Non-Hostile Casualties

Is it just me? I find the following paragraph very odd and unsettling. Thanks to a mention at the Whiskey Bar, we read this

(AP) — As of Saturday, April 2, 2005, at least 1,533 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,162 died as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department. The figures include four military civilians.

The number 1,533 is upsetting enough as it is. But it’s the figure between the lines that catches my attention (in rather the same way that sometimes it’s worth remembering that foods that trumpet “90% fat free” are still 10% fat).
The implication of these figures is that 371 troops have died in the war not as a result of hostile action. Put another way, that’s nearly 25% of our war casualties that are not the result of “hostile action”!
What does this mean? What would be the “not hostile action” here, and what is it about non hostility that kills so many troops?

You Go, Roger Ebert!

The Panda’s Thumb suggests “One Thumb Up for the TalkOrigins Archive?” over this startlingly frank piece by Roger Ebert: “Film about volcanoes falls victim to creationists“, on the basis on the final paragraph:

[...]
Surely moviegoers deserve the right to decide for themselves what movies to see? “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea,” according to the AP, “makes a connection between human DNA and microbes inside undersea volcanoes.” It says that if life could evolve under such extreme circumstances, it might help us understand evolution all over the planet.

This is not a controversial opinion. The overwhelming majority of all scientists everywhere in the world who have studied the subject would agree with it. Although discussion continues about the mechanics of evolution, there is no reputable doubt about the existence of DNA and the way in which it functions.

Yes, there is “creationist science,” an attempt to provide a scientific footing for beliefs that should be a matter of faith. Creationists say evolution is “only a theory” and want equal time for their theories, one of which is that God created the Earth from scratch in six days, and man on the seventh.

Evolution is indeed a theory. Creationism is a belief, not a theory. In science, a theory is a hypothesis that has withstood the test of time and the challenge of opposing views. It is not simply somebody’s notion about something. The creationist belief cannot withstand such tests and challenges; it exists outside the world of science altogether.
[...]
An industry has grown up around the “science” supporting the “argument for intelligent design.” It refuses the possibility that evolution itself is the most elegant and plausible argument for those who wish to believe in intelligent design. If you are interested, you might want to go to www.talkorigins.org, where the errors of creationist science are patiently explained. And you might want to ask at your local IMAX theater why they allow a few of their customers to make decisions for all of the rest.

That’s a nice mention for talkorigins, sure, but look at what he says:

…where the errors of creationist science are patiently explained.

After all the time I’ve spent reading journalistic pieces by “real” journalists who go out of their way to avoid anything that might look like a fact as they rush to maintain “journalistic balance” by quoting non-scientific yobs about this silly creationist pseudo-controversy, hearing Roger Ebert (who is, after all, only a movie reviewer and not a “real journalist”) refer to the errors of creationist science is such an amazing blast of fresh air that I can hardly breath.
A fact, in fact. What a review! Two thumbs up for Roger Ebert!

“Science” a Dirty Word?

Behold the British Press, willing to say what the American Media apparently prefer not to mention:

For Bush, science is a dirty word
In America’s right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism

Admittedly, the piece was written by Tristram Hunt, a visiting professor of history at Arizona State University. Is it significant that his opinion was published not in America?
I’ll quote the thesis, and then suggest that you read the rest — it’s got too much good writing about really bad things.

Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world’s scientific elite. But Bush’s faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.

Pseudo-Science & Schools

Some things just make you want to throw your hands up in the air, or scream and punch a brick wall or something. Somebody kindly pointed out this transcript of a report on yesterday’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer called “Creation Conflict in Schools“, reported by Jeffrey Brown.
Here were a few comments made by students — high-school students, in Kentucky:

I believe that God created the Earth and put life on this Earth. I don’t really believe in the whole evolution theory.

I believe that God also made us. I just think it’s a lot easier to believe than the big bang theory, or any of the other theories about apes.

I believe God molded man from the dust and he breathed life into it, and I believe we came out with two legs and thumbs and the thought capacity better then any other animal.

To say that this was all some big cosmic dice roll, and we went from fish to frogs to monkeys and monkeys to humans. It’s just kind of almost ridiculous.

I don’t think a human body could have just come about. I think God definitely had everything to do in it, it’s so complex, I don’t think it could have just come.

These were students in a science class. I am breathing deeply right now, and keeping my hands on the keyboard. There are some things I don’t understand, and then there are the things that I really, really don’t understand, like this whole anti-rational, anti-science, Darwin-spawn-of-Satan stuff.
In another post I might make clever, ironic comments about how it’s science, and not the bible, that keeps the IPod playing, keeps the cell phone transmitting and receiving, and keeps the airplanes from falling out of the sky. Later. This? This I just don’t understand.
Later in the piece (as reported in the transcript), neo-creationist Ken Ham (I’m sure he’d insist on being called an “Intelligent Design Advocate”, further insisting that ID has nothing to do with creationism) says some stupid things about the unknowable past. We even get a preview of his “creation museum” where one of the dinosaurs has a saddle on it, because how can we really know that humans and dinosaurs didn’t coexist?
You know, when I read that statistic that revealed that nearly half (42%) of Americans “can’t answer correctly when asked if the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs” (2001 National survey conducted by the California Academy of Sciences & Harris interactive), I thought that maybe they just got confused over the issue, despite the fact that it was a rather noticable 65 million years after the last dinosaur died before humans appeared (unless one is a young-earth creationist, then it’s still true, just not noticable). I didn’t know until today that some people actually promote the idea that humans and dinosaurs actually coexisted. All trying to cast a “shadow of doubt” over Darwinianism, I guess, as though they were amateur debaters fantasizing themselves making closing arguments in a cosmic courtroom of science.
Fortunately, there were some sane voices in this piece as well, but one despairs whether they will be heard and heeded.
First, Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education , remarks on the absurd notion that “Intelligent Design” should be taught as though it were an actual, credible scientific opponent of evolution, so that students could decide the issue:

“Teach the controversy” is a deliberately ambiguous phrase. It means ‘pretend to students that scientists are arguing over whether evolution took place.’ This is not happening.

I mean you go to the scientific journals, you go to universities like this one and you ask the professors, is there an argument going on about whether living things had common ancestors? They’ll look at you blankly. This is not a controversy.

Exactly. It is manufactured pseudo-controversy, a non-scientific controversy, stirred up to cast doubt on science.
Finally, Chris Barton, biologist at Centre College (also Kentucky):

Part of it is a failure to really understand the scientific process. Unfortunately, the United States falls far behind in terms of our scientific appreciation and scientific understanding.

Soon, the IPod may stop playing and the cell phones may go silent (metaphorically speaking, of course, since we’ll always be able to import technology from other, far-less God-fearing countries who still practice basic research and technology development).
It’s one reason, maybe the main reason, that I founded Ars Hermeneutica (see the links) last winter: to enlighten the public about the methods and meanings of science. The task looks bigger and bigger every day.

Key-Word-Based Science

I was reading an interesting article at Science Blog, “Changes in Earth’s tilt control when glacial cycles end“, about a new report (written by “Peter Huybers, a postdoctoral fellow in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department, and coauthor Carl Wunsch of MIT”) suggesting that changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis may indeed be the cause of periods of glaciation and other large-scale climate changes. Fascinating stuff, but not what this post is about.
This post is about the advertising. There’s a box on the page that has links provided by amazon.com, evidently chosen by matching subject key words, which in this case must have included “climate” and “warming”. At least when I loaded the page, they suggest two items:

1. A book called Global Warming, by John Houghton, and
2. A Panasonic, window model, 5,200-BTU air conditioner

Rather in poor taste, I thought, and showing a keen insensitivity to the second law of thermodynamics, not to mention several of the probable causes of global warming all represented by one device (that would be the air conditioner, not the book).
Were they suggesting that better air conditioning might be a tonic that would reduce the problem of global warming? The idea puts me in mind of all those people who don’t yet understand (we’ll get to it sometime, folks) why you can’t cool the apartment by leaving the refrigerator door open. Which, by the way, is significantly different from the reason why you shouldn’t heat the apartment by running the gas oven. Oddly, though, you could heat the house by leaving the refrigerator door open, but it would not be very efficient.

Doilies & Chaos Theory

Kriston, at Grammar.police posted a fantastic picture of a crocheted sculpture in yarn: “Crocheted Model of Hyperbolic Plane” (1970s) by Daina Taimina. (He references this original article: “Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane: An Interview with David Henderson and Daina Taimina“)
His reaction:

When I saw the images of Taimina’s crocheted hyperbolic figures, I was immediately struck by how instructive it could be as an applied tool to teach non-Euclidean geometry, because–well, I don’t know anything about crochet, but I get the sense that this is true–one could viscerally experience ultraparallel lines or even space curvature. It turns out that Taimina, in fact, invented the first workable model of Lobachevskian, i.e., hyperbolic geometry by abandoning paper and turning to crochet. Certainly makes a great deal of sense after the fact, doesn’t it?

Now, I’m quite serious in what follows, although it may not appear so.
He’s quite right about Taimina’s crocheted geometrics — they are fascinating and instructive as well. They suggest that there indeed could be more mathematical possibilities along the lines he mentions, regardless of whether one knows anything about crochet or not.

People who know me know that I know a bit about crochet, although I prefer working in thread rather than yarn. I crochet doilies. Obsessively. It serves the purpose of keeping my hands busy and productive when I’d otherwise just fidget. These days, since we watch television so rarely, I make most of my pieces in the car, when Isaac is driving. The problem is that, after doing this for some 10 years, one ends up with a lot of doilies — let’s say several hundreds — which is really more than one household can make use of. (Some of my work is displayed, for sale, at The Pansy Forest; there are still lots more for me to put up, however.)
Anyway, I’d never thought about making crocheted hyperbolic figures, although it’s a brilliant idea. I have, however, designed some of my own doily patterns, and the experience gave me the idea for a book about it. (This started several years ago now.)
The tentative title for the book is Doilies, Chaos Theory, and the Origin of the Universe. Seriously.
I don’t want to go into the entire story here, but I discovered what I felt were interesting and illuminating connections between chaos theory (concerning which I did some reasearch in my early graduate-student and post-doctoral days) and creating doily patterns.
Most doilies are chrocheted “in rounds”, worked successsively in thin rings from the center to the outside. Traditional doily patterns, particularly those that make use of a motif called a “pineapple” (sometimes “acorn”), typically develop their patterns over many rounds — that is to say, the patterns emerge one round at a time over the course of completing, say, 10 or 20 rounds.
Now, at the same time the pattern is emerging, it is necessary that the number of stitches in each round increase (relative to the previous round) in fairly strict geometric ratios. There can be a bit of fudging for a round, maybe two further from the center, but one cant’t get away with it for long.
Doily patterns, therefore, are highly constrained systems, and to set out to create a pattern over the course of many rounds requires planning, good luck, and a cooperative pattern. They don’t always go the way one wants.
Another way to put it is to say that doily patterns can show extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: what is allowed to happen on round 25 can depend critically on what happened on round 6. Sensitivity to initial conditions is a defining characteristic of some “chaotic systems” (at least it characterizes the motion of the systems through its phase space, but that’s a longer version of the story.)
Nevertheless, doilies do not look chaotic. Instead, they are amazingly developed mathematical patterns in many cases. How they can look so organized and yet share these characteristics with certain types of chaotic systems interests me. As for the origins of the universe: contemplating the constraints on how doily patterns emerge brings one pretty easily to considering the anthropic cosmological principle (which I tend to think is mostly bunk) and such topics.
I will be the first to admit that there may not be a big cross-over audience for a book that covers antimacassers and modern ideas about dynamical systems and self-organized complexity and such, but that may not stop me. If only I could figure out how to type the manuscript while I crochet the doilies.

Illegal but Very Cheap

Here’s another for the innumeracy files.
I heard on the radio today news that the Feds had “slapped” Wal-Mart with a fine of $11 Million to settle claims that Wal-Mart had illegally hired undocumented aliens. The spokesman for the Feds was deliriously happy with this result, evidently because it was the largest fine in the history of such things, and would, therefore, show Wal-Mart a thing or two.
Alas, he doesn’t understand the magnitudes of numbers. Wal-Mart’s yearly revenues are in the neighborhood of $160 Billion, a number over 14 thousand times larger than $11 Million. Thus, this fine is only o.oo7% of Wal-Mart’s yearly revenues. Even supposing that their profit margin is only 5%, this fine would still only be a miniscule 0.14% of their yearly profit.
Now, I’m not going to wade into the Wal-Mart good / Wal-Mart evil controversy, but I think most people should be able to see that a fine of 0.007% (that is, 1,000 times smaller than a typical sales tax), is pretty far from a serious punative fine. In fact, I’d say it’s a pretty cheap price to pay for doing business any way one wants.

Rock into Rocket Scientist

My new motto: I evolved from a rock into a rocket scientist.

Evolutionists may need billions of years to make people believe a rock can turn into a rocket scientist, but that time just isn’t available.

[Kent Hovind, aka "Dr. Dino", from Universe Is Not "Billions of Years" Old, to be found on his "Creation Science Evangelism" website.]

Scientific Truth

Mark, the “Moderate Liberal”, wrote a good piece called “The War Against Evolution“, trying to understand, as I do with very little success, the anti-science forces at work in the USA today. It’s all very trying (the anti-scientism, not Mark’s essay).
He and I, who both have degrees in Physics and are therefore part of the “science elite”, so we know that in fact there is no “scientific dogma”, but he touches on a very important point:

Remember, most of us “elite” think of science as a very different endeavor than, say, the priesthood. After all, scientific theories must be falsifiable and withstand years of observation, experimentation and criticism before any scientist will begin to think of a theory as fact.

But to the lay person, science is no different than any other elite endeavor; a bunch of people in power they don’t know get together to determine their version of the truth, then preach it to everyone else.

I do, in fact, think of it — science, that is — as a very different endeavor, perhaps a unique intellectual quest. Laying out my philosophy (and not “mine” so much as what I understand to be “the” philosophy of scientific endeavor, or even the basis of the “scientific method”, such as there is one) will take more than these 500 or so words, but Mark offers a very useful starting point.
Set aside for a moment the philosophically fundamental ideas about theories and falsifiability and all that — I do, in my way, reserve the right to disagree with Mark about the details of how science works. Nevertheless….
It’s the idea of the “elite” that brings out something I’ve long thought is a unique characteristic of science, an idea that bolsters its claim to some subset of truth:

Science invites anyone to examine its claims.

Oh, sure, to understand some of the claims may take years of study to achieve, but it’s all there, waiting for you. Science does not rely on authority to operate. Agreed, most people (i.e., those not part of the “science elite”, indeed, even scientist who don’t specialize in some field) get their information about scientific truths from scientific “authorities”. But, in my mind, getting information from these “authorities” is a practical short cut, not a dogmatic elite; everything they say is testable, in principle, if you feel the need.
This, I believe, is a defining characteristic of science: it’s truths are writ in an open book, inviting all to see, to understand, and to test. No truth in science is ever absolute.
Science thrives on openness and skepticism. In the end, if scientific practice is to survive, it will be this invitation to skepticism, examination, and revision that will win out over external, dogmatic forces that would attempt to coerce scientific truth towards their perferred, non-scientific goals.

Identity Theft

The problem of identity theft, a topic newly current after revelations about ChoicePoint and a “breach of security”, was the subject of dueling opinion pieces today in USA Today.
First, a few excerpts from the editorial piece that sets the context and says something that I think is a little more complicated than the editors seem to think:

The company is a data broker that boasts a collection of 17 billion public records. The records span everything from birth dates and addresses to driver’s license and Social Security numbers — just enough information to cause trouble if it gets into the wrong hands.
And it did.
The company, duped by criminals masquerading as business owners, gave up personal information on 145,000 people last year. For months, as police investigated, the consumer-victims weren’t told.

Thus, we have a company in the business of collecting “personal information” and then selling it; other companies are convinced that they must have this information to be competitive.
The editors say it in so many words, but don’t recognize this basic problem: how can one distinguish the “criminals” from the [legitimate] “business owners”? What happens when they are the same?
My point would be that, to the company selling the data, there is no real difference. What does it mean to “masquerade” as a legitimate business, and how is it operationally any different from “real” businesses?
The root of the problem, and the source of the solution, is not with enhancing safeguards on the data, since potential clients and potential thieves are indistinguishable. Either the data must not be collected in the first place — that battle was probably lost in the past decade or more — or it must be made somehow less useful to “masquerading bussinesses”.
In a response Fred H. Cate says:

A California law requiring businesses to notify consumers when the security of their personal data is breached is a poor substitute for real action to address the scourge of identity theft.
[...]
The problem at the heart of most identity theft isn’t access to information or consumer inattention, it is the lack of will and effective tools to verify the identity of consumers, especially when granting credit.

Mr. Cate certainly recognizes that the problem is not going to lie with enhancing “safeguards” on the data, nor with giving consumers notice of “security breaches”. (Talk about refusing to take responsibility by doing nothing that superficially appears to be doing something.)
When I was young and first got my own Social Security number, we were taught things about the number’s proper use that were thought to be so important and so inviolable that it might have been written in the consititution: your Social Security number is not a universal identity number, and you should NEVER allow it to be used as one.
Whatever happened to that admonition? Look how steadily it has eroded in the past 30 years until the Social Security number has become, de facto, a universal (US) ID number. For no good reason either: in most cases I can think of, it was used merely as a convenience for whomever was requesting it so that they could assign a unique number to someone for some temporary purpose. There are other ways to accomplish that, even easy ones, that don’t compromise the Social Security number.
Now, one almost never thinks about such a request, and one’s Social Security number can be found lying around everywhere. It would be simplistic to suggest that this is the sole cause of the problem and that restricting its use would halt the problem, but it is nearer the source of the problem, and looking there could lead to — if not solutions — at least mitigating strategies.
[Update, 1 March 2005:] The Detroit News offers its opinion in the editorial “U.S. Should Limit Use of Social Security Numbers”, identifying at least one of the problems that I mentioned. Whether their solution is more than just a start will require quite a bit more reflection.