Science Denial

University Sues Artist

2012-01-31T17:50:00.001-08:00

There is nothing good to say about college football. For most colleges, it represents a tremendous expenditure of scarce resources for trivial entertainment unrelated to the academic mission. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, recently gave a $30 million "gift" to its football team, in the midst of record-breaking budget shortfall and double-digit tuition increases.

Football "scholarships" are a flimsy sham designed to allow pre-NFL players to train, at public expense, for a private media industry which will then reap obscene profits from their prematurely-ruined bodies.

At academic institutions, such players displace students who otherwise might have the opportunity to attend. Because these scholarships are based on athletic talent and body shape--in other words, having the right genes rather than the right study habits--giving preference in admissions to students who play a particular sport makes as much sense as admitting students on the basis of hair color.

I remember the "football crowd" in some of my undergraduate classes, and for the most part, their behavior and academic laziness was a notorious shame on the university. This isn't true of every student athlete, of course, but it seemed more prevalent than in the student body in general.

And notice, I'm not even bringing up the well-publicized official "turning a blind eye" regarding a child-rapist/coach at a certain college.

As if college football couldn't get worse, the New York Times now reports that the University of Alabama is suing an artist, Daniel Moore, who creates paintings based on the University of Alabama football team. Mind you, he's not selling photographs--that would be legally different, as teams certainly have the right to control photographic representations, just as they other merchandise.

But here we're talking about paintings. By asserting that they retain legal control over an artist's interpretation of football-related events, the University of Alabama is crossing a dark line into controlling the thoughts of artists.

Imagine a world where corporate entities could dictate what artists may or may not paint. What would stop Halliburton, say, from staking a patent on the representation of sunsets, and then requiring artists who painted a sunset to pay a licensing fee? What would stop the Koch brothers from patenting the idea of a nude figure, and then sending threatening cease & desist letters to artists who painted nudes? The principle is the same: the Univ. of Alabama insists it can control even the idea of a football game.

Let's hope the courts laugh this one out in favor of the artist.

Red Rock

2012-01-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

Sitting in San Francisco Bay, just south of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, is a distinctive chunk of red radiolarian chert called Red Rock. I've sailed around this for years, admiring its geologic features, including some interesting chert banding and caves on the west side. Islands such as Red Rock reflect a deeper truth that the bay is, in fact, a recently flooded valley filled with a number of high peaks, some of which are submerged and some of which are above sea level. Red Rock is the only island that appears to be made primarily of radiolarian chert, and it is the only privately-owned island in San Francisco Bay,

Now, however, it is for sale.

With a price tag of only $9 million, I'm sure that some gentle reader will consider buying this for your intrepid geologist. I have thought often, as I sail near it, how fun it would be kayak there and have lunch atop its wind-blasted, 172 foot-high summit. Indeed, I have seen people lounging on its shores from time to time. It would be lovely to seal the shoreline, install "lasers" deep within its core, and use it to plot my nefarious schemes....

the Great Unconformity

2012-01-17T23:05:00.000-08:00

This post about the Great Unconformity is really well written:

http://written-in-stone-seen-through-my-lens.blogspot.com/2012/01/great-unconformity-of-grand-canyon-part.html

Blacktail Canyon is a very special spot on Earth. You can put your hand on a 1.2 Ga gap in time, ages and ages of rocks that are just... gone.

2012 Woo Begins. Part 1: the "Leap of Faith"

2011-12-21T18:38:00.000-08:00

Today, 21 December 2011, is exactly one year from the end of the earth. Or at least that is what many woo practitioners would have you believe.

The 2012 End of the World phenomenon is just getting into high gear, and we in the skeptical community can expect to be amazed by what will transpire over the next 365 days, as bad craziness seeps into the mainstream media, and even well-adjusted people begin to worry.

This has been building for a while. For years David Morrison of NASA has been answering a flood of strange citizen fears about 2012 and "Niburu." Morrison does a spot-on job of explaining why this is all nonsense here.

One particularly unique manifestation of this end of the world paranoia is is the "2012 Leap of Faith" promulgated by Sedona, AZ, lawyer Peter Gerston. Gerston, well known for UFO-related legal filings against the government, makes the startling promise that he will leap off a prominent cliff near Sedona on 21 December 2012 at exactly 4:11 am.

Under normal condition, such a leap would result in death. But Gerston claims that instead his leap will rescue humanity when a galactic portal opens. Citing evidence as varied as the third Indiana Jones movie and Steve Martin's movie Leap of Faith, Gerston argues that he will not perish in this fall.

Although he isn't directly asking for additional jumping volunteers, his "invitation" page clearly says, "Your presence is requested to witness this event." An invitation to a suicide surely takes the cake for strangeness. But there is the danger that even if Gerston, at the last minute, finds some reason not to jump to his death, other individuals may be inspired by his Leap of Faith and themselves commit suicide.

This is the problem with woo. Some practitioners may actually believe what they say, others may be simply be in it to make money from the gullible... but in the end, what matters is that third parties change their behavior in ways that hurt them, whether that is stopping chemotherapy while expecting crystals to heal you or giving away one's life savings to fund billboards to encourage others to donate. Woo--all of it--is a health hazard.

hooray!

2011-11-21T23:14:00.001-08:00

It's not every day you see an article about the use of isotopes in environmental tracing (a topic I happen to love), but today's NYT had this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/science/rare-krypton-81-isotope-helps-track-water-in-ancient-nubian-aquifer.html?src=dayp

This job does a good job of explaining just how geologists think about groundwater movement measurement using isotopic tracers. Gee, actual science news in a mass media outlet? Who wudda thunk?

misusing science on the phantom LA subway

2011-11-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

An interesting AP article--"Beverly Hills bids to halt subway tunnel at school"--discusses recent stirrings toward expanding Los Angeles's inadequate subway system. This article does a good job of summarizing the myriad reasons why LA's people-moving system--and we can think of cars and subways and pedestrian walkways as all part of one large circulatory system--is so deeply broken.

To wit, people seem afraid that the proposed expansion, in a path under Beverly Hills High Schools, would:

--shake their houses

--risk the tunnel's collapse

--risk a methane explosion

But earthquakes are a big focus of their fears, with some subway advocates declaring, "It would be dangerous to have it under the school--God forbid, if we had an earthquake."

Well, LA is going to have earthquakes. Large earthquakes. There are few things in the world as certain as the continued seismic activity in California. But subways survive pretty well in quakes; in 1989, the Bay Area's BART system was largely unaffected. Where BART may be affected in the future are those points where the BART system connects to the land--elevated sections of track, hoisted up into the air on pillars placed on poor soil; the tunnels themselves will likely be fine (with the exception of one section that directly crosses the Hayward Fault). But the LA project is going to be entirely underground, making the "egg-shell" curvature of tunnels something that will reinforce their strength.

In any event, the unscientific approach of subway critics is shown by their insistence that things would be okay if only the subway were moved slightly away, toward the area of the Santa Monica Boulevard. Just not near their houses.

This is geologically ridiculous. What LA faces most acutely is shaking from blind thrust faults, which riddle the subsurface of the LA basin like cracks on a broken car windshield. Moving a location a few hundred meters one way or another will make virtually zero difference in shaking intensity.

The situation here is not analogous to the Hayward fault area, where a few hundred meters could make a difference between houses sitting directly on the fault being torn apart by the expected 2 meters of movement, while those some distance away might "only" come off their foundations. Thrust faults, by contrast, often do not cause surface disruption; the shaking is the prime danger, and a big quake will ring the entire LA basin like a bell hit with a hammer.

So in short, once again misunderstandings of geology are being used to promulgate non-rational ideas. Many great cities have great transit systems--London, NY, DC. These system move people efficiently and swiftly, and don't shake the ground or cause methane to explode as trains pass. If one wants to oppose public transit because one doesn't want "those people" in one's neighborhood, fine--be honest and explicit with those sentiments. But don't misuse science in the service of such ideas.

What’s Wrong with Scientific Presentations

2011-10-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished attending the 2011 Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis, which means that in addition to giving a couple of talks about creationism in science education, I’ve sat through scores and scores of technical presentations by other scientists. While many of these talks were very well done, quite a number suffered from a set of similar mistakes that severely detracted from the speaker’s ability to get his or her points across.

It might therefore be worthwhile to consider some of the ways that scientific presentations fail to communicate, and how they could be better crafted for a conference such as GSA. Of course, I pontificate with this unrequested advice without hope that anything will ever change; because the majority of presentations repeat these errors, there is something deeper going on here, some mysterious magnetic force of obfuscation pulling presenters toward ineffective communication and away from talks that are clear, cogent, and concise.

Here, in my opinion, are some ways scientific talks could be made more effective.

Introduce yourself.

It sounds basic, but in almost no cases did I observe speakers taking a moment to say their name, their university affiliation, and what they do. Something as simple as, “Howdy, I’m Kilgore Trout, and I work on cephalopod paleontology at Miskatonic University” could work wonders toward helping the audience understand just who is talking to them. In most cases, I’m lost a minute into the presentation; I don’t remember who this person is, I don’t understand what he or she does, and I’m certainly lost as to the topic he or she is going to talk about.

State the main point. Repeat the main point at the end.

I can’t emphasize enough that scientific presentations tend to be detail-rich but context-poor. Many presentations begin with a long recitation of data in a table. The audience is left wondering, “What does this mean? What is this about? Why should I care?” Such questions are never answered. There’s just this continuous stream of data without any context. Audiences need the big picture, right up front.

If I were talking to the presenters one-on-one, I would stop them and ask, “Hey, hold on! Give it to me all in just one sentence.” This sort of big picture sentence is key in other industries. Movie pitches come in various lengths, including the “elevator pitch” that is a one or two sentence shot during a very brief social interaction, such as sharing an elevator ride. Scientists need to use more elevator pitches to communicate what they do.

A good presentation should start off with a sentence that explains what it’s all about. And don’t fear repeating this sentence. This is about the big picture--we need the big picture. In fact, the big picture may be the only thing that most audience members take away from a talk; they cannot, of course, absorb tables of numbers flashing by, but they might remember a major point--if

that point were ever articulated.

Lose the blue background with yellow text.

Too many slides are blue with yellow text; it's become a visual cliche. If I had my way, the option for a blue background would permanently disabled from all copies of PowerPoint (with the possible exception of UC Berkeley-related presentations. Go Bears!).

I do not know why blue is such a prevalent color in our society. People wear blue shirts; people wear blue jeans. The sky is blue; Miles Davis was kind of blue. Everywhere we are awash in blue, blue, blue. Enough with the blue already! Let’s have one thing in this world that isn’t frakking blue!

A significant percentage of the talks I've seen have one of these two backgrounds:

Both are distracting and over-used. Having a bad background to your talk is like trying to give your talk in a whisper while a hyperactive child is moving in front of your podium; no one is going to hear what you say with all that cranky business going on.

A white background with black text is perfectly acceptable; a white background with grey text looks pretty cool and Apple-like. Or a subtle textured background, like paper, with a faint three-dimensionality to it, can be very soothing to the eyes. Steve Jobs favored grey gradients for his presentations. All of these background work--just please stop making your background monotone blue with yellow text. There are other colors in the EMR spectrum.

Make the pictures bigger.

Almost every picture in the presentations I saw at GSA this year--and for that matter, at every scientific conference I’ve ever attended--was way too small. I think this “small picture syndrome” derives in a McLuhanesque way from the technology we use to construct presentations. People sit a foot or a foot and half from their computer screens; from their perspective at the keyboard, the details of the picture look fine. But for someone seeing the picture for the first time, it’s too small and becomes confusing. The audience leans forward in their seats trying to see what the picture shows. No one can really make it out. Then the slide changes and the process repeats, until the end of the talk. No one has really understood what the pictures were trying to show.

People also try to cram three or four pictures on every slide. Making a presentation is not a contest to maximize space; in fact, having open, unused space is preferable. Don’t crowd every slide; give the talk breathing room.

What makes the most sense of all is to use one picture per slide, with the picture taking up all the screen space. If you think a picture is important enough to put in your talk to other scientists, then blow it up big enough so they can actually see it. If it’s small enough to be ignored, then it’s unimportant enough to omit.

Another good strategy is to take a “detail” of a picture. This is what art books do; they show the whole picture, then follow with pages of details to help the reader see what’s going on in the painting. If you have a graphic taking up a lot of space, but you want to show a small sliver of it more detail, then making a transition slide that magnifies that sliver is a great idea, especially if you then drop back down to the original size to give context.

Make the figures bigger.

This is a general failing. I can’t remember how many times this year I saw speakers turn to a slide that had some figure on it, then apologize by saying, “You can’t probably can’t read this, but it says…” Urgh. If the audience can’t read it, why put it up at all? If the figure was so trivial that the audience did not need to see it, why waste time putting it up at all? If the figure was vital, why not make sure that people could actually see it?

I understand why this happens. People are dragging and dropping figures they’ve used in papers. They don’t want to remake the diagram. But it’s easy to remake your diagram in a way that will more clearly show what you’re talking about. Consider that for every major figure you have, you should make a “journal diagram” that will go with the submitted paper, and a simplified “presentation diagram” that is appropriate for slides.

Make the text bigger.

As with the size problem for graphics, most people make their presentation with their computer screens right up in their face. When it comes to the presentation, the font size that seemed right on their screens is now too small in the auditorium, and no one can read the slide.

It’s a typical fault. The solution is to grit one’s teeth and bump up all the font sizes larger than you think they need to be. I know that it looks wrong on the screen a few inches from your face, but when it’s projected on a screen a hundred feet from the audience, it will look fine.

Also, a note about PowerPoint: Microsoft likes to make fonts change size as you add more to a text box, and this can be gruesomely fatal to the look of your presentation. You need to turn this feature off and use only one font at one standard size throughout your presentations. Some may say, “Steve, I need to put more words there than will fit at that big font size.” To which I respond, “No. No, you don’t. You’re giving a talk, not writing a book. Use a word or two to prompt you, but speak the talk, rather than read the talk.” This point segues me to...

Don’t read slides word for word.

This is an embarrassingly-frequent problem. So many presentations consist of nothing more than the speaker reading, word-for-word, lengthy text. I know why people do this: they’re nervous they won’t know what to say, so they write everything out, word-for-word. Overcome your fear and learn to give a presentation.

This problem speaks to the need for required speech courses as part of everyone’s undergraduate curriculum. In my required speech course at Suisun Community College, I remember that the instructor spread consternation among the class when she announced that most of the talks would have to be done without notes of any kind, just speaking from memory. This is useful, and every college student should be forced to learn how to do it. The crutch of notes makes many presentations unlistenable.

In an ideal presentation, each slide would contain just one or two prompt words, perhaps to give the audience the spelling of an unusual word. But the screen would be filled with a large graphic that will capture their eyes. The speaker’s job is to use the laser pointer to explain what the graphic is showing. Every slide needs to have a graphic; however, in many presentations, it’s just blocks of text, one block after another, all of it read out loud by the speaker.

Because by necessity I can, like many academics, speed read, it takes me only a few seconds to scan a slide full of text. By the time the speaker has spoken the title, I’m done with the slide. So I sit there, my arms crossed, patiently waiting for the speaker to finish reading all the text. (I find these pauses a good time to make a move on the multiple WordsWithFriends games I have going on my iPhone.) Then the slide changes, and in a few seconds I’ve read it all, and the process starts anew. It’s unbearably boring. Reading to the audience makes the presentation deathly boring. Be the anti-Nike and Just Don’t Do It.

Use sans-serif fonts for titles, serif fonts for text.

This is a rule of thumb, not to be followed strictly, but it can be useful when thinking about laying out text. Headlines have much more visual punch when they are a narrow, closely-kerned sans-serif font. Text reads smoother to the eye with serifs.

A word of caution, though, is to avoid using more than two types of font on each slide. You can get away with a headline font and a text font, but if you go much beyond that then it becomes painful to the audiences’ eyes and distracts from the presentation.

An ideal font is one that balances readability with visuals aesthetics, all the while fading into the background like the soundtrack to a movie. If your audience thinks about your fonts, you’ve failed. If you audience gets distracted by your fonts, you’ve failed. Make the fonts as integral to the presentation as the calm tone of your voice.

Lose the centered text.

One of the first rules one learns in graphic design courses is to avoid centering text. Centered text looks juvenile; it’s something kids like to do. But as adults, we have better options. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to hire people with graphics experience to put together its software, so a centered headline is a common default on PowerPoint themes. People can be forgiven for making their talks this way; in a McLuhanesque sense, they’re being directed to do so because it’s how their software wants them to do it.

But chose a better option. Left-justified text is fine; right-justified looks even more interesting. Choose one and stick with it.

Whatever you do, don’t mix type justifications on one slide. Make all text justified one way--left or right--and stick with that unless you have a very good reason. (One possible justification is to wrap text around a graphic, but that should be a rarity, no more than one slide per presentation.)

Use bullet points sparingly.

I just do not understand the thinking that goes into the design of Microsoft products. On almost every PowerPoint template, when you click in the text box to write what’s going to appear on your slide, the first thing that automatically happens is that you find yourself writing in a bulleted list. This is wrong on so many levels that there’s not space here to explain, but suffice it to say that bullets should be the rarity rather than the default; bullets have a place, but not with every line of text.

Microsoft’s default here pushes users toward making horrible-looking slides, in which all their text is arranged in some sort of half-assed, bullet-determined nested hierarchy. This is no way to make a slide. Avoid bullets and simply make your text justify without unneeded ornamentation.

Lose the “talk identification” on the first slide.

Many presentations started off by giving the date and the conference, in addition to the speaker. I’m left wondering: “Does this speaker think I don’t know where I am? Does this speaker think I am unaware of what day it is?” These completely unnecessary distractions need to be removed.

Lose the speaker/university/page number crawl along the bottom of each slide.

Some talks seemed to prepared according to some institutional template, so that each speaker had an identical looking slide, with their, the institution, and the slide number along the bottom. I can’t say enough how bad this looks. It’s as if the talk is some sort of branding exercise.

A talk is a performance. Anything that distracts from that performance needs to be burned away, until the only thing left is the core of what you’re trying to say. Distractions such as slide numbers are an egregious visual annoyance; frankly, when a talk has those, I find it hard to listen to the talk and my eyes are drawn away from the slide material to the bottom. Instead of hearing the speaker, all I can do it keep thinking to myself, “Jesus, that looks bad. Why would anyone do that?”

Lose the copyright symbols

A significant number of talks have little copyright symbols along the bottom of the page. The pretension that someone would actually want to steal your slides is preposterous. Also, if anyone did actually steal your data, then you would have proper legal recourse, even without a distracting and unnecessary copyright symbol.

Thoughts cannot be copyrighted, in any event, so once you’ve said something out in public then everyone else has fair rights to it. In the modern era, a good rule of thumb is that if you speak it or put it on the Internet, then it has now become public domain, in fact if not in legal practice (I’m one of those who thinks the openness of the Internet should change laws more than laws should change the Internet). Instead of imagining that a copyright symbol on the bottom of each page somehow protects you, a much better viewpoint is that the purpose of scientific conferences is to share information, openly, without restriction.

Lose the lengthy institutional thanks.

Many of the talks ended with a slide thanking all the people who helped with the project. That’s fine, but speaking at a scientific conference is not the same as winning the Oscars.

While I understand thanking individuals for their personal help, what makes even less sense are the institutional thanks. Sure, your work was helped out by an NSF grant. Fine. But do we really need to have our time taken up talking about this? Are presentations really the place for such a thing? If so, when does that stop? If I corner you outside in the hall and ask a few questions, which you answer with knowledge you gained in part from an NSF grant, are you then obligated to thank NSF after answering my questions? Is it something like the Intel duh-do-duhduda jingle that has to be chimed whenever Intel’s name is mentioned in a commercial?

There’s a time and place for thanks. And scientists should be thankful for the research money they receive (though I might argue because many grants are so small and miserly, some of that thanks might be given a bit tongue in cheek). But a presentation is a performance. You’re on stage. Seconds are counting down. Do musicians thank all of their music teachers after each concert? Did Picasso paint a thank you to his mentors at the bottom of each painting? When the amount of time thanking institutions who are not even there competes with the talk itself, it all seems a bit much.

Finally, don’t use PowerPoint.

Many academics use Macs, but of these, the majority still use PowerPoint to write their presentations. This makes a certain amount of sense; people keep doing what they are accustomed to doing, and PowerPoint has been around a long time. But there is far superior presentation software available, Apple’s Keynote.

In every way, Keynote runs smoother, quicker, and can do a lot more than PowerPoint. Using a Microsoft product on a Macintosh is like swapping out the engine on a Porsche with the engine from a Yugo. Sure, the car may still run … sort of. But there’s no reason to use such a primitive, clunky, and underpowered program as PowerPoint on a race car computer such as a Mac.

One downside to using Keynote to write talks is that most computers are PCs and therefore only run PowerPoint. A simple solution is to export your finished Keynote presentation as a pdf; this preserves your slides exactly as they appear to you. This can also be a good way to make sure you don’t have any font issues; you may use a splendid ornate font that is installed on your computer, but if you transfer your PPT to another computer that doesn’t have that font already installed, then it won’t display correctly. Pdfs are a good way to overcome this.

Pdfs also load up fine on PCs, and you can run them full-screen simply by changing the View to View Slideshow. Pdf files do not preserve transitions, but you really shouldn’t use a lot of cute transitions--text bouncing into place, or swooping all over the screen--unless you are 12 year-old who finds such distracting gimmicks amusing.

Well, that’s it. Over the years, I've made all these mistakes in my own presentations (and may still do so in the future!). But creating talks that are even a little bit clearer will help communicate science.

Scuttling Our Fleet

2011-07-23T20:53:00.000-07:00

Last week, the final mission of space shuttle program completed with the safe touchdown of Atlantis in Florida. With this landing, the American manned space program came to an official, ignominious end. This bitter defeat comes not from a foreign enemy, or from a technological failure--but from the conscious, deliberative, mistaken choice by America to withdraw from space.

Historians regard with bewilderment at the 1433 decision by China to destroy the immense treasure ships of Cheng Ho, and to abandon its flourishing trading routes throughout the Indian Ocean. The size and scale of Cheng Ho’s expeditions is best grasped by the fact that nearly a century later, when the European explorers of Magellan’s voyage first entered this region of the world, many of the locals still prized artifacts, such as fine porcelain, acquired by trading with Cheng Ho’s fleet. Despite the potential of this empire building, one day in 1433 China inexplicably chose to discard its budding empire and withdraw from the world for over five hundred years.

Historians may look upon the end of the space shuttle program, 21 July 2011, as a similar day for the United States.

Generations of Americans have taken for granted the possibility that our best and brightest might one day achieve the dream of becoming an astronaut. Now we no longer have a manned spaceflight program, though it is possible Americans may still travel to the ISS--as passengers on Russian craft. The unearthing of irony is one of the prime motivators for historians, yet this irony is so hyperbolic as to strain credulity.

Astronaut Story Musgrave put it this way:

“Why are we so poor in our vision and so poor in our project management that we come to a point where it's reasonable to phase out the current program and we have no idea what the next one is? … Washington is in total failure that this has happened.”

Just as America has decided to abandon the frontier of space, American science stands at a precipice. American students are fleeing from science; enrollments in scientific disciplines hover in the lower single digits, while more lucrative fields--business administration, accounting, finance--swell with students. But the problems of American education are not restricted to science education.

Americans are spurning higher education, though advanced training has never been more vital to high-paying employment. The United States used to be first among other nations in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds who had earned college degrees; now we are number twelve, behind Belgium and Russia. One-third of universities saw graduation rates fall in the years between 2002 and 2008. Instead of helping this problem by lowering college costs, we are choosing instead to make it more difficult and expensive to attend college; in 2009, the University of California, one of the largest public university systems in the world, decided to raise tuition 32% in one year, making even a public education unaffordable even for many students born in the lower middle classes.

We like to imagine that America is first in every field, but in science the real figure is number twenty-nine; American students rank 29th in science abilities, behind Croatia and the Czech Republic.

Even as we are choosing to fail, other countries are choosing to thrive. The People’s Republic of China is rapidly gaining ground in the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published English; it is estimated that by 2013, the PRC will publish more scientific papers than America.

Yet this crisis elicits not even a dim reflection of the panic that consumed the country after the Sputnik launch. There are no calls for massive funding for education, no calls for increasing the number of federally-funded scientific research positions, no call for augmenting the number of science professorships at universities so that some of the PhDs snared in perpetual post-doc hell can finally begin their full research careers instead of spending all their time bumping from one temporary job to another. Such fixes are not even remotely part of the discussion.

Instead, on the same day that Atlantis touched down in Florida, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives informed the president that he was ending negotiations over the increase of the federal debt limit, a once-trivial formality needed to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. Instead of addressing the problems of science, political leaders are consumed with petty games of chicken. Just as during the invasion of Iraq, Americans workers setting up the occupation infrastructure were forced to follow OSHA regulations in the middle of an active war zone, our entire government now seems paralyzed with meaningless theatre while an ominous threat looms. It is as if the captain of the Titanic ordered his officers to make sure their compasses were in calibration even as the ship sank.

Manned spaceflight is not the only scientific casualty of these misplaced priorities. In April, an important radio telescope array in California was forced to shutter its operations for lack of funds . For scientific discoveries in astronomy, or paleontology, or high energy physics, one must increasingly look outside the United States. We have decided to withdraw.

Who would have thought that as scientific research blossom elsewhere--in the PRC, at CERN--the United States would be pulling back? Who would have thought that a little over a half century following Sputnik, the Russians would have finally fulfilled Khrushchev’s taunt and buried the United States?

But then, during the height of the treasure fleet, how could Cheng Ho have known that the forces of irrationality and incorrect decisions would so easily overwhelm progress?

new landslide hazard map

2011-05-20T19:42:00.001-07:00

The California Geological Survey has released a new map of landslide hazard that reinforces some of the incontrovertible facts about the equation that governs landslides in the Bay Area:

slope angle + clay expansion + weak rock + rain = landslide

The last variable, rain, is one that is peculiar in the Bay Area. We're moderately arid--not as many inches as Seattle, far more than Barstow. But the signature of Bay Area rains is that they come all at once, in catastrophic storms that funnel into the Bay Area across the Pacific as if by a pipeline. The effect of this is saturation, and the effect of saturation is overland runoff, water literally unable to soak into the receiving clay. This runoff can have an ferocious erosive effect, transforming stable slopes in a matter of hours to undercut, unstable, moving landscapes.

As the San Jose Mercury News has reported, this is bad news for Marin County. Marin is blessed with steep, interesting hills of schist and serpentinite and chert. But the vertiginous fractured Franciscan landscape are both weak and steep, simply waiting for a slight nudge, in the form of water weight and lubrication. And unlike the East Bay, where the mountainous regions are sparsely developed, Marin has extensive building on very steep slopes.

As bad as this is, it gets worse. As was recently discussed at a conference in Sacramento, California faces a risk from periodic "megastorms," called ArkStorms, which can deluge the state with biblical rain.

Earthquake predictions, and the coming storm

2011-05-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

Citizens of Rome are frightened that an earthquake is about to occur:

Thousands of people are reported to be staying out of Rome for the next few days, over fears the city will be hit by a huge earthquake.
The panic was sparked by rumours that seismologist Raffaele Bendandi, who died in 1979, predicted the city would be devastated by a quake on 11 May ...
But many people said they were leaving the city to be on the safe side.
There are reports of an 18% increase in the number of city employees planning to stay away from work

The magnitude of this silliness is shocking.

Earthquake prediction has never been able to pinpoint an exact day and time of a quake. This may be a goal forever out of reach of seismologists; the same nonlinear dynamics that make short-term weather prediction impossible more than about a week ahead are involved in the dynamics of earthquakes, meaning that very slight changes in initial conditions produce very different results.

But, in a very real way, this doesn't matter.

Geologists still know 1) where earthquakes will occur in the future, 2) how large they will be in the future, 3) approximately how many people they will kill in a given urban area, based upon existing buildings, and 4) a range of time, in years, when the earthquake, based on past events, is most likely to occur.

For example, on the world's deadliest urban fault, the Hayward Fault, geologists know exactly where the fault lies. In fact, its traces through the San Francisco East Bay are unmistakeable, in thousands of offset foundations, building cracks, and sidewalks buckled by creep. We know where the fault is, and because the subsurface geometry of Hayward goes (unlike many other faults) pretty much straight down, we have a reasonable idea that epicenters will be focused along the fault trace.

We also know approximately how large the coming quake will be. Right now there is thought to be enough stored energy in the rocks to produce a >6.7 Mw quake. That will be quite devastating in proximity to so many homes. We know that the tens of thousands of unreinforced brick buildings in the Bay Area will likely mean casualties on the scale of Japan's 1992 Kobe quake, which killed 1994, which killed over 6400 people.

We also know when we can expect the Hayward to rupture, based on trench work that has revealed a long-term record of past events. According to the great work of Jim Lienkaemper, of the USGS, the recurrence interval of the Hayward ranges from about 161 years, plus or minus 65 years, to 170 years, plus or minus 82 years. For the five most recent big quakes, however, the recurrence interval is only 138 years, plus or minus 58 years.

The last big Hayward Fault event was the quake of 1868, which was 143 years ago. That means by the last-five measurements, we are squarely in the time zone for the next quake, though we, in fact, entered the lower range of this in 1948. By 2064, we are virtually guaranteed to have the quake, though it most likely will occur well before this. Likewise, with the 161 and 170 numbers, we long ago entered the time zone where the quake is primed and ready to occur. This is not good news for us, but it is a prediction, one verified by much scientific research.

So when people ask when the next big quake will be, we can tell them that geologists know where, when, and how bad it will be. This usually comes as a surprise. People are looking for some sort of 3-day warning, which does not exist. People--and municipalities--need to start preparing for the guaranteed seismic event in the near future, rather than imagining scientists are somehow going to come up with a warning as they would with an approaching storm.

quakes can drop land

2011-05-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

We often think of sea level as the height of water relative to the land. But geologists know that the land is also in motion, somewhat complicating measurements of rising sea level. (Alaska, which is tectonically rising, records less apparent sea level rise than elsewhere, for example.) In cases where land is subsiding, sea level rise may actually seem augmented. And no part of the Earth underwent a quicker subsidence than areas of coastal Japan during the great quake of 11 March 2011.

As a recent story confirms,

The March 11 earthquake that hit eastern Japan was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake.

One of my professors of geology remembers camping on a beach the night of the 1992 Mendocino earthquake, and finding in the morning that the coastline had been visibly uplifted, exposing mussell-covered rocks now well-above the high tide line, dooming their sessile molluscan tenants.

While we human like to imagine the solid land as solidly fixed in one place, the reality is far more complex, though our short life spans rarely allow us to the opportunity to observe changes first hand. This the nature of deep time; we can see the long term effects of geologic changes but usually only indirectly observe them occurring.

Japan is an exception:

Some areas in Ishinomaki moved southeast 17 feet (5.3 meters) and sank 4 feet (1.2 meters) lower.
"We thought this slippage would happen gradually, bit by bit. We didn't expect it to happen all at once," says Testuro Imakiire, a researcher at Japan's Geospatial Information Authority, the government body in charge of mapping and survey.

The now permanent situation in Japan should give those of us who live in California a moment of pause to reflect on how quickly the land around may one day change.

magma ocean on Io

2011-05-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

Students always come to intro geology courses with the misconception that beneath our thin, rocky crust, there exists an ocean of magma. Intro geology students imagine that volcanoes are simply breaches in this ocean, where pressure forces this liquid rock to spew out.

The reality, of course, is that the mantle is solid, not liquid. The mantle's ability to flow over time makes it seem liquid-like, but it is in fact quite crystalline. Beginning geology students have no end of trouble over this distinction; maybe it's something wrong with the way I teach it, but I'd say at least a quarter of students just never quite get this fundamental fact about the earth. And when I throw in decompression and flux melting, students really start to have difficulty.

Now, to add to the confusion, it seems that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, does in fact have a "magma ocean." In fact, estimates are that about 10% of the volume of Io involves liquified material. This may account for Io's strikingly-intense volcanic activity. Compared to our relatively tame planet, Io has frequent volcanic activity.

wither agate?

2011-04-20T11:23:00.001-07:00

Well, it's happening again.

The great state of Louisiana is poised to enact a geological injustice. This time the victim is agate, which has held the distinction of being LA's state gem. Now under consideration is a much-debated proposal to downgrade agate to LA's state mineral.

The irony is that because agate is cryptocrystalline, it's borderline to call it either a gem or a mineral. "Gem" is a geologically-meaningless term synonymous with a mineral, which is an inorganic, naturally-occurring compound assuming a regular, orderly crystallinity.

But when you look at agate under a polarized light microscope, what you see is... well, not much. The crystals are so tiny that even under high magnification, what you mostly see in thin section is an iridescent swirl that reminds one of a CD refracting light. You could say these individual crystals are minerals, but the nature of agate as a whole is more amorphous than mineralic.

Nonetheless, more for the sake of convenience than consistency, geologists do classify agate as a mineral, a gem, or a rock, depending on the circumstances. And just as California should not have considered removing serpentinite as its state rock, so too should Louisiana refrain from offering any geological insult. Geologists vote... and we carry rock hammers, too.

anti-wolf, anti-science

2011-04-13T19:15:00.001-07:00

Fear of wolves is one of those irrational, deep-seated human traits. As Farley Mowat and others have pointed out, wolves pose virtually danger to humans, and little danger to livestock. Yet in the West wars over the classification of wolves take on an unusual prominence.

As part of the unfortunate budget deal Obama agreed to last Friday, a hostage negotiation with the operation of the federal government on the line, Obama agreed to a small, little-noticed rider that allowed Congress to change the endangered status of wolves in Montana and Idaho.

Now there is nothing wrong, per se, with a species being taken off the Endangered Species list, if the evidence warrants such an action. But the process established by Congress does not--until this week--allow for political machinations to override scientific consensus. Now the status of every animal on the list is on the table, with congress members vying with each other for which animal--stubbornly confounding some development project with its insistence on living--is to be taken off next.

The issue is science denial. Do we have a system where scientists come to a conclusion based on evidence, and then take action on a species' status, or do we have a system where politicians make these decisions, based on their own economic interests?

In the reality based community, scientific facts have meaning and relevance. In the world of science denial, facts are as fungible as opinions, because at their core denialists do not accept the idea of an objective, rational world outside their own subjective experience. They engage in magical thinking at its worst.

Dam Failures

2011-02-21T23:30:00.000-08:00

One of the worst ways to deny science is to ignore hazards to health, hazards which are well-understood by science. One of the least known dangers we face is from dam collapse.

During the early part of the 20th century, America's rivers became dammed at a prodigious rate. Virtually every major American river is dammed at multiple points. Virtually every dam is silting rapidly behind the dam, as the normal sediment flow is interrupted.

All dams are temporary, geologically-speaking. And our nation's dams, like so much of our infrastructure, are not holding up well.

As this recent report in the New York Times details, if you have water flowing out of your tap, you live downstream from a dam. You might not be directly in the flow expected from a dam failure, but many of your neighbors are.

Britain, the peninsula

2011-02-15T00:14:00.001-08:00

When sea level started rising from its low point 17,000 years ago, the coastline of the world were dramatically changed. According to this recent BBC report,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12244964

Britain remained a peninsula, connected to Normandy, until 6,100 years ago, when a titanic tsunami inundated what would become the English Channel. So much for those wankers who say Britain shouldn't be in the EU.

Cops, or Libraries?

2011-02-10T16:42:00.001-08:00

In reality this is not an either/or choice, but the police union in Los Angeles has just officially come out against libraries.

The union that represents LAPD officers came out strongly today against Measure L, an item on the March 8 ballot that would set aside funding for the Los Angeles Public Library system.

In a statement, Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul Weber said the measure "will create more problems than it solves"

Although this seems typical for a state that spends more on its prison system and its university system, yet it is remarkable to see such posturing to plainly.

One way to guarantee disorder and strife is to create artificial scarcity. Scarcity pits cops against libraries, university students against administrators, families against banks. Only by reforming the financing of such institutions as libraries, universities, and the police force can we hope to end such useless, futile conflicts. It is the current chaotic financing system for public institutions that should be shut down, not libraries.

Academically Adrift

2011-01-29T13:41:00.000-08:00

A new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, offers refreshing insights into the problems plaguing higher education. Based on information from over 2,000 students on 24 United States campuses, Academically Adrift paints a disturbing picture of the failures of modern education.

In short, students are not working hard enough:

Students are not spending enough hours studying : only 12-14 per week. Most of that time is spent in “group” study sessions that are little more peer socializing with a veneer of self-deceptive justification that studying might be occurring. The study also found that solo studiers fared better.
Students are not learning enough in some majors. Business majors, for example, showed far fewer educational gains than those in liberal arts. This reflects the non-academic, vocational emphasis of business courses compared to the intellectual challenges offered by courses in literature, rhetoric, and philosophy.
Students are not being required to read or write enough. This is hardly a surprise, considering that so many college students are unable to form even basic ideas into coherent sentences.
Students involved in fraternities and sororities learned less. This is, again, no surprise, as such socialization can only detract from time available for studying.
Arum & Roska’s work concludes with the damning statistic that 45% of students see no improvement in their first two years of college work, and 36% fail to have improvement over all four years of college.

UC Corruption

2010-12-29T13:51:00.000-08:00

The highest-paid officials of the University of California have decided that they're not being paid enough.

Specifically, 36 of the top 200 earners in the UC administration have recently threatened to file suit if their retirement packages are not recalculated to avoid a $245,000 federal limit. Because these workers earn more than that, they feel they should be entitled to have their retirements recalculated based on their current incomes rather than this federal cap. They are demanding this despite the financial chaos of the last few years, which have seen a 32% increase in UC feeds in 2009, and an 8% increase in 2010. And they want the money retroactive to 2007.

The average wage in 2009 was $49,777; a retirement benefit above $245,00 would be, therefore, almost five times what the average worker makes.

Such superstar compensation might make sense if these leading UC administrators were actually doing a good job. If they had, for example, used their political contacts and influence to prevent the state of California from cutting its education budget, then they would have earned their salaries. Police union representatives certainly earned their salaries, as they were so successful in preventing cuts to bloated law enforcement budgets. But it seems no one is there to help defend education. Not only did these administrators fail to force Sacramento from making its draconian cuts, it seems as if they hardly even tried.

A more just and equitable system would be this: Let the salaries and retirements of the top 200 UC administrators from this point forward come entirely as bonuses paid from the funds they prevent from being cut. If Sacramento cuts the UC budget, they receive nothing. Perhaps this would motivate them to take the battle to Sacramento with the same enthusiasm Sacramento has displayed for destroying public education in California.

Those executives would argue that such a salary structure change would, as they put it in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, "jeopardize the system's ability to recruit top employees." The unasked question is--are these really the "top" employees, when they so miserably fail to protect their system? And what is it they do, anyway, that justify such salaries?

Let Obama Be Obama

2010-12-07T23:03:00.000-08:00

In the West Wing episode (Season 1, episode 19) 'Let Barlet Be Barlet,' the fictional president Jed Barlet is failing.

On every front, when facing challenges from opposing Republicans and the military brass, Barlet choses to make meaningless gestures, "dipping his toes in" rather than fighting for his values. He lets one of his aides have a meeting with military officials about gay members of the military, but makes clear that this will not lead to repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Barlet half-heartedly considers appointing reformers to the Federal Election Commission, but realizes that Congress has already staked claim to the openings.

After a confrontation with his devoted chief of staff, President Barlet realizes that he needs to start fighting now if he ever hopes to achieve his agenda. The episode concludes with all staff members pledging to follow their president's wishes.

President Obama should Netflix this episode and watch it twice.

The tragedy of the first two years of the Obama administration is not that this highly-talented, fiercely-smart president was unable to achieve his legislative agenda; the tragedy is that he did achieve it, and that the bar he set himself was so low.

A half-hearted health care reform was passed, but without the critical components that would have made it a truly monumental reform. Don't get me wrong--it's great that more kids will be eligible to be insured, but the individual mandate means that by law their parents now must buy unaffordable insurance. Obama took the bold--and obvious--solution of expanding Medicare to everyone off the table very early, before it was ever seriously considered.

Obama also acted prudently to keep the US economy from plunging further into financial chaos. But while the "stimulus bill" helped banks, it did nothing to create jobs. We now creating a small fraction of the jobs we need each month just to keep pace with population growth; projections are that twelve million jobs would need to be created just to reach the point we were last at when the economy collapsed in October 2008. Instead of taking the bold--and obvious--step of revamping the Works Progress Administration and directly hiring unemployed people, Obama's talk of tax credits for businesses sounds limp.

Obama could have done much more. And now, with his enemies poised to usurp the House, he will have the chance to do far less.

In many ways, Obama is Barlet brought to life. Both are Nobel laureates. Both brim with intelligent and verbal clarity. Both are fundamentally good people. Here is what Obama wrote in his book Dreams of My Father:

"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children in Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder--alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware--is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism, dooms us all."

Obama is of the mettle of Lincoln, for no other modern president has been so eloquent and empathetic, and of all qualities in a person, empathy is the most important, while eloquence shows the quality of thought. After the nightmare years of the inchoate Bush reign, Obama's mind is a like waking up and taking a breath.

Let us hope that, like Lincoln, his victories will be more plainly seen in retrospect. During Lincoln's terms, one could have mistaken his tactics for chaos--an unruly cabinet, disobedient generals, a war stalled in its early years. The martyred, brilliant Lincoln is hardly the pre-Appomattox Lincoln, who was widely mocked and criticized almost until the moment when he achieved total victory.

But if Obama is not to enjoy Lincoln's post-assassination apotheosis, then he needs to start fighting for his values now. It is great to win a game, and unfortunate to lose, but it seems as if Obama has not even suited up. He has punted the ball on third down. It's time to get in the game.

Why TSA needs to change

2010-11-22T19:09:00.000-08:00

A bladder cancer survivor has his urostomy bag ripped open by a TSA agent untrained to recognize such objects, and the cancer survivor is soaked in his own urine as a result; a TSA representative then insults him on television. A frightened, shy 1o year-old boy resists a TSA screening, and has his shirt taken off in public. An ABC producer reporters that she was groped inside her underwear. Victims of sexual assault report that the aggressive, invasive probes they receive at the hands of TSA agents are bringing back flashbacks of their assaults.

Something is deeply broken with our passenger screening process--and this new process does nothing to keep us safer.

According to Isaac Yeffet, former head of security for Israel's El Al airlines, these invasive patdowns are pointless and a waste of time. El Al knows a thing or two about security; Israel faces much greater daily threats of attack than the United States. Yet despite the danger Israeli airlines face, El Al's remarkably effective techniques do not involve "touching the junk" of passengers. We should consider learning from what works.

Flying involves lying to passengers. Every flight begins with a ridiculous video about exit procedures, and the location of floatation devices in the event of a "water landing." A water landing is otherwise known as crashing into the ocean. With the exception of Captain Sully's famous landing, and one other such event in the 1950s, every other such landing has been fatal to everyone on the plane. And in the case of Sully's landing, people did not rely on floatation devices. So untold hours have been wasted on the tarmac listening to an absurd broadcast about a scenario that has almost zero chance of happening.

One of the most pernicious lies, however, is that our checked baggage and shipping parcels have been adequately screen. As we learned from the recent Yemeni bombs, it is relatively easy to get timed bombs on planes In the case of the Yemeni bombs, they were only detected because of an tip from the Saudis--hardly an intelligence resource we can rely on in the future.

TSA needs to consider the needs of sexual assault victims. TSA needs to guarantee that those who are viewing images of naked Americans, including American children, have been screened for pedophilia. As things stand now, it's like the Wild West has taken over our airports, and no one is accountable for the indignities visited upon those with the temerity to want to travel in their own country.

2010-11-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

Today's strangeness comes courtesy of Treeosaur.com, a site which expounds on the idea that theropod dinosaurs hunted by blending in with trees.

Okaaay then.

Money Well Spent

2010-08-03T21:18:00.000-07:00

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he famously declared that the University of California system should not subsidize intellectual curiosity. What he meant is that taxpayers should not pay for the education of California students.

Several years later, Sen. Proxmire of Wisconsin began his annual "Golden Fleece" awards, where he pointed to what he considered to be examples of wasteful federal spending. These examples sometimes included scientific research, and in this vein Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have released a new report, titled "Summertime Blues: 100 Projects that give taxpayers the blues."

First, the word "taxpayer" is often trotted out as if had magical power. The phrase "as a taxpayer..." is spoken as if this incantation conferred special rights. But everyone is a taxpayer, and if everyone is part of a group, then no one individual in that group has any special claim.

The use of "taxpayer" is meant to stake a claim that as someone who has money automatically taken out of your paycheck, you have a right to decide how that money is spent. Nothing could be further from the truth. While you nominally have power to elect someone to decide how your tax money is spent, in reality unless you are a corporation capable of making substantial donations to PACs, then you have no say about how your money is spent, and no influence on who your elected official is. So right at the outset we should dispense with the fiction that "taxpayers" have some sort

Second, the Coburn/McCain report harps upon job creation as the standard for usefulness. In section after section, the report mocks expenditures in areas with unemployment, without mentioning the rather obvious point that this money is employing people. For almost every conceivable project, payroll expenditures constitute the majority of the budget. So criticizing such projects for not creating jobs is simply untrue.

Third, much of what is in the Coburn/McCain report is legitimate, useful scientific research. Here are some examples:

The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $2 million to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and east Africa, to capture, photograph, and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

...has received a stimulus grant for an experimental applied science project to assist indigenous Siberian communities in engaging Russian policymakers in local civic and environmental issues.

...$435,271 to develop iPod Touch or smartphone apps to teach introductory biology to high school students

...$266,505 in stimulus funds to continue its annual science education workshops for reporters

...MSU received a grant to send students to work with researchers at the Natural History Museum in Hangzhou studying various dinosaur eggs and other fossils.

...$300,000 in stimulus grant money to examine computer simulations to follow the formation of galaxies through the period 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang.

Really? Researching the Big Bang and the evolution of our universe is somehow unworthy of support? Sending kids to study dinosaurs, and possibly inspiring them into a career in science, is a wasteful expenditure? We should not fund workshops for reporters to communicate science better? We shouldn't explore using new technology to teach biology?

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you to read the Coburn/McCain report for yourself. It is a damning documentation of manifest philistine contempt for education, for learning, and most of all, for science itself.

Anti-Vaxxers Showing True Color

2010-07-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

Anti-vaccination groups have reached a new low. The Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) is a group of conspiratorially-minded science deniers so intent on keeping people from getting vaccines that they have now stooped to harassing the parents of a baby who died of whooping cough:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/12/2951629.htm

According to this article, 32-day-old Dana McCaffery died last year due to pertussis. She was too young to have received the vaccine, although her parents later came out in support of other children being vaccinated. That was too much for AVN, which started harassing the parents, and sought to prove that pertussis could not have been the cause. It might have beens something else, they claimed, another disease that was now being hidden so that young Dana might be used as a poster child for pro-vaccination forces.

This shows the anti-vaxxers true colors: they are willing to exploit suffering of all kinds, and to wish for more of that suffering in the world, in pursuit of their irrational, anti-scientific, paranoid mission.

cool slow-mo landslide

2010-07-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

A very cool video of a slow-moving landslide:

http://sorisomail.com/email/42722/ja-viram-desmoranar-uma-montanha.html

Serpentinite Expelled?

2010-07-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

Oh noes! Teh iz coming foar mah rx!

"California may drop rock, and geologists feel the pain." As amazing as it sounds, the official state rock of California, serpentinite, is in jeopardy of losing its status, due to a bill by LA Democrat Gloria Romero. Romero rightly points out that California's state rock is chock-full of chrysotile asbestos, and for this reason she finds it inappropriate for this lovely, lime-green rock to be so honored by the Golden State.

The New York Times article on this--which repeats the common mistake of referring to the rock (serpentinite) by its group of mineral (serpentine)--correctly quotes a USGS geologist as saying, "There is no way anyone is going to get bothered by casual exposure to that kind of rock."

People have a hard time getting their minds around this, but we Californians are frequently exposed to asbestos fibers without demonstrably increased rates of cancer. This is especially true in the serpentinite-rich Bay Area (the alleged elevated breast cancer rates in Marin are not connected with this fact). But if we're breathing asbestos in normal air, why aren't Californians who don't smoke dropping dead of lung cancer?

For one thing, chrysotile asbestos is not the most carcinogenic asbestiform mineral--that honor goes to "blue asbestos," crocidolite, and "brown asbestos," amosite.

But unlike these two forms, chrysotile's fibers are slightly curved, meaning that they cannot penetrate quite so deeply into the small passages of the lungs. When lungs are exposed to mineral particles, they react as if these particles were viruses or bacteria; a robust immune system attacks these particles with a toxic brew of chemicals. In a way, our immune system is too good at doing this, because in the process of trying to "kill" the mineral, neighboring cells are damaged in ways that, given enough time, can turn them cancerous. The longer mineral particles remain, the longer the immune reaction occurs; the problem with asbestos fibers is that they lodge so deeply, it is very difficult for them to be dislodged.

I don't want to minimize the health hazards of asbestos, or imply that it does not cause cancer. But it's important not to exaggerate the ill effects of hazardous substances, and to understand what actually does cause harm. It should be noted that one of the more inert substances in nature--silicon dioxide, which in a mineral form is quartz--can also cause a particularly vicious lung disease called silicosis. The bottom line is that you don't want to inhale any mineral particles if you can help it; asbestiform minerals are particularly bad to inhale, and within this mineral group, amosite and crocidolite are the worst. Since most industrial asbestos was chrysotile, this means that the efforts to remove all asbestos from places such as schools has been largely an unnecessary effort, meant to placate fears more than actually protect people. Sure, less exposure is better--although by removing the material, that increases its dispersion and people's exposure.

On a side note, the first half of the South Tower of the World Trade Center had its beams wrapped in asbestos fibers. (This fact alone shows the lie in the EPA's post 9/11 statement that the air quality was non-hazardous.) This fireproofing could be literally sewn around beams in such a way that a sudden jolt--such as an earthquake or a plane

impact--would not knock it off. While the WTC was being built, however, the use of asbestos was discontinued. The North Tower and the upper portions of the South Tower were sprayed instead with a fireproofing foam. There wasn't much science to the amount added; workers recalled that they were instructed to just eye-ball it. No one expected that something would happen to the towers that would knock this insulation off the support beams, exposing them directly to fire. Had they been wrapped in asbestos sheets, this would not have happened. Can we infer therefore that asbestos insulation would have saved the WTC? No, that goes too far--but it might have bought a little more time before the collapses.

Romero's bill has good intentions, but does not take good science into account, but instead plays upon people's fears of a substance they little understand. Moreover, it overturns a tradition, and for that reason if for nothing else, it deserves not to pass.

Why Aren't Students Studying?

2010-07-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

According to recent research by UCSB economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, the amount of time spent by college students studying has dropped:

1961: 24 hours/week

2009: 14 hours/week

Moreover, the total time spend on school (attending classes + studying) has likewise diminished:

1961: 40 hours/week

2009: 27 hours/week

What's gong on here?

As every college counsellor tells students, they should expect to be responsible for studying 3 hours for every hour in class. At many schools, students are considered full-time with as few as 12 units/week, which translates roughly (not counting labs) as 12 classroom hours per week. At 12 hours/week, the 3x multiple works out to only 36 hours. Added to 12 hours, this means a total time spend on school of only 48 hours/week.

This squares with my experiencing teaching undergraduates. Assign reading, and 90% will not do it. Test on this required reading, and still 90% will not do it. I get the sense, while grading midterms, that the majority of the class has spend less than one hour preparing for the exam. There are good students, students who diligently study, even in freshmen classes. But they are quite the rarity.

It seems to be the diminished number of hours actually spent studying may have a lot to do with declining academic standards, which are hidden only the band-aid of grade inflation. There is something seriously wrong going on here.

New gravity map

2010-06-29T23:26:00.001-07:00

Gravity maps are way cool and help us picture the 4th dimension, which often we forget. Check out this new grav map:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8767763.stm

The Woo is a Lie

2010-06-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

It's hard to think of a stranger article than the recent piece by Dr. Robert Lanza which appeared in the Huffington Post.

Titled "What are we? New experiments suggest we're not purely physical," this piece might have offered some actual new experiments; instead, we are presented with tired, hackneyed cliches about quantum theory and how this, supposedly, proves the existence of something other than reality. It is quite simply nonsense.

While arguing, "part of us exists outside of the physical world," Dr. Lanza does not offer any real evidence of this. Instead, we're retold old stories about the spookiness of the quantum world, mixed with assurances the scientific community is "trapped in an outdated paradigm." Kuhn references are the last refuge of anti-science scoundrels.

Quantum mechanics is strange and counter-intutive. But simply because phenomenon occur in ways unexpected to our normal experience is not an argument against the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics simply is. Electromagnetic radiation exists both as a wave and as a particle. There is no why. Extrapolating from quantum mechanics to a New Age, woo-ish interpretation of the world goes far beyond what the evidence actually suggests.

Dr. Lanza writes:

The world was once wondrous.

And indeed it still is. Learning science should not reduce one's wonder about the world; rather, it is through science that we develop an appreciation for just how wondrous reality is.

Dr. Lanza philosophizes:

My colleagues tell me we're just the activity of carbon and some proteins; we live awhile and die. And the universe? It too has no meaning. They have it all worked out in the equations -- no need for woo.

Now we see the crux of the matter. If Dr. Lanza wants to argue that we are something other than carbon molecules, the burden of proof is on him to produce evidence for it. Perhaps there is "something else"--we cannot absolutely rule out such a possibility. But science does strongly suggest that there need not be anything else in order to explain the world and the things that live in it. Therefore to argue that some unnamed "new experiments" are producing reality-shattering paradigm shifts about the nature of reality is, quite bluntly, wrong.

Tracking research vessels

2010-06-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

Research ships are very cool. It's a small environment crammed with smart people, visiting beautiful places to do interesting work. Imagine that several times a day someone brings up a mud core--tens of millions of years old, which no one has ever seen before--and plops it down for you to start analyzing. Although prudish American ships are dry, European ships more sensibly understand the importance of the free-flow of alcohol. So where are all these ships?

Sailwx.info has a handy site allowing you to track the world's research vessels:
http://www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/researchships.phtml

You can see, for example, that the Polarstern is right now half way between Iceland and Greenland. The Thomas Thompson, from which science writer Wendee Holtcamp is blogging, in Deadliest Catch waters. It is interesting to think of all this cool research going on simultaneously around the world.

the slick

2010-06-22T17:31:00.001-07:00

NASA has just released a spectacular picture of the BP spill taken on 19 June 2010:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=44375

BTW, not that these pictures come courtesy of a governmental science agency. Remember that the next time some anti-science politician suggest cutting funding for science and leaving all innovation to the private sector. Imagine if the satellite that took this picture were owned by a corporate giant who owned BP... I suspect in such a case we wouldn't be seeing any such pictures at all.

plastic weathering

2010-06-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Geologists tend to think differently about pollution than scientists in other fields. To an oceanographer, plastic pollution in the oceans is a huge issue because such plastic may take as long as 400 years to degrade. Four hundreds years is, of course, below the resolution of many geologic dating techniques, so in the geologists' mind 400 years seems like the +/- slop that is part of every calculation. This doesn't mean the immediate, current plastic problem is not deadly to marine life now; but in the long run, if we were to stop plastic pollution, in a time period measured by geologic thinking, things would be back to normal fairly quickly.

Now, as this article in New Scientist points out,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627651.900-drastic-measures-save-plastic-treasures.html

20th century plastics are degrading faster than anyone thought. This includes works of art sculpted in plastics that are now disintegrating.

fast erosion

2010-06-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

Creationists will no doubt take solace from the way this article is phrased:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100620155748.htm

Sometimes erosion does occur rapidly. In a river such as the Colorado, for example, long periods of little erosion are punctuated by rapid erosion during peak flows. This does not, however, mean that all of geology is wrong and that the drainage of Noah's Flood carved the Grand Canyon.

Science writers should take better care to understand the ways in which their headlines will be misused.

very cool graphic

2010-06-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

A quite cool graphic showing the highest mountain, the deepest trench, and everything in between:

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249

Anakin Skywalker--borderline personality?

2010-06-06T14:52:00.001-07:00

A new paper argues that Anakin Skywalker, the future Darth Vader, displayed classic signs of borderline personality disorder.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/05/psychology-darth-vader-revealed/

If true, this could be the first time the prequels had any correspondence to the way people actually behave.

Time Lapse Glaciers

2010-06-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

An excellent site, the Extreme Ice Survey, showing graphics of retreating glacial ice.

http://www.extremeicesurvey.org/index.php/new_gallery/

Shake Maps

2010-06-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

Predicting earthquakes on a short time scale is impossible. However, we know in the long term where earthquakes will occur, and we also know pretty well how the ground will behave.

This site details recent work modeling how Southern California will respond to the next big quake. It's just a matter of time.

http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/news/feature-stories/2010/clear-with-a-chance-of-tremors/

Is Lady Gaga puppet of the Illuminati?

2010-06-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows the Illuminati control everything. So it should come as no surprise that Lady Gaga is controlled by them, too.

http://www.disinfo.com/2010/03/lady-gaga-puppet-of-illuminati-mind-control/

This site of tin-foil hat paranoia is as crazy as it seems. To cleanse the mental palette, indulge yourself in a site that attempts to analyze Lady Gaga from a literary theory perspective:

http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/

world stats

2010-06-06T14:30:00.001-07:00

Scientists love quantification. Although not every aspect of science lends itself to numerical description, when you've got solid numbers, that makes it much easier to sell your idea to other scientists.

Here is a great site of real-time statistics about the world:

http://www.worldometers.info/

I particularly like Society & Media section--it's spooky to think of the amount of info being generated each second of each day.

Biblical commandments

2010-05-19T15:29:00.001-07:00

A brilliant response to Dr. Laura:

Subject: FW: Can you own a Canadian?

In her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, she knows that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 , and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura.

Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination ... End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan.

James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus, Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia

Now here's a title

2010-05-19T15:27:00.001-07:00

"Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia."

See below for gory details:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18916-bat-fellatio-causes-a-scandal-in-academia.html

2010-05-17T23:36:00.001-07:00

May 18th is the 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, the most documented and dramatic volcanic eruption on US soil since the founding of the republic. (Mt. Shasta may have erupted in 1776, but California was not yet part of new country; Lassen in 1917 was rather small.)

David Johnson, seen here in the picture to the right, is the eponymous geologist killed in the eruption near what is now called the Johnson Memorial Ridge. He was one of many people surprised by the sideways, lateral blast that carved out St. Helens' north side.

In many ways, I became a geologist because of this eruption, which at the tender age of 10 struck my consciousness like few things had before. I still have the dog-earred National Geographic magazines detailing the event in dramatic photos, and I spent many long hours staring intently at the glossy pages.

MSNBCS has a nice set of photos commemorating the event:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37199772/from/ET/?beginTab=1&beginSlide=1

Madness in SF: Rules for Bay to Breakers & Sit/Lie

2010-05-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, San Francisco will host its annual Bay to Breakers race, which is not so much a race as an extravagant parade composed of some of the stranger sites in an already strange city. The "race" began in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake as a way to promote civic pride. For decades, it was a wonderful raucous celebration, involving drugs, copious alcohol, and the necessity of open public urination. (San Francisco, for those of you unacquainted with the city, has almost no public restrooms, so public urination is something practiced by necessity even by embarrassed tourists to our fair city.)

We're a long from the glory days of the Bay to Breakers. Tomorrow will be a corporate-sponsored, corporate-managed event carefully scripted to avoid any of its original vitality or fun. The race is now the "ING Bay to Breakers," ING being the acronym of the Dutch Internationale Nederlanden Groep.

It is unclear why this annual event of civic pride needs corporate sponsorship,

but for whatever reason, ING has sought to ban the very things that make the race worthwhile: floats, nudity, alcohol, fun. ING probably won't succeed in imposing all of the draconian restr

ictions it wishes, but the race has nonethele

ss lost its meaning. Perhaps in the future, citizens should organize an alternate parade--say, on the Saturday before the Bay to Breakers, that will simply be a flash-mob of people wishing to celebrate the original Rabelaisian spirit of the race.

At the same time that the Bay to Breakers is being strangled by Taliban-like bans, San Francisco is wrestling with a new "sit/lie" ordinance.

While the Bay to Breakers restrictions seek to impose unreasonable order, this sit/lie ordinance is being opposed by unreasonable advocates for the homeless. The reality in SF is that many areas of the city are so overrun with homeless sitting and lying on the sidewalk that no one in his or her reasonable mind would wish to go there.

The sit/lie ordinance is a rational first step toward cleaning up the city. There should be no right to camp out on city sidewalks, especially when that camping is so unsightly and disruptive.

Yet this sit/lie ordinance garners a tremendous about of vehemence against it by those who would protect the rights of violent, aggressive homeless against the rights of citizens and those increasingly-few tourists who wish to spend much-needed money in San Francisco.

SF needs to clean up--starting with the sidewalks. SF also needs to protect its unique cultural identity by not surrendering events such as Bay to Breakers to puritanical corporations such as ING.

Touching Home

2010-05-10T21:59:00.001-07:00

Touching Home is a new movie starring Ed Harris, about the relationship of identical twin boys with their estranged, alcoholic, self-destructive father. The film is based on a true story, and stars Noah and Logan Miller, who produced, wrote, and directed this marvelous film.

In an age of Iron Man 2--ridiculous special effects meant to distract the viewer from the utter lack of character and story--Touching Home shines as real art. Movies have become too much about explosions, too little about the experience of living in this broken world among broken people. Touching Home speaks to these deeper issues, and does so unflinchingly, and at time, painfully

We see the self-destructive behavior without varnish. At the lowest point in the film, when Ed Harris' character robs from his own children to fuel a drunken gambling binge, we see what, for many families, is a total reversal of the nurturing role, a descent into familial parasitism. Cuttingly, we see the character of the grandmother watch Ed Harris as he steals from his son--she watches without comment, two generations of extreme dysfunction on pathetic display. And yet there is love, complicated love, the love of children sleeping indoor and pursuing their dreams while knowing their father sleeps under the redwoods in his truck.

Noah and Logan Miller are the stars of this film are utterly convincing and honest in their acting. One would never know that this was their acting debut (which probably says something about how claims of acting being a difficult profession are self-serving). Honest acting, acting without pretense, comes across plainly on the screen, just as false, ridiculous acting (Twilight, anyone?) is also easy to spot.

Touching Home was probably shot on a shoestring budget. But this, if anything, makes it the better film and multi-million dollar masturbatory festivals of explosions and cliches. Watch Iron Man 2 this weekend if you cannot manage an independent thought; watch Touching Home if you want to be moved. No one leaves this film with dry eyes.

non-California hazard zones

2010-05-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Living in California, we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that we're the only state with significant natural hazards. Here is a Wired article about some of the non-California danger zones.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/five-us-earthqu/

Of particular interest to populations are the dangers of the Pacific Northwest and Salt Lake City. Probably very few residents realize the full magnitude of the peril.

The View From Above

2010-05-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what the view of Earth is like from space? Happily, the International Space Station has a live webcam of the view from orbit:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=station

To find out where the ISS is at a given moment, check out:

http://iss.astroviewer.net

To find out when a good time to see the ISS with your own eyes will happen,

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States

The ISS's passes are brief, but for a couple of minutes it's the fastest, brightest thing in the night sky. And it's a strange thing to look up a speck of light and think that there are human living right up there in space.

New maps

2010-04-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

We don't often hear from the California Department of Mines & Geology (probably because of their low funding). However, today the CDMG came out with two new maps, both new-fangled Google Maps mashups. Check them out:

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/GMC/stategeologicmap.html

http://www.quake.ca.gov/gmaps/FAM/faultactivitymap.html

These are pretty generalized, low-resolution maps, but sometimes that's what you want to see the big picture.

2010-04-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

The recent quake off Taiwan, together with the quakes in Haiti and Chile, and the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, have some people wondering--Is this the beginning of the end of the world? Is this the start of the coming 2012 apocalypse?

In a word, no.

Most people feel only a few quakes in their lifetimes, and most never directly see a volcano erupting. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, residents might feel one or two earthquakes in a year. Yet numerous small quakes are occurring in the Bay Area every day. This site, quake.usgs.gov, shows Bay Area earthquakes in near-real time. As of this moment, 261 quakes have occurred in the Bay Area within the last week--almost 40 per day. Yet most of these would be difficult to feel unless they occurred right underneath you.

Likewise, if we look at an earthquake map of California, we see 1357 quakes within the last week. That's almost 200 quakes per day. This week is more active than usual, but even in an average year, California receives 25-30,000 quakes.

There are fewer volcanoes erupting around the world, but many are in a constant state of eruption. On the Big Island of Hawaii, for example, an eruption near the Kilauea area started in 1983--and hasn't stopped since. If you go to Hawaii today, you can see lava flowing right into the Pacific.

The bottom line is this: Eyjafjallajökull, Chile, Haiti are the normal state of the Earth. The world is not undergoing some End Times cataclysm. And 21 December 2012 will end just like every other day, with busy Christmas shoppers scrambling for last-minute deals.

SkeptiCal 2010 at Berkeley

2010-04-24T22:37:00.001-07:00

Today, Bay Area skeptics were treated to the annual meeting of SkeptiCal at Berkeley, where we heard talks from Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, David Morrison of NASA, and Kiki Sanford, among others. Chris Hoofnagle of ScienceBlog's Denialism talked about his denialist deck of cards, and John Conway talked about misconceptions of the Large Hadron Collider.

Altogether, some good talks and discussions about science and skepticism.