It seems that a family in Illinois is picking up the black-and-white video feed from the space shuttle Atlantis. On their baby monitor.

The best part of the whole affair (besides the glorious randomness of it all) is the fact that the family really likes it!

“I’ve been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what’s next,” Meilinger said.

Celebrated economist, James Bates Clark Medal winner, and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is having a good time, and doing pretty darn well, at the World Series of Poker. (Via Marginal Revolution; here’s Levitt’s own blog.) I am willing to go on record as predicting that he will not do as well as physicist Michael Binger did last year.

I’ve been reading a bit about game theory and the mathematics of poker, and have lots of great theories, including an elaborate analogy between poker and quantum mechanics. Here is one theory: physicists (and I imagine economists, too) will end up being much better poker players than mathematicians. The reasoning is that No Limit Hold’em is an incredibly complex system; not only can we not derive a dominant strategy in closed form, we can’t even prove any very useful theorems about realistic games. So game theorists and mathematicians study simplified systems about which they can actually prove theorems. They can do pretty well in figuring out strategies at a showdown (just two players), but early in the hand at a full table there’s almost nothing they can say. It becomes a question of which approximations to make and which models to choose for your opponents. That’s much more the purview of physicists and economists, who are forced to get their hands dirty in the real world. (A corollary: phenomenologists and astrophysicists will be better poker players than string theorists.)

Why am I not at the WSOP myself? Good question. I’m totally going next year.

I’ve just read another fine, short and clear column in The Guardian by Ben Goldacre, whose take on most things I completely agree with. In this case, he’s discussing that a distinguished British academic - Professor David Colquhoun FRS of University College London - has been forced to remove his blog - DC’s Improbable Science Page - from university servers.

Now, for some blogs, this can be a good idea, in order to separate the personal ideas of the blogger on all kinds of subjects from those of their institution. However, this blog is written by a scientist and is entirely about science. In fact, it plays one of the most important roles of science, that of educating the public about how to apply scientific criteria and standards of evidence to things that directly affect their lives. In this case, the claims made by various purveyors of alternative medicine.

This is the kind of work that universities should explicitly support. Sure it costs money to deal with complaints from quacks. Sure the university will lose popularity in some quarters for supporting the fight against charlatans. Sure it may take valuable administrative and legal time and effort to back a scientist in a dispute with cheats and liars. But isn’t this the side a university should want to be on? Either an institution values science and the scientific method or it doesn’t.

The request to take down the blog comes after a number of complaints to UCL’s Provost, including one complaining about Colquhoun’s use of the word gobbledygook. But when he’s writing about topics like psychic surgery, or homeopathy, what better word is there. One might say that ideas like these are stupid, idiotic, complete bollocks, nonsensical, pseudoscientific, claptrap, balderdash, baloney, drivel, mumbo-jumbo, or any one of a hundred other fitting and appropriately insulting phrases, but gobbledygook works just fine.

For a concrete example of the work Prof. Colquhoun does to protect the public by fighting ignorance and scientific dishonesty, here’s a letter he wrote to The Independent, after they advertised the Helios Homeopathy Travellers Kit (costing £38.95) as one of their Top Ten Best Travel First Aid Kits

Sir:

On Monday 24th July you featured The Ten Best Travel first aid kits.

One of these was the Helios Homeopathy Travellers’ kit. All the “remedies” in this kit are in the 30C dilution. They therefore contain no trace of the substance on the label .You pay £38.95 for a lot of sugar pills. To get even one molecule you’d have to swallow a sphere with a diameter equal to the distance from the earth to the sun. That is hard to swallow.

Helios was one of the companies that was pilloried by the Newsnight programme when their representative recommended homeopathic prevention of malaria. That was condemned even by some homeopaths as dangerous and irresponsible.

It is quite simple. This medicine contains no medicine. You are endangering your readers by recommending it.

David Colquhoun
PROFESSOR OF PHARMACOLOGY
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
LONDON WC1

What a great letter; short, to the point, funny, and phrased in a way that hammers home how silly the idea is in terms the public can understand. Society is in desperate need of scientists to play this role. As Goldacre writes

… in a world where most orthodox “public engagement with science” activity consists of smug, faux-radical “science meets art” projects, Colquhoun - a world expert on single ion channels - was showing the world what science really does. He took dodgy scientific claims, or “hypotheses” as we call them in the trade, and examined the experimental evidence for them, in everyday language, with humour and verve. I would say his blog is a treat for the wider public, and arguably a rather good use of the time and resources of a public servant who has devoted his entire life to academia, on its relatively low wages, never once working for industry.

More and more of our everyday lives depend on scientific discoveries, and the decisions we must make regarding them demand at least a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method. At the same time scientists face increasing demands on their time from grants, teaching and research. The very least a university can do is to stand behind those who find time to take on this valuable role.

Update: It is wonderful to hear that UCL is doing the right thing and now throwing its support fully behind Professor Colquhoun. Goldacre’s Bad Science Blog now has the text of a joint statement from UCL and Colquhoun that states, in conclusion

UCL has a long and outstanding liberal tradition and is committed to encouraging free and frank academic debate. The evidence (or lack thereof) for the claims made for health supplements is a matter of great public interest, and UCL supports all contributions to that debate. The only restriction it places on the use of its facilities is that its staff should use their academic freedom responsibly within the law.
To this end, the Provost and Professor Colquhoun have taken advice from a senior defamation Queen’s Counsel, and we are pleased to announce that Professor Colquhoun’s website – with some modifications effected by him on counsel’s advice - will shortly be restored to UCL’s servers. UCL will not allow staff to use its website for the making of personal attacks on individuals, but continues strongly to support and uphold Professor Colquhoun’s expression of uncompromising opinions as to the claims made for the effectiveness of treatments by the health supplements industry or other similar bodies

Congratulations to Prof. Colquhoun and to UCL.

(Many thanks to Justin for pointing this out in the comment section)

Via Jacob Levy, a little anecdote from a class at Princeton taught by Cornel West and Robert George.

Having touched upon such profound notions as free will, autonomy, and the alienation of man from God, the discussion of St. Augustine’s “Confessions” is humming along nicely when Cornel West *80, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion, poses the afternoon’s toughest question. “Who’s been deeply in love?” he asks, leaning so far forward in his chair that his goatee is almost touching the table as he looks around him at the rapt faces of 15 Princeton freshmen.

That’s not a question most students feel comfortable answering in a setting as public as a freshman seminar. There is silence until Dov Kaufmann, showing the sort of pluck you’d expect from a former first sergeant in the Israeli army, raises his hand, tentatively at first. If he is about to fall into a trap, it will be particularly awkward to climb out, since the climbing will have to be done in front of 14 curious classmates. But Kaufmann is spared having to make any further confessions when West steps in and rescues him: “Now, this brother knows!” he exclaims. “You fall in love, you stop looking at those other girls. They became uninteresting.”

“Now, let’s not look too closely,” laughs Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, who teaches the course with West and is sitting next to him.

But West is not to be deterred. He wants to bring the point around to the freedom that comes, paradoxically, from surrender. “When you fell in love, you became free,” he tells Kaufmann. “Before that, on Saturday night, you’d be looking at all the girls. You were a slave.”

It is a witty eureka! moment, one that deftly links Augustine’s 1,600-year-old autobiography to life on the Princeton campus today. Kaufmann remembers it fondly: “Professor West seemed to maybe have some hidden story of his own, because he was really smiling too,” he says. “I thought that was neat.”

A lot of college classes present intimidating vistas of endless drudgery, but occasionally you get ones that really, truly, make you think, deep down into your core. Those are magical, and are why the undergraduate experience can be like nothing else in your life. Celebrity professors are not required; I certainly had several such experiences at Villanova.

The news hook for the story is actually not “here’s a cool class,” but “look at these ideological opposites co-teaching a course.” West (who quit Harvard after clashing with Larry Summers) is a charismatic leftist, while George is an influential conservative. But they apparently have a good time coming together with students to engage seriously with Great Ideas, and have struck up a friendship “based on a shared passion for intellectual inquiry.”

Here are the slides from the physics colloquium I gave at UC Santa Cruz last week, entitled “Why is the Past Different from the Future? The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time.” (Also in pdf.)

The real reason I’m sharing this with you is because this talk provoked one of the best responses I’ve ever received, which the provokee felt moved to share with me:

Finally, the magnitude of the entropy of the universe as a function of time is a very interesting problem for cosmology, but to suggest that a law of physics depends on it is sheer nonsense. Carroll’s statement that the second law owes its existence to cosmology is one of the dummest [sic] remarks I heard in any of our physics colloquia, apart from [redacted]’s earlier remarks about consciousness in quantum mechanics. I am astounded that physicists in the audience always listen politely to such nonsense. Afterwards, I had dinner with some graduate students who readily understood my objections, but Carroll remained adamant.

My powers of persuasion are apparently not always fully efficacious.

Also, that marvelous illustration of entropy in the bottom right of the above slide? Alan Guth’s office.

Update: Originally added as a comment, but I’m moving it up here–

The point of the “objection” is extremely simple, as is the reason why it is irrelevant. Suppose we had a thermodynamic system, described by certain macroscopic variables, not quite in equilibrium. Suppose further that we chose a random microstate compatible with the macroscopic variables (as you do, for example, in a numerical simulation). Then, following the evolution of that microstate into the future, it is overwhelmingly likely that the entropy will increase. Voila, we have “derived” the Second Law.

However, it is also overwhelmingly likely that evolving that microstate into the past will lead to an increase in entropy. Which is not true of the universe in which we live. So the above exercise, while it gets the right answer for the future, is not actually “right,” if what we care about is describing the real world. Which I do. If we want to understand the distribution function on microstates that is actually true, we need to impose a low-entropy condition in the past; there is no way to get it from purely time-symmetric assumptions.

Boltzmann’s H-theorem, while interesting and important, is even worse. It makes an assumption that is not true (molecular chaos) to reach a conclusion that is not true (the entropy is certain, not just likely, to increase toward the future — and also to the past).

The nice thing about stat mech is that almost any distribution function will work to derive the Second Law, as long as you don’t put some constraints on the future state. That’s why textbook stat mech does a perfectly good job without talking about the Big Bang. But if you want to describe why the Second Law actually works in the real world in which we actually live, cosmology inevitably comes into play.

Richard Rorty has passed away. He was arguably the most well-known living American philosopher, not least of which because he was a wonderful communicator; see Jacob Levy’s appreciation of his rhetorical skills.

Intellectually, Rorty was hard to pin down; while he was most closely identified with the American pragmatist tradition of Dewey and Peirce, he was trained as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and later became heavily influenced both by Wittgenstein and by continental/”postmodern” philosophy. So he managed to annoy everybody, basically. But his real project was to take seriously radical critiques of meaning and truth while simultaneously offering a positive prospect for morality and human living. Which is a good project to have, I think.

Wikipedia has a representative quote from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, in which Rorty spells out his view of a good “ironist”:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

As physicists go, I’m more sympathetic to postmodernism than most. (Who are, you know, not very sympathetic.) What I really think is that people who think carefully about science and people who think carefully about the social construction of truth would have a lot to learn from each other, if they would approach each other’s concerns and insights in good faith, which is hard to do.

When Rorty talks about “final vocabularies” in the quote above, he’s not really thinking of “quantum field theory” or “general relativity” or even “the scientific method,” although they would arguably be legitimate examples. He’s thinking of doctrines of religion or morality or politics or ethics or aesthetics that we use to judge good and bad and right and wrong in our lives. These are areas in which such vocabularies truly are contingent, and unpacking our presuppositions about their finality is a useful practice.

Science is different. To do science, we presume the existence of a “real world” that is “out there” and follows a set of rules and patterns that are completely independent of whatever actions we humans may be taking, including our actions of conceptualizing that real world. Questions of good and bad and right and wrong are not like that; their subject matter is our judgments themselves, which are subject to interrogation and ultimately to alteration. Right and wrong are not out there in the world to be probed and described; we create them through various human mechanisms. A scientist cannot consistently hold radical doubts about the nature of the real world.

On the other hand — and this is the part that, I think, scientists consistently miss — we certainly can hold radical doubts about the vocabulary with which we as scientists describe that real world. In fact, when pressed in other contexts, we are the first to insist that scientific theories are always useful but limited approximations, capturing some part of reality but certainly not the whole. Furthermore, even experimental data do not provide any unmediated glimpse of reality; not only are there error bars, but there are also the irreducible theory-laden choices about which data to collect, and how to fit them into our frameworks. These are commonplace scientific truisms, but they are also deep postmodern insights.

In my personal intellectual utopia, postmodernists would appreciate how science differs from morality and ethics and aesthetics by the ontological independence of its subject matter, while scientists would appreciate how there is a lot we have yet to quite understand about how we use language and evidence in an ultimately contingent way. Just as Rorty wanted to make ironic skepticism compatible with human solidarity, I’d like to see suspicion toward final vocabularies made compatible with the undeniable truth of scientific progress.

Or am I just being ironic?

More: Mixing Memory has a list of other blog posts on Rorty; Continental Philosophy has a collection of links and a recent video.

Yeah, we know, you can’t read the blog. We are once again the victim of frequent “This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota” errors. Apparently we have a bunch of slow mysql queries, and need to optimize our indices. Which might be very straightforward, if any of us knew what those words meant. Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a database manager!

Here is the kind of error message we’re getting:

# Sat Jun 9 01:23:22 2007
# Query_time: 4 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 27359 Rows_examined: 83792
SELECT
comment_post_ID, post_title
FROM (wp_comments LEFT JOIN wp_posts ON (comment_post_ID = ID))
WHERE comment_approved = ‘1′
AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘%pingback%’ AND comment_type NOT LIKE ‘%trackback%’
ORDER BY comment_date DESC

Full of important information, I’m sure, but I have no idea what it means or how to fix it. We might just change web hosts as a way to sidestep the problem, but that sounds like work. Any other suggestions?

Update: The particular problem mentioned here has been traced to a particular plugin and fixed. We’ve eliminated all of the noticeably slow mysql queries, but the problem persists. Once in a while an apparently ordinary request (”GET” a certain page, for example) takes 30 seconds, for no discernible reason. We’ve optimized the database, and even created some new indices, although I’m not even sure if that helps or hurts things. Maybe it will fix itself.

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber notes with approval that more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus. (Of which, nearly three-quarters understood that it took a year for this process to unfold.) So, you take what you can get.

I hope our blog didn’t confuse them.

Everyone is too busy to blog this week. But I’ll point you to my favorite quotes from Ezra Klein’s liveblogging of last night’s Republican presidential debate:

• 7:15 If this election is to be decided on ties, Ron Paul is totally going to win. And Sam Brownback will be executed.
• 7:41 Does anybody really believe religion is a “very important” part of Giuliani’s life? He seems like the type who would make holy water sizzle.
• 7:47 McCain thinks Americans should be exposed to “all theories.” All children will now go to school until the end of time.

Talk amongst yourselves, as long as it doesn’t involve Paris Hilton.

It was an embarrassing moment in the first Republican presidential debate when the participants were asked, “Does anyone not believe in evolution?”, and three candidates — Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Mike Huckabee — raised their hands. Embarrassing for those three, obviously, but also for the Republican party, in which they are far from unrepresentative, and for the United States, that anyone would even think to ask such a question of serious candidates for the highest office in the land.

One of the candidates, Sam Brownback, felt the need to amplify his position in a New York Times op-ed piece. He appeals to many favorite creationist weasel words, invoking the distinction between “microevolution” and “macroevolution,” but tries not to come off as completely anti-science. Nevertheless, the heart of his argument is stated clearly at the end of the piece:

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

Without hesitation, I am happy to raise my hand to that.

In our scientific understanding of the universe, man does not reflect an image and likeness unique in the created order. Humanity arose by the same process of natural selection as all the other species. Calling it “atheistic theology” doesn’t change the fact that it’s how the world works, according to science.

Eugene Volokh asks whether it really matters what a presidential candidate thinks about human evolution. He tentatively argues that yes, it does matter, but I think it’s a lot more cut and dried (but still interesting) than he makes it out to be. There are really two issues: first, has science established beyond reasonable doubt that humans evolved purely through natural selection, and second, if it has, does it matter whether a presidential candidate rejects that particular scientific understanding? Yes, and yes. But the intriguing follow-up is: what about other untrue beliefs that candidates might have?

In case you haven’t heard: yes, science has established beyond reasonable doubt that humans evolved via natural selection. Volokh confuses the issue by asking whether Brownback’s beliefs are “provably false,” and (correctly) concluding that they are not. But scientific propositions are never provably true or false; that’s not how science works. We accumulate more and more evidence in favor of one theory and against all competitors, until we reach a point where the only people left who refuse to accept the theory are cranks. Natural selection is firmly in that category; there is no scientific controversy about its truth. To draw a somewhat subtle distinction: I personally do not think that belief in an ineffable touchy-feely Aristotelian Unmoved Mover kind of God is in the crank domain. I think it’s wrong, and based on a set of deep philosophical and scientific mistakes, but not crackpottery in the same way that attributing crucial aspects of human evolution to a meddlesome anthropomorphic Designer would be.

Which brings us to the second and more interesting question, of whether this particular kind of mistaken belief should bear on one’s fitness as a presidential candidate. I think it does, for a reason that our experience with the Bush administration has made especially relevant. Denial of the standard scientific explanation for the origin of human beings is a particularly dangerous kind of mistake: one based on a decision to put aside evidence and deduction in favor of wishful thinking, and an insistence on a picture of the universe that flatters ourselves. The kind of reasoning that leads one to conclude that we can’t explain human evolution without invoking a meddlesome God is the same kind of reasoning that makes people think that cutting taxes will decrease the federal deficit, or that the people of Iraq would throw candy and greet us as liberators. (I’m sure that liberals are just as susceptible to such a fallacy, but it’s the conservative versions that are currently getting us in such a mess.) It’s a refusal to take reality at face value, in favor of a picture that conforms to what we want to be true.

The interesting part of Volokh’s question is, what about the Virgin Birth? By ordinary scientific standards, belief that Jesus had a mother but not a father is at least as unlikely as belief in a divine role in human evolution. Should we hold such a belief against presidential candidates?

That’s actually a realy tough question, and I’m going to weasel out of it a bit myself. On the one hand, everything I just said about human origins applies just as well to the Virgin Birth — belief in it is dramatically non-scientific, and prompted largely by exactly the kind of mythological self-flattery that leads to skepticism about the efficacy of natural selection. In other words, belief in the Virgin Birth is exactly as “wrong” as belief in creationism. So I can certainly appreciate the argument for holding such beliefs against presidential candidates.

On the other hand, I think the status of these two questions are different, in at least two important ways. First is the role of each question as a foundational part of modern science. Evolution is a crucial ingredient in how we understand Nature and our place in it; to deny it is to deny a bedrock principle of science. The birth of Jesus, on the other hand, is a localized miracle that nominally happened a long time ago. If someone wants to believe in that particular isolated violation of the laws of nature, I won’t go along with them, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as denying natural selection as the correct explanation for the origin of human beings.

Second, the status of evolution has taken on a unique political role in our culture. Evolution is the particular part of science which has come under the most concerted attack by the forces of irrationality, who have attempted to undermine science by calling into question the teaching of evolution in public schools. This is now a political and cultural question, not just a scientific one; it’s no accident that debates over creationism and intelligent design are essentially confined to the United States (although sadly spreading). For a presidential candidate to take a public stance against evolution by raising his hand at a televised debate is a profoundly political act, allying that candidate with the forces of superstition against the forces of science. The question of the Virgin Birth just doesn’t have that status.

Happily, I was not really hesistating over whether to throw my support to Brownback, Huckabee, or Tancredo, so the question is somewhat academic for me. But I do believe, in the face of all the contrary evidence provided by the current Administration and its die-hard supporters, in the existence of intelligent and principled conservatives who might be in favor of limited government and perhaps an aggressive foreign policy, but would like to try to base their decisions on evidence and reason. Those people are going to have to make some tough choices; the modern Republican party has chosen to ally itself with people who don’t believe in the real world, and that choice is going to have consequences.