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This story is so amazing/silly/horrifying that it’s taken a few days to sink in. Short version: Dr. Eric Pianka of the University of Texas, an internationally recognized ecologist, goes around giving talks warning that the Earth is in major trouble. We’re headed for an ecological disaster, and human beings in particular are in serious danger of being wiped out by a deadly virus like Ebola, perhaps leading to the death of 90% of our current population. It might even be good for the environment over all (although bad for us, obviously). He’s an alarmist, no doubt about it, but it’s better to hear about such disaster scenarios than to simply ignore them.

And then — and here’s the part that is so bizarre that it takes a while to really believe it — “citizen scientist” and creationist Forrest Mims apparently heard Pianka give a talk, and decided that Pianka is advocating that we release a virus to kill 90% of the Earth’s population. Completely untrue, of course; just a simple-minded and mean-spirited twisting of the guy’s words. Even from the original story, you could tell that there was a serious disconnect between portrayal and reality — the actual quotes from Pianka didn’t measure up to the surrounding alarmist hysteria.

But the right-wing/creationist blogosphere has gone completely nutso over this. I thought my fellow left-wing/scientific friends might be exaggerating the reaction a bit, but it’s true — dozens of posts about the crazy “Dr. Doom” who longs to bring down our civilization through bioterrorism. ID advocate (and tireless defender of academic freedom!) William Dembski has taken the obvious step for someone who is unhinged but nevertheless concerned — he has reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security. A good summary of the craziness has been written by Nick Matzke at the Panda’s Thumb; more coverage from PZ Myers (and here), Ed Brayton, Wesley Elsberry (and here), and DarkSyde (and here).

There’s a lesson here, although damned if I can figure out what it is. PZ thinks that these people are just anti-academic, and that it’s part of a campaign to discredit the very notion of expertise. But I suspect that it’s less calculated than that — we’re talking about folks who find it completely plausible to imagine that liberal biology professors are eager to wipe out most of the human race. The basic cognitive short-circuit seems to be an inability to understand the difference between a sentiment of the form “A human population of one billion is more ecologically sustainable than one of six billion” and something like “I would like to personally murder five out of every six living people.” It’s the right-wing equivalent of people who think that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by Halliburton and/or the Mossad. Except that it’s not a fringe movement; the buzz is all over the right hemiblogosphere, and was straightforwardly reported by Matt Drudge and others.

Next time I mention that a decay of our vacuum state via bubble nucleation could wipe out life on Earth, I’ll make sure there aren’t any creationists in the audience. I can’t imagine explaining that to the Department of Homeland Security.

Is it just me, or are you as amazed and disgusted as I am by the recent item in the news about Exxon-Mobil’s profits? In the last quarter, their profits were up almost 75% to almost $10 billion dollars! As summarized in a recent USA today article by Matt Krantz, Exxon has reported:

* Net income up 75% to $9.92 billion. That is the most a U.S. company has earned from operations in a three-month period […]

*Revenue up 32% to $100.7 billion. That is greater than the annual GDP of all but just 38 of the world’s economies.

Note also that Royal Dutch Shell reported $9 billion, BP $6.5 billion…. etc.

The reason this all makes me a bit sick to the stomach is that as a civilization, we are spending such a relatively tiny amount of money on research into alternative fuel sources to oil. We are knowingly essentially ignoring all of the things that informed commenters (see here) have told us to prepare for. How are we ever going to stop this craziness, this gluttony, and look to the future? Why are we not looking out for our children’s future, and the future of their children? It’s all so depressing.

So I repeat (and invite you to read my earlier post on just how crazy this is): Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.

-cvj

So, as I was saying….

I really love the cities I’ve visited in Taiwan on my walkabout. I’m particularly excited to see how Taipei has been transformed in so short a time by its wonderful new subway system, and I hope a similar transformation will happen here in LA, once the projects that have been put into motion come to fruition…If they do it all properly.

Not everything is wonderful about the cities in Taiwan. The horrible mistakes that have been made in the West concerning having your own convenient personal internal combustion engine which you use for everything have been made there, and continue. One major scourge is the scooter. In short, the bike began to fall out of favour a long time ago in Taiwan. Eventually, people began to think scooters were cool, and you can cover larger distances faster, so it is a cheap alternative to a car, but you buy into a car’s benefits. Taiwan was long known for its love affair with scooters, but it is really really out of control in recent times, on several fronts. And even in Taipei where the subway has made such a difference, it is still a mess, and smaller cities with less good public transport links, it is a nightmare.

First, recall your images of China (usually the other China…the big one) as having lots of bikes, everywhere…. dozens of them being cycled along together along main roads and narrow side streets, hundreds of them parked together in several lines looking rather picturesque, or higgledy-piggledy in a no less charming way (picture the bikes outside the railway station in Amsterdam for example, if you’ve not got a mental image from further East). Sort of a cvj’s paradise, right, given my yearning for more use of bikes and public transport?

Ok, scratch that image. In everything I just said replace nice clean, quiet bikes with noisy scooters with tiny engines belching exhaust fumes everywhere. You can’t park hundreds of them in a compact space (like you can with bikes), since they’re quite wide. They clog up the sides of the roads and so they are not allowed to park there. The cities were never designed for this volume of them. So guess where they park? Where pedestrians are supposed to walk: The sidewalk (or pavement, for those from elsewhere). And they are ridden there as well, when coming in and out of parking spaces. So in fact, on lots of sidewalks in smaller cities where the problem is even more acute (such as Hsinchu, which has no subway), there is actually only single-file space to walk on the formerly quite wide sidewalks, and you don’t just have to step aside to make room to other pedestrians, but scooters as well, looking for parking spots.

That’s just the beginning. There are so very many of them everywhere that there’s nowhere to hide, as a pedestrian. You have to be looking out for getting in the way of one. Furthermore, they are so erratic in traffic….streaming around cars on all sides at all speeds, that car drivers are often simply terrified of them. And they are often not very well maintained and so make a huge amount of noise, and all of them belch out exhaust fumes galore. It’s a disaster.

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So to my surprise yesterday, when I went to take the bus home (I had cycled all the way into work along the pleasant route I described here and here), a completely new bus design pulled up! It seems that while I was on walkabout, for a month, the MTA made some further improvements.

It’s one of those excellent “bendy buses” (as I like to call them), and it is a completely new design that is rather large and spacious. Together with the new 757 route on Western, (see below) these are the first Metro Rapid routes they have put them on (they first started using these buses on the Orange dedicated commuter line in the valley), and they’re excellent. It’s much more like riding the subway than a bus, as the ride is very smooth. Also, there’s even more room under the seats for things like my Brompton, and yes, there are bike racks on the front (as is usual all over the MTA) for those larger “regular” bikes everybody else uses).

(In the picture of the interior, the reason there’s nobody on the bus is becaue I took at 6:15am today, and it is at the start of the route. Within 15 minutes it was being used by several people.)

This continues to defy the lie that everybody tells about there being no public transport in Los Angeles. See my earlier remarks about that here.

In other news, the Exposition Line has now been fully approved!! See my report on this exciting public transport project (which will ultimately result in my being able to step out of my office and take the subway all the way to the beach) here. The news about the final approval can be found on the MTA website here, along with raftloads of further evidence that there’s public transport in this city.

Finally, there’s been another Metro Rapid line started, running along Western. This allows for more quick North/South connection of the middle of the city, and also connects up two branches of the subway’s Red Line. Red Line? Subway? Yes….take a virtual tour of the lovely stations, here.

So, maybe I’ll see some more USC people coming to work on my route? Come on…give it a try!

-cvj

See here for the voting procedure, and background.

E. Noether, “Invariante Variationsprobleme,” Nachr. v. d. Ges. d. Wiss. zu Göttingen 1918, pp235-257.

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(No, not a new element discovered. Just wanted to use that title.) What can I say? Black and white animals can be ridiculously cute. Especially if they’re baby ones. Spotted* in the LA Times was an article about Tai Shan (pictured in my lunchbox above), the four and a half month old Giant Panda cub (photo is from earlier) which gave its first official press conference to the national media yesterday in Washington DC.

The article’s nice and all, but the good stuff is the live pandacam (!) at the Zoo’s website on the Pandas where you can watch the mother and her cub hanging out! See also the collection of ridiculously cute baby Panda photos here, (this is where I got the photo from) and other photo galleries. (Oh, yes, and lots of valuable scientific information, and information on how to support the species, here.)

-cvj

(*Thanks Samantha!)

One of the several unfortunate myths about Los Angeles is the statement that there is no public transport. Even locals say that. You’ve probably read me going on about this fact here on blog before. People come to LA expecting that they can’t do anything unless they drive. I meet several people who are here from elsewhere (such as postdocs, students, others) who just don’t enjoy the city because they don’t have a car and think that there is therefore nothing to do. They have believed what everyone says about there being no public transport and miss out on the tremendous wealth of things to do here. People who hate LA (and gosh, there are many aren’t there?) usually hate it because they don’t know it. From the car they’re in, they see highways, and strip malls, and think that’s all there is. The great stuff is best seen on foot, or by bike, or moving at the slower, deliberate pace afforded by a city bus, on real city streets instead of highways.

Yes, it is a myth: It is not true, that thing they say about public transport. Some evidence:

Further evidence can be found at MTA’s website, where you can find that map and zoom into it and see a great deal of details. There is remarkable coverage by all kinds of buses. They run to a schedule, (reasonably reliably, but yes, there are screwups, like in any city) there’s a part of the website where you can plan journeys with a smart planner, and you can even call a number from anywhere in the city to say where you are and where you want to go and a real person will tell you what the nearest bus stop is and what bus to catch. And there are other bus companies that make that map I showed above a bit denser if you include them too. (The cute little Dash system of buses, for example, gets you around several neighbourhoods for a 25c flat fee.)

And yes, there is a subway system. People deny its existence, but it is there, with underground trains and light rail lines above ground. The subway stops are beautifully designed, and if any one of them was on the London Underground system, for example, they would be one of the flagship stations (click on station images here). Shiny and clean, due to underuse, and designed for a capacity that is undershot by two orders of magnitude. Please check out the interactive tour of the Redline stations that can be found here. It is actually fun. Those who know that the subway exists say that they don’t use it because “it does not go anywhere”. For a lot of people, this is actually true, since it is not yet a very extensive system (but you can improve coverage by combining with buses), but I’ve learned that a lot of Los Angelenos won’t ever use a public transport system because (a) With a car, you live your own little celebrity lifestyle, only poor people are supposed to use buses and trains. So witness the stark racial and class divide between those on buses and those in cars; and (b) “it does not go anywhere”, means “the stop is not just outside my front gate, I can’t stop at any store I like, and it does not stop outside the building in which I work”.

Well, (b) is a slight exaggeration. But you get the point. The car is a a pretty sweet deal, and highways are amazing. You can cross vast distances most times of day in remarkably short times. So people want the same convenience as a car, and it is hard to go back to having to wait for a bus for a bit, plan ahead, walk to a stop, etc. And sure, to cross the whole city using a bus can take a long time, even for the express buses. The system is not perfect and people demand too many stops on the line (hardly anybody here likes to walk, even a little) and so the buses make less headway than they ought. But one might hope people would use them for shorter journeys, and leave the car parked…but no. Even with the convenient bike racks on the front of every bus that could make quick shopping trips, or changes of neighbourhoods, relatively painless. It is very sad.

I have seen a slight improvement of ridership recently, and I think it might be because of the gas prices. I am not sure. But I have seen more people who don’t fit the standard description getting on the bus in the mornings and disembarking (I guess soon people will say “debussing”?) at USC. Similarly for the subway. But it could be my imagination. I have some hope that -maybe because of gas and traffic congestion- people will soon learn to use the existing transport and by their numbers demand that it gets better.

Ok. Returning to the subway and train system, there is some exciting news. Unless something goes wrong a month from now (final policy decisions to be voted on), next year they will start work on the next branch of the main city’s subway system! But it gets better. It will run right next to USC! This is very exciting. Here is the map showing where it will run (blue dotted line):
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Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.

—Marie Curie

This is the banner quote in the excellent article entitled “Green to the core? How I tried to stop worrying and love nuclear power”, by Judith Lewis in this week’s LA Weekly. In view of the issues I mentioned in my article about energy a while ago, this is very interesting reading, since it seems that there may be a huge reinvestment in nuclear energy in our near future. In case you don’t know (and most people don’t), here in the USA there is nuclear energy in our present in a big way. 20% of the electricity we use is generated in this manner. Pretty much all the stations generating this energy are rather old, and with the growing realization (or at least suspicion) that we should not continue to distort the environment by burning fossil fuels (in fact, it looks like we must stop urgently), the political (and other) will is beginning to change, and since nobody really wants to try something truly radical (such as a massive investment in research into solar power, as Nathan Lewis argues - convincingly, in my opnion - is the only sensible long term option), the nuclear issue is on the table again.

You have to read the article. It is very well written and quite satisfyingly long, as such an issue deserves. One excellent aspect of the article is the fact that it takes a little time here and there to talk about the terminology, and even some of the physics! This is great, since, as the article reports:

He [Golden, one of the interviewees] accuses the nuclear industry of “falling down on the job” by keeping so many secrets about its world, and holds that if the American public, like the more nuclear-friendly French, knew all the facts — what happens when atoms split, how unstable nuclides decay, how uranium is enriched and waste is transported — nuclear energy might be more popular with the American public. “Most Americans think they know about radiation because of Chernobyl, science fiction or the three-eyed fish in The Simpsons,” he says. “So as a country, we are phobic about radiation.”

and so Judith Lewis, in the early parts of the article, does a good job every now and again of stopping and talking a little about the terminology and the science in a very accessible way.

I’m not going to do any more extracts since it is a complicated matter. There’s political, engineering, science, sociological, safety, financial, and other issues all tangled up. No clear good-vs-bad division. So please go and read it when you have time. Come back and tell us what you think, if you’d like to.

I cannot over-emphasize how important I think it is to take the time out and read this article or an article like it. This is so important. All of our futures, and those of our decendants, are going to collide with this issue. Get yourself ready for the jolt.

-cvj

Well, you’ve read my whining here and here about being terribly distracted by having to organize departmental colloquia every week. You’ve noticed that the extra grundge work sometimes comes about because I want it to be a fun, inclusive event every week, with everybody having a great time while learning a lot, meeting their colleagues, and with a great deal of good ideas and conversation resulting from it. Achieving this requires effort, and when it does work…it is really, really worth it.

Such an event happened on Monday. Caltech’s Nathan Lewis gave an excellent presentation entitled “Scientific Challenges in Sustainable Energy Technology” at 4:15pm. As promised in the posters, there were refreshments on the lawn outside at 3:30pm, and we had people from several departments: students, postdocs, faculty, department chairs, and deans showed up. Energy is important you see. That (and tasty Trader Joe’s grub) is what I tried to use as the hook to get them there, and I think it worked, as we had at least 100 people.

We had a treat. Nate is an engaging speaker on an interesting topic which he knows very well. He’s quick as a …quick thing, and he can (and he will) call up all the facts and figures he needs to debate you vigourously on the topic of sustainable energy technology. He gave us a very detailed abstract, and as it does a pretty good job of describing a lot of the talk, I’ll reproduce it here so that you can get an idea of what he talked about:

This presentation will describe and evaluate the challenges, both technical, political, and economic, involved with widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies. First, we estimate the available fossil fuel resources and reserves based on data from the World Energy Assessment and World Energy Council. In conjunction with the current and projected global primary power production rates, we then estimate the remaining years of supply of oil, gas, and coal for use in primary power production. We then compare the price per unit of energy of these sources to those of renewable energy technologies (wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass, hydroelectric, and geothermal) to evaluate the degree to which supply/demand forces stimulate a transition to renewable energy technologies in the next 20-50 years. Secondly, we evaluate the greenhouse gas buildup limitations on carbon-based power consumption as an unpriced externality to fossil-fuel consumption, considering global population growth, increased global gross domestic product, and increased energy efficiency per unit of globally averaged GDP, as produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A greenhouse gas constraint on total carbon emissions, in conjunction with global population growth, is projected to drive the demand for carbon-free power well beyond that produced by conventional supply/demand pricing tradeoffs, at potentially daunting levels relative to current renewable energy demand levels. Thirdly, we evaluate the level and timescale of R&D investment that is needed to produce the required quantity of carbon-free power by the 2050 timeframe, to support the expected global energy demand for carbon-free power. Fourth, we evaluate the energy potential of various renewable energy resources to ascertain which resources are adequately available globally to support the projected global carbon-free energy demand requirements. Fifth, we evaluate the challenges to the chemical sciences to enable the cost-effective production of carbon-free power on the needed scale by the 2050 timeframe. Finally, we discuss the effects of a change in primary power technology on the energy supply infrastructure and discuss the impact of such a change on the modes of energy consumption by the energy consumer and additional demands on the chemical sciences to support such a transition in energy supply.

Why did I title this post “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid”? Let me explain a bit, without scaremongering too much. (more…)

I saw the film The March of the Penguins last night. It was very enjoyable. A documentary (mostly) about the life cycle of Emperor penguins, in the extraordinarily harsh conditions of Antartica. The voiceover (read by Morgan Freeman) and the added sounds had some slightly over-the-top anthropomorphic tendencies here and there, but it was forgivable. And the penguins are cute. Really really cute….and that’s not even counting the baby ones, which are impossibly impossibly cute.

So I came away thinking that penguins are amazing, and the struggles they go through are staggering, and it’s so interesting and nice that they struggle so valiantly (and bizarrely) over the year in the name of survival and propagation, and I had a bit of a worry about what would happen when/if the recent changes to our environment modify the conditions they’ve adapted to…

…And I left it at that and went to sleep (well, after a mojito, and a bit of physics) hoping that since this film was so successful at the box-office in the USA, maybe Hollywood will get into the act and start making films of this sort for general release. I’d go see them on the big screen, and I would not mind a limited amount of anthropomorphisation, if it helps get people to see more of the gripping dramas that exist out there already, rather than have to sit through the ones we end up paying for which are mostly badly written by the usual suspects. What harm could come of this?

Well, today I read* today’s article, by David Smith, in the Observer entitled How the penguin’s life story inspired the US religious right. So I got a bit concerned, but I do worry that it might be a bit of a storm in a teacup. (The Observer and its sibling the Guardian -papers I love and read regularly- do sometimes have their fair share of loud left-wing whining for its own sake, and all the British press love their “Those whacky Americans!” stories, so one has to be careful.) So let’s tread carefully here. It seems (from the article) that “The March of the Penguins” has become “The Passion of the Penguins”, in that it has become popular in devout Christian circles for various reasons. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, I would say. The thrust of the article is that the film is being used as propaganda for everything from Intelligent Design (of course) to antiabortion and “traditional family values” (and we know what that really means, don’t we?) This could be a cause for concern, although on the strength of this article alone (its quotes and examples) I’m not convinced that the sky is falling in (any more than it already is, in this context).

It probably would help to point out that I do not have a deep hatred for religion and all things religious. (Sorry to dissappoint you if you think that I should, by simply being a scientist.) So I am not in principle against religious groups picking a film and using it in their teaching, as long as they are not teaching harm to others, and as long as they do not teach things that attempt to replace science by junk. So I don’t mind the extract:

As happened with Mel Gibson’s Christian blockbuster, churches have block-booked cinemas and organised visits for their members. The 153 House Churches Network in Sidney, Ohio, runs a March of the Penguins Leadership Workshop after screenings of the film. Its website, […] provides a form that can be downloaded and taken to the cinema. It advises: ‘Please use the notebook, flashlight and pen provided to write down what God speaks to you.’

Ben Hunt, a minister at the network, said of the penguins’ struggle for survival: ‘Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians. The penguin is falling behind, like some Christians are falling behind. The path changes every year, yet they find their way, like the Holy Spirit.’

…even though it might scare some of you, it doesn’t me (well, not much!). So far, it’s just an analogy that they’re stressing in their own peculiar manner. Fine.

But then we get to:

Andrew Coffin, writing in the Christian publication World Magazine, said such miracles of nature were evidence that life is too complex to have arisen through Darwinian random selection: ‘That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat - and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design. It’s sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it’s also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film.’

Oh boy. Here we go. Will it never end? This would certainly be bad if all those church groups are indeed trying to use this as support for ID. It is not clear from the article whether this is so however, (is the interestingly named Mr Coffin also involved in organizing these same church group viewings? Not clear) but sure, let’s keep an eye on it. So do feel free to comment if you have read other articles which suggest that this is really a significant new and damaging assault on reason, or if you have another point of view on this article. I should say that I am glad that the possibility that the film could be misused was pointed out to me by the article….It had not yet occured to me….I’m just not convinced that I should be overly upset, as though it was a shocking new change of tactic. I could be wrong. Don’t be shy in expressing a different view.

(Parenthetically: For some reason -I don’t know if they thought this would help all the Observer readers digest the breakfast they just choked on- the article ends with a penguin joke! And a link to a whole website of penguin jokes. Hmm….)

By the way, I must say I’m amused by some obvious inconsistencies, such as:

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, told a conference of young Republicans: ‘Penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. The dedication of these birds is amazing.’

Really? Ideal? Ok…. so the fact that the birds randomly change mates at the end of the year, and abandon their children (explicitly mentioned in the film) is ok then? Wow! It seems that a whole new kind of Christian has been launched!

There’s a bit of back and forth about ID with the usual quotes from each side, which I won’t repeat here, since we’ve a whole archive of posts and comments here at CosmicVariance bursting at the seams with this sort of (important) chatter.

I’ll end with my favourite quote from the article, which is:

…its American distributors, Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films, insist that it is simply a tale about penguins. Laura Kim, a vice-president of Warner Independent, said: ‘You know what? They’re just birds.’

-cvj

(*Thanks Samantha!)