“A new poll shows that Minnesotans disapprove of Governor Tim Pawlenty (who scores a 42/52 job approval rating) and disapprove of their legislature by an even wider margin (25/66.) Must be because they’re rejecting Pawlenty’s big government health care plan.”
– Jonathan Chait

Sue Lowden, a Nevada Republican running against Harry Reid for his Senate seat, runs a new ad in which she blasts “government run health care”.

Harry Reid thinks Washington knows best, but I think we the people know best. Harry Reid’s big government health care plan will raise taxes, put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor, weaken Medicare, kill jobs, push us further into debt. I’m Sue Lowden and I approve this message because government run health care is wrong.

I don’t understand how anybody can, with a straight face, put themselves in the completely ridiculous rhetorical position of arguing that government run healthcare is wrong because it would weaken Medicare!

Do Republicans really think that people are that stupid?

(link via Matthew Yglesias)

Andrew Sullivan points to this post by Jonathan Rowe, in which he quotes someone who claims to have a phD in astronomy on a listserv discussing reincarnation and immortality from an atheistic perspective. Here’s the argument, in toto:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

This falls under a category of philosophic argument that only sounds clever if you don’t think about it for more than thirty seconds. Let’s examine the premises of the argument, one by one:

1. Time is infinite on both ends.

Well, no, it isn’t. According to our current understanding, the universe, as I would expect someone with a phD in astronomy, is not infinite at both ends. It started with the Big Bang, and will end in one of two ways, depending on how much matter there is in the universe: (1) it will collapse in on itself or (2) it will expand forever, but with all energy converted into heat due to entropy.

[Quick digression: But what about the multiverse? We could have a long discussion about this, but let me give you my quick perspective: there ain't no such thing. The math of quantum mechanics perfectly lends itself to there being one universe, and until you can actually empirically demonstrate the existence of another universe, it makes no sense to think they exist. End digression.]

2. Therefore, there are infinite rolls of the dice.

Even if we assume that premise (1) is true, the problem is that the universe does not run on “rolls of the dice,” or chance. It runs on certain physical laws, some of which have a probabilistic aspect, and some that don’t. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are the latter. No matter how many times you “roll the dice,” you’ll never wind up with a perpetual motion machine, just like you’ll never roll a 20 with a 6-sided die. The physical laws of the universe all interact with each other, creating some things that are more likely to occur than others–that’s the probability aspect. But they can’t make anything happen.

However infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again.

Here we can see the two problems with the premises above having a severe impact on the conclusion. Not every physical law is subject to chance, and time is not infinite. Accordingly, the idea that it was merely “infinitesimally small probabilities” bring a certain person into existence ignores the operation of time and the interaction of physical laws. Consider what has to happen in order for a certain human being to come into existence: 1. The solar system has to be created. 2. Earth has to be in it. 3. Earth (probably) has to get hit by a large body in order to create the moon. 4. Life has to evolve on earth on the same time scale. 5. An asteroid has to hit the earth and wipe out the dinosaurs. 6. Humans have to evolve in a particular climatological and geographical context. 7. People with identical genetics and personalities to your parents have to be born in a way that they’re able to meet, fall in love, and have sex. 8. They have to do it at JUST the right time so that one particular sperm hits one particular ova. 9. The genes from that sperm and ova have to rearrange their chromosomes in exactly the right way. Etc. etc. etc.

And you see, the above is just the big picture stuff. Some of which is determined by probability (genetic recombination, for example). Others are determined purely by physical laws and chance simply doesn’t have an opportunity to play a role–gravitation in the formation of the Earth and particular asteroid strikes, the chemistry involved in abiogenesis, etc.

More to the point, who “you” are isn’t dependent on mere genetic recombination. It’s from the interaction of genes with the environment, combined with free choices that you make. The very existence of differences in personality among identical twins shreds this hypothesis to ribbons. And that’s just personality. There’s also the concept of epigenetics. Epigenetics is, basically, the study of how particular genes express themselves under different circumstances. And which of your genes express when can be determined by one’s own choices. For example, if you have two twins, one of whom becomes a professional bodybuilder and the other an office-working couch potato, they’re going to have different genes express differently. They’ll look different, they’ll have made different choices, and their underlying biochemistry will also have changed. There’s no chance involved here, either–it was the free choices of the two twins that resulted in markedly different phenotypic expression of the same genes (in other words, they were, in many ways, different people.)

To sum up, this idea that someone how you are going to be eternally recurring in the universe because of the operation of chance in an infinite universe simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. You’re the only you there is, was, or will be.

So make the most of it.

Updated: In the comments, Jonathan Rowe clarifies that he was originating the idea, based on an astronmer’s conjecture that there is an infinite expansion/collapse cycle in the universe. But this doesn’t get around some of the major problems. For one, it assumes that there is such a cycle, when at the present time it’s unclear whether there is enough mass to create the gravitation necessary for a universal collapse. Additionally, we are left with the same problem as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics — there’s no empirical evidence for the existence of past and future universes, and the math works out just as well when we go along with the evidence and assume there’s only one universe. Additionally, this interpretation still does not grapple with the idea that probability is constrained by physical law or the role of choice and environment in controlling epigenetics and personal identity. So again, I say that this argument of “immortality” is simply, fundamentally flawed.

Image Credit:

One prediction of the climate change hypothesis is that methane, trapped under frozen ice in the ocean and under permafrost on land, will start to be released into the atmosphere as a consequence of rising temperatures. According to the IPCC, we should start seeing these effects around the end of the century. Unfortunately, the IPCC is wrong–it’s happening now.

During six cruises in the region from 2003 to 2008, the researchers gathered data at more than 1,000 spots in the Greenland-sized stretch of shallow ocean. The team also took atmospheric readings of methane concentration during one helicopter survey and a wintertime excursion from shore onto the ice-covered sea, says Shakhova.

The researchers found unexpectedly high amounts of methane dissolved in seafloor waters across 80 percent of the area they studied. In some spots, methane concentrations during those six years averaged more than 80 times normal. Because the water over the shelf is relatively shallow — average depth in the region is about 45 meters, Shakhova notes — much of the methane reaches the ocean surface and then wafts into the atmosphere.

To date, thankfully, this appears only to be happening in undersea methane reservoirs, which are expected to begin melting much sooner thanks to the salt water in the ocean depressing the melting point. Still this highlights the fact that some of the predictions made by the climate change hypothesis are coming true–and scarily, are coming true faster than previously anticipated. This is particularly disturbing because methane is a MUCH more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Put more of it into the atmosphere, and it could potentially accelerate the warming we’re already seeing.

Speaking of warming, it’s also worth mentioning that despite record levels of snowfall in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, January was, according to satellite data, the hottest January on record. And this is also despite the fact that we are currently in a deep solar minimum — meaning that radiation from the sun is lower than it usually is. Meaning that temperatures should be lower–but they’re not.

Don’t worry, though. There are plenty of people who will patiently explain to you that you should ignore all of these facts, because scientists are engaged in a massive global conspiracy to manipulate data in order to destroy the economy and technology. Because scientists HATE money and technology. Everyone knows that.

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It’s odd that I had two different posts pop up in my feed reader today, both of them revolving around the theme that the modern conservative movement, as represented by TV punditry and the tea parties and Republicans in Congress, has some more than passing resemblance to the hard-left counterculture of the 60s and 70s. First is this piece by Stan Collender:

it was hard not to conclude that one of the biggest changes from when I last saw “Hair” was that the real radicals these days are not kids on the street wearing torn jeans, wearing peace symbols, and getting high (Never mind the fact that torn jeans are now sold in the stores).

Today, the most radical behavior by far is coming from middle age congressional Republicans.
Think about it: GOP members of the House and Senate routinely reject rules, norms, and procedures and, like the hippies from the 60s, feel absolutely justified in doing it.

House and Senate Republicans also don’t feel bound by precedents or culture.

And then, there’s this essay by Freddie de Boer, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Convinced of the necessity of imprinting the conservative brand onto even the most elementary of human experiences, conservatives have come to look for ideological status (and thus ideological battle) in the narrowest crevices of day-to-day life. This has led to the sprawling industry of providing “conservative alternatives,” in the realm of commodities or media, to conservative people. It is now entirely easy for someone to consume only conservative-oriented media at every level: conservative magazines, conservative radio, conservative television and news, conservative websites. Broader still, there are conservative dating services, conservative coffee houses, conservative colleges, conservative financial services, conservative rock music, a conservative YouTube….Often explicit, always obvious, these conservative-situated alternatives send the inescapable message: there is no end to the political; all of human life is a part of an endless ideological struggle; nothing is to be considered free from the quest for conservative purity.

As I’ve said, this is an uneasy development for an antigovernment movement; branding all of one’s attachments, affinities, and commodities self-consciously “conservative” ensures that all political arguments will be fought on liberal battlegrounds. More troubling, though, is the inevitable stakes-raising that this kind of ideology-in-everything provokes. If one’s whole life is part of an ideological war, if every aspect of someone’s daily existence is to be counted as a function of an endless partisan squabble, there is no hope for reconciliation, only for victory. Political disagreement becomes not an easily-compartmentalized distraction from everyday life, but an affront to the whole self. Whatever its valuable insights, Marxism has this elementary failing; it is a corrosion of human life to relegate all behavior to the battle for resources and the wages of political war. Yet this is a seduction that movement conservatism has fallen prey to almost entirely.

Read both pieces. They’re quite fascinating.

So apparently, Lauren Ashley, who is this year’s Miss Beverly Hills, takes a rather Old Testament view of homosexuality.

Carrie Prejean isn’t the only beauty queen open to expressing her objection to same-sex marriage. Miss Beverly Hills 2010 Lauren Ashley is also speaking out in support of traditional nuptials.

“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white,” Ashley told Pop Tarts.

“I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life.”

I have to say that I’m very impressed with Miss Ashley, because it’s rare to find people these days who take the words of their sacred religious texts so seriously. However, it appears that Miss Ashley has been remiss in her Bible study, as it’s become apparent that she has missed some vital portions of the Old Testament. In the interest of saving her immortal soul, I believe that there’s a few verses she needs to be made aware of.

1) Deuteronomy 22:5

Here is a photograph taken last year of Miss Ashley. Do you see the abomination that she’s committing? She’s wearing pants–a clothing that only men should wear. For as it says in Deuteronomy 22:5:

A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the LORD your God.

For the sake of her soul, I hope she stars wearing more modest, gender-suitable clothing.

2) Leviticus 19:19

It’s inevitable that, as part of the Miss California competition, that Miss Ashley will have to participate in the swimsuit competition. Most swimsuits manufactured these days, though, are a blend of spandex and nylon. This poses quite a problem, because it violates Leviticus 19:19, which states:

Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.

Hopefully, she’ll pick a swimsuit made from one material only.

3) 1 Timothy 2:9-10

Finally, I think that if Miss Ashley truly believes that the Bible shows that God “knows more than we do about life,” then she should heed 1 Timothy 2:9-10:

I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

In other words, she should quit the beauty pageant racket entirely and go out into the world and do great things, instead.

Megan McArdle discusses this New York Times article by Olivia Judson, which hypothesizes that the act of sitting, all by itself, is a contributor to obesity. As it states:

That, at least, is the conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists and worse profiles of blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

So what’s wrong with sitting?

The answer seems to have two parts. The first is that sitting is one of the most passive things you can do. You burn more energy by chewing gum or fidgeting than you do sitting still in a chair. Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.

As far as I can tell from the abstracts of the papers cited by the author (I couldn’t find free full text versions), however, these studies are nothing more but a long line of studies that merely demonstrate a correlation between sedentary lifestyles and obesity. They do not demonstrate any kind of cause, and the idea that it has to do with a simple extra expenditure of calories is absurd. It’s far more likely that these studies and this article, like many similar studies, are simply reversing cause and effect. In other words, those who are genetically prone to obesity are also genetically prone to being sedentary. Let me refer you to Gary Taubes fantastic 2007 article on the subject, where he examines the history of the “exercise = weight loss hypothesis” and explains why the evidence doesn’t support it:

Ultimately, the relationship between physical activity and fatness comes down to the question of cause and effect. Is Lance Armstrong excessively lean because he burns off a few thousand calories a day cycling, or is he driven to expend that energy because his body is constitutionally set against storing calories as fat? If his fat tissue is resistant to accumulating calories, his body has little choice but to burn them as quickly as possible: what Rony and his contemporaries called the “activity impulse”—a physiological drive, not a conscious one. His body is telling him to get on his bike and ride, not his mind. Those of us who run to fat would have the opposite problem. Our fat tissue wants to store calories, leaving our muscles with a relative dearth of energy to burn. It’s not willpower we lack, but fuel.

For the last 60 years, researchers studying obesity and weight regulation have insisted on treating the human body as a thermodynamic black box: Calories go in one side, they come out the other, and the difference (calories in minus calories out) ends up as either more or less fat. The fat tissue, in this thermodynamic model, has nothing to say in the matter. Thus the official recommendations to eat less and exercise more and assuredly you’ll get thinner. (Or at least not fatter.) And in the strict sense this is true—you can starve a human, or a rat, and he will indeed lose weight—but that misses the point. Humans, rats, and all living organisms are ruled by biology, not thermodynamics. When we deprive ourselves of food, we get hungry. When we push ourselves physically, we get tired.

[...]

The key is that among the many things regulated in this homeostatic system—along with blood pressure and blood sugar, body temperature, respiration, etc.—is the amount of fat we carry. From this biological or homeostatic perspective, lean people are not those who have the willpower to exercise more and eat less. They are people whose bodies are programmed to send the calories they consume to the muscles to be burned rather than to the fat tissue to be stored—the Lance Armstrongs of the world. The rest of us tend to go the other way, shunting off calories to fat tissue, where they accumulate to excess.

Read Taubes’ whole article, which goes into great detail in explaining the hormonal regulations that prevent exercise from leading to much weight loss–if any at all. You’ll note that Judson’s article is based on the archaic “thermodynamic black box” model of weight loss (standing burns more calories, so you’ll lose weight!) without any consideration of the underlying biochemistry in order to defend her hypothesis. This is, sadly, not just true of newspaper reporters, but of a lot of people in the obesity field as well. Most studies about obesity tend to center around the types of observational studies that Judson cites, which are simply bogus exercises in statistics that lack controls or any rigorious testing of variables in order to defend or deny a hypothesis (e.g. “these people say they exercise and they’re lean, these people watch TV and they’re fat, therefore, watching TV makes you fat”). The best experimentation in the field of obesity are those studies that actually test changes. They control diets and/or types of exercise, then they test body composition, including triglycerides, fasting glucose levels, etc. after such changes.

Beware of observational studies–they’re simply fodder for speculation.

Image Credit: Sighthound’s photostream via a Creative Commons License

The AP is reporting that the Obama Administration is set to announce that it will provide loan guarantees for new American nuclear power plants.

The Obama administration’s planned loan guarantee to build the first nuclear power plant in the U.S in almost three decades is part of a broad shift in energy strategy to lessen dependence on foreign oil and reduce the use of other fossil fuels blamed for global warming.

President Barack Obama called for “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants” in his Jan. 27 State of the Union speech and followed that by proposing to triple loan guarantees for new nuclear plants. He wants to use nuclear power and other alternative sources of energy in his effort to shift energy policy.

Obama in the coming week will announce the loan guarantee to build the nuclear power plant, an administration official said Friday. The two new Southern Co. reactors to be built in Burke, Ga., are part of a White House energy plan that administration officials hope will draw Republican support.

I am definitely all for this. Nuclear power is a much safer, cleaner source of energy than coal. This is long overdue.

h/t Dodd Harris

Image Credit: Sarah Elzas

Via John Cole, it appears that for the past decade or so, Goldman Sachs and other banks were working to help Greece keep its debt off the books.

As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation engaged in a decade-long effort to skirt European debt limits. One deal created by Goldman Sachs helped obscure billions in debt from the budget overseers in Brussels.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s letter to philosopher John Taylor:

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

‘Nuff said.

I opened up my browser this evening to the Drudge Report headline “The Great Climate Change Retreat!”, which led to this Daily Mail article, which is entitled (take a deep breath), “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″

The scientist in question is Professor Phil Jones, who is the head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Suffice to say, this has made quite a hubbub around the blogosphere. The article is based on an interview that Jones gave to the BBC. Of course, delving into the article itself, it’s clear that Professor Jones did not say that there is no global warming since 1995. He says that there is no ’statistically significant’ global warming since 1995. Which still sounds bad.

Unless, of course, you actually read the interview.

B - Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

That’s hardly the same as “no global warming since 1995″ and certainly does not represent a “retreat” or a “U-turn.” (For a good primer on statistical significance and what that means, check out this link).

There are several other flagrant misinterpretations of Jones’ statements in the Daily Mail article, as well, but they’re pretty easy to spot simply by comparing the article to the interview and its companion piece.

Heck, reading the Daily Mail, one might come away with the impression that Jones was renouncing the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change. To correct that impression, let me just quote one more part of the interview:

E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?

I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

Whether you accept the hypothesis of global climate change or not, I’m sure we can all agree that shoddy reporting like the Daily Mail article ought to be repudiated. It’s a deliberate misinterpretation of a fascinating interview (I’d highly recommend reading the interview, though–the reporter asking the questions clearly knows his stuff and it is not a softball).

Frankly, I think this provides an excellent example of why, when it comes to scientific topics, you’re much better off going to primary sources than you are trusting a newspaper reporter.