Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Did you know that there is a new Wikipedia entry for ScienceBlogs? And that there is even an entire category for blogs about science?

And yet there is no entry for Cosmic Variance. Just an unobtrusive little mention at the bottom of the entry on the actual concept of cosmic variance (not the blog).

Hint hint.

Simultaneously, and without apparent coordination, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, and Chris Pirillo put up posts that say basically the same thing: “I like to blog about stuff I am interested in, which includes more than one thing. If your interests do not precisely coincide with mine (which should hardly be surprising), you are welcome to skip over those posts you don’t care for, and enjoy those that you do.”

Hmmm. A daring, quirky, somewhat off-the-wall point of view. I wonder if it will catch on?

The much-anticipated Bloggingheads.tv faceoff between George Johnson and myself is now available. We talk about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and plates. After this, any further episodes might just be superfluous.

This Saturday, at the invitation of science writer George Johnson, I’ll be participating in “Science Saturday” at bloggingheads.tv. If you don’t already know, the idea behind bloggingheads seems to be to bring together bloggers (or writer/pundits, more generally) for one-on-one conversations about subjects of mutual interest. Videos of the conversations are recorded using Quicktime on the participant’s MacBook Pros (or related pieces of inferior technology), and then shared with the world. Some day, of course, every room of every house will have a webcam broadcasting 24 hours a day, and we won’t need such artificial set-ups.

Most of the Science Saturdays have been discussions between George and John Horgan, and the most recent one is no exception. (I believe the redoubtable PZ is teaming up with John on the following episode.) In the closing bit, George advertises my upcoming gig and John responds by suggesting that George challenge me to a bet. John himself has a bet with Michio Kaku, detailed at Long Bets, on whether or not anyone will win a Nobel Prize by 2020 for “work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Horgan is voting “no,” Kaku is voting “yes.” I’m happy to bet on things, but when it comes to predictions I like to take even-money bets on propositions that I personally believe are at least 3-1 favorites. And that certainly doesn’t qualify. In fact, I suspect it’s not even money; nobody will win a Nobel for quantum-gravity type work until there is some experimental prediction that comes true, and the chances are running against that happening in the next decade or two. Beyond that, my powers of prognostication become pretty weak, at least where there’s money concerned.

Note that, earlier on, Horgan talks about inflation, segueing smoothly from “evidence for inflation is purely circumstantial” (true) to “inflation is not really a legitimate theory any more” (completely crazy). Evidence for inflation is indirect, and likely to remain so for a while even if the theory is true (which of course it might not be), but it’s still by far the dominant theoretical paradigm for thinking about the early universe. That’s what happens when your theory both solves pre-existing problems and makes predictions that come true.

I enjoy bloggingheads occasionally, even if one’s selection criteria for “good blogger” or even “good writer” aren’t necessarily the same as those for “engaging video personality.” Video has certain obvious disadvantages when compared to text — it’s much harder to skip quickly to the parts of interest, for example — but also some advantages — you can see the person’s face and peer through their eyes into the inner reaches of their soul. The highlight of the series so far, I think, was a well-publicized meltdown on the part of Ann Althouse. I doubt any such thing will happen between George and me, unless one or the other of us has at least a couple of martinis before our 10 a.m. taping. We’re both pretty laid-back guys by nature, so we need to come up with some good topics to get feisty about. Any suggestions?

Links people have been passing to me:

The Foundational Questions Institute Community Site now has a handy RSS feed:

feed://www.fqxi.org/community/rss.php

If, like me, you read your blogs in a newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) rather than the old-fashioned way of actually visiting every damn blog, this is a godsend. Anthony Aguirre has an interesting post, inspired in part by the Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist, on How Do We Fund Einstein Without Funding Crackpots? (To a large extent I think the present system does a pretty good job at that, actually. I would love to see much more flexibility in how researchers with a good track record get to use their funding, and much less onerous reporting requirements, but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants. I’d be interested in hearing otherwise.)

I’m on a new American Physical Society Committee on Informing the Public, and one of the things (the only thing, really) I was able to help them with was some suggestions on improving their website. The APS runs a public-outreach site, Physics Central, that occupies some prime internet real estate — it’s a top-ten result when you do a Google search on physics. One of the things I suggested to keep the page current and lively was a regular update on interesting articles to appear on physics blogs — and lo and behold, they now have a regular Physics Blogosphere feature. From there, for example, you might be directed to Cocktail Party Physics, to learn about speeding Priuses, cloud chambers, the Iron Science Teacher competition, Cute Child Syndrome, the Exploratorium, and some insight into Rush Limbaugh’s manifold shortcomings. (That’s just in one post, of course; there are others.) It’s sort of like Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist, but just for physics. Now if we could only get them an RSS feed…

Finally, Terri Yu points to a series of podcasts by MIT physicist Peter Fisher on Life as an Academic. A good example is this episode on imposter syndrome — the nagging feeling that you don’t belong here among all of these actually-smart people. For the most part, they don’t either, so don’t worry about it.

In early 2005, back when I blogged at Orange Quark, I wrote about my good friend Teri Weaver, who is a reporter (then based in Seoul, now in Tokyo), for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Teri was heading off for a six week assignment in Iraq and had started an interesting and well-written blog detailing her visit. It was fascinating reading, and I was lucky enough to get some first-hand versions of the stories when Teri and I met up in Beijing later that year.

Well, it’s two years later and Teri is back in Iraq for another assignment and is once again writing at Stonesoup. The posts are a riveting and quite personal window into what it is like to be on the ground in Iraq, and I hope you’ll drop by and take a look at some of them.

Update: I hadn’t realized, but Teri’s blog is invitation-only! However, Teri has been nice enough to participate in our comment thread and writes

If you’d like to take a peek, send Mark your email and I’ll sign you up. I’m a little leary of putting it out there for the web-at-large.

Thanks! Teri

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)

A few links to interesting things before I hop on an airplane:

• We’ve talked before (well, Anthony Aguirre talked for us) about the Foundational Questions Institute, an organization devoted to supporting work on, how should we put it, foundational questions in the physical sciences. I was originally a little leery about the whole operation, but have since been convinced that FQXi is a respecable and independent organization, even if the acronym continues to baffle me. I’ve even become a member, although I’m still working out what that means.

  Now they’ve launched a new community site, which looks interesting. There are feature articles, news items, forums, and blogs. We’re talking serious Foundational Questioning 2.0 here. Have a look.

• Stuart Coleman at Daily Irreverence will soon be hosting Philosophia Naturalis, the physical-sciences blog carnival. If you’ve written or read something great along those lines recently, be sure to send him a line to have it included.
  
• David Harris at symmetry writes to let us know that they’re compiling a Particle Physics Life List, and need good suggestions. That is to say, they want a list of the 101 particle-physics-oriented things that everyone should do once in their life. I would have suggested “enjoy a buffalo burger at a Fermilab barbeque,” but they’ve already included “see one of Fermilab’s newborn baby buffalo,” and there’s some tension there. Cycle of life and all that, however.

I know that you’ve all booked your tickets for Chicago in August, for the big YearlyKos shindig. True, it’s not exactly like going to a physics conference; the halls will be filled with candidates trying to drum up votes, and people who use words like “netroots” unironically. But if last year’s event was any indication, there should be all sorts of fun people there, even if it’s harder to find poker tables in Chicago than in Vegas. (You have to go to the riverboats in Gary.)

Like last year, the inimitable DarkSyde is making sure that science is well-represented, including a high-powered Science Panel. Last year the role of “bearded ScienceBlogger battling against creationism” was played by PZ Myers; this year it will be played by Ed Brayton. The role of “clean-shaven 4-star general who will talk about cosmology and the anthropic principle” was played last year by Wesley Clark; this year it will be me, except for the 4-star general part. The role of Chris Mooney will continue to be played by Chris Mooney. I’m honored to be participating, even if the commenters at Daily Kos are wishing it was my fiancee instead.

I hope any readers who are at the event will give a shout. It will be fun to return to the old haunts, go down to 75th Street to listen to Vonski, maybe indulge at Alinea if we save our pennies. And we all know that the weather in Chicago in August is invariably pleasant and charming, so there’s really no exuse.

The blog world, and now, timidly, the “real” media (if Netscape News is the real media) are abuzz about a purported attack code named Operation Bite in six days against Iran. Many of the stories are straight cut-and-paste, all pointing back to a single newspaper article in Russia, by Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli.”

With tensions at the present level between the US and Iran, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. would take unilateral action like this. But is this all just a propaganda leak from the Russians? Apparently an ex-advisor to Putin, former Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, speculated that the US might even use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against hardened underground facilities. Well, that got people’s attention.

So, anyway, April 6 at 4 am Iran time…