Science

The Telegraph reports on a “surfer dude” (who happens to have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. though he spends his time surfing and snowboarding) who has come up with a unified theory of everything that is getting some serious attention from other physicists. (Via The Agitator.) Historical Comments Einzige (2007-11-24): Turns out the guy is good friends with several people I work with. He's one of our system's beta testers. At the risk of sounding like a total doofus... I sat next to him at dinner a few months ago. ...

Some nice high-definition video images have been taken by the Japanese lunar orbiter “Kaguya," showing the earth setting behind the moon’s surface.

Here’s a blog, Watts Up With That?, that documents with photographs some weather stations that are taking temperature measurements under conditions that violate standards for site locations. There are photos of temperature sensors on concrete, on asphalt parking lots, next to buildings, and close to multiple air conditioners. I was disappointed to see that the University of Arizona, where I went to graduate school, was an offender, with its weather station located in the middle of a parking lot (pictured). Anthony Watts’ blog describes the rules for siting weather stations, shows pictures of violators and explains why what they’re doing is a problem, and shows the data from those stations. There are all sorts of bias-correcting measures applied to temperature measurements, but I don’t think they are correcting for sensors that are located in the path of air conditioner exhaust. This might be a reason to prefer satellite data. (NCDC’s website has a huge collection of climate-related data from many sources.) UPDATE: Hume’s Ghost points out in the comments that bad sites show the same long-term warming trends as good sites, with a link to his blog, The Daily Doubt, on the subject. UPDATE (July 31, 2009): Peter Sinclair’s Climate Change Crock of the Week has done a video on Anthony Watts’ claims–and Watts has misused the DMCA to get the video taken down. But it’s back! UPDATE (February 5, 2010): The U.S. Climate Reference Network provides further evidence that surface station siting problems are not responsible for anomalous temperatures. The linked-to post at Rabett Run includes a comparison of the University of Arizona COOP station with readings from the Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. ...

At Salon, Steve Paulson interviews Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein about their relationship, their work, and their atheism. (Hat tip to Wade Smith on the SKEPTIC list.) Historical Comments Einzige (2007-10-16): Jim,I find much to disagree with in your assessment of Pinker in this post.:-) olvlzl (2007-10-16): I used Steven Pinker's voice for Professor Lockheart when I read my niece the second Harry Potter book. Other than that he's pretty useless. There, does that satisfy you, Einzige? ...

Taner Edis at the Secular Outpost comments on a recent article by Jon Haight about the benefits of religion, including its impact on generosity. I’ve previously offered some comments on evidence that conservatives and the religious are more generous than liberals and the secular and that believers are more generous than atheists. I’ll add that I doubt that studies of charitable giving dig deep enough to uncover whether the giving is going to charities like these. Is it really being more generous if your charitable donations aren’t being used to actually do good?

Blogger Will Wilkinson has posted a lengthy critique of George Lakoff’s “framing” arguments that the Democrats have lost elections because the Republicans have changed the meanings of words. He cites the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt to offer a different conclusion: Haidt’s research leads him to posit five psychological foundations of human moral sentiment, each with a distinct evolutionary history and function, which he labels harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. While the five foundations are universal, cultures build upon each to varying degrees. Imagine five adjustable slides on a stereo equalizer that can be turned up or down to produce different balances of sound. An equalizer preset like “Show Tunes” will turn down the bass and “Hip Hop” will turn it up, but neither turn it off. Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment, and justification. If you’re a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and ingroup pushed up to eleven. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned ingroup way down and harm way up.Rather than recommend that liberals fake religiosity, he offers a different suggestion: Democrats can try to appeal to religious American voters by giving some ground in the culture wars. But it seems unlikely they will find an effective balance. There is no point conceding stuff too trivial to really matter, such as school prayer, and comically pretending to be moved by the pure and the foul. And there is even less point in nominating religiously convincing candidates who really do believe embryos have the spark of divinity, that gay is gross, etc. Socialized health care isn’t worth it. Democrats should play to their own moral-emotional strengths, not apologize for not having different ones. Haidt’s early research on moralized disgust shows that its cultural manifestations vary. The Japanese apparently find it disgusting to fail their station and its duties. And here at home, formerly “repulsive” practices, such as interracial marriage, have become mere curiosities. ...

Eastern Michigan University sociology professor Marcello Truzzi was a co-founder and co-chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, now just CSI) and the editor of its original magazine, The Zetetic (later renamed Skeptical Inquirer). After he broke with the group over what he perceived as dogmatism and a desire for a more academic than popular approach, he published his own journal on paranormal and fringe science subjects, the Zetetic Scholar. George Hansen has now put the first five issues of the Zetetic Scholar online at his website as PDFs, along with the tables of contents of issues six through eleven. (Only one other issue, a larger one identified as a double issue, twelve and thirteen, was published.) Issues 9, 10, and 11 are noteworthy for publishing debate about CSICOP’s “Mars Effect” controversy. My personal collection includes only issues 9 through 12/13, so I’m happy to see the older issues made available. Truzzi died of cancer on February 2, 2003. He was a meticulous researcher who was very generous with his time and sources. I corresponded with him on a number of occasions, and had several telephone conversations with him about skepticism and the Mars Effect controversy, about which I’ve assembled a very lengthy chronology and bibliography. When I wrote a chapter on “Veteran Psychic Detective Bill Ward” for Joe Nickell’s book Psychic Sleuths, Truzzi provided me with a few newspaper clippings on Ward that he had obtained while researching his own book on psychic detectives, The Blue Sense. Truzzi was agnostic to a fault–he would refrain from coming to conclusions even when evidence was overwhelming.

Part two of the Internet Infidels’ “Great Debate” project has been posted at the Secular Web, on “Evil and Evolution.” Draper makes an argument for atheism on the basis of a version of the problem of evil informed by evolution, and Plantinga gives a version of his argument that evolution undermines naturalism. Each offers an objection to the other, followed by a reply. Reader questions are being solicited for the next couple of months, which the authors will respond to on the site.

From the Washington Post: The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either “true” or “false.” Among those identified as false were statements such as “The side effects are worse than the flu” and “Only older people need flu vaccine." When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.The article suggests that when we hear or read a denial of a statement, we tend to remember the association of the items in the statement but not the fact that the statement was a negation. Thus nonsense tends to persist in the face of refutation. ...

Rightwing Nuthouse reports that the History Channel’s documentary, “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction” gives the conspiracy theorists a high-quality debunking. The format is to allow a 9/11 conspiracy theorist to make a claim, and then have experts in the appropriate fields respond to the claim. I’ve got the TiVo set up to record this weekend’s showing. UPDATE (August 26, 2007): I watched the show today, and I thought they did a very good job, though of necessity they were fairly brief in their rebuttals. I was pleased to see that, contrary to some conspiracy theorist claims, they did in fact address conspiracy theorist claims about the collapse of WTC Building 7. I was also quite amused to see that in Alex Jones’ concluding remarks, he made the classic crackpot self-comparison to Galileo, and did so in such a way to demonstrate his own lack of awareness or concern for factual accuracy by stating that the dispute between Galileo and the Catholic Church was about whether the earth was round or flat.