Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico Image by NASA

19 years ago, March 23, 1989, Apollo asteroid 4581 Asclepius passed within 700,000 km (400,000 miles) of Earth, passing through the exact position the Earth was only six hours before.

Had it impacted, it would have generated an explosion thousands of times more powerful than the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. So let’s not forget the importance of projects like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which search the skies, keeping an eye on the Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could reset the human race back to the Stone Age in the blink of an eye.

Here’s a question that started nagging me today: Why hasn’t it become standard for politicians to spice up their speeches with Power Point Presentations?

Could you imagine a modern-day scientist getting up in front of a conference and try to make a persuasive argument with just an inspiring speech? “Every American must embrace String Theory as an integral step toward a Grand Unified Theory of physics that will make this Country great again!”

I think that would result in a lot of raised hands and head-scratching. Why can’t political speeches be more like TED Talks? Why are they geared towards those living fossils the Baby Boomers? I love to hear Obama talk, but I can do that with an MP3. I wanna see a multimedia presentation accentuating his words.

Mind you, not all speeches lend themselves to this format. Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” stands on its own.

It’s time we stopped using the word “theoretically,” the word is an oxymoron unto itself, at least in the way we use it:

• “Is it theoretically possible for science to someday create a real lightsaber? (source)”
• “Antimatter galaxies theoretically possible, but unlikely (source)”
• “Critics say the White House’s theoretical arguments may fly in the face of empirical evidence. (source)”
• “…academics/media do a big disservice by raising issues that are theoretically possible, but not at all important in reality. (source)”
• “Are MMORPG goods theoretically taxable? (source)”
• “A science is most exciting when there are two or more strong, competing theories. (source)”

In science a theory is a “comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time.” A theory is not synonymous with fact, but it is the best approximation to it.

The way everyday people use the word theory is synonymous with speculation, and this leads to much confusion when debating scientific issues. People who don’t understand science argue that evolution and Anthropogenic Global Warming are only theories, not realizing that what they have actually said is that Evolution and AGW are only practically facts.

The word people should be using in the above examples is hypothetically. In science, we move from hypothesis through experimentation to theory.

There is no such thing as “competing theories.” This is an oxymoron. If they are competing, then they are hypotheses. If you have to ask if something is “theoretically possible,” then it probably isn’t, it’s merely “hypothetically possible.”

Remember Gravity is only a Theory.

“What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

Al Gore never said he invented the Internet. You can’t see the Great Wall of China from space. There is no ghost of a little boy in the background of Three Men and a Baby. Goldfish do not have memory-spans only 10-second’s long. Nobody’s drugging college kids and stealing their kidneys, and many of the Darwin Awards are made up.

Mass media has the power to spread memes like wildfire, even false ones. But it’s not just the MSM promoting inaccuracies, our own memories are highly fallible, we experience creeping normalcy and false memories. Human memory is a reconstruction, not a record.

Nothing has illustrated the inaccuracies in my own head more than blogging. It all started when I began linking to my sources so readers could see for themselves. Then I became more selective of my sources, going for primary sources whenever possible, academic institutions, and respectable news sources. The collective-consciousness wikipedia maintains data integrity by placing “[citation needed]” notes beside anything not backed-up with a reference in its articles.

But I still have to begin writing my posts from what’s inside my head. I come up with a topic, support it with the relevant facts I “know” from previous studies, and then go out to find credible sources that verify those facts. No matter what I do, I have to start from the data in my head.

You know what I’ve learned? I’m really wrong on a whole lot of “facts” I take for granted. Let me tell you, there is nothing more frustrating than wasting two hours of your life struggling to write a blog post, before finally admitting to yourself that you have NO $%&#ING IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT.

Suddenly there are all these [citation needed] signs popping up all over inside my head. Aaaaaagh my brain!!!

That’s why the Internet is such an incredible fact-checking device for the modern age, one massive peer-review journal for the human race, and everyone has a responsibility to contribute to it and reference the truths they take for granted against it. The result isn’t 100% truth, but it’s a much closer approximation of it.

Note: Another legend I discovered just last week is that Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” According to The Churchill Centre he never said this.

I think I’ve gotten really good at this since I started running with ideonexus full speed, keeping the daily posts stocked with photos I get from NASA, wikimedia commons, and other legitimate sources, like flickr creative commons photos.

However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that I did violate a photographer’s copyright in my 20071126 Science Etcetera post. In my rush to find a photo of a Mauve Stinger jellyfish, I went with a photo that showed up all over google images and wrongly assumed it was safe to use.

Richard Lord, a professional photographer, took that photo, and very politely e-mailed to let me know my mistake and ask for a link back. I’ve updated the original post to include the copyright info, but I also wanted to post this as a formal apology and to make my readers aware of my error. While I am a copyleft advocate, I do have total respect for copyright laws and the importance of people being able to own and profit from their ideas.

I also wanted to draw attention to Richard Lord’s work. Which is awesome. He directed me to this news story with photos (not his), about high tides swallowing roads and coming up to storefront doors in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. Richard himself has some even more amazing and shocking photos online of rising sea levels and storm wall damage from the 10th of March.

As someone who who will soon loose his front yard to global warming, these pictures really speak to me.

I love books that shake up my preconceptions, and reading Pinker’s book was like experiencing one big personal iconoclasm. The thoroughness with which he engaged gender, violence, intelligence, and other aspects of our social understandings unsettled my positions on much of the whole “Nature VS Nurture” debate. While it did not convince me entirely, it did work effectively to move me a few degrees along the debate spectrum.

Where Pinker and I were in full agreement was in rejecting the antiquated idea of the noble savage, the idea that we are born pure and innocent, living in harmony with nature and it is civilization that corrupts us. The fossil evidence shows human on human violence and environmental destruction in primitive times. The noble savage is an idealized concept that we need to put away in order to understand the histories of all the civilizations that have failed before ours.

Where Pinker’s arguments got weak is when tackling the role of media on our perceptions. He criticizes the logic behind political correctness and efforts to have minorities portrayed respectfully:

Since images are interpreted in the context of a deeper understanding of people and their relationships, the “crisis of representation,” with its paranoia about the manipulation of our mind by media images, is overblown. People are not helplessly programmed with images; they can evaluate and interpret what they see using everything else they know, such as the credibility and motives of the source. (pinker, 216)

Putting the obvious straw man aside (no one claims we are “helplessly programmed“), what are images and language but an effort to construct context? Why do people rally against the crass distortions of perspective on Fox News? What are political advisors, advertisers, artists, and opinion columnists of all types doing but to try and move the line of scrimmage?

Pinker’s writing suffers from a wealth facts that he takes for granted on subjects he obviously hasn’t looked into with much scrutiny. He dismisses the hypothesis that the United States Constitution was in part inspired by the Iroquois Federation as “1960s granola (Pinker, 296);” however, this is an unsettled dispute among historians, and the Smithsonian has admitted to striking similarities between the two government models. He makes the claim that people irrationally lobby to remove carcinogenic chloroform from drinking water, but peanut butter 100 times more carcinogenic. This statement is pure bullox. As is his use of the Darwin awards to argue that men are gender-biased to daredevil stunts (Pinker is very fond of anecdotal evidence throughout the book).

So Pinker is prone to some unsupported claims, urban legends, and exaggerations to make his case. Nobody’s perfect, but it does give us perspective on Pinker’s approach to his subject matter.

Where Pinker makes his strongest arguments, and justifies his book, is in arguing that, just because something isn’t Nurture, doesn’t justify eugenics, discrimination, and inequality. Wherever you fall on the NvN debate, Feminism was a good thing for women and society in general. Everyone deserves the same shot at an education because, even if intelligence were hereditary, everyone must still start on the same footing. Equality makes civilization stronger regardless of NvN

While Pinker makes great strides in banishing the false division between nature and nurture, he ultimately makes the mistake of estimating it at a 50/50 ratio (pinker, 388), keeping the false dichotomy firmly in place when he should have concluded it was time to do away with it. In psychology the whole NvN debate is considered naive since nature and nurture are so interwoven that their influences are ultimately indistinguishable.

Consider the meta argument that ultimately everything is innately nature since we are ultimately products of the physical laws of our universe, and the same case is true for nurture, as we are ultimately products of the environment of those physical laws. Environment and genetics are wrapped up in one another, so let’s stop trying to pin one down as the root cause for what we are. So while Pinker is correct that Nurture is over-hyped, he is equally guilty of over-hyping Nature.

Every year Green Sea Turtles travel 1,300 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from their nesting grounds in the middle of the South Atlantic to their feeding grounds on the Brazilian Coast. Why do the turtles undertake this incredibly taxing journey each year?

135 million years ago, South America and Africa were a single super-continent called Gondwanaland. At this time, the turtles probably inhabited a small bay or sea, nesting on one side and feeding on the other.

Over time, a process known as plate tectonics split the continents apart at about the same rate your fingernails grow. The change was imperceptible to the turtles, who traveled a few inches farther each year out of habit until, millions of years later, they were migrating the incredible distances they traverse today.

Doesn’t the epic nature of this tale, crossing oceans of time, distance, and generations of turtles, just tickle the imagination delightfully? Isn’t this an absolutely fantastic hypothesis?

It’s also completely discredited¹. We know this because the fossil evidence and geological timelines don’t match up. Sea Turtles didn’t evolve that way. Please don’t go around spreading this scientific urban legend.

The Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, once said, “The tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” It seems like what science knows is always changing, and indeed this is the case. Every day new articles appear in peer-review journals disproving formerly established paradigms, rendering what we assumed were facts into falsehoods.

Just look at a decade’s worth of news articles on health and nutrition to see the wealth of contradictory information that field of research produces. Eat a low-fat diet. No, wait, eat a low-carb diet. Eat how many servings of meat? Dairy?

Many people characterize the mercurial nature of scientific knowledge as a weakness. Science is unstable, they argue, it claims to know the truth, but the truth doesn’t change. The fact that scientific knowledge is perpetually evolving is actually its greatest virtue, because scientists know how to admit when they are wrong.

The famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking published ground-breaking theories on Black Holes. Today we refer to the x-rays Black Holes emit as “Hawking Radiation” in his honor. In July 2004 Hawking acknowledge he was in error about a characteristic of black holes for 30 years.

The Biologist Richard Dawkins regularly tells the story of when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. A respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department there believed and taught that the Golgi Apparatus was not real. One day a visiting lecturer came and presented convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, Dawkins tells us, the elder statesman “strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said–with passion–‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red”²

Western Civilization once thought the Earth was the center of the Universe and that the stars, moon, and sun orbited around it. Then Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and other astronomers developed the theory of a Heliocentric (sun-centered) Universe. Today we know the sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy moves through the Universe as well. Because Science has the power to admit when its wrong, it has the power to grow and improve. Our understanding of reality grows and improves with it.

Daniel Dennet, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, New York, 1995. (footnote on p245)

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, United Kingdom, 2006.

Fish Specimens in Jars

I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind the practice of Naturalism.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Saw Beowulf Friday night, not a classic tale I’m particularly fond of, but I was curious about this being the first attempt to make a film with as-real-as-possible human characters since Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within belly-flopped in 2001 (not counting mixture CGI/live action films like The Matrix, which also failed).

The film still failed overcome my Uncanny Valley response; however, it was far superior to Final Fantasy. This realism was probably because this film used motion-capture technology to model the characters on live actors, like Disney cartoon films. This allowed film makers to turn Ray Winstone into a young, athletic action hero.

Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins in Beowulf

As for the story itself, since Beowulf was passed down as an oral tradition for a long time before finally being committed to written text (like the Christian Gospels), it falls prey to the broken telephone effect (this is also why the gospels contradict one another). This means film makers are free to put their own spin on their adaptations. However a magnificent flop at the box office, The 13th Warrior was one such adaptation, crafting a plausible story about a battle between Vikings and primitive cannibals that could become Beowulf through decades of retelling and embellishment.

This film takes similar liberties, but preserves the fantastic elements. If you intend to see this version, I recommend familiarizing yourself with a synopsis of the tale in order to appreciate how it diverges from the original and why.

I’ve started twittering.

I’m not ready to have this thing start texting my phone just yet, despite the fact that I can set it up so that my houseplants can text me when they need water. I’m sure my cats would love this service too, “Ryan! Come home and let us (in/out) of the house! Bring treats!”

Anyways. I tried texting my daily activities, but it felt kinda big-brother. So I’m just gonna use it to post interesting quotes I hear/read and interesting ideas I and other people have that can be condensed into 140 characters, and haikus. I’ve subscribed to all my friends’ feeds that I’m aware of, so please shoot me a line if I’ve missed someone. : )

The RSS Feed can be found here, but you can also see it in the sidebar. I replaced the Geeking Out rss feed since it was mostly redundant.