"Bad Boys"? Whatever, nerds.

I don't normally like posts that consist of nothing but a plug, but in this case I'll make an exception to my general aversion. Break Through is a really important book, and everyone even remotely political or environmental needs to read it.

The short version of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' idea, first set forth in their essay "The Death of Environmentalism," is that the environmental movement, whatever its original intent and founding efficacy, has become a culture of complaints and ineffective restriction. The subtitle of the book is "From the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility," and that's definitely the spirit in which they write. Environmental protection requires the luxury of critical thinking, no matter whether it's inspired by aesthetic virtue or enlightened self-interest, and critical thinking doesn't occur much in people who are hungry, terrified, or even existentially insecure; therefore to go forward, environmental protection and sustainability must go hand-in-hand with improved standards of living, growth, and progress.

Essentially - and I know this seems like an obvious idea to many of us, but you'll note that it hasn't been done yet and that modern environmentalists and especially politicians still speak in terms of "limits" and "protections" and "repair" - in order to get the world to embrace the idea of protecting the world and thinking in the long term, we'll have to offer them something that will look appealing, and very few long-term benefits are going to look appealing so long as their lower-order needs are unfulfilled.

This is why technologies like photovoltaics are so vitally important, and why it's equally important that we get both people and leaders of people to realize that a massive investment in those technologies is necessary, not only to jump-start clean energy, but to create accompanying economic growth through diversification and, yes, to ease security concerns by reducing dependence on foreign energy sources.

This isn't an unconditional endorsement of Break Through or of Shellenberger and Nordhaus' ideas. I have my issues with them, and especially with their attitude that everything and everyone that's antedated them in environmentalism is rather petty and backwards. I dislike the way they dismiss luminaries like E.O. Wilson and Al Gore without so much as a word of recognition of the many good things they've done. All in all, though, I do agree with them, and I do think that even if it's sometimes aggravating and maybe even offensive, their book is a very important one.

I rather want to buy a copy and go hit Hillary Clinton upside the head with it. "Here, Madame President-to-be. You'll need this."

I'm sorry

...about the long silence. I didn't forget.

It's really astonishing to me the difference that dysthymic depression makes in my life. It's not what usually termed "clinical depression"; it's something different and wholly more insidious. Rather than a crushing, smothering coat of wet concrete that leadens and suffocates, it's more like... well, like ADD with a dash of bitters. Dysthymic depression, for me at least, tends to take the form of lethargy and demotivation. It's not exactly an inability to focus, just... disinterest. I still have my passions, my pet causes and my hobbies, but when it comes to actually applying myself, to stirring myself from comfortably, numb routine, I'd rather go play video games. I'd rather not deal with it.

I have this percolating stew of ideas in my head, perhaps more vigorous and sharply focused now than they've ever been. I want to, I need to get them out. The energy is there and the purpose is defined, but somewhere in between the mechanism is disconnected. The pistons are pumping and the wheels are free, but the driveshaft is broken and the steering is locked up.

The clarity with which I can perceive this condition now is astonishing to me. For years I had no idea if I was ADD, stupid, or just lazy. My high school and undergraduate GPAs both wound up, if not in the tank precisely, then certainly well below what they ought to have been, and I came away from the University of Texas with a single BA instead of the BA and two BSes I really wanted. (Now, I'm not trying to excuse my dilatory negligence by any means; I am who I am, and any conditions I have are simply a part of me. If I fail, I fail; there is no "I failed but...")

Anyway, I suppose that all that is a roundabout way of explaining that I haven't been updating because I haven't cared enough to update, and that, ultimately, I haven't cared enough to update because my motivation is broken and I was allergic to the medication that came close to fixing it. Hopefully, I'll soon have an opportunity to try out another class of medication that will help even more and, ideally, not make me break out in hives and suffocate.

Incidentally, I hate being an "allergic person." I never had any allergies whatsoever before I came to this city, you know, and now that I have at least one, I feel frail and vulnerable, like at any moment someone is going to shoot me in the heel with an arrow smeared with crab and cochineal. I do not enjoy having a weak point in which I can be shot for massive damage.

More on my own personal Green Revolution coming soon.

Do You Want To Know Why I Blog?

Because talking to people is so much harder.

That's why.

I communicate better in writing. Take it or leave it.

House of Cards

Nothing makes my stomach churn quite like spiteful ignorance.

In particular, I'm talking about the sorts of individuals who, out of ignorance (be it unwitting or willful), malice, or denial, will attempt unceasingly to poke holes in all of humanity's greatest scientific achievements because they don't like the implications of one theory or another. I'm talking about the sorts of folks who will reject out of hand entire disciplines of thought because they can imagine a question that can't be answered in that school. There are others in virtually every arena of science, but by far the most prominent are religious creationists, especially the "stealth" creationists of the Intelligent Design movement.

I'm talking about assholes like this or this, who pretend at science while twisting every fact they encounter to conform with their preconceptions. These are the types from whom you'll hear big talk about how "many scientists" are "increasingly questioning" evolutionary biology. They're the type who will proudly parade before the world an apparent gap in the fossil record, or a biogenesis question that science "can't" answer, as if a single unknown detail will bring the whole institution crashing down - as if each and every question that can be asked, each detail throughout all of the history of the universe, is a card in a towering but delicate house of cards where every single precariously balanced fact is a necessary support for all the others.

I have a little news for you, though, folks: that's not how it works.

Science - the sum over history of human evidentiary thought - is not dependent on any single fact or theory. It is a collection, not a construction.

Let's go over that again, because I'm so fucking sick of hearing argument after argument that essentially simplify down to "science can't answer this question I came up with to my satisfaction, so everything it concludes must be wrong and therefore my theory must be right." We'll get to the fallacy in the latter half of that in a little while, but for now we're discussing the former. So: science is a process which allows humans to use material evidence to find reproducible information which can allow us to form predictive theories about the real world. It is designed to be self-correcting, and is strengthened, not destroyed, whenever a gap is discovered or an error is deleted, because rather than being depending on every single facet, it is cumulative. There is no "god of the gaps" waiting to provide a divine explanation for any questions science hasn't answered, because anything we don't know is simply a question we haven't answered yet.

There is no unilateral community. The "Scientists" that you hear about so often in the news, in advertisements, and in criticisms simply don't exist. Science is a cutthroat community; it is positively Darwinian, in fact. Why? Well, simple: scientists make a name for themselves by demolishing older theories and replacing them with newer, better ones. It is in any individual scientist's best interests to formulate newer, more accurate theories to supplant the old.

And the only reason people can't accept this is religious bias. Witness the divergent worlds of mathematics & physics, and biological science... in particular, the cultural treatment of each. You will find no widespread criticism of astronomical physics because "Newton was wrong" or "Newtonian physics can't explain" this or that. We've accepted, happily and without cultural upheaval, the idea that Einstein's relativity supplanted classical Newtonian physics, and that relativity was thereafter modified by quantum physics. People accept the idea that modern discoveries in physics can necessitate new mathematical models. Why, then, is it so difficult for so many of us to accept that new discoveries in areas like biology or geology may require revision or wholesale replacement of classical theory? Why do people still believe that attacking Darwin's original ideas or even his personal life is somehow a telling blow against evolutionary biology? Why is "Darwin recanted on his deathbed" still advanced as "proof" that evolutionary theory is all some sort of hoax? Why is a single small gap in the fossil record assumed to be "proof" that the world was supernaturally created, rather than evidence of a world that is chaotic, destructive, and wholly unreliable as a historical recorder?

Why is it unacceptable to refine and revise some theories? Well, here's the thing: it isn't. Not only is it acceptable, it's required.

Science is not a house of cards. It does not collapse in upon itself if you remove on small piece, or if you add on one piece too many. Bad theories can be excised and replaced as a matter of course - indeed, doing so is the matter of course in many branches of science!

To extend the metaphor, science has much more in common with a notebook, its sheets laid flat and orderly - picture it as a big, fat three-ring binder, tabbed, annotated, scribbled on, noted, de-noted, constantly re-ordered and reviewed. Every page is in a different hand. Some sheets - Euclidean geometry, Cartesian coordinates - are staid, solid, uniform and yellowed with age, and on others - superstring theory - a hundred different pens have scribbled and more aren't yet dry. In the section simply labeled "biology," perhaps one page in twenty of Darwin's original enormous contribution remains. Given that only footnotes remain of the work of ancient luminaries like Aristotle, Darwin's contribution is notably substantial, but even so it can hardly be said to be the greater part of evolutionary science. The science binder is infinitely expandable and infinitely divisible, and anyone can insert, mark, or remove a page so long as their contribution withstands the harsh scrutiny of their peers.

In the front of this binder, there is a page of rules. It is titled simply "The Scientific Method," and it reads, in large, plain font:

BEFORE ADDING CONTENT

I. OBSERVE
II. HYPOTHESIZE
III. PREDICT
IV. TEST

REPEAT AS NECESSARY

You'll notice, with a simple experiment, that large binders of information do not crumble to ruin if you remove and replace a page, or if you find that a certain piece of information has yet to be added. Science is not an iterative, stochastic process, but rather a cumulative one. Pull out a page, and you'll still have a big, thick binder with a space awaiting new pages.

And that's quite enough of that metaphor.


Now, as to the second half of the usual false dichotomy. "Evolution has problems, so everything must have been created."

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you could demonstrate conclusively that biological evolution was impossible. I'm not going to worry about how you might demonstrate this; that's not the point here. Just assume that, for whatever reason, you could prove that things didn't evolve.

Where do you go from there?

If you've shown that evolution is incorrect, you must have done so with data that conflicts with the predictions of an evolutionary universe. So what might the data indicate? To make a positive assertion, you must have evidence for your assertion, not simply evidence against some conflicting notion.

Imagine that I have a box. I present you with the box, and tell you that inside, there's a gift for you. Now, you've been wanting a new car, and a new watch. Everyone wants a new car and a new watch, right? But you can see plainly that there's no room in the box for a car. (We'll set aside for the moment the possibility that I was clever and only put the car keys in the box.) You conclude that the box must contain a shiny new Rolex, because I am a generous fellow. "Thank you," you say. "This is a princely gift." Upon opening the box, you are surprised to find a cubic zirconia tie pin in the shape of a yorkshire terrier.

The box represents the universe, of course, and opening the act of finding out how it works, so opening the box is stretching the metaphor more than a little. All the same, the rhetorical error so often seen is the same as the thought error in the example - a false dichotomy. You erroneously reduced the realm of possibility from virtually infinite to a mere two, a mistake which seems impossibly stupid in this context, but which happens all the time in the real world. Listen closely to political debate, personal argument, or particularly religious dispute, and you will quite often hear what amounts to "If not A, then B!" The problem is, "not A" is not the same as B, because lurking out there waiting to be addressed is the entirety of the rest of the alphabet and more.


So in short: no, a single missing data point does not break the statistical curve, and no, breaking the curve would not even in fact prove anything; and that doesn't even address the fact that most of the objections that inconsistent shills like Michael Behe raise are out-and-out lies. No, Mr. Behe, the bacterial flagellum is not "irreducibly complex"; genetic sequencing of flagellate bacteria have provided several solid possible histories for the development of the flagellum from simpler units which coincide quite nicely with theoretical predictions of said development. No, we will not "teach the controversy," because the only "controversy" is between meticulously obtained and organized knowledge and ignorance, and ignorance is not a valid "alternative world view." No, creationism is not "just as valid a scientific theory," because there is nothing remotely scientific about claiming, "Well, if you can't explain every single detail of the universe on the spot, my god must have done it."

So can we quit rehashing these arguments now? I know I've wandered from the topic a bit, but I swear I hear this same worn-out bullshit every day, and it's past time it was put to rest. I'm past tired of popular opinion and policy in what damned well ought to be a great nation being shaped by misinformation, misconception, and ignorance.

Stop trying to pull down my binder. It's not a house of cards.

And no, it's not a series of tubes, either, smartass.

Punk bloggin': hiatus

Hey, you know what the definition of a sellout is?

A punk who bathes.

----------------------------

I think I'm done writing stuff about punk for a while. There's no easy answer. It is what it is to any number of very different people. There are teenagers who listen to Avril and wear skinny jeans and spiked bracelets who call themselves punks, and there are brilliant, dedicated artists in their forties with spouses and kids and even PhDs, who dress neatly and are generally in a natural shape and color who define punk. There are punks who would sooner slit their own throats than wear a shirt that isn't secondhand, and punks who'll sign to a major record label and endure the shitstorm of scorn that that entails because they think it's just that important to get their message to a wider audience... or because they love money. There are destructive punks, apathetic punks, poser punks, good punks, bad punks, sellout punks, and whatever other kinds you'll find down in the crowds at your local dive venue.

So let it be what it is. It's not one particular lifestyle, or one attitude, or one key philosophy, I don't think. About the only thing the far reaches of punk have in common is some sort of dissatisfaction, but that in itself isn't very satisfying, so let it be. Keep on resisting whatever you're resisting. And don't confuse growing up with giving up.


More to come shortly. On different topics. I may revisit this one eventually, but I think I've done all I can with my current limited store of experience.

Been too busy

And not feeling all that well. Sorry. Still thinking; will write it out soon.

Possible topics!

1. Punk culture relies on powerlessness. It's self-defeating. What happens when punks can actually accomplish something or manage to build real lives? Suddenly they're not punk any more? But my values haven't changed; what gives? I know it's cliche to say that punk requires you to be young, poor, and angry, but is that really true? I think about these things.
2. Medication and culture. People talk about a nation of Prozac zombies, and insist that "for thousands of years we got by without brain meds. Why is everyone depressed now?" Well, you know what? For thousands of years we got by without antibiotics and contraceptives, too.
   Anyone with the least real grounding in evolutionary biology will tell you that evolved organisms are designed imperfectly; "suboptimal design" is one of the key supporting arguments in favor of biological evolution, in fact. We are emphatically not perfectly suited to our environment. We are a makeshift job, adapting old parts to new tasks as well as can be managed by random repurposing until something works.
   And on top of that, we're not even in our environment any more! Our environment is an African savannah with low, broad-branched trees! We have created an artificial world that suits some of our needs, mostly the physical ones, without anywhere near the time needed to biologically adapt to it.
   Is it any wonder it helps a lot of us out to tweak old, outdated brain chemistry a little? Consider it a software patch to allow an old, old program to run in a new operating system. We're not tinkering with a system that's perfect if left alone and kept from getting unbalanced; we're simply trying to keep a hodgepodge assemblage of random parts working smoothly. We're not deviating from the "correct" blueprint of human design and operations because there isn't one.
   
   Science: it works, bitches!
   
   
3. Apparently Rick Steves, the travel guy from the long-running European travel show on PBS, was the keynote speaker at Hempfest up here, and is a chair member of NORML. Who knew? He's a really cool, really, well, normal guy. He says he's seen what good marijuana laws can do for a country. I believe him.
   I'm not a user myself, but you know what? It's about time we pulled out heads out of our asses about cannabis here in the United States. It's a gateway drug, sure, but you know why? Because we tell people that they might as well be smoking crack. If our government assures them of that, well, why wouldn't they?
   

The Easy Way

I took a pretty hefty Modern Physics course back at the University. It was designed to be an overview of all the stuff you don't learn in early physics courses; essentially, it was about everything since Newton. All that stuff that doesn't make one damn bit of intuitive sense.

Now, I liked Dr. Gleeson. He was fun, and he was obviously a pretty smart dude, if a little weird... but I was willing to let weird slide, because physicists are always weird. It's just part of the job description. Anyway, he was pretty cool.

But I don't know why he was so resistant to explaining things the easy way. Don't get me wrong: I want to know the hard stuff too. I want to know all the math. I want to know the nitty-gritty.

But it really helps to learn all that if you understand what you're learning first, dammit! When we started learning Maxwell's equations, I didn't even understand what the hell a field was! Last I had heard, we were being told that you couldn't have action at a distance, and that there emphatically was not any sort of aether. Now, to jump from that to the electromagnetic field...? How was I supposed to take that? All of a sudden we can have action at a distance, and there is something light propagates through? What? But...

Anyway: the easy way.

There really is a way to explain most difficult concepts without getting into the technical stuff. For the dilettante, that's usually enough; if you're just curious, well, the casual explanation will probably sate you. But for the serious student - whether he intends to learn just the basics, or whether he intends to go on to a career in the stuff - it makes an excellent start.

Example: relativity.

Relativity is weird at first glance. I had the fact, but not the reason or the mechanism, explained to me many times over the years, and it's so counterintuitive that most often I just assumed that the person explaining it to me - and generally doing a bad job of it, I might add - had misunderstood it. It just didn't make sense that speed through space could have anything to do with time! And I wasn't alone in that fallacy, either; in fact, I was in company with the exalted likes of Sir Isaac Newton, who asserted quite matter-of-factly that time and space were absolute! It's simply borne out by human experience!

Human experience is limited.

Relativity is a brilliant, simple concept, and it's very, very true (except in quantum situations, but we won't get into those for now). Experiments bear it out. As you go faster in space, you go slower in time... sort of. Relative to a stationary observer. Or him to you. It's... well, it's relative. It has to do with frames of reference.

Anyway, here's the thing: due to conditions at the beginning of the universe that I'm really not qualified to enumerate, we are all hurtling through spacetime - the four dimensions in which we exist - at the speed of light, which is, as we know, the ultimate speed limit. It's as fast as things go. (Note that I didn't say it's the fastest things can go, but rather that it's as fast as things do go. That's important.)

We are going the speed of light, in four dimensions. How? Easy: if you're not moving in space, the three dimensions we're used to, then you're moving in time. If you start to move through space, you divert some of your total velocity from moving through time, and lo and behold... you slow down in time.

It's that simple! It's as if you were driving at 65 mph northward, and then turned to the northeast. You'd still be going 65 mph, but not moving northward at 65 mph - some of your velocity would now be moving eastward. When you move through space, you're not moving as much through time.

Okay, it's not really that simple. That's actually kind of a gross, oversimplified, slightly inaccurate summation. But it nonetheless conveys a good sense of the idea! It's the easy way to get a handle on what relativity means! As a starting point, it's absolutely invaluable!

So why did it take this damn long for me to learn it?!?