I’ve been trying to figure out how to immortalize myself with my very own Scientific Eponym, and…

Eureka! Behold!

Somma’s Stochastic

Somma’s Stochastic states that the number and intensity of logical fallacies employed by a pundit in a debate is inversely proportional to the empirical evidence supporting their position.

Stated Simply The less science behind a pundit’s belief, the more BS they shovel to distort the issue.

To the left of the equation, we have good science with the -1 indicating it’s inverse relationship to the logical fallacies being put out to the right wing hand of the equation.

For example:

	Intelligent Design
	“The fact that Microbiology and Organic Chemistry are too difficult for me to understand, means that all life must have actually been designed by an invisible old man in the sky who cannot be detected, quantified, logically inferred, or otherwise shown to exist.” (Argument from Ignorance, Argumentum ad Ignorantiam)

Another example:

	Anthropogenic Global Warming Skepticism
	“So what if you have decades of data, ice core analyses, atmospheric measurements, and broad scientific consensus? It snowed in North Dakota today! Don’t you look silly!!!” (anecdotal fallacy)

Check out more Scientific Eponyms hosted at the Science Creative Quarterly.

French Astrolabe, 1600s

The Hubble Telescope was impressive. For some reason, I’d never realized how huge this orbiting eye on the Universe actually is, easily three-stories tall. Scale was a common theme for me throughout the museum. The walk-through size of Skylab, the claustrophobia-inducing interior of the cramped Mercury capsule. These pictures won’t fully communicate these dimensions. You have to see for yourself in person.

You can view the complete flickr set here.

Here’s an online treasure trove of audio files brought to you by the Internet Archive of the 1970s radio series Mind Webs. The show featured the greatest speculative fiction stories from top-notch authors of the day. You can find a summary of plotlines here. I’ve been listening to the shows for weeks in my car now, and enjoying them immensely.

Some of my personal favorites:

Harry Harrison’s The Ever Branching Tree, about an elementary school field trip back in time to observe evolution as it happens.

Robert Silverberg’s wonderfully satirical and observant When We Went to See the End of the World, which is even more relevant as a commentary on today’s world than the one it was written for 30 years ago.

Brian W. Aldiss’ The Night That All Time Broke Loose involves an alternate reality where “time gas” allows people to cause various elements of their surrounding reality, their dinner, home decor, even bodies, to travel back in time, dialing them to desired states. It seems like a miracle technology, until a gas line breaks at the time gas plant and starts de-evolving everything.

Aside from the original Night of the Living Dead, I full on loathe zombie films. The plots are always the same, a virus (or magic) turns people into perpetual-motion flesh eating things. Big whoop.

That was until the independent film 28 Days Later came out and reinvented zombies. Only these weren’t walking-dead, these were people infected with super-hyper-rabies cubed. And they didn’t want to eat your flesh, they wanted to puke blood on you to spread the virus. And it had an intelligent plot with terrific characters trying to survive and keep their humanity, instead of just lining then up to die in variously gory ways. (Note: The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was an unintelligent film that did just line up characters to die in variously gory ways.)

So when I heard Director Danny Boyle and Writer Alex Garland were teaming up again to make a hard-core Science Fiction film, Sunshine, I was peeing my pants with excitement–only the high-budget thriller wasn’t being shown within a 200 mile radius of where I lived. You would think that Cinema Multi-plexis with a bazillion screens each a little bigger than a TV could let this film grace at least one of them, but no, so sorry, having 10 screens to show another Shrek film is more important than selection.

This afternoon I rented Sunshine, finally released on DVD, and it was well worth the wait. This film is Hard SF, but also a classic horror film that lines up the characters to die in various inventive ways. The deaths are not so much gruesome, but interesting, as characters are fried by the Sun’s heat, frozen in space, etc. etc. Because the victims here are scientists, we don’t experience the same frustrations watching them as we do with the college-kids appearing in most horror films doing stupid things we all know are stupid on their way to becoming monster-fodder.

Instead, we have highly-professional characters who are really smart. So instead of shouting at the screen, “Don’t go into the basement you stupid Cheerleader!!!” you get to yell, “Don’t forget to factor the solar shielding into your calculations when you plot your course adjustments you stupid physicists!”

Okay, not really, actually it’s all the audience can do to keep up with and admire the inventive solutions the characters arrive at to survive. Which is the other cool aspect to having scientists as horror-movie monster-fodder, they don’t take it shrieking. These characters identify the threat and immediately figure out a daring solution, all of them. Even the least courageous of them is still pretty damn courageous.

It’s nice to see a film that doesn’t underestimate the audience’s intelligence, even if the theaters underestimate our desire for intelligent films.

Warning, the film’s website has plot spoilers right on the front page.

Blue Whale Display American Natural History Museum Photo by Ryan Somma

Whale-watching businesses use blue whales to sell their product. Documentary-makers use blue whales to sell Nature Films. Nature magazines like National Geographic use blue whales to sell magazines. Marine Biologists use blue whales to learn more about the natural world. Whalers use whales to make sushi.

There are millions of dollars of business and a large number of people who rely on blue whales for their livelihood; therefore, blue whales have a value to everyone, even though no one owns them.

Whalers, in killing blue whales to make their product, prevent other businesses from using those blue whales in their ocean tours, documentaries, articles, and research. If they harvest all the whales from the Ocean, then the other businesses will fail because the whalers have monopolized the entire product.

Garrett Hardin called this the “Tragedy of the Commons.” In a completely free-market system, no one owns the whales, and any one business may drive them into extinction for the sake of profit. In fact, driving whales to extinction is an excellent business model if you want to increase the value of products only obtainable through killing whales. You could hold a monopoly on all such products by harvesting all the whales before anyone else could. Trilobyte fossils sell for hundreds, even thousands of dollars because the Earth discontinued its Trilobyte production millions of years ago. Blue Whales are vastly larger than these pill bugs, and required a great deal more evolutionary R&D before they could grace our oceans.

So we have a natural resource, blue whales, that have a market value to everyone on planet Earth, but the whalers taking this natural resource away from everyone aren’t compensating anyone. In a functioning market, the Whalers would be paying a fee to all the businesses they are depriving of their valuable blue whales.

What’s the value of a single whale? There’s no easy answer to this question, so let’s guestimate a ballpark figure using a cold capitalist calculation:

Let’s pretend there are 1,000 Blue Whales in the Ocean (their actual numbers are estimated at 1,500), and the net-worth of all businesses relying on Blue Whales for their income is $100 Million, probably a gross underestimation, but it simplifies our math. In such a situation, every whale harvested from the Ocean would reduce the ability of Whale-Watchers and Documentarians to find whales by one whale less than 1,000, meaning their businesses have taken a 0.001 percent hit to their productivity because of the Whalers.

To be fair, the Whaling company owes the Whale-Watchers and Documentarians $100,000 for harvesting the one whale. This leaves 999 whales in the Ocean, meaning the next whale they harvest should require them to pay $100,100 to those businesses they are hurting.

This also means they’ll be paying $1 Million or more per whale when their numbers dwindle to 100. As there are less whales in the Ocean, their value increases, and the more cost-prohibitive it becomes to harvest them. Similarly, the healthier the blue whale populations, the less valuable they become.

Despite the reality of the situation, the free market system fails to account for it, and thus an injustice is incurred. Luckily, the free market system is a purely social construct, a game we humans agree to play, and when the rules are unjust, we can adjust them to play fair. We need a market systems that establishes the value of each blue whale and forces companies that remove them for personal use to incur an economic cost for taking them away from the rest of us.

Carbon Credits are a free market system for placing a value on another common resource, clean air. Every ton of pollutants a company puts into our shared atmosphere reduces its quality and our health. Clean air is a commodity that all human being need to survive; therefore, an honest market would place a market value on this finite, shared resource.

There is no economic incentive to build a zero-emissions power plant, but there is an environmental one. There should be a market incentive to improving the environment, because there is a demonstrable market value to the environment.

Runaway consumption of natural resources is a purely capitalist enterprise, while cleaning up the resultant pollutants and restoring ecosystems is mostly a charitable one. Carbon Credits creates such a market incentive. Companies will have an incentive to put their greenhouse gas production into the negative so they make earn additional profits from reversing the effects of global warming.

Carbon Credits are not perfected, but then few capitalist systems are (just look at our current sub-prime mortgage crisis). It will take numerous market adjustments to determine the cost of one ton of CO₂, the amount covered in one Carbon Credit, and we should expect much political debate over the value of a carbon credit, what environmentally friendly actions deserve carbon credits, , but that’s a good thing.

This is because the environment is something we all share, and we should all have a say in its value. There is a market value to clean air, water, and biodiversity, but we have to demand it. At this moment, each one of us owns one share out of 6.5 billion shares or 0.000000000153 percent of planet Earth.

It may seem insignificant, until you consider that without your share you die.

This portion of all the Planet’s resources is your birthright as a member of the human race, why let someone else take it for their own profit?

PZ Myers on my Facebook

A Biology professor at the University of Minnesota, PZ Myer’s sharp wit and powerful logic put the smack down on Intelligent Design’s anti-science agenda. For the last five years, Myer’s evolution-promotin’, evangelical-blastin’, cephalopod-appreciatin’ blog Pharyngula has generated between 10,000 and 25,000 hits daily and posts that exceed hundreds of comments.

Raised Lutheran, Myers simply didn’t buy into Christianity, finding much more promise and awe in the natural world, what biologist E.O. Wilson termed the ionian enchantment. This is the modern day Thomas Henry Huxley, aka. “Darwin’s Bulldog,” who defended Darwin’s Theory of Evolution against criticism in its early days, only these days the opponents are Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and other arch-conservatives.

Myer’s greatest strength lies in his political insightfulness. Because the science fails to fit their preconceived ideas about the world, conservative political pundits resort to attacking the scientific process, casting doubt on established scientific principles, and presenting alternative hypotheses completely bereft of factual support.

Luckily, PZ Myer’s is there to call BullPuckies on them.

Myer’s didn’t get any takers when he asked Ann Coulter fans to cite one scientific argument from her book Godless, where she attacks science and evolutionary theory extensively with insults and factual inaccuracies. When Bill O’Reilly interviewed Ben Stein, Myer’s was there to respond to the major points and their silliness. PZ Myers’ witty sarcastic response to Jim Pinkoski’s arguments for biblical literalism, led to the spread of the PYGMIES + DWARFS internet meme in the Science Blogger community.

PZ Myers will make an excellent addition to my collection, and further my nefarious plans substantially.

BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!

I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum:

Hall of Bones

Man and the Manlike Apes

The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity of a tool all animals share, an internal skeleton. Without this scaffolding on which to drap our skin over and attach our muscules to, we’d be just a bunch of blobs, oozing from place to place… Well, that could be pretty cool too.

Visit the flickr set here.

Hall of Mammals

Morganucodon oehleri Common Ancestor to Us All

While the Hall of Bones fascinated me and was immensely instructional, the Hall of Mammals was fairly disappointing. Yes, the huge collection of diversity in the Class Mammalia is pretty amazing. Yes, the exhibit is very educational. It’s certainly not without merit.

However, I saw this exhibit the day following an all-day adventure at the Zoo, seeing real live animals, fully animated with their biological clockworks running with near indecipherable and irreproducible complexity.

Compare this to a collection of taxidermied animals, frozen in time, and positioned best as possible to appear as they do in real life, but still unconvincing enough to trigger my Uncanny Valley response.

That’s why we have to keep them alive.

Visit the flickr set here.

I’ve been up and down health-wise all my life. From years of swimming all day long as a child, to years of vegging out in front of the TV in High School, to taking a proactive, fitness-center approach to my health, to falling off the proverbial wagon and putting on the pounds, back to climbing back on to work them off again. It’s a yo-yo.

So I think it’s great when people take on New Year’s resolutions to get fit and eat right. Even if they don’t succeed, the resolution is a great step in the right direction. Thinking about being healthy is how you eventually become healthy.

What’s the best exercise? Is it the muscle-lengthening, joint-strengthening practice of Yoga? Is it the bone and muscle-density increasing effort in weight-lifting? How about the heart-working, artery-cleaning aerobic exercises like running, biking, and various sports?

The best exercise is the one you do. If you try to get into a weight-lifting regimen, but dread going to the gym to actually pump iron, then you’re not going to keep at it. So find something else.

I’m not very big on aerobics, so I found myself skipping my days planned for the treadmill. It wasn’t until I switched to the stationary bike, where I can read books while sweating bullets, that I didn’t mind the activity, and quickly went from 20 minute sessions to over an hour, and now I see how high I can set the resistance as I bike and it just keeps going up.

Yoga, martial arts, baseball, skating, basketball, swimming, jump-rope, running, hiking, biking, volleyball, boxing, racquetball, tennis, power walking, tree-climbing, gymnastics, stair-climbing, golf–you get the idea. There’s lots of options.

Here’s Some Exercise Ideas for Geeks:

The Eowyn Challenge: can you hike as far as those two pip-squeak hobbits did in the Lord of the Rings? Get outdoors and do some live action role-playing.

Do you fall in the senior citizen category? Then you might want to check out the Nintendo Wii, which provides light exercise and high entertainment value. Here’s a Personal Trainer’s thoughts on the Wii.

If you want to be green while you sweat, try the stationary bike, which can generate enough electricity to power a laptop; however, this is currently a pretty expensive investment, in the $1k-$3k range and purely DIY.

And if you’re the video game addict sort of geek, you can always do the Paint Ball thing. Those pellets can really hurt, and dodging them gets the blood pumping. Playing first-person shooters behind a monitor is for wimps. Unless you strap a camera rig to your back and turn real life into an FPS:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/TuC1st-cA9M&rel=1]

And if these aren’t doing it, then maybe you need to change your state of mind. Read the scientific literature on working out, chart your progress, keep graphs, calorie count, just completely geek out on thrill of hacking your body. That’s what all the jocks are doing at the gym.

Maybe you could find a way to quantify your exercise in experience points?

My deconstruction of the logical fallacies in Inhofe’s recent report, titled Senate Report Debunks “Consensus” on Global Warming drew a whole lot of comments on my otherwise thoroughly-ignored blog. I really wish the report had come out at a more convenient time, instead of when I had the blog on auto-pilot for the holidays. I appreciate everyone’s comments, especially the one’s I disagree with, and whom I hope all catch AIDS and die. : )

It’s important to remember that my response to Inhofe’s report is a rhetorical deconstruction, just as Inhofe’s report is a rhetorical device itself. This isn’t a science blog, it’s a science appreciation blog. If that makes me unqualified to write about Inhofe’s report, then Inhofe is unqualified to write the report in the first place.

So Thpppt!!!

The actual science that many of the legitimate scientists apply in their arguments referenced in Inhofe’s report has all ready been exhaustively debated on websites like RealClimate. I’m not going to rehash them. If AGW skeptics have science on their side, then they will need to start publishing their findings in Peer-Reviewed journals. Until that happens, they don’t have science on their side.

So double Thpppt!!!

Tipping points, Carbon Credits, over-hyped alarmism are all valid debates in the overall scheme of things, but what do these issues have to do with the consensus on AGW Theory, which, very simply states (1) it’s happening (2) we’re causing it?

Nada. Nix. Null. Nil. Naught. Zero. Zip. Zilch. A set of reasons that can be expressed with the symbol . Bugger all. Bumpkis. Posting them as responses are purely red herrings meant to distract us from the ridiculousness of Inhofe’s report.

I’m not a Climatologist, I’m a BS detector, and Inhofe’s report is very plainly a great big steaming pile of the stuff. Inhofe’s AGW skeptics are telling us everything, but showing us nothing. AGW theorists have shown us everything, published it, and had it peer-reviewed. That’s what makes it a consensus.

Nah. Nah. Nah.

But to address a few of the rhetorical points made in the comments section:

One commenter took issue with my use of the term “Parrotheads,” which is synonymous with “Dittoheads,” a term NeoConservatives proudly use to refer to themselves. If “Parrotheads” is offensive, then I think Dittoheads need to take an introspective moment and reconsider how they self-identify.

On another note, if calling AGW skeptics “Parrotheads” in anyway invalidates my arguments, then Inhofe’s arguments are also invalidated for refering to AGW Theorists as Nazis. My demeaning and jocular nickname suggests my opponents lack critical thinking, Inhofe’s comparison suggests we want to round up millions of people and exterminate them.

More than one commenter pushed the point that Scientists only push AGW theory to get grant money. Lot’s of AGW Skeptics were turned on to this argument from the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

But doesn’t this rhetoric cut both ways? If AGW Skeptics believe, illogically, that scientific arguments are invalid because the Climatologists are only trying to get research grants in order to justify their average $84k salaries, then Inhofe’s arguments are, by the same illogic, invalidated several times over for the nearly $1 Million in campaign contributions he has received from the Oil & Gas Lobby in order to justify, through reelection, his $165k salary.

The disqualifier disqualifies based on his own fault, as the Hebrew saying goes. If AGW skeptics really want to keep applying this logical fallacy, then I think it’s very nice of them to give AGW Theorists a free debate point. Boo Yah!

Another commenter made the always hilarious, never gets old, point that it snowed this week somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

It snowed in Winter??? Boy is my face red. According to Parrotheads, it shouldn’t get cold in winter if Global Warming is real. Of course, the science doesn’t say this at all, and I’ve all ready given this argument a good spanking and sent it home crying to mommy, so I won’t bother to repeat myself. Still, thanks for the chuckle.

Multiple commenters blamed the sun, which a lot of skeptics like to blame for Global Warming, but never produce any scientific studies to support it. Probably because they can’t. A report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, found no connection between solar variation and recent warming, and, in fact, there is less sunlight reaching the Earth due to air pollution. So sorry. Please try again.

One commenter cut and pasted the talking points from a recent publication (PDF) in the International Journal of Climatology purported to disprove AGW Theory. Unlike the commenter, I actually bothered to read the report, which doesn’t dispute AGW Theory in any way, shape, or form. It merely questions the accuracy of predicting future warming trends through observed discrepancies between the researchers’ measurements and the existing modeling data.

It’s conclusions are also in complete disagreement with another report published around the same time. Conflicting reports? That’s not bias, that’s just another day at the office for science.

Black Wallaby makes a counter point to my criticism that there were too many economists in Inhofe’s report by pointing out that a very alarmist report from economist Sir Nicholas Stern caught a whole lot of media attention. So why the discrepancy?

Because there is no discrepancy. Stern’s report has nothing to do with AGW Theory, it has to do with the economic repercussions of what climate models predict. The accuracy of those models, his economic predictions, etc. all fall outside the scope of the debate over AGW Theory’s consensus point.

If I were to say, “Did you hear??? Sir Nicholas Stern supports the consensus on AGW!!! OMFSM! Tee-Hee! LOL! WWJD!!!”

You could legitimately retort, “He’s a $%#&ing economist dorkbutt!!!” slap me in the face, and send me home to cry myself to sleep for referencing an economist as an expert on a scientific issue.

However, if I were to say, “Sir Nicholas Stern believes AGW holds serious economic repercussions for the world!”

You could reply, “Yeah, but he’s basing those economic forecasts on climate models that may be over hyped.”

It’s a whole different argument.

He also cites McKitrick and McIntyre, the former of ClimateAudit. These two AGW skeptics had their comments rejected by the Journal Nature, most likely for making false claims, of which, we can see, they have made several. Unfortunately, if these two have anything real to contribute to the debate on AGW, they have all ready spoiled their reputations with what is either dishonesty or sloppiness.

However Black Wallaby also makes important points that I am being very unfair to economists, biologists, et al, and I was being unfairly dismissive of them. I did, however, make the point that all of these disciplines have something to contribute to the AGW debate. One group I did not at all mean to sound dismissive of was Meteorologists, and I thought I made that clear by lumping them in with Climatologists, apparently this was misinterpreted as having the opposite intention. Dammit. Oh well.

Anyways. I do completely agree with Wallaby’s point that it’s wrong to put the opinions of scientists in Ivory Towers and resort to an argument from authority logical fallacy. As Carl Sagan once sagely noted, in science “there are no authorities, at best, there are experts.”

His post was definitely the most collegiate and persuasive of all. He should have posted it at a more respectable blog.

Beyond Wallaby’s quibbles, there really weren’t any major refutations of my core arguments. Inhofe’s book report remains an uncollaborative effort, many of the quotations cited don’t in any way dispute the consensus on AGW, and absolutely none of them have been officially entered into the scientific debate through legitimate peer-review journals. Of course, that could be because of academia’s vast left-wing conspiracy. We liberal illuminati are the real reason climate skeptics don’t get published.

On a final note, I was really happy to see that all AGW skeptics were apparently way too embarrassed to defend Kurzweil’s inclusion in the report, where he doesn’t dispute the consensus, like many of the scientists quoted don’t, but does say AGW doesn’t matter because microscopic robots will fly in to save us from it in a few decades. I totally scored a solid debate point there, and I’m really glad I so nefariously plagerized the argument from Joseph Romm.

Thanks Romm!!!

Carbon Credits VS Tax Penalties are another, very important, purely political debate that falls well outside the scope of my post. As I’ve stated before, it’s very much where I would like to see this debate progress. Stay tuned to this blog if you want to eventually dispute my opinions on that entirely different subject. I’ll be happy to make you all feel very small and puny against my insanely puerile rhetorical genius.

PS – Thanks so much for the encouragement Sheryl!!! Don’t worry I won’t quit my day job!!! You totally rock the casaba! I’m even down to using using just a few squares of toilet paper with each bathroom break! You would be so proud! I’ve also added your comment to my resume!

XX OO XX !!!

Author or editor of over 500 books, including the incredible Foundation Series and I, Robot books. I was led to Asimov by my favorite author at the time, Kurt Vonnegut, who lavished much praise on his prolific friend. Asimov and Vonnegut are now equal in my eyes, Vonnegut for his humanity, Asimov for his down to Earth brilliance, both were presidents of the American Humanist Association

Despite being a member of Mensa (like myself), Asimov was very concerned with bringing complex subjects within the realm of understanding of everyday human beings. He advocated the elimination of English grammar, which he believed was so illogical as to promot illiteracy, deconstructed the Bible so thoroughly it took multiple volumes to cover it, and explained complex scientific subjects with a simplicity that promoted science in common discourse.

I got a treat yesterday as I was listening to NPR, and learned that, despite writing extensively about space travel, Asimov was too afraid to ever fly in a plane. I’ve read Asimov’s own accounts of his longtime resistance to word processors, which, once overcome, dramatically increased his productivity.

He would be 87 today.