Category: Science

from [here]

Bill Nye… “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.  As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own. But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” according to the Waco Tribune.

Nye…brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.  At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury….

This story originally appeared in the Waco Tribune, but the newspaper has…pulled its story from the online version….

Here’s an answer, courtesy Dr Ben Goldacre of badscience.net, to my quiz from yesterday:

Egged on by a rather fanciful press release from the University media office, and a quote from a sociologist, the [news story which appeared in The Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and others] was unstoppable. I got hold of the research paper, with some hassle. In fact, before we even begin to read it, I don’t think it’s very good behaviour to pimp a study to the media before it’s published, before academics can read it and respond, since the media commentariat have proven themselves to be morons.

Anyway: in a sentence, the study finds that the brain bloodflow changes which are observed when a subject is experiencing compassion for social pain peak, and dissipate, at a slightly slower rate to those seen with compassion for physical pain. It does not mention Twitter. It does not mention Facebook. It does not mention social networking websites. It makes – and I’m being generous here – a single, momentary, passing reference to the rapid pace of information in “the digital age” in the discussion section, but that is all. These news stories were bullshit.

Now here’s the real test. How much of THAT do you believe, and why?

Here’s a critical thinking test:

Read this article on how using Facebook and Twitter make you a bad person. Don’t have time? Okay, I’ll give you the gist in small, edited quotes:

• Using Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values, as they don’t allow time for compassion or admiration, scientists have warned.
• emotions linked to moral sense are slow to respond to news and events and have failed to keep up with the modern world
• If things are happening too fast you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality
• Using brain imaging they found that humans can sort information very quickly and respond in fractions of a second to signs of physical pain in others, but admiration and compassion take much longer.
• In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in

Now, how much of that do you believe, and why? Answers tomorrow.

While reading an article on David Attenborough I learned about the Optimum Population Trust, a “leading think tank in the UK concerned with the impact of population growth on the environment.”

The population clock on the website is kind of scary. Since I started this blog about 500,000,000 people have been born. I really do think that population control is the #1 solution to almost all of the world’s problems. That, and education – and really I think they go hand in hand. We won’t have one without the other. Attenborough says:

we can make sure women have the choice as to whether they have children. If you spread literacy, education, a decent standard of living, the population increase drops. That’s why the notion, the ability, to restrict population growth should be around. I don’t believe women want to have 12 children where eight of them die, as they did in this country 150 years ago. Now they have a choice, and that is the reason we have an almost static population here – if you discount immigration.

On the OPT site:

What’s the population solution?

GLOBALLY: reduce birth rates. NATIONALLY: reduce or keep birth rates low and/or balance migration to prevent population increase. All countries need environmentally sustainable population policies to underpin other green policies. PERSONALLY: have fewer children and work a few more years before retiring.

OPT POPULATION POLICY
OPT campaigns for policies to achieve environmentally sustainable population levels both globally and in the UK. The ecological issue is one of population numbers, resource demands and the environmental impacts created by different sizes of population at given levels of affluence and technology. For more details see Population policy projections, Fertility, Migration, Briefings and submissions and other sections of this website.
OPT recommends the following population policies:

Globally, that full access to family planning should be provided to all those who do not have it, that couples should be encouraged to voluntarily “stop at two” children to lessen the impact of family size on the environment, and that this should be part of a holistic approach involving better education and equal rights for women.

Stopping at zero would be best, but I can’t ask for the moon.

A few days ago I was blogging about the misuse and abuse of antibacterial soap.

How appropriate that today I found this TED Talk which is mostly about how bacteria communicate, but for the demonstration of how there are good bacteria that in fact keep us alive, just watch the first 3 minutes of this video.

from wikipedia:

Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary,[1] is

1. a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions
2. a doctrine that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone and that life is in some part self-determining

Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the “vital spark,” “energy” or “élan vital,” which some equate with the “soul.”

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: most traditional healing practices posited that disease was the result of some imbalance in the vital energies which distinguish living from non-living matter. In the Western tradition founded by Hippocrates, these vital forces were associated with the four temperaments and humours; Eastern traditions posited similar forces such as qi and prana. Vitalistic thinking has also been identified in the naive biological theories of children.[2]

This in light of the news that BC gives naturopaths rights to prescribe drugs.

From passiveagressivenotes.com

And from Natural Life Magazine

Q: I’ve just had a baby and want to make sure she has the healthiest possible start in life. With all the viruses and bacteria around us, I am trying to keep our home as clean as possible. But during a recent visit, my mother-in-law said I shouldn’t be using antibacterial soap. I figure that using it is one of the no-brainer things we can do. So who is right?

A: There is a great deal of evidence that the use of antibacterial soap in the normal household is unnecessary and causes far more harm than good, both to human health and the environment.

Since 2000, the American Medical Association (AMA) has been advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to closely monitor and possibly regulate the home use of antimicrobials. At the AMA annual meeting in 2000, Myron Genel, chair of the AMA Council on Scientific Affairs and a Yale University pediatrician, said, “There’s no evidence that they do any good and there’s reason to suspect that they could contribute to a problem” by helping to create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And just this past fall, the FDA finally announced that it is considering restricting antibacterial soaps, which its panel of health experts overwhelmingly said have not been proven any more effective than regular soap in preventing infections among average consumers. Actions the FDA could take include changing product labels, restricting marketing claims or pulling the products off the market altogether.

The advisory panel told the FDA that consumer products that include bacteria-fighting ingredients should be required to have scientific data proving they prevent infections. At issue are antibacterial products that include chemicals such as triclosan, which is known for its bacteria-fighting properties.

However, antibiotics kill more than the disease-causing bacteria to which they are directed. They kill any other susceptible bacteria. Once the ecosystem is cleared of susceptible bacteria, resistant bacteria can multiply and dominate the environment due to lack of competition, resulting in drug-resistant “superbugs”. The phenomenon can be likened to weeds that have overgrown a lawn where the grass has been completely destroyed by an overdose of herbicides. The ubiquity of the antibacterials in soaps “is a worrying thing,” lead researcher Dr. Eli N. Perencevich of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, told the media at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in New Orleans in 2000. He said at the level of usage of antibacterial soap in the typical home, bacteria could easily develop that would be resistant to both antibiotics and the antibacterial soaps themselves.

from nytimes.com

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market.

Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with ending Bush restrictions on stem-cell research; that 55 percent endorse either gay civil unions or same-sex marriage; and that 75 percent believe openly gay Americans should serve in the military.

The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion.

This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”

The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice. After the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s.