The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

Us white folk didn’t have these until a thousand years later, and you expect me to believe those brown people figured it out on their own?

Haha, I kid! Blatant euro-centric racism is only half of the utter stupidity behind these idiots. The other half is a complete misunderstanding of the way that technology is invented and propagates.

There was one of those ancient astronaut shows on the History Channel last night. (As an aside: a while ago, I got a request on Flickr from the producers of an ancient astronaut show for permission to use my Antikythera Mechanism photo. I’m pretty sure this was the same show I got the request from.) Basically every argument in the show for how the Aztec pyramids or the Antikythera Mechanism or whatever else were built came down to, “Well, we’re not sure exactly how they got the idea for this, so clearly it was aliens. I mean, really, do you think those people were clever enough to invent this?” The latent racism was painfully, uncomfortably obvious.

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For those not informed, Ada Lovelace, a.k.a. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is the woman widely regarded as the world’s first ever computer programmer. In the 1840s. (She’s also Lord Byron’s daughter, which is pretty neat.)

To give the short version, Charles Babbage at the time had built a successful mechanical calculator called the Difference Engine. It was powered by a hand crank and calculated solutions to polynomial equations. More intriguingly, he also spent much of his life developing an “analytical engine”, a generalised machine for solving mathematical problems that would have been equivalent in use and capability to some of the early digital computers. The analytical engine would have been able to solve a wide variety of different mathematical problems, not just a small subset of them, by running programs encoded on punch cards. (Again, just like early digital computers.)

Ada Lovelace comes into the picture while translating a paper published by an Italian mathematician on Babbage’s analytical engine. Her notes ran longer than the translation and included a computational algorithm tailored to be run on the analytical engine, which is now recognised as the first computer program.

For more on Ada Lovelace and the contribution of women scientists to the Royal Society see this post over at Skulls in the Stars.

The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology assumes that human evolution completely stopped with the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens 200,000 years ago. Discuss.

Look, science journalists. Getting shit right is not hard. It usually doesn’t take that much longer than whatever you’re doing now. Honest! For instance, I read this Reuters report on fMRI and vegetative states, then spent like five minutes reading abstracts on PubMed to learn that the research has been misrepresented.

The fact is, the researcher quoted in the article doesn’t think he’s communicating with people in vegetative states. I’m pretty sure this is the specific article being referenced, although since journalists can’t be bothered with things like “article titles” or “names of journals”, I can’t be sure. Quoth the abstract:

One of the major challenges in the clinical evaluation of brain injury survivors is to comprehensively assess the level of preserved cognitive function in order to inform diagnostic decisions and suggest appropriate rehabilitation strategies. However, the limited (if any) capacity for producing behavior in some of these patients often limits the extent to which cognitive functions can be explored via standard bedside methods.

I.e., the point of the study was to evaluate whether “standard bedside methods” (behavioural asessment) are truly effective in determining the level of cognitive function the patient possesses. Quoth another article by the same researcher quoted by Reuters:

A diagnosis of vegetative or minimally conscious state is made on the basis of the patient’s clinical history and detailed behavioral examinations, which rely upon the patient being able to move or speak in order to demonstrate residual cognitive function. … However, it remains possible that a subgroup of these patients may retain some level of awareness, but lack the ability to produce any motor output and are therefore mistakenly diagnosed as vegetative.

I.e., the hypothesis is misdiagnosis. The new fMRI technique is aimed at uncovering these individuals who aren’t actually vegetative but appear so due to severely impaired motor function — and, yes, allowing them to communicate.

This took five minutes on PubMed and basic critical reading skills to figure out. I didn’t need any special foreknowledge of the medical literature. Hell, for all I know, the author of the Reuters story interviewed Dr. Adrian Owen and learned this from him, but either didn’t understand it or thought that “VEGETATIVE PATIENTS CAN COMMUNICATE ZOMG TERRI SCHIAVO” made a sexier story. Which is especially crass, since the technique was only demonstrated to work on patients with traumatic brain injury, not oxygen starvation like Terri Schiavo. So, yeah: fuck you for that pointless, ghoulish re-dredging up of that poor woman’s suffering, you ghoulish hack.

P.s.: Steven Novella has also written about this.

As if it weren’t bad enough that one of his more famous books is just a paraphrase of Pinker’s The Blank Slate or that his PowerPoint presentations are so awful as to be considered crimes against humanity under the Geneva Convention or that he insists on promoting his libertarianism in every talk, no matter how irrelevant to the topic, he’s apparently taken to concern trolling now.

The facts are these. Shermer wrote a rather bland article about religion and evolution for CNN. Jerry Coyne quoted two paragraphs of Shermer’s conclusion and explained why it represents both an arrogant and unrealistic view of people’s religious beliefs. But he called Shermer an “accomodationist”, which is an apt descriptive term for someone who feels, as Shermer evidently does, that religion and science can coexist — accomodate one another, if you will. In response, Shermer threw a hissy fit about the big, mean Jerry Coyne being a big, mean meany head to him.

At no point in Shermer’s whine does he bother to explain why his position is not, as Coyne claims, profoundly arrogant. He just quotes a couple of commenters and has a good laugh about how superior he is to Jerry Coyne and how enlightened he is, even while he digresses to say that “there is more than one way” and suggests that even the unwashed, unsophisticated, rabid mongrels like Coyne and Dawkins might have a place. There might be some use for that, he says, then quotes someone else who says that Shermer’s approach will “reduce religion’s virulence”. I see that asserted all the time. I’d like some kind of demonstration, at some point, that it actually works.

Because this is the part of Coyne’s post that Shermer ignored to focus on the term “accomodationist”:

Who is Shermer, I suggest, to tell people what beliefs should or should not “matter” to them? Try telling this to a fundamentalist Christian or a devout Muslim. To these folks, scripture is scripture, and it matters that it is true. If, as recent work suggests, prayer doesn’t work, should Shermer tell the faithful that it doesn’t matter whether or not they pray?

That’s a good question. Coyne’s use of fundamentalists for his example was inapt, though. The question applies just as equally to any believer. How is Shermer telling someone, “Oh, you can believe in this kind of god but not that kind of god?” any better than what Shermer sees as Coyne’s “head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault”. How is it any less offensive? I’d argue it’s not. It’s just that Coyne and Dawkins and PZ Myers have the honesty to admit what they genuinely believe — that there is not evidence for the existence of a god — rather than pussyfooting around it saying, “Well, I don’t think there is, but you can think there is, and I won’t say anything about that as long as you believe everything else I think you should.”

The bottom line is, Shermer’s mockery is all out of proportion with the fact that Coyne raised a good point. And for that matter, Shermer doesn’t acknowledge the fact that he is, in fact, despite his own protestations to the contrary, attempting to dictate what is and is not an acceptable form of religious belief. Which is fine, if for fuck’s sake you just have the integrity to admit that you’re doing it.

Either every climatologist on the planet is involved in a conspiracy to hide data manipulation, or some assholes with an agenda don’t know how to interpret jargon. Which do you think is more likely?

Apparently, we have degraded, as a society, to the point where a journalist actually has to go find an expert to explain this:

Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something – a short cut can be a trick.

STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES. Words can mean more than just one thing? And you can’t figure out which meaning is the relevant one without using context? And that some people are willing to quote other people out of context to support an ideological agenda?

I am shocked, shocked.

Further, we also need journalists to go track down scientists to explain exactly what they were thinking when they wrote a random e-mail ten years ago:

Australia’s Investigate magazine reports here that Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit, says that he does not remember exactly what he meant 10 years ago when he wrote in an e-mail about the need to “hide the decline.” He argues, though, that he was not trying to mislead anyone, but rather had likely been discussing how to add “instrumental data” from recent years to “proxy data, going back further in time, a thousand years.”

Yes, sometimes scientists have problems with data calibration. They often need to apply adjustments when comparing data from two different sources. Again, this is not controversial, although I admit that a lot of people who haven’t done actual science might not be aware of this. I haven’t, either, of course, but I’m an engineer by training, so I know damned well that different instruments can have different biases that need correcting when using the data together. When you’re comparing not just data from different instruments but two completely different kinds of data, one from direct instrumentation and one representing historical inferences, the problem is only compounded.

None of this. None of any of this, these two phrases — and that’s all anybody is citing, just a couple of excerpts, not even entire e-mails –, “completed Mike’s Nature trick” or a Kevin Trenberth quote that I can find even less context on, indicates a conspiracy to hide climate data. It’s just normal chatter between scientists trying to make sure that they’re doing things correctly. But then doing things correctly is a concept alien to most conspiracy theorists and denialists.

Update: Real Climate has a post up that is interesting. They’ve spent some time going through the actual e-mails.

More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords.

Quite.

Oh, and specifically on the Trenberth quote that’s getting passed around:

[Response: Trenberth is talking about our inability to be able to measure the net radiation balance at the top of the atmosphere to the requisite precision to be able to say on short time scales what the energy budget is doing. The observations are inadequate for that - not sure who is saying otherwise. - gavin]

Today is evidently Carl Sagan’s birthday. To celebrate, let’s all make his apple pie recipe tonight.

I got my vaccination for seasonal flu today. Have you had yours yet? H1N1 vaccines aren’t available in Massachusetts yet, but as soon as they are I’ll be signing up for that as well.

I didn’t used to get the flu shot, because I figured I was young and healthy and probably wouldn’t get the flu anyway. Of course, I’m still pretty young and quite healthy, but I decided to get the shots this year anyway. That’s because I realised that the flu shot is ultimately really a public health hygiene issue — it’s not about protecting me, it’s about protecting everyone who isn’t quite as young and healthy and able to fight off the flu.

For that reason, I’m really happy to see that the Obama administration is pushing flu vaccinations especially hard this year. They’ve even set up a dedicated website for providing information on the flu and both the seasonal and H1N1 vaccines. And that includes some random widgety, newfangled, web 2.0 social networking things, so in the spirit of that I’m gonna go ahead and stick a link thingy on my sidebar.

Now stop reading this and go get your damned shot.

Ben Goldacre has a fun article about a completely bogus story in the UK’s Sunday Express claiming “Jab ‘As Deadly As The Cancer’”, referring to the UK’s HPV vaccine and giving the impression of a direct quote. As Ben Goldacre explains, the Express quoted Dr. Diane Harper for the headline and claimed that she was one of the scientists responsible for developing the vaccine. Of course, it turns out that the only thing the Express got right was the fact that Diane Harper exists and is a medical doctor:

I did not say that Cervarix was as deadly as cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix could be riskier or more deadly than cervical cancer. I did not say that Cervarix was controversial, I stated that Cervarix is not a ‘controversial drug’. I did not ‘hit out’ – I was contacted by the press for facts. And this was not an exclusive interview.

If only she had a paid consultant to help frame her message, this whole misunderstanding could have been avoided! If she would just stop being SUCH a scientist, she wouldn’t be misunderstood like this. Obviously. Obviously.

This has always been my problem with Nisbet, Mooney, Olson camp. They’re extremely cynical about the stupidity of the public and ineptitude of scientists while simultaneously being incredibly naive about their pals and colleagues in the journalism industry. The fact that they can see this kind of blatant, deliberate misrepresentation and conclude that scientists are at fault makes them either criminally stupid or stupidly venal. But then removing planks from one’s own eye has never been as lucrative as publishing books and making films about the motes in others’, has it?

I report, you decide.