Blue Collar Scientist

The Discovery Institute has written more anti-semitic Holocaust revisionism, this time slandering a recently-passed resolution of the Methodist Church. The DI says:

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

So the Discovery Institute says, among other things, that eugenics specifically comes from Charles Darwin.

Contrast this with what the Methodists’ well-researched resolution actually says:

The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England.

Darwinian eugenics, huh?

Poor creationists. They can’t tell the difference between the name Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. No surprise, I guess; they seem to be unable to understand considerably simpler biological concepts.

Hat tip to Bay of Fundie, who has a more complete takedown.

Well, it just seemed like some kind of warning was in order.

I’ve been gone for just over a week to southern Arizona to do some observatory work, but I got back into Anchorage Wednesday night, and I can now say that I’m mostly almost recovered from the experience, at least in superficial ways.

I have one more video to put up relating to the trip - all the footage was made in Arizona, but I didn’t have time to get it edited and posted before I left. I’m expecting that to appear sometime Friday, but it will probably be late. There will also be new posts to this blog starting at about 8:00 AM EDT, just a few hours from now.

I will also be editing some pictures of Rebeccawatson and sending them to Rebecca Watson, and to a newspaper that keeps bugging me about them; and I think I’ve uncovered the discovery images of Philplait; Phil has patiently been waiting for them for more than a month. I’ll be posting those here in due time.

Other than that, I have unpacking, laundry, photo tripod assembly, the editing of an all-sky, all-night time lapse movie that I made while I was on the trip, and a number of household chores to catch up on. And even though the time difference is only an hour, I have to admit that the big honking travel day that it takes to get here exhausts me. I think I’ll be soundly and long for a few nights.

The trip was highly productive. I installed a new high-level control system with a number of new features and nearly 10,000 lines of new code, and saw it perform flawlessly while I was there. This is in part due to the ability to test the code while running the ASCOM suite under Windows XP on my MacBook under VMWare, whilst doing the actual development on the MacBook using native Mac OSX text editors, which - get this - are better development editors even for Microsoft proprietary languages like Visual Basic. I’m mainly talking about BBEdit, which frankly is so superior to any other text editor I’ve used that I consider it useless to look any further.

And yes, I’m even editing compiled Visual Basic (6 and .net) code modules with this editor. Of course I’m still designing VB interfaces¹ with Visual Studio under Windows, but otherwise, there’s no point to this that I can see. (Disclaimer: Intellisense has never worked in my IDE under six different platforms, so maybe if it did work, I would be singing a different tune.)

I also installed an AppleTV in the observatory’s entertainment room, updated some old networking stuff, evaluated the telescope for proper collimation (it was fine, requiring no adjustment), advised on the reproduction of some century-old photographs, and visited Tom Kaye’s observatory and paleo lab, an experience that is likely to affect me for a long time. I also smashed bugs and deployed new versions of two other programs that I write - a simple utility for adding targets to the scheduler, and a little gadget that is part of the image analysis pipeline that makes sure everything is formatted just-so for the Minor Planet Center. Basically, I was busy practically every moment of the trip. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve also taken a new commission: Automating milli-magnitude photometry - both image acquisition and reduction - from the 32″ at the observatory. This shall be an interesting project. Interesting project indeed. If this works out, gents, I expect my name on some of the exoplanet papers you guys are going to publish. Just so we’re clear. :-)

<gross>

While I was in southern Arizona, the humidity dipped most days to around 12%, which leads to nosebleeds and rock-hard bloody snot stuck in both the near and far reaches of the sinus areas. This is of course profoundly uncomfortable, and it seems I’m especially prone to the problem for some reason. I’m pleased to report that 30 hours back in Anchorage has worked that problem out.

</gross>

So anyway, I’m back in AK. And it is nice to be getting back to the routine.

1. When I have to design an interface, that is - most of my software are black boxes with no user interfaces, just .net or COM+ programmatic interfaces. [↩]

I just thought I’d mention, for anyone going through Tucson in the near future, that if you sit out in front of the Delta ticketing counter and select the “linksys” ssid, you might well find that you can reach the intertubes.

I’ve finally completed the video about data reduction at Junk Bond Observatory. In this video, we answer the question of how Junk Bond Observatory got its name, and provide a demonstration of what our images look like and how we turn them into scientific results. The demonstration by Dave is followed by a higher-resolution screen recording to show you the details, so stick with it to the end if you are interested in seeing the images up close. (And yes, I know this isn’t the best way - I’ve been learning whole new continents of my computing system doing this, and I am learning, but if I wait to post until I’ve learned everything, I’ll never get around to posting this stuff.)

In the next video, I’ll have answers to the rest of the questions that people asked after the first video was posted, and hopefully it won’t take me so long to get it posted. What can I say - I’m on a working trip. Work comes first, and even though the formal purpose for the visit was fulfilled sometime yesterday, I’ve still been quite busy taking care of loose ends and addressing things that I felt needed to be dealt with before I left.

Tomorrow will be a semi-travel day for me; I’ll be leaving JBO around noon Arizona time and heading up to Tucson, with a long stop to visit some people in between. Then Wednesday is a travel day. Blogging will continue to be light, sporadic, and possibly sub-standard until I’m home and have had a chance to sleep properly. But I’m hoping to get a few things posted from the hotel in Tucson, so stay tuned.

After posting the video tour of Junk Bond Observatory the other day, I made a mental note to add that video to YouTube, and now I’ve done so. You can see my YouTube Channel here, and if you go over there quick, you can be the very first person to watch a video from me on YouTube. If that dubious distinction does anything for you, anyway.

I’ll be working today on more video content, and will get the questions asked after the first video answered, so look for new video content tomorrow!

By way of Space Politics I learn that the upcoming 2008 Libertarian National Convention, at which the libertarian party will select a presidential candidate, was to include a presentation on the topic of “Inside NASA” by Dr. David Hoagland.

This, it turns out, was an error, and the actual talk is “Do We Still NEED NASA?” and will be given by Richard C. Hoagland. He’s going to talk about this:

Mr. Hoagland will … reveal –with official NASA imagery — startling scientific discoveries NASA, by law, has deliberately withheld from the American people for more than 40 years!

It is bad enough that every third Libertarian I meet is a credulous UFO nutjob, and now they are giving voice to this total whackjob¹.

This is a guy who believes that James Clerk Maxwell’s equations were misunderstood and can only make sense in terms of “Hyperdimensional physics,” which says that enormous energy is available at a latitude of 19.5° on the Sun and every planet in the solar system. The evidence? Olympus Mons. (Which isn’t at 19.5 °, but 18°, a degree and a half difference.) No word about all the free energy available on the Earth at this latitude as yet.

This is the guy who thinks there was an advanced extraterrestrial civilization on Mars in the past.

And that the Martians moved to Earth and became humans.

And there was a similar civilization on Europa.

And on the moon.

And on Iapetus, the moon of Saturn, which is in fact artificial, kinda like the Death Star except maybe without Darth Vader and the big planet-destroying laser beam.

And that the moon civilization built glass domes which have been retouched out of Apollo imagery.

And that the Apollo astronauts had their minds wiped to they forgot seeing these domes.

This is the guy who claims that the Galileo probe to Jupiter caused a black spot due to nuclear materials on board.

This is the guy who claims the 9-11 attacks were part of a Masonic conspiracy.

This is the guy who says the Apollo 1 astronauts were murdered by NASA.

This is the guy who claims there is a clandestine space program, using antigrav technology stolen from extraterrestrials, which causes comets to explode².

This is the guy that swore that the Space Shuttle main fuel tank could never work using conventional engineering, and something called “Torsion Physics” would have to be used to solve the problems.

This is the guy who repeatedly claims to have friends at JPL who provide him with inside information.³

This is the guy who claims to have designed the Pioneer 10 plaque that was actually designed by Carl Sagan.

And so on.

Now, if you believe anything in this lengthy list of Hoagland claims, congratulations. You are a nutjob. If you don’t believe it, you should understand why I view the libertarian party as the party of choice for cranks, lunatics, and other stout deniers of reality.

1. And yes, the taxonomy is valid - total whackjobs are far stranger than nutjobs. [↩]
2. Sounds like fun. But I’m pretty sure I’d notice if comets started exploding; you know, that’s the sort of research we do here at the observatory I’m currently visiting. [↩]
3. I have actual friends with real names at JPL who deny they provide Hoagland information, inside or otherwise. [↩]

It has apparently been four years now that I’ve been reading Tangled Bank. The latest edition is up at Dammit Jim! - go have a look.

One of the things I emphasize to my students is that a lot of the better research going on today is interdisciplinary, in which scientists from completely different fields collaborate to study a phenomenon and the scientific results are improved from the participation of folks that have different knowledge and different backgrounds.

Yesterday I spent a little time in my own cross-disciplinary scientific world. I wasn’t really contributing anything, I was soaking up the awesome coolness that is Tom Kaye.

Tom’s a sort of modern gentleman-scientist, of the sort that nearly went extinct shortly after Darwin’s time when the cost of doing scientific research began to require funding that was not available even to the very rich. I’ve known Tom by reputation for years; back in 2000, he had a telescope set up at a friend’s observatory where he made the first amateur astronomer detection of an exoplanet using the radial velocity method. He’s also the guy that got hold of Norm Oberle’s 1-meter mirror blank; I knew Norm back when I lived in Ohio, have seen the blank, and knew that someone had bought it, but never knew who until I went to dinner with Tom a few nights ago.

Tom’s neck-deep in astronomy, but he’s also a paleontologist, and he’s specifically looking at a possible connection between gamma-ray bursters, the K-T boundary extinction, and the Chicxulub impactor. To support this research, Tom has a bunch of fossils, K-T boundary samples, microscopes, and atomic composition analysis equipment.

And when I say microscopes, I mean microscopes. He’s got everything from a simple stereo microscope, to a couple of the nicest compound binocular microscopes ever made, and even two electron microscopes. We slapped a spider leg into one of the electron microscopes and took a look at it in all its hairy, spikey glory. Really cool stuff - I’ve never had a chance to play with a microscope before.

Tom was kind enough to donate a bunch of hadrosaur teeth to me for use in my educational programs, along with a sauropod stomach stone and some 35 million year old fossilized poop. And we’re going to work at the beginning of next school year on putting together some brief educational videos for use in the classroom, and maybe even set him up so that he can visit my classes through webcam to talk about his research.

It’s amazing the people you meet in my line of work.

One of my favorite authors, writerdd on the Skepchick blog, has a post on the topic of moderate Christianity and whether it is the authentic voice of religion. She raises many interesting points and I thought I’d offer my perspective here.

The media features fundamentalists or extreme conservative believers every time a topic regarding morality comes up, as if these are the only people who can speak for believers, as if they have authority to speak for all people of faith on these issues. Not only are atheists and agnostics left out of the conversation, but moderate and liberal believers often are as well…. When journalists act this way, they are echoing the fundamentalist point of view.

I think writerdd is missing the bigger perspective here. The mainstream media is useless, or worse, in part because their function is not (as we are led to think) covering the story, but gaining ratings. They include religious extremists in stories involving morality because:

1. Such people are available to the media - they promote themselves as sources, so every reporter and producer knows how to call them up and get them on the air.
2. Such people create controversy and drama when they appear, which improves ratings.
3. Media producers are generally very socially savvy, even to the point of knowing how to manipulate people and being willing to do it to get what they want; but they are not, in general, critical thinkers, or even knowledgeable about the topics that they cover.

When journalists bring religious extremists to the airwaves, they are giving them a voice, but they are not (in my opinion) necessarily echoing religiously extreme points of view - unless they take the trouble to agree with their source, pitch them softball questions, and so forth. There’s certainly no shortage of religious extremists in the ‘librul media.’

Sam Harris and many others often claim that moderate religious groups give cover to fundamentalists by honoring the holy books that they use to build their walls of doctrine. I used to agree, but now I’m not so sure that’s true.

I think Sam Harris is right, and wrong. He’s right that moderate religious groups give cover to fundamentalists. He’s wrong to say that they do it by honoring their holy books. They do it by failing to oppose exremists. By failing to denounce the destructive religious behaviors of those who claim to be co-religionists, they do indeed provide protection.

I’ve said in the past that one way to distinguish a non-extremist religious group is to see if they oppose (through excommunication, political opposition, etc) those who take their beliefs too far. Take a quick look at religiously motivated terrorism, and you will see very few of their co-religionist leaders taking the trouble to denounce their violent extremists.

A very similar situation holds true today, in America, where Christians who look forward to the destruction of the Jews as the precursor to Christ’s return, want total war in the mideast to accelerate that event, and who adopt a variety of political positions and personal behaviors that harm their neighbors - opposing evidence-based medicine, depriving minorities of basic civil rights, molesting children, and so on - go almost entirely unopposed or remarked upon by mainstream Christians.

That’s enabling behavior. At times it seems the only thing the moderates aren’t doing is buying the extremists bombs and beer.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, would rather encourage a moderate, liberal kind of faith where people are free to cherry pick what they want to believe while they conform to modern, secular values and use skepticism to make decisions in daily life. I think I’d like to befriend people with this type of faith and work together with them to keep fundamentalism in check, to preserve the separation of church and state, and to protect the benefits of a scientific and secular society.

I agree. And I’m putting my money where my mouth is: For three years, I’ve had a relationship with a private religious school that brings me into the classroom frequently to teach science and critical thinking. I work with religious teachers and religious school administrators in that context, and while I would say they are moderate, rather than extremist, religionists, we still have our disagreements. But we all understand that our disagreements constitute an argument among friends, nothing more.

So what is everybody else doing about their opinions on this issue?