Tag: science

In fairness, science bloggers are rather stupid

At least, the sort of science blogger I’ve encountered over the years, such as Myers, Brayton, and Orac, are. They have reliably proven to be narrowly educated, logic-challenged, emotionally incontinent individuals with reading comprehension problems and an astonishing ignorance of recorded history. They don’t seem to grasp that their paranoid “defense” of science against the hordes of creationists slavering to, well, put stickers on textbooks for fifth-graders who can barely manage to read or count to fiver doesn’t pass for science or its defense in the eyes of any rational observer. You’d think science bloggers would worry a lot more about the economy than stickers and school boards, but then, they’re economic illiterates too. But let the science journalists speak for themselves:

Today who is treated with the most skepticism by the general public? Science journalists and climate scientists. Even Big Pharmacy marketing departments who have found a golden egg in the vaccine industry have more trust among the public.

Ghosh went on to say something that I know resonated with everyone in the room. Journalists, he said, “do not defend science. Ask the awkward questions.”

So Ghosh does not blame bloggers for the demise of science journalism, he seeks to get them back on the right path and once again become the “trusted guides” they once were regarding complex climate issues. With him on the panel was Mariette DiChristina of “Scientific American”, who nodded at all the right places while he spoke, yet does not seem to realize that her magazine is a culprit along with the rest of them. “Scientific American” is not a trusted guide, it is more like a tour guide in Istanbul who takes you on a tour that will always end at his brother’s carpet store. And with that decrease in credibility has come a decrease in readership and jobs while a magazine like “The Scientist” still has high regard among scientists and casual science readers alike.

Kennedy had the most vitriol. He did not dislike all blogs, he said, he read blogs on environmental policy and politics – in other words, he was willing to settle for opinion and lack of expertise on matters outside the science field – he just couldn’t find a single one in science worth a darn. Only large newspapers and high end journals deserve to survive.

Of course, most of this is simply Old Professional Media bitching about the Uncontrollable Amateur Media. It’s still pretty funny, though, to see the editor-in-chief of Science ripping to shreds the very individuals who flatter themselves as being the brave guardians of science and secularism against the threat of a new religion-inspired Dark Ages.* “Not worth a darn” is a bit more generous than I would grant, but it’s certainly an apt description.

*I know. And you know. But they don’t, which tends to underline my point.

UPDATE – Ed Brayton underlines my point about science bloggers and their relative lack of intelligence in both his failure to understand the logical irrelevance of the question he wanted to ask Washington as well as his amusing inability to keep his story straight.

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1

Yeah, I’m sure Ed is one FEARSOME debater. He’s probably doing the right thing by evading Washington, because even if Washington is a scientifically illiterate fool, that doesn’t mean that Brayton won’t shoot down his own argument without any help from Washington. And Ed, perhaps your own readers needed it spelled out for them, but everyone else understood that you didn’t believe anyone could answer your irrelevant question. That was kind of the point about how you’re using it avoid the risk of embarrassing yourself.

Which you’ve now managed to do anyhow. No wonder the real science journalists have almost as much contempt for your kind as I do.

The hunt intensifies

First bounds on the Higggins boson

“The left shaded portion is the mass range excluded by LEP, and the central shaded region is the range excluded by the Tevatron. High masses are excluded by precision measurements of the weak mixing angle and the W mass, leaving only the range 115–150 GeV/c2 for future searches if the standard model is the correct theory.”

I find the Great Boson Hunt to be rather interesting, mostly because I am anticipating the prospect of all the amusement that will be provided by the competing explanations for why the standard model of particle physics is incorrect, what the most likely alternatives are, and whose fault it was.  It is quite funny to think of all the time and effort that has gone into the search for something that may still turn out to be no more real than the mythological pegasi. And yet, one has to respect the physicists, as unlike the evolutionary biologists, they have the intellectual integrity to test their assumptions and are even willing to abandon their theoretical models when their predictions fail rather than angrily defending them in the face of the observable evidence.

As we all know, if Haldane’s famous rabbits in the pre-Cambrian are ever found, it will take about two nanoseconds for the Darwinists to begin shrieking that what they had previously sworn up and down was a pre-Cambrian strata were actually Palaeogene rocks and this doesn’t disprove anything anyhow and maybe it’s not a real rabbit and why do you hate science you stupid Creationist bible-thumper…. Actually, come to think of it, it’s almost a pity that physicists don’t behave this way.

Science self-corrects

No worries, it’s just evolution in action:

Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said. The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

Since we’ve been informed so many times that scientists are trained to be rational and objective, and that science is what scientists do, it is clear that Prof. Bishop’s actions should be considered an experiment in natural selection rather than a crime. For as we know from the regrettable slanders stemming from Hackergate, no scientist would ever do something terrible like invent data, much less shoot anyone, in the tawdry, unscientific pursuit of filthy lucre.

UPDATE: It’s hard to be a butterfly collector. There’s a lot of stress, especially when they are so cruel as to make you do a little math. “As members of the biotechnology program, students have to pass core classes in biology, chemistry and chemical engineering. But Ms. Bishop became convinced, he said, that the chemical engineering professors were trying to keep biology students from succeeding by making the classes too difficult.”

A card falls out of the stacked deck

The whitewashers slip up:

A member of the panel set up to investigate claims that climate change scientists covered up flawed data was forced to resign last night, just hours after the inquiry began. Philip Campbell stood down after it was disclosed that he had given an interview in which he defended the conduct of researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), insisting that they had done nothing wrong.

That’s just science at work, right? Because nothing says “science” like the editor-in-chief of Nature being caught out in a lie about his lack of predetermined views on the subject. I am not saying that all scientists are dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, I am merely pointing out the obvious fact that because some of the most institutionally-respected scientists have proven themselves to dishonest, corrupt, ideological propagandists, the logical observer has no choice but to distrust anything a scientist says that is not independently replicable. The fact that one can have reasonable confidence in the scientific method absolutely does NOT mean that it is reasonable to have confidence in the scientist who claims to have utilized it.

And, for the sake of the obtuse scientific illiterati, I will once more point out the important and obvious fact that peer review is not, and has never been, any more intrinsically scientific than white lab coats or being unattractive to women.

Scientific consensus = false

The fraud and deception of the “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming/climate change continues to pile higher:

The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

I’ve been a total skeptic from the beginning and even I think this is beginning to get ridiculous. They haven’t gotten ANYTHING right! By the time this round of exposes is done, I half expect to be told that Al Gore and the climate change “scientists” are humanoid aliens from Europa who require a frozen climate to live comfortably.

Criminal scientists

So much for the Climategate denialists claim that the global warming email scandal didn’t reveal any wrongdoing or anything outside the scientific norm:

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny. The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The Climategate denialists are not only defending frauds and liars, but criminals. This is now a fact. I have known this from the start, because man-made global warming is simply not taking place and therefore anyone who claims it is is either deluded, mistaken, or lying. In the case of the so-called scientists, it’s quite clear that they fall into the latter category.

The fact of the matter is that scientists are no less likely to be full of BS than anyone else, and scientists whose access to outsized incomes depends upon reaching specific predetermined conclusions are no more trustworthy than investment bankers touting a company in which they hold significant equity. For example, Phil Jones, the lead charlatan at the heart of Climategate, is reported to have collected 55 endowments amounting to $22.5 million for his pseudo-scientific crimes. The more insidious problem is the possibility that the Climategate denialists are telling the truth and that these sorts of shenanigans probably is the scientific norm.

Sex in the City vs Science

I found the juxtaposition of these two Telegraph articles to be more than a little amusing. First is one Becky Pugh expressing an all-too-typical female opinion on the wisdom of settling for a husband rather than holding out for the Sex in the City dream of a tame Alpha who is chastened by the near-loss of the precious snowflake he almost permitted to get away:

Time and again, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw could have walked off into the sunset with kind, wholesome Aidan. But she didn’t. Instead, she valiantly endured years of pain while she listened to her instincts and waited for Mr Big. She was right: just look at them now (as far as we know they are living happily ever after, which is where we left them at the end of the first movie). Like Jane Eyre and Carrie Bradshaw, most women would rather wait for Mr Right, and risk ending up alone, than settle for dependable, passionless Mr Second Best…. it’s easy to see how the temptation to skip down the aisle with Mr He’ll Have To Do Because He Is The Only Impregnator Available To Me is a strong one. But, even so, Gottlieb’s watershed age of 30 is fantastically mean.

I note, with a straight face marred only by the occasional twitch to indicate the degree of silent inner mirth I feel, that Jane Eyre and Carrie Bradshaw are both fictional characters and it just may possibly be sub-optimal for a woman to base her relationship philosophy upon them. Can you even imagine what women would say if a man wrote a column recommending men to base some of their most significant life decisions on the lifestyle choices of Aquaman and the Green Lantern? And if she thinks Ms Gottlieb’s watershed age of 30 is “fantastically mean”, one wonders how she’ll describe the latest scientific research on age and fertility.

While they may continue to produce eggs throughout their 30s and 40s, the reservoir of potential eggs from which they are taken has shrunk to almost nothing, it suggests. As the body chooses the best eggs from the reserve, the likelihood is that the quality of the eggs will suffer as you get older increasing the difficulty of conception and the risk of an unhealthy baby….

It shows that on average women are born with 300,000 potential egg cells but this pool declines at a much faster rate than first thought. By the age of 30 there is only 12 per cent left on average and by the age of 40 just three per cent. Dr Hamish Wallace, the co-author, said: “Our research shows that they are generally over-estimating their fertility prospects.”

If there is one thing that a single woman between the ages of 18-25 badly needs to understand, it is this: there are plenty of girls on the girl tree. They make new ones every day. And it probably wouldn’t hurt that single woman to keep in mind that while there will always be men who will be interested in her, the social status and perceived quality of those men will begin to decline drastically somewhere between the age of 25 and 30. Ask a gamma male; they all know that a woman at 30 is much more in play for them than she was five years before. In fact, that’s precisely the sort of thing they rely upon in order to land a halfway-attractive woman.

Abortion may cause breast cancer after all

This is an interesting, if unsurprising, backpedal by the medical community:

In April 2009, seven researchers from organizations highly respected in scientific academia published a study, “Risk factors for triple-negative breast cancer in women under the age of 45 years,” in the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The focus of the report was the revelatory finding that “a distinct etiology” exists between oral contraceptive use and triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly virulent form of the disease that typically strikes women under 45, many African-American.

TNBC was only first described in scientific literature in 2007. So for this study the seven researchers re-examined 897 saved cancerous breast tissue specimens from two previous studies to see if they tested positive for TNBC.

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The seven researchers concluded the risk for TNBC rose an appalling 250 to 420 percent, depending on the length of oral contraceptive use.

This was news enough, but buried in the study was acknowledgement and additional corroboration of the link between abortion and breast cancer…. The seven researchers concluded women with histories of abortion increased their risk of getting TNBC by 40 percent.

As is so often the case, never trust a “scientific consensus” that is claimed by scientists with an obvious axe to grind. I was always skeptical of the irrational vehemence with which feminist doctors and scientists insisted that abortion couldn’t possibly ever cause any sort of cancer and that it would be criminally irresponsible to even suggest that such a link might even be theoretically possible. But the truth usually comes out sooner or later.

There is no global warming: glacier edition

To put it bluntly, if you still believe that “scientific consensus” means anything, or that that man-made global warming is actually occurring, you’re an idiot:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research….

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.

So, telephone interviews are now science? That’s cool. I have been doing a crazy amount of science since RGD came out.

Mailvox: defining science

BR emails to inform us that the definitions of the various elements of science in TIA have proven useful:

Vox, the definitions of science that you developed in TIA have been very useful. I recently described climategate to some friends like this: Fraudulent Scientistry was finally tripped up by established Scientage. Scientody takes a bow, and Science itself is none the worse for it. The discussion that followed was priceless.

Of course, I can’t take any credit for the development of the tripartite science definition. That was the Fowl Atheist’s work. I merely provided the nomenclature and publicized the concept, a Dawkins to his Darwin, if you will.