Relatively Science

Making Adult Stem Cells pluripotent

2010-08-27T20:30:00.000+12:00

Recent advances in the field of induced pluripotent stem cells have got to the point where we can using various methods convert adult stem cells back to a state where they are pluripotent. I am not going to go into the details of these methods or much of the repercussions of this as these can be found much better at other sources - such as here and here and here.

Essentially I wanted to play devil's advocate here for a second with one thought that came to my mind. Now don't get me wrong I am all for stem cell research, and in fact I do not have an issue with the use of embryonic stem cells under reasonable conditions - especially in the case of those that are spare or to be wasted from IVF treatments.

The interesting thought I had in regards to this issue is, how do we know that these adult stem cells have been made to be pluripotent?

One way is to let the cells develop and multiply and see what happens. Although this is not exactly what is done in the study (actually the nucleus of the stem cells was put into a blastocyst) it is for all intents and purposes the same effect. Well... they develop in to an embryo of course.

Which brings us back to the beginning of that what we have done is use adult cells to create embryonic cells, which not only defeats the purpose of not using embryonic cells but is basically cloning.

Does this really solve the image problem that stem cells have?

Thoughts on the experience of publishing papers

2010-06-11T12:35:00.006+12:00

As a ionospheric/near-earth-space physicist by training, I have published a few papers (mostly as co-author but one as a first author) in the geophysics journals that service this field. But recently I have also had a very different experience being a co-author on a paper that resulted from some work I have been doing in psychology.

The psychology paper, which is a really good study which shows interesting and possibly profound results (on which I will write more when it actually hits the dead-tree and/or pixel press), has just been accept after numerous submissions (and even more rewrites) to various journals.

This contrasts hugely with my experience in publishing in the geophysics journals, where although the reviewers have sometimes wanted substantial changes, I have not had a paper of mine rejected, and very few of those of my supervisors (none that I can immediately recall) have been rejected. That might imply that the journals we usually publish in such as the American Geophysical Union run Geophysical Research Letters (2008 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor of 2.959) and the more specific Journal of Geophysical Research A: Space Physics (2008 JCR impact factor of 3.147 - though this is for all 7 parts of which Space is only one) accept almost everything for publication (as an illustration in the last 5 weeks there have been 49 papers published electronically in JGR-Space), but I don't think that is the case.

I suppose with Psychology being such are large field, as is Physics, that the more general journals will get huge amounts of submission and to be the best you only want to accept the best so there will obviously be more rejections in these types of journals rather than the more sub-field specific journals I have been used to.

As a counter point to the impact factors of the geophysics journals above I guess it is only fair to compare these to the journals the psychology study was submitted to: Nature (would have been nice but we did not expect to get accepted) JCR impact factor of 31.434, Cognition 3.481 (there may have been one or two more but I can't be sure) and Experimental Brain Research (where it is being eventually published) 2.195.

I would be interested in hearing any other stories of experience publishing in various fields, so don't hold back.

Can we be Chemical-free?

2010-05-16T10:15:00.000+12:00

In the good tradition of any scientific article with a question as a title the answer to the question posed in this title is no.

The reason for bringing this up is that in the Lifestyle section, published Friday, under the banner of Body and Soul, of the Otago Daily Times (ODT) was an article about a mother in Wanaka who was starting a cosmetics business from her kitchen.

Susan Helmore is not a chemist, a herbalist or a computer whizz - although she says she's fast becoming a "geek".

She makes lists, has an indexed bright-ideas book, Google is her "friend" - and there's peanut butter on her lap top.

Her passion is chemical-free skin-care and cleaning products.

I am all for people having good ideas and making a business and a living of their own abilities. But this is clearly not a good idea. Why I hear you asking, well let me explain.

The problem rests on the word chemical. Everything in the universe is a chemical, whether it be an element, a molecule or a compound. So water is a chemical, oxygen is a chemical, as is sodium lauryl sulfate (one of the main ingredients in most soaps and body washes). So for something to be chemical free it has to have nothing at all in it - in other words it is a vacuum.

This is a fallacy that comes up quite often from people who claim to be using "natural" solutions that are chemical free, both in the terms of cosmetics and cleaning products like here but also things like organic farming, which also claims to be a chemical free process.

Yes some people have allergies and will react badly to some chemicals, but that does not mean that chemicals are bad, and the are certainly not avoidable. Diagnoses like MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity) are rarer than even people who believe they have them think.

Substances like detergents and soaps need to contain certain classes of chemicals such as surfactants so that they can react with both the water and the grease, or else they will not work. So what ever the source of the chemicals be them synthetic or "natural" they still must perform the same job in the same way, and so will in all likelihood have the same interactions with the body.

Remote Sensing of the Ionosphere: Part 1

2010-05-07T14:07:00.001+12:00

Now that the hectic period of writing up my thesis is over, resulting in somewhat of a blogcation, I thought that it was high time I shared some of the research that went into my thesis.

The ionosphere is a region of plasma in the upper atmosphere, it extends from about 50 km on the lower end to more than 1000 km at the top. Mostly the plasma is created by radiation from the sun, which breaks up (dissociates) the atoms, i.e. ionises them, into electrons and positive ions. A small part of the ionisation is created by cosmic rays, and particularly at the lower altitudes where the neutral atmospheric density is higher the electrons can collide with the neutral atmosphere to form negative ions.

The ionisation density depends both on the rate of input from the sun or other sources (dissociation rate) and on the rate at which the ionisation decays by recombining to form neutral atoms (recombination rate).

Now the ionosphere is not really a layer in the atmosphere like the troposphere and the stratosphere which are defined by temperature, but rather is a region in which the plasma is overlayed over the top of these temperature variation defined layers. So the ionospheric altitudes are the same as those covered by the mesosphere and the thermosphere.

Different frequencies of solar radiation interact with different molecules or atoms in differing regions of the atmosphere to create several layers within the ionosphere. The peak density of ionisation is in the F layer, above 200 km in altitude, which is due to extreme UV solar radiation ionising atomic oxygen (O). Below this there is the E layer, around 90-120 km in altitude, due to soft X-rays and UV ionising molecular oxygen (O₂). Below this is the D region, not a true layer like the E and F, but more of a bump in the slope of the electron density profile. The D region is 50-90 km in altitude and is mostly due to Lyman-α ionising nitric oxide (NO).

Since most of the ionosphere is due to the sun, we see variation between day and night and between the seasons as well as over different latitude ranges. In the image you can see the difference between a summer ionosphere and a winter ionosphere, with the electron densities displayed for Corsica (summer, solid line) and Dunedin (winter, dashed line) in late July.

By having all these electrons (and ions) up in the atmosphere, the physical properties of the atmosphere are altered. In particular the electrons are very good at doing what they do in copper wires, conducting electricity. This presence of conducting layers in the atmosphere reflects radio waves, forming a "leaky" or partial mirror. In fact the first direct evidence for the existence of the ionosphere came in mid-December 1901 when Guglielmo Marconi informed the world he had received radio signals at Newfoundland, Canada, sent across the Atlantic from a station he had built in Cornwall, England.

Differing frequencies reflect off differing electron densities (and hence conductivities) at differing altitudes in the ionosphere. My work was focused on VLF (Very Low Frequency, 3-30 kHz) radio waves which reflect of the D-region. Higher altitude regions can be studied using higher frequency radio waves.

VLF radiation, as well as some other frequencies, reflects not only off the ionosphere but also off the surface of the Earth (very well off sea water, not so well off land, and very poorly off ice, depending on the conductivities of these surfaces). The result of this is that the radiation can travel long distances (>10000 km for powerful transmitters) reflecting between the Earth and the ionosphere, like it was travelling in a waveguide.

This allows us to observe radio waves at a receiver and infer the condition of the ionosphere between the transmitter and the receiver. Changes in the received signal are caused by changes in the ionosphere (or extremely rarely the ground), and by comparing the observed changes to expected changes from computational modelling, you can get a indication of what processes are occurring in/effecting this altitude range and the relative importance of the processes.

The ability to remote sense the 50-100 km region of the ionosphere using VLF radio waves is very useful, since this altitude range is too high for direct observation by plane or balloon, and too low for in situ measurements by satellites. Rockets have been used to study this region but those measurements are transitory and relatively expensive.

Of course operating large, powerful VLF transmitters is also expensive (especially since they usually have low transmission efficiencies ~10-20%), but fortunately for the world of science, many governments have undertaken to operate such transmitters (usually for the purpose of maintaining communication channels with submarine fleets). The US, Russia, Japan, China, India, France, Germany, Italy and the UK all have (or used to have) such transmitters. Radio waves in this frequency range can penetrate tens of meters into seawater allowing communication (even if simple communications with a low baud rate, due to the VLF carrier frequency) with submerged submarines, so that the submarines do not have to surface and give away their position.

This network of transmitters in conjunction with similar networks of scientific receivers allows simultaneous coverage of much of the Earth's ionosphere (at least at D region altitudes).

Degrees of Science Communication

2009-11-19T15:09:00.005+13:00

A few years back the University of Otago started a Master's course in Science Communication, and the fruits of that are starting to come to bear. This weekend six films by Science and Natural History Filmmaking students will be shown at Dunedin's Regent Theatre. According to the Centre's website the films will constitute a part of the student's thesis.

I think that this is a great idea, and you can specialize in the above film-making, creative non-fiction writing or a general popularizing of science. I think that more people should be taking an interest in that... but then again I am a science blogger and now part of the Science Media Centre's Sciblogs.co.nz set up so maybe I am biased.

That is not to say that I can't have concerns about some of the outputs of this venture, an article online at the Otago Daily Times highlights one of the videos being screen about the 1080 poison debate, and I think it illustrates just how easy it can be to miss the point of communicating the science.

Sure it is good to get subjects such as this out in to the public (not that this one is not already out there) but the goal must be first and foremost to tell the science's story. So below is a rant that I left as a comment on the article that I think deserves wider audience and discussion.

I find the paragraph about balance interesting coming from students of a science communication course.

Mr Holmes said while many films had been made on 1080, they were mostly one-sided, so their aim was to make a "balanced" account of the issue by presenting both sides of the argument alongside the science.

As they say they present both sides of the debate along side the science. But the key point is not the politicization of the issue or the various points of view but the facts, which are the science.

And while the students do mention this, It's a very emotive subject and some facts get lost in the argument, it does not seem from the article as if this is what they have achieved.

Sure giving the balance adds to the drama and emotion but it detracts from the aim of what they are trying to achieve. The point of their course is to teach them to communicate the science.

I appreciate the need to have a "hook" upon which to attach the science and to have a narrative that brings the viewer along. But science is not about balance, it is a one sided process that involves the facts.

Personally I do not have all the information to make a decision on this situation, although I do have my opinions, and if the intent of this film is to communicate the science and to hence give the information that is needed to make a decision then give the rhetoric of either side (or both sides for that matter) is not going to help that process along.

The goal of science communication should not be to start debates but to provide the public access to the information that settles the debate. The communication is not, as Mr Ting seems to think, about getting the two sides of the debate to talk together but to get the correct information out to where it can be accessed by all, removing the need for a debate.

Ares Boldly Goes

2009-11-05T16:25:00.004+13:00

Ethan at Starts With a Bang has a great post up about just how spectacular NASA's first new rocket in over 30 years is. Videos of the test launch, which took place on 28 October 2009, has been circulating on Youtube:

But why spend all this money on sending humans into space, it is dangerous, and relatively pointless, and robots can do so well without us there. Well firstly there is at present a limit to what robots can do either on there own or with our help, problems such as they are generally designed with a specific purpose, where as a human in the same situation is much more versatile.

But the most important reason is that on this pale blue dot of ours there is a limited amount of resources and indeed time. At some point or another in the next 4 or so billion years that it has remaining, the Earth will no longer be able to support us and we will need to be somewhere else if our species is to survive. To that end we need to now begin the efforts of seeding the stars with populations of Humans (and for that matter cattle and grains etc. you know things that we will need to survive).

So by all means use the robots to find out where we can go and how we can get there and what we will find when we get there, but remember that the Earth is the cradle of humanity and one cannot stay in the cradle forever.

Local skeptics meetups

2009-10-22T16:42:00.002+13:00

One of the trends in modern skepticism groups that has been developing across the world is to get together and have a few drinks of choice. The Skeptics in the Pub concept has recently made it to New Zealand and groups have been meeting up in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and now Dunedin.

I for one think that these are a great idea, a great way to keep in touch with old friends and meet new ones, as well as learning something new (which we should all do every day)

My local Dunedin chapter is only a few days old and is light on people so if you are keen click the link and sign up. Of course if you are far away from New Zealand's premier centre of learning go to the main national page (or the links above) where you can find the groups in the bigger cities or even start your own in your town.

Ozone

2009-10-10T17:31:00.001+13:00

With spring coming to the southern hemisphere, the blossom and the daffodils are out and the weather is definitely warmer (OK some of the time). But there is a also something bad that also happens, as the sun rises over the polar horizon, and the polar vortex (winds that rotate about the pole) begins to shut down for the summer there is a large patch of stratosphere which has been enclosed in the polar vortex that has an appreciably lower Ozone content. This Ozone "hole" breaks up with the shut down of the polar vortex and regions of lower Ozone content spread out over parts of the southern hemisphere as the two regions diffuse into one an other.

What this means for us that live closer to the South Pole than the equator is that around the time of the southern vernal equinox we tend to get a period of very low ozone over head. So in honour of this and the dangers it can present, I have a series of posts on Ozone.

Firstly, some basics. The Ozone hole is not a region of no Ozone (which is the reason for the scare quotes in the above paragraph) but merely a region of lesser density of Ozone. The hole is defined as a region of Ozone less than 220 Dobson units (DU). This level was chosen as the reference since ozone levels had never been seen lower than this before 1979.

Ozone itself is a relatively unstable allotrope of oxygen (O₃). It forms when UV radiation from the Sun breaks the bond between the atoms in the O₂ molecule, some of the liberated oxygen atoms then bond with other O₂ molecules making O₃. This same interaction with UV radiation also breaks down the O₃ and it is these two together that are responsible for the UV protection we get from the Ozone layer. Ozone is unstable and quite reactive, especially with molecules containing nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine, or bromine.

That is enough for today, next in this series we will look at how the Ozone hole has formed and what we have done about it.

The Advertorial

2009-10-02T16:25:00.002+13:00

This has to be what I would call one of the worst in terms of despicable advertising practices. Literally it is designing your advert such that it resembles an article in the newspaper/magazine, and usually the only way to tell is there is the word advertisement in very small text at the top. This is making it seem like the newspaper condones and supports the issues the author is raising, giving his/her position more authority than an opinion piece would.

And strangely enough those that practice this deceptive form of advertising seem to be those that are already attempting to deceive people (or themselves) in other ways about the quality of their product or service, such as alternative medicine (alt med) providers.

Now this might seem a tad harsh on alt med people, but then if the alt med had been shown to work, then it would not be alternative medicine but rather simply medicine.

One recurring example of this practice is seen in a local free weekly (one of many my locale seems to have) I get in my mailbox The Star (digital online version can be found here). Almost every week without fail either on page 3 or 5 (usually at the bottom right) there is an advertorial by a local chiropractor - laying down how we should manipulate our spines to prevent swine flu or some such (perhaps I will ~~scan some in~~ ~~point you to the online version~~ find them on the chiropractor's website and deconstruct them at some point in the near future - it seems just to richer source of fodder to ignore).

Taking the example of this particular chiropractor, on his website under "health news", which is where he says to look for the archive of his ad, he clearly states (emphasis mine):

Here are some of the latest developments in the world of healthcare, with chiropractic commentary from Dr Tat Loo. Tat also contributes occasional feature articles and commentary for the weekly Dunedin based paper The Star which we will be included on this page.

This is exactly the sort of deception which is being practiced in these advertorials trying to pass off ads and opinion as "feature articles".

Any way enough for now... enjoy your weekend, I think I will spend some time looking at the relevant acts and laws regarding false advertising.

Don't Panic

2009-09-30T10:40:00.002+13:00

The advice given on the outside of the book that gave Douglas Adam's "trilogy" its title (I mean of course the "Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy") is always a useful thing to keep in mind, especially in the days of media sensationalism.

Today's worrying threat is a Tsunami, and like I said above I don't want you to panic, and that is for a couple of reasons, the first one is - you may have missed it already (The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii's updated timings for the arrival of a tsunami in New Zealand are: East Cape at 9.44am, Gisborne 10am, North Cape 10.12am, Napier 10.40am, Wellington 10.50am, Auckland (east coast) 11.12am, Auckland (west) 11.39am, Lyttelton 11.55am New Plymouth 12.17pm, Nelson 12.23 pm and Dunedin 12.31pm) and the second being as is clearly highlighted in the NZPA bulletin that the ODT website is carrying the wave is very unlikely to cause much damage - being mostly less than 1m in height when it comes ashore. That said - DON'T GO TO THE BEACH TO WATCH IT.

"It is very important that the public should keep away from beaches and shorelines."

Mr Swinney said that people who live in coastal areas should continue listening to More FM, Classic Hits or Newstalk ZB radio stations for further instructions.

So often we scientists and skeptics find a lot of fault in journalism for pushing sensationalism or not getting the facts even remotely correct. But it is nice to see that in a serious situation all hands are on deck and working together. So keep a weather ear out for any further warnings and follow any civil defense instructions especially if asked to head to higher ground.

The earthquake that caused the tsunami was an 8.3 on the Richter Scale and was centred 205 km south of Apia in Samoa at around 6.50 am this morning (NZDT). It sounds like parts of Samoa were very badly shaken and that there has been some loss of life, so our thoughts go out to those who have lost loved ones, and to those who have lost homes and lively hoods.

Something wicked this way comes

2009-09-26T16:10:00.000+12:00

And I mean wicked in the colloquial sense with positive connotations (although I admit that is probably just showing my age) rather than the sense in which Shakespeare intended.

Coming very soon (next week) to some internets near you is a venture put out by New Zealand's Science Media Centre, they have collected some of New Zealand's leading established science bloggers, as well as other scientists who will be starting up some new blogs and created Sciblogs.co.nz. All up there are about 26 blogs to be found there.

The Science Media Centre was set in 2008 up by the Royal Society of New Zealand, at the behest of the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, to facilitate links between the media and science so that the media has easy access to relevant scientific information. It is based on similar centres in the UK and Australia.

Yes Sciblogs.co.nz is designed to be similar to the already famous science blog community Seed Magazines's Scienceblogs, but if there is an idea out there that works why reinvent the wheel.

The blog community site goes live next week (I think the September 30) and amongst the great content that will be there is going to be yours truly. My blog along with those of several other established bloggers will be syndicated to the Sciblogs.co.nz site so you will be still be able to find all my intellectual ramblings here or you can go there and see what else is on offer in addition to me.

You should be able to find my content at Sciblogs.co.nz/relatively-science

If only...

2009-08-21T11:03:00.005+12:00

From the Center for American Progress, via Climate Progress, The Island of Doubt and the ScienceBlogs weekly update email:

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 5

2009-08-07T13:56:00.003+12:00

Well it is Friday already, the weeks are just zipping by which is not good for my deadlines and stress levels, but good laugh while waiting for the computer to run its programs is always useful and for today we have a couple of clips from the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb - first up a classic take on the religious seeing messages/images in food, followed by a homeopathic A&E.

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 4

2009-08-06T16:33:00.002+12:00

For today we have comedian Dara O'Briain setting the record straight about the public understanding of science, with a good knock on some alternate medicine too

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 3

2009-08-05T13:29:00.003+12:00

For some totally irreverant and skeptic humour, there is this aussie bloke who is quite funny and well worth a listen to. Tim Minchin is his name and his shows usually involve his scruffy haired, bare foot appearance and a grand piano. The juxtaposition of these and what he has to say only adds to humour. So it is well worth a poke around on youtube or his site, but for now I have two of my favourites.

Relatively Science Humour week: Day 2

2009-08-04T13:47:00.000+12:00

For you today I have found a very funny man Brian Marlow who markets himself as a science comedian, there are some great samples on his home page and mostly they include a good honest laugh at the funnier side of science - I especially love the twister clip (it is about mid way down the page with several other embedded audio clips). Below the fold for you today we have him on the subject of Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, and the speed of light.

Laughter is the best medicine

2009-08-03T13:38:00.002+12:00

While the title of this post is not necessarily true, a little laughter does go a long way towards reducing stress and making life a bit more enjoyable. And since I have been reading Richard Wiseman's Quirkology and thoroughly enjoying it especially the section on his search for the world's funniest joke, I thought that I would share some humor with you the readers.

If you would prefer something a little more intellectual go check out the latest skeptic's circle at Beyond the Short Coat either before or after enjoying a little laugh

My plan is over the next week to include a post a day with humour in it - it will be a sort of Relatively Science humor week. And as that title sounds most of the humour will be relatively science related - but first up below the fold is comic genius Bill Cosby talking about kids and brain damage

Come back tomorrow and all week for more.

Is swine flu really all that bad?

2009-07-23T12:11:00.003+12:00

Now I am not denying the fact that there is a nasty novel variant of type A H1N1 influenza out there. And that it has an interesting and rather nasty set of symptoms to it. But a good comparison to be looking at is how it compares to the seasonal flu statistics from previous years.

And this is exactly what happens in part of this article in the Otago Daily Times (ODT - my local paper). Mostly the article was about how with the University semester starting last week and many students coming back into town there has been a surge in the number of cases suspected, especially at the University's student health centre. It reports that there are (have been?) 2443 confirmed cases nationwide (as of Tuesday), which was up 80 from the day before, with 26 in intensive care and 11 deaths.

The comparison comes at the end of the article, where it states that the total number of influenza-related deaths (for all subtypes) so far this season (April - end of June) was 109, and this compares to 479 deaths for the last year for which the Ministry of Health had released figures, 2006. So with seasonal flu being a winter months phenomenon then we expect that most of the cases occur between April and maybe October (the winter months for us in the southern hemisphere - ok here I have included most of autumn and the start of spring).

What this suggests, at least at first glance is that this has been a quiet year so far for seasonal flu although this years numbers do not include the coldest month of July. And further more that swine flu has not been a major factor in influenza deaths so far.

So while there may be lots of cases (especially suspected cases - if the anecdotes I hear from friends and family are to be believed), this flu certainly here in NZ does not seem to be much to worry about. Especially in comparison to previous flu pandemics such as 1918. This of course could be some what due to the reaction of bodies like WHO and the local health authorities and their publicity/education campaigns about how to prevent the spread of the disease.

Though it is interesting to note that the North American region is having a lot of cases out of flu season. I guess we will all have to wait and see what happens.

A funny thing happened on the way back from the Moon

2009-07-20T12:30:00.007+12:00

40 years ago tomorrow Micheal Collins in the Command Module Columbia snapped this pic of the ascent stage of the Lunar Module Eagle as they returned from the surface of the moon.

And in the couple of years following this 10 more men walked on the surface of our planet's orbital buddy, following in the historic footsteps of Armstrong and Aldrin (40 years ago today- so I will wish Tranquility Base happy 40th birthday).

Unfortunately to this day some people do not believe, for various reasons, that we never set foot on the moon (for example see here).

But one of the results of this walking/driving on our natural satelite is that we left an awful mess behind us. Descent stages of the lunar landers, flags, rovers, scientific equipment, footprints, the list goes on. One of the denier arguments goes along the lines of well if this stuff is there why can't we see it. The answer to which is that it is too small.

That is until now. Recent photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which entered orbit around the moon in the last few weeks has a camera with enough resolution to quite clearly see that which we left behind. Many more details can be found here on the NASA site. These photos are awesome, I mean just look at this:
You can even make out the path the astronauts took to set up the scientific experiments that they left behind. And the good news is that these photos were not taken at the final mapping orbit of the satellite and hence are not at the fullest resolution that the onboard camera will be able to see. So keep a look out there will be more and better photos of these sites as the LRO mission continues.

Thanks to Starts With A Bang and Astronomy Picture of the Day for the links

Update: oops got my dates wrong again - for some reason the 19th always sticks in my head but the lunar landing happened on the 20th.

Cosmic Rays, Clouds and Climate

2009-07-03T15:59:00.003+12:00

For some reason I am still not sure of I ended up this afternoon on the wordpress homepage and one of the featured blogs was last year's weblog award winner for best science blog What's Up With That (WUWT).

If you have never come across this blog before, and I have only ever heard about it in passing, they are of some what of a climate change denialist point of view (which as Phil mentions in that last link just shows that all the webbies are is a popularity contest rather than an evidence based award). The post that was front and centre on the blog was this one about the relationship between cosmic rays and cloud formation. What really caught my attention was the juxtaposition between the "headline": Message in the CLOUD for Warmists: The end is near?, and the graph that followed the first paragraph.

Now the paragraph (and actually the graph) talk about the correlation between cosmic rays (using various isotopes as a proxy) and temperature. Much of the rest of the post is a quite interesting description of the CERN experiments and hypothesis that links the galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and cloud formation, and while that is all interesting it is irrelevant to what I wanted to say, even if this turns out to be correct.

Now if you look closely at the graph you can see that it covers the last almost 800 years and the proxies for the GCR (¹⁰Be and ¹⁴C which are the blue and black lines) correlate very well with the red line (Siberian Temperature). They track each other quite well through the dark ages and into the medieval warm period and even through the maunder minimum (little ice age) right up until the middle of the 19^th century. Now once we get to the late 19^th century we see that the temperature continues to rise and the other lines level off a bit - you can still see that there is a slight influence with the dip in temperature around early to mid 20^th century but the lines in general are no longer closely correlated.

Oops! Maybe if you are going to make an argument you should make sure that your strongest piece of evidence does not plainly and in clear sight contradict your argument.

What does that all mean, firstly well it looks remarkably like the temperature and sunspot cycle length plot I showed previously and as I stated in that post what we can see is an excellent correlation spoiled since the industrial revolution. I left a comment on the WUWT blog that outlined the above lack of modern correlation and stated that what has happened since the industrial revolution that we know may have caused this warming, well we have been putting out a lot of CO₂.

Other commenters on the WUWT blog mention that CO₂ is a very minor atmospheric constituent and that H₂O is a better green house gas and much more prevalent. Well this is also true, however H₂O has some rather interesting behaviors it saturates quite easily in the atmosphere and everyone that does not live in desert (or at least a drought) gets to experience this - RAIN! Also if you have ever been to the tropics, you may have noticed that the rain can be quite heavy when it is warm this is because increasing the temperature allows the atmosphere to hold more water.

If water vapor itself was enough to trigger the sort of greenhouse effect that we are seeing then we would have long ago passed the point of now return, but fortunately the saturation of water in the atmosphere (what we call 100% relative humidity) seems to prevent this from happening - although this is not to say that when the temperature does get warm that there will be more water in the atmosphere which will probably on lead to worse storms etc rather than any large feedback effect (which means I had to write a retraction since I claimed that there may have been an H₂O feedback in my original comment on WUWT - ooops gotta think the consequences through more).

Bad experiment design

2009-07-03T14:44:00.005+12:00

Here in New Zealand we tend to import big important current affairs shows such as 20/20 and 60 Minutes, of course we put our own host upfront and show a couple of local stories as well as the interesting ones, mostly from the US, that seem to come with the program.

Well on Monday, during 60 Minutes they had a discussion (and this was one of the local stories) about food coloring and children's behaviour (the video clip of the story at the link). They talked with the experts and afflicted parents about how food coloring is bad and is being phased out in places and why are we not doing it etc. This in and of itself is reasonable and studies have shown that coloring can lead to hyperactivity in (some) children

But the really bad part of this was when they set up an experiment to show just what effect that the colorings have. They got some parents to lend their children (the kids all looked to be around 6-10 maybe) to the demonstration and put them in two groups. One group would have a healthy color free afternoon tea and the other group would have an afternoon tea full of colorings. They tested the children by getting them to do a drawing and some writing both before and after the food, and the children with the color free food had very little change in their drawing/writing while those in the color group there was a marked decrease in competency. However the best illustration (as far as the producers and the anti-color people were concerned) was that the kids in the color group were just bouncing off the walls and in one case bouncing balls of the presenter and interviewee (a child psychologist I think).

On the face of it this sounds like a great demonstration that showed up exactly the concerns that exist about the colorings. The problem was in the controlling of the coloring/non-coloring foods. The coloring group got all the foods that you can give to kids with heaps of the bad colorings in them, things like candy, cordial drinks and coke and that sort of thing. The non-colorings group had lots of fresh fruit and water.

If you have not spotted why this does not show colorings in a bad light then maybe go back and compare those snacks again. The colorings group not only got colorings that the non-colorings group did not get but they also got lots of high sugar food (especially refined sugars) and caffeine that the control group did not get, for those of you at home these are known as confounding factors.

So what did the demonstration show, that a combination of lots of sugar, caffeine and coloring leads to kids bouncing off the walls. Last time I checked with my two little boys (and their friends) that amount of sugar alone will set kids off, as I witnessed at my elder boy's 4th birthday party last weekend.

How could they have done this better, well clearly the control group should have had the same amount and type of sugars, that way you would have been able to see the effect of the colorings, rather than what I suspect was mainly the effect of the sugar that these kids got to stuff themselves with. An example of a way that this could have been done was to use cordial drinks alone as the difference between the groups as many brands put out a color-free variety as well as the usual colored ones.

Unfortunately, my wife tells me that some of the other mothers at the playcentre my children go to, did not manage to see this fault in the demonstration and my wife was not able to convince them of why it did not show what they said it showed.

That all said, there does appear to be something to this hypothesis that food colorings can be bad for children's behavior - now if only we could get the TV people to realise how to design a demonstration to illustrate a point. Oh well I had better send them a copy of this.

Update: added link to clip from show.

The Power of Probability

2009-06-26T12:04:00.000+12:00

I wanted to take a quick detour into probability today, for various reason which I don't really want to divulge.

But in particular I wanted to look at the cumulative probability of multiple independent events. Such as always rolling a 6, or always drawing a red card from a full deck.

It is fairly simple to see that if you want to roll a 6 there is a 1 in 6 or 0.16666... probability of this happening. The same goes for always drawing a red card where the probability is 1 in 2 or 0.5 (or 50%).

But once you start to choose multiple times then you see the the probabilities start to get smaller quite quickly. So the probability of rolling 2 6s, or drawing 2 red cards

P(2 6s) = 0.1666 x 0.1666 = 0.1666² = 0.0278 = 1/36 = 2.78%
P(2 red) = 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.5² = 0.25 = 25%

And then the probability of three

P(3 6s) = 0.1666³ = 1/216 = 0.46%
P(3 red) = 0.5³ = 0.125 = 12.5%

You can see that the dice roll is now quite unlikely less than half a percent and even the high probability drawing a red card from a full deck (which is the same as flipping a coin and getting a head - not sure why I didn't use this as my example) is down to 1/8.

What about if we say drawing 10 cards that are all red, from a full deck

P(10 red) = 0.5¹⁰ = 0.0977%

Which as you can see is really unlikely. So over 99.9% of the time you will not get 10 red cards drawn in a row (or 10 heads on a coin toss).

Of course our examples here uses the same event happening over and over again, but the same math applies when considering events with different probabilities as long as they are independent (which means that one event does not influence any others). As long as the probabilities of the events happening is less than 1 (which would mean that that particular event always happened) then the chances of a series of events happening is more and more unlikely as more and more events are in the series.

One place where this knowledge can be quite useful is in a court case. If for example there are several pieces of evidence that show that the accused could have done the crime. What the defense will try to do is cast doubt on those pieces of evidence, such as by saying that this bloody handprint could have gotten there in a total innocent way. Of course the whole idea of the defense is to cast reasonable doubt as to the accused's guilt. But the more pieces of evidence that there are against the accused then the lesser the probability of them all being circumstantial and the greater the likely hood of the accused being guilty. Even if there is some doubt about each piece of evidence taken together they point to the accused as being guilty, even if the doubt is large such as 50% like we showed above.

Ayuveda in my paper

2009-06-05T15:48:00.001+12:00

The online version of my local paper carried a story today under the guise of its Lifestyle and Health section about a reporters experiences trying out some Ayurvedic "medicine". It seems at least to my equal parts horror or pleasure (horror that they paid to have this and pleasure that it was not a local reporter) that this story has been imported from the LA Times and/or Washington Post. Skimming over it immediately prompted me to leave a lengthy comment on the site which I will post below for your reading pleasure.

The article mentions that few "western" doctors espouse these types of healing methods due to lack of (or inability to conduct) scientific studies.

However, those in learned circles, or at least with a working knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and physics as well as a rational brain can clearly see that methods that have no basis in any scientific understanding of the body, such as the "doshas" (which cannot be shown to exist) have no point in being studied in clinical trials until there is a viable method for their mechanisms of action.

This is all very similar to the ideas (the four bodily humours) that science correctly discarded at the end of the middle ages as utter nonsense. Many feature of the Ayurveda and indeed traditional Chinese medicine are based on disproven ideas of how the body works.

And while more and more this sort of non-reality medicine creeps into the western (especial post-modern) philosophies, you find that in their native countries (in this case India - but it also applies to China) the locals are abandoning these methods for ones that actually work by methods other than relaxation and the placebo effects.

The statements about nutrition and the need to balance what you eat are not restricted to Ayurveda, and can be found just as readily in science-based medicine.

And as for food having energies - Yep it does... you might have heard of them they usually go by the name Calories.

Carnival of the Godless

2009-05-03T16:12:00.001+12:00

Hello and welcome to this latest edition of the Carnival of the Godless, for those new to carnivals this one is a fortnightly chance to submit your post on Godlessness (and all that entails) to a potentially wider audience, good for promoting your blog and engendering discussion.

We have had a very good turnout here for this edition and I will endeavour to bring it to you in a succinct fashion after all you are not here for me (at least not entirely) - although if you want to have a look around feel free to check out some of the post on basic physics, skepticism, atheism/religion or any of the myriad other topics I have discussed here.

Now on with the show...

To start with Paul Sunstone of Café Philos shares with us a parody:Helping Those With Mormon Interests.

Some of you may remember the smut for smut campaign were people could exchange their bible for porn, well Jennifurret of Blag Hag tells us of her campus groups better taste effort Fiction for Fiction. She then goes on to ask Is "New Atheism" White Supremacist? and discuss sexuality in nature with Natural Sexuality

First time submitter Bryan W/a 'y' from Science. Why not? deconstructs at time magazine article about faith healing in Spirituality is about as good for your health as sugar pills.

lukeprog writing at Common Sense Atheism presents a possible futuristic look back at the end of a religion The Last of the Christians.

At Right To Think yunshui compares cheeses and churches, In Cheeses' Name, Amen before looking at some of the hypocrisy of the conquistadors in Is that a beam in your eye, Mr Cortes?.

Brent Fisher gives one of his earlier musings on now that he is not religious what is he, in Humanism, a possible model for moral humans

In a post at his bog Pleiotropy Bjørn Østman tells how he is both atheist and agnostic, which is something that I completely agree with as it is the truly skeptical point of view on religion.

Greta Christina serves us a helping of religion and the difference between possible and plausible with Why You Shouldn't Jump Out of Windows , and follows by decrying the patronizing attitude that treats atheists, and especially queer atheists, as sad lost sheep in Why Do Queers Leave Religion?

Dr. Jim has a low down on some of his exchanges in the letters to the editor of his local paper Lethbridge's 'Militant' Atheist in Chief 'Heralded' again..

Postman delivers this letter direct from the almighty, himselfDear Union of Amalgamated Cherubim & Seraphim Local 151... posted at "Gone Fishin': Postcards From God".

Living With Mormonsgive some insight in to what goes in inside What do Mormons believe? A look at Fast and Testimony Meetings.

Beth Terry at Fake Plastic Fish (Living Life with Less Plastic) tells us her thoughts on the purpose of life.

Metamagician and the Hellfire Club's Russell Blackford speaks aboutJerry Coyne on science organisations and accommodationism, before going on to Harvard's Islamic chaplain: "great wisdom" in death penalty for apostates and then why we should be worried about Hate speech and the ICCPR.

Lying for Jesus seems to be a common occurrence these days and The Atheist Blogger Adrian Hayter gives us Telegraph Caught Lying For Jesus about the misrepresentation of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS).

larryniven of Rust Belt Philosophy presents Walking the walk about following Ontological arguments to their natural conclusions.

Michael of a Nadder! has some Optimism About Deborah 13 a BBC documentary about an "uber-Christian family with no contact with the outside world".

Andrew Bernardin discusses The Spirit World's Interest in Sex at The evolving mind

The Invisible Pink Unicorn's Ron Gold shares the story of How I Became An Atheist.

Gregory Lawrence of skin hunger brings up and knocks down some common stereotypes about the happiness of atheist in The thing that pisses them off.

vjack leading the Atheist Revolution brings up Bigotry and Religious Freedom.

PhillyChief tells of How rational people indulge in the irrational on his blog You Made Me Say It...

and in our final entry for this episode Mauzzie the Ponderer vents about those zealots.

Hope you all enjoyed the reading on offer and the next edition will be in a fortnight at State of Protest

in the mean time enjoy some irreverant skeptical and atheistic humour

Coming Soon

2009-05-03T12:01:00.004+12:00

Ok those here for the latest carnival of the godless, which is due on Sunday 3 May, I apologise for the delay (that should only effect those in timezones much ahead of UT). The carnival will be up in the next couple of hours - family sickness and deadlines at work have meant that I am behind schedule on this

Thanks for you patience and check back in a couple of hours.

Robert

Excitement

2009-04-20T15:39:00.002+12:00

I am very excited as I have just received a brand spanking new copy of Phil Plait's Death From The Skies! very kindly purchased for me by my library - OK not purchased for me but at least at my request and as such I get to be the first to borrow and read it. Of course I now have to decide whether or not to interrupt my current read (Science of Discworld III - also from the library but renewed over the weekend so there is plenty of time yet) or to finish that first. And of course now some friends are loaning me one of their books to read - and that always puts you under a bit of pressure to read and return.

Oh well the anticipation builds, might have to wait and in the mean time just read more of Phil's excellent blog. Oh and I will do a little review here or provide some comments on the book at least when I am done.

Today in history

2009-04-12T09:00:00.001+12:00

There is an interesting conjunction of events in history today. Three of the most important events have all happened today.

It is Cosmonauts Day (none of this lame Yuri's night stuff). 1961 saw the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut orbited the Earth once, propelling himself into history and ratcheting up the Cold War's space race.
1981 the Shuttle Columbia made its maiden flight, the first reusable space craft. And this lovely little truck, and its cohorts, have served space flight quite well in the intervening 28 years (although not with out mishaps).
AND most importantly, with out a doubt the biggest event to happen today in history. I was born, (lol what else would I have been talking about) 29 years ago today, yep that is right and yes I do feel old but perhaps not as old as I will feel next year.

Hope that everyone has a fantastic weekend, and enjoys the chocolate.

Skeptical Listening

2009-03-13T03:00:00.001+13:00

Well to kick off this post, we have the latest Skeptic's circle being published and in a different format to usual, a podcast, don't worry all you traditionalists out there, don't worry all the usual links to the fantastic posts are there too.

And it is the subject of podcasts that brings me on to much more about idea of the listening side of web2.0. While blogs are a fantastic media to bet across you point of view or just rant about what pisses you off at a given moment, we are a multi-sensorial species (if that phrase is not in the lexicon then maybe it should be) and as such we have many different ways to get you knowledge fix. Podcasts are too much work for me to take on, I can barely post weekly here at the blog, but that certainly doesn't stop me from listening to many and enjoying them greatly.

Now my tastes are quite eclectic, and so the podcasts I listen to range from

Skeptical:

Science:

American politics and culture:

Declaring Independence

Humanism:

Humanist Network News

In fact if I had more listening time (listening during work is not good for productivity) I would probably listen to a much wider range of subjects.

Of course there are many others out there that you can choose from, and you can even get into the realm of video with vlogs and vodcasting, and while this is not something I have spent much time investigating, I will suggest that you check out the JREF on youtube.

Too many cooks?

2009-03-09T12:22:00.003+13:00

In this modern technical age this series of tubes can make keeping up with the field (which ever one it is) much easier than waiting weeks for the paper copy to be mailed to the library (it takes forever for the journals to come to New Zealand for some reason). I keep track of the latest studies by a weekly email roundup of the relevant journals (at least the ones through the American Geophysical Union).

So I get to spend some of my time on Monday perusing titles and abstracts for relevance, but every now and then is something that really catches one's eyes. This morning it was the first article in the list for the last 7 days in the Atmospheric Science section of the Geophysical Research Letters whose author list was exceedingly tedious:

Osprey, S., J. Barnett, J. Smith, P. Adamson, C. Andreopoulos, K. E. Arms, R. Armstrong, D. J. Auty, D. S. Ayres, B. Baller, P. D. Barnes, G. D. Barr, W. L. Barrett, B. R. Becker, A. Belias, R. H. Bernstein, D. Bhattacharya, M. Bishai, A. Blake, G. J. Bock, J. Boehm, D. J. Boehnlein, D. Bogert, C. Bower, E. Buckley-Geer, S. Cavanaugh, J. D. Chapman, D. Cherdack, S. Childress, B. C. Choudhary, J. H. Cobb, S. J. Coleman, A. J. Culling, J. K. de Jong, M. Dierckxsens, M. V. Diwan, M. Dorman, S. A. Dytman, C. O. Escobar, J. J. Evans, E. Falk, G. J. Feldman, M. V. Frohne, H. R. Gallagher, A. Godley, M. C. Goodman, P. Gouffon, R. Gran, E. W. Grashorn, N. Grossman, K. Grzelak, A. Habig, D. Harris, P. G. Harris, J. Hartnell, R. Hatcher, A. Himmel, A. Holin, J. Hylen, G. M. Irwin, M. Ishitsuka, D. E. Jaffe, C. James, D. Jensen, T. Kafka, S. M. S. Kasahara, J. J. Kim, G. Koizumi, S. Kopp, M. Kordosky, D. J. Koskinen, A. Kreymer, S. Kumaratunga, K. Lang, J. Ling, P. J. Litchfield, R. P! . Litchfield, L. Loiacono, P. Lucas, J. Ma, W. A. Mann, M. L. Marshak, J. S. Marshall, N. Mayer, A. M. McGowan, J. R. Meier, M. D. Messier, C. J. Metelko, D. G. Michael, L. Miller, W. H. Miller, S. R. Mishra, C. D. Moore, J. G. Morfin, L. Mualem, S. Mufson, J. Musser, D. Naples, J. K. Nelson, H. B. Newman, R. J. Nichol, T. C. Nicholls, J. P. Ochoa-Ricoux, W. P. Oliver, R. Ospanov, J. Paley, V. Paolone, Z. Pavlovic, G. Pawloski, G. F. Pearce, C. W. Peck, D. A. Petyt, R. Pittam, R. K. Plunkett, A. Rahaman, R. A. Rameika, T. M. Raufer, B. Rebel, J. Reichenbacher, P. A. Rodrigues, C. Rosenfeld, H. A. Rubin, K. Ruddick, M. C. Sanchez, N. Saoulidou, J. Schneps, P. Schreiner, S. M. Seun, P. Shanahan, W. Smart, C. Smith, R. Smith, A. Sousa, B. Speakman, P. Stamoulis, M. Strait, P. Symes, N. Tagg, R. L. Talaga, M. A. Tavera, J. Thomas, J. Thompson, M. A. Thomson, J. L. Thron, G. Tinti, G. Tzanakos, J. Urheim, P. Vahle, B. Viren, M. Watabe, A. Weber, R. C. Webb, A. Wehmann, N. West, C. White, S. G. Wojcicki, D. M. Wright, T. Yang, K. Zhang, and R. Zwaska

The paper was titled: Sudden stratospheric warmings seen in MINOS deep underground muon data and while such large experiments do warrant many people being involved, especially when using what sounds like a rather novel technique, I am not really sure that around 150 people need to be authors on the paper (No I did not count each individual name, I estimated from the 17 lines it took in the email that each had about 9 names, which is of course ~153).

Global warming and what we can do: Part 2

2009-03-05T14:40:00.004+13:00

Here is the promised part 2 where I discuss some possible things we can do to deal with the global warming.

This leads us to the situation we are now in, the world is warming and our CO₂ emissions are the most likely cause of it.

Will cutting back on our CO₂ emissions have any effect?

Probably not a big effect unless we can get China and India to sign on as well.

Does this mean we should not try to cut back?

Certainly we should try to limit our CO₂ production, any reduction is better than no reduction at all.

What about the technological ideas that might save us?

We have very little idea what any "geo-engineering" attempt to sequester atmospheric carbon will be able to achieve and how bad the side-effects will be, such as ocean acidification.

What happens if we don't cut back on the levels of atmospheric CO₂?

Well the warming will probably continue to increase, we will continue to lose ice caps (this will happen even if levels do not increase, we have now lost about 10 ice sheets and new studies are showing that ALL of Antarctica is indeed warming) and begin to experience sea level rises. This will put a strain on our food production, if not through direct loss of arable land then by migrations of people from coastal areas.

As we live on a finite planet and have shown only finite growth in technological advances in the past, one should really plan to use the resources we have in a responsible manner.

We need to encourage investment in cleaner and renewable technologies that we have, as well as fund research into more such technologies. Particularly the government and the power generation industry needs to get into this as does much of the rest of industry.

Unless there is incentive to invest in new technologies and a disincentive to continue as is then things will not change. We cannot leave this up to the free market to adjust our behaviours.

Whether we cap and trade with a steadily reducing cap, or we carbon tax depends on how the proceeds are distributed, and how the incentives for new technologies are to be handled. For example IF the best way to induce investment in new technologies was by government funding incentives then this would probably be best to be funded by a carbon tax (where all of the proceeds of the tax go back into the new technologies).

Though I would like to point out that if businesses simply pass on all there new costs associated with either the cap and trade or the carbon tax straight to the consumers then the system will not work. In the case of petrol the costs should probably be passed on (as much as it pains my very limited budget to admit).

But for power generation, which is something that is very integral to our modern civilization, this is where the costs should be born almost solely by the corporations involved in the generation. If the costs are simply passed on to the consumer then there will be very little incentive for investment in new tech on the part of the power companies.

As for what we should do for China and India and the like, well clearly if they keep burning coal as they are particularly in China, we may all be completely f'ed. So the first world nations will need to help out, with incentives to use clean sources for energy, nuclear power being probably the first cab off the rank. Followed by the sharing of all the renewable technologies we have.

Global warming and what we can do: Part 1

2009-03-05T14:00:00.005+13:00

Oops having just gone a whole month without posting for the first time I hang my head in shame, however, I recently posted this to the NZ Skeptics group as the first part of a response to recent discussion about global warming and our response to it, a lot to the discussion was whether we should do anything at all, which partly came from the idea that since China and India weren't going to do any thing then what was the point ruining the economy. But some of it seemed a bit too much like AGW denial, so I started with the following discussion, which I will reprint below just in case there are those out there that don't know the arguments for anthropogenic global warming. The second part discussing what we can do will follow.

Is the globe warming?

Yes.

Is there an increase in CO₂ levels that began about the time of the industrial revolution?

Yes.

Is this a similar pattern to what happened in most other warming periods?

NO, mostly the CO₂ increase lagged behind the temperature. So this is something different than we have seen.

Do we know what was responsible for much of the previous warmings?

Mostly, we have a fairly good idea that much of the warming/cooling cycle is related to the Milankovich cycles of the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit.

Is that what we are going through now?

NO, calculations in the 70s thought that the next Milankovich cycle was going to happen soon leading to an ice age, but this was in error and now is not expected to happen for a few thousand years. NB: the next part of the Milankovich cycle is due to cause an ice age not warming.

What about the influence of the sun? It caused the Little Ice age in the late middle ages did it not?

Yes the Maunder minimum of solar activity did cause a little Ice age in Europe, and yes the sun spot activity has been correlated to temperature fluctuations in the past. However, the recent temperature increases have not followed the fluctuation of solar cycle length (see an ealier post here). So NO the Sun is NOT responsible for this warming! I have heard from my colleagues that there maybe some fluctuations that correlate to other space weather phenomena, but not solar driven ones. I will have to wait for that paper to come out to let you know more.

So we can easily establish that the neither the Sun nor the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is to blame for this warming. So having ruled out the two leading causes for historic climate change we turn to other hypotheses.

The obvious one is that we know CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, can this leading trend of increasing CO₂ be responsible?

This is where the controversy comes in (everything above is pretty incontrovertible). Most climate models using CO₂ as the driver for the warming, regardless of how they predict the future, are very good at reproducing the data from the past. If they could not reproduce the data from the last few centuries then they would not be used to try to predict the future.

Let me just restate that clearly, CO₂ driven climate models can reproduce the recent warming that we have experienced.

Is this a smoking gun?

In the absence of any other credible hypothesis that can explain the data, probably, perhaps it is best to say that it is not the murder weapon but our finger prints are all over the crime scene.

End of Faith

2009-01-30T16:43:00.013+13:00

Having recently finished reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith, I thought that I would make a few remarks on some of what I found interesting. Now this is not going to be a review or in any way a comprehensive look at the book or its subject - well accept to say a lot of it especially the earlier chapters make a whole lot of sense. I do agree that the idea of faith itself (and hence most religious beliefs) do by there very nature promote the sorts of actions of terror we have seen unfortunately all too often.

Religion does not however have a monopoly on terrorism, it seems to arise any where that one group oppresses another, or struggles to have its voice heard (hence all the fuss about President Obama's links to terrorist, stemming from the violent side of the anti-Vietnam war movement.) Though that is not to say that Harris's thesis is incorrect, as any where religion is involved you do find the in-group/out-group behaviors emerging usually along with an easy rationale for hatred of, and justification of violence towards members of out-groups (To be fair to Harris he probably does mention this and I just don't remember it). And I certainly can't think of any in-group/out-group situation religion has made better.

One of the more stand out quotes from the book must actually go to Christopher Hitchens, and it is a quote of his that I hadn't heard before (and will have to put on my notable quotes over on the side bar) but sums up a lot of my positions, not only on religion but about skepticism in general:

What Can Be Asserted Without Evidence Can Be Dismissed Without Evidence.

Much of the second half of the book is about morals and ethics. One of the main factors of this section was a counter to what I have seen as a large claim by theists against atheist, that with out a god to direct us, carrot (heaven) and stick (hell), we are left to create our own morals and therefore everything is relative. Unlike the genetic advantage of altruism approach favoured by Richard Dawkins, Harris has decided instead to just blow relativism out of the water.

Essentially he makes the argument that relativism, or the idea that all worldviews are equally valid, means then that a worldview that some positions are true and others false must be valid, of course the consequence of that is that all worldviews cannot be valid.

Ok I am paraphrasing a bit but the idea behind it is that relativism is self contradictory, and as I stated above if all possible worldviews are equally valid then the worldview that there is an object reality which can confirm or falsify any position must also be valid, since it is by definition a subset of all the possible worldviews. However an objective reality which can falsify a worldview means that all worldviews cannot be equally valid and therefore relativism contradicts itself and cannot be correct. This all means that indeed there must be some method we can use to confirm or falsify our worldviews, which essentially means that there is an objective reality and when it comes to morals/ethics there must exist definite rights and wrongs.

The book finishes with a discussion about the need for spirituality, and I have heard many comments about how Harris sees this in a sense that is too religious and that it is a bit of a "sacred cow" for him. Harris does approach spirituality from an "eastern mystic" viewpoint and I think that is what leads to the issues that some people have. My view on this is one that spirituality, and a sense of awe that seems to go with it, is something that as humans we seem to be programmed for, and there is no reason one cannot find that internally as Harris suggests although I have my doubts that anything that comes from introspection and meditation must automatically relate to the world around us.

I find that nature and the universe itself is a great source of the sense of wonder and awe that many people turn to religion to find and perhaps if some of Hubble's (the Hubble space telescope) images were put into the mainstream media others may get a chance to see just how amazing the universe really is.

Government Funded Woo

2009-01-26T11:26:00.002+13:00

Here in New Zealand the ACC (Accident Compensation Corporation), which is the government funded accident compensation scheme providing 24-hour no-fault personal injury insurance cover (and yes I lifted that description off their webpage), has for a while now been funding certain "complimentary and alternative" treatments such as chiropractic, acupuncture and osteopathy.

However in The Press on Friday, we hear that the new Minister for ACC (who has been on the job for almost 6 weeks now despite our election happening after that of the US) will be reviewing this policy:

Spiralling public spending on complementary medicine will be reviewed amid concerns about the treatments, ACC Minister Nick Smith says.

The ACC spent $37 million on complementary and alternative medicine (Cam) in the 2007-2008 year up from $18.4 million in 2003-2004.

Smith said Cam expenditure had been growing significantly faster than other parts of accident compensation.

There were "legitimate questions" about the effectiveness of some alternative treatments, and the issue would be looked at as part of a broader ACC review, he said.

This was brought to my attention over the weekend via the NZ Skeptics group, along with the suggestion that we email the minister and show our support for this (and I suggest that any NZ readers here do the same, my email will be reprinted below the fold). I think this is certainly a cause for hope that reality may be setting in here, and at least some in the new government will be on our side, for example Dr Smith who is the ACC minister is also the Minister for Climate Change.

Dear Dr Smith

I wanted to thank you for initiating an investigation into the ACC funding of "CAM" treatments, many of which have been shown to have no medical validity.

I think that you should follow the position of the MoH, in that only those treatments which are shown to be effective should be funded.

Any treatment modality which can be shown to be effective under the standards used to judge modern medicine, is neither complimentary or alternative, it would simply be medicine, and as such your funding model should reflect this.

I feel that this investigation is a good thing for the country and I wish you all the best for it. A good resource to help sift the wheat from the chaff would be the excellent website http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/.

Thank you for your time

The Compassionate Thing To Do

2009-01-16T10:32:00.006+13:00

I have recently (Monday) had to deal with the loss of my parents dog (a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel). She has been getting progressively worse over the last month or so, and it looked like her kidneys were failing, so my parents faced the hard choice of what to do. As she was fairly old they in the end did the compassionate thing and had her put down.

It is really hard to have to let someone (and yes I consider a dog a someone) go, especially someone who was close to you and special, it leaves a hole inside you, and this is the second time in a few months that I have had to deal with this, with my father-in-law passing away from cancer in November. At the very least I can say that neither of them are suffering anymore. The long drawn out stages where the illness is taking over and body is on the decline is so hard to watch and must be hard to endure too.

What I find interesting is that although both were clearly suffering, the right thing to do for the dog is to have her put down, where as if one was to euthanize a person you would essentially be facing murder charges. Do we humans not get to die with dignity, where is the compassion in letting a terminally ill person suffer through the debilitating last stages of cancer (or any other disease)?

I will however point out that my father-in-law fought to stay alive for a long time after he was no longer able to be fed, in fact this in itself made things worse for the family (especially my wife who is the only girl among 4 brothers).

What I want to finish on is that if I was in that situation (which I hope to hold off for as long as I can, after all I am still planning on doing a lot of living), my body failing and the end near, I would like to go the way of the dog, with dignity and not suffering to the bitter end. I would like some one to show me the same compassion as my parents did to their dog. Not only that I would like someone to be allowed to show me that compassion.

Welcome to the year

2009-01-16T10:14:00.002+13:00

Well everyone welcome (belatedly) to 2009. I have been busy over the last couple of weeks, helping with our Summer School Astronomy course, it is quite fun to teach and we get a real mix of students (it is maths-lite and we have tried to market it arts students and the such). It does keep me very busy and while I am trying to be more active on the blog at the moment it may have to wait until after next weeks optics lab (the only real experimental science lab that we get them to do).

Still I will direct you to the first skeptics circle of the year for some good reading and if that is not enough you can check out the Carnival of the Godless from late last year that featured my Good for Goodness Sake post.

Good for Goodness sake

2008-12-15T20:05:00.004+13:00

I have just been catching up with some of last months Freethinker Sermonettes on the Effect Measure blog over at the borg-HQ.

One in particular talks about a series of ads the American Humanist Association has taken out on Washington, DC buses. The ads proclaim:

Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.

Not suprisingly christian groups in the US, are up in arms, crying foul and persecution at (as quoted in the Effect Measure blogpost)

the campaign's attempt to ban God and Christmas from the public square

Sorry say what, let me remind you that this is nothing more than the line from that famous of christmas carols Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

But that said sure we atheistic types can't have the chutzpah to suggest that Jesus is the reason for the season, but as is pointed out on the campaigns website people have been celebrating a midwinter festival since long before there were any christians and apparently Jeremiah 10:1-5 outlaws the whole idea of a christmas tree at all (damn those germans and their big forests of evergreens for introducing this tradition).

Of course we all know that the middle of winter is due to the axial tilt of the Earth and where that axis points as we orbit the sun. Which also makes all those traditions seem all the more ridiculous down here in the sunny southern hemisphere (ahem trying to ignore the fact that the cricket test was essentially washed out due to all the rain we have had over the last week).

So where does that leave our friendly neighbourhood christians and their celebration, well I say let them celebrate, why not. Of course given that Jesus, even if he did exist, almost certainly was not born in the middle of winter (after all who watches their flocks at night in winter). Well I dunno maybe just an excuse for a party?

xkcd

2008-11-26T20:00:00.004+13:00

XKCD does it again with another great one, if you don't follow this web comic well maybe it is time to start.

Of course like any good myth it has a basis in reality, however an extension cord is several orders of magnitude to small for Geomagnetically induced currents, such as have caused black outs such as the one in Quebec in 1989.

Skeptic 's circle turns 100

2008-11-21T14:07:00.002+13:00

The skeptic's circle has turned 100. Go and see the great collection of posts up at the fearless leader's blog.

Skepitics circle for you to read

2008-11-07T11:00:00.005+13:00

The good news for all you out there is not only is the free world free again (or at least will be in January) but there is a new edition of the skeptics circle for you reading pleasure this morning

Sophisticated Political Commentary of the Day

2008-11-04T13:51:00.002+13:00

This is worth a look at

Sophisticated Political Commentary of the Day

Posted using ShareThis

Time for a new skeptics circle

2008-10-24T11:30:00.003+13:00

The latest skeptics circle (the 97th) is up at hallq's uncredible blog.

I suggest that you go and read and enjoy. I know I will.

Out the airlock

2008-09-18T05:22:00.003+12:00

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for this interesting link, and note that I outlast him (though it is probably only because I am a young whipper snapper lol).

Not Vaccinating IS Child Abuse

2008-09-13T15:18:00.004+12:00

Not vaccinating, for anything other than medical reasons, is among the worst kind of child abuse, and not just of your own children.

There is a significant proportion of the population that cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons and these people require the benefits of herd immunity to protect them from the harms the rest of us are protected from by being vaccinated.

Now for those that don't know, herd immunity is when enough people (>95%) are vaccinated and there is no ability for the disease to have a reservoir in the population and hence infect people. If too many people do not vaccinate then diseases that can be avoided can become rampant in the community, e.g. the measles outbreaks in the UK in the last few years.

Edit: Oh and in case you missed it the point of this was to direct you to Mark Crislip's wonderful post at sciencebasedmedicine about exactly what we are vaccinating against.

What is wrong here?

2008-08-04T20:06:00.002+12:00

A london bus has this advert on its side. Can any one spot why it won't work.

Google is in on the Conspiracy

2008-08-01T11:23:00.003+12:00

Google seems to be in on the Apollo conspiracy as you can see in this video from youtube

It is funny, alas if only there weren't people out there who took it seriously.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for pointing this out

92nd Skeptics' Circle is up

2008-08-01T10:49:00.001+12:00

Wow and it is a good one, go over to Lay Science and enjoy the Ideology Olympics edition of the Skeptics circle.

Facts and opinions

2008-07-21T15:12:00.004+12:00

When reality is being gotten down here is a very pithy comeback:

You’re entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.

This was uttered by US Sen. Joe Biden to fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Meet The Press show, and thanks to Atheist Revolution for pointing it out.

Teach the Controversy

2008-07-18T13:30:00.002+12:00

Hmmm maybe we should be teaching the controversy, well you know if there was one.

'Big Science' is always suppressing The Truth with their blatant pro-evolution anti-wacko agenda: from the fact that UFOs built the pyramids to the reality of creationism and fact the universe is "Turtles All The Way Down". It is time to fight back and urge schools to Teach The Controversy with these intelligently designed t-shirts.

I want the Turtles one!

Thanks to Vicki Hyde of the NZ Skeptics for the link

new skeptics circle

2008-07-18T13:02:00.002+12:00

The latest edition of the skeptics circle is out and about at sorting out science, it all looks like some good reading, so I hope to see you there

Global Warming and the Sun

2008-07-17T15:31:00.003+12:00

Well there was an opinion piece in my local daily (well ok to be fair I don't know if it made the press version but it was front and centre on the webpage this morning) and it was about global warming, and while it was not outright denying it (nobody who is anybody does that any more not even George W. Bush) it takes a look at the solar influences and presents them as the dominant factor.

Before I say more about the article I would like to mention that one of my supervisors does research on Solar Flares and how they effect the atmosphere (in particular the ionosphere), and as solar flares are caused by sunspots, this leads to me have a pretty good idea of the solar cycle.

So when Professor Geoff Kearsley (of the Department of Media, Film and Communication, though to be fair according the article a geographer by training) claims that anthropocentric claims about climate change are "distorted by dogma" and the real driving forces such as the sun are being ignored. I want to scream and tear my hair out, both about those that claim the mantle of Climate skeptics (not so much driven by the article - but it is related) and about the relationship between temperature and solar activity (as defined in the usual way by sunspot number).

I will address the skeptics point first - anyone who claims to be a skeptic of something just because they disagree with it is should really be named as what they are contrarian. I suppose a lot of the general public get the wrong idea when all the media does with respect to skeptics is give them a brief quote anti to any of the journalists favourite quackery - such as psychics.

But a skeptic is one who looks at the evidence for any phenomena (and the quality of evidence which is very important) before making up his mind. So if there was concrete evidence for psychics, or for homeopathy, or what ever then the skeptics would be behind such things rather than against them.

As such I will proudly call my self a climate skeptic despite the fact that I am completely swayed by the facts that it is a man-made phenomenon. That is right I just said that we are causing climate change.

And my response to the good professor is has he seen the image at the top of this post. Ok it is old data now (from an article in 2004 - which should be available here but you will need a subscription - if you are desperate to see a copy just ask), but the point it makes (and I apologise if it may be a bit hard to make out some of it this was pinched out of one of my supervisors presentations and I will try and extract it anew from the original) is the the global temperature in recent times (the green and blue lines and the plot is over the last 300 years) follows reasonably (although with a little lag) the red line which is the smoothed trend for sunspot cycle length (orange line) up until approximately the 1950s at which point the temperature leaves the cycle of sunspots behind and increases.

This would tend to indicate that even if more recent data might show a slight dip in the trend in the past couple of years, that there has been a shift in the global temperature response to the solar cycle. More recent data may show (and I haven't seen any) a change in the trend but that does not deny the massive change in temperature compared to solar cycle activity that has occurred in the last 50 years, the point of this being if this abnormally long solar cycle (which has officially ended now) is visible in the temperature trend it is unlikely to have had a big effect as it would have without the effect of the industrialization of our planet.

Sugar in the Morning

2008-06-18T13:35:00.002+12:00

I've never really been a big fan of the whole artificial sweetner thing. And now it seems as if replacing the sugar in your diet can be a bad thing.

A study by Purdue University researchers that came out in February links artificial sweetners to weight gain.

Why would a sugar substitute backfire? Swithers and Davidson wrote that sweet foods provide a “salient orosensory stimulus” that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn’t followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.

Now to be fair this research was done on rats, and not humans but as Cliff Mintz of BioJobBlog notes

Although this study was conducted in rats, its findings are consistent with the observations that increased use of artificial sweeteners can contribute to human weight gain.

As always more study is going to be needed on this and in particular human studies, so time will tell.

Thanks to Science to Life for the hot tip

Its about time

2008-06-04T13:22:00.003+12:00

It appears that Obama has finally beaten Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Why on Earth did this process take so bloody long, why can't all those little states get their acts together and vote over a time period that isn't 6 months.

Seriously they could do it all on one day (as we will see in November) but if they want to take a bit of time, why not 1 - 2 weeks, surely with all the campaigning that happened before the the first of the primaries would that not be enough time to shake some hands and kiss some babies? Or if you are a republican shake some babies and kiss some hands.

Dirty Limericks and Skeptics

2008-05-23T11:50:00.002+12:00

Well I'll be that sounds like just the best combination ever and it can be found in the 87th skeptics circle of at Action Skeptics, go and enjoy if you dare.

The latest skeptic's circle

2008-04-11T11:36:00.001+12:00

The latest edition of the skeptics circle is up Archaeoporn, read and enjoy.

A few things to think about

2008-04-02T14:46:00.003+13:00

Well courtesy of the Scienceblogs weekly round up email I found several posts that I just had to share with you all.

Firstly Living the Scientific Life gives reason why more science education (especially biology in this case) is needed.

Secondly Pharyngula highlights possible the best comeback to a creationist statement ever! (from Mike the Mad Biologist).

And finally again from Pharyngula something that just has to be watched.

Enjoy and stay tuned for when I actually get back to blogging again lol.

New skeptics circle is up

2008-03-14T15:44:00.002+13:00

Well here is most recent skeptics circle hosted by Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes. Read and enjoy

Love is in the air at the skeptics circle

2008-02-15T10:05:00.002+13:00

Well at least the Valentine's Day edition of the skeptic's circle is out at Bug Girls Blog.

Check it out as usual the quality is good and the quackery is busted.

Homeopathy the way it should be sold

2008-02-08T13:40:00.000+13:00

Here is a site that sells homeopathy the way it should be sold with plenty of disclaimers as to the actuall effects and lots of winks and nods to the placebo effect. Now if only I had thought of it sooner.

Diet Water

2008-02-08T13:34:00.000+13:00

Hmmm well i guess someone had to try and sell it after all people will buy anything it seems

http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=23701

Science Based Medicine

2008-01-04T18:00:00.000+13:00

Orac has kindly made us aware of a great new group blog looking at Science-Based Medicine.

As he succinctly puts it:

It's a new year, a year that I, as an advocate of science- and evidence-based medicine hope will be less filled with dubious claims and quackery than last year. (I'm ever the optimist.) To that end, Steve Novella has asked me to announce a new blog to the Skeptics' Circle mailing list as well as to bloggers who are alarmed by the proliferation of non-evidence-based medicine. It is a blog that many of you, I hope, will be interested in and find to be of value in the never-ending battle against woo.

I hope you join with me in enjoying what the big guns of the medical/skeptical blogosphere have to teach/share with us.

First up is a great article on the false dichotomy between herbs and drugs, or to put it another way Herbs = Drugs, so why should they be treated differently?

Oh and on a similar note the latestest skeptics circles is up at Whitecoatunderground.

Compliments of the Season

2007-12-28T14:10:00.000+13:00

Well I hope every one is enjoying the holiday season. For once our summer is actually being summer and it was nice to have a lot of sun on the solstice (our wedding anniversary - 3 years), of course it helps to be in the southern hemisphere. Though I must admit the December is usually out wettest month and there is now some concern for lack of water for the rest of the summer and into early autumn (ie March) which is our period of usually good weather.

Two thoughts I wanted to leave you with prompted mainly by the season:

Why oh why would shepherds be out in the fields tending their flocks in the middle of winter?
Do nun's habits remind anyone else of a Burkha?

Giving Thanks

2007-11-28T16:01:00.000+13:00

In the spirit of the US holiday of thanksgiving that occurred so recently (Ok it was a week ago now almost), and that I got a chance to participate in due to a friend of ours from the states hosting a thanksgiving dinner, I would like to post some thoughts I had about the general tradition of giving thanks before meals (rather than the tradition specific to this holiday).

Yes I have some thoughts about saying grace before meal.

It is supposed to be sauying thanks for the food that we are about to receive but how inconsiderate is it to not give thanks to the people who actually provided the food the farmers who grew it, those invovled in the processing of it (ie bakers butchers etc) and possibly most importantly in our consumer age the person who earned the money to buy it. (ok I could really get pedantic and talk about the ancients who domesticated the crops and cattle - by genetic modification through cross breading and artificial selecttion but then that really should be a subject for its own whole history of science post).

How arogant is it to ignore all the effort that goes into the food we eat and give thanks only to god.

If you take the farmer or the baker out of the equation it pretty much falls over for most people in this day and age so it is to them that the bulk of thanks should go.

How to...prevent the prevention of cancer

2007-11-05T16:08:00.000+13:00

Well you may have heard the word about the 'tubes' several months ago about a vaccine for Human papillomavirus (HPV) and how this will lead to a reduction in cases of cervical cancer.

Well it has been recently announced here that the government intends to fund it for preteens (I remember hearing 12 year olds mentioned on the radio this morning- have not been able to find much recent information on the web to follow up this). Religious groups (mostly with "family" in the name) are up in arms about this since HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and so promotion of this vaccine, is seen (by them) as a free pass for young girls to have sex.

Mostly this ranting by religious groups is done in relation with the promotion of abstinence only sex education which has been shown in studies to not work. So unsuccessful is the idea of abstinence only sex education, that some regions have experience higher STI rates, higher teen pregnancy rates (and abortions), and most importantly lower ages of first sexual experience.

Even if the abstinence only education programs worked, that would still not be a reason for the fallacious argument being made here. Unfortunately whatever you do teens will have sex mostly when they want to rather than when you want them to, largely because they are trying to be adult and have some control over their own lives. A lot of young teens will regret experiences that that try, such as having sex, but for them to have to deal with cancer as a possible repercussion of that, when they can be protected against it, is cruel and unusual.

Now I am in agreement that young teens are not ready to have sex (in fact some older teens aren't either) it is a complex mental and emotional development issue which tends to run contrary to the physical development and urges of puberty. But what is the best way to get some one to do something - forbid them to do it, and then provide no further information.

If you are going to teach adolescents responsibility you have to give them all the information about it and let them be responsible. Teach them about safe sex practices, and tell them about the consequences and counsel them so that they know when they are ready.

So whatever high horse the religious groups are on they should get off it before they fall. Of course this would not have been a problem in the days when girls where married off at 13 (or younger), no need to worry about premarital sex then.

My favourite holiday

2007-11-05T15:55:00.000+13:00

Well this one I did mean to have up last week but well things happen. So I wanted to just pass on a happy Halloween to all out there.

It is my favourite holiday, mainly because it is one that the christians can actually claim most of the credit for unlike christmas and easter where they just stuck there own ideas over pre-existing events (winter solstice and spring equinox - to give them the northern hemisphere names) and yes I know Halloween is near the autumnal equinox, but what I am trying to get at is that despite many christian churches trying to dismiss the ghosts and ghouls these are the christian creations (actually to be fair to christmas so is santa).

Halloween is the night before All Saints day and the day after that is All Souls day, so it was customary to think that the spirits of the dead in particular the saints (those who are hallowed) to be active. So don't any christian tell you anything about Halloween and worship satan or witches, this one is all theirs.

My son has a doppelganger

2007-10-05T17:15:00.001+13:00

Either that or they got him to act in it with out my premission. Must ask his grandfather if he taught him to drive his Hyundai?

And yes I should have put this text in to explain why I posted the video somepoint closer to the time when I originally posted it.

Skeptic's Circle

2007-09-28T16:16:00.000+12:00

Well, it has been a while since I really had a chance to get on and blog about stuff but I do have several ideas/posts in the works but for now you will have to be content with the latest, and very funny, edition of the Skeptic's circle, oh and it looks like there are some good submissions too.

On a similar subject other carnivals that I should pay attention exist as well and I do hope to be getting involved with when I get back on my horse again as far as keeping this thing running but for now enjoy the latest tangled bank as well for the bio-y side of science.

Contradiction in Terms

2007-09-10T16:39:00.001+12:00

Low Calorie Energy Drinks. Such as Tab.

C'mon.... Seriously.... Are you kidding me?

How can an energy drink be low calorie?

OK we ALL know that they are stimulant drinks. Maybe something should be done about the false advertising.

Bad Medicine and Microwaves

2007-08-29T10:58:00.000+12:00

I have just finished reading Christopher Wanjek's Bad Medicine, a book that in my opinion everyone on the planet should read. It is thoroughly well written and well set out with easy to understand debunking of most health fallacies.

However a review of the book is not my main reason for this post. One of the topics covered was radiation and the worry people have of microwaves. Chris covers the topic well but I realised something rather ironic when I read this section and that is: Infra-red (IR) radiation has a higher frequency than microwaves so standing in front of the stove while cooking is more likely to cause cancer than the the microwave.

For the physics of it all, electromagnetic radiation (light, UV, IR, microwaves, gamma rays, x rays and radio waves) interacts with matter as a photon. The energy of a photon is determined by the frequency of the radiation.

There is a cutoff in energy level for a photon to remove an electron from an atom (called the photoelectric effect), and this is required for their to be any harm (esp. to DNA) other wise the only effect is heating (which is short term and goes away as soon as you remove the source of radiation i.e. cell phone).

Now the cutoff frequencies for this is in the spectrum of visible light, so anything with a lower frequency (IR, microwaves, radio waves)than this is not going to do any lasting damage (like cause cancer).

So to reiterate, although neither is going to cause cancer, IR radiation from your stove top is more dangerous than your microwave.

Well Since My Baby Left Me

2007-08-16T14:55:00.000+12:00

I found a new place to dwell
Down at the end of lonely st
Heartbreak Hotel.

The King IS Dead. Long Live the King

Thank you, Thank you very much, You're beautiful.

PS Today is the anniversary of the passing of Elvis Presley.

It's another Boy

2007-07-22T09:07:00.000+12:00

Well my family seems to be expanding at a rapid rate with nieces and nephews coming from all over. But this time it was our turn.

Yep that is right our second child was born at 8.20 pm yesterday (Saturday) and no he will not in any way be named for the Harry Potter book that came out the same day.

I had better get back to hospital and spend some time with Mother and baby but you never know I might even get some photos up in the next few days.

(Update 16/08: For those of you interested in names we went with Quinn - it means the wise in Celtic - and no we did not take this long to decide just to post the update)

The Skeptics' Circle

2007-07-22T08:59:00.000+12:00

Well the latest edition of the Skeptics' Circle is up at NeuroLogica Blog. It is the 65^th edition and is an exciting trip to the Museum of Skepticism where you can see exhibits on cranks and crackpots of all shapes, sizes and colours and of course how to see the reality of it all. Well worth the trip, especially since admission is free.

If I were American

2007-07-16T16:01:00.000+12:00

I saw this on The Greenbelt and decided that it would be fun just to see roughly whose policies are in line with my own. Now since I am not a US citizen this is rather pointless, and of course I have never heard of about half of them (and some of the rest by name only) but I am not too surprised at some of the names at the top and the bottom of the list.

Thank you for visiting this Selector.
For more information on this selector and your results, go to 2008 President Selector

Rankings:
Theoretical Ideal Candidate (100 %)
Dennis Kucinich (85 %)
Barack Obama (81 %)
Alan Augustson (campaign suspended) (75 %)
Joseph Biden (75 %)
Christopher Dodd (74 %)
Hillary Clinton (74 %)
Al Gore (not announced) (71 %)
Wesley Clark (not announced) (70 %)
Michael Bloomberg (not announced) (69 %)
John Edwards (67 %)
Mike Gravel (not announced) (65 %)
Bill Richardson (62 %)
Kent McManigal (campaign suspended) (55 %)
Ron Paul (53 %)
Elaine Brown (38 %)
Rudolph Giuliani (28 %)
John McCain (25 %)
Mitt Romney (24 %)
Mike Huckabee (23 %)
Chuck Hagel (not announced) (19 %)
Tommy Thompson (17 %)
Newt Gingrich (not announced) (15 %)
Fred Thompson (not announced) (14 %)
Tom Tancredo (14 %)
Jim Gilmore (withdrawn) (11 %)
Sam Brownback (10 %)
Duncan Hunter (3 %)

And all that with no real science questions asked, despite the fact that that would be one of my big priorities.

Where do Stem Cells come from

2007-07-06T12:40:00.000+12:00

A lot of the debate about the use of Embryonic Stem cells (ESC) in research comes from objections that are based about the murder of all those babies to get the ESC. You know the sort of thing where on The Simpsons, Mrs Lovejoy comes along and cries out "oh won't somebody please think of the children".

However this is a very unrealistic point. As anyone who has ever been a parent will know, how and when you find out you are going to be a parent is quite variable. Normally the first signs are morning sickness, or extreme tiredness, but neither of these are themselves a reliable test that you are pregnant. So how do we confirm pregnancy? Usually it involves a take-home pregnancy kit, some urine and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

Well now that we know that what does it actually mean. hCG is produced during pregnancy to fulfill some role (that is unimportant to this discusion but can be found at the link above), and so once you are pregnant this hormone starts to be produced (by the embryo/placenta), and it takes some time for the levels to build up such that it is excreted from the mother's body.

For the test to be accurate you want it to cut down on the false readings. The way this is dealt with is by having a threshold concentration for the hCG, this at least cuts down on the false positives (where the test reads positive when you are not pregnant). However because it takes time for that concentration to build up it is possible to get false negatives (where the test reads negative when you are pregnant).

An example of this was with our first child, my wife got pregnant just before I left for Europe for a conference. Now she had her best friend's hens night several days after I left she was worried that she might be pregnant and didn't want to drink if she was. So she took the test and it came back negative. A week or so later the tiredness really kicked in and she went to the doctor and took another test there, it came back negative. Only another week of so later when the morning sickness was started up did a test finally come back positive (note that the timing of the morning sickness and the positive test are incidental).

So in this case my wife was pregnant for three weeks before actually knowing for sure that she was pregnant.

This delay is long enough such that the harvesting of ESC from a mother is not really an option.

So if this is not an option what is? Well as I see it there are two options either we specifically create embryos to take the stem cells from or we make use of the vast numbers of spare embryos that as we speak are sitting in freezers in IVF clinics all around the world. Spares that will most certainly never be anything more than they are now.

In fact since storage capabilities of any organistion are finite then eventually many of these will be destroyed. They clearly are surpluss to the parents IVF requirements and are unlikely to all be adopted. Since they can't be kept forever they will end up being destroyed, but why then can't they be put to a good cause, that of research in to finding cures to many debilitating diseases and conditions.

8 Random Facts

2007-07-02T15:46:00.000+12:00

Well this meme about 8 random facts has been doing the rounds and suprisingly enough I have been tagged (thanks to Ken at Open Parachute).

All right, here are the rules.

We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Ok so those are the rules to live by and here are the facts.

I have lived in Dunedin all my life. But have been fortunate enough to travel to many other places.
I like to write, although this is the most of my public output thus far.
I am keen on photography and have won an online photo competition. (one day I may even upload the photo).
I am married with a two year old boy and another on the way (due end of this month)
Both my wife's family and my own consist mainly of boys (I have one brother and she 4 - neither of us have any sisters).
The next generation has 4 boys and 2 girls (with one boy due this month and an as yet unknown for December).
I had 13 years of Catholic education and logically I became an atheist.
I have been working on my PhD for 5 years now and I just want it to be finished.

Alright and now for people to tag hmmmm, actually I am goona cheat (but only cause the pooflinger cheated first) and I am going to tag anyone who reads this blog that has not done it yet and you have to leave a comment here saying that you did it.

BZP and party pills

2007-06-29T14:40:00.000+12:00

In an article in the local paper (the Otago Daily Times - note that link is probably only good for a day or so) raises some interesting oppostion to legislation that proposes to ban party pills that contain BZP.

THE party-pill ingredient BZP will be forced underground following the Government’s decision to make it illegal, a Dunedin party-pill seller says.

Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton announced yesterday BZP would be reclassified as a Class C1 drug, making its sale and manufacture illegal. He hoped the legislation could be passed by the end of the year.

Surprisingly enough the move was condemned by the industry which makes and sells them and welcomed by critics (and one must assume Emergency department staff).

But maybe that Dunedin retailer (John Cockburn, owner of South Dunedin BZP retail outlet Herbal Heaven) might also have an ulterior motive

A ban would put him out of business, because he only sold BZP related products,he said.

Hmmmm, maybe he should be selling something other this, which is as herbal as drain cleaner, to kids who want a high.

His decision to recommend a ban to Cabinet was based on research, analysis of submissions and advice from experts and Government agencies. There would be a six-month amnesty for possession of less than 5g of the drug for personal use after the ban came into effect.

That sounds like a reasonable and well thought out action on the part of the minister.

However the comments of the reaction from some of the other points of view quite interesting.
First we have one of the more extremist parties in Parliament:

Green Party drug law reform spokeswoman Metiria Turei said the party was disappointed by the move, but pleased the Government had chosen to make the changes using the full legislative process, rather than by resolution, so the decision was open to full public and parliamentary scrutiny and debate.

Well at least they are all for the process. This guy sounds like he is from an industry lobby group:

Social Tonics Association of New Zealand (Stanz) chairman Matt Bowden said prohibition was not the right way to minimise BZP harm.

‘‘P is prohibited and look at the problems there,’’ Mr Bowden said.

The right answer was regulation, a power Mr Anderton had under the Misuse of Drugs Act, he said.

The main opposition in Parliament clearly have their head screwed on as to this issue but still manage to get a jibe at the government

National Party Otago MP Jacqui Dean said the process had taken too long, but she welcomed the move.

And more importantly from the people who have been studying the issue:

Meanwhile, a doctor who led a major study of party pill use said yesterday’s decision was ‘‘a tough call’’ but on balance was probably the right one.

Dr Chris Wilkins, from Massey’s Centre for Social and Health Outcomes, said there had been no research on the longterm effects of BZP or the role it might play in psychological illness.

‘‘Consequently, there was a strong case for stricter regulation of the use and sale of party pills and on balance a ban appears to be the low-risk decision,’’ he said.

Surely there have to be more fun things for today's youth to do than this. Although just thinking that last statement made me feel very much older than 27.

Lightning and Hurricanes

2007-06-27T04:13:00.000+12:00

I found this recent paper by a couple of Israelis that I have had the pleasure of meeting, and that our group has had some ties with. They have come up with an interesting correlation between lightning activity in the East African sector and Atlantic Basin hurricanes. Hopefully the abstract at least should be viewable to the general public at the link. But the crux of the idea is that:

In this paper we provide evidence showing the connection between lightning activity over eastern Africa, and the AEWs that leave the west coast of Africa, some of which develop into hurricanes. We have analyzed the 2005 and 2006 hurricane seasons, one a very active hurricane year (2005), and the other a very quiet year (2006). More than 90% of the tropical storms and hurricanes during these 2 years were preceded by periods of above average thunderstorm activity in eastern Africa.

Before we go to much further we need to define a few things. AEWs are African Easterly Waves, disturbances in the African Easterly Jet a (high altitude?) wind that forms a the region of strongest gradient of the temperature gradient between the relatively cool equatorial Africa (due to the Guinean coast) and the hot hot air above the Sahara - this is the reverse of the usual gradient where it is warmer at the equator than either side.

It appears that ~60 of these AEWs can form in a year mainly in the months of April - November, and they travel west across Africa (in a matter of a few days to a week) and then move out into the Atlantic ocean where they may or may not form Tropical Depressions, Storms or Hurricanes. There appears to be no correlation between number of AEWs and the number of Hurricanes although some 60% of minor Hurricanes and Tropical Storms and 85% of major Hurricanes can be traced back to AEWs.

Now the central African region is the global hot spot for lightning with a rate of over 50 flashes per square km per year. The lightning flash rate here is higher than any where else on the planet, though lightning is a very seasonal and time of day dependant. Lightning seems to prefer the late afternoon-early evening sector so at varying times of the day it will peak in different longitude sectors. Surprisingly enough lighting is more common in summer than winter. Which naturally fits with our increased AEW occurrence in this time period.

The AEWs are associated with deep convection and intense thunderstorms over tropical Africa... One of the key questions relating to these tropical waves is whether the waves trigger the convection, or whether the convection triggers the waves... We investigate whether the intensity of the convection, measured by lightning activity, is related to the AEW intensification.

So we have pressure instabilities that are related to strong lightning activity that originate in East Africa (in the paper they specifically look at 10–20 N and 30–40 E, in the region of the Ethiopian Highlands), and propagate across the continent and out into the atlantic where these drops in pressure can sometimes become hurricanes.

Now to get the local lightning rates for this region you can either stand there and count or you can make use of a network set up to detect lightning. That is all well and good if you are in a developed country which has one of these. Most lightning detection networks are extremely localised and need many stations to cover any decent sized area - mainly because of the frequency range that they use to detect the lightning (MF - 300kHz to 3MHz). Now if you use a much lower frequency range (VLF 3 - 30 kHz) it turns out that the absorption of the wave is less and hence you can see the waves at a much greater distance.

So using this long distance propagation and a few other nifty tricks, a former Professor here at Otago Prof Richard Dowden set up a company (LF*EM Research Ltd) and a World Wide Lightning Location Network (or WWLLN - pronounced "woolen" as wool from a sheep). Because the VLF part of the signal from the lightning travels much further then you need a much lesser density of stations. In fact there in the WWLLN there are currently about 30 stations, (we host one here in Dunedin) and this covers the whole globe since we are able to see the signals of lightning strikes happening many thousands of kilometers away.

This network is far from perfect, it requires at least four stations to register the signal from a lightning strike and then the timing of the reception must be with certain limits (other wise you cannot be sure that the stations are all looking at the same flash) or the network will not register the lightning. So this means you have a trade off between number of "legitimate" detections and the accuracy of these detections but then I imagine that is true of any similar system. So this tends to mean that the detection efficiency (number of "legitimate" detections versus total lightning) is lower than one would like, however those detections are favoured to more intense lightning strikes - since these are the ones more likely to be detected at more stations, as they radiate more power and the signals are likely to be observed further away.

So this is the technique that the authors used to look for lightning (they host a station in Tel Aviv and as such have acces to the full data set rather than just the summary on the web). But I think that the interesting issue here is the one that they clearly are not getting all the lightning happening in the region buit we are reasonably confident that they are getting the locations of all the storms and most of the stronger lightning. The authors certainly see a link between the strong lightning, and the AEWs and hurricanes, but I don't think that this could ever be a forecasting tool for hurricanes.

Religious Freedoms

2007-06-27T03:18:00.000+12:00

Two items from Bob Park's What's New newsletter both of which deal with religion or at least the religious imposing their ideas on every one else.

STEM CELLS: BUSH DECLARES "ALL HUMAN LIFE IS SACRED."
Peace activists say the same thing. The President said this while issuing his second-annual summer-solstice-veto of legislation to lift his ban on embryonic stem cell research. He said that the United States is "founded on the principle that all human life is sacred" – unless you’re in Iraq, where 80 American lives have been sacrificed so far this month. I couldn’t find such a principle in the Constitution; instead I found the First Amendment. By imposing his bizarre religious belief that embryonic stem cells are people on the rest of us, the President has violated the constitutional rights of every living, breathing American.

POPULATION: HOUSE REVERSES BAN ON CONTRACEPTION AID.
Before you applaud, it faces a veto, and there are not enough votes for an override. The ban is a key element of Bush foreign policy, though why the U.S. opposes birth control in other countries is beyond comprehension. Uncontrolled population growth will, in time, overtake every advance in human condition.

But of course you might say that these are Bush's policies and he has every right to act on them. However even the religious among us can see that these policies are grounded in his religion.

And hopefully everyone should understand that having someones will imposed upon then especially when it comes to religion is outlawed by among other things the first amendment to the constitution of the USA and Article 18 of the Universal declaration of Human Rights.

I am not claiming that Bush is not allowed to have his beliefs but what he is not allowed to do is to force others to have those beliefs too.

More terror

2007-06-26T16:15:00.000+12:00

Which religion promotes terrorism again?

The Ridger over at the Green Belt points out that a group in Milwaukee are holding up terrorists as heros.

Read the post and the links that she provides, and then hope maybe that this one makes the list for Bush's "War on Terror".

What is the USA coming too. Some one please tell me that this is not what Christianity in America is all about. And once you have done that go and tell these guys that too.

Positive News

2007-06-21T16:21:00.000+12:00

Just wanted to say that we had good news yesterday. It would seem that my father-in-law's cancer has gone into remission, the doc couldn't be completely sure from the scan (there is some scar tissue that they are not 100% about) but so far so good, he will have another scan in 6 months and regular blood tests between now and then, so heres hoping that it all comes out clear.

Skeptic's Circle the Solstice Edition

2007-06-21T15:45:00.000+12:00

Welcome to the 63^rd edition of the Skeptics' Circle, celebrating today's Solstice (June 21 2007 18:06 GMT).

Now if you are in the Northern hemisphere this will be the longest edition of the skeptics' circle and conversely if you are in the Southern hemisphere it will be the shortest.

And now you may want to know how I am going to do this... well the answer is I'm not after all today is still 24 hours long regardless of where you are on the planet and so this edition of the skeptics' circle will be the same length for all.

That and the fact that my lack of ability to come up with anything better leads us straight to the meat of this last fortnight's skeptical round up in no particular order with the exception of the first.

Infophile has a good post, explaining part of what it means to be a skeptic, that really should be a must read for everyone (not just us skeptics).

The Discovery Institutes latest and greatest Dr Egnor continues to offer his ignorance on plate for the rest of us and his recent ideas about dualism (mind/brain) have provided much fodder. PZ of Pharyngula, Blake Stacey of Sunclipse and Orac of Respectful Insolence all take him to task for this.

The Hoofnagle brothers at Denialism has a good couple of posts, on the dangers of unrestricted advertising and how to be a crank

And now for a nice relaxing break a look at some good old fashioned (or not so old fashioned as the case may be) quackery, thanks to Tara of Aetiology, Andrea's Buzzing About, and Orac of Respectful Insolence.

Away from the Bench has a brief look at what went on at DC's Improbable science and DC himself tells how the saga has been some what resolved.

We will follow this up with Aurora Walking Vacation's little illustration of eggs and bad science, Infophile showing the absence of evidence can be evidence of absense and Prof. Bleen tells of the Peer review process at the IJCR

The old adage is that you are what you eat, however Junkfood science explains just what food processing is before illustrating that the point that if you are going to study what is in the food and what it does to the body it might pay to put it in the body (or at least a part of it). On a similar topic the Holford watch shares us the tale of quack being put to the sword on live tv, heck you can even watch the video.

And to finish up where would us loyal skeptics be with such classic targets as UFOs, Creationism and the autism mercury link for us to rant against.

I want to thank everyone who submitted posts for this, I just couldn't include everyone but they were all great posts.

And for all of you who stopped by please do follow all the links, they are great examples of what we want to see more of in this world.

Well that is all from me for this round of the skeptics' circle...
but never fear for it won't be long 'til we next appear...

In fact I hope to see you all at The Skeptical Alchemist in two weeks time for the 64rd Skeptics' Circle on July 5.

Any and all feedback is welcome so that I at least know that you are reading this. You never know, if you don't tell me how bad this is I might have to host it again.

More bad news for Pluto

2007-06-15T14:06:00.000+12:00

The Bad Astronomer has a post up about new measurements on the size of Eris. Remember Eris it is the one that started out as Xena and caused the demotion of Pluto. Any way it turns out that Eris is a bit bigger than Pluto so there is no way we can ever have 9 planets again.

Call it a planet if you want. It doesn’t matter that much to me — and less to Pluto itself — but you’ll be doing the object, and yourself, a disservice. And Eris is bigger anyway. Nyah nyah.

The Circle is Coming to Town

2007-06-13T13:47:00.000+12:00

Step right up folks and share the wonders of the skeptical world.

That's right next week I will be hosting the fortnightly blog carnival Skeptic's Circle (I am of the belief that this will be the 63rd edition).

So if you have something that you would like to be considered for this carnival email me before next Wednesday.

rmcsquared at gmail dot com

Since I am on the other side of the planet than most of the bloggers (I am in New Zealand!!) who will be submitting here I really actually mean before next Wednesday (which will be my Thursday). My aim is to have the circle up early afternoon my time (which will be early morning on Thursday GMT - late evening Wednesday for those in the States)

I look forward to what everyone has to offer.

Robert

PS My apologies for not having this info up earlier.

Charity for the religious

2007-05-30T16:24:00.001+12:00

New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists put out a press release in the last week (Thanks to Des of the New Zealand Brights Local Constituency for alerting me to it) disucssing the recent budget's removal of the tax rebate cap for charitable donations.

The issue is not one of charitable donations are bad as of course they are not but rather that the standards for what makes a charity are somewhat interesting. Here is what Elizabeth McKenzie, President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists had to say:

[W]e support any measure that sees more money being passed into the hands of genuine charitable organisations that provide a tangible benefit for society. However we are concerned that an archaic definition in New Zealand’s charity legislation means that the promotion of religion alone is regarded as a charitable activity.

So the issue is what makes something charitable. It turns out that in New Zealand being a church is enough. All you need to do is ave the intent of spreading your religion.

However there is an ugly side to that in that Des reports that an attempt to create a Humanist trust, he was not allowed to have part of the trusts mission being to promote humanism.

Hmmm that smacks of a double standard, but I will be looking further into this as I find the time.

A household of three

2007-05-24T15:40:00.000+12:00

I heard on the an ad for the current affairs program Close Up last night, that they were interviewing the "Lion Man" who has been charged with assaulting his partner (and yes she is a woman) who he found in a ménage et trois [sic]. Now if you have any knowledge of french you will know that the phrase is ménage à trois, but the presenter clearly pronounced it with a short "e" sound rather than the short "a" sound that it is supposed to be. (OK here feel free to have a go at me for not using the correct phonetic letters to describe the sounds - but that is just not my thing, at least I have better things to do today than teach my self them.)

This of course like most good mispronunciations, totally changes the meaning of the phrase. So instead of the intended "household of three" (literally) it became "household and three" which a child can see is quite meaningless.

How can someone who is supposed to be one of the countries best TV presenters be so clueless or careless about pronunciation. Especially since this sets an example to people for how they are supposed to talk, or at least say words and phrases that are not natural to them

So what should be done about this? Maybe we should institute lessons in elocution and the "Queen's English" for all TV and radio presenters. Though I doubt that will really prevent the slide into laziness that the English language is currently taking.

Friday's Physical Law - Mexican Wave

2007-05-18T16:35:00.000+12:00

Last time we mentioned that one simple harmonic oscillator (SHO) couple to another SHO can have interesting effects. In fact when you have one SHO coupled to another SHO coupled to another SHO... you get a oscillation that varies not only in time but also in space and what we have is a wave.

Yes you can think of it just like the Mexican wave at you favourite sporting event (ok now that is an interesting thought - can anyone tell me where that name comes from?) first one person stands up and then the next and so on. The main difference between coupled SHO and drunk sports fans is that with sports fans you get a single pulse travelling around the ground (or very occasionally two pulses), but with the coupled SHOs each one continues to oscillate so you get a series of pulses following (often quite rapidly) one after the other.

So what exactly is meant when I say the oscillations varies in time and space. We know from last time how the SHOs vary with time, and that is carried through to the behavior of waves. We see each individual point oscillating with the same equations for position and velocity and acceleration. The variation in space can be described in a very similar way, as a cos or sin function varying with respect to position rather than time. Obviously the angular frequency term of the time variation is also replaced by a term that is related to how the wave repeats in distance, this is sometimes know as the wave vector (k). Remember:

ω = 2π/T

well similarly

k = 2π/λ

where λ is the wavelength of the wave and is the distance over which the oscillation repeats, much like T is time in which the oscillation repeats.

But what exactly are the oscillators that we are talking about, well these can be almost anything, ok not anything but waves happen in lots of different materials. The obvious examples of waves is those on water, but almost all musical instruments make sounds with waves and then there are earthquakes and electromagnetic radiation and ...

Stay tuned for more exciting developments next time

The Phoenix rises

2007-05-07T14:15:00.000+12:00

I think we have a winner for the most appropriate (and quite cool) name for a professional sports franchise.

And no it isn't the Dallas Mavericks rotflmao.

The new New Zealand side in the Australian soccer competition, which will be the third attempt at having a team in the competition.

Of course being such a small country the resources, particularly for what is a minor sport here, are scarce and so this effort at entering a team very nearly didn't get airborne either.

But the Wellington Phoenix rises.

Domestication

2007-05-04T16:50:00.000+12:00

Wow you know what this has taken me so long to get around to finish off but finally I have it here for your viewing pleasure.

The three main early breakthroughs in the history of mankind have to be the domestication of crops, of cattle, and of fire. All of these can be thought of as major scientific sdvances (and in some cases we are still trying to work out how to improve on what we did at this stage of history) even if the scientific method was not really used.

There is evidence that Homo erectus was controlling fire up to a million years ago. Fire is important as it will have helped with lessening cases of food poisoning and improved the taste particularly of meat, both achieved by cooking the food. It also provided a means for defense, enabling the users to see in the dark and also as a scare for predators (most animals are afraid of fire). Later on as agriculture developed fire was an important tool in clearing land for growing crops.

Early man was a hunter-gatherer, this meant that he had to spend much of his time chasing animals and/or looking for edible plants/leaves/berries. Gradually the hunt became easier to follow the herds of prey animals and from there it was a simple step to instead of trying to follow, to lead the animals (at this point it is probable that man also began the domestication of the dog to help in this herding – although this may have been already started as part of the hunting – certainly this was something that dogs would have been selected for cf modern huntaways and such). And once you have control over the herd, it follows that you will ensure that the feeding and breeding of the herd is to your satisfaction. Selective breeding begins to create differences between the wild herds and the controlled herds. which we can see and indeed continue today with our domestic cattle.

So with the herding of “cattle” we loose the hunt part of hunter-gatherer but still we must maintain a nomadic lifestyle since we still need the gathering and now also we must find grasses for the cattle. This leads to the idea of growing your own. But the largest problem to that is that the feed for the cattle is different to the feed for humans, and indeed most often are found to be in different locations in nature.

The start of agriculture is a big step as it requires not only the finding/cross-breeding of the right types of plants to provide sustenance but also the growing of these said plants in a location where you can also get easy access to stock feed. So we have the domestication of crops leads to permanent settlements forming where access to the new crops and the stock feed is available.

And the permanent settlements leads to the domestication of humans.

America's deadliest terrorists strike again

2007-05-04T15:14:00.000+12:00

A doctor's clinic in Texas where abortions where performed has had a close shave when police found a bomb in a duffel bag outside.

This is an all to common situation at abortion clinics in the US where christian fundamentalists are conducting a reign of terror.

Yet does this even raise the eyebrows of homeland security? I think not... after all good christian Americans are not the problem are they?

The Bush administration's War on Liberty continues unabated as does terrorism!

Friday's Physical Law - Simple Harmonic Motion

2007-05-04T15:00:00.000+12:00

Like we saw last week simple harmonic motion (SHM) is a periodic (repetitive) motion that is descried by sine/cosine functions. There is one other requisite in the definition of SHM and that is a restoring force. What do I mean by a restoring force, well it is mostly what is sounds like, it is a force which acts to restores the system to its original or equilibrium position.

So a restoring force is at its simplest a force that acts counter to the position of the object within the system. Think of a mass on a spring - when the spring is extended it pulls the mass back, conversely if you compress the spring it pushes the mass out. So this force can be described by:

F = -kx

where x is the displacement and k is the spring constant, and the negative sign shows that the force counteracts the displacement.

Another example of this is a pendulum where gravity provides the force and is always trying to force the bob (the mass at the end of the pendulum) to its lowest point.

But wait if there is a force that is always pushing it back to equilibrium then how does it keep repeating its motion. Well to explain this lets look at the case of the mass on a spring (the pendulum is the same but its motion tends to be 2d and so slightly harder to explain).

If you have a mass attached to a spring and it is sitting at equilibrium and you pull it down a certain distance, then when you release it the spring pulls the mass back towards the equilibrium point, accelerating it as it goes, now as the mass gets closer to the equilibrium the force and acceleration get smaller, but the velocity gets bigger (since it is being accelerated). So when it gets back to the equilibrium x=0, so F = 0 and a = 0, however v ≠ 0 so the motion continues past the equilibrium where the acceleration now acts to slow the mass down, until it stops at the opposite point the where it started, and then accelerate it back again.

So as long as friction is small (or as well like to think for our examples non existent) then this motion will go on and on and on. This gives us our simple harmonic motion:

x = Acos(ωt)
v = Aωsin(ωt)
a = -Aω²cos(ωt)

Now so you don't look at me and ask where there heck did they come from, the first one is found in last time's discussion about circles is just the position of the mass relative toe the equilibrium, and the second two come from the definitions of velocity and acceleration, so are the change of position and velocity with respect to time. Strictly speaking these last two are the derivatives of position and velocity with respect to time which relies on calculus and gives us the instantaneous values for velocity and acceleration.

Now we saw last time that ω is related to the period of motion T. And so combining the restoring force equation and Newton's second law and the above expressions for x and a we can get:

F = -kx = ma
ω = √(k/m)
T = 2π √(m/k)

Now since we talk about how long it takes for things to happen with T, one other factor that is related to this is how often things happen, the frequency, f.

f = 1/T = ω/2π

The frequency of an event is the amount of occurrences in 1 second (usually measure in Hertz, Hz), it is inversely related to the period, of is something takes o.1 second to occur then it has a frequency of 10 Hz etc. OK this is only true for repetitive (oscillatory) motion other wise the frequency does not make sense.

So we can see that a mass that oscillates back and forth about an equilibrium is SHM, however circular motion does not really fit the bill since it does not have that restoring force.

Of course like the name suggests SHM is simple, but harmonic motion in general can be a lot more complicated, such things as friction can damp the motion, or something can drive the motion. Even the presence of other oscillators coupled to the first causes interesting phenomena but that is for next week.

Friday's Physical Law - Round and Round

2007-04-20T17:00:00.000+12:00

We saw a while ago that circular motion requires a centripetal force, but there is also another interesting feature that comes out from all that going round, and that is that you can do it all again (and again and again ... ad nauseum).

So what we have is a type of motion we refer to as periodic motion. That is motion that repeats itself after a period of time, and most commonly this period of time is constant (ie uniform circular motion, such as an orbit). So you start off at a certain point and then you move before coming back to where you started.

This is sort of obvious when you think about travelling in a circle. And as you can see this is a very simple sort of periodic motion.

Now since going around in a circle involves going through 360° we often describe the motion in terms of the rate at which the angle changes - the angular velocity (ω) if you will. The simplest way to think of this is, like I said, a velocity so we will consider the angle changed divided by the time taken (much like velocity is distance moved divided by time taken) and so we get

ω = 2π/T

But wait a minute I hear you say what does 2π have to do with angles. Well if instead of the more common degrees as a measure of angle we use radians, which are a slightly more natural way of describing angles (it all comes from the ratio of arc length to radius), then this is a measure of the angle. In fact you probably use radians with out even knowing it, when ever you say the circumference of a circle is 2πr then you have just used radians. So just to clarify:

2π rad = 360°

So in other words our angular velocity is the total angle in a circle divided by the time taken to go round the circle. As we saw in the gravity post:

v = 2πr/T

so we can combine this with above and we see that

v = ωr

and we also get similar expressions for arc length (s, distance around the circumference of the circle) and acceleration (a)

s = θr
a = αr

where θ is the angle and α is the angular acceleration.

Now why is all of this remotely important, any one familiar with geometry will note that the position relative to the centre of the circle in xy-coordinates can be described in terms of the angle or indeed ω and t.

x = r cos(θ) = r cos(ωt)
y = r sin(θ) = r sin(ωt)

So in addition to being a simple periodic motion, circular motion is also a simple harmonic motion, harmonic meaning that it varies sinusoidally (like a sine or cosine wave). Now this term has a very specific meaning in physics and we will see next week just what it entails, and whether or not this is an accurate description.

Ooops more trouble on the blogging front

2007-04-19T10:05:00.000+12:00

Well at least this is the end of it I hope, I was flat out with work and shifting up until Easter and then after the break I come back to find that my work PC has died (actually very similarly to my laptop - I am of course considering if there is a correlation).

And so the last week has been mad trying to sort out alternate computer resources, get the problem fixed, and of course catch up on all the work i let fall by the way side before Easter.

But never fear as I am back and I will be restarting my weekly series (hmmm what is the plural of series????? I must look into that), I have some long awaited posts on the history of science in the not too distant future and a couple of new features that I will be trial, so hopefully posting will be on the increase.

Another Temporary Blogging Hiatus

2007-03-30T18:24:00.000+12:00

This time because we have had to move flats and it has been a somewhat stressful experience, and most of next week will be taken up with cleaning up the old place but I will be trying to get some more stuff up by Easter.

If not enjoy your chocolate eggs (the darker the chocolate the better)!

Now I Really Feel apart of the Wider Community

2007-03-22T15:55:00.000+12:00

What you may ask makes me feel this way, well it is the fact that I have my first ever paper to peer review for a journal.

Now you may say that this is terrible and reviewing papers takes up so much time, that you could be using to publish your own work, and I can see that, but as a young researcher I feel it is the biggest responsibility that can be laid upon me. (Well that and having younger students in the lab to mentor).

Of course I have already had a few papers published (ok only one as first author) so I have already made contributions in that regards, but this feels bigger to me. It is peer review so that officially makes me a peer.

Ok well I had better get back to it, deadlines and all.

I wanted numbered lists... and now I do

2007-03-21T18:24:00.000+12:00

Well you may have or may not have noticed that all my lists were coming up bulleted, this was not meant to be the case an I have finally got around to digging through my template and learning how to mess with the right parts.

As you can probably see a few other things like the colours got changed too, in fact if you visited the site this afternoon you may have seen changes like crazy as I tried to work out what did what (I apologise if this caused any upset) and if not relax and enjoy my now correctly enumerated lists

Friday's Physicsal Law - Gravity

2007-03-20T16:15:00.000+12:00

Ok well yet again this is a catchup post of this series, it was due on ~~Feb 30~~ March 2.

We all have a good daily experience with gravity, we can feel it pulling us down whatever we do. And our everyday experience on how it effects us is usually limited to the acceleration that we undergo or our weight

F = mg

where g is the acceleration due to gravity and is approximately 9.8m s^-1. Now this is all well and good for describing the effects of gravity here at the surface of the Earth. But what it does not do is tell us anything about what gravity is or how we work out 'g' for other locations (ie surface of the Moon or Mars).

For our everyday experience, that is so well described by the above equation, we can derive myriad equations to describe the parabolic motion of projectiles, to determine time of flight, maximum height, distance traveled and velocity along the path but these equations are simply those that can be used for any acceleration (interestingly enough this equivalence between acceleration and gravity plays a role in the development of General Relativity too):

d = v_it + ½at²
v_f² = v_i² + 2ad

etc.

However to get the true experience of gravity we must leave this time and place and travel back to the time when Tycho Brahe was observing the motion of the planets. And since we are travelling back in time we might as well get our selves situated nicely above the plane of the solar system so we can see everything.

Johannes Kepler using Brahe's observations deduces three laws that govern the astronomical.

The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the foci
A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time
The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axis of the orbits

And it was upon these, in particular the Kepler's third law that Newton formulated his Law of Universal Gravity, basically by combining Kepler's law with his Laws of Motion.

Now to do this without resorting to inventing (or just using) calculus you and I will make a handwavey assumption (and one that isn't all that bad). The ellipse detailed in Kepler's first law are rather circular so to make the maths easier we will just use circles (note that a circle is a special case of an ellipse where the two foci are in the same place).

Now remember from last time that circular motion requires:

a = v²/r

since the velocity around a circle depends on the circumference (2πr) and the period (T) (which probably should have been mentioned in the other post):

v = 2πr/T

which gives us

a ∝ r/T²

and combining this with Kepler's third law, which for a circle can be written:

T² ∝ r³

then we get

a ∝ 1/r²

So the acceleration and hence the force are inversely proportional to the square of the radius of the orbit (as the radius increases the force decreases). So this tells us how our weight (remember this is given by mg) varies as we change our position relative to the Earth, but what about on other planets?

Well if we were to go to the moon and weigh ourselves we would discover the scales read about 16% of what they did before we left Earth, since the Moon is smaller than the Earth then if nothing else was involved in gravity then our weight would go up, so something else must be involved and this turns out to be the mass of the object we are on (be it a planet or moon or whatever).

So this gives us Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation:

F = G Mm/r²

where G is the gravitational constant and has a value of about 6.67×10^-11 N m² kg^-2 and M and m are the masses of the two objects (sometimes written m₁ and m₂).

Now many find it counter-intuitive that because of the M and m in the equation the force of gravity on me due to the Earth is the same as the force of gravity on the Earth due to me. Since clearly the Earth moves me and not the other way around. Of course we must remember that force is not the whole story, it is the acceleration that causes the motion and since the Earth ways more than me the movement of me is much more than that of the Earth.

This can be seen better in the case of binary stars, or Pluto and Charon, or any other objects that are orbiting a spot in between them. This consequence is really just an illustration of Newton's third law, equal and opposite action and reaction.

Friday's Physical Law - Going round in circles

2007-03-19T17:03:00.000+12:00

Again in my vain attempt to catch up on my weekly posting due to the myriad issues some of which I mentioned in an earlier post, this post is late, it was due on February 23.

In an earlier post in this series we touched on the concept of circular motion.

And if this force is always at right angles to the motion then the object will continue at a constant speed the changes in direction will cause it to move in a circle. In this case we call the force a centripetal force, meaning center-seeking, but more about that another time.

And now then is that other time. For the motion to be circular the velocity must also follow the circle, so at each point there must be a change in velocity at right angles to the motion, this change in velocity is the acceleration that points into the centre of the circle (at right angles to the motion) and is caused by the centripetal force acting on the object.

So, to have circular motion you can see we need two things, an object travelling at velocity v and a centripetal acceleration a (and hence force F).

To get the motion to be a nice circle you need to have the correct relationship between these two. Obviously (at least I hope so) the size of the circle (to be specific its radius, r) is also going to play a role, in fact the relationship comes out as (after a bit of complicated maths - some of which can be seen here):

a = v²/r

which with Newton's second law gives us the nett force or the centripetal force:

F = mv²/r

Now I used the term nett force above, what I mean by that is the force that is the result of adding all the forces on the object together, for example when we are standing still the nett force on our bodies is zero, but we are experiencing at least two forces, that of gravity pulling down on us and the ground pushing back up (Note: these are not an action/reaction pair). In general when we talk about forces especially in relation to acceleration we are really talking about the nett force.

In this case the centripetal force must be the nett force, otherwise the motion would not be circular.

There are many different ways to provide the centripetal force, obvious ones include

Gravity (for orbits and sloped paths like on a velodrome)
tension in a piece of string
Friction (between tyres and the ground)

Now since the centripetal force is required to keep an object moving in a circle, what happens when we remove that force. Like I said above the centripetal force is the nett force, so if it is removed then there is no force acting on the object and hence no acceleration. So an object released from circular motion will travel in a straight line in the direction of its velocity when released, this can be seen when you think about how one uses a sling to propel projectiles.

There is one further issue that people have trouble with when dealing with circular motion and that is the difference between centripetal and centrifugal but that is the subject for another post.

The Skeptics are at it again

2007-03-02T11:39:00.000+13:00

EoR at Second Sight has the latest and greatest of the last fortnight's skeptical blogging all in one place with the 55^th Skeptics circle, head on over and enjoy, it is a real special number.

How to ... disobey the second law of thermodynamics

2007-03-01T11:47:00.000+13:00

OK well this post is very late, it was due up a week or so ago, but things have been hectic and since my laptop died working from home has become impossible, but I am endeavouring to catch my self up with these posts

Well the second law of thermodynamics (SLoT) gets quite a bum rap from all sides of the anti-science. For starters there is perpetual motion, infinite amounts of free energy, but the is also a horrible use of the SLoT as an argument about evolution.

One reason I suspect as to why SLoT is so mis-understood is that while it conveys a fairly simple physical law, when it is applied to different situations it tends to need to be stated in very different ways. To quote P.W. Bridgman

There are almost as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions of it.

For example:

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body.

A transformation whose only final result is to convert heat, extracted from a source at constant temperature, into work, is impossible.

The first two statements are from Rudolf Clausius, and the last one from Lord Kelvin. And they are all equivalent, but generally phrased to high-light what the law means with reference to a particular situation. For example Lord Kelvin's statement above is a very mechanical one, essential stating that while we can use heat to do work we can never covert all the heat to work, so there is always some energy lost as heat.

The other difficulty with SLoT is that it is a statistical law, it is based on probability. Essential every system is in a certain state (macro-state) that is comprised of all the states of the atoms (micro-states) that make up the system. The more atom states that correspond to a particular system state then the more likely that system state is to exist. Naturally there are many more disordered (macro-) states than ordered (macro-) states, so systems will tend to wards disorder (an increase in entropy).

The big caveat to this statement is that all this applies only if you do not start adding energy to the system. In other words the law only applies to isolated systems.

So the Earth is not an isolated system, it receives a lot of energy from the sun. So the Earth and everything on it does not obey the SLoT, however if we take the Universe to be our system then this is clear isolated (it is all there is by definition) then the SLoT is obeyed.

And our magnetically levitated spinning top in the foyer of the lecture theatre next to the Physics department here will only spin perpetually if the power is plugged in other wise the interaction of the magnetic fields (and some air resistance) will cause to stop spinning and fall.

Friday's Physical Law - Work Work Work

2007-02-16T18:43:00.000+13:00

As we have previously seen force impacts a lot on motion. Today I want to look at how we apply forces, or rather what allows us to apply forces, and as you may have guess by the title this involves the concept of work.

When we exert a force on an object what we are doing is work on that object. And by work we don't mean what one does 9 to 5 but rather transferring energy. To be precise work W is done on an object when ever and object is moved a distance d parallel to a force F acting on the object

W = F d cosθ

when F and d are parallel θ = 0 and then cosθ = 1 and the work is maximum when the angle (θ) between F and d is 90° then they are perpendicular and cosθ and hence W = 0.

Well that can all be a little complicated and daunting, but essentially you can think of it in terms of a box, if I push the box across the floor I give it motion and hence energy (by doing work: force across direction across), however if I hold it while walking across the room the box itself is only in motion because I am and as such is not getting any energy from me (so no work done: force up direction across).Of course while I was lifting the box (before I carried it across the room) then I was doing work on it.

So as you an see (hopefully) work is done and energy transferred when giving an object motion or changing its position with respect to gravity. We refer to these forms of energy as kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy, respectively.

So we will now look at these a bit closer. Firstly, kinetic energy occurs when anything has velocity (is moving), and is dependant only on the mass of the object and the velocity it has:

E = ½mv²

And gravitational potential energy, is a form of potential (or stored) energy which depends on position with a gravitational field, and it depends on height (above ground), the mass of the object, and gravity (on Earth the acceleration due to gravity, g, is about 9.8 at the surface of the Earth, but this will vary for other planets and heights, at this stage I plan to deal with this next week):

E = mgh

There are many other types of energy that we will get to in the fullness of time, such as the potential energy of a spring, thermal energy (heat), electrical energy, nuclear energy etc, but the important thing to note is that energy can never be created or destroyed only converted (transferred) from one form to another (this incidentally is the first law of thermodynamics).

And when it comes to motion this idea of conservation of energy can simply be put as:

½mv²_f + mgh_f = ½mv²_i + mgh_i + W

where the _f indicates the object in a final state and the_i indicates the object in an initial state. And we can see that friction is a case of work acting against the motion of an object, reducing its kinetic energy and creating heat (thermal energy).