes of stifling weed growth while improving the quality of that soil. In addition, I planted some grass seed in good soil that was otherwise bare.

This is a learning experience for me, and the health of my lawn hangs in the balance. I have a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the Bermuda grass, and except to water-in the pre-emergent weed killer I’ve switched off lawn watering. When the tips of the grass start to curl, then they need water. I’ve got to plant other things in the shady parts of the lawn, where the Bermuda grass is less likely to thrive. Weeds have typically shallow roots (the dandelion tap root aside), and less watering will help choke their growth.

In the end, the lesson of the lawn will be the same as the lessons of industrial agriculture. If I substitute a love and understanding of the lawn for the power of chemical prowess, I will create a lawn unable to sustain itself, fight invaders, and fight infection. I will create a lawn that is a living tipping point. If, instead, I use the strengths of the lawn against the weaknesses of the invaders, I will create a dominant species capable of supporting and sustaining itself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_grass

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So long, Songbird

steve — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:33:54 +0000

The music player Songbird has been a project I’ve been excited about for a long time [1]. When Songbird first appeared, it wasn’t great on Linux but it brought a promising feature into the music player mix: a built-in web browser, allowing you to surf to music blogs and grab free MP3s from the site. This integrated free music on the web with all the amenities of a modern music player: integrated for-pay music stores, a well-organized music library system, streaming content, and dynamic playlists. Since then, it’s become a reliable and beautiful project.

Alas, today, the project that was born from open-source, designed as a multi-platform player, is abandoning the Linux operating system [2]. And so, in symmetry, I am abandoning Songbird. The player that held such promise as a truly open-source, multi-platform project integrating music and the web has decided to go and compete against iTunes only on the platforms supported by iTunes (nicely pointed out by many comment posters on the Songbird Blog announcement of their decision). So long, good luck, and see ya later.

This comes at a bad time. As part of a streaming media integration project in my own home, Songbird played a central role. Jodi wanted to be able to listen to streaming radio when she’s working on bills in her office; Songbird let me marry streaming audio with our extensive digital music collection, and with an interface similar to iTunes it was familiar to Jodi. Instead, as of today, I have removed Songbird from all of our systems and instead have gone for Rhythmbox.

Rhythmbox is a great GNU/Linux project [3], but I abandoned it because of Songbird’s web integration. If Rhythmbox had a plugin that integrated a browser with this player, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. Rhythmbox has everything else I need except web integration.

Songbird said goodbye to Linux. So I can’t really respect them, and I can’t mourn the loss too long. It is refreshing to come back to Rhythmbox, and I look forward to seeing it evolve in Ubuntu 10.04 and beyond.

[1] http://www.getsongbird.com/

[2] http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2010/04/02/songbird-singing-a-new-tune/

[3] http://projects.gnome.org/rhythmbox/

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The Hypothesis of “Big Government” – Disposable Income

steve — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:16:14 +0000

In the first two parts of the “Hypothesis of Big Government” series, I got my hands on federal employment and employee income data, and also on median family income data, from about 1947 to 2007. A commenter on the second part of the series noted that

” . . . an intelligent conservative might post this question: ‘Even if I accept the idea that income is a good measure of quality of life, what matters is how much income I spend (after taxes), not how much I earn. Bigger government usually leads to more taxes and less disposable income. Are your income numbers gross or disposable?’”

This is an excellent point – disposable (post-tax) income is a MUCH better measure of quality of life than gross income. The median family income quoted was gross (at least, the Census Bureau does not indicate otherwise). I decided to hunt around for median pre- and post-tax income to see what I could learn.

I was only able to find this data for 1980-2003 [1]. Since there are already interesting trends in those two decades (large growth of govt. size and continued growth of deficit in the 1980s, followed by rapid shrinking govt. size and deficit in the 90s, followed by slight growth in size and large growth in deficit in the 2000s), this period could already be informative. In addition, it has the benefit of political party flipping – three terms of Republican presidents in the 80s, two terms of a Democrat in the 90s, and most of one term of a Republican president in the 2000s (up through 2003, when the data ends).

One important note: the data available is median HOUSEHOLD, not family, income. These are not the same. I will therefore show median pre-tax family income as well as median pre-tax household income. The family income is a control; if household income tracks family income, we should see this and then consider the post-tax household income as a reliable measure of post-tax family income.

Observations

First, let us compare the control (pre-tax family income) to the new data (pre-tax household income). They track beautifully. The slope of the ratio of these two data sets is 0.002 (2007 Dollars)/year, which is essentially zero. Therefore, pre-tax household income measures the same trends as pre-tax family income.

The pre- and post-tax household incomes are clearly different, and that difference varies with time. The difference, divided by the gross, is a measure of the median tax burden. From 1980-1992, this (as a percentage of gross income) was 17.7%; from 1993-2000, this was 17.1%; from 2001-2003, this was 15.9%. So on average it’s been dropping by about 1% per decade.

The trends in disposable income largely track those in gross income, except after 2000, when disposable income flattens out while gross income drops. The opinion of the author is that here we are seeing the effect of the Bush tax cuts, since government spending was very much on the rise (along with deficit spending) while disposable income seems to hold against those pressures.

The tables illustrate the slopes in the size of government, government spending/deficits, and household and family income. We see that the trends in household and family incomes largely track, as expected. The caveat is that in the first and last periods studied (where household data is available), there is LESS household data, so one cannot expect the slope measured with fewer points to perfectly track the slope in the family income data. In between, where there is just as much data in both samples, we can make more reliable observations.

Considering the relationship between the size of government and disposable income, the conclusion is that the pace of increase in disposable income is largely unaffected by the large changes in the size of government from 1980-2000. Disposable income grows, but by less, after 2000 (until 2003, when the data ends) There are definitely internal variations that seem largely to coincide with recessions, but overall the trend is up and doesn’t seem all that connected to swings in the size of government.

The relationship between federal deficits and disposable income seems to be inverted, as it was with gross income. When deficits grow at a large rate, the rate of increase in disposable income is slowed. This is most apparent in the 2000s, but also clearly visible in the 1980s.

Conclusions

Disposable income is a more realistic measure of the quality of life in an American household. Trends in disposable income largely track those of gross income, except in the early 2000s. The author attributes this to the effect of the Bush tax cuts, but that is an opinion. In general, when federal deficit spending increases, the pace of disposable income growth decreases.

[1] SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/rdi1.html

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Yes, in my back yard

steve — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:24:14 +0000

I think a lot of people like to pick on places like Texas because of the very public way in which religion, politics, history, and science have been mixed up in discussions of education and teaching standards. An article I received today in the mail [1] suggests that we shouldn’t pretend that issues about science, religion, and education are isolated to places like Texas, Kansas, and Pennsylvania.

Let me begin this discussion of the article by stating two of my own personal beliefs regarding issues of science, religion, and education. First, everybody is entitled to their opinion about the origin of the universe and/or life – liberty is the essence of democracy. However (and second), opinions that are either irrelevant to a scientific understanding of nature, or which contradict observations of the natural world, have no place in shaping science education policy.

The news article discusses a new school board member in my hometown school district who explicitly denies that evolution has a role in shaping human development. Quoting from the article,

“To him, the idea that humans and apes share a common ancestor takes ‘a whole lot more faith than believing there was a creator who set all these things in motion and allows us to operate under free will.’” [1]

“‘I sort of got stuck on one thing with [several high school science teachers and school administrators], which was basically the teaching of evolution in the schools and how it tends to ride roughshod over the fact that various religions — Christian, Hebrew, Muslim — hold a theistic world view . . . Evolution is basically an assumption that there is no God.’” [1]

Let’s start by asking whether or not any of these views matter. To first order, the answer is “no,” so long as this isn’t the beginning of an attempt to alter science teaching in my home district. Personally, I don’t care if these views result in the creation of a theology/philosophy curriculum that gives students the chance to explore different theological world views, creation myths, and their impact on history and society. But, if this is the start of an attempt to put pressure on science teachers in my home district, I take SERIOUS issue.

I, like many others, am a product of the excellent science education offered by the Region 17 public school district. I began a love of physics as a freshman in high school, thanks in large part to my physics teacher, my father, and a NOVA episode entitled “The Creation of the Universe.” It was in the science classes where I found that I could “do” and “explore.” In physics, I could do great experiments and had the freedom to write lab reports with a computer (in 1992!). In chemistry, there were the usual smelly labs but also the chance for to be a lab assistant for two semesters. In biology, there was the usual biology class but also a special “DNA” class sponsored by Pfizer and run by one of the science faculty. That class actually let me run my own DNA tests, make new bacteria, etc. My concern, therefore, is only that the quality of the science education is under threat by theological ideology which fundamentally misunderstands science and mislabels it as arbitrary philosophy.

Science is the process of making observations of the natural world, offering hypotheses that explain those observations, testing those hypotheses with further observation or controlled experimentation, and the development of theories from successful hypothesis testing. This is a messy, non-linear business, where theories are not just “ideas,” but battle-tested predictive frameworks that develop new knowledge from previously disconnected observations.

What worries me most is the characterization both of science and evolution illustrated by the quotes above. Science and evolution don’t require the non-existence of a creator, and to say that is to pretty much fundamentally make-up stories about science. Science is only a means by which explanations of the natural world can be formulated, tested, and propagated. Scientific truths are those things which are apparent to any observer under the same conditions, usually written as mathematical statements. God can still have started the whole thing, and God can still have a role in the universe. But the point is that if God is in there mucking about with things as he pleases, that’s neither reproducible (in the observing) nor relevant. Therefore, science and evolution don’t deny the existence of a God – they merely don’t require it. That’s a very different statement.

I also find it a little funny that the district that started a DNA class now has a school board member who believes that it’s more likely that humans appeared fully formed in their present state and can’t be a variation on apes. To deny things like evolution and the observed age of the universe is, to me, to deny the work of the creator and is thus an affront to that creator. But the nice thing about science is that it frees me from worrying about such things.

It’s too bad this newest school board member so misunderstands the role and nature of science, because there is unique self-enlightenment in a scientific understanding of nature. There is deep beauty in the simple fact that Chimpanzee DNA is 99% similar to human DNA. There is real wonder – real child-like mind-numbing wonder – in how so little a set of variations is needed to create a species like ours . . . one which can evolve over thousands of years only to convince itself of the opinion that the whole thing never happened.

[1] http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-evolution-haddam-school-boar.artmar15,0,4249837.story

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