"Ferocious storms and deadly heat waves are occurring with alarming frequency all over the world."

"We are living with the reality of the climate crisis every day. The only question is, how soon can we act?"

Al Gore is threatening us with reality... TV...." a live-streamed event called 24 Hours of Reality...."



I love the way reality is so propaganda-y when it emanates from The Mind of Gore.

"On September 14th, the world will join hands to create 24 hours of reality..."

That was so weird. It didn't have the slightest feeling of science to it at all.

"A jilted husband built an electric chair in his garage in an attempt to kill his wife after she shocked him by asking for a divorce."

The old jilt → jolt sequence.

Andrew Castle, 61, was so furious at the crumbling of his 18 year marriage he planned to rig a metal armchair to the mains - and invited wife Margaret in ''for a chat.''

Castle asked unwitting Margaret to sit in the chair so he could knock her her out with a cosh and throw on the switch.

But Margaret, 61, got up out of the seat and the couple then got caught up in a violent struggle. Castle landed several blows on his wife's head with the rubber cosh but she escaped through a side door.

A cosh, eh? It's a blackjack. The word I want to talk about is "jilted." Look at the etymology:

"to deceive after holding out hopes," 1670s, from jilt (n.) "loose, unchaste woman; harlot," perhaps ultimately from M.E. gille "lass, wench," a familiar or contemptuous term for a woman or girl (mid-15c.), originally a shortened form of woman's name Gillian, popular form of Juliana.

But if a man does it to a woman, we don't masculinize it and say he jacked her. Although this Castle guy did react with a blackjack....

used in many senses since 16c., earliest is possibly "tar-coated leather jug for beer" (1590s), from black + jack in any of its many slang senses. The weapon so called from 1889; the card game by 1910.

Castle is an interesting name for a man who couldn't say his home was his castle.

"Teach him that his home is his castle, and his sovereignty rests beneath his hat."

He had to go out to the garage and rig up a chair with electricity and invite his wife to sit down and chat in an evil but ineffectual attempt to regain control over his domain. He couldn't avoid the jilt, but — by simply getting up — she avoided the jolt...

1590s, perhaps from M.E. jollen, chollen "to knock, to batter" (early 15c.), or an alteration of obsolete jot (v.) "to jostle" (1520s). Perhaps related to earlier jolt head "a big, stupid head" (1530s). Figurative sense of "to startle, surprise" is from 1872.

A big, stupid head. Thinking about a man named Castle who didn't rule his house or even his garage, you may wonder — in the etymological atmosphere of this post — whether "castle" and "castration" have the same root. The answer is... I'm not sure. "Castle" goes back to a word that means "fort," and "castration" goes back to a word that means "knife," but that word in both cases is the same: "castrum."

Blogger gets up out of her blogging chair and escapes through a side door.

"The AMS has not held the type of open and honest scientific debates on the AGW hypothesis which they should have."

Writes Bill Gray Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, (American Meteorological Society Fellow, Charney Award recipient, and over 50-year member):

Why have they dodged open discussion on such an important issue? I’ve been told that the American Economic Society does not take sides on controversial economic issues but acts primarily to help in stimulating back and forth discussion. This is what the AMS should have been doing but haven’t....

Many of us AMS members believe that the modest global warming we have observed is of natural origin and due to multi-decadal and multi-century changes in the globe’s deep ocean circulation resulting from salinity variations. These changes are not associated with CO2 increases. Most of the GCM modelers have little experience in practical meteorology. They do not realize that the strongly chaotic nature of the atmosphere-ocean climate system does not allow for skillful initial value numerical climate prediction....

The AMS is going to be judged in future years as having foolishly sacrificed its sterling scientific reputation for political and financial expediency....

Read the whole thing.

Science needs to be science. It is a great violation of ethics to make it politics or religion.

Ideology and irony: Stephen Jay Gould mismeasured "The Mismeasure of Man."

A new study shows that Gould — who purported to show that ideology influenced the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton — was himself the one who got the data wrong.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls... “demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions”...

Dr. Gould, who died in 2002, based his attack on the premise that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence. But there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it.... Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately....

But the Penn team... identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases”....

Does that mean Gould was the ideologue? Did Gould consciously or unconsciously slime Morton? Gould isn't around anymore to explain. He died in 2002, presumably a rich man, having sold many books that said many things readers enjoyed hearing, including the defamation of a man who'd died a century before he was born. But all the skulls remain, to be measured and evaluated by the living.

Ah, but what does John Hawks — our local (UW) blogging paleoanthropologist — have to say? 

Some of Gould's mistakes are outrageous, with others it is hard for me to believe that the misstatements were not deliberate misrepresentations.

For example, let's take the story about pushing seed into the skulls. Here is a paragraph from Lewis and colleagues, with direct quotes from Gould:

Gould famously suggested that Morton's measurements may have been subject to bias: “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action”... While Gould offers this as only a “plausible scenario,” and did not remeasure any crania, subsequent authors have generally (and incorrectly) cited Gould as demonstrating that Morton physically mismeasured crania...

In other words, Gould made up the whole thing. It was an utter fabulation. It is disgraceful that later authors have cited this idea as fact.

Truly shocking.

"Unlike homosexuality, heterosexuality is amenable to therapeutic remedies--or so Anthony Weiner and his fellow House Democrats would like us to believe."

Snarks James Taranto.

"Fluoridated water. Artificial sweeteners. Genetically modified foods. Power lines. Vaccines"

"Now cellphones have officially been served with their own baseless indictment, by no less than the World Health Organization."

Those who pollute science with politics, emotion, and other things that are not science deserve our contempt. Expose them. Criticize them. They are great malefactors.

Bad science and why we get fat.

A diavlog with Gary Taubes.

And here's his book: "Why We Get Fat."

And here's his NYT article: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

"Then there are the nutritional concerns about a diet that some say mimics anorexia."

Says the NYT in a prominently featured article that gives some credence to the science behind an inane weight loss scheme in which some doctors charge over $1000 to inject you with a hormone and — guess why it works — you also limit yourself to 500 calories a day.

As Paul Campos says: "Limiting yourself to 500 calories a day 'mimics' anorexia in the same way that injecting heroin every day 'mimics' heroin addiction."

Why, oh, why did the "green" roof collapse? You'd think it would have been "sustainable."

Isn't nature sympathetic to our efforts to be good people?

A 700-by-50 foot section of a roof over a parking area buckled on Feb. 13 at a garden pond construction and supply company in St. Charles, Ill., west of Chicago. No one was injured in the collapse, which occurred on a Sunday afternoon when few people were working at the company, Aquascape Inc.

Nearly a week later, investigators were still waiting to try to determine why the roof collapsed,  said Ed Beaulieu, a company vice president...

“The collapse happened right at the beginning of the thaw,” he said, leading to speculation that ice on the roof might have prevented meltwater from draining off. “But right now no one really knows.”

If you don't know the answer to a question like that, you shouldn't be putting tons of water absorbing dirt on top of a gigantic roof.

"If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community."

"They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value."

Says University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, quoted in this John Tierney piece in the NYT, which gets pretty good if you read past the first half. The first half invites mockery for being so head-slappingly obvious. Glenn Reynolds already wrote just about exactly the post I was about to write. I might have gone even shorter, though. "Duh" is shorter than "Indeed." So, yeah, conservatives are so radically underrepresented in academia that it can't be mere chance.

But let's skip into the middle of the piece and think about the mechanisms of exclusion, these "sacred values" that displace scientific thinking. Haidt notes the example of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, back in 1965, who "warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks" and "was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist."

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

According to Tierney, Haidt's audience of social psychologists "seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument."

A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. 

Affirmative action? Why not just stop giving affirmative action to liberals? I think that would get you way above the 10% quota... if you could do it. Ironically, talking "affirmative action" is inherently off-putting to conservatives. It's more of those sacred values from the tribal-moral community that ward off outsiders.

***

Here's Haidt on Bloggingheads, back in 2008, talking about the social psychology of conservatives and liberals. And here's Haidt's "Your Morals" website project about morality and political ideology.

"It would be impermissible for the court to base its decision of recidivism on its unsupported theory of genetics."

Oh, but maybe the poor judge was born with a tendency to believe that his gut instincts and stuff he's seen on the internet are scientific fact.

"Can one man unilaterally change the zodiac?"

An astronomer brings science to what isn't science but refers to some scientific facts that are susceptible to being set straight, and suddenly you might find yourself Ophiuchus, the Snake Annoyer.

"A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an 'elaborate fraud'..."

CNN reports:

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible.

"It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data."

What psychological suffering this man caused in so many vulnerable parents of little children! For a scientist to subvert science — why don't we have a much more intense feeling of horror about that? How dare those trained in science to misuse it and undermine the enterprise of science? Our shared interest in science is so strong – our need to rely on experts so great — that we should severely punish those who betray it. But we can't, really, can we? If we tried, we might only exacerbate the pressures on scientists to toe the line and give us the answers we want, lest we target them for destruction.

***

Our shared interest in the rule of law is equivalent, yet how could we punish the lawyers and judges who push the law beyond what is truly legal? We'd only end up with worse legal arguments, and our "rule of law" would lose the qualities that made us value it in the first place. Nevertheless, science is different. The scientific method is more agreed-upon. But scientists, like lawyers and judges, go looking for the answers they want. Something non-neutral pulls them along. And yet we expect them — like judges (if not lawyers) — to conduct their search within a professional methodology. We'd like to be able to trust them, and yet we'd be fools to trust them. But we need to trust them, and we trust them all the time....

"City officials wanted the campaign to have... a 'major gross-out factor' that would make the YouTube video, called 'Man Drinking Fat,' 'go viral' on the Web."

Oh, I'm grossed out all right. 

The video, which has been viewed more than 700,000 times, shows a young man sucking down fat from a can as it dribbles down his chin to a cheery calypso-flavored tune.

I'm not grossed out because I watched it. I didn't. I avoid government propaganda. I'm grossed out that it's done at all.

It was the video that sparked the dispute, with its claim: “Drinking 1 can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year. Don’t drink yourself FAT.”

Uh... you already called us fat when you said drinking soda would make us fatter. The government can't get the science right. It can't even get the English usage right.

"Brooklyn is now overrun with rats and opossums."

"A few years ago, officials in Brooklyn, New York came up with a seemingly brilliant idea to deal with the rat-infestation problem in their borough: release opossums into the neighborhood to eat the rats...."

Ha. Of course, like rats, they prefer garbage. No shortage of that.

"The critters have a mouth full of 50 sharp teeth, tend to exude a foul odor, and can occasionally contract rabies... They are nocturnal, and some Brooklynites have become terrified to go into their yards at night."

Oh, Brooklynites! I thought youse guys were tough.

Time to bring in some wolves, I think. They eat rats.

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."

Uh oh! That's Christine O'Donnell, my dear friends.

Via Memeorandum.

ADDED: And here she is with Eddie Izzard!

"I blame not Heaven, but rather a society..."

"We must pray..." for the brilliant comic actor Glenn Shadix, who gave the hilarious funeral sermon in "Heathers" (and played the interior decorator in "Beetlejuice"), and who has died now, at the age of 58.

On his website, he told this story:

... Faced with estrangement from those I loved, I decided to put my fate in the hands of the Birmingham Alabama Psychiatric Community and see if I could rewire myself into something resembling a heterosexual.

... This therapy consisted of male and female pornography and electrodes attached to a large car-size battery and then to me. I was told to look at the male pornography until I became aroused and then dear Dr. Hainey would turn up the juice as I stared at the male nudes and the muscles in my arm would begin to burn and contract. When the pain became intolerable (I was told not to be a sissy about it and to take as much pain as possible) I was then to turn my head and when I looked back the male nude was replaced by a female nude and Dr. Hainey would shut off his little current of torture....

I just want my high school to be a nice place...

ADDED: He's really saying "I blame not Heather..."

Diagnosed as ADHD?

Maybe you're just the youngest kid in the class.

So now there's this theory that the iPad is going to cause insomnia but the Kindle will not.

This is a big, long article in CNN that doesn't seem have much science to it.  Theoretically, the light emanating from electronic screens is different from the light from a lamp that bounces off a paper book or a nonglowing screen like the Kindle. Much is made of blueness.

The New York crime of having a balloon.

In NY, a court found helium a "noxious substance" and upheld the charge of "unlawfully possessing or selling noxious material" against a man who sold 2 helium balloons. It says "possessing or selling," so I must infer that even having a helium balloon is a crime. So watch out kids.