Strange Doctrines

Happy New Year? Sure, Why Not.

I was going to abjure a "happy" New Year (per my usual), and instead recommend a thoughtful one.

But the coda to Tony Judt's reflection on life with advanced stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) has given me, well, second thoughts:

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably—as it now appears to me—by those not exclusively dependent upon them. Much the same can be said of well-meaning encouragements to find nonphysical compensations for physical inadequacy. That way lies futility. Loss is loss, and nothing is gained by calling it by a nicer name. My nights are intriguing; but I could do without them.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

The Sound of Salience

Every 9/11, there is ubiquitous, conspicuous public mourning.

Every 12/26, there is nary a whisper.

Must be the timing.

The Parable of God's Retirement

What with the sun's being about to enter its red-giant phase, God realized it was time to get the End Times rolling. (He had always thought that the imminent, literal end of the solar system would be a reasonably clear sign to everyone. But anyway...)

First, then, the tribulation. The Antichrist induced war among all men. Then came pestilence. Famine. Earthquakes. Surviving populations fled to caves to escape the molten fragments of planet and moon and star hurtling toward earth. The wicked were slaughtered, rendering the seas boiling cauldrons of human blood and viscera. In short, just the kind of wholesale ghastliness one would expect from the penultimate stage of any lovingly plotted eschatology.

But then the Messiah returned to earth. And the dead were resurrected. And the sinners were forever banished from the cosmos. And the rest were invited to join God in Heaven, for all eternity.

And so all of God's work was complete.

And then God pondered: Okay, what now?

Best Blog Post First Sentence of the Year

And the award goes to Carl Zimmer:

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

Okay, two sentences. But still.

The remainder of Carl's post lives up to its initial promise.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

You Are Not Qualified to Have an Independent Opinion

I keep meaning to do a long, thoughtful post on scientific pseudoscandals like "Climategate" and the fatal socio-epistemological problems for lay skepticism about consensus theories. But...time and all that, you know.

In the meantime, this post at the Economist captures the spirit of the problem:

[W]hat am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don't know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? Do I have to waste the time of the readers of this blog with yet another long post on the subject? Why? Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I've seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it's not worth my time to look into it?

Well, here's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.

What's the Connection?

Jonathan Benthall reviews five new books* that "reflect the withering away of the 'secularization thesis' that prevailed in sociology thirty years ago." It's a good review, and it made me think about the common trope that religion is uniquely concerned with achieving a sense of connectedness with something greater or other than oneself.

"Global Warming is Bunk!"

Piltdown Man was a major scientific hoax. A forger cobbled together the jawbone of an orangutan, the teeth of a chimpanzee, and the skull of a human, then passed the contraption off as the fossilized remains of a hominid ancestor of Homo sapiens. The ruse fooled the scientific community for 30 years.

Here are two possible lessons a person might have drawn from the Piltdown Man hoax, probably the most notorious hoax in science history: 

1. This fraud distorts the current picture of the evolution of hominids; all our current evidence will have to be reevaluated, and that picture may have to be significantly revised.
2.  Evolution is bunk!

The first conclusion would be a reasonable assessment. The second is insane.

This observation may be of some topical relevance.

The Philosophical Shallows of "Narrative Depth"

Theologian John Haught in the WaPo notes that "[e]volution makes very good sense scientifically speaking," then queries: "But does it make good sense theologically as well?"

Haught uses the next 693 words inadvertently to show that the answer is "No."

A more advertent showing is available from Jerry Coyne.

(Via Butterflies & Wheels.)

Strange Way to Spell "Salad Mix"

Climategate Debunked

The only thing that's fraud is the fear of fraud itself:

(Via Pharyngula.)

Has a Song with So Much Promise Ever Gone So Wrong?

The first verse of Jimmy Webb's "The Highwayman" is just superb:

I was a highwayman
Along the coach roads I did ride
With a sword and pistol by my side
And many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
And many a soldier shed his life blood on my blade
They finally hung me in the spring of '25
But I am still alive

"But I am still alive." Wow. I'm thinking Sergio Leone, the Man with No Name, like that. And the language and music - very cool.

What's My Motivation?

Will Wilkinson chimes in on "climategate":

The hacked/leaked emails and data seemed to me like prime fodder for motivated cognition. My expectations were pretty much met. Many alarmists have inappropriately minimized the importance of the evidence of a shameful conspiracy to enforce what is clearly an ideological party line among climate researchers. Many skeptics have gone too far in using the revelations as grounds for casting doubt on the entire scientific case for AGW. But, clearly, the thrust of the scandal vindicates the skeptics’ claims that the science of climate change is conducted in an ideologically charged atmosphere, that there really are coordinated attempts to suppress or marginalize studies and scholars out of step with the favored narrative, and that there really are coordinated attempts to make evidence in favor of the favored narrative look better than it really is.