In January, I told you about a terrific new website from the National Academies called What You Need to Know About Energy. It describes the ways we use energy, where it comes from, and how energy efficiency and alternative sources can figure into our energy future. The following month I also shared the link for NASA's new Global Climate Change site designed to explain how warming impacts our world. Apparently, I'm not the only one who noticed these are fantastic resources... What You Need To Know About Energy and Global Climate Change have both been nominated in the 14th Annual Webby Awards for 'best science website' and I encourage readers to go vote! Scroll waaaaay down to the bottom of the page to find 'science' (what gives?), and choose your favorite site working to communicate science.

Introduction

This is a bit of a long post. As such, I’ve broken it up into sections, to help me corral my thoughts, and make it more likely people will actually read what I’ve written before leaving comments.

Yes, that’s a hint. I’ve spent quite some time wrestling with these issues the past two days, and I’m interested in rebuttals as well as supporting arguments. I urge people to comment, but please read what I’ve written first, and please keep it civil.

So.

By now you’ve probably heard that the Pope is in trouble. A letter written and signed by him seems to indicate that he was complicit in, at the very least, holding up discussion on what to do with an Oakland priest who was a pedophile. That’s pretty awful, even more so when considering that it took him four years to get around to even writing this letter after he was informed of the trouble, and during that time the priest was still working with children. At worst, it looks very much like Ratzinger, at the time a Cardinal, may have actively stalled the Church’s actions against the priest.

Let me be as clear as I can here: if Pope Ratzinger in any way stalled or prevented an investigation, Church-based or otherwise, into any aspect of child molestation by priests, then he needs to be indicted and brought to trial; an international tribunal into all this is also necessary and should be demanded by every living human on the planet. Obviously, a very thorough and major investigation of the Catholic Church’s practices about this needs to be held. It is a rock solid fact that there are a lot of priests who have molested children, and it’s clear that the Church has engaged in diversionary tactics ever since this became public (like the abhorrent Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who says homosexuality lies at the heart of this scandal).

The skeptic community has been up in arms about this, as one would expect, since organized religion is a major target of skeptical thinkers. There have been rumors and misinformation about all this, including a dumb article (one of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, natch) that said that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins — both noted skeptics and atheists — were going to try to arrest the Pope if he visited England. This has been debunked by Dawkins himself.

But the idea of Dawkins swooping in to arrest the Pope got a lot of people fired up, notably in the skeptic community. A lot of folks have sounded off about what the skeptic community should do about this as individuals, as organized groups, and as a whole.

But the ideas being tossed around, to me, are a bit confused. The bottom line is, what role does the skeptic movement, such as it is, have in all this?

It depends on which part of this issue you mean. First there’s the Pope’s behavior. Then there’s the Church’s behavior, and then why the Church did the things it did. Finally, there’s the issue of the skeptics’ behavior.

Here are my thoughts.

1) The Pope

This is actually pretty cut and dried.

I agree in part with Rebecca Watson’s premise that the Pope needs to be called before justice. However, I do in fact care who does it and why; more on that below. But the important thing is that there is a fair trial and justice is served.

Basically, it seems that the Pope was putting the Church before the children, children who were being sexually molested. That is so abhorrent that words fail.

However, I don’t know if this is specifically a skeptical issue. It’s more a human issue, and a criminal issue. If the Pope had said that the Bible says it’s OK to molest children, then yeah, critical thinking and skepticism come into play. But if he was trying to protect the Church and was breaking laws (moral or civil) to do it, then see my comment above re: resignation and indictment. That’s something anyone should understand, whether or not they are a skeptic.

Skepticism deals with issues of the paranormal, issues with faith, issues where scientific evidence can be used to test a claim. In this case, I don’t see skeptics needing to be involved more than any other interest group.

2) The Church

This in many ways mirrors what I said about the Pope. As an institution, it was trying to protect itself, and sacrificed a lot of children’s lives to do it. If this is the case — and it seems very likely — then again the perpetrators need to be hauled in front of a tribunal, and, if found guilty, they get to find out first hand how child molesters are treated in prison.

3) The Church’s behavior

Here’s where things get interesting to me. In this country for sure, religion gets a free pass that a lot of other institutions don’t enjoy. They live tax free. They can say all manners of bizarre things, and people just blow it off, saying that personal beliefs are sacred. And religion can get all kinds of tangled up in politics, and again it gets a pass because it’s faith-based.

If the Catholic Church covers up, stalls investigations, moves priests around, and does other reprehensible acts to save itself, that’s one thing. But if it then says the Bible commands them to do it, or uses the religious authority people invest in it to let things slide, or says that the Pope is infallible and therefore what he did must be right, then yes, absolutely, 100%, skeptics need to jump in and cry "foul!"

But that raises the question: how should this be handled by skeptics?

4) The Skeptic Response

It is no stretch at all to say that skeptics in general and atheists in particular don’t enjoy a positive reputation outside of their respective groups. More people would rather see a gay President than an atheist one, and there are many polls that show atheists to be the least trusted demographic in the United States.

So skeptics are already at a disadvantage before they even open their mouths. Worse, a lot of Catholics are bound to be very uncomfortable right about now, and possibly more than a little defensive. Imagine that you’ve believed fervently in an institution all your life, and then you found out that it is rotten from within, even at the very highest level. You’d be disenfranchised, terribly distraught, and not, perhaps, in the best frame of mind.

This is the absolute worst position a person can be in if you’re trying to convince them of something. Clearly, tactics will be needed. A ham-fisted attack on religion and the Pope will probably not make you any friends, no matter how evil a deed they’ve done.

I have seen claims thrown around that it shouldn’t matter who leads the attack, because clearly moral religious people will rally behind you. That is monumentally naive. If skeptics and atheists jump in, that will be seen as an attack from the outside, when at the very best Catholics will want to see this handled by their own.

Put yourself in their shoes. Let me make up a scenario: imagine rock-solid evidence came up that Randi had embezzled the Million Dollars, and a few days later — after all the discussion and arguments and self-immolation that would occur on the blogs and fora and the media about it — Sylvia Browne said she would be leading the charge to see him brought to trial. Tell me honestly: would you rally behind her?

Honestly?

So charging in with guns blazing is not a good idea. In her post about this, Rebecca said that skeptics jumping in cannot hurt the movement. But I think they can, if this is not done carefully and with tact.

Specifically, she said:

So is this effort going to somehow hurt the “skeptical movement?” You may notice that I use the quotation marks here, because I can’t bring myself to seriously consider a movement supposedly based on the defense of rationality that would turn its back on children who are raped by men they trust because those men claim a supernatural being gives them power, wisdom, and the keys to eternal life with a direct line to God’s ear.

I want to parse her argument carefully here. To be clear, the question isn’t whether to act at all or not; I don’t think anyone is advocating sitting back and letting the Church and Pope get away with these horrid crimes. The question is, is this a skeptic issue in the first place?

The answer, to me, is: yes, it’s a skeptic issue if the Church uses a supernatural defense. Sure, it enjoys the power bestowed on it as a faith-based entity, and I have little doubt it was the corruption of that power that allowed the rape culture to exist. That is surely something for skeptics to take on. But we have to separate out arguments based on that versus secular criminal actions the Church has undertaken, and what the skeptics should do about it. And all the while the skeptics have to tread very carefully indeed if they don’t want to tick off the rest of the world.

As Rebecca points out, if the Church is relying on blind faith, acceptance of authority, and diversion of blame (like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone did) then those are absolutely within the skeptic realm, and something we should be talking about.

And to my point about cooperation, I also agree with Rebecca that the religious people themselves need to step up, especially leaders in the Catholic movement, and condemn what the Church has done (her calling out Bill Donohue was especially wonderful). Of course Donohue never will; he has been so vicious and so antireality for so long that he will knee jerk against any bad mouthing of the Church. And he in fact has, attacking the New York Times and defending the Pope. Shocker, I know.

But that’s my point. People will not rally behind skeptics or atheists simply because they are doing the right thing. Quite the opposite. People will attack the skeptics. And even if there is iron-clad evidence of the Pope’s wrongdoings as well as the Church’s, Catholics will not just suddenly see the light and stand beside skeptics. We know this is true from endless studies of how people behave, how they change their minds, and how defensive they get when their core beliefs are attacked. See my point about Randi and Sylvia Browne again, and search your feelings carefully about it.

Skepticism’s role in this is very delicate and very important, so we must be mindful of how we do it. If not for our own reputation, then for our ultimate goal of getting everyone to understand the real issues here. That’s what skepticism is all about, but I sometimes think a lot of skeptics forget that big picture.

And there are most definitely ways of going about this that will deeply tarnish the reputation of skeptics. I don’t think PZ Myers’ comments, for example, are helpful. They may foment (some of) the troops, but no Catholic of any stripe seeing that statement will suddenly realize the folly of their ways. Quite the opposite I’d imagine, as I pointed out above.

How we say things matters. You can argue that Catholics all over the world should be rising up and taking action — and in fact should have been all along, years ago — and obviously a strong case can be made that the culture and nature of the priesthood in Catholicism enables child molestation. But inflammatory and hyperbolic rhetoric won’t help, and is in reality contrary to the cause.

I’ll note that there are some 75 million Catholics in the U.S., a huge number. They outweigh atheists (and skeptics) by a fair margin. Ticking them off, insulting them, saying "I told you so" is not going to help, and in fact will hurt in the longer run. I would think this is patently obvious.

Conclusion

The one thing skeptics pride themselves on is the use of rationality and reason when making a case, yet it seems to me that quite a few are letting their emotions and prejudices get the best of them. If you perceive Catholicism as the enemy, then so be it. But when faced with overwhelming numbers against you, sometimes a head-on assault isn’t the best idea. I’m angry over this, damned angry, and heartbroken over the lives destroyed by it. But anger is a place to start, something from which we can draw energy and motivation, but we must not let it take over.

We don’t always need warriors. Sometimes we need diplomats.

My point, after all this, isn’t too hard to grasp: if the Pope did what he has been alleged to do, then he needs to be brought to justice. The Church itself looks to have been complicit in hushing up this scandal for years, decades. They too need to face criminal justice. And as skeptics, we need to be vocal about the methods employed by the Church, where those methods can be analyzed using critical thinking and the arsenal skeptics employ. But just attacking them because they are a religion is the wrong reason to do it, and attacking them with abandon, with insults, and with vitriol will not help.

Those 75 million American Catholics should be outraged by all this. If you think skeptics and atheists can bring down the Church’s administration and authority by alienating that population — a quarter of the people in the U.S. — then you are not applying skeptical methods at all.

All of us need to be standing up to the horrors the Church has perpetrated, just as we would if any organization did such a thing. And where skepticism applies, we should apply it, but we should have a care when doing so. If the ultimate goal is to change the hearts and minds of people, then we need to be human and humane.

I would say that’s critical.

Discovery's wing as seen from the ISS. Wallpaper versions below. Credit: NASA/STS-131/ISS

I needed some new wallpaper. I kind of liked this one, won’t be much longer and the shuttle will be nothing but a memory. I put various sizes below:

..

Now the Future:
President Obama’s ears were probably ringing as many former astronauts sent him an open letter expressing serious concerns about where the country is heading with regards to the space program.  Today we learned that letter was apparently followed by a second letter sent by Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell, calling the plan “misguided”. read this story at the NY Daily News.  I was glad to see these letters come out because as you well know, I’ve been lamenting our direction for some time now, and I figure if the space program is gong to go down the tubes we all need to speak up; sure it may fall on deaf ears but as least we can say we tried.

The question is: will we be talked into a back seat or is everybody all wrought up over nothing?We’ll find out because President Obama is going to outline NASA’s future tomorrow. Here’s a sneak peak (in PDF format).

While getting an author’s permission to use his photo on the blog, I visited his site and found some truly amazing work.  The author, Daniel Lopez, very nicely gave me permission to use any of his photos on the blog, and I wanted to show you some of the outstanding images he’s created.

Rayo Verde - Daniel Lopez

Daniel has several progressive shots of this green flash.  That glowing horizon with the uniform burnt sky and landscape must have been something to see.

Conjunction of Saturn and the Moon 01/03/07 - Daniel Lopez

Now here I spent so much time staring at the Moon with my mouth hanging open, I almost didn’t see Saturn (at 8:00 o’clock) in this shot.  I had to shrink the image to fit the blog, of course, but it enlarges!

05/04/07 "lenticular sombrero teide" - Daniel Lopez

Look at how bright the landscape is with that clear star field.

07/02/07 gorro teide - Daniel Lopez

I can almost smell the air in this shot.

nubes flecha, Oct 09 - Daniel Lopez

Can you imagine standing there looking at this?

Teide sombrero - Daniel Lopez

This will take you to Daniel’s site, and…
This link will take you to an animation of a total lunar eclipse Daniel put together.  NICE!

I’ll be linking Daniel to this post, and he’s agreed to answer any questions you have about his work.  Daniel says he doesn’t speak English well, and asks your patience.  I found his English to be excellent, by the way.

This week marks the anniversaries of both stunning success and nearly catastrophic failures in human spaceflight—it’s been 49 years since Yuri Gugarin became the first man in space, and 40 years since the life-threatening drama on board Apollo 13. So perhaps it’s fitting that this is the week the fight over the future of NASA comes to a head. Tomorrow, President Obama will defend his new plans for manned spaceflight, which he has changed somewhat after his proposal to cancel the Constellation program was met with a flood of criticism.

When the President announced his budget in January, which came without funding for Constellation and its plans to go back to the moon and beyond, members of Congress had a fit (especially those who represent areas with jobs connected to Constellation).

Former astronauts came out of the woodwork, too, and that list of critics now includes Neil Armstrong. The first moon-walker typically shies away from media controversies, but this week issued an open letter to the President. He writes: “The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope. It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation” [The Times]. Armstrong also writes that if the United States finds itself without spacecraft that can travel to the Earth’s orbit and beyond, our nation will be destined “to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

In response to the criticisms, Obama plans to speak tomorrow on his plans for NASA at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and it sounds like some compromises could be in the offing. Ahead of the President’s speech, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke yesterday at the National Space Symposium and announced a restructured plan that potentially could save parts of Constellation, specifically the crew capsule called Orion. The new proposal calls for a variant of the space capsule that could be launched unmanned to station within the next couple of years to serve as a crew lifeboat. Garver said the plan would allow the agency to retain some of its multibillion-dollar investment in the program while reducing U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft currently used as an emergency crew escape capability on the space station [Space News].

And because Armstrong and many other said the President’s plan would leave the United States stuck in low-Earth orbit, White House officials said on Tuesday that Obama wants NASA to begin work on building a new heavy lift rocket sooner than envisioned under the canceled Constellation program, with a commitment to decide in 2015 on the specific rocket that will take astronauts deeper into space [Reuters]. Future robotic missions, the White House says, will scout out potential targets for manned missions under the new plan.

We’ll keep you posted on what Obama says tomorrow. In the meantime, his tentative policy shift has impressed some critics. At Bad Astronomy, DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait blogged Neil deGrasse Tyson’s vehement defense of NASA maintaining a bigger, bolder vision of manned space exploration than Obama’s initial plan. In response to the administration’s shift, however, Tyson wrote on Twitter, “Obama’s NASA plans looking better, as of yesterday. A reasonable person responds to reasonable argumnts [Sic].”

80beats: Obama’s NASA Plan Draws Furious Fire; The Prez Promises To Defend His Vision
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: New NASA Rocket May Not Be “Useful,” White House Panel Says
80beats: Presidential Panel: Space Travel Plans Are Broken
Bad Astronomy: Neil Tyson Sounds Off on NASA
Bad Astronomy: President Obama’s NASA Budget Unveiled
Bad Astronomy: Give Space a Chance

Image: NASA

I’m still a sucker for stories like this, Only Known Living Population of Rare Dwarf Lemur Discovered:

Researchers have discovered the world’s only known living population of Sibree’s Dwarf Lemur, a rare lemur known only in eastern Madagascar. The discovery of approximately a thousand of these lemurs was made by Mitchell Irwin, a Research Associate at McGill University, and colleagues from the German Primate Centre in Göttingen Germany; the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar; and the University of Massachusetts.

The species was first discovered in Madagascar in 1896, but this tiny, nocturnal dwarf lemur was never studied throughout the 20th century. Following the destruction of its only known rainforest habitat, scientists had no idea whether the species still existed in the wild — or even whether it was a distinct species….

Living today is much more awesome than the 19th century overall, but, we’ve mapped the whole world, and have a good sense of all the large animals (at least the upper bound, unfortunately the number seems to be dropping). Call me mammal-centric, but I feel that we have tapped out most of the zoological wonder of our planet. Is it too much to say that the terrestrial domain now involves mostly the counting of beetles? (I exaggerate!) But sometimes there’s a lemur in Madagascar or a rare ungulate in Vietnam, and we get a sense of the wonder which once was (along with all the -isms which we now abhor!). Could you imagine the blog posts that Carl Zimmer or Ed Yong could have written about the discovery of the Platypus? Actually, they’d probably end up narrating a special on the National Geographic Channel….

Here’s the original paper: MtDNA and nDNA corroborate existence of sympatric dwarf lemur species at Tsinjoarivo, eastern Madagascar.

Credit: Image courtesy of McGill University

Many cat owners worry/wonder about what their buddies are up to while the humans are away at work. Are they eating the houseplants? Sleeping on the kitchen counter? Prowling next door to bother the neighbors’ pet bird?

Now, researchers in Japan hope to bridge the gap between humans and their pets by rigging cats with sensing devices that help owners track their felines’ activities.

Cat@Log, one such sensing device, allows you to snoop on your cat as he goes about his daily schedule.

You can track his movements, map his territory, and even see what he sees thanks to a bulky device that can be strapped on your kitty’s collar. The tech site Recombu says that Cat@Log comes loaded with a camera, microphone, microSD card, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and GPS.

Recombu writes:

The GPS hooks up to Google Maps to create a territory map, showing you where your cat goes when he’s out and about, while the camera gives you a ride-along view. The accelerometer can also interpret certain actions like scratching, going up and down stairs, eating, and jumping, all of which can be used to update a Twitter-feed – or even a full-on blog – of what your cat is up to all day long.

The Cat@Log is great, especially for anxious owners who are away on holiday and wondering if the cat-sitter is doing a good job, writes Recombu. You can also be assured your cat won’t be lonely on Twitter as he’d have Sockamillion (Sockington), the famous tweeting cat, for company.

Here’s a video of Cat@Log in action:

Related Content:
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Image: Cat@Log

Have robots got the right stuff? We’ll soon find out, as NASA has announced that one of the last flights of the space shuttle will carry a humanoid robot, Robonaut 2, up to the International Space Station.

The two-armed ‘bot is the result of a venture by NASA and General Motors, and will help the researchers involved identify in what ways a robot could be a help to human explorers in space. Before it gets to go on its first space walk, however, it’ll be monitored to see how well it deals with weightlessness [DVICE].

The robot isn’t much more than 300 pounds of torso, head, and arms, with wheels for locomotion rather than humanoid legs. But NASA hopes it could one day work alongside human astronauts, perhaps helping them during spacewalks. While we’ve blasted plenty of unmanned explorers into space, this will be first largely humanoid robot to venture beyond our home planet.

NASA and GM first showed off Robonaut 2 (or R2) in February, and it will fly to the ISS for this test mission on board the shuttle Discovery in September. Back here on Earth, GM hopes to use R2 to help out workers building cars on factory floors.

GM and NASA have been in business together since the automaker produced lunar rovers for Apollo missions, and could see more collaboration as President Obama pushes for more collaboration between NASA and private enterprise (though the government still owns the majority share of GM).

The space agency is pushing the same kind of collaboration with Chrysler: What the three-year alliance between Chrysler and the space agency could generate are lighter-weight materials, more dexterous, even human-emulating robots and advanced batteries that ease drivers’ worries about running out of electricity on a transcontinental trip [Detroit Free Press].

Related Content:
80beats: Robonaut 2: Coming to Space Stations and Assembly Lines Near You
80beats: Obama’s NASA Plan Draws Furious Fire; The Prez Promises To Defend His Vision
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: NASA’s New Underwater Robot Chugs Along Indefinitely on Ocean Power
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving

Image: General Motors/NASA

Jason Salavon is a new-media artist whose solo show at Ronald Feldman Gallery opened last week in New York. He is also a research fellow in the Computation Institute and assistant professor in Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. I asked him last week about his image, Generic Mammal Skull, featured in the current show.

RH: Where did this idea of creating a generic mammal come from?

JS: I’ve been interested in evolutionary processes for a long time and wanted to explore them in my own way. I was specifically interested in representing fictional, imagined forms, things missed or skipped by evolution, in a rich, historical way. Combining that with a renewed interest in 17th century Dutch still life made for a challenging project.

RH: Do you decide what percentages of what mammal to use, or does the software determine that? If you decided, how did you determine which mammals to use, and what percentages? For example- why wild boar instead of blue whale?

JS: I designed four very accurate, high resolution models (bear, human, baboon, wild boar), hoping to capture much of the large land mammal “design space.” Percentages in the photographs were chosen for visceral impact as well as representing opposed regions in the “design space.” There is a parent project, a video animation of sorts, that covers a larger range of possibilities.

Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Generic Mammal Skull (21% baboon, 18% bear, 17% human, 44% wild boar), 2010

My old friend Neil has something to say about NASA and inspiration.

I wonder how often he reads my blog? More likely, he and I just strongly agree on this topic. He is a very smart guy, after all.

Are Top Scientists Really So Atheistic? Look at the Data asks Chris Mooney. He’s referring to a new book, Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund. Here’s the Amazon description:

… In Science vs Religion, Elaine Howard Ecklund investigates this unexamined assumption in the first systematic study of what scientists actually think and feel about religion. Ecklund surveyed nearly 1700 scientists, interviewed 275 of them, and centers the book around vivid portraits of 10 representative men and women working in the physical and social sciences at top American research universities. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion. Her respondents run the gamut from Margaret, a chemist who teaches a Sunday-school class, to Arik, a physicist who chose not to believe in God well before he decided to become a scientist. Only a small minority are actively hostile to religion….

Some of Chris’ readers are rather agitated about this all, and he suggests that perhaps they should read the book to answer their questions. I haven’t read the book, but you can read much of it on Google Books or Amazon’s text search feature. Skimming a bit I encountered the term “spiritual atheist,” which many might find an oxymoron. Rather than present her interpretation, let me post some of the tables which have data in them.

In reply to Chris’ question posed, my own interpretation is that yes, scientists are that atheistic! The reference point is the general population. In fact, 72% of scientists hold to a non-theistic position. On the other hand, most are not militant atheists in the mould of Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins. Interestingly, if you assume that all of those with no religion are in the non-theist category (I think this is unlikely, but probably sufficient as a first approximation) then 40% of those who claim a religious affiliation among these scientists are non-theists. Also, I believe that Sam Harris, with his interest in meditation and Eastern mysticism more generally, would probably class as a spiritual atheist, so the categories New Atheist and spiritual atheist are not necessarily exclusive.

I find table 3.1 intriguing. I suspect here scientists and the general public may be speaking somewhat about different truths, or more specifically, scientists are thinking of a narrower subset. For the general public religious truths are both descriptive and prescriptive. That is, they describe the world’s past, and its present, as a factual matter, and, they prescribe a set of actions and norms. I think most scientists are thinking in prescriptive terms here, not descriptive. In other words, the religions of the world have integrated within their belief systems basic core human morality and ethics. Fundamental moral truths. I would myself agree that there are basic truths in many religions.

Note: I’ve seen most of this data in Ecklund’s papers, so I’m not spilling treasured secrets by presenting the tables.

All tables from Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think

I’ve watched television shows via my computer since 2004, so I’m not too plugged in to the changes in channel line-ups. But some of the trends on this chart showing the political orientation of television viewers surprised me. In particular, that the History Channel, Discovery and TLC all lean Right in their viewers. But then again television viewing has a somewhat older skew I assume, and older people are more conservative today. Thoughts? It makes more sense now that TLC has Sarah Palin’s new show if they knew their viewer demographics well. CNBC’s slight Leftward tilt is surprising to me as well, but remember that a fair amount of the cultural Left is rather affluent (Barack Obama and Bill Bradley were both notable for initially fueling their insurgent campaigns thanks to big donations from investment bankers, Obama successfuly).

Source (H/T Steve)

A few days ago the following headline on the New York Times website caught my eye: Seeing What the Hubble Sees, in Imax and 3-D. There are two reasons this headline is worthy of note. First, it is amazing that an IMAX movie about the Hubble Space Telescope exists at all, and is worth mentioning on the front (web)page of the NYT. Hubble is a part of the popular imagination, and may be the object most closely tied with Science in the eyes of the general public (even more than the LHC). Furthermore, it is absolutely astounding that NASA launched hundreds of kilos of camera equipment and film into orbit, and spent valuable astronaut time (both on the ground and in space) to pull off the filming. I would claim one of the lasting legacies of the Apollo missions to the Moon are the photographs, and in particular Earthrise. That single photograph of our home as a small blue marble against the vastness of space put our planet into proper perspective for the very first time. NASA is well aware that part of its mission is to light up the public imagination, getting us to peer past our limited horizons, and out into the vast Universe beyond. This film is part of that tradition.

The second interesting aspect of the headline is that it’s nonsensical. Hubble has only one eye. It has one mirror. It can’t perceive depth, and therefore can’t see in 3-D. We see slightly different images in each of our eyes, and then a fairly impressive difference engine (called a “brain”) figures out the depth to everything we are looking at, and whether that rock is about to bonk us on the head and we need to duck NOW! 3D movies (such as Alice and Avatar) use circularly polarized light, and glasses with different filters in each lens, to produce the different images for each eye. (The light is circularly polarized so that, if you tilt your head, it all still works; the old linear polarization approach didn’t do this, and had a tendency to make one feel motion sick [at least, it did for me]).

In general astronomical sources are too far away for us to discern distance using parallax. That’s why the night sky looks “flat”, even though the planets and stars and galaxies are at a tremendous range of distances. If you wanted to be able to directly “see” the distance to the nearest star, in the same way that you ascertain the distance to an approaching lion, your eyes would need to be separated by roughly 10 billion km. (Eye separation = Distance*Angle. The human eye has an angular resolution of roughly 1 arcmin = 0.0003 radians, and the nearest star [Proxima Centauri] is 4 lightyears = 3.8e13 km.) The way we figure out distance in Hubble images is by using color information (and, in particular, the spectra) to discern recession velocity (redshift), and thereby distance (using Hubble’s law). This is not something we do with our eyes (although we do use color information to discern temperature; you’re unlikely to grab something that is so hot it’s glowing blue). Hubble sees a purely two-dimensional Universe. So “seeing what the Hubble sees …in 3-D” is a contradiction in terms. Was the headline carefully crafted to see if we were paying close attention?

Click here to view the embedded video.

A video of the second spacewalk.  They got the new ammonia tank installed, but I’m not sure they hooked it up as they were running short on time for that EVA.

To watch this video at a little higher resolution and a larger size, click the source link below.

Source

If you haven't yet, I encourage you to download or stream my fourth (and so far, I think, best) Point of Inquiry program--with Eli Kintisch on the subject of geoengineering. All this week on the blog, I'm going to be discussing issues raised on the show--so having heard it will be kind of an essential baseline. This post is to raise the first issue, which has to do with Eli's response to my question around minute 6, where I ask about the geoengineering techniques that scientists consider to have the most promise. In response, Eli provided a fairly encyclopedic answer that essentially broke geoengineering schemes into two categories: 1) carbon capture/removal techniques to get the stuff out of the air, by sucking it into machines, into the ocean, into trees and plants, etc; and 2) sunlight blocking techniques, which essentially reduce the total solar radiation being absorbed by the planet. My problem is that the carbon removal techniques (with perhaps the exception of iron fertilization) are relatively uncontroversial. Whereas the sunblocking techniques--and especially what Kintisch calls the "Pinatubo option"--are wildly so. So is it really wise to group them both together under the rubric of "geoengineering"? Don't we have a pretty big ...

Even enigmatic eclipsing binaries are thrilled to appear in Beetle Bailey. Sinatra would have killed to appear in Beetle Bailey, am I right?

After 24 years of championing a ban on commercial whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will soon weigh a proposal seeking to resume commercial whaling. The plan would let Japan, Norway and Iceland hunt the ocean giants openly despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. In return, whaling nations would agree to reduce their catch “significantly” over 10 years [AFP]. These pro-whaling nations have kept up their hunts either by officially objecting to the moratorium or by insisting that they’re killing whales for scientific research.

The proposal is due to be submitted before the body’s annual meeting in June in Morocco, leading some conservationists to complain that the IWC should “save whales, and not whaling.” The details of the proposal will made public on Earth day–April 22. Calling the withdrawal of the ban “the best chance to fight overfishing of these animals,” U.S Commissioner to the IWC Monica Medina said: “It’s a global problem, and needs global solutions” [Washington Post].

Making its case to pull back the ban, the IWC said that during the last few decades whale populations have substantially rebounded–with bowhead whale populations off Alaska increasing to between 8,200 and 13,500, eastern Pacific gray whale numbers rising to between 21,900 and 32,400 in 1999, and blue whale populations also rising. Conservationists, however, are seething, pointing out that 1,800 to 2,200 whales continue to be killed each year. “It’s great to be showing success, but should we be planting the flag and saying, ‘We’re there’?” asked Howard Rosenbaum, who directs the ocean giants program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “We’re not out of the woods yet” [Washington Post].

They say that despite the rise in numbers, several species still struggle to survive. Just 130 or so western Pacific gray whales swim off the coast of Russia now — compared with at least thousands, if not tens of thousands, in the past — and they are still vulnerable to being caught in Japanese fishing nets and offshore energy projects. Even one of the populations that made major gains over the past few decades, the Southern right whale, is experiencing a sudden die-off. Since 2005, researchers have identified 308 dead whales in the waters around Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes, an important calving ground, and 88 percent of the dead were calves less than three months old [Washington Post].

Critics argue that the resumption of commercial whaling would not just endanger future whale populations but would also legitimize behavior by countries like Japan, which many accuse of overfishing the waters of the Southern Ocean sanctuary and which recently won a victory in Doha, Qatar where a proposed ban on the trade of the bluefin tuna was shot down. Norway and Iceland have already disregarded the IWC’s moratorium and have hunted whales commercially.

Australia, meanwhile, has been extremely vocal in its opposition to the proposal, with a spokesman for the Environment Ministry, Greg Hunt, saying it would set too dangerous a precedent. “It is not about protecting whales, it is about a shoddy deal which gives the green light to whaling and is a white flag on plans to end whaling,” he said [Australia Network News]. The United States, while opposed to commercial whaling, said it was waiting to see the final proposal. The proposal needs a three-quarters majority vote to go ahead. A number of IWC nations have yet to declare their position.

Related Content:
80beats:Bluefin Tuna Is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: Videos Show Collision Between Japanese Whaling Ship & Protesters
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales

Image: Flickr / ahisgett

Below I referenced a talk that Peter Thiel gave at the Singularity Summit 2009. In the Q & A I recall that Thiel was skeptical that we’d head into another irrational bubble craze after having gone through two speculative boom & bust cycles in less than 10 years. My friend Michael Vassar points me to an article in Wired from January where Thiel asserts that we are in a bubble. Either I don’t recall correctly, or he’s changed his mind. Here’s the relevant part:

Wired: You’ve had a rough year. The stock market rallied strongly, and Clarium Capital bet the wrong way.

Thiel: I think we’re back to a zone of irrational exuberance.

Wired: Like before the Internet bubble burst?

Thiel: I think it’s maybe even more irrational because there’s no story about the future. At least in ‘99 there was a story.

In ‘99 there was a story based on something concrete, the internet. In the aughts we had a fake story. Now we’re down to no story. Well, at least above the board. If you haven’t you might be interested in listening to this week’s This American Life, which chronicles the market manipulation which one hedge fund engaged in, and which bankers allowed them to get away with because it was in their private (as opposed to corporate) interest. Some people can make money off bubbles, even if aggregate utility is less after than before.

Rod Dreher has a poignant reflection up on his roots in Louisiana. He finishes:

I thought about this memory this weekend, visiting Ruthie and my family. Ruthie and Mike bought part of what was once the orchard from our distant cousins, and built their house there. The rest of the land that had once been Lois and Hilda’s was sold to strangers. The cabin has long been gone; a nice big brick house belonging to someone I don’t know is now where the cabin was. True to Hilda’s palm-reading prophecy, I traveled far in my life. I have now spent well over half my life living away from there. Yet that is home for me, because that is where my family is, and the landscape of my childhood. Now, though, my parents are getting up in years, and my younger sister, at age 40, is battling a disease that may take her life. I hadn’t realized until this crisis with Ruthie how much I had counted on the continuity of her remaining there, even after our parents pass away, to anchor that place as the center of my imaginative universe. She, who has always loved the land and her place there far more than I, and she, whom I could count on to always be faithful to it, however unfaithful I was, sits in her armchair in what was once the orchard, coughing and straining for breath. We hope and we pray for healing, but now the way I thought the world would be may not be the way the world is, or will become. And I am having a hard time coming to terms with that, as both an emotional and a philosophical matter (i.e., trying to understand how to relate to where I come from now that the permanence I assumed would always be there is threatened).

From what I recall Louisiana is a region of the United States where people move least, and are deeply rooted in their locales. In this way I suppose it’s more like Europe and much of the Old World, with the importance of place encapsulated in terms such as Heimat. Though I am an American my family is from Bangladesh, and on the rare occasions that I interact with Bangladeshis I will be asked what my desh is, roughly my ancestral homeland. That would happen to be a small town in the southeast of modern Bangladesh, where my paternal ancestors settled several centuries ago, and where my extended family still has lands. But here’s the thing: I’ve never been to “my” desh. My parents always found this amusing when I asked as a child how my homeland could be a place to which I’d never been, and on some level I think they accept that these terms are anachronistic. Like much of Asia Bangladesh has seen massive urbanization within the past generation, and I get the sense that these old terms are far less relevant. In some ways it may be that Europe and North America, where development and modernization occurred at a slower place, may be the regions where a traditional sense of place remains the most robust because of the more gentle transition from the past to the future.