SkeptiCal 2011

My sister Karlacita! used to be an author of New Age books. In the past few years, she has come to question the things she used to believe and in some ways has become a pariah in her old field. She found some like minds in the skeptical community, so she decided to attend SkepiCal 11 this past weekend in Berkeley. She asked me to come along as moral support, to be that person she could turn to and ask the all important question, "Is it me or is it them? It's them, isn't it?"

I won't say I felt "right at home" in a conference of skeptics, but I certainly had been in similar situations before. It was a nerd herd. It was somewhere between a professional nerd herd and a amateur nerd herd. For me, an amateur nerd herd is a board game convention or about back in the 1990s, a sealed deck Magic The Gathering tournament. Professional nerd herds have been things like the Computer Game Development Conference back when I did that for a living or math symposiums now.

Since the idea of SkeptiCal was plunking down money to hear people talk, it's more like the professional. By that standard, this was pretty weak. I will be kind and name the only speaker worth his salt, while others will be described but not named.

The first fellow was a member in good standing in the skeptical community who had appeared on Survivor a few times. We spent an hour learning about the ins and outs of a show I have never watched all the way through. (Personal note: The last drummer for my old band The Wonders of Science has been on more than one season, and I still haven't watched one full hour of the show in my entire life.)

Here's the inside dope. What you see is real, but it's all about the editing.

Thanks. I already figured that out without watching. I didn't need an hour's explanation of it. (Karlacita! tells me that in the line to the ladies' room after, my feeling about that hour was echoed several times.)


The next speaker was Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, a climate scientist who is also a blogger on the Huffington Post, giving a talk entitled Climate Change Misperception. His inclusion on the speakers' list was a source of controversy for reasons I will discuss later.

Gleick's talk was the only one where I actually learned something from the speaker. (I learned plenty from Karlacita!, but that can happen when we're just hangin' out and I don't have to plunk down forty five simoleans to do that.) He discussed several of the critical thinking fallacies - ad hominem attacks, appeal to authority, appeal to consensus, cherry picking data, etc. - and showed concretely how climate change deniers use these tools. He also stated that climate science consensus might look like an argument by consensus, but that it is more that the scientists are convinced by the data and that data forms a valid scientific consensus.

The skeptical community, if one can call it that, is a very contentious bunch and internecine squabbles are common. Gleick showed an e-mail from a skeptic who would not attend because Gleick's inclusion showed the group had obviously caved to the Warmists, as deniers sometimes call the vast majority of climate scientists. This was the last mention of any alleged grudge or slight in Gleick's talk.

There are dozens of tacks the deniers take to poke holes in the climate data. Having only an hour to talk, he only brought up a few examples directly and showed Power Point slides that proved the statements, some of which I had heard before, were egregious examples of cherry picking.

1) Polar ice coverage is not shrinking because April 1989 coverage was less that April 2009 coverage.

Refutation: Yes, April 1989 was less than April 2009, but every other month in 2009 had less ice coverage than 1989, often quite a bit less. Classic cherry picking, especially since there was exactly one cherry in twelve matched pairs of data.

2) Global warming stopped in 1998, even though CO2 levels continue to rise. (I hadn't heard the first argument before, but I had heard this one, notably from George F. Will, who couldn't prove the Pythagorean Theorem with an hour's head start and the address to mathworld.wolfram.com.)

Refutation: Average yearly temperatures go up and down. 1998 was warmer than 2008, but 2005 was warmer than either, and now that 2009 and 2010 data have been added, both far warmer than 1998, this argument is complete bunk, though deniers still quote it.

Again, Gleick's talk was the closest to the quality I would see at a math symposium, most of which are free of charge. (Quibble: everyone who used technology had trouble with it, including Gleick. For most of his talk, the computer resolution was wrong and his slides were cut off at left and right. To his credit, when the problem was pointed out, Gleick is the only one who fixed his technical difficulties.)


You may not have heard of the skeptical community. For example, when Karlacita! told the Gosh Darned Pater Familias about where she was going, neither he or any of his friends had ever heard of people describing themselves as skeptics.

In this small community, the great celebrity is The Amazing Randi, a magician and debunker of paranormal claims. His greatest moment of glory is going on Johnny Carson's show and showing the famed spoon bender Uri Geller was a fake. He is the founder of the modestly titled James Randi Educational Foundation, or JREF.

In December 2009, The Amazing Randi wrote a piece doubtful of climate change, which he has since recanted with a standard non-apology apology. For me the money quotes are using the wry quotations marks around "politically correct" label he gave to the academics who do the hard work he is not willing or able to do and most damningly, the first sentence in paragraph six:

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.

For those of you unaware of The Petition Project, climate change deniers got it into their heads to put together a petition of scientists NOT in the field, as though ten sociologists counterbalance one climate scientist. This is obviously both an appeal to completely unearned authority and an appeal to consensus.

Many skeptics fell in line behind Randi and have not changed their position even though he has weakly recanted.

I've seen this before in nerd herds. Way back in the day, a guy named Chris Crawford, a writer of video games that didn't sell well but that he thought were "important", started the Computer Game Developer's Conference (CGDC) to get his ideas out. I had more than a few run-ins with him and his tiny cult, but eventually the business was making too much money to have such a meeting be a yearly pilgrimage to his shrine and he left, though the level of volunteerism in departure is disputed. Once The Great Man was dislodged, the CGDG actually became a Big Damn Deal.

Here's the thing. We can all of us fall prey to these problems with critical thinking. When it comes to hero worship in math, I am honest to Lenny* proud of the fact that I shook the hand of Donald Knuth, the author of The Art Of Computer Programming, and can remember chapter and verse the conversation I had with Frank Harary, the father of graph theory.

Here's my defense. Knuth and Harary actually moved human endeavor forward. As someone who teaches math, it is my job and my glad duty to make sure their names, and more importantly their ideas, are never forgotten.

I cannot say the same for the Amazing Randi.

* For those new to the blog, "honest to Lenny" is my oath to my favorite mathematician in history, Leonhard Euler. Yet another example of hero worship and one I will defend to my last breath.

Here endeth the lesson.

Is Asperger's Syndrome the engine for human progress?

In 1944, Dr. Hans Asperger of Vienna published an account of symptoms he saw in some of his young patients. Some were mild and others severe, but the most typical symptoms were tendencies towards physical awkwardness and difficulty in dealing with others due to a lack of understanding of non-verbal cues, such as reading other people's facial expressions or body language.

These are just some the downsides of Asperger's Syndrome, as it is known today. The upside is a remarkable ability to concentrate on a topic that catches their interest. While his paper was first published during WW II, it was not translated into English until 1991, some ten years after Dr. Lorna Wing popularized the term in the English speaking medical community. Asperger's syndrome is now recognized as being part of the autism spectrum and Dr. Wing's interest was due to having an autistic daughter.




The diagnosis exploded in popularity from the 1980s forward and it is assumed though not yet proven there is a genetic tendency. Asperger himself saw that many of his clumsy children also had clumsy fathers who showed some if not all the symptoms of his syndrome themselves.

Possibly the best known dramatic portrayal of a person with Asperger's Syndrome is Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. His character Raymond shows many of the traits of the syndrome, including his dislike at being touched, (many people with Asperger's can be touched, but only if you first get their permission), his obsessive interests and his remarkable ability at math.

Unlike the character in the movie, there are many people with Asperger's Syndrome who are not institutionalized, and high functioning Asperger's (HFA) can be very successful as researchers. Usually, they are not as successful as teachers, because it is common for people with Asperger's to assume that if they know something, everyone knows it and even if they overcome that, they intensely dislike have to repeat themselves.

And so we have this diagnosis, only known for about seventy years and only popularized in the past thirty, that describes a certain class of brilliant eccentrics. Many people have taken to historical diagnosis, putting forward their arguments that x had Asperger's or y showed symptoms. A lot of people who are putting this stuff forward don't seem to have read the literature very well. Doing a little browsing around the Internet, I have found claims of both Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have showed signs.

Both Franklin and Jefferson were horndogs. If you see a bright eccentric with a serious thing for the ladies, it's very likely that their eccentricity is not caused by this syndrome.


Two other names that pop up a lot are Newton and Einstein. Einstein didn't speak fluently until he was nine, but early developmental problems are NOT typical with Asperger's Syndrome. He did show the intense interest in problems that is a characteristic, sometimes working on a problem so hard he would forget to eat or sleep. But again, there are stories of Einstein getting busy with the ladies, and that would tend to be a counter indication.

Not everyone is convinced, but I find the data for Newton to be the strongest case of a historical character who may have Asperger's. He once wrote in a letter to a friend that he was proud he would die a virgin, and besides mathematics and physics, he had lifelong obsessions with alchemy and religion. He produced a proof that the Holy Trinity was impossible, but he declined to publish, seeing as back in his day, the Church of England was still putting heretics to death from time to time.

Another symptom mentioned in descriptions of Newton was his habit when in deep thought to rock back and forth uncontrollably, another very common behavior for people with the syndrome.


I read a book earlier this year by David Mamet titled Bambi Vs. Godzilla,and I have already written a blog post recommending that the book be avoided. Mamet hypothesizes that many of the early Jewish film directors had Asperger's because they were successful, highly focused and complete pains in the ass to work with, and that there is a prevalence of the syndrome in the Eastern European Ashkenazi community.

Once again, I call bullshit, which is an unpleasant but necessary task one must perform often when reading David Mamet's non-fiction.

People with Asperger's tend to love reading and dislike film and TV. So much of the visual arts is the understanding of non-verbal communication, and this is a skill at which even HFAs are notoriously bad.

Being intensely focused and an asshole does not mean automatically a diagnosis of Asperger's. Some people are just raised that way. A popular T-shirt slogan in the Asperger's community is "I have Asperger's. What's your excuse?"

So the short answer to my question about the syndrome being the engine of human progress is "probably not, with just a few large and remarkable exceptions".

Whew, that's lotsa 'splainin'. Glad it's a Saturday.

Pouring cold water on this whole giant planet in our neck of the woods thang.

So Tuesday, I was like all excited about this idea that there was a massive planet relatively close to us called Tyche. When I say "relatively", I mean that it's relatively close by astronomical standards, which means about a quarter of a light year away.


Even big objects like the Sun and Tyche have next to no gravitational pull at those kinds of distances, so there's no way Tyche is "orbiting" the Sun or vice versa. It would take the fastest spaceship we can build many decades to get there and the journey would definitely be risky.

My more science-y pal Ken Rose sent me a link that says it's pretty damned unlikely Tyche is actually hanging out in the Oort Cloud. Even the Oort Cloud itself is just a "probably exists" kind of thing.

Boy am I bummed.


From what I can tell, there are some astrophysicists who like the idea of giant planets as much as Matty Boy likes the idea of giant women.

Which means they like the idea A LOT!!!!!

I feel for these guys in some odd kinship, and I understand how they could sell some folks in the media on the idea of some exciting unexpected magical thing, kind of like an astronomical version of Bigfoot or the chupcabra.

p.s. If anyone knows this girl's cell phone number, do a brother a favor and hook us up.

Science fun for February 2011: Tyche, the mysterious giant planet

I've seen this story floating around some websites I read, and I find it fascinating. There may be another planet in our solar system. Not some tiny rock like Pluto or Sedna, this new hypothetical fellow traveler Tyche is four times bigger than Jupiter, the biggest planet in our neck of the woods, so it may be a brown dwarf, a small sun that has burned out.

How can something so big still be uncertain? It's really far away. The distance from the earth to the sun is called an Astronomical Unit or A.U. for short. Pluto, which has a very elliptical orbit, is sometimes as close as 29 A.U. and sometimes as far away as 49 A.U.

Tyche, if it exists, is 15,000 A.U. away. The handy picture above is NOT drawn to scale as far as the orbit of Tyche is concerned. It's speculated to be out in the Oort Cloud, the asteroids, rocks and comets that make up the very edge of our solar system.

The guys claiming the discovery are John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. According to them, it might take about two years of study of data that has already been gathered by NASA to prove their conjecture.

I have to admit, this is kind of cool. I'm not as hip to astronomy as a nerd should be, so I didn't even know about the Oort Cloud until yesterday. Now, I'm looking for ways to pepper it into my conversation.

Oort Cloud. Say it today to someone you love.

And to add a little bit of politics to a completely apolitical topic, I found this stuff on Talking Points Memo, a left-wing politics blog, the Huffington Post, a left-leaning general news source and Slate magazine, another website leaning left of center. I couldn't find it on any right wing websites.

The evidence is strong. Our side really does want to learn how the universe works. Their side kinda likes sticking their fingers in their ears and humming loudly. Guys like Bill O'Reilly don't even know that Mars has two moons, so a giant planet orbiting the sun a long way away is completely off his radar.

Doubling down on teh stoopid.

Let's stipulate for argument's sake you say something stupid or offensive or just something you didn't want to say. If your momma raised you right, you then say something like "I was wrong" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that".

But if you were raised by wolves or you have some congenital problem that makes it impossible for you to admit error, you say something along the lines of "I meant to do that!" or "No, YOU'RE wrong!" or "Jeez, but you're sensitive and politically correct."

This is what the young people on the Internets call "doubling down".


A few weeks back, Bill O'Reilly thought he completely pwned an atheist by saying that no one could explain the tides, and therefore God must exist. Stephen Colbert did an amazing smackdown of this with the aid of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In the Colbert bit, his crack staff found footage that shows O'Reilly has been using this argument for years and years.

Okay, stupidity over. Done and done!

Not so fast, my friend. Remember earlier when I spoke of people raised by wolves or congenitally incapable of admitting error? Bill O'Reilly is the grand marshal of that parade.

Now that someone explained gravity and the moon to Bill, his next inexplicable miracle no human can explain is "How did the moon get there?"

Here's the thing. We are all ignorant of something. You kind of expect this of people who got third rate educations, like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. But Bill O'Reilly graduated Harvard and he's still this Sofa King stupid.

Guys like this make it harder for me to type the sentence "I believe in education". It also makes me wonder exactly how many classes he slept through on his way to his high school and college diplomas.

Authority.

Bill O'Reilly had an atheist on his show last week. As you might expect, this was not to have an open and frank discussion between differing viewpoints, but instead a chance for Bill O'Reilly to have a chance to call someone he disagrees with a pinhead.

Here was Mr. O'Reilly's trump card for the existence of God.

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

And this is from a Harvard graduate. Where, if anywhere, can we even begin?


The math and physics for the explanation of the tides are about 300 years old now. It has to do with the gravitational pulls of both the moon and the sun on the earth. Newton did the math and he was really good at it, though he readily admitted he did not understand the causative agent of gravity.

Our best idea for the cause of gravity now is Einstein's idea that we live in a four dimensional universe, where time is the fourth dimension, and physical objects warp the spacetime around them. This idea is a mere 100 years old and the math of warped space is about 50 years older than that. It takes a lot more mathematical background to 'splain these things, both on the part of the speaker and the listener, but the tides, like the rainbow and the seasons and where babies come from, are among those wonders of the world about which science has a very good working knowledge.

Instead of using this incident as a chance to mock Bill O'Reilly's massive if not boundless ignorance, I would like to look at the topic of authority. O'Reilly wants to give the final authority to God, but his definition of the Almighty is honestly one of the worst possible. If God is the sum of all mysteries, then God would be numberless, possibly even infinite. The problem lies in the fact that people work hard to solve mysteries, and each new solution diminishes our view of God using this definition. It would also set the faithful against human progress, and sadly that has been the case for several millennia.

Religious authority is so much simpler than scientific authority. The ancient text is true because the ancient text vouches safe for its own infallibility. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Scientific authority is much cloudier. It is usually built on mathematical foundations, but it is constantly changing, sometimes by small increments, sometimes by revolutionary new ways of looking at problems. Any simplification of science, including what I write here, does a lot of hand waving over topics that are staggeringly complex, and to truly be a scientist is an initiation into a priesthood ever bit as arcane, if not more so, as any religious sect ever founded.

The sciences want change and speculation and refinement of ideas, but only such change that can carry its own weight. You could ask "What if the moon was made of green cheese?", but it's not really a question that moves things forward.

Religious authority changes as well, but sometimes in completely pointless directions. The idea of speaking in tongues, for example, comes from the story of Pentecost, where the disciples of Jesus, simple men who only spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, could somehow make themselves understood in the languages of foreigners nearby, like Egyptians and Romans and Greeks. Now, there are religious authorities who act as though any jibberish that comes out of their mouths is a sign of the Holy Spirit moving through them. This is movement, but not movement towards greater understanding.

A recent essay on the Huffington Post by a follower of Kabbalah spoke of bringing science and faith closer together, a worthwhile goal. Sadly, this benighted soul made logical arguments that assumed the measurements of longevity reported in the Old Testament as established scientific facts. Science fully accepts that some things in the past were not as they are now, but people living past 900 years old, which are the numbers bandied about for Adam and Methuselah and a few others, asks us to overturn dozens of things we know very well about the nature of biology and physics and chemistry. When it comes to longevity, we live in the true age of wonders, and the stories that say otherwise deserve the exact same credit we give to the stories of Achilles' invulnerability.


As I write this, an Arizona congresswoman lies in a hospital after a gunshot wound, victim of a madman who does not accept the authority of people to disagree with him on matters of politics. Others in the crowd, including a federal judge, are dead. The Tea Party thought their signs that read "We came unarmed... this time!" were the height of wit and cleverness, but those of us who disagreed with their goals saw something darker.

I wish we could make the stupid people shut up, but we can't. Democracy means the mean and mediocre and even murderous have the right to be heard just much as do you and I. And if only for a short time, the murderous will get the entire world for their audience.

It will not improve, because whether they are Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews, they think they have the true authority.

Or like the madman who made the news yesterday in Arizona, there is no authority greater than a loaded gun and a person willing to use it.

Science fun for December 2010:Carbon and hydrogen, two great tastes that go great together

Hey, Matty Boy! You know what science you almost never talk about?

Well, hypothetical question asker, I guess I'd say chemistry.

Why is that, Matty Boy?

The main reason is that a barely know bupkiss about it.

I do know a thing or two. One thing is carbon and the other is hydrogen, the atoms you put together to form hydrocarbons. Carbon has four bonds and hydrogen only one and while sometimes the atoms are standoffish and like to keep to themselves, often they get together and fill up their entire dance cards, so every bond has two atoms. This picture of a carbon atom linked to four hydrogen atoms would make the chemical compound CH4, known by the name methane, a very common gas, known to be colorless, flammable and stinky, though the super stinky varieties owe that special ability to sulfur hanging around with them, trying to be cool and getting into the gang, even though they are just hangers on.


Another possibility is to have two carbon atoms linked and six hydrogen atoms filling in the rest of the bonds, making the chemical compound ethane, C2H6. The prefixes of hydrocarbons tell you how many carbon atoms are in the picture, where meth- means one, eth- means two, prop- means three and but- means four. The higher numbers of carbon molecules have prefixes that sound more like math prefixes, pent- for five, hex- for six, hept for seven, etc.

The two dimensional diagram as shown here is pretty standard, but the bigger illustration shown for methane is a little more accurate. The four bonds for carbon don't line up like a cross, but instead make a three dimensional shape like the corners of a tetrahedron, the simplest of the platonic solids.


Because carbon has four bonds in a special shape, it is possible for two carbon atoms to double bond, linked to each other using two bonds apiece. Instead of two tetrahedra linked at a single corner, now they would be linked along an edge. This would mean each carbon atom has two free bonds and if all four attract hydrogen atoms, we get C2H4, known by the name ethylene.

Now we are cooking with ethyl!



Because of the geometry of it, it's impossible for two carbon atoms to bond with each other using all four bonds, but a triple bond is possible, just in the same way one face of a tetrahedron can match up with a face of a different tetrahedron. If we get carbon atoms triple bonding, then there are only two open places to bond, and if those are filled with hydrogen we get C2H2, also known as acetylene. I nicked this picture of a model of acetylene from www.pixmac.com, a company that makes cool looking chemistry models.

As I said before, I don't know much about chemistry, and if I have any spare time and cash in the future, I think I'll take a class and see if I can do something about it. I love this stuff for the mathiness of it, the geometry and graph theory, but it would be interesting to understand the properties of the hydrocarbons better than just simple classification.

Learning to believe.

I watched Religulous this weekend. Didn't care for it much. Seeing it was a chore to be performed so I can call myself educated. I watched Passion of the Christ for the exact same reason. These movies helped me re-learn things I already knew. The Mel Gibson mess reminded me I don't like torture porn. The Bill Maher mess reminded me I don't like comedy based on embarrassing people.

Maher says he wasn't the best candidate to become a skeptic because he was raised Catholic by his father, with no noted objections from his Jewish mother, until one day his father stopped going to church when Maher was a teen. Actually, when he talks about how much he hated church as a kid, he sounds like an excellent candidate.


In all modesty, I am a better candidate for skepticism, though I tried Christianity for a few years as an adult. My parents were not churchgoers, but they didn't forbid us to attend if friends asked. I tried it a few times, but I didn't like it at all.

And yet I believed in the unseen, in forces greater than myself. They were called dinosaurs, and it took some faith to accept their existence, seeing as they had been extinct for millions of years before humans walked the earth. My parents bought me a bunch of natural science books, including the one pictured here, the cover art by the most famous dinosaur artist of the day Rudolph Zallinger, best known for his Age of Reptiles mural which is still on display at the Peabody museum at Yale. The museum asks folks not to reproduce the enormous painting, and that request makes sense, in large part because no reproduction can convey the sheer size of a painting 110 feet wide.

The quibbler in me can't resist this. The painting above is from a bygone era and our beliefs about the dinosaurs have evolved. We know longer think the Brachiosaurus (not a Brontosaurus, different shaped head) was a swamp dweller and most paintings today of an Allosaurus (like a Tyrannosaurus, but smaller) would make it a lot thinner and not putting any weight on its tail, using it instead as a counterbalance to stay low.

I didn't just love dinosaurs. I loved all kinds of natural history. I learned about the mammals that wandered the earth after the dinosaurs went extinct. Most people would know a few of these species, notably the Mastodon and the Sabretooth Tiger (Smilodon), but I read about many more, sloths the size of bears and massive rhinoceri from Asia who were as tall at the shoulder as the top of the head of a modern day giraffe. Maybe my love for the big girls is an extension of my love for big creatures in general when I was a wee lad, I don't know. The only small critters I can remember from the Age of Mammals were the a prototype species of horse about the size of a small dog and a small pig-sized ancestor of the elephant.

And then there were the creatures who went extinct during the Time of Man, often because of man's hunting or sometimes due to man's heedlessness. Everyone knows the Dodo, a flightless bird about the size of a turkey but related to the pigeon, but only a few will know about the Moa, the Elephant Bird, Steller's Sea Cow, Ivory Billed Woodpecker and the Tasmanian Wolf. Many of these animals were hunted out of existence but others died because their habitats were destroyed. It was just over 100 years ago the species known as the Passenger Pigeon ceased to exist. Humans hunted the creature for food, but there were so many of them there would not have been enough bullets to kill them all. The widely accepted view today is the destruction of their habitat caused by the westward movement of Americans in the 19th Century brought doom to this species.

These creatures were like my own self-made catechism. I gladly committed to memory the particulars of their lives, when they lived, how they died. And they instilled in me a faith that lives to this day, a awesome feeling of both respect and disgust for the power of human heedlessness. Einstein is given credit for the clever quote "There are only two infinite things, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the first one." I think it's wrong to call it stupidity. It's more like a character flaw that the bad things we have seen are not going to happen to us, that we are somehow the exception to the rule we have seen repeated over and over again.

There are some social conservatives who believe that we cannot destroy the earth because God promised us it wouldn't happen again after the Great Flood. My catechism teaches me a different lesson. Human heedlessness is a force greater than a hundred hurricanes a year, and unlike hurricanes, it has no off-season.

It will exist for as long as we do.

Okay, we're in nerd heaven now.

You may have already heard the news that NASA had a big press conference today announcing an entirely new life form.

With NASA, you'd expect it to be from outer space, but no, it's from the incredibly toxic Mono Lake in California. They found a bacteria that is still carbon based, but everywhere you would usually find phosphorous in the biochemical compound, it has been replaced by arsenic, which my chemistry friends tell me is a pretty good mimic of phosphorous.

Trying to do this in a lab would be pretty tough, what with arsenic being poisonous to 99.9% of life forms, but if you do an outdoor experiment in just how badly you can fuck up a bio-region, darn it if life itself won't try every trick until something works. It's every bit as weird as the creatures that live near the incredibly hot and toxic volcanic rifts under the sea.

Personally, though, I won't believe it until it's been turned into a monster movie on the Syfy channel. They should spare no expense and hire Larry Drake AND F. Murray Abraham AND Lance Hendrickson AND Renee O'Connor. Casper Van Dien is optional.

Science Fun, Vol. 6:Beakman's World and soap

Back in the early 1990s, two science shows aimed at kids began to air. I have a lot of respect for Bill Nye The Science Guy, but I have to admit that I tuned in to Beakman's World on as regular a basis as I could, given that it came on Saturday afternoons and could easily be pre-empted for a ball game or other such non-regularly scheduled stuff.

Beakman's World was very silly, and as I had just turned 18 for the second time, it was right up my alley. How can you not love Lester the Rat? Who isn't in the mood for a segment called Those Disgusting Animals, in which the viewer is told about the digestive habits of the lamprey?

Most of the science Beakman discussed I already knew, but I remember to this day the discussion of soap. Some viewer sent a question in permanent marker on a filthy grease covered handkerchief asking what made soap work.

Beakman said "Soap makes water wetter."

The fancy explanation is that oil and water don't mix and oil tends to attract dirt to make grease. Things that mix with water are hydrophilic, things that don't are hydrophobic. Soap is made of long molecules that connect to water at one point and connect to grease nearly everywhere else, which means a soap molecule can be moved around by water and all the gunk that connects to the soap molecule will move around as well.

Though not as precise, I like Beakman's short version of the explanation better.

Science Fun, Vol. 5:Bumblebees can't fly?

When I was a kid, long before the word "meme" was in popular usage, there was a meme that said "science says bumblebees can't fly". It was usually repeated by people who wanted to prove that scientists were stupid. Many but not all of the people repeating this story were trying to cast doubt on something else scientists say, quite often the theory of evolution. In general, scientists are both not stupid and unlikely to make statements proven false by actual experience. Where did this story start?

According to Cecil Adams* at The Straight Dope website, this story came about because of a discussion between some German scientists at a dinner party. A physicist did some quick calculations and determined the bumblebee could not flap her relatively small wings fast enough to produce the necessary lift. A biologist heard this, and wanting to show up someone from "the hard sciences", spread the story far and wide. As Adams puts it, once the physicist sobered up, he saw his error. The number of firings by the bee's nervous system does not produce enough flaps, but the wings vibrate many times per flap, not unlike a string vibrates many times on one pluck or a drum head vibrates many times when hit only once. The vibrations account for the extra necessary wing movement, and science tells us what we already knew, bumblebees fly. The difference is, now we know how and the answer is not one that could be arrived at using that over-rated commodity, "common sense".

I bring this up because there are still people wishing to discredit some part of science, and they often try to do so by bringing up some story to show that science has been wrong before. Without question, scientific knowledge changes, sometimes refining an idea, sometimes overthrowing it completely when a new revolutionary theory explains all the data previously explained and reconciles puzzling evidence the old theory could not. Mathematics, my field, isn't quite as fickle, but it also isn't quite as useful.

While there are still people trying to cast doubt on evolution, the theory that is being hit hardest right now is anthropogenic climate change, the idea that human action has something to do with with general warming trend of the past hundred years or so. It is the standard model used by climate scientists, and it is possible that it could be overturned, but if it is, it will be overturned by a truly better theory that explains all the data at least as well and in some cases better. It will not be overturned by the wishful thinking of people who just don't want to stop making obscene profits or just don't want to alter their overly comfortable life style.

*(Note: Adams answered this question in 1990 and the source link he gives is dead. If anyone can find an earlier source, I'd be glad to make a link to it.)

A sixth flavor found!

According to scientists, there were five flavors that made up the sense of taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein rich. Now a sixth distinct flavor is identified: fatty.

Who could believe that the last flavor science could identify would be the most delicious-est flavor of them all?

Personally, I don't think they have a complete list until they add crunchy, gooey, crispy, melty and tastes like ass.