I have no independent knowledge of the veracity of this report, but a local TV station in the Bay Area is reporting rumors that the SETI program running at the upgraded Arecibo radio telescope has detected an anomalous signal (or in the very high tech language of their reporting, a “mystery signal”). The report includes some quotes from Dan Wertheimer, the director of the program, so presumably the reporter talked to someone with verifiable science cred before writing the piece. The quotes from the project’s scientists are guarded enough that I’m guessing this is just a lousy job of science reporting in the local news.

The part that got my blood pressure going was the follow-up about what we should answer back. The idea that our backward, technologically impaired civilization should jump up and down and wave its arms around saying “LOOKY HERE!!!! LOOKY HERE!!!! PICK ME!!!!”, is,….what’s the word….oh….batshit crazy. History is not exactly awash in cases where the technologically less advanced civilization wound up the winner when two cultures collide. Usually, it gets rolled.

In spite of this, some crazy optimists in Russia are actually beaming signals out to nearby stars, right now. This “active SETI” program strikes me as completely foolish, and has already caused a rift within the SETI community (so apparently, I’m not alone in my abject fear of being spotted by a more advanced civilization). While this issue hopefully has less urgency than figuring out the political response to planetary climate change, we need to eventually get our collective goverments organized into a treaty about how to deal with this issue. Suppose someday we actually detect some alien space ship whizzing through our local neighborhood. Do we let the Raelians and Scientologists invite them down for a drink, even if the rest of us think it’s better to lay low?

In the meanwhile, Earth should just STFU.

(UPDATE: Link to timesonline changed to the original reporting that they swiped from a much better article by David Grinspoon at Seed.)

(AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Plait did some actual reporting (you know, calling and actually asking), and yup, it’s just bad journalism, as expected.)

It has been a dodgy couple of days for news about my part of England.

Yesterday I watched with pride as my hometown football team - Wigan Athletic - scored three goals in the first half against Blackburn. This then turned to horror as they conceded three, with my pride eventually recovering after they pulled a couple back for a scrappy 5-3 victory (first in thirteen games).

Then (via PZ) I find out that the same type of creationist nonsense that we’re forced to waste time and effort fighting in the U.S. is rearing its empty head in England, and in Lancashire no less! As the Observer reports

The AH Trust, a charity set up last year by a group of businessmen alarmed by the direction in which they see society heading, has identified a number of potential sites in the north west of England to build the £3.5m Christian theme park.

The trust claims it already has a number of rich backers who are keen to invest in the project, which will boast two interactive cinemas, a cafeteria, six shops and a television recording studio, allowing it to produce its own Christian-themed films and documentaries.

Oh the horror! What is going on in my home country? And this isn’t just a place to churn out rip-offs of The Passion of the Christ; they have other issues

‘The church in this country is in crisis and many church leaders living in Australia, America and Canada have openly proclaimed that God has left the church in England,’ the trust states on its website.

‘Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society and we need the television studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood, which presently is destroying the church foundation.’

It just brings tears to my eyes. But I’ll end on a note of pride. Even better than Wigan breaking their losing streak at football is to read this about your hometown

The theme park’s anti-evolution bias and its emphasis on Genesis has raised eyebrows among planning officials, according to Jones, who originally wanted to build the park at the site of an old B&Q store but was refused permission by the council.

‘Wigan council slammed the door in our faces. You mention the C [Christian] word, and people don’t want to know,’

It just warms your heart doesn’t it?

Via Andrew Jaffe and Not Even Wrong, news that the UK will be withdrawing a massive amount of investment in large physics projects.

A funding crisis at one of the UK’s leading research councils has forced the country to pull out of plans for the International Linear Collider (ILC). The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) says in a report published today that it does not see “a practicable path towards the realization of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale”. The report also says that the UK will stop investing in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, withdraw from the Gemini telescopes, and cease all support for ground-based solar-terrestrial physics facilities…

“This is one whole great big bombshell,” says particle physicist John Dainton from the Cockcroft Institute at Liverpool University in the UK, which is involved in planning the ILC. “How can administrators in government departments and the STFC get this so wrong? There must be a reason and incompetence comes to mind. We are furious. You are killing off the exploitation of years of investment.”

Andrew also notes that they will be:

“revisiting the on-going level of investment” in gravitational wave detection, dark matter detection, the Clover CMB experiment and the UKIRT telescope. The UK will pull out of the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes.

Terrible news for particle physics, astrophysics, and solar physics. The ILC is certainly on shaky ground; if countries start dropping out, the LHC might very well be the last particle accelerator at the energy frontier built in our lifetimes.

Two stories, superficially unrelated, neatly tied together by a deep lesson at the end.

The first is the case of Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for multiple murders of patients under her care. However, there was very little direct evidence tying her specifically to the deaths of the individual cases. Much of the prosecution’s case against her was statistical: it was simply extremely unlikely, they argued, that so many patients would die under the care of a single nurse. Numbers like “one in 342 million chance” were bandied about.

But statistics can be tricky. Dutch mathematician Richard Gill has gone over the reasoning presented in the case, and found it utterly wrong-headed; he has organized a petition asking Dutch courts to re-open the case. Gill estimates that 1 in 9 nurses would experience a similar concentration of incidents during their shifts. And he notes that there were a total of six deaths in the ward where de Berk worked during the three years she was there, and seven deaths in the same ward during the three years before she arrived. Usually, the arrival of serial killers does not cause the mortality rate to decrease.

But patients had died, some of them young children, and someone had to be responsible. Incidents that had originally been classified as completely natural were re-examined and judged to be suspicious, after the investigation into de Berk’s activities started. The worst kinds of confirmation bias were in evidence. Here is a picture of what de Berk actually looks like, along with a courtroom caricature published in the newspapers.

Also, she read Tarot cards. Clearly, this is a woman who is witch-like and evil, and deserved to be punished.

The other story involves a brilliant piece of psychological insight from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice, previously lauded in these pages. It involves the reason why people play slot machines, or gamble more generally. There are many complicated factors that go into such a phenomenon, of course, but it nevertheless remains a deep puzzle why people would find it so compelling to roll the dice when everyone knows the odds are against you.

Peter asks us to consider the following joke:

An old man goes to the synagogue and prays, every day, thusly: “God, let me win the lottery. Please, just one big win. I’ll give money to the poor, and live a righteous life. . . . Please, let me win the lottery!”

For years, he comes to the synagogue, and the same prayer goes up: “Let me win the lottery! Please, Lord, won’t you show your grace, and let me win the lottery!”

Finally, one day, after fifteen years of this, as the man mutters, “The lottery, Lord, let me win the lottery. . . ,” a golden light suffuses the sanctuary, and a chorus of angels singing a major C chord is heard. The man looks up, tears in his blinded eyes, and says, “Lord . . . ?”

And a deep resonant voice rings out, “Please . . . would you please BUY A TICKET already?”

And that’s why we gamble: so God can answer our prayers. Fortune’s wheel, in other words, might occasionally want to favor us, but how can it if we don’t give it a chance? By playing the slots, we make it so much easier for Providence to bestow its bounty upon our deserving heads.

The common thread, of course, is the deep-seated aversion that human beings have to accepting randomness in the universe. We are great pattern-recognizers, even when patterns aren’t really there. Conversely, we are really bad at accepting that unlikely things will occasionally happen, if we wait long enough. When people are asked to write down a “random” sequence of coin flips, the mistake they inevitably make is not to include enough long sequences of the same result.

Human beings don’t want to accept radical contingency. They want things to have explanations, even the laws of physics. They want life to have a purpose, chance events to have meaning, and children’s deaths to have a person to blame. They want life to make sense, and they want to hit the triple jackpot because they’ve been through a lot of suffering and they damn well deserve it.

Of course, sometimes things do happen for a reason. And sometimes they don’t. That’s life here at the edge of chaos, and I for one enjoy the ride.

That’s the punishment you get in Saudi Arabia for being a woman and riding in a car with a man who is not in your family. Oh, after your gang rape. (Via Feministing.)

A court in the ultra-conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia is punishing a female victim of gang rape with 200 lashes and six months in jail, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

The 19-year-old woman — whose six armed attackers have been sentenced to jail terms — was initially ordered to undergo 90 lashes for “being in the car of an unrelated male at the time of the rape,” the Arab News reported.

But in a new verdict issued after Saudi Arabia’s Higher Judicial Council ordered a retrial, the court in the eastern town of Al-Qatif more than doubled the number of lashes to 200.

A court source told the English-language Arab News that the judges had decided to punish the woman further for “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

But, lest you jump to conclusions, understand that it’s not only women who have to feel the occasional lash to be kept in line. It’s gay men, too!

About 50 people picketed Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London on Oct. 19 in protest against the nation’s reported floggings and executions of gay men.

On Oct. 2, two Saudi men convicted of sodomy in the city of Al Bahah received the first of their 7,000 lashes in punishment, the Okaz daily newspaper reported. The whippings took place in public, the report said.

I presume that the strong connections between totalitarian impulses, religious fundamentalism, and sexual repression have already been the subject of dozens of Ph.D. theses. There is a truly ugly part of human nature that feels a need to control the lives of others, and theocracy serves as a mechanism for amplifying those impulses into public actions.

As mentioned yesterday, I just gave a public lecture about dark energy.
I think the lecture went well. As Jamie said in the comments below, it was literally earthshaking.

Seriously, it seems I have learned out to control the movements of the earth’s crust. I had just finished a rather long leadup about what the universe is made of (from the pre-Socratics through to R&B bands) to introducing dark energy, had just mentioned the 1998 supernovae results on the accelerating universe, and showed my personal favorite graphic about dark energy, which I think I found several years ago in a google search —
and read the label of this lovely substance. Right after the words came out of my mouth, “Dark Energy, it Stinx, but it Rocks!”, the earth started shaking.

Yes, indeed, there was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake, just about 25 miles from where I was speaking, right in the middle of my talk. Right at the punchline. A bit of chaos ensued (doesn’t dark energy always have that effect on people?) but eventually I reigned them all back in with a witty remark and carried on.

Really, I swear I planned that. Can’t wait for the video.

UPDATE: the video is now available! The excitement occurs during minute 34.
“Dark Energy: a discovery so revolutionary, that it shook the earth.”

Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum both link to this Pew Report on various worldwide opinions. Here is the graph that gets people talking, a plot of per capita GDP versus religiosity:

This looks like a curve that was drawn by hand, rather than fit by least-squares, but there is obviously a correlation: as a country gets wealthier, it gets less religious. The United States, obviously, is a whopping outlier. Why is that? What is it about the U.S. that makes it so different from our demographic cousins, even within the Anglosphere? (Kuwait is also an outlier, but the reasons are pretty straightforward.) I’ve heard various theories, but none has really been convincing.

(Looking closely, maybe a better fit to the data would be to horizontal line segments: one at 2.25, for GDP between 0 an 10,000, and one at 0.75, for all higher incomes. Perhaps there is a phase transition that countries undergo when their per capita GDP hits around 10,000. Or, even more likely, there is some hidden third variable that is highly correlated with both GDP and religiosity. That kind of curve would make the U.S. seem less exceptional.)

Charts and graphs are always exciting. They add an undeniable aura of quantification to any set of claims. What I like to do, when I see a graph illustrating some news item, is to guess what is being plotted before reading the text or axes labels very carefully. Here, via Ezra Klein, are the results of a BBC/ABC News poll:

The large-type words at the top give away the basic issue being addressed: has the U.S. “surge” of additional forces into the Baghdad area made things better or worse? But you can still get the picture from glancing at the colorful vertical bars, before reading any of the tiny text. Tiny red and yellow outliers flank a rampant baby-blue cohort. So my guess was, red meant “better,” blue meant “stayed the same,” while yellow meant “worse.” That would reflect what I had been hearing in the wake of Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress, that overall Americans were not in the slightest convinced that the escalation was bringing an end to sectarian and helping to nuture the first flowerings of Iraqi participatory democracy, with checks and balances for all.

But no! A glance at the fine print reveals that it was blue that corresponded to “worse,” while yellow meant “had no effect.” (In my defense, why wasn’t “had no effect” put in the middle?) I knew the war and the surge were unpopular, but had no idea they were that unpopular.

It takes a dip into the text in the article accompanying the graph to figure out what is going on: this was a poll of Iraqis, not Americans. So now it all makes sense; as unpopular as our military efforts are here at home, it’s nothing like the scorn that we receive from the country we are purportedly saving. Admittedly, closer scrutiny did provide clues that the poll might not have been sampling Americans: the question referred specifically to the escalation “in Baghdad and surrounding provinces,” rather than just “in Iraq,” a distinction that is rather too fine for most Americans to fret about. And there were six different forms of the question, addressing levels of detail that again would not be foremost of the minds of anyone who saw things in terms of supporting vs. attacking our brave men and women in uniform. Like the President.

The best argument for leaving Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t want us there. (It’s not an argument that is discussed very much, for reasons about which you are free to speculate.) This poll from earlier this year is illuminating. On the basic issue of “Do you support the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq?” we find that 46% strongly oppose and 32% somewhat oppose, with only 22% support, strongly or otherwise. It’s not completely unambiguous; when asked if those selfsame forces should get up and leave, only 35% just say “leave now” — which you will notice is smaller than the number who strongly oppose their presence. A full 63% want the forces to stay until they achieve some goal of improving the political or security situation, even though they are not judged to be doing a very good job at that. (The numbers might look worse, post-surge.) Which goes to show that Iraqis don’t necessarily think any more clearly about these things than Americans do.

Of course, only 1% of Iraqis want American forces to stay forever, which is what our government has been preparing to do. So someone is going to end up being disappointed.

The LA Times has a front-page article, apparently free of irony, that laments the glacial rate of progress on constructing a world-class subway system for the city, and imagines wistfully how much easier it would be if only we lived in a one-party communist state. In particular, they look at the progress that Shanghai has made in building its own subway, and pout about all of those nefarious restrictions that Americans have to put up with because we give actual citizens a say in the process.

“If the government wants to do something, even if the conditions are not ready for it, it will be done,” said Zheng Shiling, an influential Chinese architect who teaches at Tongji University in Shanghai.

At the risk of only slight oversimplification, the system works like this: Planners draw subway lines on a map. Party officials approve them. Construction begins. If anything is in the way, it is moved. If they need to, Chinese planners “just move 10,000 people out of the way,” said Lee Schipper, a transport planner who has worked with several Chinese cities in his role as director of research for EMBARQ, a Washington-based transportation think tank. “They don’t have hearings.”

Schipper recalled consulting with one Chinese metropolis whose ancient city wall stood in the way of a transportation project.

“One of the members of the People’s Committee said, ‘Oh, I know how we’ll solve the problem. We’ll move the historic wall.’ ” It was, he said, as if a planner in Washington proposed moving the Potomac River to make way for construction.

One searches the article in vain for the part where they say “Of course we live in a democracy, and some people think that there are certain benefits to that kind of system, even if the government does have to ask permission before tearing down historic sites,” but the moment never comes. Instead, we are treated to stirring stories of the plucky citizens of Shanghai, who don’t raise a peep when construction displaces them from their homes — no, indeed, they are happy to be displaced, as it gives them a chance at a new life! (It might be that voices of complaint are not heard because they are actually silenced, but that smudges up the narrative.)

As a dweller in downtown LA, where a better subway system would be a life-altering good and the lamentations of fragile newcomers who are shocked at the presence of construction noise in a booming high-density urban core form a constant background chorus, I deeply sympathize with frustration at the demands the democratic process force onto city planning. But I’ll tolerate the delays if it means that, if the Mayor wants to tear down our apartments, he at least has to hold a hearing first.

Greetings from the International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing. I once read, in Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell, about a year that Russell spent lecturing on philosophy in Beijing. He was extremely taken with the city and the country, predicting that it would flower into a leading role in the world. This momentarily puzzled me, as my vision of China didn’t seem in sync with Russell’s democratic ideals. But then common sense clicked in, and I realized that we were talking about a period just after World War One, during the Sun Yat-sen era. The new Republic of China was struggling to emerge out from Imperial rule, and the Communist takeover was decades in the future. One could have easily imagined that this sprawling country, united by a common language and a rich heritage of culture and innovation, would rapidly take its place among the free and prosperous nations of the world. The fact that it didn’t is one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century history.

These days China is increasingly prosperous, but not quite free. Upon landing at Beijing International Airport, one fills out the usual customs declaration form, full of admonishments against bringing in firearms or questionable agricultural products. But there is an extra item on the list of dangerous imports: writings, recordings, or other collections of information that could be judged as a threat to the political, moral, or social good of the nation. The didn’t actually ask to search my laptop, but the warning was there.

It’s well known that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) censors blogs, so I’ve been poking around using the internet connection here in my hotel room, trying to judge the extent to which this is true. (The flipside, of course, is the perilous situation of bloggers located in China; apparently they’ve been required to register in order to blog, but I don’t have the latest on that. I should mention that there are all sorts of blogs about China, not that I have any expertise about them.) Access to most websites is fine, but certain addresses are certainly being blocked. Of course it’s impossible for me to distinguish between the actions of the local ISP, the city of Beijing, or the Chinese government itself, but you draw conclusions using the data you have, not the data you wish you had.

Any blog on Blogspot is definitely off-limits (so I can’t visit Preposterous Universe for old time’s sake). You can type in the address or click a link, and the browser will think for a minute, and then return a “Problem loading page: The connection has timed out” error. My impression is that that’s been true for a long time, although apparently it’s been on and off for a while now. Typepad blogs are also off-limits, so no Cocktail Party Physics for me, although that might be a recent development. Livejournal seems to be unavailable, and likewise Xanga, but blogs hosted on Wordpress.com seem to be available. You can search on Google Blog Search or Bloglines, but Technorati is blocked. I haven’t found any individually-hosted blogs that were off-limits, although certain news sites like philly.com are mysteriously banned. The Eagles are in the middle of training camp, how am I supposed to keep up? Also, the New York Times is readily accessible, so make of that what you will. I also couldn’t reach the BBC, although I can actually watch the BBC news channel on my hotel room TV.

Google, of course, is available, in the wake of their somewhat-infamous deal struck with the Chinese government. But Wikipedia is a little confusing — blocked at times, available at others. Apparently this is an ongoing skirmish. I typed in “China” to Google, and the first link was the the Wikipedia page, so I clicked there, and saw it no problem. Then I typed “China internet” into the Wikipedia search box, and was given a list of pages, including Internet Censorship in the People’s Republic of China. But when I clicked there, it briefly began to load, before switching to a “The connection was reset” error. A little spooky, to be honest. Right now I seem to be able to see most Wikipedia pages, although apparently not those specifically about the PRC (although the main China page is still okay). You might think, no problem, I can just look at the Google cache pages for whatever Wikipedia article I’m interested in. But no, you can’t; nothing in Google’s cache seems to be available. So much for infamous deals.

None of which has prevented me from reading any of my favorite blogs. I just do what I always do, and read the feeds via Bloglines. They’re all perfectly visible, even for the blocked sites. Google reader works just as well. A lack of internet savvy on the part of the censors, or an intentional oversight? The one thing that one can’t do is leave comments (or start up your own blog, obviously), and maybe that’s the point.

(I also notice that when I visit google.com, I am not automatically redirected to the local version google.cn, which seems to happen in European countries. Is this because the hotel’s service provider is rigged for foreigners, and ordinary citizens have different rules? Not sure.)

It could be much worse, of course. I mean, here I am, typing away on my own blog, with little fear that the secret police are going to burst into my hotel room in the middle of the night to haul me away. But the biggest single reason I don’t have that fear is that I know that word would get around, and that it wouldn’t look good — free information protects free people. Amnesty International has a campaign, irrepressible.info, to protest against internet censorship around the world. The more noise people make about this issue, the more pressure governments will feel to keep the web free.

Update: In the United States, we prefer to have our censoring-for-political-content performed by corporations, rather than directly by the government. Different cultures, different systems.